Friday, June 30, 2006

1.: Plum Island not Going Away Anytime Soon

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:48 am (PST)

from Edward Hammond's 'Biodefense' list...

[COMMENT: It has been a subject of my ongoing annoyance that DHS
officials and bidders on the NBAF have suggested, and the media has
frequently dutifully reported, that the NBAF facility would "replace"
the "outdated" Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York... as if
Plum Island would sink below the waves when NBAF comes online.

I don't know why there is/was so much buy-in to that suggestion.

I never thought Plum Island would go away, and hopefully this post
will put that mistaken notion to rest. Below is a description of at
least $30 million in planned upgrades to PIADC, including a new
animal wing, new BSL-3 space, upgraded electrical, HVAC, and H2O
systems, etc.

NBAF, as huge as it is planned, is not going to be the singular
DHS/USDA facility for foreign animal diseases, and PIADC is not going
to fade into obscurity. - EH]

C -- A-E Services for Programming & Design of Integrated Facility
Improvements at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center

General Information

Document Type: Sources Sought Notice
Solicitation Number: LGL06R00012
Posted Date: Jun 09, 2006
Original Response Date: Jun 23, 2006
Current Response Date: Jun 23, 2006
Original Archive Date:
Current Archive Date:
Classification Code: C -- Architect and engineering services
Naics Code: 541310 -- Architectural Services

Contracting Office Address
Department of Homeland Security, Federal Law Enforcement Training
Center (FLETC), Biocontainment Procurement Division, Procurement
Division TH378C 1131 Chapel Crossing Road, Brunswick (Glynco), GA,
31524

Description

This is a new acquisition for award of an A-E contract for
programming/planning services and the resultant design of facility
improvements and enhancements at the Plum Island, NY, Animal Disease
Center (PIADC), which is a unique national asset for Agro-defense and
the only facility in the United States permitted to handle live
virus. It is the intention of the Government to award the
programming/planning study and the design services to the same A-E
firm. The contract will contain options for additional services to
include Construction Administration and Commissioning Services. It is
necessary to obtain the expertise for these services from a highly
qualified Architect-Engineering firm with demonstrated expertise in
the design of Bio-Safety Level 2/3/3Ag laboratories, animal
vivariums, necropsies, or similar facilities. The proposed
improvements and enhancements to the PIADC facility will assure the
continuation of existing research as well as satisfy increased
mission responsibilities for Agro-defense.

The proposed improvements and enhancements are as follows:

Construct New Animal Wing, consisting of 8,000 net square feet of new
animal holding capacity with various room sizes and configurations. A
new batch wastewater treatment system to handle potential zoonotics
isolated to the new wing will also be required.

Upgrade Chiller Plant - Provide additional chiller towers with
sufficient capacity to service all new construction and interior
facility upgrades; replace and upgrade the chilled water transmission
line leading to Building 101.

Expand and Upgrade the East and Orient Necropsy - Construct new
necropsy capability dedicated to research functions servicing the new
animal holding wing. The existing necropsy will be improved and
expanded to handle school observation and decontamination needs.

Convert the East Service Wing Storage Area to BSL-3 Laboratory Space
- Provide 2500 sq. ft. of converted storage space as laboratory space
for DHS research programs; refurbish existing labs C & D and the
conversion of underutilized space for APHIS and/or ARS needs.

Power Distribution/UPS?Provide an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
System for the HVAC systems, communication, alarm and security
systems, and compressed air for airlocks.

Bldg. 102 Waste Water Decon Upgrades - Provide necessary process
upgrades (isolated tank, pump, piping replacements) to the laboratory
wastewater decontamination system. Provide a new wastewater
transmission line from Building 101 to Building 102. Perform
necessary structural repairs, roofing and finishes to ensure the
facility meets necessary bio-containment standards.

Upgrade Water Supply System - Provide evaluation of known issues,
replacement of antiquated distribution system piping and upgrade of
treatment systems related to the domestic water supply system, water
purification system and fire suppression system.

Perform an Environmental Assessment - A new Environmental Assessment
will be developed prior to the construction and improvements at PIADC
to comply with NEPA requirements and DHS policy. The Environmental
Assessment shall incorporate potential impacts from all projects
listed herein.

Firehouse/Motor Pool - Construct new firehouse/motor pool building to
replace the antiquated and inadequate structures and to consolidate
within the active area of the island the Firehouse, Motor Pool, and
Emergency Operations Center (EOC).

The Estimated Cost of Construction is about $30 million. Selection of
the A-E will be conducted in accordance with the Brooks Act, and as
outlined in Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) Part 36.6. Firms
will be evaluated in terms of their relevant experience, including
relevant experience of staff members, specifically on design work
required by this procurement. The synopsis for this requirement will
be posted about July 14, with A-E submittals due about August 16,
2006. The Government intends to use the results of this
Sources-Sought Announcement to determine acquisition strategy for
this acquisition, utilizing NAICS Code 541310, Size Standard $4.5M.
Interested A-E firms should, as early as possible, but not later than
4:00 PM Eastern Time, June 23, 2006, indicate interest in this
acquisition by letter (no more than 2 typewritten pages) with a brief
summary of experience in relevant contracts. Letters should be sent
to the attention of Robert Driggers, Contracting Officer, to the
address noted above, preferably as an e-mail attachment, with copy to
Ms. Paulette Webster at the e-mail address below. Ensure your letter
includes your business size. More detailed present/past performance
information will be required with A-E submittals. THIS IS A SOURCES
SOUGHT SYNOPSIS AND IS NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS.

Points of Contact: Bob Driggers, Contracting Officer, (912)261-3630,
E-mail Bob.Driggers@dhs.gov
Danny Hager, Chief, Bio-containment Contracting Branch, Procurement
Division, (912) 267-3290, E-mail Danny.Hager@dhs.gov
Paulette Webster, Procurement Technician, (912) 554-4613, E-mail:
Paulette.Webster@dhs.gov

Point of Contact Robert Driggers, Contracting Officer, Phone
912-261-3630, Fax 912-280-5343, Email bob.driggers@dhs.gov - Paulette
Webster, Procurement Technician, Phone 912-554-4613, Fax
912-280-5343, Email paulette.webster@dhs.gov

Place of Performance

Address: Plum Island Animal Disease Center, Long Island, New York
Postal Code: 11944
Country: United States of America

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2.: Reuters covers LA 9/11 Symposium

Posted by: "shane_digital" shane_digital@yahoo.com shane_digital

Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:51 am (PST)

Reuters covers LA 9/11 Symposium

Prison Planet | June 25 2006

Reuters has picked up and covered this weekend's American Scholars
9/11 Truth Symposium hosted by Alex Jones in LA.

More analysis of this report on the way...

Conspiracy theorists meet over 9/11

Reuters | June 25 2006

They wore T-shirts asking What Really Happened?, snapped up DVDs
titled 9/11; The Great Illusion, and cheered as physicists,
philosophers and terrorism experts decried the official version of the
September 11 attacks that shook America to its core.

Some 1,200 people gathered at a Los Angeles hotel over the weekend for
what organisers billed as the largest conference on the plethora of
conspiracy theories that see the 2001 attacks on Washington and New
York as, at best, official negligence, and at worst an orchestrated US
attempt to incite world war.

Alex Jones, a syndicated radio talk show host, told a news conference:
"There are so many prominent people who are incredibly well-respected
who have stated that the evidence is overwhelming that 9/11 was an
inside job."

"There are hundreds of smoking guns that people need to be made aware
of," said Jones, calling for the impeachment of President George Bush
and charging that mainstream media had been slow to cover the growing
movement of 9/11 sceptics.

The 9/11 and the Neo-Con Agenda conference comprised two days of
seminars, video presentations and talks by groups including Scholars
for 9/11 Truth, infowars.com and an appearance by actor Charlie Sheen.

Motives and oil giants

Most are convinced the US military command "stood down" on the day of
the attack, that the hijackers were trained at American military
bases, and that the World Trade Centre towers collapsed because of a
series of controlled explosions set before they were hit by two
hijacked planes.

Suggested motives range from expected benefits for US arms and oil
conglomerates to revolutionary plans for a new world order headed by
the United States.

The theories, derided by critics as wild and far-fetched, have mostly
been confined to the internet, talk radio and the alternative press.

But an August 2004 Zogby opinion poll revealed 49% of New York City
residents believed US leaders knew in advance of the attacks and
failed to act.

The official 9/11 Commission, set up in 2002, cited government
intelligence lapses in the failure to prevent the attacks by al Qaeda
that killed about 3,000 people.

A 10,000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and
Technology held that jet-fuel fires weakened the structure of the Twin
Towers and led to their collapse.

'War of civilisations'

Sheen, star of the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, provoked a media
storm in March by calling in interviews for an independent investigation.

Sheen "brings the movement some legitimacy. He gives it a face," said
a Los Angeles student attending the conference who gave his name as Rico.

"Rational, well-educated people are starting to take a look at all
this and are seeing there are some pretty bad things happening," Rico
added.

Webster Tarpley, author of 911 Synthetic Terror; Made in USA, said the
Sept 11 attacks were an example of "state-sponsored, false-flag
terrorism" designed by rogue CIA elements "to start the war of
civilisations."

Tarpley said Washington was "gripped by war psychosis" and had used
terror as a pretext to turn the United States into a police state.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/250606Reuters.htm

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3.: Space Shuttle Omen-Clature

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:53 am (PST)

Space Shuttle Omen-Clature
(Conspiracy Nation, 06/20/06) -- Various omens surround the planned July 1st launch of the space shuttle Discovery.

There are several aspects to these omens, not all directly linked to the Discovery launch. Think of the planned July 1st launch as a unifying thread.

February 1, 2003
To begin with some retrospect, it was February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. The specific mission was code-named STS-107.

Skeptics had doubt as to the official explanation for the disaster. A thermal protection system had been supposedly damaged during launch, leaving STS-107 poorly protected when it re-entered the atmosphere. Yet close-up photographs have been made of the Soviet space shuttle Buran after its single successful, unmanned obital flight. These 1988 photos show rather extensive damage to the wing's leading edge. Critics argue the Columbia could not have been destroyed due to RCC tile damage, as Buran, which was of similar design, survived.
(http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster)

Various alternative theories of "what really happened" to STS-107 have been proposed:

a.. An apparently still-unknown amateur astronomer captured five strange and provocative images of the shuttle Columbia just as it was re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, reported the San Francisco Chronicle on Feb. 2, 2003. "Bright electrical phenomena" were seen flashing around the track of the shuttle's passage. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/02/MN221641.DTL)
b.. On Feb. 5, 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle issued a follow-up report. "Top investigators of the Columbia space shuttle disaster are analyzing a startling photograph -- snapped by an amateur astronomer from a San Francisco hillside -- that appears to show a purplish electrical bolt striking the craft as it streaked across the California sky," reported Sabin Russell. The unknown photographer refused to release the photo until NASA had first examined it. NASA came to his home, and he was left with a receipt for his camera and photo(s). Since then, the story seems to have disappeared. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/05/MN192153.DTL)
c.. According to a Pravda report, STS-107 was the first spacecraft to have its own Internet address. Via satellite, it was directly connected with Earth. Coincidentally, an Internet "worm" attack, traced to Red China, occurred during Columbia's final mission. (http://www.shout.net/~bigred/Shuttle.htm)
d.. A report headlined at Rumor Mill News (www.rumormillnews.com) states that the space shuttle was downed by a "scalar Tesla Howitzer weapon." ("Scalar Psyop Strike on Columbia Ends World War III?" 2/2/03). According to the author, "The telltale sonic boom from the deployment of the weapon was so strong: 'It was like a car hitting the house or an explosion. It shook that much,' John Ferolito, 60, of Carrolton, north of Dallas, told the Associated Press." Recall how the Columbia disaster occurred in the time-frame of build-up to the Iraq war.
Cosmic Red Alert
Mark Lerner, at the Yahoo general horoscope, normally issues rather calm prognostications. So it was noteworthy when, on June 14th, 2006, Lerner headlined a "Red Alert." Over the next week, he warned, "a series of intense cosmic alignments can wreak havoc on Spaceship Earth." In the following days, Lerner continued his unusual theme: "Extreme forces are about to be unleashed"; "psychic thunderstorms"; "volatile and hostile energies"; "a cluster of intense and nightmarish sky patterns."

Coincident to Lerner's alarming prognosis, on Monday, June 19th, a Continuity Of Government drill began. This drill is "the largest such exercise ever conducted," according to William M. Arkin. (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/06/back_to_the_bunker.html)

Also coincident is a disputed decision by NASA to go ahead with the launch, on July 1st, of the space shuttle Discovery. Against the advice of the agency's chief safety officer and top engineer, the shuttle launch is now scheduled to occur in spite of risk of catastrophic faults. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,1800706,00.html)

But this July 1st launch, if it proceeds as planned, will coincide with the reported beginning of "The Day Of Jehovah." This "Day," according to Bible scholars, marks the start of 22 biblical lunar months. It begins on June 30/July 1 with "the first birth pang of the Kingdom of God." During this "Day", the various physical disasters of biblical proportions, many of which are nuclear, are described by the Bible as the birth pangs of a woman. Is this such a good time for a space launch, especially since within NASA itself the decision is already disputed? (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/6/prweb400595.htm)

More Omen-Clatures
Concurrent with an increasing inventory of un-sold houses, and a decline in new construction, primarily-Mexican workers who flourished during the housing boom are getting a "go back to Mexico" pink slip. Coincident with the apparently looming demographic shift, a surprise turn in recent polls has Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador the slight favorite. The latest figures show Obrador ahead of rival candidate Felipe Calderon by 4 percent. Obrador, reportedly a "leftist," marks a significant change should he win the July 2nd election.

On July 6th, Jupiter, "King of the Gods," changes course from retrograde to direct motion. Before and after July 6th, Jupiter has been in Scorpio, signifying death and regeneration. This circumstance also argues against any space launch near this crucial time. (Jupiter enters Sagittarius sometime in November. Hallelujah! Joviality returns!)

-------Conspiracy Nationhttp://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.htmlhttp://www.shout.net/~bigred/Omen-Clature.html

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4.: Chip Berlet and the Ford Zoo

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Mon Jun 26, 2006 6:55 am (PST)

This article appears in the June 16, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Chip Berlet and the Ford Zoo
by Anton Chaitkin
John Foster "Chip" Berlet, a sewer creature who has been paid throughout most of his adult life to slander American political leader Lyndon LaRouche, will speak June 23 in Colorado to a conference of a tax-exempt charity, the International Cultic Studies Association.[1] Berlet will exhort his audience to demonize LaRouche. He will say that LaRouche's promotion of the political-economic policies of Franklin Roosevelt, and his attack against the Bush-Cheney Administration, "are a coded form of historic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that appear in the infamous hoax document, the `Protocols of the Elders of Zion' "!

Over the past four years, as LaRouche has rallied the Democratic Party to return to Roosevelt's policies and to stand up to the Cheney clique, a large portion�$325,000�of the funds paying Berlet's salary has come from grants by the giant Ford Foundation to Berlet's group, Political Research Associates of Somerville, Massachusetts.

Why would the Ford Foundation pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into Chip Berlet's activities? Berlet's career as a low-level dirty-tricks operative against LaRouche, his sole claim to fame, stretches back to the 1970s when he worked for the narcotics trafficking magazine High Times. The accompanying illustration shows his May 1981, article attacking the LaRouche political movement, entitled, "They Want to Take Your Drugs Away!"

Lyndon LaRouche was a declared candidate for U.S. President in 2002, when the Ford Foundation gave Berlet's group $175,000. And in early 2004, when Ford gave another $150,000, LaRouche had the highest number of contributors of any of the candidates for the Democratic nomination. Did the $10 billion Foundation circumvent the rules barring tax-exempt entities from interfering with individual political candidacies? If so, why?

Political Passion and Campus Recruitment
The answer seems to be supplied by the rapid growth of the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), taking off in the year 2000. While no one else was seriously organizing young people, and the Democratic Party as a whole was morbidly inactive against the Cheney war drive, the LaRouche movement aggressively reached out to campuses to multiply a political youth force that could spur the Democratic Party into a fighting stance and an FDR revival. Young adults trained in Classical music and Renaissance science manned LaRouche literature tables, and lit up American colleges with intense, impassioned philosophical and policy debates, in classes and outside. The growth of the LYM shocked Democrats, while profoundly gratifying the labor and civil rights elements of the Party.

According to the 2002 Ford Foundation annual report, the official purpose for that year's grant to Political Research Associates (PRA) was, "To study the college and university campus leadership and outreach programs of major national organizations and social movements and their relationship to political environments on campuses."

By way of accounting for the two political payments from Ford, Berlet's PRA issued an 84-page report ("Deliberate Differences�Progressive and Conservative Campus Activism in the United States") in 2004, which makes this petulant claim:

"We saw very little evidence of national organizations physically coming to campus to recruit members. Perhaps this might be a result of college administrators' efforts to limit such groups' access to students. For instance, at Howard [University], our interviewees were aware that . . . supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, right-wing [sic] ideologue and political movement leader . . . had approached students on campus, only to be asked to leave by the administration."

As is only too well known to Berlet's financier sponsors, the LaRouche Youth Movement has in fact constituted the only live politics on the U.S. campus scene in the past several years. At Howard University in Washington, D.C., LaRouche organizers have a constant presence despite a hostile administration fed by lies from Berlet.

Ford's `Strategic Hamlets' for the USA
Chip Berlet's sordid career is part of the initiative of financiers, to crush out the American spirit of industrial progress and optimism associated with Franklin Roosevelt's use of government for the general welfare, the Kennedy space program, and Martin Luther King's civil rights leadership.

