Observations on current events

Use Dollars, Or Become The Target of The U.S.

Rep. Ron Paul: The End of Dollar Hegemony
"...Greenspan, in his first speech after leaving the Fed, said that gold prices were up because of concern about terrorism, and not because of monetary concerns or because he created too many dollars during his tenure. Gold has to be discredited and the dollar propped up. Even when the dollar comes under serious attack by market forces, the central banks and the IMF surely will do everything conceivable to soak up the dollars in hope of restoring stability. Eventually they will fail.
Most importantly, the dollar/oil relationship has to be maintained to keep the dollar as a preeminent currency. Any attack on this relationship will be forcefully challenged—as it already has been.
In November 2000 Saddam Hussein demanded Euros for his oil. His arrogance was a threat to the dollar; his lack of any military might was never a threat. At the first cabinet meeting with the new administration in 2001, as reported by Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, the major topic was how we would get rid of Saddam Hussein-- though there was no evidence whatsoever he posed a threat to us. This deep concern for Saddam Hussein surprised and shocked O’Neill.
It now is common knowledge that the immediate reaction of the administration after 9/11 revolved around how they could connect Saddam Hussein to the attacks, to justify an invasion and overthrow of his government. Even with no evidence of any connection to 9/11, or evidence of weapons of mass destruction, public and congressional support was generated through distortions and flat out misrepresentation of the facts to justify overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
There was no public talk of removing Saddam Hussein because of his attack on the integrity of the dollar as a reserve currency by selling oil in Euros. Many believe this was the real reason for our obsession with Iraq. I doubt it was the only reason, but it may well have played a significant role in our motivation to wage war. Within a very short period after the military victory, all Iraqi oil sales were carried out in dollars. The Euro was abandoned.
In 2001, Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia spoke of Venezuela switching to the Euro for all their oil sales. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reportedly with assistance from our CIA.
After these attempts to nudge the Euro toward replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency were met with resistance, the sharp fall of the dollar against the Euro was reversed. These events may well have played a significant role in maintaining dollar dominance.
It’s become clear the U.S. administration was sympathetic to those who plotted the overthrow of Chavez, and was embarrassed by its failure. The fact that Chavez was democratically elected had little influence on which side we supported.
Now, a new attempt is being made against the petrodollar system. Iran, another member of the 'axis of evil,' has announced her plans to initiate an oil bourse in March of this year. Guess what, the oil sales will be priced Euros, not dollars..."


[Hardly] Full Disclosure:

UPI: UAE Terminal Takeover Extends to 21 Ports
"A United Arab Emirates government-owned company is poised to take over port terminal operations in 21 American ports, far more than the six widely reported.
The Bush administration has approved the takeover of British-owned Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to DP World, a deal set to go forward March 2 unless Congress intervenes.
P&O is the parent company of P&O Ports North America, which leases terminals for the import and export and loading and unloading and security of cargo in 21 ports, 11 on the East Coast, ranging from Portland, Maine to Miami, Florida, and 10 on the Gulf Coast, from Gulfport, Miss., to Corpus Christi, Texas, according to the company's Web site..."


GMOs

Herve Kempf: New Suspicions about GMO
"Do transgenic plants have a negative effect on health? Ever since their commercialization in 1996, the question has agitated circles of experts and ecologists, without any indisputable proof allowing an affirmative response. Now, several recent studies effected by credible researchers and published in scientific reviews tally with one another to throw doubt on GMOs' complete harmlessness. They don't assert that GMOs generate health problems. But at the very least they suggest that GMOs provoke biological impacts that must be more widely studied. This new questioning arises just as the Council of Ministers adopted a proposed law on GMO Wednesday, February 8, and as the World Trade Organization (WTO) handed over an interim report February 7 to the parties in a conflict that opposes the United States, Canada, and Argentina to the European Union on the issue of transgenic plants.
In November 2005, Australian researchers published an article in a scientific review (Vanessa Prescott et al., Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, 2005, p. 9023) explaining that the transfer of a gene that expresses an insecticide protein from a bean to a pea had provoked unexpected problems: among the mice fed the transgenic peas, Csiro (the Australian equivalent of the French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS) researchers observed antibody production, markers of an allergic reaction. The affair, which made headlines in the Australian and English press, led Csiro to stop development of that transgenic pea, while West Australia Minister of Agriculture Kim Chance announced that his government would finance an independent study on feeding animals with GMO: 'The state government is aware of the anxiety concerning GMO safety, while most of the research in this domain is conducted or financed by the very companies promoting GMO,' Mr. Chance explained in a November 2005 communiqué..."


Our [Fleeting] Right To Privacy:

CS Monitor: US plans massive data sweep
"The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy..."

Domestic Surveillance:

Shane Harris,: T[otal] I[nformation] A[wareness] Lives On
"A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.
It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.
Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA..."

Patenting Nature For Profit:

ENN: Farmers, Others Sue USDA over Monsanto GMO Alfalfa
"A coalition of farmers, consumers and environmental activists Thursday sued the U.S. government over its approval of a biotech alfalfa that critics say will spell havoc for farmers and the environment.'
Opening another front in the battle over genetically modified crops, the lawsuit contends that the U.S. Department of Agriculture improperly is allowing Monsanto Co. to sell an herbicide-resistant alfalfa seed while failing to analyze the public health, environmental, and economic consequences of that action.
'The USDA failed to do a full environmental review when they deregulated this genetically engineered alfalfa,' said Will Rastov, an attorney for Center for Food Safety, one of the plaintiffs. 'They're going to wreak untold dangers into the environment.'
The lawsuit asks the federal court in San Francisco to rescind the USDA's decision until a full environmental review has been completed.
The suit asserts that the genetically modified alfalfa will probably contaminate conventionally grown alfalfa at a fast pace, ultimately forcing farmers to pay for Monsanto's patented gene technology whether they want the technology or not.
The group says biotech alfalfa would also hurt production of organic dairy and beef products as alfalfa is a key cattle feed. And the suit claims farmers could lose export business, valued at an estimated $480 million per year, because buyers in Japan and South Korea, major importers of U.S. alfalfa, have indicated they would avoid buying U.S. alfalfa once the genetically engineered variety is released..."


