Linda S. Heard
Online Journal
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The Americans and the Israelis are acting in concert vis-à-vis Iran. The unmistakable message they are putting out loud and clear is that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is on the cards in the event Tehran doesn’t cave in to their demands. Are they bluffing as part of an arm-twisting strategy or are they seriously planning to transform this region into an inferno?
Pundits have been analyzing the probability of a US or Israeli attack on Iran for several years now. Some have even come up with likely dates but most of those have come and gone, eroding the analysts’ credibility and dulling fears. There’s been so much chatter on the subject that we may reach the point when a “will they or won’t they?” discussion will turn into nothing more than an academic exercise on the basis it hasn’t happened so, therefore, it probably never will. The danger is Iran and the region could easily be lured into letting down its guard. Certainly, members of the Iranian leadership have indicated they don’t take the threat very seriously even though they are planning for every contingency and threatening to set the Middle East aflame if attacked.
In recent weeks, since the Israelis launched a supposed dry run in the eastern Mediterranean using 100 fighter planes and aerial tankers, the chatter has reached a crescendo. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has vowed, “Iran will not be nuclear.” Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz has termed a strike on Iran “unavoidable.”
Retired Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit warned that if Israel doesn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities within a year, Israel would be vulnerable to nuclear incineration. He says that even if Israel doesn’t receive a green light from the US, it should be prepared to go it alone. Shavit believes there is a window of opportunity before the upcoming US election when the deed should be done in case of a win by Barack Obama, who has advocated jaw-jaw before war-war.
Arch neoconservative and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton says he believes Israel is poised to strike in November once the ballot has taken place.
Knesset member and retired Maj. Gen. Dani Yotom, who isn’t known for his hawkish views, says sanctions against Iran aren’t working and so “a military operation is needed.” Even the normally moderate Israeli historian Benny Morris recently said, “If the issue is whether Israel or Iran should perish, then Iran should perish.”
Suspicions that an attack might be in the pipeline were heightened after leaks supposedly forced the Israeli prime minister to admit he had secretly met with Aviam Sela, a brilliant military tactician said to be the architect of Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. It is believed that Sela was asked to give his opinion on the feasibility of similarly putting Iran’s nuclear facilities out of action.
There is no doubt that Israelis genuinely fear a nuclear-armed Iran, which they believe would constitute an existential threat, but why are Israelis being so upfront about their intentions when history tells us they normally strike first and answer questions later?
Given that Iran is not Iraq circa the 1980s, as far as airpower, weaponry, technology and sophisticated communications go and in light of the fact Iran’s main nuclear facilities are buried under layers of steel and concrete, as much as 100 feet underground, eradicating Tehran’s nuclear capability would be challenging for any military unless it was prepared to unleash nuclear bunker-busters. Moreover, unlike the Osirak surprise strike, an attack on Iran would trigger serious military repercussions that could involve Syria, Hezbollah and pro-Iranian Shiite Iraqi groups. Such a preemptive move would probably result in a massive loss of life on all sides and would have a devastating effect on the global economy with oil prices reaching hitherto unimaginable heights.
Further, since neither Israel nor the US are in any position to launch a ground invasion without the complicity of anti-government Iranian surrogates, strikes on Iranian nuclear plants would probably result in Tehran not only reconstructing but setting their sights on developing nuclear weapons even if they’ve no plans to do so now. It’s worth mentioning that the Osirak reactor was for peaceful purposes and it was only after it was hit that Saddam Hussein actively sought a bomb.
According to the New Yorker’s veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in an article, titled “Preparing the Battlefield,” President George W. Bush has sanctioned covert operations and requested $400 million designed to destabilize Iran outside the sphere of the US military. These will largely be carried out by Iranian dissidents rather than Americans in the field, he says. But, once again, Iran is not Iraq. It’s a far more cohesive country and although not all of its citizens support the government, most identify themselves as proud Iranians who harbor a historical aversion to neoimperialist plots.
There is no doubt that Israel and the US would like the Iranian government to be wiped off the face of the earth along with its nuclear ambitions but both countries are divided on what to do. So far their joint and separate belligerency isn’t working. If their bellicose words and provocative actions are, indeed, a giant bluff they are ineffective. They are simply causing the Iranian leadership to dig its heels in further and assert its right under the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Even if this is a coordinated bluff, it could so easily reach the point of no return when to maintain strategic credibility, the players will have to make good on their threats. Certainly, one Iranian commander Brig. Gen. Mir-Faisal Baqerzadeh is taking these to heart already. According to Press TV, he has already got his troops digging more than 320,000 graves within Iran’s bordering provinces to provide any invading force with “the respect they deserve.”
SOURCE: Online Journal
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
SCOTT SHANE
NY Times
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.
Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.
But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
FULL ARTICLE @ NY Times
NY Times
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.
Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.
But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
FULL ARTICLE @ NY Times
US: Pentagon Iran remarks 'foolish'
Press TV
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The State Department brands as 'foolish' comments by a Pentagon official who had said an Israeli attack against Iran was increasingly likely.
In an interview with ABC News, the unidentified defense official had said it was increasingly likely that Israel would attack Iran over its nuclear program. The pentagon official added that such a strike would lead to retaliation against Israel and the United States.
“I have no information that would substantiate that, and I think it's rather foolish of people who often have no clue what they're talking about to assert things and not even have the courtesy to do so on the basis of their name,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said on Tuesday.
The defense official told ABC News one red line that could trigger an Israeli offensive would be when Iran's nuclear facility had produced enough enriched uranium to create an atomic weapon. That could happen in 2009 or later this year, ABC News reported, citing US and Israeli intelligence assessments.
The remarks by the Pentagon official followed last month's Israeli military maneuver in the Mediterranean, which US officials said was an apparent rehearsal for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Senior Iranian officials and high-ranking military commanders have promised that any attack on Iran would meet a very “devastating response”.
Iran has vehemently denied charges that it is seeking nuclear arms. Iran has signed the nuclear non-proliferation regime and its nuclear facilities are constantly monitored by the UN nuclear watchdog.
However, Israel is the only country in the Middle East which eludes to sign the NPT and is widely believed to have around 200 atomic warheads.
SOURCE: Press TV
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The State Department brands as 'foolish' comments by a Pentagon official who had said an Israeli attack against Iran was increasingly likely.
In an interview with ABC News, the unidentified defense official had said it was increasingly likely that Israel would attack Iran over its nuclear program. The pentagon official added that such a strike would lead to retaliation against Israel and the United States.
“I have no information that would substantiate that, and I think it's rather foolish of people who often have no clue what they're talking about to assert things and not even have the courtesy to do so on the basis of their name,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said on Tuesday.
The defense official told ABC News one red line that could trigger an Israeli offensive would be when Iran's nuclear facility had produced enough enriched uranium to create an atomic weapon. That could happen in 2009 or later this year, ABC News reported, citing US and Israeli intelligence assessments.
The remarks by the Pentagon official followed last month's Israeli military maneuver in the Mediterranean, which US officials said was an apparent rehearsal for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Senior Iranian officials and high-ranking military commanders have promised that any attack on Iran would meet a very “devastating response”.
Iran has vehemently denied charges that it is seeking nuclear arms. Iran has signed the nuclear non-proliferation regime and its nuclear facilities are constantly monitored by the UN nuclear watchdog.
However, Israel is the only country in the Middle East which eludes to sign the NPT and is widely believed to have around 200 atomic warheads.
SOURCE: Press TV
Starbucks to cut up to 12,000 jobs, close 600 stores
Lisa Baertlein
Reuters
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) said on Tuesday it plans to close 600 underperforming U.S. stores and cut up to 12,000 full- and part-time positions, as it copes with an economic downturn and increasing competition.
The coffee seller, bracing for its first full-year profit decline since 2000, has been grappling with the slowing U.S. economy and consumer spending at the same time that major competitors like McDonald's Corp (MCD.N) have begun attacking its core business.
Starbucks plans to close the company-operated stores by the end of March 2009. The related job cuts would reduce the company's U.S. workforce by about 8 percent.
The news lifted shares nearly 5 percent.
In a conference call with analysts, Chief Executive Peter Bocian said the move should improve company's domestic profitability and help it meet previously issued forecasts calling for accelerating earnings for fiscal 2009 through 2011.
In January, Starbucks brought back founder and chief executive Howard Schultz to turn around the company. Soon after, Schultz targeted 100 stores for closure -- a number that grew by 500 when firm plans were announced on Tuesday.
He has also slashed plans for store openings and shifted the company's most ambitious expansion efforts to international markets.
"At this point, management has decided that 2008 is a wash and to throw in everything but the kitchen sink to get ready for growth in 2009 and beyond," said William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia.
"It's another sign that management doesn't have their head in the sand," said Zackfia, who has an "outperform" rating on the stock.