This project applied a strategy used in the Vietnam War, known as strategic hamlets, for political/psychological warfare against the United States population. In Indochina during the 1960s, villages were isolated from each other and from the outside world, subjected to political assassinations, and taught to think of themselves only locally rather than as part of a national anti-colonial resistance.

The Ford Foundation led the application of this brutal policy to the American homeland, as a direct continuation of the overseas war. McGeorge Bundy (of the Boston Anglophile banking families) was President John Kennedy's National Security Advisor, until Kennedy was killed while trying to pull out of Vietnam. Staying on as President Lyndon Johnson's National Security Advisor, Bundy immediately pushed through an escalation of the war, and brought in the strategic-hamlets approach. In 1967, Bundy left the government and became the Ford Foundation's chairman.

The Foundation then went to war against the people in America's cities, campuses, and political caucuses. What in Vietnam was called "strategic hamlets," might now be called "identity politics."

To break potential resistance to intended austerity, slave wages, service cutbacks, the demolition of factories and farms, and a predatory neo-colonialism, you fragment the population along racial, gender, and religious lines, and inculcate new, isolating identities upon the various competing fragments. You lower the self-conception of your victims below the dignity of scientific reason, destroying the compassionate belief in mankind's technological progress.

As we shall see, Chip Berlet would emerge in the 1970s, a career practitioner of the new "political technologies" in this domestic counterinsurgency process.

As bankers slashed school budgets, the Foundation funded "local control" programs. They threw New York City neighborhoods into violent racial struggles over what remained, blacks against Puerto Ricans against whites, ghetto parents against Jewish teachers and the teachers' union. They pitted destitute welfare recipients against employed workers, to displace them for a welfare check instead of a paycheck.[2]

The Ford Foundation and its spinoffs in the "alternate philanthropy" movement paid for a new sexual politics. Homosexuality was promoted as a primary identity, to trump the self-concept of a political person passionate about mankind's betterment.

Meanwhile, Holocaust-haunted Jews were panicked away from FDR politics into the Conservative Revolution, herded by bankers' agencies such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Israeli hard-liners. Other, allied bankers' agencies built the Armegeddonist Christian Right.

The Ford Foundation led the promotion of narcotics use, with its degraded culture and cognitive death.

This began in 1951, when the financiers running the Foundation acquired a huge bequest from car manufacturer Henry Ford and his family. With University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins directing the program grants, the Ford Foundation paid for a project to test-proliferate the use of LSD and mescaline, in tandem with the MK-Ultra program of Allen Dulles's Central Intelligence Agency. Hutchins later used millions from the Ford Foundation to create his Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI) to replace the "Old Paradigm" of industrial America with the new rock/drug/sex "revolution."

Under McGeorge Bundy, the Ford Foundation sponsored the movement to legalize narcotics. Using the Foundation's subsidiary, the Drug Abuse Council, and myriad other channels, the Ford Foundation paid for and helped lead the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

The result was the intended, reeking counterculture swamp, a crippled Democratic Party, and a managed Identities Zoo with functionaries such as Chip Berlet.

What Is Chip Berlet?
John Foster "Chip" Berlet's upcoming speech to the International Cultic Studies Association , is yet one more assignment in a bizarre life devoted largely to abusing Lyndon LaRouche.

Berlet was born in 1949 in New Jersey, the son of Reserve Army Lt. Col. George Numa Berlet, Jr., who reportedly worked permanently in military intelligence. The father became involved with layers of the intelligence apparatus, by combining his career as a Wall Street stock and bond executive, and his high rank within veterans organizations such as the American Legion. George named his son after John Foster Dulles, the brother of CIA Director Allen Dulles and an early supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Berlet drifted into radical causes in college, such as those favoring narcotics legalization and homosexuality.

Around 1975, when he was about 25 years old, Berlet was in Chicago, having entered a world of political intrigue as a staff member of the National Student Association (NSA).

NSA had been exposed back in 1967 as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. By the time Chip Berlet came in, New Leftism had taken the helm at the NSA.

Chip was reportedly recruited to the NSA by David Ifshin, famous as the Association's earlier president who had gone to Hanoi in 1970 to broadcast against the U.S. war. But before he mentored Berlet into the NSA, Ifshin had undergone a miraculous change of mind, moving him into the service of the London-New York banking axis and their Cold War Social Democrats.

Chip Berlet became the NSA's chief fundraiser. Having grown up with his father's intelligence connections, Chip was the perfect intermediary to the new radical-theme foundations such as the Field Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Stern Family Fund, which funded Wall Street radical-Zoo projects in tandem with the Ford Foundation.[3]

NSA activists at the time have described Berlet as a "non-ideological" permanent staffer, more or less apolitical: a well-connected apparatchik.

Berlet's recruiter Daivd Ifshin would go on to become general counsel to the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC), a leader of the Anti-Defamation League, and a director of the neoconservative Committee for a Democratic Majority. Thus did Berlet join the team which aimed, in particular, for the eradication of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy within the Democratic Party.

The Chicago Dope War and Wall Street
While at the NSA in the late 1970s, Chip Berlet went to work as Washington bureau chief for High Times, the magazine financed by narcotics traffickers, for narcotics users. High Times shared its criminal revenues with the pro-legalization NORML, a joint project with the Ford Foundation and Playboy magazine.

Lyndon LaRouche's political movement launched the National Anti-Drug Coalition in 1978, a Chicago-centered counter-offensive against the drug culture and the "bankers above suspicion" laundering Dope, Inc.'s money.

By the beginning of the 1980s, LaRouche and his movement had energized an otherwise moribund labor element of the Democratic Party, while simultaneously influencing a patriotic (anti-globalist) core of the Reagan Republicans to begin moving away from the Bush-Kissinger-Wall Street elements.

On Dec. 16, 1981, Chip Berlet and a fellow writer for High Times, Dennis King, held a press conference in Washington to demand that Federal agencies "investigate allegations of widespread illegal conduct by organizations tied to Lyndon H. LaRouche" and his political movement. The wild fabrications on their seven-page press release would show up almost verbatim years later, in opening statements of various prosecutorial teams assembled by the financiers sponsoring Berlet.

In 1983, Chip Berlet met with John Rees, a right-wing spy for the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League�whom Berlet has many times publicly attacked as such. Rees introduced Berlet to Richard Mellon Scaife, �ber-financier of the Conservative Revolution, and later, the sugar daddy for the assault on Bill Clinton's Presidency. John Rees then paid Chip Berlet and Dennis King to attend one or more of a series of meetings in 1983 and 1984 in the home of Wall Street/intelligence figure John Train. There, representatives of the Anglo-American globalist faction of the National Security Council, such as Roy Godson, conferred with co-factioneers from NBC, Readers Digest, and other media, the Anti-Defamation League, and the drug lobby's Chip Berlet and Dennis King, to map out a combined media and prosecutorial attack on LaRouche, who was denounced in these meetings as "financed by the KGB"!

From these meetings, Richard Mellon-Scaife arranged the financing for a book by Dennis King attacking LaRouche, (Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, which was given wide free distribution.

Despite intense hostility from the Wall Street media. LaRouche associates won the 1986 Illinois Democratic primary election for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State, promising to crack down on drug bankers. Pandemonium erupted.

By this time, Chip Berlet was working for Midwest Research Associates, a group funded by the ultra-wealthy Chicago speculator Richard Dennis, a prime sponsor of the movement to legalize narcotics through his Drug Policy Foundation. Money also came in through foundation networks of the Ford-David Hunter-George Pillsbury axis, among whose devotees was wealthy gay activist Jean Hardisty, founder of Midwest Research Associates and Berlet's employer.[4]

The Zoo Moves to Boston
The 1980s Chicago version of Chip Berlet was certainly a strange composite specimen. For three years, through 1982, he was paid by the "Better Government Association," the bankers' "reform" group at war against the regular Democratic Party of Chicago. The 1986 LaRouche electoral victory raised the tempo of slanders and demands for police repression. Chip Berlet and the entire John Train "salon" began acting as consultants to the U.S. Attorney in Boston, William Weld, scion of an old Boston Anglophile banking family, who was at the center of the federal "Get LaRouche Task Force."

Chip Berlet and his "Midwest Research Associates" moved, in 1987, from Chicago to Boston, in time for the first trial of Lyndon LaRouche; they then became "Political Research Associates."

Berlet had a unique send-off: a going-away party sponsored by the Chicago Area Friends of Albania, supporters of the ludicrously pro-Stalin, pro-Mao dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. They put out a flyer which declared, "Chip and his family are moving to the Boston area to continue his anti-fascist work. Chip was one of our founding members, and a steadfast friend of Albania through thick and thin."

In the Boston LaRouche trial, Federal Judge Robert Keeton brought in material from LaRouche's factional opponents within the Reagan Administration (the George H.W. Bush-Roy Godson-Oliver North vector), tending to show a vendetta was in process. A mistrial resulted. But seven days after George Bush Sr.'s 1989 inauguration, his faction finally managed to jail LaRouche, who was only released after Clinton took office.

Now, a quarter-century after Chip Berlet was hired as an anti-LaRouche operative, the Democratic party is again the scene of a climactic fight between LaRouche-led supporters of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy, and those who would surrender to bankers such as Felix Rohatyn, who have decimated U.S. industry and almost exterminated the industrial labor force.

While the Ford Foundation has jumped back into the fray with direct sponsorship of Chip Berlet, a remarkable legal process has opened up behind them.

In August 2005, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox launched an investigation of the Ford Foundation. The financier vultures who wrecked the auto industry and made Detroit one of America's poorest cities, also seem to have "kidnapped" the Ford Foundation, which is a Michigan-chartered entity, although its headquarters is in New York. The Foundation has betrayed the industrial heritage of the Ford family, whose wealth they took hold of, and given virtually nothing back to help the people of Michigan. Attorney General Cox is probing the Foundation's governance, potential conflicts of interest of its officers, and its abandonment of its legal home base, Michigan. This ongoing state probe coincides with LaRouche's fight to reverse the shutdown of the auto industry, and to overcome decades of anti-industrial brainwashing and financial piracy by the Ford Foundation and other sponsors of Chip Berlet.

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

[1] Formerly, the American Family Foundation.

[2] In the late 1960s, Lyndon LaRouche directly attacked Bundy and the Ford Foundation in a groundbreaking pamphlet entitled "The New Left, Local Control, and Fascism."

[3] Stern Fund executive director David Hunter had worked at Ford Foundation pioneering their ghetto counterinsurgency projects. Hunter moved his prot�g�, flour-heir George Pillsbury, to organize the "Alternative Philanthropy" initiative. They created the Funding Exchange and many Lesbian/Gay-theme money channels for financier paradigm-bending projects; these comprise most of the funds eventually backing Berlet's organization PRA.

[4] The Ford Foundation gave a $100,000 grant to Richard Dennis's personal group, the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies, to educate citizens on how to cope with necessary "structural changes" in the economy, i.e., austerity and post-industrialism. Richard Dennis poured hundreds of thousands into the operation of gubernatorial nominee Adlai Stevenson III, who wrecked the state Democratic Party by splitting off to a temporary third party, rather than run on the ticket with LaRouche Democrats.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3324_berlet.html

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5.: American Scholars Symposium A Huge Success

Posted by: "shane_digital" shane_digital@yahoo.com shane_digital

Mon Jun 26, 2006 4:06 pm (PST)

American Scholars Symposium A Huge Success
Attendees from around the globe attest to 'best 9/11 truth conference
ever'

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | June 26 2006

Over 1200 attendees from as far field as Japan, Great Britain and
Australia converged on the Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles to enjoy a
conference that they later described as the best 9/11 truth symposium
ever, the highlight of which was a personal appearance and speech by
Hollywood star and 9/11 truth crusader Charlie Sheen.

People from as far away as Japan and Australia made the long-haul trip
to L.A. to view slick presentations from numerous high profile
speakers. Media organizations from Great Britain and Australia were
also represented as well as over 100 alternative press outlets.

BYU physics professor Steven Jones' authoritative lecture on the use
of incendiary devices in the demolition of the trade towers and
building 7 went further than ever before in its conclusive tone on the
issue. Jones has now tested steel samples from two different sites
that both clearly show the use of thermate as a tool of implosion and
the analysis has been verified by two other universities.

Lt. Col. Robert M. Bowman, the former head of the Star Wars weapons
defense system and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from
Cal Tech, also gave a powerful presentation on the NORAD 9/11 stand
down which was extremely well received.

The highlight for many was the surprise personal appearance of
Hollywood star, current TV hit and recent shining addition to the
ranks of noted 9/11 whistleblowers Charlie Sheen, who received a
rapturous ovation before his speech on the courage of those who went
before him in standing up to an unpalatable truth in the name of freedom.

----------------------------------------------------------
Get Alex Jones' new movie TerrorStorm for just $5.95!
----------------------------------------------------------

The overall sentiment after the conclusion of the conference was that
it was the most powerful, informative and progressive 9/11 symposium
to date.

The conference was a declaration of independence and a warning to the
watching media that major western governments are planning more acts
of false flag terrorism in order to justify new wars and geopolitical
domination of the globe as well as a domestic police state.

Reflecting a positive trend embraced by an earlier New York Times
article, a Reuters report on the conference mainly sticks to the facts
and avoids the scoffing, sneering tone of similar reports about 9/11
events we have seen over the last few years.

The Reuters article has mainly been picked up by foreign news outlets.
From previous experience we know that newswire gatekeepers, ostensibly
operating out of London, selectively sideline sensitive stories and
order them not to receive substantive nationwide attention.

The Reuters piece has not been picked up by any US or European news
outlet thus far.

Publications such as Turkey's Zaman Online, South Africa's Independent
Online, Qatar's Gulf News as well as Al Jazeera and Iran's Tehran
Times all carried different versions of the original Reuters piece.

http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/huge_success.htm

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6.: CAFTA, the EU & Communitarian Law

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:25 am (PST)

CAFTA, the EU & Communitarian Law
by Niki Raapana
Anti-Communitarian League (ACL)
Anchorage, Alaska, January 23, 2006

After wading through all the publications and websites representing both support and opposition for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-approved by the U.S. Congress July 2005), it's astonishing to realize how very few of them bother to explain the legal foundation for the agreement. CAFTA, like most international trade agreements, is based entirely in the supremacy of communitarian law.

This isn't Bush and Clinton quietly slipping in communitarian programs like Local Agenda 21 that bury communitarian laws deep inside hefty grants and incentives. The U.S. Congress has officially denounced their own Constitution as Supreme Law. When the United States Congress approved CAFTA they endorsed a regional trade agreement that places U.S. Constitutional Law below Communitarian Law. While communitarian law is without a doubt the most important legal topic in the world, American experts on both "sides" of the free trade arguments completely ignore it. Consequently, it's the rare American who has any concept of how prevalent or powerful this new system of justice is.

The European Court of Justice is occassionally referred to as the Communitarian Court of Justice. CAFTA officials openly discuss using the EU as their model for communitarian case law. Communitarian Regulations govern the archiving of EU legal documents. The term communitarian law is in hundreds of online law journals. It's taught in several foreign law schools and there are degreed law professors of Communitarian Law. The Jean Monet program sponsors symposiums on it at U.S. universities. The D.C. Communitarian Network sends out a communitarian law newsletter. It's a widely understood term in Europe, Central, and South America. Still, Communitarian Law is so unfamiliar to U.S. Americans (and their attorneys) that most have never once heard the terms used.

One reason for its obscurity comes from the fact that communitarian law is also called Community Law, community aquis, and aquis communitaire. But another reason for its obscurity is the simple fact that globalists don't want our people to know anything about it. The European Constitution was defeated at the polls by the Dutch and the French voters because of its supremacy of communitarian law. The last thing the communitarian supra-nationalists want to happen is for all of America to learn the whole truth about communitarian "free trade." Remember, universities in England, Spain, Portugal, and Romania offer coursework and masters programs in Communitarian Law. Only a few elite American universities offer courses in communitarian law, and barely a handful of American students have ever studied it.

The vice-president of the EU Constitutional Convention sums it up nicely:

"One must act 'as if' in Europe: as if one wanted only very few things, in order to obtain a great deal. As if nations were to remain sovereign, in order to convince them to surrender their sovereignty. The Commission in Brussels, for example, must act as if it were a technical organism, in order to operate like a government ... and so on, camouflaging and toning down. The sovereignty lost at national level does not pass to any new subject. It is entrusted to a faceless entity: NATO, the UN and eventually the EU. The Union is the vanguard of this changing world:it indicates a future of Princes without sovereignty. The new entity is faceless and those who are in command can neither be pinned down nor elected ... That is the way Europe was made too: by creating communitarian organisms without giving the organisms presided over by national governments the impression that they were being subjected to a higher power. That is how the Court of Justice as a supra-national organ was born. It was a sort of unseen atom bomb, which Schuman and Monnet slipped into the negotiations on the Coal and Steel Community. That was what the 'CSC' itself was: a random mixture of national egotisms which became communitarian. I don't think it is a good idea to replace this slow and effective method - which keeps national States free from anxiety while they are being stripped of power - with great institutional leaps - Therefore I prefer to go slowly, to crumble pieces of sovereignty up litle by little, avoiding brusque transitions from national to federal power. That is the way I think we will have to build Europe's common policies..." - Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, later Vice-President of the EU Constitutional Convention, interview with Barbara Spinelli, La Stampa, 13 July 2000. Posted in a great list of quotes compiled by Free Europe Blog.