The Retalliatory Leak:

Jason Leopold: White House 'Discovers’ 250 Emails Related to Plame Leak
"The White House turned over last week 250 pages of emails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Senior aides had sent the emails in the spring of 2003 related to the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed during a federal court hearing Friday.
The emails are said to be explosive, and may prove that Cheney played an active role in the effort to discredit Plame Wilson’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Bush administration’s prewar Iraq intelligence, sources close to the investigation said.
Sources close to the probe said the White House 'discovered' the emails two weeks ago and turned them over to Fitzgerald last week. The sources added that the emails could prove that Cheney lied to FBI investigators when he was interviewed about the leak in early 2004. Cheney said that he was unaware of any effort to discredit Wilson or unmask his wife’s undercover status to reporters..."

Yet Another Example Of Why Voting Technology Ought To Pass A Public Security Audit, Rather Than Be Protected 'Intellectual Property' Of Private Industry:

Again, as Stalin is reputed to have said, "Those who vote determine nothing, those who count the votes determine everything."

Black Box Voting: Someone accessed 40 Palm Beach County voting machines Nov 2004
"The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.

After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.

Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.

You can find the complete set of raw voting machine event logs for Palm Beach County here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/6628.html
Note that some items were not provided to us and are ommitted from the logs.

The logs rule out the possibility that these were Logic & Accuracy (L&A) test results, and verified that these results did appear in the final totals. In addition to the date discrepancies, most had incorrect polling times, with votes appearing throughout the wee hours of the night. These machines were L&A tested, and the L&A test activities appeared in the logs with the correct date and time.

According to the voting machine assignment log, these machines were not assigned to early voting locations. The number of votes on each machine also corresponds with the numbers typical of polling place machines rather than early voting.

Many of these machines showed unexplained log activity after the L&A test but before Election Day. In addition, many more machines without date anomalies showed this log activity, which revealed someone powering up the machine, opening the program, then powering it down again. In one instance, the date discrepancy appeared when someone accessed the machine two minutes after the L&A test was completed.

Voting machines are computers, and computers have batteries that can cause date and time discrepancies, but it does not appear that these particular discrepancies could have been caused by battery problems.

The evidence indicates that someone accessed the computers after the L&A and before the election, and that this access caused a change in the machine's reporting functions, at least for date and time. Such access would take a high degree of inside access. It is not known whether any other changes were introduced into the voting machines at this time. As learned in the Hursti experiments, it is possible for an insider to access the machines and leave no trace, but sometimes a hasty or clumsy access (such as forgetting to enter a correct date/time value when altering a record) will leave telltale tracks..."


Bush's Next Target, Iran:

Financial Times (UK) - US marines probe tensions among Iran's ethnic minorities
"The intelligence wing of the US marines has launched an investigation into Iran's ethnic minorities at a time of heightened tensions along the border with Iraq and friction between capitals.
Iranian activists involved in a classified research project for the marines told the FT the Pentagon was examining the depth and nature of grievances against the central Islamic government, and appeared to be studying whether Iran would be prone to a violent fragmentation along the same kind of fault lines that are splitting Iraq.
US intelligence experts suggested the marines' effort could represent the early stages of contingency plans for a ground assault on Iran.
Alternatively, it could be an attempt to evaluate the implications of the unrest in Iranian border regions for marines stationed in Iraq, as well as Iranian infiltration. Others suggest it simply highlights competition between the various US intelligence organisations.
Whatever the motive, the survey will add to Iranian anxieties about Washington's intentions..."

Is The PNAC Aganda Being Disavowed Just As It's List Of Objectives Is Almost A Fait Accompli?

Has this zebra changed his stripes? Is should be remembered that Mr. Fukuyama was, after all, a signatory to the 1997 'Statement of Principles' of the Project For The New American Century (along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Elliot Abrams, Khalilzad, 'Scooter' Lewis, etc).

These are the people who advocated the invasion of Iraq, ratcheting Pentagon spending back up to Reagan-era levels (as a % of GDP), the militarization of space and US-control over cyberspace. They were were so adamant about doing so that they even dropped the hint that it might take a 'catalyzing event' like another Pearl Harbor to get the public on board with spending that much on defense.

Francis Fukuyama: After Neoconservatism
"...Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support...
...There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court..."


Port Security:

Team Bush is showing its penchant for pursuing profitable business deals for the well-connected. The current Treasury Secretary, Mr. Snow, was tapped to replace Mr. O'Neil a short time before CSX, for whom he served as CEO, sold part of its operations to The Carlyle Group.

The fact that a foreign direct investment case such as the Dubai port deal did not result in a 45-day investigation, as required by law, also makes one wonder why the Administration feels fit, yet again, to ignore the law.

Paul Krugman: Osama, Saddam and the Ports
"The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn't make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn't endanger national security. But that's nothing new - the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation's ports.
So why did this latest case of sloppiness and indifference finally catch the public's attention? Because this time the administration has become a victim of its own campaign of fearmongering and insinuation.
Let's go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military commanders their marching orders. 'Judge whether good enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time - not only UBL [Osama bin Laden],' read an aide's handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes were recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request. 'Hard to get a good case,' the notes acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'
So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals - especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.
But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to do two things. First, he had to create a climate of fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat, metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil threatening America. Second, he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn't.
The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers..."

New York Daily News: W aides' biz ties to Arab firm
"The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.
One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.
Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.
The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration..."


Where Are You Leading Us, Mr. Bush?

Nat Parry: Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs'
"'The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements,' Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.
'I stand by this President’s ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant to do that,' Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.
'Senator,' a smiling Gonzales responded, 'the President already said we’d be happy to listen to your ideas.'
In less paranoid times, Graham’s comments might be viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to have it both ways – ingratiating himself to an administration of his own party while seeking some credit from Washington centrists for suggesting Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush runs the War on Terror.
But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.
Top U.S. officials have cited the need to challenge news that undercuts Bush’s actions as a key front in defeating the terrorists, who are aided by 'news informers' in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
[For details, see Consortiumnews.com 'Upside-Down Media' or below.]

Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with 'an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,' KBR said. [Market Watch, Jan. 26, 2006]..."

Robert Parry: An Upside-Down Media
"The gravest indictment of the American news media is that George W. Bush has gutted the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter – yet this extraordinary story does not lead the nation’s newspapers and the evening news every day..."