Starbucks said the 600 stores are either unprofitable now or are not expected to meet future return thresholds. All of the targeted units are close to another company-operated store, Bocian said.
"This is validating some of the critics who said they were opening stores too close to one another," said James Walsh, an analyst at Starbucks investor Coldstream Capital Management.
Those critics complained that the company had overbuilt in the United States -- particularly in major urban areas like Manhattan, where it is not unusual to see several Starbucks in a single city block.
The Seattle-based company was also an aggressive builder in California and Florida. Those states experienced red-hot growth during the housing boom and have been hardest hit by the U.S. housing downturn.
Oppenheimer & Co analyst Matt DiFrisco said he was "very encouraged" by the company's announcement.
"It helps remove some of the cannibalization that the company brought on itself," said DiFrisco, who also has an "outperform" rating on Starbucks shares.
Starbucks said the closures are spread across all major U.S. markets and that 70 percent of the targeted stores have been open since the beginning of fiscal 2006.
Total pretax charges associated with the planned U.S. company-operated store closures, including costs associated with severance, are estimated to be in the range of $328 million to $348 million.
Starbucks also trimmed planned openings for its upcoming fiscal year ended September 2009. It now plans to open fewer than 200 new U.S. company-operated stores, down from 250 previously.
The stock rose to $16.35 in after hours trading, up 4.7 percent from its close of $15.62 on Nasdaq.
While investors cheered the announcement, analysts were quick to point out that a further worsening of the U.S. economy or steep increases in gas and food prices would put additional pressure on the company known for its premium-priced coffee drinks, such as $3 to $4 lattes.
"Consumers are not in the spending mood," said Bob Goldin, executive vice president at restaurant consulting firm Technomic.
(Additional reporting by Nichola Groom and Jennifer Martinez; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, Leslie Gevirtz)
SOURCE: Reuters
Reuters
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) said on Tuesday it plans to close 600 underperforming U.S. stores and cut up to 12,000 full- and part-time positions, as it copes with an economic downturn and increasing competition.
The coffee seller, bracing for its first full-year profit decline since 2000, has been grappling with the slowing U.S. economy and consumer spending at the same time that major competitors like McDonald's Corp (MCD.N) have begun attacking its core business.
Starbucks plans to close the company-operated stores by the end of March 2009. The related job cuts would reduce the company's U.S. workforce by about 8 percent.
The news lifted shares nearly 5 percent.
In a conference call with analysts, Chief Executive Peter Bocian said the move should improve company's domestic profitability and help it meet previously issued forecasts calling for accelerating earnings for fiscal 2009 through 2011.
In January, Starbucks brought back founder and chief executive Howard Schultz to turn around the company. Soon after, Schultz targeted 100 stores for closure -- a number that grew by 500 when firm plans were announced on Tuesday.
He has also slashed plans for store openings and shifted the company's most ambitious expansion efforts to international markets.
"At this point, management has decided that 2008 is a wash and to throw in everything but the kitchen sink to get ready for growth in 2009 and beyond," said William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia.
"It's another sign that management doesn't have their head in the sand," said Zackfia, who has an "outperform" rating on the stock.
Starbucks said the 600 stores are either unprofitable now or are not expected to meet future return thresholds. All of the targeted units are close to another company-operated store, Bocian said.
"This is validating some of the critics who said they were opening stores too close to one another," said James Walsh, an analyst at Starbucks investor Coldstream Capital Management.
Those critics complained that the company had overbuilt in the United States -- particularly in major urban areas like Manhattan, where it is not unusual to see several Starbucks in a single city block.
The Seattle-based company was also an aggressive builder in California and Florida. Those states experienced red-hot growth during the housing boom and have been hardest hit by the U.S. housing downturn.
Oppenheimer & Co analyst Matt DiFrisco said he was "very encouraged" by the company's announcement.
"It helps remove some of the cannibalization that the company brought on itself," said DiFrisco, who also has an "outperform" rating on Starbucks shares.
Starbucks said the closures are spread across all major U.S. markets and that 70 percent of the targeted stores have been open since the beginning of fiscal 2006.
Total pretax charges associated with the planned U.S. company-operated store closures, including costs associated with severance, are estimated to be in the range of $328 million to $348 million.
Starbucks also trimmed planned openings for its upcoming fiscal year ended September 2009. It now plans to open fewer than 200 new U.S. company-operated stores, down from 250 previously.
The stock rose to $16.35 in after hours trading, up 4.7 percent from its close of $15.62 on Nasdaq.
While investors cheered the announcement, analysts were quick to point out that a further worsening of the U.S. economy or steep increases in gas and food prices would put additional pressure on the company known for its premium-priced coffee drinks, such as $3 to $4 lattes.
"Consumers are not in the spending mood," said Bob Goldin, executive vice president at restaurant consulting firm Technomic.
(Additional reporting by Nichola Groom and Jennifer Martinez; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, Leslie Gevirtz)
SOURCE: Reuters
Obama: I will never question others’ patriotism
VOA News
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is defending himself against questions about his patriotism, and vows to never use the issue against his opponents.
Senator Obama said Monday during an address in Independence, Missouri that he has always had a deep and abiding love for the United States.
Obama said he will never question the patriotism of others in the campaign and will not stand idly by when others question his own.
Meanwhile, Republican candidate John McCain campaigned Monday in Pennsylvania. He responded to remarks on Sunday by an Obama supporter, retired General Wesley Clark, who questioned whether McCain’s service during the Vietnam War qualified him to be president. Senator McCain called the statement an “unnecessary” distraction from issues facing voters.
McCain said voters are more concerned about soaring gas prices, energy independence, and economic challenges in keeping their jobs and homes.
In other campaign news, Obama talked by telephone with former President Bill Clinton, whose wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, was Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. An Obama spokesman said Obama is honored to have the former president’s support.
Obama's comments on patriotism come ahead of the U.S. Independence Day holiday on July 4.
After his campaign stops in Pennsylvania, McCain will make a trip this week to Latin America as he tries to demonstrate his expertise in foreign policy. McCain will visit Colombia and Mexico to discuss the war against drug trafficking, illegal immigration, free trade, and other issues.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.
SOURCE: VOA News
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is defending himself against questions about his patriotism, and vows to never use the issue against his opponents.
Senator Obama said Monday during an address in Independence, Missouri that he has always had a deep and abiding love for the United States.
Obama said he will never question the patriotism of others in the campaign and will not stand idly by when others question his own.
Meanwhile, Republican candidate John McCain campaigned Monday in Pennsylvania. He responded to remarks on Sunday by an Obama supporter, retired General Wesley Clark, who questioned whether McCain’s service during the Vietnam War qualified him to be president. Senator McCain called the statement an “unnecessary” distraction from issues facing voters.
McCain said voters are more concerned about soaring gas prices, energy independence, and economic challenges in keeping their jobs and homes.
In other campaign news, Obama talked by telephone with former President Bill Clinton, whose wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, was Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. An Obama spokesman said Obama is honored to have the former president’s support.
Obama's comments on patriotism come ahead of the U.S. Independence Day holiday on July 4.
After his campaign stops in Pennsylvania, McCain will make a trip this week to Latin America as he tries to demonstrate his expertise in foreign policy. McCain will visit Colombia and Mexico to discuss the war against drug trafficking, illegal immigration, free trade, and other issues.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.
SOURCE: VOA News
Ex-Abu Ghraib prisoners sue US contractors, claim torture
AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Four Iraqis announced Monday in Istanbul they are suing two US firms and their employees for allegedly torturing them at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Bagdad five years ago.
Their lawsuit is against private security contractor CACI International and two of its interrogators, Daniel Johnson and Tim Dugan, and the translation agency L-3 (formerly Titan Corp) and its interpreter, Abel Nakhla, lawyer William Gould told AFP.
Their complaint was to be lodged Monday at courts in Maryland, Ohio and Washington — the US states where the alleged torturers live — as well as Michigan, where L-3 recruited most of its interpreters, said Gould in Istanbul, where he met with his clients from Iraq.
He said the court cases would show that the accused were in Abu Ghraib and involved in a conspiracy that included the torture of the plaintiffs.
Abu Ghraib prison became infamous after the publication in 2004 of photographs showing Iraqi detainees being humiliated and abused by their US guards. The scandal led to the sentencing of 11 soldiers to up to 10 years in prison.
The majority of the abuse took place at the end of 2003, when CACI and Titan employees were working in the prison, US military courts have said.
This the second set of lawsuits against CACI and L-3.
Another group of former Abu Ghraib prisoners filed complaints against the two firms last year in the states of Washington and California.
One of the current plaintiffs, Suhail Najim Abdullah Al-Shimari, 49, was taken from his Bagdad home in November 2003 and spent more than a year at Abu Ghraib, where he claims to have been subjected to electroshock and night-long cold showers in the winter.