How is it possible that Americans, with their "free press" and literate population are completely unfamiliar with the term communitarian law? The problem appears to be a constitutional issue over the definition of treason. Communitarian law is designed to over-rule all national law, including the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Why do so many Americans flat out refuse to consider the possibility that current events resulting in federal legislation and Executive Orders are related? Communitarian laws balance individual rights against "safety" (as do the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act). This shows a pattern of thought, doesn't it? Part of the problem is the American people don't believe there are any more Hitlers or Stalins. They believe communism "died" in the eighties, and that former evil colonial rulers all magically, spiritually evolved into nice, kind "helpers." This amazing under-education promotes such a naive approach to modern politics that admitting the unknown is almost impossible for them. Indeed, many prefer to "shoot the messenger" rather than admit they somehow missed the most important legal development of the 20th century. The fact is, communitarian law and philosophy are so well hidden from the American people that many have accused this author of making the terms up as a part of my own personal "conspiracy theory."

European voters, on the other hand, are much more familiar with the terms of the new agreements. Dutch and French voters rejected the European Constitution because of its basis in the supremacy of communitarian law. With a rare openness regarding the controversy, James Kanter reported in the International Herald Tribune on Sunday, January 1, 2006 that, "There are some tendencies within the European Union that can be seen with critical eyes," he said, notably "an extension of communitarian law by the European court." ( From Austria, 'new thoughts' for EU)

Besides CAFTA, many other "soft" communitarian legal agreements have been made between U.S. officials with international and supranational organizations. The U.S. has been governed by communitarian laws for decades. Communitarian legislation is before every legislative body in the country. Readers who've been studying the meaning of Sustainable Development will immediately recognise the true meaning of communitarian law. Communitarianism puts the rights of the community "at large" over the rights of the individuals living in the community. This is the entire foundation for anything communitarian. Global communitarians came to the U.S. to "shore up the moral, social and political environment." They came to "balance" American's selfish individualism (and outdated and dangerous nationalism) against their definition of the collective good.

Each member state choosing to join the supra-national organization must modify their national constitutions to accommodate communitarian principles. Communitarian Law balances the rights of individuals and nations against the rights of the "community." It requires nations to make political and legal internal reforms. Communitarian law integrates nations into the global communitarian justice system. The term "community," when used by global communitarians, can define everything from smallest rural area to the entire region, as in the "European Community." Today the EU Communitarian Court is used as the model for all regional trade agreements in the works. The United Nations is also based entirely in the supremacy of communitarian law. Communitarian law supports the mandates for sustainable and smart growth principles established in UN Local Agenda 21. Besides the communitarian supremacy of CAFTA and in other proposals for a North American Free Trade Agreement, there are also plans to create a communitarian code of justice for the Middle East.

Communitarian Community based Development is the structure for implementing the new system of law. Bush called it Re-Building Community when he explained the new War on Terror in February 2002, and he wasn't kidding. The idea for re-building every community in the world under the control of a powerful community government is well underway in every nation. It's being violently exported to Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq and discussions have begun to export the law into the entire Middle East. It's being quietly adopted by local stakeholder councils across the U.S. Everywhere, from Mexico to Peru, Serbia to Malaysia, the Philippines to Russia, China to the UK, the EU to Central America, all are in the process of subordinating national law under regional communitarian authority. No place in the entire world has been left behind.

The original American system, now much denigrated and ridiculed, was based entirely in the idea of protecting local markets from imperialist monopolies. When we "threw out the British," we threw out their banker's control over our trade, production and land. The U.S. federal government was later designed to protect our national borders from continual imperialist invasions. It was authorized to regulate trade and commerce between the free and independent states and to establish a national bank to coin American money. The bank had private investors but it was regulated by officials in the U.S. Government, who were responsible to the states. The first bank funded state banks who provided loans to build a transportation infrastructure, and it made small loans to small businessmen and cottage industries along the routes.

The plan was to make the U.S. entirely self-sustaining both economically and politically. We were working toward a balance between agriculture and industry, whereas after achieving it we would slowly begin to engage in foreign trade with equals. During those years, before taxes, the U.S. built up a huge surplus in the U.S. Treasury. The American national system worked so well here it was copied by almost every imperial colony during the first half of the 19th century. (The early 1800s could be described as the "Declaration of Independence" Days.) But that didn't last long before the international bankers were back in control of everybody's land. Now we have the private corporations called the World Bank and the Federal Reserve. We have a progressive tax and an unfathomable national debt. Today the "idea" of a national system or a national bank is ridiculed as a capitalist, elitist idea. Protected trade and tariffs are regarded as selfish, anti-human sentiments. Individual rights are really just a barrier to peace and social justice. Private land is ecologically unsustainable. The communitarian banker's plan is more "fair," or you're an uneducated buffoon.

Here's how communitarian rulings create a new quality of life:

"Adams offered an illuminating example of the questions arising from the interaction between European institutions on the one hand and society at large on the other. Only keen observers of communitarian matters are aware that the European Court of Justice has been an active policy maker, in a role similar to that played by the U.S. Supreme Court after World War II. By enforcing on individual countries, sectors and firms the laws approved at the level of the European Community (now Union), the Court has profoundly affected long-standing national practices. In the exemplary case chosen by Adams, the German beer market, regulated since the Middle Ages by strict purity laws, was suddenly thrown open to producers following looser practices. As typical of judicial decisions, the Court was not concerned with the question of what rules ensured the production of the best beer (provided no harm to consumers would ensue, of course); it merely weighed different legal principles against one another. The Court thus decided that the principle of free movement of goods and services in Europe trumped local German norms, because these de facto created a protected market for German producers." The Euro: A New Currency for a New Millennium By Daniela Gobetti.

None of this is new. The European Commission tells us their Communitarian Court of Justice has established communitarian environmental case law precedent since 1957. Legal permission from the locally elected officials for enforcing new laws in rebuilt sustainable communities is almost always granted. It's the rare Smart Growth Plan in the United States that wasn't unanimously passed by states, counties and municipalities. Communitarian environmental law was the first major breakthrough back in the 1970s. By the 1990s every state in the U.S. had jumped on the bandwagon. Communitarian environmental laws are supreme to any national law or individual right that conflicts with the collective rights of the member states included in supranational organizations. Regional justice centers have replaced City Halls and County Courts. Administrative Hearing and Review Boards replaced constitutional courts altogether. (Try to use the Bill of Rights to get your driver's license back from the DMV.) Revised zoning violations and public nuisance abatements are used by government and NGO partners to assume control over private land. Eminent domain has been expanded to include "best use" policies. All American cities, towns, and rural areas have the exact same new Community Development agencies; they enforce all the exact same new communitarian laws.

United Nations Local Agenda 21 was adopted just before Clinton took office. The U.N. sponsored Bruntland Commission defined the new way to explain the principles of a communitarian system; communitarian law came to be defined as "sustainable development." It mimicked Marxism's motto of "each according to their need, each according to their ability." UN Sustainable Development means to protect all resources for future generations and make everyone in the present quit making anything useful or productive that comes out of the earth. The whole theory is based on the idea that humans kill the planet by using its resources. Communitarians promote a thing called human rights, a theory of justice which is totally the opposite of individual rights. Individual rights are what the U.S. Bill of Rights was established to protect. Human Rights covers every aspect of human suffering and death. Unlike clear laws that protect individual liberty, Human Rights can only be enforced by a supreme global communitarian legal system. What Americans really don't understand is that ultimately, Human Rights includes the Marxist mandates for confiscation and "equal" distribution of private property and goods. In the logic of the globalists, individual rights to protect yourself, your property, and the freedom to choose ones' own life path, are ancient, outdated barriers to global peace and justice. Does it matter to Americans (or Iraqis) if individual rights are being criminalized under communitarian laws?

Community Development agencies partnered with Community Policing in almost every American community. Many towns have a whole lot more COPS on the beat now. The new cops prevent crime before it happens and their new job includes helping rebuild livable communities. This is why new COPS walk right in people's private homes all the time without knocking or wasting time getting a legal search warrant. Modern cops are part of action teams who write innovative communitarian laws. Modern COPS can require our citizens show ID (Hiibel v. State of Nevada). Communitarian COPS visit nosey neighbors and gather "anecdotal information" that may indicate who's a "problem."

In the communitarianized U.S., former KGB spies and Mossad assassins train cops to use high-powered technology. Some COPS are military snipers. Cops wear bullet proof vests all the time now. New COPS have fifty nifty new gadgets hanging all over their uniforms (while our troops in Iraq send home for 12 gauge shotguns). And, in a major shift in American public policy regulations, communitarian COPS sit on "citizen" committees. New cops help rewrite local zoning regulations to incorporate communitarian laws. Actually, the COPS help suggest the problems. Then they suggest new ways to get around the individual rights of the problem people, rights which are too strongly guaranteed by a binding legal contract called the U.S. Constitution. They write the exact same laws in every community in America to address the exact same locally identified, citizen suggested problems. They call it holistic, local, grass roots, "participatory democracy" in action.

COPS are trained to stalk and patrol targeted neighborhoods. More and more neighborhoods in the U.S. are ghost towns at night. It's creepy to drive through neighborhoods where the only cars are cops who play cat and mouse games. COPS keep computer logs of patrons at local watering hubs, and the statistics on Americans who've been arrested by them for DUIs is astounding. Our President has openly admitted to have ordered illegal surveillance on private citizens. This is communitarian "law" in action. Communitarian data-gathering requirements are now part of every state driver's licensing agency. Our private information is being cross-referenced with data gathered from our family members, work associates, and our friendly, patriotic neighbors. Our private communications, via phone and our personal and work computers, on and off the internet, are all being monitored in the name of community security. Does it matter that the justification for this is communitarianism?

Now you must ask yourself. Can this possibly be true? This is a big revelation. It's much too important to come from a nobody. Something so fantastic would never be left to the small-time, rank-and-file, American home based researcher. Grassroots is only a good word when it applies to community plans, not to opposition research. This should be a New York Times or a Washington Post story. Who the hell is the ACL? I wish I could list off all my degrees and Ph.ds, but the fact is we have no credentials, none, what-so-ever. We're just two freedom loving American women who asked the wrong questions at the right time. You've gotta figure that if this article were factual and verifiable, obviously, somebody much more credible would have broke the story a long time ago. But they didn't, did they? "CAFTA eliminates the U.S. Constitution!" was never headline news, was it? And now, maybe you're just a little curious. Once you verify our sources and confirm the existence of communitarian law, you've got to ask yourself the only thing that matters anymore. Why? Why didn't your schools or your elected officials or your TV news stations or your newspapers publicly explain U.S. integration into a communitarian juridical system? The U.S. has been integrating communitarian legal principles for several decades, and what's obvious to us is, the last thing the plotters want is for you to identify how they're doing it.

What would happen if Americans began identifying communitarian laws and programs AS communitarian? What happens when our citizens question the authority of communitarian law in the United States? Would it make any difference if Americans were able to recognise and therefore legally disobey communitarian laws and programs? And, not that it will ever happen, but could it have any affect on the elections this November if U.S. voters were pre-informed of the proposed Andean Parliment? I can't help but wonder about the depth and layers to this entire Hegelian ruse. Sponsored by Republicans who support "free trade," CAFTA passed with just enough votes to get it through. Only a thorough understanding of the Hegelian dialectic explains why our most committed communitarian senators and representatives vote against it.

References:

http://www.fas.usda.gov/itp/CAFTA/cafta.html

Why We Oppose Cafta by the Oakland Institute.

The Creation of a Communitarian System of International Law cyber.law.harvard.edu.

pdf-Harmonization and harmonizing measures in criminal law, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Eminent-Domain-Supreme24jun05.htm

Integration to the EU and Economic Transformation: State and Its Role on the Example of the Export-Promoting Policy by Marek Csabay

Presentation by Dr Jan Mazak, President of the Slovak Constitutional Court 21.10.2004.

University of Oradea Faculty of Law and Jurisprudence

From Aquamont to Berlaymont: On the Integration-Friendly Features of the Slovak Constitution by RADOSLAV PROCH�ZKA

EDUCATION IN EUROPEAN LAW AT THE POLICE ACADEMY OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC

commlaw@hermes.gwu.edu

THE FUTURE OF CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT IN THE EUROPEAN UNION:CONSTITUTIONAL SUPREMACY AFTER THE CONSTITUTIONAL TREATY* by Mattias Kumm and Victor Ferreres Comella.

Historical Archives Service of the European Commission "ARCHISplus (French ARChives HIStoriques) is the Historical Archives of the European Commission's database which contains references to files of European institutions from their beginnings to today. It is extracted from an internal database, Archis, and includes those references only which are helpful to access historical files open to the public according to communitarian regulations pertaining to their archives (30 years rule)."

http://nord.twu.net/acl/caftaEU.html

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7.: Dubai Port Deal

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:33 am (PST)

Remember Dubai?

By Vicky Davis

Dubai is shorthand for the takeover last March of six major U.S. ports and 16 smaller ones by a United Arab Emirates company named Dubai Ports World (DPW). DPW acquired rights to operate the ports when it purchased the British company, P & O Navigation, Inc.

The deal caused such a furor that some members of Congress - mostly Peter King (R-NY) actually intervened to stop the deal. The backlash was significantly embarrassing enough that DPW announced they would sell the contract for the American port operations to an American company. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief, life in the United States went back to normal and the whole nasty episode was quickly forgotten.

Fortunately however, America's only real mainstream news source, CNN's Lou Dobbs didn't forget about it. On Monday, June 19, 2006, CNN correspondent Bill Tucker reported the status of the Dubai deal. That status is best described by the following exchange between Lou Dobbs and Bill Tucker:

DOBBS: So at this point, now it's just about four months since this agreement was reached, Congress has backed away from its language. Dubai Ports World has not acted. CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, has said that it reserves the right to make Dubai Ports World do what it said it would do publicly. So you're not suggesting, are you, Mr. Tucker, in your reporting here, well, let me rephrase that. Is it a reasonable inference that the American public, the American citizens are being gamed again by this administration and this Congress?

TUCKER: I think it's a reasonable inference that they should be paying attention to what's going or not going on in Washington.

How did it happen that a foreign country through a front company is buying access to American infrastructure that has national security implications? There is a long and a short answer to that question. The short answer is that during the Reagan Administration, radical and corrosive policies were implemented to begin the process of dismantling the government and selling off the assets. The longer and more complex answer is in how they managed to do it.

During Reagan's administration the concept of 'public-private partnerships' was first introduced under the heading of privatization. Once the mandate for dismantling the U.S. government and turning power over to the private sector was in place, it was the beginning of the end of the United States as a nation and a leader in the world. Under corporate governance, the U.S. has become a predator nation with a carefully cultivated public image of benevolence and private agenda of 'anything goes as long as the money keeps coming in to the corporate coffers'.

There were a whole series of legislative and regulatory changes that were implemented under the Reagan-Bush-Clinton Administrations that will be included in Part II of this story. In the meantime, you can ponder this one by President George H.W. Bush:

Executive Order 12803 - Order to Privatize Infrastructure.

These are the three key definitions in the order. This is how it came to be that we have foreign countries masquerading as businesses operating our critical infrastructure like the 6 major ports in the Dubai deal.

(a) �Privatization� means the disposition or transfer of an infrastructure asset, such as by sale or by long-term lease, from a State or local government to a private party.

(b) �Infrastructure asset� means any asset financed in whole or in part by the Federal Government and needed for the functioning of the economy. Examples of such assets include, but are not limited to: roads, tunnels, bridges, electricity supply facilities, mass transit, rail transportation, airports, ports, waterways, water supply facilities, recycling and wastewater treatment facilities, solid waste disposal facilities, housing, schools, prisons, and hospitals.

(e) �State and local governments� means the government of any State of the United States, the District of Columbia, any commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States, and any county, municipality, city, town, township, local public authority, school district, special district, intrastate district, regional or interstate governmental entity, council of governments, and any agency or instrumentality of a local government, and any federally recognized Indian Tribe.

And just in case you have any doubts about the validity of Executive Order 12803, consider the following:

Strapped States Try New Route, Lease Toll Roads to Foreign Firms

Vicky Davis

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I
can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will
not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do,
I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God,
I will do." ~ Edward Everett Hale

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8.: Bruce Springsteen & The Seeger Sessions Band Bring 'em Home 23 June

Posted by: "shane_digital" shane_digital@yahoo.com shane_digital

Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:33 am (PST)

Bruce Springsteen & The Seeger Sessions Band Bring 'em Home 23 June 2006

http://bandcontact.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=20

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9.: Video: Charlie Sheen at the 9/11 L.A. Conference

Posted by: "shane_digital" shane_digital@yahoo.com shane_digital

Tue Jun 27, 2006 2:51 pm (PST)

Video: Charlie Sheen at the 9/11 L.A. Conference

Prison Planet.com | June 27 2006

Actor and activist Charlie Sheen appeared this past weekend at the
American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 & The Neo-Con Agenda event in
downtown Los Angeles to introduce a presentation by filmmaker and
radio personality Alex Jones.

RELATED: American Scholars Symposium A Huge Success

Click here for another video of Charlie Sheen's speech.

video link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/270606charliesheen.htm

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10.: SenMurtha saysU.S.poses top threat to WorldPeace More than Iran&Kore

Posted by: "ranger116@webtv.net" ranger116@webtv.net ranger116_2000

Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:36 pm (PST)

SenMurtha saysU.S.poses top threat to WorldPeace More than Iran&Korea+

��www.azstarnet.com

Address:http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/135159

``````````````````````````````````````````````
So isn't it time Hispanics Stopped being considered to be minorities.

http://www.drudgereport.com/

``````````````````````````````````````````````
911tvfakery -- Shows how video of

9/11was faked.
Address:http://911tvfakery.blogspot.com/

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Govt to prosecute newspaper for printing the truth !