Odd Things Afoot At US Airbases in Europe:

The Sunday Times (UK) - US military planes criss-cross Europe using bogus call sign
"The American military have been operating flights across Europe using a call sign assigned to a civilian airline that they have no legal right to use.
Not only is the call sign bogus — according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) — so, it appears, are some of the aircraft details the Americans have filed with the air traffic control authorities.
In at least one case, a plane identified with the CIA practice of 'extraordinary rendition' — transporting terrorist suspects — left a US air base just after the arrival of an aircraft using the bogus call sign.
The call sign Juliet Golf Oscar (JGO) followed by a flight number belongs, says the ICAO, to a now bankrupt Canadian low-cost airline called Jetsgo of Montreal.
But for several years and as recently as last December it has been used selectively by both the American air force and army to cover the flights of aircraft to and from the Balkans.
These range from Learjet 35 executive jets to C-130 transport planes and MC-130P Combat Shadows, which are specially adapted for clandestine missions in politically sensitive or hostile territory.
A Sunday Times analysis of flight plans and radio logs has placed these aircraft at locations including Tuzla in Bosnia, Pristina in Kosovo, Aviano, the site of a large joint US-Italian military air base in northern Italy, and Ramstein in Germany, the headquarters of the US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE)...
...A USAFE spokesman last week said American aircraft using the JGO call sign were performing 'Joint Guard Operations' for the Nato/European peacekeeping mission in the Balkans.
However, inquiries have shown that the military operation called 'Joint Guard' ended in 1998. They also show that none of the US aircraft deployed in it match ones using the JGO call sign.
A spokesman for the ICAO said: 'Our records indicate that the designator JGO is still assigned to Jetsgo and the ICAO does not assign the same code to two operators,'."

On Torture:

He tried to tell them, but they would not listen. The New Yorker article is a must-read.

NY Times: Senior Lawyer at Pentagon Broke Ranks on Detainees
"One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document shows.
The lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, a political appointee who retired Dec. 31 after more than four years as general counsel of the Navy, was one of many dissenters inside the Pentagon. Senior uniformed lawyers in all the military services also objected sharply to the interrogation policy, according to internal documents declassified last year.
But Mr. Mora's campaign against what he viewed as an official policy of cruel treatment, detailed in a memorandum he wrote in July 2004 and recounted in an article in the Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, made public yesterday, underscored again how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject..."


Civil Liberties:

Richard Schmitt: Privacy Guardian Is Still a Paper Tiger
"For Americans troubled by the prospect of federal agents eavesdropping on their phone conversations or combing through their Internet records, there is good news: A little-known board exists in the White House whose purpose is to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are protected in the fight against terrorism.
Someday, it might actually meet.
Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.
More than a year later, it exists only on paper.
Foot-dragging, debate over its budget and powers, and concern over the qualifications of some of its members — one was treasurer of Bush's first campaign for Texas governor — has kept the board from doing a single day of work.
On Thursday, after months of delay, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a first step toward standing up the fledgling watchdog, approving the two lawyers Bush nominated to lead the panel. But it may take months before the board is up and running and doing much serious work..."


Poverty In The U.S.

The Guardian/Observer (UK) - 37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty
"...A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.
Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.
Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush's trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.
For a brief moment last year in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina brought America's poor into the spotlight. Poverty seemed on the government's agenda. That spotlight has now been turned off. 'I had hoped Katrina would have changed things more. It hasn't,' says Cynthia Duncan, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire..."

The U.S. Constitution Under Threat:

William Rivers Pitt: The Enemy
"...We hear a great deal about enemies these days, and many of them are quite real and quite perilous. It is difficult to imagine a more perilous enemy, however, than the one operating out of Washington today. This enemy would set itself on high, beyond control or censure, and create of itself that permanent faction James Madison so earnestly warned us of. This enemy deletes or hides evidence of its calumny, or simply alters existing laws that would otherwise derail its plans. This enemy destroys lives out of hand, lives by the tens of thousands, and reaps a pretty profit in the process.
The difference between the enemies we hear about and the one in Washington is simple and deadly: only the enemy in Washington can annihilate the constitutional government we have enjoyed for more than two centuries. The idea that is America cannot be terminated by terrorists or rogue states. Were the nation entire to be somehow obliterated, the idea that is America would endure. Only its keepers can kill it completely. They are well on their way.

'As nightfall does not come at once,' wrote Justice William O. Douglas, 'neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness.'

We must deal with the enemy within the halls of our government, the enemy whose power to destroy far outstrips any enemy beyond our borders. In doing so, we save that which is unique in the world. In doing so, we deal a death blow to all other enemies. In doing so, we save ourselves from that darkness."

The Environment:

The idea of drilling existing or closed landfills for capturing their methane emissions for use in generating energy is a good one. The notion, however, that these waste 'disposal' [there is no such thing as throwing something 'away'] corporations would seek to ensure the continuing stream of organic materials into their landfills to aid in future methane trapping, rather than diverting these sorted materials toward composting, is environmentally unconscienable. In our own personal experience, composting has allowed our household to reduce the trash we send to the landfill by an average of 58%.

Heather Rogers: Titans of Trash
"...The corporations that handle much of the country's garbage today make their money in direct proportion to the amount that gets thrown away: the more trash, the more cash. In fact, these companies earn the highest profits from castoffs that get landfilled; burying rubbish generates more before-tax income than all other waste company operations combined. And since organic items make up almost two-thirds of all landfilled waste, these firms would stand to lose vast profits if those discards were diverted to, say, a composting program. Bioreactor technology, by contrast, is designed to maintain maximum flows of discards into the ground.
According to David Kirkpatrick, managing director of a Durham, North Carolina, firm that invests in clean technologies: 'Clearly, [for-profit landfill operators] will make more money the more tons that come in. Any front-end separation for composting reduces the volumes going into the landfill, and that reduces revenues.'
In an Orwellian flipping of the script, WMI markets the bioreactor as a means of 'enhancing environmental protection.' The corporation claims it can readily capture the dramatically increased methane output through wells dug into the bioreactor. This gas would then be channeled to power plants for conversion into electricity. In full green-washing mode, Gary Hater, the firm's senior director of bioreactor technology, lays it out: 'By going from methane to energy, you're decreasing reliance on imported fuels and domestic fuels; you're taking a waste material and generating green energy in a renewable way--you're creating green energy!'
Never mind all the energy that's wasted when discards are buried in landfills instead of getting reused or recycled. According to Neil Seldman of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 80 percent of US products are used once, then thrown away. If those items were built to last longer, if they were easier to repair and reuse, a lot less energy would be consumed in the first place...
...Under the current regime, corporations are in charge of treating a huge portion of US household discards. With their colossal budgets and the political power they therefore wield, the trash giants exercise considerable influence over the way garbage will be treated in the coming decades. And they aren't investing in waste-reduction, recycling or composting technologies in any significant way, although these are proven, ecologically sound methods..."