"We think there will be people there in the United States who will want to give us back our dignity... by bringing these people to justice," he told AFP via an interpreter.
Sa'adon Ali Hameed Al-Ogaidi, 39, said he was repeatedly beaten at Abu Ghraib and tied to door handles.
"At times, it seemed they were torturing people to have fun," said the former prisoner, who claims to have witnessed guards sodomising prisoners.
Taxi driver Mohammed Abdwihed Towfek Al-Taee, 39, was taken to Abu Ghraib in 2003.
He has scars on his leg and head that he said came from beatings with an iron rod. He also said he was forced to drink litres of water while his penis was tied to prevent him from urinating.
"I wish I would be the last person to be detained and to be tortured," he said.
Abu Ghraib was closed in 2006.
SOURCE: AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Four Iraqis announced Monday in Istanbul they are suing two US firms and their employees for allegedly torturing them at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Bagdad five years ago.
Their lawsuit is against private security contractor CACI International and two of its interrogators, Daniel Johnson and Tim Dugan, and the translation agency L-3 (formerly Titan Corp) and its interpreter, Abel Nakhla, lawyer William Gould told AFP.
Their complaint was to be lodged Monday at courts in Maryland, Ohio and Washington — the US states where the alleged torturers live — as well as Michigan, where L-3 recruited most of its interpreters, said Gould in Istanbul, where he met with his clients from Iraq.
He said the court cases would show that the accused were in Abu Ghraib and involved in a conspiracy that included the torture of the plaintiffs.
Abu Ghraib prison became infamous after the publication in 2004 of photographs showing Iraqi detainees being humiliated and abused by their US guards. The scandal led to the sentencing of 11 soldiers to up to 10 years in prison.
The majority of the abuse took place at the end of 2003, when CACI and Titan employees were working in the prison, US military courts have said.
This the second set of lawsuits against CACI and L-3.
Another group of former Abu Ghraib prisoners filed complaints against the two firms last year in the states of Washington and California.
One of the current plaintiffs, Suhail Najim Abdullah Al-Shimari, 49, was taken from his Bagdad home in November 2003 and spent more than a year at Abu Ghraib, where he claims to have been subjected to electroshock and night-long cold showers in the winter.
"We think there will be people there in the United States who will want to give us back our dignity... by bringing these people to justice," he told AFP via an interpreter.
Sa'adon Ali Hameed Al-Ogaidi, 39, said he was repeatedly beaten at Abu Ghraib and tied to door handles.
"At times, it seemed they were torturing people to have fun," said the former prisoner, who claims to have witnessed guards sodomising prisoners.
Taxi driver Mohammed Abdwihed Towfek Al-Taee, 39, was taken to Abu Ghraib in 2003.
He has scars on his leg and head that he said came from beatings with an iron rod. He also said he was forced to drink litres of water while his penis was tied to prevent him from urinating.
"I wish I would be the last person to be detained and to be tortured," he said.
Abu Ghraib was closed in 2006.
SOURCE: AFP
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway
STEVEN HIGGS
Counterpunch
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The day after John McCain flew to Canada to glorify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 73-year-old Rosie Edwards repeatedly laughed about her flood-ravaged home in Martinsville, Ind.
“I’ve cried all I can cry,” the grandmother of 55 grand and great-grandchildren said on June 21 in her moldy, now-gutted home of six years. “I’ve lost everything.”
Just across State Road 37, which Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and his Democratic opponent Jill Long Thompson envision as an extension of the Interstate 69 NAFTA Highway, Bill Bergman likewise chuckled. He became a minor media star after painting “Mitch, Make Me an Offer?” on the side of his home and signed it “I-69 Backer.”
“If I don’t hear from him soon, it’s going to be ‘Ditch Mitch’ on the roof,” said Bergman, who sees I-69 as “part of progress.”
In response to the flood and declining economic conditions, long-time highway opponents argued the I-69 NAFTA Highway is now even more economically unfeasible in a state where the transportation research group TRIP says 32 percent of its “major roads are in poor or mediocre condition” and 22 percent of its bridges “are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”
On June 20, the day McCain spoke to the Economic Club of Canada, Daniels also sicced state and local police agencies on I-69 NAFTA Highway opponents in Gibson County, dislodging two from a tree-sit protest.
In response to the arrests, youthful protesters engaged in civil disobedience around Indiana that led to at least six more arrests. About 50 took over the streets of downtown Bloomington on June 21, carrying torches, banging drums and chanting anti-authoritarian incantations such as, “You can’t put our friends in jail, we will drive the final nail.”
The Martinsville flooding only amplifies the arrogance that underlies the mindset of McCain, Daniels, Long Thompson and NAFTA Highway supporters, according to Tom and Sandra Tokarski from Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads (CARR).
I-69 currently runs from the U.S.-Canada border at Port Huron, Mich., to the north side of Indianapolis. The highway lobby’s plans are to extend it from Indianapolis’s southwest side to the U.S.-Mexico border at Laredo, Texas.
Consistent with Daniels’s life’s work — from his career as a drug company executive to his role in bankrupting working-class investors at the Indianapolis Power and Light Co. (IPALCO) to his stint as George W. Bush’s budget director to his three-and-a-half years as governor — his interest in I-69 is reactionary.
“He wants the big money from the highway construction lobby,” Sandra Tokarski said. “That is the bottom line. If there weren’t big highway construction lobby money coming in to all these politicians, especially Mitch Daniels, this thing would have been dead many years ago.”
Tom Tokarski argued that an array of factors, of which the flooded highway is but one, have converged this summer to highlight the arrogance behind Indiana’s determination to build I-69.
With gasoline surpassing $4 a gallon and no prospect of coming down, citizens are driving less, which means the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) is receiving less revenue from gasoline taxes, the state’s primary source of funding for highway and bridge construction and maintenance, Tokarski said.
“We think INDOT’s funding levels are away down,” he said.
And as with fuel, food and everything else, highway construction costs are skyrocketing.
“Everybody is saying the costs are just through the roof,” he said.
But, even though the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates the cost of crude oil has jumped 68 percent from 2007-2008, Daniels, the highway lobby and Indiana media continue using five-year-old INDOT propaganda that estimated I-69 construction costs at $1.8 billion.
“It’s a miracle highway because the cost never goes up,” Sandra Tokarski said.
With the now-undeniable proof that State Road 37 — the planned I-69 corridor through Martinsville — is in a floodplain, the NAFTA Highway’s real costs have risen again, Tom Tokarski said.
To avoid becoming a “dam” that would exacerbate flooding, the highway will have to be elevated, perhaps built on pillars, he said.
“I can’t imagine what that’s going to cost,” he said.
INDOT spokesman Andy Dietrick responded that the flood will have no impact.
“An analysis of the flood plain pertaining to the I-69 corridor in the Martinsville area was conducted long before the recent flooding, as part of the Tier 1 environmental study,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Alternative. “The latest flooding validates the data gathered during that study.”
Tokarski responded that the Tier 1 study offers no guidance.
“The Tier 1 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) says that existing SR-37 will be used through Martinsville,” he said. “State Road 37 washed out during the flood. If that roadway is used, as it exists, for I-69 then INDOT will be building in a known floodplain that has already washed out once. The FEIS also says a raised urban section through Martinsville would be ‘considered.’”
The FEIS says the proposed route from SR-39 south of Martinsville to I-465 in Indianapolis may require reconstruction of existing SR-37, Tokarski said.
“This tells me that the corridor through Martinsville has not been evaluated to handle the now-known flood threat,” he said. “Bottom line: Andy Dietrich is mistaken. The plans are not fixed, and the cost is not known.”
Bergman, who said his home is situated at a planned highway intersection, pointed to his kitchen sink to illustrate how high the flood was without a highway dam.
“The spigot, it’s got mud on it,” he said. “That’s how high it was in here.”
And while Bergman doesn’t use the term “ignorance” while explaining how water got from nearby Indian Creek into his sink, he doesn’t mince words.
“I’ll just be blunt,” he said. “The city planning department and the city engineers, they’ve built a slab of concrete and pavement from the top of the hill all the way down.”
Specifically he referred to the sprawling development along SR 37 that includes Martinsville High School, Wal-Mart, two car dealerships and “all those restaurants.” With nothing to absorb the flood water, it overfilled the Sartor Ditch that parallels the roadway and flooded homes for hundreds of yards on both sides.
In response to Bergman’s highly publicized offer to sell his property to the state for I-69, INDOT issued a news release on June 17 saying, “Governor Mitch Daniels has asked the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) to begin purchasing homes along State Road 37 in Martinsville that will eventually be impacted by the construction of Interstate 69.”
INDOT said it would begin making contact with homeowners whose properties would be impacted by I-69 construction “by the end of the week.” But Jeff Hurst, whose home may be in the I-69 right-of-way, said he hadn’t heard anything.