Address:http://www.startribune.com/484/v-print/story/514249.html

``````````````````````````````````````````````
Not Your Soldier�:�Index
(Help keep recruiters out of public schools)

Address:http://www.notyoursoldier.org/

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Redford To Democrats: Show More Courage

Address:http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah584.shtml

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This is an incredible free film which covers the explosions of all 3
buildings (WTC 1, 2, and 7).

It goes into even more depth than Loose Change on this issue. It is
truly a must-see and is a little less than one hour in length.

PASS IT ON TO EVERYONE INCLUDING MEDIA

http://911revisited.com/video.html

Although I have some hunches, much to the disappointment of many who I
speak with, I can not tell you with absolute certainly precisely *which*
individuals in positions of power within our own government and military
were involved with planning and orchestrating the crimes of September
11, 2001.
I have, however, been studying 9/11 for some time and am prepared
to make the statement that many of the things that we were told by the
9/11 Commission and by our political leaders about these "attacks" are
not true.
The events of September 11, 2001 were used as justification for the
invasions and continued occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq. In
order for these illegal wars to end? Americans must learn the truth
about September 11, 2001.
��So far, we have
not gotten the truth about September 11 from our government, from the
9/11 Commission, nor from the vast majority of the mainstream media. We
never will, either, unless enough of us express our outrage and boldly
demand the truth - as well as prosecutions - for all of those who had a
hand in these attacks. Many people still do not know that the FBI is not
looking for Osama Bin Laden in connection with the crimes of September
11.

http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/fugitives/laden.htm

We need to demand that the actual perpetrators of the mass murder of
that day be "brought to justice."

After the film, to learn more, visit Scholars for 9/11 Truth at:

http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/ .

Thanks for all you do.
Cathy Garger
http://mytown.ca/garger/

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11.: BUSH CRIME FAMILY DEATH LIST

Posted by: "Tim White" phantom469366@yahoo.com phantom469366

Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:42 pm (PST)

Bush Death List

Subject: You've heard of Clinton's 'Dead';
Here's a partial list of Bush 'Dead'...

A Roster of the Dead

This is a list of bodies, a roster of the dead, who
might have been called Witnesses had they not met
their untimely ends. Some of the names on this list
will give you pause. Some are rumor. Some you may find
incredible, and some frightening. Do your own research
http://www.google.com. You will draw your own
conclusions.

The above paragraph began the last edition of the Bush
Body Count. In previous editions, there were no
special criteria for adding bodies - only that they
could be related to the Bush family in some way, and
be dead. In fact, the original Bush Body Count started
as a parody of the so-called Clinton Death List.

Times have changed. The Bush Body Count is no longer a
parody, and many of the names have been removed. This
edition examines the scandals and misdeeds of the Bush
family generations, and lists the corpses they leave
in their wake.

Bush Went AWOL

Bodies

Sid Adger
Mr. Adger, a Houston oil supply company executive and
Bush family friend, died in 1996 of unknown causes.
Adger was the mysterious businessman who approached
General James Rose and asked him to help George W.
Bush avoid Vietnam by recommending him for a pilot
position with the National Guard.

General James Rose
General Rose recommended George W. Bush for a pilot
position with the Texas National Guard. He died of
unknown causes in 1993. He was immediately buried and
no autopsy was performed.

Lt. Colonel William Harris, Jr.
Lt. Col. William Harris was one of two commanding
officers who could not perform George W. Bush's annual
evaluation covering the year from May 1, 1972 to April
30, 1973. They stated in their filing that "Lt. Bush
has not been observed at this unit during the period
of this report." Fortunately for George W. Bush, Lt.
Col. Harris is not here to verify his 1973 statement.
He's dead.

Lt. Colonel Jerry B. Killian
Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian was another of George W.
Bush's commanding officers. He cannot testify in a
court of law as to George W. Bush's dereliction of his
sworn duty. Lt. Col. Killian is dead.

James Downing Aalund
Mr. Aalund's name is the first on a long list of young
Texans who died in Vietnam. These young men did not
have influential fathers to pull the strings necessary
to get them into the Texas Air National Guard. If they
had been so lucky, they would surely have fulfilled
their responsibilities to the ANG, if only out of
gratitude that they did not have to die, thousands of
miles away in a strange land. They surely would not
have disappeared from duty for over a year, as did our
fearless leader George W. Bush.

Enron

Bodies

J. Clifford Baxter
Found dead in his car, shot in the head. Mr. Baxter
was vice chairman of Enron Corp. when he resigned in
May 2001. Enron has been hot copy lately with the
revelation that they were the largest campaign
contributors for George W. Bush. Was J. Clifford
Baxter a potential witness to Bush foreknowledge of
their wrongdoings? His death was ruled a suicide.

Charles Dana Rice
He was the senior vice president and treasurer of El
Paso Corp., an energy corporation swept up in the
recent energy scandal. Two months after the "suicide"
of Enron executive Clifford Baxter, in the midst of
questions about the accounting practices of El Paso
Corp., Charles Rice was found dead of a gunshot wound
to the head. His death was ruled a suicide.

James Daniel Watkins
His body was found on December 1, 2001 in the Pike
National Forest in Colorado, a gunshot wound to the
head. Mr. Watkins was a consultant for Arthur
Andersen, the accounting firm for Enron. He
disappeared on November 13 after he left work. He was
described as a devoted family man who always called
home if he were going to be late. Officials initially
said that the death was suspicious, but have changed
their tune and have ruled his death a suicide.

Commerce Secretary Ron Brown
He died in a plane crash on April 3, 1996. Was Ron
Brown the first Enron body? In 1995 Enron officials
accompanied Brown on a trade mission to India, and to
Russia in 1994. Speculation among right-wing whackos
suggests that our last duly-elected President, Bill
Clinton, was somehow responsible for his death, but we
wonder: was Secretary Brown privy to information that
would conclusively link George W. Bush to Enron greed
and corruption? Charles Meissner, Assistant Commerce
Secretary, also died in this crash.

Jake Horton
He was the senior ice-president of Gulf Power, a
subsidiary of Southern Company, a cohort of Enron in
the energy industry, and a major contributer to the
Bush agenda. According to reporter Gregory Palast
http://GregPalast.com and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/enron/story/0,11337,643422,00.html
, Horton knew of the company's appalling accounting
practices, and "... had no doubt about its illegal
campaign contributions to Florida politicans - he'd
made the payments himself. In April of 1989 Horton
decided to come clean with state officials, and
reserved the company jet to go confront company
officials. Ten minutes after takeoff the jet exploded.

Kennedy Assassination

Bodies

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
An internal FBI memo reported that on November 22 a
reputed businessman named George H. W. Bush reported
hearsay that a certain Young Republican had been
talking of killing the President when he came to
Houston. The Young Republican was nowhere near Dallas
on that date. According to a 1988 story in The Nation,
J. Edgar Hoover said in a memo that Mr. George Bush of
the CIA had been briefed on November 23rd, 1963 about
the reaction of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami to
the assassination of President Kennedy. George H. W.
Bush has denied this, although he was in Texas and
cannot account for his whereabouts at the time.

Hale Boggs
He sat on the Warren Commission, which concluded that
President Kennedy was slain by a lone assassin. Later,
in 1971 and '72, Boggs said that the Warren Report was
false and that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI not only helped
cover up the JFK murder but blackmailed Congress with
massive wire-tapping and spying. He named Warren
Commission staff member Arlen Specter as a major
cover-up artist. Congressman Boggs' plane disappeared
on a flight to Alaska in 1972. The press, the
military, and the CIA publicly proclaimed the plane
could not be located. Investigators later said that
was a lie, that the plane had been found. On the plane
were Nick Begich, a very popular Democratic
Congressman, and Don Jonz, an aide to Mr. Boggs. All
were killed.

George de Mohrenschildt
A rich Russian oilman, he was described with his wife
as being the two people friendliest to Oswald at the
time of the assassination. De Mohrenschildt was the
man who moved Oswald to Dallas. In the late 1970's,
shortly before the first meeting of the House Select
Committee on Assassinations, de Mohrenschildt started
seeing a new doctor in town. He quickly became
mentally unstable, at which time his wife convinced
him to stop seeing the doctor. They moved away and
left a false forwarding address. On the same day that
the Committee tried to contact him about testifying,
he was found dead of a gunshot wound. In his personal
address book was the entry Bush, George H.W. (Poppy)
and Zapata Petroleum Midland (the oil company owned by
George H.W. Bush).

Mrs. E. Howard Hunt
In December 1972, while George H. W. Bush was at the
Republican National Convention, a United Airlines
flight carrying Mrs. Dorothy Hunt, CIA operative and
wife of Howard Hunt, (CIA operative and suspect in the
Kennedy assassination) crashed. Believed to be
carrying $25,000 in "hush money", she died in this
crash.

George H.W. Bush

Bodies

Gary Caradori
He was investigating Lawrence E. King, Jr., a very
influential black Republican who was also a friend of
George H.W. Bush. King was director of the Franklin
Community Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska, and was
suspected of embezzling $40 million . The Nebraska
Senate questioned child prostitutes, who accused King
of running a child prostitution ring. One of these
children said that she saw George H.W. Bush at one of
King's parties. "Pronto", a newspaper in Barcelona,
Spain, reported that the scandal "appears to directly
implicate politicos of the state of Nebraska and
Washington DC who are very close to the White House
and George Bush himself". On July 11, 1990, Gary
Caradori was killed along with his 6-year old son in
the crash of his small plane, after a mid-air
explosion, the cause of which was never discovered. He
had told friends repeatedly in the weeks before his
death that he was afraid his plane would be sabotaged.

Orlando Letelier
He was torn to bits by a car bomb on the streets of
Washington DC just before he was to testify against
the Chilean dictator Pinochet. After the bombing, CIA
Director George H. W. Bush told the FBI that there had
been no Chilean involvement whatsoever. In 1991 the
post-Pinochet Chilean Supreme Court asked George H. W.
Bush if he would submit to questioning. BUSH REFUSED.

Ronni Moffit
She was Letelier's assistant. She and her husband were
riding in the car with Letelier when the bomb
exploded. Mr. Moffit survived. Ronni didn't.

Jack Delaney and Ted White
These young men were killed when pilot George H. W.
Bush abandoned his plane when it was hit by enemy
fire. Much has been made of this story - Bush
propaganda would have us believe that he was a hero.
An eyewitness to the event tells us otherwise: Chester
Mierzejewski, who was the turret gunner in another
plane, had an unobstructed view. He states that he saw
a "puff of smoke" come from Bush's plane and quickly
dissipate. He states that the plane was never on fire
and that Bush never attempted a water landing, which
was standard procedure, and which would have given Mr.
Delaney and Mr. White a chance.

Silent Voices

Bodies

Steve Kangas
His web site, Liberalism Resurgent, was meticulously
researched and presented such a problem to the "real
boss" of George Bush, Richard Scaife, that he hired a
private detective to look into Kangas' past. Steve
Kangas was found in a 39th-floor bathroom outside of
Scaife's offices at One Oxford Centre, in Pittsburgh,
an apparent suicide. Mr. Kangas, a very prolific
writer, left no note. He had brought a fully-packed
suitcase of clothes with him to Pittsburgh. He bought
a burglar alarm shortly before he left for Pittsburgh.
Why did he need a burglar alarm if he was going to
commit suicide? An avowed advocate of gun control, he
nevertheless bought a gun. What was he afraid of? Why
did he go to Pittsburgh? After his death, his computer
was sold for $150 and its hard drive wiped clean.
Everything in his apartment was thrown away.

Danny Casolaro
He was working on a book that tied together the
scandals surrounding the presidency of George H. W.
Bush. He told his friends he was going to "bring back"
the head of the Octopus. Instead, his body was found
in a hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August
10, 1991, an apparent suicide.

Mark Lombardi
He was an accomplished conceptual artist who, while
chatting on the phone with a banker friend about the
Bush savings and loan scandal, started doodling a
diagram and was inspired to create a complex series of
drawings and sketches that charted the details of the
scandal. According to the New York Times, "He was soon
charting the complex matrices of personal and
professional relationships, conflict of interest,
malfeasance and fraud uncovered by investigations into
the major financial and political scandals of the day;
to keep facts and sources straight, he created a
handwritten database that now includes around 12,000
3-by-5-inch cards."

On the evening of March 22, 2000, Mark Lombardi was
found hanging in his loft, an apparent suicide.

James Hatfield
Mr. Hatfield was the author of Fortunate Son, an
unauthorized biography of George W. Bush. The book
detailed Bush's cocaine use and cover up of a cocaine
arrest. He was found Wednesday, July 18, in a motel
room, an apparent suicide.

Prescott Bush

Bodies

William S. Farish
He was one of Prescott Bush's partners in business
deals with Adolph Hitler. He was devastated by the
intense grilling he received from the Senate about his
dealings with Nazis, and while Prescott Bush skated
free, Farish collapsed and died on November 29, 1942.

James Forrestal
He was U.S. Secretary of Defense, and become a problem
for Prescott Bush when he proposed racial integration
of the Armed Forces. On March 28, 1949, he was forced
out of office and flown on a military plane to Jupiter
Island in Florida. From there he was taken to Walter
Reed Army Hospital, where he was given insulin shock
treatments. He was shielded from all visitors except
his estranged wife. From "George Bush, the
Unauthorized Biography":

On May 22, Forrestal's body was found, his bathrobe
cord tied tightly around his neck, after he had
plunged from a sixteenth-story hospital window. The
chief psychiatrist called the death a suicide even
before any investigation was started. The results of
the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's
diaries were published, 80 percent deleted, after a
year of direct government censorship and rewriting

Texas Justice

Bodies

Karla Faye Tucker
She was executed in spite of enormous protest from the
public, even those religious groups that advocate the
death penalty. Even Pat Robertson thought that Karla
was truly repentant and asked George W. Bush to spare
her life. He refused. Afterward, in a Talk Magazine
interview, Bush mocked the woman whose death warrant
he had sanctioned, pursing his lips and whimpering,
"Please don't kill me!"

David Wayne Spence
David Wayne Spence was executed in Texas in 1997 in
spite of compelling evidence of his innocence. Two of
the State's witnesses were co-defendants who testified
to avoid the death penalty, one of whom changed his
story three times in response to discrepancies. He
later testified that D.A. Simons encouraged him to
alter his testimony. Two other witnesses for the State
were jailhouse snitches who recanted later and stated
that Simons offered them favors in exchange for
testimony. All of this and more was supposedly
reviewed by Governor George W. Bush, but Bush refused
to commute his sentence, and did not order the Board
of Pardons and Paroles to review his request for
clemency. It is a myth that a Texas Governor can do
nothing to stop executions; the Board will almost
always go with his recommendation. Bush washed his
hands of the matter and did nothing. Reasonable doubt
is not a factor in Texas justice.

Gary Graham
Gary Graham was convicted of the robbery and murder of
a white man in 1981. Nearly two weeks after the crime,
the state's prime witness could not pick Gary's
picture out of a photo line-up. Mr. Graham was
arrested with a 22 caliber pistol. The victim had been
killed with a 22, but the police firearms examiner
determined that Mr. Graham's gun DID NOT fire the
fatal bullet. Four witnesses said Gary Graham was with
them, miles away from the convenience store, when the
murder occured. All four took and passed polygraph
tests. George W. Bush, predictably, expressed his
faith in the Texas judicial system and allowed Mr.
Graham to be put to death. Mr. Graham maintained his
innocence to the end.

Related Websites:

http://www.greaterthings.com/News/Dubya

http://www.holywesternempire.org

http://www.bk2k.com/bushbodycount/index.shtml

http://www.americanpolitics.com/070699deaththreat.html

Back to GeorgeWalkerBush.net

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12.: Video: Jon Stewart takes a look at the case known to many as "The Mi

Posted by: "shane_digital" shane_digital@yahoo.com shane_digital

Tue Jun 27, 2006 6:17 pm (PST)

Video: Jon Stewart takes a look at the case known to many as "The
Miami Seven." He examines the careful and decisive evidence told to us
by Alberto Gonzales:

Gonzales: These individuals wish to wage a quote: "full ground war
against the United States."

Stewart: Seven guys? I'm not a general. I am not anyway affiliated
with the military academy, but I believe if you were going to wage a
full ground war against the United States, you need to field at least
as many people as say a softball team.

Please Alberto, don't take any questions-you were doing just fine up
until then. That was followed up by some careful analysis of the men
involved in the plot.

A: One of the individuals was familiar with the Sears Tower- had
worked in Chicago and had been there-so was familiar with the tower,
but in terms of the plans it was more aspirational rather than
operational.

Stewart: No weapons, no actual contact with al-Qaeda, but one of them
had been to Chicago�
Video link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/270606Miami.htm

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13.: Tom Delonge questions 9/11 - Blender Magazine + audio clip with tom

Posted by: "shane_digital" shane_digital@yahoo.com shane_digital

Tue Jun 27, 2006 6:36 pm (PST)

Tom Delonge questions 9/11 - Blender Magazine + audio clip with tom
delonge and James Fetzer
link:
http://www.truthring.org/?p=1334

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14.: Can Microsoft Remotely Kill Your Windows PC? - Why Web 2.0 will end

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 7:28 am (PST)

Can Microsoft Remotely Kill Your Windows PC?
Posted on 06/13/2006 @ 10:37:03 in Privacy.

You may have bought and paid for Windows XP. But Microsoft decides whether or not you can use it.

If your XP software is up-to-date and online, it negotiates its validity with Microsoft servers every day. Nothing personal. Just part of Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) system protecting Redmond's property... checking to see if your Windows software (and heaven only knows what else) is perfectly valid.

Evoking memories of RealNetworks efforts to protect themselves from their loyal customers, innocent Microsoft officials explained to the discoverer, Lauren Weinstein, that this constant DRM enforcer is obviously not a constant DRM enforcer.

Instead, they averred, the feature simply allows Microsoft to disable the validation checker, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), if it should ever malfunction. (After the damage wrought on music lovers' computers by Sony-BMG's DRM software, Microsofties apparently thought Windows imbibers might swallow this "we monitor our monitor for your protection" line of reasoning.)

Silly us. Like Weinstein, we figured the daily validation check might allow Microsoft to remotely monitor you or pull the plug on your system, should you ever displease them down the road... perhaps, by refusing to buy a mandated Windows update, or discontinuing a Windows subscription.

Indeed, Microsoft officials admitted that, in the process of validating, they trap the IP address and date/timestamp.

Thus, as Microsoft knows that laptop's geographic location whenever it's online, it's easy to envision Homeland Security shadowing John Q. Public as he meanders across the country with his laptop... or Chinese authorities tracking a political dissident who had the temerity to use the word freedom.

And then, there's Microsoft itself. In addition to adding more details about you to its information reservoir, the company is blatantly letting you know who really controls the computer you bought.

You've been owned.

http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/privacy_aaejbacjbc_ge/

~~~

Email Privacy Whacked By EU Vote
Posted on 10/13/2005 @ 13:02:35 in Privacy.