Bush's Next Target: Iran

Kurt Nimmo: Iran Attack - Turning America Into A Straussian Totalitarian State
"In the weeks before the Straussian neocons invaded Iraq, we were told only a few thousand Iraqis, at most, would die in the initial onslaught. Of course, thanks to the Pentagon, uninterested in body counts, we do not have a good idea of how many Iraqis died in the initial assault, and to make matters worse, 'Iraq's Health Ministry ordered a halt to a count of civilians killed during the war and told its statistics department not to release figures compiled so far,' the Associated Press reported in December, 2003, months after the invasion. The following year, however, a British medical journal, the Lancet, conducted surveys in Iraq and determined that over 100,000 Iraqis had died since the invasion, the Washington Post reported. Now we are told a 'major American attack on Iran's nuclear sites would kill up to 10,000 people and lead to war in the Middle East,' according to the Oxford Research Group...
...Either Cheney or the Straussian neocons are insane-courting depression and social and political disaster-or something else is up their sleeves. In order to understand what the Iran attack means in the larger context, it pays to examine the Straussian philosophy.
'Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat, and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured,' writes Shadia Drury. 'Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,' Strauss wrote. 'Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united-and they can only be united against other people.' Strauss' established governance, according to Drury, is made possible through 'aggressive, belligerent foreign policy,' and '[p]erpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in.' According to Jim Lobe, 'Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a 'national destiny'-as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983-that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a 'myopic national security.''
Attacking Iran, with its ensuing financial and social chaos, is precisely the sort of 'national destiny' the Straussian neocons have in mind for America. 'A sense of perpetual crisis and war cements the society together with absolute loyalty' to the ruling Straussians, explains Michael Doliner. The Straussians 'are not, as some think, merely agents of Israel,' Doliner continues.
Nor was the war fought merely for oil. They did not ally themselves with the religious right merely for expedience. They do not seek primarily to further the fortunes of Halliburton and Bechtel. All these are real motives, but they are peripheral motives. Their goal is to turn America into the Straussian State and rule it perpetually. Consequently, the debacle in Iraq [or the coming debacle in Iran] does not seriously affect their plans. Even the Katrina aftermath might not shake them. A Straussian society needs an endless war to supply a 'them' against which 'we' will do endless battle. The endless war, such a horrible prospect for the rest of us, provided the political glue to transform the United States of American from a liberal democracy to a Straussian totalitarian state..."

Domestic Surveillance:

UPI: Whistleblower Alleges Second Wiretap Program
"A former NSA employee said Tuesday there is another ongoing top-secret surveillance program that might have violated millions of Americans' Constitutional rights.
Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a 'special access' electronic surveillance program that he characterized as far more wide-ranging than the warrentless wiretapping recently exposed by the New York Times but he is forbidden from discussing the program with Congress.
Tice said he believes it violates the Constitution's protection against unlawful search and seizures but has no way of sharing the information without breaking classification laws. He is not even allowed to tell the congressional intelligence committees - members or their staff - because they lack high enough clearance.
Neither could he brief the inspector general of the NSA because that office is not cleared to hear the iformation, he said.
Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said they believe a few members of the Armed Services Committee are cleared for the information, but they said believe their committee and the intelligence committees have jurisdiction to hear the allegations..."


On Torture:

Democracy Now!Prof. McCoy Exposes the History of CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror
"...ALFRED McCOY: Well, if you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, okay? In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost.
From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered -- they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill -- and the first breakthrough came at McGill. And it's in the book. And here, you can see the -- this is the -- if you want show it, you can. That graphic really shows -- that's the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGill University --

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it.

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, it's very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.
And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.
Now, then the second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, 'You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.' And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.
Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you’ll see that they're short-shackled -- okay? -- that they're long-shackled, that they're made -- several of those photos you just showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the C.I.A.'s technique...

...ALFRED McCOY: In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the United States found it had no intelligence assets; it had no way to contain the insurgency, and they -- the U.S. military was in a state of panic. And at that moment, they began sweeping across Iraq, rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib prison. At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, and he brought his techniques with him. He brought a CD, and he brought a manual of his techniques. He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.
In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452, and if you look at those techniques, what he's ordering, in essence, is a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation, and if you look at the 1963 C.I.A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 C.I.A. Interrogation Training Manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and interrogation, and then twenty years later, you look at General Sanchez's 2003 orders, there's a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both the general principles, this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity and existence, okay? And the specific techniques, the way of achieving that, through the attack on these sensory receptors...

...ALFRED McCOY: Right. Most Americans think that it's over, that in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act 2005, which in the language of Senator McCain, who was the original author of that amendment to the defense appropriation, the author of that act, it bars all inhumane or cruel treatment, and most people think that’s it, that it’s over, okay? Actually, what has happened is the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Cheney went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain refused. The National Security Advisor went to McCain and asked for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. He refused.
So then they started amending it. Basically what happened is, through the process, they introduced loopholes. Look, at the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration ordered torture. President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation, 'I don't care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.' Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles. One, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. Two, that there was a possible defense for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture, and the defenses were of two kinds. First of all, they played around with the word 'severe,' that torture is the infliction of severe pain. That's when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, '’severe’ means equivalent to organ failure,' in other words, right up to the point of death. The other thing was that they came up with the idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty. The third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts. Now, in the process of ratifying – sorry, passing the McCain torture – the torture prohibition, McCain’s ban on inhumane treatment, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said --

AMY GOODMAN: This was the statement that he signed as he signed the McCain so-called ban on torture?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, he emailed it at 8:00 at night from his ranch in Crawford on December 30th, that he was signing this legislation into law. He said, 'I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America.' Okay, that was the first thing. The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that's a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A. torturers. The third principle was – is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory, and last month --

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

ALFRED McCOY: So, and then in the last month, the Bush administration has gone to federal courts and said, 'Drop all of your habeas corpus suits from Guantanamo.' There are 160 of them. They've gone to the Supreme Court and said, 'Drop your Guantanamo case.' They have, in fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their actions..."