“They’re supposed to buy 25, but we haven’t heard what 25,” he said on June 21. “Rumor has it’s just across the street.”
Dietrick said INDOT representatives were in Martinsville on June 18 to assess which flood-damaged homes would be eligible for early acquisition.
“Twenty-eight homes were identified, and coordination has begun on the optional acquisition process,” he wrote. “Inquiries from other homeowners in the Martinsville area, and throughout the I-69 corridor, are being reviewed on a case-by-case basis.”
The homes, he said, “will be appraised on pre-flood condition.”
The Tokarskis question whether INDOT will pay the homeowners what their properties are worth and see the move as little more than a cynical, public-relations ploy.
“What will INDOT offer to pay for them?” Tom Tokarski asked. “An appraisal is not the same as an offer to buy. Their appraisals tend to be low in regular situations. What will they be here?”
Sandra Tokarski said Daniels will make a few Martinsville voters happy in an election year and send a signal that the I-69 NAFTA Highway is moving forward.
“It’s a public relations coup for him, if he can pull it off,” she said.
After 18 years of high crimes and misdemeanors being perpetrated upon Indiana citizens by politicians from both political parties, someone finally went to jail over the I-69 NAFTA Highway.
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t anyone from Democrat Frank O’Bannon’s administration for brazenly ignoring the public will while giving millions of taxpayer dollars to an Evansville engineering firm that gave back 10s of thousands in campaign contributions.
Nor was it anyone from the Daniels administration for effectively giving the people’s most valuable assets — its transportation infrastructure and natural resources, for example — to multinational conglomerates and using the short-term profits to confiscate private property, destroy average citizens’ lives and further his own political career.
Nor was it any of their co-conspirators in these abuses of state power and law — the 150 men and women in the State Legislature who are beholden to the highway lobby’s interests, especially the NAFTA Highway’s. Among the most guilty: State Sen. Vi Simpson and former State Rep. turned Mayor Mark Kruzan, both Bloomington Democrats.
On June 20, two weeks to the day after Martinsville became a lake, two activists who occupied a tree-sit protest just off the highway’s path in Gibson County were arrested. At least five more protesters have been arrested in actions in the Evansville and Bloomington areas since police destroyed the tree sit.
The Evansville Courier & Press reported on June 21 that INDOT asked the police to remove the tree-sit protesters from the public land because “groundbreaking on the initial segment of I-69 (is) scheduled for mid-July.”
“Officers used a cherry picker to pluck the pair from the trees early Friday and lowered them to the ground to arrest them on trespassing charges,” the paper reported.
The “criminals” ranged in age from 20 to 25 and came to Southwest Indiana from across the country, signaling that the I-69 NAFTA Highway is a focal point for populist resistance against global corporations and their political enablers who will destroy anything, including citizen property and lives, in pursuit of wealth and power.
The tree sit, which had been manned by a variety of activists since May 19, was just south of State Road 68, where the Daniels administration has destroyed the first four of 400-plus homes and businesses that will be demolished by the I-69 NAFTA Highway.
The Roadblock Earth First! Web site described the protesters’ removal.
“One protester was not attached to a safety line during the eviction but was still hostilely handled by the Conservation Officers. As they reached her with the cherry picker, they pulled her, unattached to anything that would have prevented her tumbling to the ground, putting her life in great danger.
“After evicting the first sitter, officers moved on to the second. They raised the cherry picker below the platform to threaten the sitter and then lifted the platform with the cherry picker. They proceeded to cut the support line that was holding it in the tree. This protester had locked himself onto the ropes using a ‘lock box’ device intended to help him evade eviction. The officers cut that rope, leaving this protester also without any form of safety.”
In addition to the Bloomington march, where another protester was arrested for taking pictures of a police car, the resistance spread to Northwest Indiana, where a “solidarity” march to an INDOT district office was held in Gary.
On June 25, protesters shut down operations at the Gohmann Asphalt & Construction Co. in Princeton, also in Gibson County, after locking themselves to a truck leaving the facility.
Gohmann has contracts to work on the I-69 construction.
“Repression only breeds resistance,” the Roadblock EarthFirst! Web site says.
SOURCE: Counterpunch
Counterpunch
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The day after John McCain flew to Canada to glorify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 73-year-old Rosie Edwards repeatedly laughed about her flood-ravaged home in Martinsville, Ind.
“I’ve cried all I can cry,” the grandmother of 55 grand and great-grandchildren said on June 21 in her moldy, now-gutted home of six years. “I’ve lost everything.”
Just across State Road 37, which Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and his Democratic opponent Jill Long Thompson envision as an extension of the Interstate 69 NAFTA Highway, Bill Bergman likewise chuckled. He became a minor media star after painting “Mitch, Make Me an Offer?” on the side of his home and signed it “I-69 Backer.”
“If I don’t hear from him soon, it’s going to be ‘Ditch Mitch’ on the roof,” said Bergman, who sees I-69 as “part of progress.”
In response to the flood and declining economic conditions, long-time highway opponents argued the I-69 NAFTA Highway is now even more economically unfeasible in a state where the transportation research group TRIP says 32 percent of its “major roads are in poor or mediocre condition” and 22 percent of its bridges “are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”
On June 20, the day McCain spoke to the Economic Club of Canada, Daniels also sicced state and local police agencies on I-69 NAFTA Highway opponents in Gibson County, dislodging two from a tree-sit protest.
In response to the arrests, youthful protesters engaged in civil disobedience around Indiana that led to at least six more arrests. About 50 took over the streets of downtown Bloomington on June 21, carrying torches, banging drums and chanting anti-authoritarian incantations such as, “You can’t put our friends in jail, we will drive the final nail.”
The Martinsville flooding only amplifies the arrogance that underlies the mindset of McCain, Daniels, Long Thompson and NAFTA Highway supporters, according to Tom and Sandra Tokarski from Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads (CARR).
I-69 currently runs from the U.S.-Canada border at Port Huron, Mich., to the north side of Indianapolis. The highway lobby’s plans are to extend it from Indianapolis’s southwest side to the U.S.-Mexico border at Laredo, Texas.
Consistent with Daniels’s life’s work — from his career as a drug company executive to his role in bankrupting working-class investors at the Indianapolis Power and Light Co. (IPALCO) to his stint as George W. Bush’s budget director to his three-and-a-half years as governor — his interest in I-69 is reactionary.
“He wants the big money from the highway construction lobby,” Sandra Tokarski said. “That is the bottom line. If there weren’t big highway construction lobby money coming in to all these politicians, especially Mitch Daniels, this thing would have been dead many years ago.”
Tom Tokarski argued that an array of factors, of which the flooded highway is but one, have converged this summer to highlight the arrogance behind Indiana’s determination to build I-69.
With gasoline surpassing $4 a gallon and no prospect of coming down, citizens are driving less, which means the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) is receiving less revenue from gasoline taxes, the state’s primary source of funding for highway and bridge construction and maintenance, Tokarski said.
“We think INDOT’s funding levels are away down,” he said.
And as with fuel, food and everything else, highway construction costs are skyrocketing.
“Everybody is saying the costs are just through the roof,” he said.
But, even though the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates the cost of crude oil has jumped 68 percent from 2007-2008, Daniels, the highway lobby and Indiana media continue using five-year-old INDOT propaganda that estimated I-69 construction costs at $1.8 billion.
“It’s a miracle highway because the cost never goes up,” Sandra Tokarski said.
With the now-undeniable proof that State Road 37 — the planned I-69 corridor through Martinsville — is in a floodplain, the NAFTA Highway’s real costs have risen again, Tom Tokarski said.
To avoid becoming a “dam” that would exacerbate flooding, the highway will have to be elevated, perhaps built on pillars, he said.
“I can’t imagine what that’s going to cost,” he said.
INDOT spokesman Andy Dietrick responded that the flood will have no impact.
“An analysis of the flood plain pertaining to the I-69 corridor in the Martinsville area was conducted long before the recent flooding, as part of the Tier 1 environmental study,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Alternative. “The latest flooding validates the data gathered during that study.”
Tokarski responded that the Tier 1 study offers no guidance.
“The Tier 1 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) says that existing SR-37 will be used through Martinsville,” he said. “State Road 37 washed out during the flood. If that roadway is used, as it exists, for I-69 then INDOT will be building in a known floodplain that has already washed out once. The FEIS also says a raised urban section through Martinsville would be ‘considered.’”
The FEIS says the proposed route from SR-39 south of Martinsville to I-465 in Indianapolis may require reconstruction of existing SR-37, Tokarski said.
“This tells me that the corridor through Martinsville has not been evaluated to handle the now-known flood threat,” he said. “Bottom line: Andy Dietrich is mistaken. The plans are not fixed, and the cost is not known.”