EU interior ministers have gone to the mats to protect you from terrorists. They've declared war on Europe's parliament.

It seems the parliament has a few qualms about forcing ISP's to archive your email for later snooping... Some nonsense about civil liberties. Interior ministers are untroubled by the privacy silliness. They're simply hung-up on whether they should force you to archive mail six months, twelve months or longer.

Think the EU is getting a bit too big for its britches? Actually, it's a bit late to the party. Several EU members already have a hodgepodge of tougher statutes on the books. For example, Italy requires Internet cafes to run monitoring software, along with archiving customer passports.

But the US leads 'em all.

In The Impact of Regulations on Email Archiving Requirements, Oesterman Research concludes that nearly everyone who powers up an email server is required to archive mail to satisfy some government agency.

a.. Finance types answer to the Securities and Exchange Commission, New York Stock Exchange, National Association of Security Dealers (SEC/NYSE/NASD), etc.
b.. Hospitals, insurance companies, data processing centers and assorted medicos face the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
c.. Government agencies must deal with their own regs, in addition to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
As if that's not enough to make you shut down your mailserver, check out Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the mountain of state requirements (like the Child Protection acts of Michigan and Utah). So far, courts have been doling out non-compliance judgements at US$10,000 and up, up, up.

Canadians are similarly strapped down.

Those whose baby-kissers have thus far missed the bandwagon have no room for smugness. Every message they send to the outside world is dutifully stored for later retrieval by somebody somewhere.

Your archiving options mirror those for spam and virus filtering. You can archive email at the network border, the mail server, the desktop, or you can outsource it. Just make sure that whatever option you choose meets the regulations for your industry, today and tomorrow.

Now that government has discovered email, your job's only going to get tougher. And until this moment, you thought you were a law-abiding citizen. Silly you.