The So-Called War On Terror, Or Playing The Fear Card Every Time Anyone Challenges Bush's Agenda:

Paul Joseph Watson: Twenty-Three Intel Experts Say LA Terror Plot a Sham
"Following [Feb. 9th]'s highly suspiciously timed announcement that the US government had foiled a 2002 terror plot against the Los Angeles Library Tower, intelligence experts and White House reporters have uniformly debunked the story.
As we reported yesterday, in an orchestrated set-up, George W. Bush announced that a plan to fly a plane into the LA Library Tower was thwarted in 2002 and within minutes news networks were showing footage of the same building being destroyed in the movie Independence Day.
After the mayor of LA, Antonio Villaraigosa, immediately went public with comments of his absolute bewilderment concerning the alleged plot, no fewer than twenty three intelligence experts told Capitol Hill Blue that President Bush was 'cheapening and politicizing their work' by creating a 'fantasy world' of discredited terror alerts and using them for political points scoring.
Both current and former NSA and FBI officials vented their fury with George Bush, one telling Capitol Hill Blue that he was 'full of shit,'..."


Domestic Surveillance:

Washington Post: Congressional Probe of NSA Spying Is in Doubt
"Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.
The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.
They attributed the shift to last week's closed briefings given by top administration officials to the full House and Senate intelligence committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials, including Vice President Cheney. 'It's been a full-court press,' said a top Senate Republican aide who asked to speak only on background -- as did several others for this story -- because of the classified nature of the intelligence committees' work..."


Iran:

GNN: Nuclear Proliferation: A Gathering Storm
"...For almost 38 years the vast majority of the world’s nations have adhered to the NPT. Only India, Pakistan, Israel, and possibly North Korea have joined the Big Five, although, at the time the Treaty was signed, a dozen more were on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. In short, the vast bulk of the signers have held to what they agreed to.
The Big Five, however, have ignored the obligation to dismantle their nuclear arsenals or to even discuss general disarmament. At the NPT Review Conference last summer the issue did not even come up, a shortcoming which UN General Secretary Kofi Annan called a 'disgrace.'
Not only have the Big Five refused to consider eliminating their nuclear arsenals, in 2002 the Bush Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) unilaterally overturned the 1978 pledge, and the White House threatened to use nukes on Syria, Iran, and Iraq, all non-nuclear states. The Administration’s rationale is that the NPT is not just about nuclear weapons, but 'weapons of mass destruction,' which it argues, includes chemical and biological weapons. It is a re-interpretation the French appear to embrace as well..."


The DoD and 'Full Spectrum Dominance'

GNN: Marching Us Into Chaos?
"...For years, the QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review] was part of a regular military planning policy that evolved during the Cold War and set out perceived threats over four year periods. Congress voted to approve the policies to counter those threats, which would be locked into military policy until the next review. This ensured that the military could not make unaccountable shifts in foreign policy in the interim, or influence funding debates beyond their initial proposals.
Or at least they couldn’t until the Bush administration.
They had decided to overhaul military planning before September 11. Under a scheme known as the 'Planning Programming and Budgeting System' (PBBS), the military had requested funds for long term strategic projects every four years. In 2001 the DOD introduced PBBE (where the 'E' stands for 'execution'), under which budgeting and ‘programming’ processes within the Pentagon were amalgamated. What might seem a minor procedural matter actually provided the means to launch a radical new military policy and vastly increased the power of the Secretary of State for Defense...
...It talks about catastrophes such as hurricanes or WMD attacks, and recommends that 'In order to respond effectively to future catastrophic events, the Department will provide U.S. NORTHCOM with authority to stage forces and equipment domestically prior to potential incidents when possible.' (p.26) That is, prior to something happening. Before anybody has had a chance to debate whether the deployment of troops is needed. It is a potential rationalization of ongoing martial law.
As it continues, 'The Department (of defense) will also seek to eliminate current legislative ceilings on pre-event spending' whilst it seeks the option of 'Prompt and high-volume global strike to deter aggression or coercion (internationally), and if deterrence fails, to provide a broader range of conventional response options to the President. This will require broader authorities from the Congress.' Congress is expected to give up power of the purse and effectively the sword. (p.31)...
...The development of BioDefense as a central aim also raises huge problems. Like the Missile Defense Shield, Biodefense will be interpreted abroad as the US trying to gain first strike capability. In theory, it will be able to hold the threat of biological attack over other states, whilst defending the homeland from retaliation. In reality, it is more likely to stimulate an arms race to develop more lethal, and more easily delivered weapons as an insurance policy. It is terrifying.
The expansion of psy-ops into naked propaganda is worrying from a media standpoint. As the report states, 'helping out states versus non-state actors to succeed in such operations, the United States must often take an indirect approach, building up and working with others. This indirect approach seeks to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.' (p.11) This is surely meant to combine with the commitment to 'manage' information. When this becomes clear across the world, independent media will inevitably be seen as agents of empire..."

Exploiting Fear for Profit, With A Little Help From Team B, Then And Now...

Thom Hartmann: Rumsfeld and Cheney Revive Their 70's Terror Playbook
"Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are at it again.
Last week, Rumsfeld told the press we should be preparing for 'the Long War,' saying of the war this administration has stirred up with its attack on Iraq that, 'Just as the Cold War lasted a long time, this war is something that is not going to go away.'
The last time Rumsfeld talked like this was in the 1970s, in response to the danger of peace presented by Richard Nixon.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning of a process Kissinger called 'détente.' On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said:

'Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear—for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world.'