Bergman, who said his home is situated at a planned highway intersection, pointed to his kitchen sink to illustrate how high the flood was without a highway dam.
“The spigot, it’s got mud on it,” he said. “That’s how high it was in here.”
And while Bergman doesn’t use the term “ignorance” while explaining how water got from nearby Indian Creek into his sink, he doesn’t mince words.
“I’ll just be blunt,” he said. “The city planning department and the city engineers, they’ve built a slab of concrete and pavement from the top of the hill all the way down.”
Specifically he referred to the sprawling development along SR 37 that includes Martinsville High School, Wal-Mart, two car dealerships and “all those restaurants.” With nothing to absorb the flood water, it overfilled the Sartor Ditch that parallels the roadway and flooded homes for hundreds of yards on both sides.
In response to Bergman’s highly publicized offer to sell his property to the state for I-69, INDOT issued a news release on June 17 saying, “Governor Mitch Daniels has asked the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) to begin purchasing homes along State Road 37 in Martinsville that will eventually be impacted by the construction of Interstate 69.”
INDOT said it would begin making contact with homeowners whose properties would be impacted by I-69 construction “by the end of the week.” But Jeff Hurst, whose home may be in the I-69 right-of-way, said he hadn’t heard anything.
“They’re supposed to buy 25, but we haven’t heard what 25,” he said on June 21. “Rumor has it’s just across the street.”
Dietrick said INDOT representatives were in Martinsville on June 18 to assess which flood-damaged homes would be eligible for early acquisition.
“Twenty-eight homes were identified, and coordination has begun on the optional acquisition process,” he wrote. “Inquiries from other homeowners in the Martinsville area, and throughout the I-69 corridor, are being reviewed on a case-by-case basis.”
The homes, he said, “will be appraised on pre-flood condition.”
The Tokarskis question whether INDOT will pay the homeowners what their properties are worth and see the move as little more than a cynical, public-relations ploy.
“What will INDOT offer to pay for them?” Tom Tokarski asked. “An appraisal is not the same as an offer to buy. Their appraisals tend to be low in regular situations. What will they be here?”
Sandra Tokarski said Daniels will make a few Martinsville voters happy in an election year and send a signal that the I-69 NAFTA Highway is moving forward.
“It’s a public relations coup for him, if he can pull it off,” she said.
After 18 years of high crimes and misdemeanors being perpetrated upon Indiana citizens by politicians from both political parties, someone finally went to jail over the I-69 NAFTA Highway.
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t anyone from Democrat Frank O’Bannon’s administration for brazenly ignoring the public will while giving millions of taxpayer dollars to an Evansville engineering firm that gave back 10s of thousands in campaign contributions.
Nor was it anyone from the Daniels administration for effectively giving the people’s most valuable assets — its transportation infrastructure and natural resources, for example — to multinational conglomerates and using the short-term profits to confiscate private property, destroy average citizens’ lives and further his own political career.
Nor was it any of their co-conspirators in these abuses of state power and law — the 150 men and women in the State Legislature who are beholden to the highway lobby’s interests, especially the NAFTA Highway’s. Among the most guilty: State Sen. Vi Simpson and former State Rep. turned Mayor Mark Kruzan, both Bloomington Democrats.
On June 20, two weeks to the day after Martinsville became a lake, two activists who occupied a tree-sit protest just off the highway’s path in Gibson County were arrested. At least five more protesters have been arrested in actions in the Evansville and Bloomington areas since police destroyed the tree sit.
The Evansville Courier & Press reported on June 21 that INDOT asked the police to remove the tree-sit protesters from the public land because “groundbreaking on the initial segment of I-69 (is) scheduled for mid-July.”
“Officers used a cherry picker to pluck the pair from the trees early Friday and lowered them to the ground to arrest them on trespassing charges,” the paper reported.
The “criminals” ranged in age from 20 to 25 and came to Southwest Indiana from across the country, signaling that the I-69 NAFTA Highway is a focal point for populist resistance against global corporations and their political enablers who will destroy anything, including citizen property and lives, in pursuit of wealth and power.
The tree sit, which had been manned by a variety of activists since May 19, was just south of State Road 68, where the Daniels administration has destroyed the first four of 400-plus homes and businesses that will be demolished by the I-69 NAFTA Highway.
The Roadblock Earth First! Web site described the protesters’ removal.
“One protester was not attached to a safety line during the eviction but was still hostilely handled by the Conservation Officers. As they reached her with the cherry picker, they pulled her, unattached to anything that would have prevented her tumbling to the ground, putting her life in great danger.
“After evicting the first sitter, officers moved on to the second. They raised the cherry picker below the platform to threaten the sitter and then lifted the platform with the cherry picker. They proceeded to cut the support line that was holding it in the tree. This protester had locked himself onto the ropes using a ‘lock box’ device intended to help him evade eviction. The officers cut that rope, leaving this protester also without any form of safety.”
In addition to the Bloomington march, where another protester was arrested for taking pictures of a police car, the resistance spread to Northwest Indiana, where a “solidarity” march to an INDOT district office was held in Gary.
On June 25, protesters shut down operations at the Gohmann Asphalt & Construction Co. in Princeton, also in Gibson County, after locking themselves to a truck leaving the facility.
Gohmann has contracts to work on the I-69 construction.
“Repression only breeds resistance,” the Roadblock EarthFirst! Web site says.
SOURCE: Counterpunch
Logan will install body scanners
Nicole C. Wong
Boston Globe
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Transportation Security Administration said yesterday it will beef up screening at Boston’s Logan International Airport with better X-ray machines to check carry-on bags and full-body scanners that can see through clothing to detect whether travelers are concealing objects.
The TSA plans to outfit the airport in October or November with more than one of these so-called whole-body imaging machines, which have raised privacy concerns where they have been tested. The scanners produce three-dimensional images of people’s naked bodies, but the agency says procedures have been modified to protect passenger privacy.
The technology “allows us to screen passengers for any prohibited items quickly and unobtrusively,” said George Naccara, the TSA’s federal security director for Logan. “Efficiency and effectiveness will improve with whole-body imaging.”
According to sample images shown on the TSA website, full-body scanners can display images that show details such as muscle definition. But the machines will blur passengers’ faces, which is one of the improvements the TSA has made.
“They’ve turned down the intensity a bit so some of the images under the clothes will be fuzzy,” he said. “They’ve also remotely located the person viewing the images so that person can’t associate the image with the passenger. We don’t have any capability to store or to print any of these images.”
The machines can detect nonmetallic objects hidden under clothing, such as explosives, and will replace pat downs of travelers who trigger a metal detector or are flagged as a “person of interest.”
FULL ARTICLE @ Boston Globe
Boston Globe
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Transportation Security Administration said yesterday it will beef up screening at Boston’s Logan International Airport with better X-ray machines to check carry-on bags and full-body scanners that can see through clothing to detect whether travelers are concealing objects.
The TSA plans to outfit the airport in October or November with more than one of these so-called whole-body imaging machines, which have raised privacy concerns where they have been tested. The scanners produce three-dimensional images of people’s naked bodies, but the agency says procedures have been modified to protect passenger privacy.
The technology “allows us to screen passengers for any prohibited items quickly and unobtrusively,” said George Naccara, the TSA’s federal security director for Logan. “Efficiency and effectiveness will improve with whole-body imaging.”
According to sample images shown on the TSA website, full-body scanners can display images that show details such as muscle definition. But the machines will blur passengers’ faces, which is one of the improvements the TSA has made.
“They’ve turned down the intensity a bit so some of the images under the clothes will be fuzzy,” he said. “They’ve also remotely located the person viewing the images so that person can’t associate the image with the passenger. We don’t have any capability to store or to print any of these images.”
The machines can detect nonmetallic objects hidden under clothing, such as explosives, and will replace pat downs of travelers who trigger a metal detector or are flagged as a “person of interest.”
FULL ARTICLE @ Boston Globe
Ex-Agent Says CIA Ignored Iran Facts
Joby Warrick
Washington Post
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.
The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.
The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.
The consensus view on Iran’s nuclear program shifted dramatically last December with the release of a landmark intelligence report that concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons design in 2003. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran undermined the CIA’s rationale for censoring the former officer’s lawsuit, said his attorney, Roy Krieger.
“On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,” Krieger said in an interview.
In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program, Krieger said.
The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were "thwarted by CIA employees," according to court papers. Later he was told to "remove himself from any further handling" of the informant, the documents say.
In the months after the conflict, the operative became the target of two internal investigations, one of them alleging an improper sexual relationship with a female informant, and the other alleging financial improprieties. Krieger said his client cooperated with investigators in both cases and the allegations of wrongdoing were never substantiated. Krieger contends in court documents that the investigations were a "pretext to discredit."