http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/privacy_aabibbfeee_fe/

~~~

Why Web 2.0 will end your privacy

Published: 3rd June 2006 by Wil Harris

We all know the plushy, rounded, pastel-coloured faces of Web 2.0. MySpace. Digg. Flickr. The achingly trendy Silicon Valley startups that are selling for millions to big media conglomerates and making their founders into stars. Tom Anderson. Kevin Rose. These are the pinups of the Web 2.0 generation - but little do they know the monster they've created.

My firm belief is that the net effect of the Web 2.0 movement will be a marked loss of privacy on the internet, one which leads to big business knowing more about you than it ever did before. This is why.

Defining the genre

Let's start by examining what exactly we mean by Web 2.0. It's a buzzword, a catchphrase - a candy-coated way of glossing over a core set of principles and technologies. Most people will take Web 2.0 to mean the rise of bloggers. The growth of social networking. The invention of tags and the contribution of end users to the final product. It means freedom to connect and share with your friends. It means desktop-like applications on the web. Whilst an exact definition escapes even the brightest, this can be taken as a fairly close approximation.

"Web 2.0 is also about the evolution of online businesses"

Let's take some exemplar applications. Digg.com is a brilliant example, since it combines many of these Web 2.0 facets. Unlike a traditional news publication, end users write the news that appears on Digg. News they've written, and news they like, is linked to their profile. Their profile is linked to the profiles of their friends, so that social groups can check out each others' recommendations. There's some funky programming and some blogging thrown in with it.

Then let's take MySpace, the ultimate social network (and now owned by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp). Users can share music, thoughts, pictures and words and can meet new people and discover new interests through their online links. If MySpace tells you that your friend likes The Super Arctic Guitar Axe Nirvana Marsupials, well, you might too.

Web 2.0 is also about the evolution of online businesses. Google is turning from a search engine to an advertising company. Email is being sidelined into a business niche by instant messaging. Outlook and Office are becoming increasingly redundant as PIM applications are being Ajax'd. Getting everything online has never seemed so important.

Benefits to the users

And why not? The more this 'movement' grows, the more the web evolves, the better for the end user, right? Already, Digg has taken a hatchet to traditional publishing, with users proving pretty good at finding stories that satisfy their own demographic - and its popularity is a testament to that. MySpace has enabled teenagers everywhere to escape the dastardly clutches of their parents and do what teenagers do best - namely, skulk around, making awkward social contact with the opposite sex and opining over the latest bands and fads.

Flickr has provided free photo hosting for millions. Thanks to some great coding, sharing photos with other people has never been easier. The integration of Larry Lessig's Creative Commons licenses even means that Flickr has some stick-it-to-the-man indie creds too, to attract otherwise sceptical washed out hacks and code monkeys. Google Mail and Calendar make Outlook redundant for many - why pay Microsoft when you can do everything you want online, for free? With the growth of networks worldwide, as well as cellular internet connectivity, you're virtually never without a net connection.

Web 2.0 sites provide some of the best functionality and fun on the web. Isn't that pretty neat?

The calm surface

But for all this user coolness, the benefit to the companies involved here is minimal. I mean, so minimal, it's what convinced me to look under the surface in the first place. Take Flickr, our last example. Bought out by Yahoo for millions upon millions of dollars, it makes next to no money whatsoever. Look at the site. What is on there that makes money? Sure, you can have a premium membership, but I bet you can count the number of users that have paid for that on the fingers of the hands of the millionaires that Flickr's sale made. Yahoo is burning money at an alarming rate to keep Flickr online.

Digg recently took $1m in venture capital to grow its business. Its sole source of income appears to be adverts at the top of the page, provided by Google - not exactly raking it in. Digg has been remarkably slow to roll out new features and to show its hand when it comes to raking in cash. The only features that have been put in have been to allow users to connect better with other users and to allow them to see what other users are doing.

Perhaps a more extreme example is YouTube. It is reportedly burning $1m a day in bandwidth costs to serve the amount of video being put up there. How on earth are they going to find cash to cover that?

So what's the conspiracy?

The major question therefore becomes, how do any of these businesses plan to make money? They are all burning cash, and none of them appear to have a revenue model beyond Google ads. Sure, Google ads is great - but that really only makes money for Google itself.

Why are the companies worth so much money? Why is MySpace worth over half a billion dollars without a proper revenue model? Why is Digg allegedly pitched at over $20m (at the last count) without any idea of where money is going to be pulled from?

"Digg knows what stories you've submitted, what demographic you're in, how other people in your demographic react to what you post"

The answer is - data. Information. Marketing. Every detail about you and me. That is where the money is.

This is not necessarily a new argument. I've heard it thrown at me by various followers of the Web 2.0 bubble, who allegedly regurgitated it from some of the 'A-List' bloggers out there, including John Battelle.

But the argument holds weight, nonetheless. The one thing the Web 2.0 sites have in common is that they are furiously mining information about you and your buddies. What you like. What you like that your buddies like. Digg knows what stories you've submitted, what demographic you're in, how other people in your demographic react to what you post. MySpace can break its users down by almost any statistic imaginable, then mine that data for more information about what it is you're doing and sharing online, and how that relates to your friends in the same (or different) demographics.

Flickr is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. Search for 'cat', and Flickr will record the most popular photo clicked. By associating the colour and picture data within photos with keywords used to search, Yahoo is slowly building a database of human identification. It has often said that the differentiator between Yahoo and Google, going forward, is that Yahoo wants the web processed by humans and Google wants it done by robots. Google uses algorithms to generate anything to do with its business. Yahoo, with its acquisition of Flickr and Delicious and whatever else is on the horizon, wants people - and social networks - to define how it does business.

The EndGame

So Murdoch knows everything about MySpace. The financial gurus at Yahoo know all about your personal thoughts, pictures and bookmarks. The guys at Google know everything about your search habits, and you can bet they want to link 'em up to your email and calendar and whatever else you end up using online. How much is that data worth? With marketing spends online going ever upwards, as more and more of the world 'logs on', you can bet that it's only going to get more and more valuable.

And where it's valuable, it will be bought and sold. Our social networks, searching habits, visual identifiers and personal preferences will be mercilessly sold to anyone who wants to get their hands on our particular demographic. And when your photos, your files, your email and your friends are all online, you'll have to be online - and thanks to net everywhere, like the Google San Francisco project, you'll always be able to be online. And as long as you're online, they can market to you.

When the Web 2.0 bubble bursts - when the massive buyouts are done, the millionaires are made and the sites we love today are in the hands of big business - the innovation will grind to a halt, and what's left will be the endless grinding of the marketeering machine.

But hey - at least you'll be closer to your friends. And you'll have free photo hosting, too.

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2006/06/03/web_2_privacy/1.html

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15.: Flight of Capital

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 3:58 pm (PST)

Saturday, June 17, 2006
Flight of Capital

They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.
I can't help it if I'm lucky. - Bob Dylan

This may be old news to you, but just a quick note here of something I'd missed about Flight 77, thanks to "Bismillah" and the RI forum, that I hope you won't miss, too.

At least among those with a mind for such things, it's fairly well-remembered that on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld made the shocking announcement that the Pentagon "couldn't track" $2.3 trillion of its transactions. "Iroquois" observes, "What's interesting to me is that he made his press release on a Monday. In DC, I always see bad news given on a Friday, usually late in the afternoon on Friday. The exception, of course, would be when someone happens to know that there is a far bigger story coming out."

And we know that Flight 77, allegedly piloted by an incompetent, made an aerobatic, spiralling descent over Washington, effecting a 270-degree turn to strike the Pentagon from a western approach at ground level. The side struck was the only one with an exterior wall hardened against attack, and was relatively empty while renovation continued.

Relatively. The unfortunate construction workers perished outside, but who were the expendables within?

From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 20, 2001: "One Army office in the Pentagon lost 34 of its 65 employees in the attack. Most of those killed in the office, called Resource Services Washington, were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts. They were at their desks when American Airlines Flight 77 struck."

The Arlington County After-Action Report noted that the "impact area included both the Navy operations center and the office complex of the National Guard and Army Reserve. It was also the end of the fiscal year and important budget information was in the damaged area." And Insight Magazine editorialized that "the Department of the Army, headed by former Enron executive Thomas White, had an excuse [for not making a full accounting]. In a shocking appeal to sentiment it says it didn't publish a "stand-alone" financial statement for 2001 because of "the loss of financial-management personnel sustained during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack."

High Crimes of State often come down to the movement of capital, and so the high criminals generally share the gray and black economics of common felons. Money is money; it's the magnitude of the heist that's different, and the means to effect and cover-up the crime. And part of the cover-up of the Pentagon heist has been the no-plane shell game, played smartly by Rumsfeld himself who "misspoke" that a "missile" had struck the Pentagon the same week Thierry Meyssen's original no-plane website was launched.

It's such disinformation that has drilled irrelevance and folly into a once potentially dangerous and angry army of authentic skeptics.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/flight-of-capital.html

Jeff said...
But if we go down that road of assuming a remote controlled plane, I'm quite sure that plane was empty.

I think the logistics of empty planes scenario - making all those people who were supposed to be on board disappear by other means, for instance - creates far more potential for operational failure.

My speculation: I believe the hijackers were themselves hijacked to ensure only the approved targets were hit. I believe this accounts for the lies regarding the recovery of the black boxes. If there were a failure of the control system, it would not be exposed, because there was no way the planes were going to land safely. Either the hijackers would crash the planes on their own, or they would be shot down, as in Shanksville. There were never going to be survivors.

Jeff said...
m abernathy,

Hope you don't mind, but I've moved your lengthy comment "Satanic Activity in Oregon" to the "Data Dump" board of the RI Forum. It can be read here. It was just too long and off-topic for this comment field.

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16.: Chant Down Babylon

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:01 pm (PST)

Friday, June 23, 2006
Chant Down Babylon

Men see their dreams and aspiration
Crumble in front of their face
And all of their wicked intention
To destroy the human race - Bob Marley

Maybe more Yippie, and less Hippie?

Yesterday on the RI board, "Johnny Nemo" remembered Abbie Hoffman saying "There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers... all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these 'flower children' who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?"

The Yippies were trickster revolutionaries, who staged shamanic acts to advance social transformation. They led thousands to the Pentagon in 1967 to attempt its levitation. They crashed the galleries of Wall Street to shower money on the trading floor. They ran a pig for president. But the decade, in America's memory, belongs to the Hippies.

The misty-eyed nostalgia has created bitterness and confusion over how members of the Grateful Dead can also be members of the Bohemian Grove. Before Neil Young's change of heart, there was dismay at his support for Ronald Reagan and at his "Let's Roll" jingoism. And there's the resistance I still feel within myself to the consideration that Hunter S Thompson may have been up to some pretty weird shit with some disturbed company, even though Michael Aquino is also a fan, and Thompson said in 2003 that he didn't "hate Bush personally. I used to know him. I used to do some drugs here and there."

But where the hell did the hippies go? They entered into power, and the institutions of selfishness, because If it feels good, do it is a philosophy of life that doesn't shy from power, because it needs power to feed the habit.

The Sixties, at least as romantically recalled, is one of the most debilitating things that ever happened to progressive America. A mass, Dionysian movement for social justice became co-opted and debased into Bacchian self-indulgence, and was called a triumph.

In Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of Robert, who one day in the Sixties consumed three Fly Agarics with some friends. To their disappointment, nothing seemed to happen. Until he went to the kitchen to grab a beer:

I took out the beer, turned around, and across the kitchen there were three huge mushrooms staring at me - a five foot tall, a four foot tall, and a three foot tall mushroom. The mushrooms were red and yellow and they had little eyes and little mouths. They looked just as solid and real as me or you.

Robert and the mushrooms stared at each other, until the largest asked, "Why did you eat us?" Robert thought, and then replied, "I was just following my dream."

Pinchbeck writes:

The mushrooms conferred with each other. Finally they seemed satisfied by his answer. "But are you prepared to follow this path?" the tallest Fly Agaric asked. Robert answered, intuitively and without hesitation, "Yes I am." Whereupon the mushrooms vanished. Fifteen years passed before Robert realized that the path he had agreed to follow was plant shamanism.

(Unknown at the time to Robert, Paul Devereux writes in The Long Trip that "the spirits of the mushrooms might appear to the individual and converse with him directly.... The number seen depends on the number of mushrooms consumed.")

A friend of Robert's who also ate Fly Agarics received a similar visitation, and was also asked "Why did you eat us?" But he answered, "I was trying to get high." The mushrooms told him, "Well, if you ever do this again, we're going to kill you."

That was America in the Sixties, and that was its choice, and these are the consequences. And it was more than just the mushrooms talking. At almost every turn in the culture and the counterculture, the easy and the selfish were chosen over the hard and the common. Not surprising. But America and the wider world still await a vanguard to take the harder paths into sacred space that lead to sacrifice and social transformation. It's a lot to ask, but that's how Babylon gets chanted down.

By the way, a couple of good things to report, after a month of bad from Blogger.

Thanks to 'et in Arcadia ego,' RI now has an excellent footprint in myspace. And here's a sign of things to come. Our family is moving, in material space, next week, so a move in virtual space will need to wait a little bit longer. But I'm looking forward to providing a better home for this community.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/chant-down-babylon_23.html

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17.: Mind over Mind

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:02 pm (PST)

Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Mind over Mind

Eden is burning; either brace yourself for elmination,
or else your heart must have the courage
for the changing of the guards - Bob Dylan

Maybe I've been reading too many comic books, or maybe too many books that should be comic books. Or perhaps a lot of non-fiction that describes a world most people presume to be fantasy. But I've been thinking lately how it can't be enough to know enough to recognize how strange and perilous our circumstances are, and how wicked the rulers of this age. Because if that's all we're about then it will be first they came for the communists-time all over again. Though possibly with the added insult that they won't even be bothered to come for us, because so long as we don't progress beyond analysis and diagnosis to treatment, then our virtual world has no congruity with theirs, and we're nothing but paperless tigers.

"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement." Philip K Dick wrote that in 1978, when it was easy to give up the fight because it appeared already won before it was truly engaged. Americans saw a modest President who wore sweaters in the Oval Office, and who asked small, sensible things of them, such as consumption in moderation. (What they weren't allowed to see was his National Security Advisor "stirring up Muslims" in Central Asia.) And for what it's worth, and it must be something, in every year since there's been a Bush in the White House either by fact or by proxy. And the manifestations of seemingly intractable Empire are promoting in its demoralized opposition a paralytic state of apprehended madness.

So, if we mean to do something, how can we avoid Dick's paradox? How can we safeguard ourselves and whatever victories we may win from the viral derangement of Empire? But before we can answer that, perhaps we need to learn of what we're capable. Because the Empire knows, and would rather that we didn't.

A few weeks ago on the RI board, "slimmouse" introduced me to the story of Mirin Dajo, the "inviolable man," whose performances were banned when the sight of his assistant running fencing foils through his body induced a heart attack in an audience member.

Tony Crisp writes that, in 1947,

A Swiss doctor, Hans Naegeli-Osjord, hearing of Dajo's alleged wild talent, induced him to allow scientific investigation of what happened when he was pierced. In the Zurich Cantonal hospital many people, including doctor Naegeli-Osjord, doctor Werner Brunner, the chief of surgery at the hospital, and a number of other doctors, students, and journalist observed and reported on the experiment. In front of them Dajo stripped to the waist and after spending some time in meditation, had his assistant once more plunge the steel through him. This should have damaged vital organs, but there was no apparent harm, although the witnesses were shocked. Dajo was then asked to allow an x-ray to be taken with the rapier still in place. He agreed, walked to the x ray theatre with the foil still in place. The result of the x-ray undeniably showed Dajo was pierced through vital organs. At a later date Dajo was again examined by scientists in Basel, and this time allowed the doctors themselves to pierce him. Each time there was no apparent harm.

Jack Schwartz was a Nazi concentration camp survivor "who for years had to train himself to endure severe torture and pain." After liberation he "repeatedly astonished dozens of physicians by sticking mammoth six-inch sail-maker's needles through his arms without injury or bleeding."

More on Schwartz:

Below, Jack Schwartz painlessly - smiling - thrusts a large darning needle through his biceps repeatedly on request for the lab researchers. He was able to stop and start bleeding at will, control his heart rate (stop his pulse), hold lit cigarettes to his arm with no pain, or permanent skin damage. The cigarrette burns ranged from simple red marks to blisters on different occassions. With 72 hours all trace of burns dissappeared. Although he had been doing these kinds of demonstrations for years, the reserachers remarked that "The skin on Jack's arm is as smooth as a baby's." All of his puncture "wounds" closed immediately, and were completely healed and completely invisible between 24 and 48 hours.

Michael Talbot, in The Holographic Universe, uses examples of multiple personality disorder to demonstrate how consciousness, even when fragmented within the same individual, creates its own physical states. Medical conditions possessed by one alter may not be shared by another. Dr Bennett Braun of Chicago documented a case in which all but one of a patient's subpersonalities were allergic to orange juice: "If the man drank orange juice when one of his allergic personalities was in control, he would break out in a terrible rash. But if he switched to his nonallergic personality, the rash would instantly start to fade and he could drink orange juice freely." Psychiatrist Francine Howland had a dissociative patient arrive for an appointment with an eye completely swollen shut from a wasp sting. She immediately booked him an appointment with an opthamologist, but in the meantime, as he was in severe pain, and since one of his alters was an "anesthetic personality" who felt no pain, she had the anesthetic alter become dominant. The pain stopped immediately, and the swelling was gone by the time the opthamologist could examine him an hour later, who saw no need for treatment and sent him home. The following day, after the anesthetic personality had relinquished control, the swelling and pain returned, and he again visited the opthamologist, who later called Howland for an explanation. "He thought time was playing tricks on him," she said. "He just wanted to make sure that I had actually called him the day before and he had not imagined it."

Trauma inducing altered states of consciousness, and dissociative personalities exhibiting compartmentalized functionality even on the biological level - where have we seen this before? The Empire's mind control work has always been about more than zombie creation. It's been about activating dormant, and heightened, human capacities in its service. The "Monarch" subjects were not treated like royalty, but like butterflies: emergent creatures with novel powers, who were told to be proud of their status and their new flesh.

For example, survivor Kathleen Sullivan describes "Theta" programming as "thought energy":

I just knew it as magnetic-type energy from the individual to do a number of different things that they were experimenting with, including long-distance mind connection with other people - even in other countries. I guess you would call it "remote viewing" - where I could see what a person was doing in another state in a room or something like that. It was both actual programming and experimentation. Because what they did - they kept it encapsulated in several parts of me, several altered states. It was a lot of training, a lot of experimentation.

Sullivan notes that this level of programming went beyond remote viewing, to projecting mental energy in attempts to kill others at a distance. Fort Bragg's "goat lab" was also training ground for psychic killers, according to Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats. At least one Green Beret, Michael Echanis, is said to have had success, though former psychic spy Glenn Wheaton told Ronson that Echanis's own heart suffered sympathetic damage. "Everything goes with a cost, see?" said Wheeler. "You pay the piper."

And so we're back to Dick's paradox. The Empire is mad, and we don't want to share in its madness and recreate its enslavements in our opposition to it. But it's made our consciousness part of its dominion, and it exploits our ignorance of ourselves and our power to maintain us in a state of false weakness. We shouldn't want to stop hearts with a burst of psychic energy - that's what they're about - but we should know that, however unlikely, it's possible that we could. And then we should try to do something better.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/mind-over-mind_21.html

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18.: Crimes of Aspiration

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:03 pm (PST)

Monday, June 26, 2006
Crimes of Aspiration

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine - Bob Dylan

Around the time of the 2002 Academy Awards, a screenwriter somewhat estranged from Hollywood told me he felt like flying a plane into the Kodak Theatre. (Whoopie Goldberg was hosting, so he probably wasn't the only one.) He had no flight experience, no access to an aircraft, no history of violence. He wasn't "operational" - just some guy who happened to be pissed off and briefly indulged in a dark fantasy. But by the seeming logic of last week's Miami arrests, Whoopie and the motion picture establishment don't know how close they came to becoming a stain and a ruin among smouldering Bob Mackie originals.

It's a stretch to call the Miami 7 amateurs. Like even mediocrity requires talent, being an amateur takes avocation. If they had been true amateurs, they would have sought explosives and weapons' training from their make-believe "contact," rather than new boots and uniforms. These guys were playing paintball al Qaeda. They were no more amateur terrorists than a daily regime of lip-syncing and air guitar might make me an amateur musician.

Miami and South Florida, of course, do not want for terrorists, but they are the amateurs who have been made operational by the true professionals who dream the dark fantasies of empire into being. It is these deadly amateurs who become the empire's tactical expression. Robert Parry does a nice job detailing US national security's hypocrical embrace of mass murderers such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada. (Though "national security" means very little when nations are essentially meaningless.) And after the Cubans have come others, like Atta and Al-Shehhi, who landed in the old Iran-Contra milieu and helped supersize it into the "War on Terror."

The case of the Miami 7 also implies the domestication of the terror threat - we have seen al Qaeda, and it is us - but as with Katrina, which saw resourceful whites "scavenge" supplies while blacks "looted," race and poverty remain defining characteristics of the ruling class's scaremongering. It can no longer be said, even fallaciously, that "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here," because they are here already, and they're looking like the poorest and darkest of us.

Just as America's policy towards the Middle East and the Muslim world has not been composed of false steps but rather calculated provocations, so too it's war at home, with the disappearance of the middle class and the ongoing projects of disenfranchisements. That the sharpening of tensions breeds resentment and violence should surprise no one, least of all those wielding the sharpener. And the violence needn't be more than an impractical thought to be treated as a credible threat.

In the June issue of Harper's, Ben Metcalf wrote:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