But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear. Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated? And how could billions of dollars taken as taxes from average working people be transferred to the companies that Rumsfeld and Cheney - and their cronies - would soon work for and/or run?
Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear.
They did it by claiming that the Soviets had a new secret weapon of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody knew about but them. It was a nuclear submarine technology that was undetectable by current American technology. And, they said, because of this and related-undetectable-technology weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work or have businesses relationships with.
The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a 'complete fiction' and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone...
...Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.
Wolfowitz's group, known as 'Team B,' came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology. It could - within a matter of months - be off the coast of New York City with a nuclear warhead.
Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of this powerful new Soviet WMD was unproven - they said the lack of proof proved the 'undetectable' sub existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz helped re-organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom many of these same men would later become lobbyists.
And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.
Trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs and the Soviet super-sub technology...
... Today, making Americans terrified with their so-called 'War On Terror' is the same strategy, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq to bring it into fruition - we may well be bringing into reality forces that previously existed only on the margins and with very little power to harm us.
Most recently we've learned from former CIA National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia Paul Pillar that, just like in the 1970s, the CIA disagreed in 2002 with Rumsfeld and Cheney about an WMD threat - this time posed by Iraq - even as Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz were telling America how afraid we should be of an eminent 'mushroom cloud.'
We've seen this movie before. The last time, it cost our nation hundreds of billions of dollars, vastly enriched the cronies of these men, and ultimately helped bring Ronald Reagan to power. This time they've added on top of their crony enrichment program the burden of over 2200 dead American servicemen and women, tens of thousands wounded, as many as a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, and a level of worldwide instability not seen since the run-up to World War Two...
... Now that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has confessed that many of the terror alerts that continually popped up during the 2004 election campaign were, as USA Today noted on 10 May 2005, based on 'flimsy evidence' or were done over his objection at the insistence of 'administration officials,' it's increasingly clear that the Bush administration itself is the source of much of the 'be afraid!' terror inflicted on US citizens over the past 5 years..."

Energy Policy:

New York Times: U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies
"The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.
New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.
Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico..."


Um, Not The Democracy We Meant, So You Start Over...

...and put people we can control in charge. Here endeth the lesson in democratic principles.

New York Times: U.S. and Israelis Are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster
"The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.
The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.
The officials also argue that a close look at the election results shows that Hamas won a smaller mandate than previously understood.
The officials and diplomats, who said this approach was being discussed at the highest levels of the State Department and the Israeli government, spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the issue..."


Bush's Next Target: Iran

Ray McGovern: Who Will Blow the Whistle Before We Attack Iran?
"The question looms large against the backdrop of the hearing on whistleblowing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon by Christopher Shays, chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. Among those testifying are Russell Tice, one of the sources who exposed illegal eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, and Army Sgt. Sam Provance, who told his superiors of the torture he witnessed at Abu Graib, got no satisfaction, and felt it his duty to go public. It will not be your usual hearing.
I had the privilege of being present at the creation of the international Truth-Telling Coalition on September 9, 2004 and of working with Daniel Ellsberg in drafting the coalition's Appeal to Current Government Officials to put loyalty to the Constitution above career and to expose dishonesty leading to misadventures like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Whether or not encouragement from the Coalition played any role in subsequent disclosures, we are grateful for those responsible for the recent hemorrhaging of important information - from the 'Downing Street Minutes,' showing that by summer 2002 the Bush administration had decided to 'fix' intelligence to 'justify' war on Iraq, to disclosures regarding CIA kidnappings, secret prisons, and state-sponsored torture.
As former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who leads the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, keeps reminding us, 'Information is the oxygen of democracy.' And with this administration's fetish for secrecy and our somnolent Fourth Estate, we would likely all suffocate without patriotic truth-tellers (aka whistleblowers)..."

The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War,
And The Policymakers Who Accept No Dissent:

Paul R. Pillar: Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq
"The most serious problem with U.S. intelligence today is that its relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly needs repair. In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these disturbing developments..."

Sunday Times (UK) - CIA chief sacked for opposing torture
"The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as 'water boarding', intelligence sources have claimed.
Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was 'not quite as aggressive as he might have been' in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: 'It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.'
Grenier also opposed 'excessive' interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro..."


Next Target: Iran

The Daily Telegraph (UK) - US prepares military blitz against Iran's nuclear sites
"Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a 'last resort' to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.
Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt..."

The Boston Globe: Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn
"Iran is prepared to launch attacks using long-range missiles, secret commando units, and terrorist allies planted around the globe in retaliation for any strike on the country's nuclear facilities, according to new US intelligence assessments and military specialists.
US and Israeli officials have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to thwart its nuclear ambitions. Among the options are airstrikes on suspected nuclear installations or covert action to sabotage the Iranian program.
But military and intelligence analysts warn that Iran -- which a recent US intelligence report described as 'more confident and assertive' than it has been since the early days of the 1979 Islamic revolution -- could unleash reprisals across the region, and perhaps even inside the United States, if the hard-line regime came under attack.
'When the Americans or Israelis are thinking about [military force], I hope they will sit down and think about everything the ayatollahs could do to make our lives miserable and what we will do to discourage them,' said John Pike, director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, referring to Iran's religious leaders.
'There could be a cycle of escalation,'..."


And So It Begins...

When will national governments start doing this, too?

Security Focus: Company requires RFID injection
"Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.
Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.
Although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment, anyone without one will not be able to access the datacenter, according to a Register article.
Ironically, the extra security sought may be offset by a recent discovery of Jonathan Westhues, where the security researcher showed the VeriChip can be skimmed and cloned, duplicating an implant’s authentication. When contacted, those at CityWatcher were unaware of the chip's security issue, according to the spychips.com release."