Krieger maintains that his client is being further punished by the agency's decision prohibiting him from fully regaining his identity. "He is not even allowed to attend court hearings about his own case," Krieger said.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on the specifics of the case but flatly rejected the allegation that the agency had suppressed reports. "It would be wrong to suggest that agency managers direct their officers to falsify the intelligence they collect or to suppress it for political reasons," he said. "That's not our policy. That's not what we're about."
SOURCE: Washington Post
Washington Post
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.
The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.
The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.
The consensus view on Iran’s nuclear program shifted dramatically last December with the release of a landmark intelligence report that concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons design in 2003. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran undermined the CIA’s rationale for censoring the former officer’s lawsuit, said his attorney, Roy Krieger.
“On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,” Krieger said in an interview.
In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program, Krieger said.
The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were "thwarted by CIA employees," according to court papers. Later he was told to "remove himself from any further handling" of the informant, the documents say.
In the months after the conflict, the operative became the target of two internal investigations, one of them alleging an improper sexual relationship with a female informant, and the other alleging financial improprieties. Krieger said his client cooperated with investigators in both cases and the allegations of wrongdoing were never substantiated. Krieger contends in court documents that the investigations were a "pretext to discredit."
Krieger maintains that his client is being further punished by the agency's decision prohibiting him from fully regaining his identity. "He is not even allowed to attend court hearings about his own case," Krieger said.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on the specifics of the case but flatly rejected the allegation that the agency had suppressed reports. "It would be wrong to suggest that agency managers direct their officers to falsify the intelligence they collect or to suppress it for political reasons," he said. "That's not our policy. That's not what we're about."
SOURCE: Washington Post
Pentagon Official Warns of Israeli Attack on Iran
JONATHAN KARL
ABC
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Senior Pentagon officials are concerned that Israel could carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the end of the year, an action that would have enormous security and economic repercussions for the United States and the rest of the world.
A senior defense official told ABC News there is an “increasing likelihood” that Israel will carry out such an attack, a move that likely would prompt Iranian retaliation against, not just Israel, but against the United States as well.
The official identified two “red lines” that could trigger an Israeli offensive. The first is tied to when Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility produces enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon. According to the latest U.S. and Israeli intelligence assessments, that is likely to happen sometime in 2009, and could happen by the end of this year.
“The red line is not when they get to that point, but before they get to that point,” the official said. “We are in the window of vulnerability.”
The second red line is connected to when Iran acquires the SA-20 air defense system it is buying from Russia. The Israelis may want to strike before that system — which would make an attack much more difficult — is put in place.
Some Pentagon officials also worry that Israel may be determined to attack before a new U.S. president, who may be less supportive, is sworn in next January.
Pentagon officials believe the massive Israeli air force exercise in early June, first reported by the New York Times, was done to prepare for a possible attack. A senior official called it "not a rehearsal, but basic, fundamental training" required to launch an operation against Iran.
"The Israeli air force has already conducted the basic exercise necessary to tell their senior leadership, 'We have the fundamentals down.' Might they need some more training and rehearsals? Yes. But have they done the fundamentals? I think that is what we saw," the official told ABC News, adding that if Israel moves closer to military action, he expects to see more exercises like the one conducted in early June.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was in Israel over the weekend for a series of meetings with senior Israeli military officials, including, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to a military spokesman, Iran's nuclear program was "a major topic" of discussion.
The widely held view among Pentagon officials is that an Israeli attack would do only temporary damage to Iran's nuclear program, and that it would cause major problems in the region and beyond, prompting a wave of attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
SOURCE: ABC
ABC
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Senior Pentagon officials are concerned that Israel could carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the end of the year, an action that would have enormous security and economic repercussions for the United States and the rest of the world.
A senior defense official told ABC News there is an “increasing likelihood” that Israel will carry out such an attack, a move that likely would prompt Iranian retaliation against, not just Israel, but against the United States as well.
The official identified two “red lines” that could trigger an Israeli offensive. The first is tied to when Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility produces enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon. According to the latest U.S. and Israeli intelligence assessments, that is likely to happen sometime in 2009, and could happen by the end of this year.
“The red line is not when they get to that point, but before they get to that point,” the official said. “We are in the window of vulnerability.”
The second red line is connected to when Iran acquires the SA-20 air defense system it is buying from Russia. The Israelis may want to strike before that system — which would make an attack much more difficult — is put in place.
Some Pentagon officials also worry that Israel may be determined to attack before a new U.S. president, who may be less supportive, is sworn in next January.
Pentagon officials believe the massive Israeli air force exercise in early June, first reported by the New York Times, was done to prepare for a possible attack. A senior official called it "not a rehearsal, but basic, fundamental training" required to launch an operation against Iran.
"The Israeli air force has already conducted the basic exercise necessary to tell their senior leadership, 'We have the fundamentals down.' Might they need some more training and rehearsals? Yes. But have they done the fundamentals? I think that is what we saw," the official told ABC News, adding that if Israel moves closer to military action, he expects to see more exercises like the one conducted in early June.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was in Israel over the weekend for a series of meetings with senior Israeli military officials, including, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to a military spokesman, Iran's nuclear program was "a major topic" of discussion.
The widely held view among Pentagon officials is that an Israeli attack would do only temporary damage to Iran's nuclear program, and that it would cause major problems in the region and beyond, prompting a wave of attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
SOURCE: ABC
White House mum on alleged coverts ops in Iran
AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The White House declined to comment Monday on a news report that US lawmakers last year approved 400 million dollars to ramp up covert operations in Iran to undermine Tehran’s leadership.
“I couldn’t comment either way,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said after The New Yorker magazine reported tat the US Congress passed US President George W. Bush’s funding request for a dramatic increase in such secret operations.
Asked about the likelihood of US military action against Tehran’s disputed nuclear program before the president leaves office in January 2009, Perino said Bush “is singularly focused on trying to solve this issue diplomatically.”
The New Yorker, which cited former military, intelligence and congressional souces, said the funding revealed a “major escalation” in clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing the Islamic republic’s religious leadership amid concerns over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
FULL ARTICLE @ AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The White House declined to comment Monday on a news report that US lawmakers last year approved 400 million dollars to ramp up covert operations in Iran to undermine Tehran’s leadership.
“I couldn’t comment either way,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said after The New Yorker magazine reported tat the US Congress passed US President George W. Bush’s funding request for a dramatic increase in such secret operations.
Asked about the likelihood of US military action against Tehran’s disputed nuclear program before the president leaves office in January 2009, Perino said Bush “is singularly focused on trying to solve this issue diplomatically.”
The New Yorker, which cited former military, intelligence and congressional souces, said the funding revealed a “major escalation” in clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing the Islamic republic’s religious leadership amid concerns over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
FULL ARTICLE @ AFP
Judges cite nonsense poem in Guantanamo case
MATT APUZZO
AP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court reviewing evidence at Guantanamo Bay compared a Bush administration legal argument to one made by a hapless, dimwitted character in a 19th century nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited the 1876 poem, “The Hunting of the Snark,” in ruling that the military improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim as an enemy combatant. The ruling was issued last week but an unclassified version of the opinion was released only Monday.
It was the first time a court has reviewed the military’s decision-making and considered whether a detainee should be held.
The court said military review panels were unable to assess much of the evidence against the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, and at times treated accusations as evidence.
Parhat is one of a group of Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, being held at Guantanamo Bay. Their case has become a diplomatic and legal headache for the U.S., which has tried to find a country willing to accept the Uighurs (pronounced WEE’-gurs) even as it defended its decision to hold them as enemy combatants.
The Justice Department concedes that Parhat never fought against the U.S. and says it has no evidence he was planning to do so. The case hinges on Parhat’s connection to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant group that demands separation from China. Parhat says he considers China, not the United States, the enemy.
FULL ARTICLE @ MATT APUZZO
AP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court reviewing evidence at Guantanamo Bay compared a Bush administration legal argument to one made by a hapless, dimwitted character in a 19th century nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited the 1876 poem, “The Hunting of the Snark,” in ruling that the military improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim as an enemy combatant. The ruling was issued last week but an unclassified version of the opinion was released only Monday.
It was the first time a court has reviewed the military’s decision-making and considered whether a detainee should be held.
The court said military review panels were unable to assess much of the evidence against the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, and at times treated accusations as evidence.
Parhat is one of a group of Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, being held at Guantanamo Bay. Their case has become a diplomatic and legal headache for the U.S., which has tried to find a country willing to accept the Uighurs (pronounced WEE’-gurs) even as it defended its decision to hold them as enemy combatants.
The Justice Department concedes that Parhat never fought against the U.S. and says it has no evidence he was planning to do so. The case hinges on Parhat’s connection to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant group that demands separation from China. Parhat says he considers China, not the United States, the enemy.