Let me be clear that I have no wish to perform such a deed in fact, nor do I want anyone else to destroy bodily what is, at least in the technical sense, a fellow human being. (Let me be equally clear that the above qualification, although true, is intended primarily as a legal ploy and should in no way be attributed to my claimed pacifism, which today's prosecutor might find a way to use against me. I would also like excused from the proceedings my personal feelings for George W. Bush, embarrassment and rage, as they could probably be turned to my disadvantage as well.) In truth, I bring neither a message nor a promise of violence. I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if I were to slaughter the president of the United States with my bare hands.

Ben Metcalf was allowed to write that, and it probably didn't hurt that his name is Ben Metcalf and his magazine is Harper's. Someone with another name, writing farther afield from the mainstream, might have had the knock on the door by now. America's affluent white liberals may feel better entertaining the fantasia that their thought crimes make them enemies of the state, but it would appear they are still far too comfortable to make the enemies' list.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/crimes-of-aspiration.html

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19.: If I Only Had a Plane

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:04 pm (PST)

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
If I Only Had a Plane

Strawman, going straight to the devil
Strawman, going straight to hell - Lou Reed

It hasn't been a month since Salon's Farhad Manjoo declared case closed on 2004 election fraud. (The abbreviated argument, via Sadly, No: "There may have been widespread election fraud in 2004, but what really gets me steamed is the zany conspiracy theory that it might have affected the election.�) But he's already back to slay another conspiracy dragon with "The 9/11 deniers." And yes, that's the implication: to dispute the finding of the Kean commission is to make yourself a fellow traveller with Holocaust revisionists. (Though truthfully, we need to be careful about what company we keep.)

Is Gerald Posner glancing anxiously over his shoulder? The 28 year old Manjoo seems to be making a run for his title of Alpha Debunker. His prejudicial deference to authority, his selection and deselection of evidence, his strawmen and his sarcastic disdain for contrary thought should grease his way to great success. And conventional wisdom's eager-to-please houseboy has already come a long way since his 2000 graduation, "with apparently no advanced degrees in social science or political science."

Predictably enough, Manjoo's representative text of 9/11 conspiracy is the flypaper Loose Change, which he calls "something like a film version of a highly contested Wikipedia page." (Suggesting a certain shallowness of thought Manjoo's wiki fixation runs deep, as demonstrated by his cut and paste blog, What I Learned on Wikipedia Today.) Manjoo's critique of Dylan Avery's work is almost wholly borrowed from Jim Hoffman's "Sifting Through Loose Change", and though he credits Hoffman, he also studiously ignores Hoffman's far more credible case for conspiracy.

Following Salon's RFK Jr hit piece, Bob Fitrakis wrote that "Manjoo is much like the Tobacco Institute or the people they used to send around to show us film strips about 'Readi Kilowatt' back during the Cold War. They are individuals who have developed a cottage industry as debunkers and denialists. And in a society famed for Know Nothings an anti-intellectualism, of course an opportunist like Manjoo would come forward."

True. And much the same could be said of Dylan Avery. The 9/11 movement remains a creature of the general culture that rewards style and flash over substance and reflection. The dumbed down is raised up, and a scattershot of distortions and faulty assumptions is too often mistaken for argument. (Avery even shares Manjoo's wikipedia fixation, citing it with authority in Loose Change.)

Debunkers and disinformation artists aren't always found in the alphabet soups of intelligence agencies. Often, they're just working for themselves, trying to establish their names in whatever fields they've staked out by launching them into the prevailing winds. And frequently, Looking Out for Number One means you've got the Company's back whether you know it or not. Manjoo and Avery deserve each other. Now, how about the rest of us?

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/if-i-only-had-plane.html

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20.: That Bill Hicks Moment

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:07 pm (PST)

Tuesday, June 13, 2006
That Bill Hicks Moment

Carved next to his name, his epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game. - Bob Dylan

Just trying to get my groove back, here.

I've written before that it's never been enough, or even likely correct, to say Bush Knew. As usual, it's the under-examined things that suggest why that may be.

From The Longboat Observer, September 26, 2001 (and it's a surprise to see this still online; so many of mainstream stories that don't make an easy fit to the official fabrication have become dead links):

At about 6 a.m. Sept. 11, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan was at the front desk of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort as Bush prepared for his morning jog. From that vantage point, Mooneyhan overheard a strange exchange between a Colony receptionist and security guard.

A van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony stating they had a "poolside" interview with the president, Mooneyhan said. The self-proclaimed reporters then asked for a Secret Service agent by name. Guards from security relayed the request to the receptionist, who had not heard of either the agent or plans for an interview, Mooneyhan said.

Possibly the same van was reported later that morning by a resident awaiting the presidential motorcade to pass, just minutes after Flight 11 struck the North Tower. Two men of Middle Eastern descent were seen "screaming out the windows, 'Down with Bush' and raising their fists in the air."

Earlier - "in the middle of the night" according to Monica Yadov's report for ABC's Sarasota affiliate - a "warning of imminent danger was delivered...to Secret Service agents guarding the President.' With peculiar precision, she noted it came "exactly four hours and thirty-eight minutes before Mohammad Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center." That would place the warning at 4:10 AM.

There are more than a few odd things here.

The Secret Service, allegedly in receit of a warning of imminent danger to their charge less than two hours earlier, simply turn the van away, telling its occupants to "contact the president�s public relations office in Washington." This, despite the fact that just two days earlier, the Taliban's greatest foe, Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, was assassinated under the ruse of a phony interview, by a bomb hidden inside the video camera.

If the "poolside interview" was an assassination attempt, it was less likely to succeed than the alleged plot of some Toronto kids to storm parliament and behead the Prime Minister. (Abandoned, sensibly enough, because they didn't know their way around Ottawa.) Showing up at six in the morning - any morning - dropping the name of a non-existent Secret Service agent and making the easily-checked false claim of an interview is not a winning tactic. The Secret Service would have had to be Dealey Plaza-negligent to have allowed them anywhere near Bush, yet they acted surprisingly nonchalant in light of the warning of "imminent danger" to the President they'd received just two hours previous and the recent example of death-by-interview of Shah Massoud.

Coincidentally, according to three eyewitnesses, including bartender Darlene Sieverts, Atta himself was in town September 7 "drinking rum and coke" at the Holiday Inn and meeting a man identified as Marwan Al-Shehhi, the alleged pilot of Flight 175. (Memorably, "he left a $20 bill to cover a $4 tab," Sieverts tells Daniel Hopsicker in Welcome to Terrorland.) Sepetember 7 was also the day Bush's visit to Booker Elementary was publically announced.

The poolside plot was not a serious assassination attempt, though it may have seemed as though it was to the men in the van who were permitted to go so far but no farther. But neither was it meant as a public shadow play that Bush was himself at risk. If it had been, the propaganda value of a thwarted assassination attempt would have been played up, rather than hushed up. I think, instead, it was a private display of power to the play-acting president that even a Bush had better not hold illusions of being his own man.

This lesson was reinforced later that morning, with the "credible threat" delivered, appropriately, by Dick Cheney, that "Angel is next", which effectively kept Bush out of both Washington and Cheney's alternate control and command loop until events had run their course. Remember? An anonymous White House caller, speaking in code, declared Air Force One a target. Though the administration soon quietly denied this awkward story that no longer fit, it's been supported by interviews with many principals, including Air Force One pilot Mark Tillman. "It was serious before that but now it is - no longer is it a time to get the president home," said Tillman. "We actually have to consider everything we say. Everything we do could be intercepted, and we have to make sure that no one knows what our position is." Tillman requested an armed guard at his cockpit door, and Secret Service double-checked every passengers' identity. This threat, at the highest level, was also made at the highest level.

What implication can we draw from the conflicting accounts? That there was no anonymous call to the White House, but Dick Cheney did phone in the threat to Air Force One. And Bush wasn't in on the hoax.

Bill Hicks famously said that he had "this feeling" that whoever's elected president,

no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail - blah, blah, blah - when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down... and it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll.... And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, 'Any questions?'

"Just what my agenda is."

Message received, over and out.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/that-bill-hicks-moment.html

Jeff said...
Thanks, I fixed the link.

About Cheney, I don't know that I could say, simply, that he's "behind it," because I think 9/11 happened by a coalescence of interests, some perhaps not even in communication with one another (except perhaps by a wink or a nod). I think Cheney's role may come down to the facilitation of the paralysis of response. He took upon himself, a few months before, the task force for determining a response to domestic terror attacks. And Norman Mineta's testimony to the 9/11 Commission I've always found telling, even though Lee Hamilton, predictably, wouldn't follow it up:

Mineta: There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out.The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?"

And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And.

Hamilton: The flight you're referring to is the.

Mineta: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

...

Hamilton: And so there was no specific order there to shoot that plane down.

Mineta: No, sir.

So the order wasn't to shoot down the aircraft, and it seems the young aid came to quetion the orders the closer the aircraft came. What were the orders that Cheney snapped back still stood?

Jeff said...
Thanks bismillah. I was very discouraged a few days ago and thinking, well, that's it then. But my spirits have lifted, thanks to so many wise and big hearted people here. I just got the conversation rolling; the great virtue of the place is the commentary.

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21.: Snakes in the Head

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:07 pm (PST)

Thursday, June 15, 2006
Snakes in the Head

Wiggle 'til it whispers, wiggle 'til it hums,
Wiggle 'til it answers, wiggle 'til it comes. - Bob Dylan

Please note: I remain unable to update the original site, and Blogger is now telling me that this page has the "characteristics of a spam blog," which may be the precursor to my getting locked out of here, too. This is looking like corporate incompetence on a Bushian scale, which is to say, as if.

And if we happen to go under here as well, please refer to the RI board, particularly this thread. Because we'll be somewhere.

And having typed that, I'm anxious to get this posted before I can't. So to get the conversation started in a half-assed fashion, I'm wondering about the imaginal meaning of a recurrent ayahuasca vision and voice.

First, from Jim DeKorne's Psychedelic Shamanism, via this thread on the RI forum:

Immediately I had the vision of a snake wrapping itself around my head. I saw my head open, as if my brain had been cut in half. It looked like the honeycombs of a beehive. Dozens of snakes appeared and began sliding into the tunnels of my brain. At first it felt wonderful, as if an immense power was entering me, but then I wasn't sure that I should let it in. I remembered Julio's warning that some spirits are good, others are evil. I was afraid I was dealing with an evil one. What if it wasn't the spirit of ayahuasca; or if it was, what if it was an awful, dark aspect of it?

I asked the voice what the snakes meant why they had to enter me -- but I didn't get an answer. Part of me thought it was a test. Another part knew that if the snakes disappeared into my brain, I would never get them out. The thought was horrifying.

Suddenly, I knew I had to get those snakes out of my brain. I began pulling them out by their tails. They were strong and hard to dislodge, but the more I fought them the more certain I became that the voice wasn't the real spirit of ayahuasca. It wouldn't have asked to enter me in such a disturbing way. I was fighting for my life. I feared that if I lost I would be enslaved forever.

The moment I got the last snake out, I began to doubt my decision ... I felt that I had failed a test and missed an extraordinary opportunity. I asked the voice why it seemed to be testing me. The voice answered that it had already given me so many gifts that I should have some faith and trust. The voice didn't sound angry or disappointed. It just said I shouldn't ask for so much without giving anything in return. Then it disappeared, and I knew my visions were over for that evening.

Now Peter Gorman, from his exceptional essay "When Ayahuasca Speaks - An Unexpected Venture into Healing":

...on perhaps the most extraordinary ayahuasca journey of all, a journey in which I was forced to confront my deepest fears and most hidden desires, I encountered a voice which asked me why I kept calling it. Thinking I was going crazy I answered that I had not called it, to which the voice said I certainly had, otherwise why was I drinking ayahuasca. Feeling silly that I was talking to myself, and simultaneously terrified that I was actually in conversation with a being that was way beyond my ken, I timidly told it that I was drinking ayahuasca to visit friends in New York, and to fly with birds. The voice responded that those were parlor tricks meant to entice me to return to ayahuasca; that the real reason I returned was to learn things and that the way to learn them was to allow ayahuasca to enter me. At that, my head seemed to split open, as my whole body and being had when Julio and his apprentice sang years ago ,and I watched in horror as a thousand snakes began to enter my brain. I knew that if I didn't get them out I'd be taken over by ayahuasca or whatever evil spirit that was, forever. So I fought with all my life to pull the snakes out and when I'd won the fight I was exhausted.

I didn't mention the experience to Julio for two years, during which I'd visited him but didn't drink. I simply couldn't face that voice again. When I did finally broach the topic he told me the voice was the voice of ayahuasca, that I could ask it for things, like songs to make me strong, or how to learn what plants were good for healing, or to answer questions that were otherwise unanswerable. He assured me that while it was a real spirit, as were many others I might encounter under the influence of ayahuasca, it was only a spirit and couldn't hurt me unless I let it. He also said I was a fool to have pulled the snakes out of my head, that it was a gift from ayahuasca to get snakes in one's head or belly because anyone who had them would always know who their enemies were, from thieves in the city to brujhos, black magic sorcerers, who would try to kill you with invisible arrows.

(Author Daniel Pinchbeck tells me that he, too, has had the snakes enter his head. Though interestingly, "not on ayahuasca - it happened to me one day at home, and had a strange visionary valence to it.")

Snakes and ayahuasca, we've seen, go together like the two halves of a double helix. Kira Salak concludes her recent account of her ayahuasca initiation by shining her flashlight into her vomit bucket: "No. I lean down closer. Steady the beam of light. I catch my breath as I examine the object: A small black snake seems to have materialized from my body."

I can well imagine how, to Western initiates into plant shamanism - even those who've already had the entheogenic elves break and enter their heads - the vision of snakes tunneling into their brains would be enough to make them suddenly doubt the wisdom of their path, and feverishly start yanking them out by their wriggling tails like a psychonautic Samuel L Jackson ("I've had it with these motherfucking snakes in my motherfucking brain!") That's the conditioned reflex determined by centuries of demonizing the figure of the snake, though it has long been regarded elsewhere as representative of humanity's potential power, typically coiled and dormant, known as the Kundalini.

But even in the scriptures of the West, it hasn't all been bad press for the snake. In Matthew 10:16, Jesus says "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."

I hate the term sheeple, because it's almost always arrogantly applied to others. But in a world ruled by wolves, divided between prey and predator, let's get over ourselves: we are the sheep. In fact, if our souls are precious to us, we had better be. But that needn't mean we're what's for breakfast, if we can nurture a serpentine wisdom. And we won't become indistinguishable from our roaring adversary if, at the same time, we can also embrace our doveself.

I'm still skeptic enough to appreciate the caution from Emmanuel Swedenbourg that "when Spirits begin to speak with a man, he must beware that he believes nothing they say." But I've also come to suspect that against the principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in High Places we have great allies, which are all the same ally, which is Life. Test the spirits, but sometimes it may take a few snakes in the head to see we have friends in high places, too.

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/snakes-in-head_15.html

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22.: The Aristocrats

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:12 pm (PST)

Monday, June 19, 2006
The Aristocrats

It's always the same, the name of the game
Is who do you know higher up? - Bob Dylan

Familiar with the joke, and the movie of the joke? It's allegedly the comedian's "secret handshake": a family of vaudevillians visits a talent agent, who's reluctant to take them on because family acts are "too cute." But the act is a litany of scatological and sexual obscenity, often with horrific violence, and the more imaginative the comedian's depiction of the young children's abuse the more successful is regarded its telling. "It's the perfect joke," says Dana Gould. "Just hearing out loud descriptions of giddy shit-covered incest." (Like Otto Peterson's: "then my daughter comes on stage. She's a real sexy 9-year-old. I hit her with an ax handle....") When the family has finished, the agent says "That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?" And the father always replies: "The Aristocrats!"

Get it? The joke's pay-off is the supposed disparity between depravity and nobility. What could be more absurd than a family of torture artists engaging in polymorphous abuse identifying themselves by a term denoting high social station?

Here's another variation of the joke, as told by Crown Prince Vittorio Emanuele Alberto Carlo Teodoro Umberto Bonifacio Amadeo Damiano Bernardino Gennaro Maria of Savoy:

Italy is in shock after the son of its last king was arrested as part of an investigation into prostitution and corruption. One of the country's best-known figures, Prince Victor Emmanuel was detained in the north but taken to a jail in Potenza in the south where the probe is based.

His family strongly denies the allegations against the 69-year-old who went into exile with the rest of the country's royals when Italians rejected the monarchy in favour of a republic, in 1946. But the magistrate who signed the arrest warrant for the prince and 12 other men told reporters about what he called "extremely alarming evidence."

"I believe I have made a rigorous assessment without taking into account the rank of the person concerned," said Alberto Iannuzzi.

Others detained include Salvatore Sottile, a top aide to the foreign minister in former Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government.

According to media reports, investigators believe Prince Victor Emmanuel had contacts with Mafia clans and was involved in procuring prostitutes for clients of a casino in Campione d'Italia, an Italian enclave on Lake Lugano near the Swiss border.

Implicated in Victor Emmanuel's corruption charges is also his cousin, Bulgaria's former child King Simeon II, Simeon Saxe-Coburg.

[And on edit, updating with a story from May 29 posted in the comment field:]

Police bust suspected child trafficking gang

A Bulgarian gang of suspected child traffickers has been broken up by police in simultaneous operations in Italy, Austria, Germany and Bulgaria. Police in Italy say dozens of people were arrested in the raids.

Most of the children moved by the gang were from Bulgaria and were between the ages of eight and 13-years-old. They appear to have been sold to the gang by their poverty stricken parents.

Police said some of the children appeared to have been sexually exploited, they had been kept in slave like conditions and they had been used to move drugs and commit crimes. Operation Elvis Bulgaria - coordinated by the Italian Carabinieri - involved police forces in Austria, Germany and Bulgaria.

[It's not a great stretch to see the potential of a link between this action of Italian police and the unspecified "extremely alarming evidence" against Victor Emmanuel, which also appears to have a Bulgarian connection.]

Some other knee-slappers of the Italian Prince have included shooting a tourist to death in 1978 (and subsequently acquited of unintentional homicide), dealing arms for the likes of the Shah of Iran (his son bears the name Reza in honour of Reza Pahlavi), defending Mussolini's anti-semetic legislation under his father, the last King of Italy, as "not that terrible," and having been a member in good, secret standing of P2, Licio Gelli's criminal fascist Masonoic lodge. As was, let's never forget, Berlusconi.

In April 1981, Milan magistrates broke into Gelli's villa and discovered his lodge's membership lists, which read, says Daniele Ganser in NATO's Secret Armies, like a "'Who is Who in Italy' and included not only the most conservative but also some of the most powerful members of Italian society." Fifty high-ranking officers of the army, for instance, and ten bank presidents. In the subsequent parliamentary commission, Communist member Antonio Bellocchio lamented that "we have come to the definite conclusion that Italy is a country of limited sovereignty because of the interference of the American secret service and international freemasonry." He regretted most commissioners had not followed their analysis to its logical end, but understood why they could not, because then "they would have had to admit they are puppets of the United States of America, and they don't intend to admit that ever."

Even without a joke, even just as a punchline, there remains something anachronistically comic about the aristocrats. They appear about as serious as actors in a heritage fort or pioneer village, recreating the rituals of a long-dead era. Their form is absurd, because their function appears to carry no consequential gravity. Yet they remain apart from us in a privileged world, linked by blood. And not only by the blood in their veins.

Early in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles - comic art, and as funny as the End of the World - we read a phone conversation between Whitehall and an occultic assassin. Scion of the ruling class Sir Miles Delacourt, who's favourite recreation is the most dangerous game, cuts the conversation short: "Look, I have a Cabinet ritual to attend, and if it's anything like the last one we'll be up to our knees in blood and spunk for at least the next twelve hours." It could almost be a joke.

A network of fascist Princes and Kings, laundering money, shooting tourists, running guns and elite prostitution rings, is a hell of an act. What do you call it?

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/aristocrats_19.html

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23.: Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Thu Jun 29, 2006 9:59 am (PST)

Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?

BY GREG PALAST
Tikkun Magazine JULY/AUGUST 2006

June 26, 2006

Did the Jews do it?

The US Congress will open hearings this week on the War in Iraq -- a wee bit late one might think. But one question at the forefront of the minds of many on both the Left and the Right is sure not to be asked: Did the Jews do it? I mean, after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?

The question was first posed to me in 2004 when I was speaking at a meeting of Mobilization for Peace in San Jose. A member of the audience asked, "Put it together- Who's behind this war? Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and the Project for a "Jew" American Century and, and, why don't you talk about that, huh? And ...."

But the questioner never had the full opportunity to complete his query because, flushed and red, he began to charge the stage. The peace activists attempted to detain the gentleman-whose confederates then grabbed some chairs to swing. As the Peace Center was taking on a somewhat warlike character, I chose to call in the authorities and slip out the back.

Still, his question intrigued me. As an investigative reporter, "Who's behind this war?" seemed like a reasonable challenge-and if it were a plot of Christ-killers and Illuminati, so be it. I just report the facts, ma'am.

And frankly, at first, it seemed like the gent had a point, twisted though his spin might be. There was Paul Wolfowitz, before Congress in March 2003, offering Americans the bargain of the century: a free Iraq-not "free" as in "freedom and democracy" but free in the sense of this won't cost us a penny. Wolfowitz testified: "There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money."

A "Free" Iraq

And where would these billions come from? Wolfowitz told us: "It starts with the assets of the Iraqi people.... The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the next two or three years."

This was no small matter. The vulpine Deputy Defense Secretary knew that the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, "Does Saddam really have the bomb?" but "What's this little war going to cost us?"

However, Wolfowitz left something out of his testimony: the truth. I hunted for weeks for the source of the Pentagon's oil revenue projections-and found them. They were wildly different from the Wolfowitz testimony. But this was not perjury. Ever since the conviction of Elliott Abrams for perjury before Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings, neither Wolfowitz nor the other Bush factotums swear an oath before testifying. If you don't raise your hand and promise to tell the truth, "so help me, God," you're off the hook with federal prosecutors.

How the Lord will judge that little ploy, we cannot say.