Domestic Surveillance:

John Dean: Vice President Cheney and The Fight Over 'Inherent' Presidential Powers His Attempt to Swing the Pendulum Back Began Long Before 9/11
"Vice President Dick Cheney has stirred up an old fight in Washington. He sent a rookie, however, to make his case publicly. It did not work.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to offer what may have been the weakest legal argument for presidential power to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance since Nixon's Justice Department invoked the views of King George III.
King George III's take on the matter did not carry any weight either. Indeed, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals could barely believe the Nixon Justice Department was serious. The panel reminded the government's lawyers that warrantless searches were among the very reasons the colonies fought for their independence...
...all this is something of a periodic Washington ritual. And no one enjoys beating this drum to keep the executive power issue alive more than Dick Cheney. It may, in fact, be the reason he selected himself to be George Bush's Vice President.
'In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate,' Cheney recently told the Wall Street Journal, 'there was a concerted effort to place limits and restrictions on presidential authority.' There were 'a series of decisions,' he explained, 'that were aimed at the time at trying to avoid a repeat of things like Vietnam or ... Watergate.'
'I thought they were misguided then,' he continued, and 'given the world that we live in [today] that the president needs to have unimpaired executive authority.' Cheney said the only restraint on the president should be 'the Constitution.' He did not say, however, as he has on other occasions, that it is the president who says what the Constitution means, as far as his own duties and responsibilities...
...Do not, however, mistake Cheney's reference to 'this day and age' as having anything to do with terrorism. Long before 9/11, Cheney was pushing this cause.
To understand Cheney's position, he suggests that others 'go back and look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-Contra report, [and] you'll see a strong statement about the president's prerogatives and responsibilities in the foreign policy/national security area in particular.'
If one does as Cheney says, as I have, what will be found is rather startling, to say the least.
The so-called Iran Contra report to which Cheney is referring emerged as part of a five-hundred page final report of a Congressional investigation which lasted eleven months. The investigation was undertaken by a joint committee of both House and Senate, of which then-Representative Dick Cheney was Vice-Chair.
At issue was whether the Reagan Administration had ignored the Boland Amendment, a 1984 law that restricted the CIA's use of appropriated funds to support the Nicaragua Contra movement - and, relatedly, whether Congress had been properly informed about the Administration's actions.
The majority report asserted that the entire affair 'was characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy.' But Cheney authored a minority report - joined by several other Republicans, though not all.
Cheney's report took a very different view: He called the failures of the Reagan White House to comply with the laws 'mistakes,' insisting they 'were just that -- mistakes in judgment and nothing more.'
These so-called mistakes were actually serious criminal offenses according to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who successfully prosecuted some eight Reagan officials for their mistakes. All eight, however, either had their verdicts reversed on technicalities, or were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. The George W. administration hired many of these people, and has made the records of George H.W. Bush disappear.
Somewhat astoundingly, Cheney's minority report not only defended the White House's lawbreaking but also scolded Congress for passing the relevant laws in the first place. Congress, he argued, was 'abusing its power' when it adopted laws restricting the president's spending of money to aide the Nicaraguan Contras. 'Congress must recognize that effective foreign policy requires, and the Constitution mandates, the President to be the country's foreign policy leader,' Cheney's report declared, ignoring the fact the Constitution gives Congress exclusive power over the purse.
Clearly, Cheney's mindset about the Congress vis-à-vis the president has changed little since 1987. His position, however, is far from as solid as he claims..."

The Retalliatory Leak Is Cheney's To Explain:

Murray Waas: Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information (02/09/2006)
"Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been 'authorized' by Cheney and other White House 'superiors' in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.
Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
Beyond what was stated in the court paper, say people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war..."

Washington:

Gannett News Service: Hastert, Frist said to rig bill for drug firms
"Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert engineered a backroom legislative maneuver to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits, say witnesses to the pre-Christmas power play.
The language was tucked into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of a House-Senate conference committee, say several witnesses, including a top Republican staff member..."


The True Cost of 'Always The Low Price'

Seattle Times: The Seattle Times: Local News: State subsidy to Wal-Mart employees put at $12 million
"It cost the state an estimated $12 million in 2004 to provide government-subsidized health care to Wal-Mart employees, according to a state Senate analysis released Tuesday.
The total was nearly double that amount if costs to federal taxpayers are included.
The new figures provide fresh ammunition for a labor-dominated coalition that is pushing for legislation that would force some big employers to spend more on health-care benefits and stop shifting those costs to the state..."


Social Security 'Reform'

No matter that the country was unconvinced by W's PR campaign on his ideas on SS 'reform,' just shove it in the budget and hope nobody on the Hill reads it (like the first PATRIOT Act)...

Washington Post: Bush Sneaks Social Security Plan into Budget
"If you read enough numbers, you never know what you'll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.
Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.
His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.
If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You're not alone. Bush didn't pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message last week..."


What The White House Ought To Have Known:

NY Times: White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
"In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.
'FYI from FEMA,' said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, 'are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires,'..."

The True Cost Of Imported Persian Gulf Oil, or How We'd Rather Not Confront Reality

A great many people find it fashionable to complain about high fuel costs when they fill up their vehicles. Little do they seem to realize the bargain they have been getting for the last 50 or so years. This bargain looks more like a deal with the devil if one looks at what its operating assumptions are.

The truly sad thing is that if We The People forced oil companies to pay for all of the petroleum supply route protection services that are provided by the US Navy in the Gulf, and the cost of the two wars the U.S. has fought there for oil, these companies surely would pass those costs on to the consumer. Fuel made from Persian Gulf-sourced petroleum would cost $5.00/gal. or more. People would be screaming for 40 mpg+ vehicles to come to market here, too.

Instead, there is a deliberate (and wildly successful) program underway by the U.S. government to have the Federal taxpayer (who funds the Pentagon) pay for this every April 15th, regardless of how much the individual taxpayer chooses to make use of petroleum via his/her own consumption habits/lifestyle choices. So, in essence, people who drive inefficient 5,000 lb. trucks masquerading as passenger vehicles are receiving a subsidy from anyone who pays U.S. Federal taxes. This is a classic example of market distortion, yet the people who scream the loudest about 'free markets' as a fundamental pillar of U.S. policy never raise this as a point of concern. The oil companies are thus effectively externalizing costs that they would otherwise have to bear onto the entire American tax-base, rather than just those who choose to use the most oil from volatile regions.

A much more impactful way of funding this part of the Pentagon's activities would be to tax all petroleum coming from areas that require US military protection, so that the consumer sees it when they make their choices. Such measures allow 'free' markets to function. Of course, this would affect petrochemicals, fuel, plastics, etc. The obvious result would be dramatically higher prices for a large number of things that Americans consume every day, and it would force a great many people to rethink how/what they purchase. What should be obvious at this point is that there are people who do not want this to happen. Reality is just something the U.S. government does not want its citizens to stare in the face. So, instead, U.S. society has come to expect very cheap oil, regardless of the fact that consumers simply are not being allowed to pay at the pump (or anywhere else its members buy petroleum products) what the commodity actually costs.