FULL ARTICLE @ MATT APUZZO
Saudi king urges consumers to get used to high oil prices
AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whose nation is the world’s number one oil exporter, called on consumer countries to get used to high prices in comments published on Tuesday.
“Consumer countries have to adapt to the prices and the mechanisms of the market,” the king said in an interview published by the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassah.
“We have nothing to do with the current sharp increase in crude prices,” he said reiterating the Saudi position that speculation, rising demand and the taxation of oil products in consumer countries were to blame.
“These countries must reduce their taxes on fuel.. if they want to contribute to easing the burden on ordinary consumers,” he said.
SOURCE: AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whose nation is the world’s number one oil exporter, called on consumer countries to get used to high prices in comments published on Tuesday.
“Consumer countries have to adapt to the prices and the mechanisms of the market,” the king said in an interview published by the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassah.
“We have nothing to do with the current sharp increase in crude prices,” he said reiterating the Saudi position that speculation, rising demand and the taxation of oil products in consumer countries were to blame.
“These countries must reduce their taxes on fuel.. if they want to contribute to easing the burden on ordinary consumers,” he said.
SOURCE: AFP
Billboard’s ‘Top 20′ lyrics under scrutiny
Onenewsnow
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Culture and Media Institute is sounding a music alarm over the explicit lyrics contained in many top 20 pop songs.
The Institute took a close look at top songs on Billboard magazine charts over a 14-week period and found that a fourth of the songs that made the Top 20 sent a message of sexual degradation, and nearly half included some form of sexual content. Out of the 50 songs examined, 13 were sexually degrading, six contained profanity, and seven referred to drugs and alcohol.
Colleen Raezler, who helped in the study, says the sexual content was so pervasive that it was borderline pornographic in nature. And she contends that the lyrics point to a “coarsening of the culture.”
“[The songs] just contained all sorts of terrible messages…,” says Raezler. “…[T]hings are much more accepted now, and artists are constantly pushing the envelope trying to be edgy, to sell records,” she reckons. “The controversy really helps sell records.”
Most of the songs examined are listened to by young children. And Raezler points out that a study published two years ago in Pediatrics magazine revealed that adolescents who listen to sexually degrading music are more likely to start intimate behavior.
SOURCE: Onenewsnow
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Culture and Media Institute is sounding a music alarm over the explicit lyrics contained in many top 20 pop songs.
The Institute took a close look at top songs on Billboard magazine charts over a 14-week period and found that a fourth of the songs that made the Top 20 sent a message of sexual degradation, and nearly half included some form of sexual content. Out of the 50 songs examined, 13 were sexually degrading, six contained profanity, and seven referred to drugs and alcohol.
Colleen Raezler, who helped in the study, says the sexual content was so pervasive that it was borderline pornographic in nature. And she contends that the lyrics point to a “coarsening of the culture.”
“[The songs] just contained all sorts of terrible messages…,” says Raezler. “…[T]hings are much more accepted now, and artists are constantly pushing the envelope trying to be edgy, to sell records,” she reckons. “The controversy really helps sell records.”
Most of the songs examined are listened to by young children. And Raezler points out that a study published two years ago in Pediatrics magazine revealed that adolescents who listen to sexually degrading music are more likely to start intimate behavior.
SOURCE: Onenewsnow
Shell Wants Refiners Exempt from EU CO2 Cap Plan
Reuters
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
MADRID - Royal Dutch Shell Plc wants oil refiners to be given CO2 emission permits for free in the next phase of the European Union’s CO2 emissions trading scheme but is happy for most other sectors to be charged.
Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer told the World Petroleum Congress that the crude refining, chemicals and paper industries should be exempt from proposals to charge businesses for emitting CO2, because they would otherwise be at a disadvantage against rivals in the US and Asia.
However, he supports the idea of other sectors being charged as a means to fight climate change.
Van der Veer was also sceptical of the EU proposal, subject to other regions making commitments on CO2 cuts, to raise its target for cutting CO2 emissions to 30 percent by 2020, from the current target of 20 percent by that date.
He said the plan risked Europe getting stuck “half-way between a daydream and a nightmare”. (Reporting by Tom Bergin; Editing by Quentin Bryar)
SOURCE: Reuters
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
MADRID - Royal Dutch Shell Plc wants oil refiners to be given CO2 emission permits for free in the next phase of the European Union’s CO2 emissions trading scheme but is happy for most other sectors to be charged.
Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer told the World Petroleum Congress that the crude refining, chemicals and paper industries should be exempt from proposals to charge businesses for emitting CO2, because they would otherwise be at a disadvantage against rivals in the US and Asia.
However, he supports the idea of other sectors being charged as a means to fight climate change.
Van der Veer was also sceptical of the EU proposal, subject to other regions making commitments on CO2 cuts, to raise its target for cutting CO2 emissions to 30 percent by 2020, from the current target of 20 percent by that date.
He said the plan risked Europe getting stuck “half-way between a daydream and a nightmare”. (Reporting by Tom Bergin; Editing by Quentin Bryar)
SOURCE: Reuters
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
The Reece Committee: Social Science as a Tool for Control
Danie Taylor
Old Thinker News
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
In 1954 the Reece Committee, chaired by Carroll B. Reece, produced its findings regarding the influence of tax-exempt foundations in the field of education. The report also briefly mentions their influence in politics, propaganda, social sciences and international affairs. The Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation and others were discussed during the Committee hearings.
The Reece Committee was smeared by the media and by John D. Rockefeller the 3rd himself as being wholly inaccurate, but historical hindsight gives us a perspective that shows what the Committee found is far closer to the truth than Rockefeller would have you believe.
A predominant theme found in the Committee’s findings is the desire of the foundations and those behind them to create a system of world governance. The use of propaganda and social engineering was identified as a means to and end to achieve this goal. In 1932, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason, stated that “The social sciences… will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control…”
FULL ARTICLE @ Old Thinker News
Old Thinker News
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
In 1954 the Reece Committee, chaired by Carroll B. Reece, produced its findings regarding the influence of tax-exempt foundations in the field of education. The report also briefly mentions their influence in politics, propaganda, social sciences and international affairs. The Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation and others were discussed during the Committee hearings.
The Reece Committee was smeared by the media and by John D. Rockefeller the 3rd himself as being wholly inaccurate, but historical hindsight gives us a perspective that shows what the Committee found is far closer to the truth than Rockefeller would have you believe.
A predominant theme found in the Committee’s findings is the desire of the foundations and those behind them to create a system of world governance. The use of propaganda and social engineering was identified as a means to and end to achieve this goal. In 1932, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason, stated that “The social sciences… will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control…”
FULL ARTICLE @ Old Thinker News
Abilene man wants to warn you about the dangers of ‘chemtrails’
Brian Bethel
Reporter News
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Darrin McBreen wants people to look up in the sky — and contemplate what might be happening up there that might be affecting us down here.
McBreen, 41, has created a popular YouTube video, featuring footage shot in Abilene, examining “chemtrails,” a term derived from the belief of some researchers that certain jet plane contrails dump chemicals on an unsuspecting populace below.
The reasons given for such alleged activity vary.
Some advocates link it to weather control experimentation, while other researchers tie in more dire effects, ranging from ill health to (at the extreme end) a program of mind control, echoing other historical examples of overt experimentation on mass human populations.
McBreen, who is an Abilene Reporter-News Internet media consultant, said the response to his roughly nine-minute video was both surprising and pleasing.
“The response has been incredible,” he said. “About 30,000 people have seen it in a week’s time. … I’ve received responses from all over the world.”
Feedback has ranged from confirmation and personal anecdote to overt snark — along the lines of “Are you wearing your tinfoil helmet?” he joked.
But his video, “Danger In the Sky — The Chemtrail Phenomenon,” has maintained a five-star rating on YouTube and garnered more than 600 comments, features interviews with figures such as Austin-based radio personality Alex Jones, speaking over footage of planes flying among familiar Abilene landmarks.
A contrail, short for condensation trail, is a line-shaped cloud sometimes produced by aircraft engine exhaust, according to a U.S. Air Force online document “Contrails Facts.” The combination of high humidity and low temperatures that often exist at aircraft cruise altitudes allows for their formation.
Such contrails are composed primarily of water, in the form of ice crystals, and “do not pose health risks to humans,” according to the Air Force site.
But advocates of chemtrail and other related theories argue that isn’t always the case, although their reasons differ — often wildly.
McBreen said chemtrails appealed to him as a video subject because he believes the concept has credibility.
“It started out with an article by Devvy Kidd,” he said. Kidd, a journalist who lives in Big Spring, is sometimes featured on the Web site of Jeff Rense, a radio talk-show host who often deals with controversial topics such as chemtrails.
“I thought that was kind of interesting that (Kidd) was from the Big Country,” he said.