But Wolfowitz's little numbers game can hardly count as a Great Zionist conspiracy. That seemed to come, at first glance, in the form of a confidential 101-page document slipped to our team at BBC's Newsnight. It detailed the economic "recovery" of Iraq's post-conquest economy. This blueprint for occupation, we learned, was first devised in secret in late 2001.

Notably, this program for Iraq's recovery wasn't written by Iraqis; rather, it was promoted by the neo-conservatives of the Defense Department, home of Abrams, Wolfowitz, Harold Rhode and other desktop Napoleons unafraid of moving toy tanks around the Pentagon war room.

Nose-Twist's Hidden Hand

The neo-cons' 101-page confidential document, which came to me in a brown envelope in February 2001, just before the tanks rolled, goes boldly where no U.S. invasion plan had gone before: the complete rewrite of the conquered state's "policies, law and regulations." A cap on the income taxes of Iraq's wealthiest was included as a matter of course. And this was undoubtedly history's first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation's copyright laws. Once the 82nd Airborne liberated Iraq, never again would the Ba'athist dictatorship threaten America with bootleg dubs of Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time."

It was more like a corporate takeover, except with Abrams tanks instead of junk bonds. It didn't strike me as the work of a Kosher Cabal for an Imperial Israel. In fact, it smelled of pork-Pig Heaven for corporate America looking for a slice of Iraq, and I suspected its porcine source. I gave it a big sniff and, sure enough, I smelled Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the capo di capi of right-wing, big-money influence peddlers in Washington. Those jealous of his inside track to the White House call him "Gopher Nose-Twist."

A devout Christian, Norquist channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition to fight the devil's tool, legalized gambling. He didn't tell the Coalition that the loot came from an Indian tribe represented by Norquist's associate, Jack Abramoff. (The tribe didn't want competition for its own casino operations.)

I took a chance and dropped in on Norquist's L Street office, and under a poster of his idol ["NIXON- NOW MORE THAN EVER"], Norquist took a look at the "recovery" plan for Iraq and practically jumped over my desk to sign it, filled with pride at seeing his baby. Yes, he promoted the privatizations, the tax limit for the rich, and the change in copyright law, all concerns close to the hearts and wallets of his clients.

"The Oil" on Page 73

The very un-Jewish Norquist may have framed much of the U.S. occupation grabfest, but there was, without doubt, one notable item in the 101-page plan for Iraq which clearly had the mark of Zion on it. On page seventy-three the plan called for the "privatization....[of] the oil and supporting industries," the sell-off of every ounce of Iraq's oil fields and reserves. Its mastermind, I learned, was Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation.

For the neo-cons, this was The Big One. Behind it, no less a goal than to bring down the lynchpin of Arab power, Saudi Arabia.

It would work like this: the Saudi's power rests on control of OPEC, the oil cartel which, as any good monopoly, withholds oil from the market, kicking up prices. Sell-off Iraq's oil fields and private companies will pump oil in their little Iraqi patches to the max. Iraq, the neo-cons hoped, would crank out six million barrels of oil a day, bust its OPEC quota, flood the world market, demolish OPEC and, as the price of oil fell off a cliff, Saudi Arabia would
fall to its knees.

"It's a no-brainer," Cohen told me, at his office at Heritage. It was a dim little cubby, in which, in our hour or two together, the phone rang only once. For a guy who was supposed to be The Godfather of a globe-spanning Zionist scheme to destroy the Arab oil monopoly, he seemed kind of, well...pathetic.

And he failed. While the Norquist-promoted sell-offs, flat taxes and copyright laws were dictated into Iraqi law by occupation chief Paul Bremer, the Cohen neo-con oil privatization died an unhappy death. What happened, Ari?

"Arab economists," he hissed, "hired by the State Department . the witches brew of the Saudi Royal family and Soviet Ostblock."

Well, the Soviet Ostblock does not exist, but the Arab economists do. I spoke with them in Riyadh, in London, in California, in wry accents mixing desert and Oxford drawls. They speak with confidence, knowing Saudi Arabia's political authority is protected by the royal families -- of Houston petroleum.

"Enhance OPEC"

After two mad years of hunting, I discovered the real plan for Iraq's oil, the one that keeps our troops in Fallujah. Some 323 pages long and deeply confidential, it was drafted at the James A. Baker III Institute in Houston, Texas, under the strict guidance of Big Oil's minions. It was the culmination of a series of planning groups that began in December 2000 with key players from the Baker Institute and Council on Foreign Relations (including one Ken Lay of Enron). This was followed by a State Department invasion-planning session in Walnut Creek, California, in February 2001, only weeks after Bush and Cheney took office. Its concepts received official blessing after a March 2001 gathering of oil chiefs (and Lay) with Dick Cheney where the group reviewed with the Vice-President the map of Iraq's oil fields.

Once I discovered the Big Oil plan, several of the players agreed to speak with me (not, to the chagrin of some, realizing that I rarely hold such conversions without secretly recording them). Most forthright was Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who was flown into Baghdad on a C-17 to make sure there would be no neo-con monkey business in America's newest oil fields.

It had been a very good war for Big Oil, with tripled oil prices meaning tripled profits. In Houston, I asked Carroll, a commanding, steel-straight chief executive, about Ari Cohen's oil privatization plan, the anti-Saudi "no-brainer."

"I would agree with that statement" Caroll told me, "privatization is a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."

Bush world is divided in two: neo-cons on one side, and the Establishment (which includes the oil companies and the Saudis) on the other. The plan the Establishment created, crafted by Houston oil men, called for locking up Iraq's oil with agreements between a new state oil company under "profit-sharing agreements" with "IOCs" (International Oil Companies). The combine could "enhance the [Iraq's] government's relationship with OPEC," it read, by holding the line on quotas and thereby upholding high prices.

Wolfowitz Dammerung: Twilight Of The Neo-Con Gods

So there you have it. Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique- bookish, foolish, vainglorious-had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and convincingly by the powers of petroleum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis.

Between the neo-cons and Big Oil, it wasn't much of a contest. The end-game was crushing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the land of Babylon. And to make certain the arriviste neo-cons got the point, public punishment was exacted, from exile to demotion to banishment. In January 2005, neo-con pointman Douglas Feith resigned from the Defense Department; his assistant
Larry Franklin later was busted for passing documents to pro-Israel lobbyists.
The State Department's knuckle-dragging enforcer of neo-con orthodoxies, John Bolton, was booted from Washington to New York to the powerless post of U.N. Ambassador.

Finally, on March 16, 2005, second anniversary of the invasion, neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz was cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank, moving from the testosterone-powered, war-making decision center to the lending office for Bangladeshi chicken farmers.
"The realists," crowed the triumphant editor of the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, "have defeated the fantasists!"

So much for the Big Zionist Conspiracy that supposedly directed this war. A half- dozen confused Jews, wandering in the policy desert a long distance from mainstream Jewish views, armed only with Leo Strauss' silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates with a combined throw weight of half a trillion barrels of oil.

**********

Investigative Reporter Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats,
Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War to be released next week in United Kingdom and Ireland by Penguin UK, from which this essay is adapted.

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24.: Police raid Riviera home of former MI6 officer

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Thu Jun 29, 2006 6:20 pm (PST)

Police raid Riviera home of former MI6 officer

Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday June 29, 2006
The Guardian

British and French police raided the Riviera house of the former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson, arrested him, and seized all his computer equipment and personal papers.
Mr Tomlinson, who has been engaged in cat and mouse operations with his former employer ever since he was released from jail in 1999, told the Guardian yesterday: "At 6.27am on Tuesday, 12 police were outside my home with an EU arrest warrant.

"They took every bit of computer equipment, all my phones, my emails, all my personal files, my Psion organiser with my bank account details. It is a complete and utter catastrophe," he said.

They then searched his boat. British police wanted to take away the files in his office and both his passports - he has dual UK-New Zealand nationality - but their French colleagues prevented them, he said.
Mr Tomlinson and MI6 have not been in touch since he published The Big Breach, an account of his life as a British secret agent, in 2001. He is now employed as a yacht broker, selling and chartering boats from an Antibes-based company, BCR Yachts. He lives in nearby Cannes.

He has set up an internet blog, with the provocative title of "Tomlinson v MI6". It is this which seems to be worrying Britain's intelligence agency.

He has posted an aerial photograph of MI6's training facility at Fort Monckton in Hampshire. He wrote: "This is where new recruits undertake their IONEC [a six-month training course]. It is also where pre-posting refresher training takes place, as well as courses for liaison officers from other friendly intelligence services." MI6 is particularly worried Mr Tomlinson will reveal names of its officers on his website.

Government lawyers recently asked him to take the names of two MI6 officers off his site. He agreed and wrote: "It is a most encouraging first response from MI6 and the Treasury solicitor. If they had approached things as sensibly as this 11 years ago, the dispute between us need never have happened."

After his arrest in 1997 under the Official Secrets Act, Mr Tomlinson was accused of placing lists of alleged MI6 officers on websites. He said yesterday the police accused him of placing new lists on known subversive sites last year. "It was absolutely nothing to do with me whatsoever," he said yesterday. "It's so easy to prove it wasn't me. It absolutely wasn't me. It's causing me enormous hardship and distress." He said the police insisted the list was genuine. The list is apparently concocted from the official British diplomatic list. As a list purporting to be one of MI6 officers, it is inaccurate.

Mr Tomlinson, 42, described on his blog how he was arrested and held in Cannes police station. "I am having to write this blog from work now, as MI6 have again confiscated all my computer gear with trumped-up and invented charges," he wrote.

He said the police would not show him the lists while he was being questioned.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,1808393,00.html

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25.: Dump Windows Update, use alternatives

Posted by: "norgesen" norgesen@yahoo.com norgesen

Fri Jun 30, 2006 7:49 am (PST)

Dump Windows Update, use alternatives

By Brian Livingston

The Internet interprets Microsoft as damage and routes around it.

My apologies to John Gilmore for tweaking his famous 1993 quote about censorship. But the above statement just happens to sum up the alternatives Windows users are adopting ever since Microsoft's "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) debacle.

It was only a few weeks ago when the Redmond software giant started quietly auto-installing WGA to Windows machines in the U.S., U.K., and a few other countries. The code, which qualifies as spyware under any objective definition, was programmed to contact Microsoft's servers every 24 hours. Now, after hearing from plenty of outraged customers, the company back-pedaled on June 27, saying it would release a version that calls home less often.

That's not really a solution, as I'll explain below. Since that's the case, the entire affair has given enormous momentum to third-party products that render Microsoft's Windows Update routine completely unnecessary.

I'll explain in today's article exactly how you can best deal with WGA. For those in a hurry, here's a 4-point elevator summary:

1. Turn off Automatic Updates in the Control Panel. Set it to merely notify you of new patches, not auto-install them.

2. WindizUpdate.com, an independent patch-download system, which I've been asked about by many readers, is a flawed alternative to Windows Update that I can't recommend.

3. By contrast, patch-management software that's well-supported, such as Shavlik's NetChkPro, provides an inexpensive and reliable solution that far exceeds Windows Update's capabilities.

4. Once your alternative update mechanism is in place, follow the routine I describe below to uninstall WGA and get it out of your system for good.

What's so bad about Genuine Advantage?

My last article, in the June 15 newsletter, flatly declared that Windows Genuine Advantage is Microsoft-sponsored spyware. That story received the highest reader ranking since we started asking our readers last January to vote on our articles (4.4 out of 5.0). We also received almost 200 e-mails, far more than we normally get about any single topic. Windows users are highly agitated.

I've repeatedly heard terms like "furious" and "livid" to describe how people felt about Microsoft pushing a piece of marketing spyware through the company's sacred mechanism for distributing critical security updates. Perhaps the most deeply offended were the outside professionals who have defended Microsoft for years against charges that it's an "evil empire." Microsoft's abuse of its auto-update system to install an intrusive sales gimmick caused a lot of these faithful ones to rail against the idea as though personally betrayed.

Without repeating my June 15 article, I'll summarize the bottom line: No security-minded company or individual can allow a program to stealthily contact a distant server and morph its behavior at will. This principle holds just as true for people who think Microsoft is the world's greatest corporation as it does for those who deeply distrust the company's motives. (The rule obviously doesn't preclude trusted programs with specific, known tasks � such as an antivirus utility � from automatically downloading new signature files.)

Let me emphasize that I'm dead set against the mass piracy of software or any other creative work. But Windows Genuine Advantage and Windows Product Activation, which WGA is meant to enforce, have nothing to do with stopping mass piracy.

As I reported in InfoWorld Magazine way back on Oct. 22 and Oct. 29, 2001, Microsoft deliberately designed Product Activation to be trivial for pirates to circumvent. Any fly-by-night business can copy a single file and sell thousands of machines that pass Product Activation (although the innocent buyers may have trouble validating months or years later).

The purpose of Product Activation has always been to prevent Mom and Dad from buying a Windows package, installing one copy on the parents' PC and another on the kid's PC. Frankly, copyright laws for hundreds of years have allowed buyers of copyrighted works to make a limited number of copies exclusively for themselves. If you bought an music album you liked, you could legally make a copy to play in your car. In the U.S., this is known as the "personal use exemption" of the copyright laws or, more generically, "fair use."

Product Activation isn't aimed at hard-core pirates. Instead, it's part of a surprisingly powerful, coordinated effort to change the basic nature of copyright so people can't make any personal copies whatsoever.

The fact that personal-use copies have traditionally been permitted under copyright laws is illustrated by, of all things, Microsoft Office. The Product Activation scheme in Office has always explicitly allowed the buyer to install copies on two different machines. Furthermore, Office Update � which uses a patch-download mechanism distinct from that of Windows Update � has never required Genuine Advantage prior to users downloading security patches for Word, Excel, and the like.

(Secret: Windows' own flavor of Product Activation does allow anyone to install Windows XP on a different machine, which will then in most cases successfully validate, about once every six months. Microsoft almost never mentions this fact.)

By displaying warnings about piracy as often as once a day or even once an hour, Windows Genuine Advantage has no security benefit but was solely designed to sell more copies of XP to confused users. WGA was programmed so any actual pirates (and savvy Windows users) could turn off the nag screens with a few clicks � but novices would be unlikely to understand that.

Stopping the guys with the high-speed duplicators should be Microsoft's top concern. Instead, the Redmond corporation inexplicably targets fair-use home installations. The marketers behind this presumably hope to increase gross revenue so Microsoft's share price will get out of the doldrums. But most home users aren't a ripe market to spend the kind of money Microsoft wants.

If the company devoted as much time developing innovative products as it does cooking up ways to prevent personal-use copies, its stock price wouldn't be half of what it was six years ago.

WindizUpdate.com is not a recommended solution

Many readers in the past few weeks have asked me about WindizUpdate.com. This Web site, launched in 2005, scans your computer for needed Windows patches and then displays links to the relevant download locations at Microsoft.com.

Unfortunately, as promising as this approach may seem, after investigation I can't recommend this site. Here are a few reasons why:

1. The site installs an unsigned control, which performs the scanning and reporting function. Without a digital signature, you can't verify that the control is really from the same people who manage the site itself.

2. The scan process asks several times to read the Registry. If you know that WindizUpdate is perfectly legitimate, which I have no reason to doubt, this might be fine. But it's bothersome, while at the same time it's too risky to click "Always allow this site," which would permit too many unknown future actions.

3. The site is a part-time hobby with no visible means of support. There are many fine pieces of software and Web services that are free of charge. But WindizUpdate is performing a serious security task and doesn't have a team of programmers that's adequate to develop it, much less provide technical support if the user base grows.

I called the prime mover behind WindizUpdate, Phil Young, who is based in Auckland, New Zealand. He's a director of 62nds Solutions Ltd., a consulting firm with two employees and a few part-time staff on the island.

When asked why WindizUpdate didn't use a digital signature to provide a verifiable identity for its control, Young replied, "I haven't got the $400 to spend on the security signing certificate. Because it's a free site, it's not high on our list of priorities."

I inquired whether the site might become supported by advertising or voluntary contributions by users. "I have considered putting some ads on," Young said, "but I dislike sites that have more advertising than content."

Besides having no digitally signed code, WindizUpdate also lacks the ability to scan for and deploy Microsoft nonsecurity updates, Office updates, or security updates for products other than Microsoft's, such as RealPlayer.

All of the above nonfeatures cause me to advise readers to hold off on WindizUpdate. As attractive as the idea of a non-Microsoft patch-management system may be, other companies do a much better job.

One final strike against WindizUpdate is that it has no apparent uninstall procedure. If you've ever installed a WindizUpdate control, I recommend removing its components using the manual procedure described on the site's page entitled Uninstalling.

Shavlik's patcher joins the Security Baseline

It's hard to find objective ratings published within the last 12 months of patch-management systems that are appropriate for home users as well as small and medium-sized businesses. That may be due to the fact that Microsoft has taken some luster off the category by expanding its own free offerings: Windows Update, the new Microsoft Update (which updates both Windows and Office apps), Windows Server Update Services, etc.

Based on the reviews by independent test labs shown below, however, I feel the best home and SMB alternative to Windows Update is currently HFNetChkPro from Shavlik Technologies. (The name of the product is a contraction of Hotfix Network Checker Pro.) Effective today, I'm adding Shavlik's software to my Security Baseline feature, which appears in every issue, and removing Windows Update/Microsoft Update.

NetChkPro isn't free, but its one-time license fee of $25 per machine is very reasonable. There's also a 25% annual maintenance fee after the first year, Eric Schultze, Shavlik's chief security architect, told me in a telephone interview. But this works out to only about $6 a year � a good investment if you like your software to remain supported.

Shavlik has been in business for 13 years, has developed award-winning products, and has a financial base that should be strong enough to support the growing number of users it's attracting. In addition to patching Windows and Microsoft Office apps, NetChkPro can auto-deploy patches for Firefox, Adobe Reader, WinZip, RealPlayer, Macromedia Flash, and other programs.

NetChkPro is "agentless" patch-management software. That means a installation on a single PC can scan and deploy patches to as many machines across a workgroup or domain as you have licenses for. No "agent" program needs to be installed on each machine that's to be scanned. In addition, NetChkPro gives back a license for any machine you haven't deployed patches to for 45 days. That's handy if one machine in a home or office is retired and a new one takes its place.

The minimum purchase at Shavlik's site is a 5-user license, which amounts to $125. In my opinion, that's justified for small offices and home users with several PCs. For home users with only a single PC, Schultze says a Web service that scans machines remotely will become available in a couple of months for an affordable monthly fee.

Here are some of the awards I examined when analyzing potential replacements for Windows Update:

1. Redmond Magazine, a periodical that's independent of Microsoft, stated flatly, "HFNetChkPro is the best Windows-based agentless product," in a November 2004 test of seven competing products.

2. SC Magazine, a British publication, in a June 2004 test suite of 10 contenders gave HFNetChkPro its Recommended award. A more recent test in March 2006 handed the Recommended title to NetChk Protect, a closely related Shavlik product with added antispyware capabilities.

3. Computer Business Review Online, in a March 2006 review, names no winners on points but includes NetChkPro in a useful description of 10 competing patch-management solutions.

I'll be looking for additional torture tests of patch-management programs, now that running Windows Update has become somewhat dangerous to Windows users. Just as third-party software firewalls and antivirus programs are widely considered superior to Microsoft's own offerings, I believe patch management will become a category in which those in the know demand independent solutions.

If test labs start handing Editors' Choice awards to a product other than Shavlik's, of course, I won't hesitate to include the new winner in the Security Baseline when that day comes.

Uninstall Genuine Advantage the official way

One of the clear outcomes of the customer pressures on Microsoft regarding WGA is the written uninstall procedure MS posted on June 27 in Knowledge Base article 921914. WGA had previously been difficult to remove, with components regenerating themselves as soon as one was deleted.

I stated in my June 15 article that it was pointless for home users to try to uninstall WGA if they'd somehow installed it. Even if the Web rumor mill provided the right steps, removing WGA would at that time have simply made it impossible for users to get any downloads from Microsoft, even critical security updates.

With NetChkPro or any decent patch-management solution installed, however, you can now remove WGA and never worry about using Windows Update again. Microsoft reportedly will soon allow all comers to once again receive crucial security patches � but whether the company does or not won't matter to you. Shavlik and the other top-rated PM firms make sure the right patches flow to the right machines without any reliance on Windows Update.

The WGA uninstall process that's now documented in KB 921914 is the same one that's been described for the past few weeks in several private blogs and discussion groups on the Web. Now that the procedure has a place on Microsoft.com, however, I believe it can be followed by Windows users with confidence.

There are 11 separate steps in the removal process. These include renaming files, running commands in a character-mode window, and editing the Registry. (Microsoft could have simply provided an uninstall utility, of course, but hasn't yet.) I believe even novice users should be able to follow all 11 steps, if each one is carefully followed.

Note: Two of the three Registry keys that are deleted in step 10 of Microsoft's procedure are identical, as of this writing. This appears to be a documentation error � the two relevant lines in the instructions are simply duplicates of each other.

Watch out for downloads in the night

The change of tone from Microsoft about WGA doesn't mean you can let your guard down. In a June 8 statement, the company said WGA would be changed to call home every 14 days instead of every 24 hours. A subsequent June 27 press release is unclear on this point but emphasizes that the new WGA will still operate, just not as frequently:

a.. "It is important to note that WGA Validation still periodically checks to determine whether the version of Windows is genuine."

Furthermore, I tested Microsoft Update this morning (June 29), and it still refuses to identify any critical security updates until WGA is installed. Before showing the needed patches, the service displays the same deceptive message as before: "Software Upgrade for Some Windows Components Required." No mention of WGA is made unless you click a tiny "details" link, and even then no information about WGA's true functionality is displayed.

Microsoft's statements imply that everything is fine and all of this is in the best interests of users. What customers around the world want to hear instead is, "We've canned the people who were responsible for misusing our critical security mechanism, and we've appointed an independent board to make sure it can never happen again."

Until then, make sure you don't allow patches 892130 and 905474 � the two components of WGA � to install themselves. And use the third-party software listed below in the Security Baseline to ensure you won't wake up to any unpleasant surprises one day.

I'd like to thank readers John Holden and David Speck, M.D., for being the first among scores of readers who sent in valuable tips on this topic. (These two gentlemen are in no way responsible for the views I express above.) They'll receive gift certificates for a book, CD, or DVD of their choice for sending us their research.

To submit more information about WGA, or to send us a tip on any other subject, visit WindowsSecrets.com/contact.

http://windowssecrets.com/comp/060629/

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Friday, June 30, 2006

[september_eleven_vreeland] Digest Number 1399

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