If someone makes widgets, and they cost the producer $3 to make, but they sell them to the consumer or industry at $1, because the producer gets somebody else to pay the other $2, does that sound fair, if the person or group who is paying the $2 doesn't realize it? The consumer or industry that is getting widgets for $1 will think they are ‘cheap’ and start using them for many more things than if they cost what they actually should. Markets can't function if they're distorted, but arguably every U.S. administration since WW II doesn't appear to be bothered by this. The public isn’t interested, either, it seems. The corporate mass media makes no serious attempt to examine these market distortions, because of the fundamental questions it would raise about the ‘American Way of Life’ from which they profit enormously.

Coretta Scott King:

William Rivers Pitt: Trapped Like a Rat
"...President Jimmy Carter, who has come to be one of the harshest critics of Mr. Bush, hurled fire across the stage over the deplorable administration response to Hurricane Katrina. 'This commemorative ceremony this morning and this afternoon is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over,' said Carter. 'We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.'
Carter also took a moment to drop a brick over the recent revelations that the NSA has been spying on Americans, without court approval or warrants, at the behest of Mr. Bush. 'It was difficult for them personally,' said Carter, 'with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and as you know, harassment from the FBI.'
By far, the harshest criticism came from Rev. Joseph Lowery, a King protégé, who spoke of Mrs. King's staunch opposition to the occupation of Iraq. 'She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar,' said Lowery. 'We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor.'
Would Coretta Scott King have approved of this? One can be certain that the woman who said 'If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children' would have certainly approved..."


The CIA Leak Case:

Jason Leopold: Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson
"Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials.
The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson.
In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House..."

Domestic Surveillance:

Insight Magazine: Rove counting heads on the Senate Judiciary Committee
"The White House has been twisting arms to ensure that no Republican member votes against President Bush in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of the administration's unauthorized wiretapping.
Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November..."

Iraq:

New York Times: 31 Days in Iraq
"In January more than 800 people — soldiers, security officers and civilians — were killed as a result of the insurgency in Iraq. While the daily toll is noted in the newspapers and on TV, it is hard for many Americans to see these isolated reports in a broader context. The map,
based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths for the first month of the year..."


Domestic Surveillance:

Washington Post: NSA's Vast Spying Yields Few Suspects
"Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as 'terrorist surveillance' and summed it up by declaring that 'if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why.' But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no..."

AP: Rumsfeld, Cheney Wanted Warrantless Wiretaps in 70's
"An intense debate erupted during former U.S. president Gerald Ford's administration over the president's powers to eavesdrop without warrants to gather foreign intelligence, newly disclosed government documents revealed.
Former president George Bush, current Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney are cited in the documents. The roughly 200 pages of historic records reflect a remarkably similar dispute between the White House and Congress fully three decades before President George W. Bush's acknowledgment he authorized wiretaps without warrants of some Americans in terrorism investigations.
'Yogi Berra was right: it's deja vu all over again,' said Tom Blanton, executive director for the U.S. National Security Archives, a private research group that compiles collections of sensitive government documents.
'It's the same debate.'
Senate judiciary committee hearings are scheduled to begin Monday on the question of Bush's authority to approve such wiretaps by the ultra-secretive National Security Agency without a judge's approval. A focus of the hearings is to determine whether the Bush administration's eavesdropping program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law with origins during Ford's presidency..."


Iran:

Ray McGovern: Headed for Iran, Juggernaut Gathering Momentum
"The Bush administration, however, has already mounted a full-court press to indict and convict the Iranian leaders, and the key question is why.
Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and insists (correctly) that the treaty assures signatories the right to pursue nuclear programs for peaceful use. And when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claims, as she did last month, 'There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment,' she is being, well, disingenuous again.
If Dr. Rice has done her homework, she is aware that in 1975 President Gerald Ford's chief of staff Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought Iran's argument that it needed a nuclear program to meet future energy requirements. This is what Iranian officials are saying today, and they are supported by energy experts who point out that oil extraction in Iran is already at or near peak and that the country will need alternatives to oil in coming decades.
Ironically, Cheney and Rumsfeld were among those persuading the reluctant Ford in 1976 to approve offering Iran a deal for nuclear reprocessing facilities that would have brought at least $6.4 billion for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric. The project fell through when the Shah was ousted three years later.
It is altogether reasonable to expect that Iran's leaders want to have a nuclear weapons capability as well, and that they plan to use their nuclear program to acquire one. From their perspective, they would be fools not to. Iran is one of three countries earning the 'axis-of-evil' sobriquet from President Bush and it has watched what happened to Iraq, which had no nuclear weapons, as well as what did not happen to North Korea, which does have them. And Iran's rival Israel, which has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty but somehow escapes widespread opprobrium, has a formidable nuclear arsenal cum delivery systems..."

The Environment:

Bill Moyers: The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal
"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress.
For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
One-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup Poll is accurate, believes the Bible is literally true. This past November, several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in what is known as the 'rapture index,'..."


The So-Called War On Terror:

Star Tribune Editorial (MN)Editorial: The FOIA pierces secrecy's veil
"...Ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the U.S. Defense Department has held hundreds of so-called 'enemy combatants' at the facility. Contrary to the simplest of human-rights principles, the inmates there have been imprisoned without being charged or publicly named. Worries persist about their lack of meaningful access to counsel as well as about recent White House attempts to choke off their access to court review. And as a report this month by Amnesty International notes, there's substantial evidence that Gitmo detainees have suffered physical and psychological torture at the hands of their U.S. military keepers.
Few Americans object to these outrages because few know about them -- a circumstance reinforced by government stealth about the happenings at Guantanamo. But holes are at last appearing in the secrecy veil -- thanks to a sharp instrument called the FOIA.
Filed by the Associated Press, the latest FOIA suit could ultimately help Americans learn a lot about Guantanamo's prisoners. The AP case sought no more than the names of the 558 detainees who've been permitted to challenge their incarcerations before a military tribunal. After much mulling, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff this week came to a straightforward conclusion: The U.S. government has no authority to withhold the names. If upheld, that decision will grant reporters and advocates details that will help them track down the truth of the hundreds held at Guantanamo..."