According to Rense’s Web site, chemtrails “look like contrails initially but are much thicker, extend across the sky and are often laid down in varying patterns of Xs, tic-tac-toe grids, cross-hatched and parallel lines.”
Such trails, according to a Frequently Asked Questions file on Rense’s site, “expand and drop feathers and mares’ tails. In 30 minutes or less, they open into wispy formations which join together, forming a thick white veil or a ‘fake cirrus-type cloud’ that persists for hours.”
A normal contrail “is supposed to dissipate over 30 seconds to three minutes,” McBreen said.
Many researchers also report a sort of cross-hatching effect of interspersed contrails, which some take to be sky-based markers, and unusual behavior of the planes themselves, circling and looping to cover and recover an area in ways they find to be anomalous.
Like many, McBreen believes some chemtrail sightings can be tied to weather experimentation, with side effects such as spikes in elements such as “aluminum and barium in drinking water supplies and in the air,” he said.
Some who have communicated with him because of the video have agreed, even going so far as to say they can “taste the aluminum” in their mouths from chemtrails in their area, he said.
“Some of the more hard-core researchers wonder if it isn’t a type of population control, with the intent to wear down your immune system,” he said. “When I first heard that, I found that to be pretty extreme. But the United States has a long history of chemical and biological testing on its own personnel.”
McBreen mentioned a 1994 “Rockefeller Report,” often quoted on conspiracy and chemtrail Web sites, detailing alleged experiments performed on U.S. soldiers. The report, “Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans’ Health? Lessons Spanning Half a Century,” indicates it was prepared for the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in December 1994.
Among the report’s conclusions are that “for at least 50 years, (the Department of Defense) has intentionally exposed military personnel to potentially dangerous substances, often in secret.”
That said, the U.S. Air Force’s Web site describes the entire chemtrail theory as a hoax, which it claims has been investigated and refuted by established and accredited universities, scientific organizations, etc.
Specifically, the Air Force notes that a contrail can remain visible for long periods of time with its lifetime a function of temperature, humidity, winds and aircraft exhaust characteristics — and that such contrails can form many shapes as they are dispersed by horizontal and vertical wind shear. Similarly, skeptics assert the changeover from turbojet to turbofan engines results in a different appearance than what some chemtrail theorists remember contrails used to look like.
Requests for a comment from Dyess Air Force Base on Tuesday were met with referrals to the Air Force’s official position on the phenomenon.
McBreen said that while chemtrail research is thriving on the Internet, it is important for people to understand that the evidence is “not limited to photos and videos posted on the Web.”
There are military reports, government studies, U.S. patents and U.S. legislation that back up claims by researchers,” he said. “The Space Preservation Act of 2001 mentions chemtrails by name, for example.”
In the Act, which seeks to “preserve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by permanently prohibiting the basing of weapons in space by the United States,” chemtrails are described, along with lasers, plasma, electromagnetic, sonic, ultrasonic weapons, and others as “exotic weapons systems.”
Mainstream media reports are included in McBreen’s video, most notably television news reports from KSLA News in Louisiana (which McBreen said “confirms barium in Chemtrails”) and a “report from NBC News 4 in Los Angeles where residents reported getting ill from chemtrail activity,” he said.
McBreen said he would simply like to see more open debate on the topic.
“Not every contrail you see that stays up there might be a chemtrail,” he said. “But we do know that there are weather modification programs. We do know that they are cloud seeding. And we do know that they have experimented on their own people in the past.”
It isn’t the end of McBreen’s video-making. Next, he plans to tackle the topic of depleted uranium, used in munitions and considered controversial because of what some believe could be potential long-term health effects.
SOURCE: Reporter News
Reporter News
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Darrin McBreen wants people to look up in the sky — and contemplate what might be happening up there that might be affecting us down here.
McBreen, 41, has created a popular YouTube video, featuring footage shot in Abilene, examining “chemtrails,” a term derived from the belief of some researchers that certain jet plane contrails dump chemicals on an unsuspecting populace below.
The reasons given for such alleged activity vary.
Some advocates link it to weather control experimentation, while other researchers tie in more dire effects, ranging from ill health to (at the extreme end) a program of mind control, echoing other historical examples of overt experimentation on mass human populations.
McBreen, who is an Abilene Reporter-News Internet media consultant, said the response to his roughly nine-minute video was both surprising and pleasing.
“The response has been incredible,” he said. “About 30,000 people have seen it in a week’s time. … I’ve received responses from all over the world.”
Feedback has ranged from confirmation and personal anecdote to overt snark — along the lines of “Are you wearing your tinfoil helmet?” he joked.
But his video, “Danger In the Sky — The Chemtrail Phenomenon,” has maintained a five-star rating on YouTube and garnered more than 600 comments, features interviews with figures such as Austin-based radio personality Alex Jones, speaking over footage of planes flying among familiar Abilene landmarks.
A contrail, short for condensation trail, is a line-shaped cloud sometimes produced by aircraft engine exhaust, according to a U.S. Air Force online document “Contrails Facts.” The combination of high humidity and low temperatures that often exist at aircraft cruise altitudes allows for their formation.
Such contrails are composed primarily of water, in the form of ice crystals, and “do not pose health risks to humans,” according to the Air Force site.
But advocates of chemtrail and other related theories argue that isn’t always the case, although their reasons differ — often wildly.
McBreen said chemtrails appealed to him as a video subject because he believes the concept has credibility.
“It started out with an article by Devvy Kidd,” he said. Kidd, a journalist who lives in Big Spring, is sometimes featured on the Web site of Jeff Rense, a radio talk-show host who often deals with controversial topics such as chemtrails.
“I thought that was kind of interesting that (Kidd) was from the Big Country,” he said.
According to Rense’s Web site, chemtrails “look like contrails initially but are much thicker, extend across the sky and are often laid down in varying patterns of Xs, tic-tac-toe grids, cross-hatched and parallel lines.”
Such trails, according to a Frequently Asked Questions file on Rense’s site, “expand and drop feathers and mares’ tails. In 30 minutes or less, they open into wispy formations which join together, forming a thick white veil or a ‘fake cirrus-type cloud’ that persists for hours.”
A normal contrail “is supposed to dissipate over 30 seconds to three minutes,” McBreen said.
Many researchers also report a sort of cross-hatching effect of interspersed contrails, which some take to be sky-based markers, and unusual behavior of the planes themselves, circling and looping to cover and recover an area in ways they find to be anomalous.
Like many, McBreen believes some chemtrail sightings can be tied to weather experimentation, with side effects such as spikes in elements such as “aluminum and barium in drinking water supplies and in the air,” he said.
Some who have communicated with him because of the video have agreed, even going so far as to say they can “taste the aluminum” in their mouths from chemtrails in their area, he said.
“Some of the more hard-core researchers wonder if it isn’t a type of population control, with the intent to wear down your immune system,” he said. “When I first heard that, I found that to be pretty extreme. But the United States has a long history of chemical and biological testing on its own personnel.”
McBreen mentioned a 1994 “Rockefeller Report,” often quoted on conspiracy and chemtrail Web sites, detailing alleged experiments performed on U.S. soldiers. The report, “Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans’ Health? Lessons Spanning Half a Century,” indicates it was prepared for the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in December 1994.
Among the report’s conclusions are that “for at least 50 years, (the Department of Defense) has intentionally exposed military personnel to potentially dangerous substances, often in secret.”
That said, the U.S. Air Force’s Web site describes the entire chemtrail theory as a hoax, which it claims has been investigated and refuted by established and accredited universities, scientific organizations, etc.
Specifically, the Air Force notes that a contrail can remain visible for long periods of time with its lifetime a function of temperature, humidity, winds and aircraft exhaust characteristics — and that such contrails can form many shapes as they are dispersed by horizontal and vertical wind shear. Similarly, skeptics assert the changeover from turbojet to turbofan engines results in a different appearance than what some chemtrail theorists remember contrails used to look like.
Requests for a comment from Dyess Air Force Base on Tuesday were met with referrals to the Air Force’s official position on the phenomenon.
McBreen said that while chemtrail research is thriving on the Internet, it is important for people to understand that the evidence is “not limited to photos and videos posted on the Web.”
There are military reports, government studies, U.S. patents and U.S. legislation that back up claims by researchers,” he said. “The Space Preservation Act of 2001 mentions chemtrails by name, for example.”
In the Act, which seeks to “preserve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by permanently prohibiting the basing of weapons in space by the United States,” chemtrails are described, along with lasers, plasma, electromagnetic, sonic, ultrasonic weapons, and others as “exotic weapons systems.”
Mainstream media reports are included in McBreen’s video, most notably television news reports from KSLA News in Louisiana (which McBreen said “confirms barium in Chemtrails”) and a “report from NBC News 4 in Los Angeles where residents reported getting ill from chemtrail activity,” he said.
McBreen said he would simply like to see more open debate on the topic.
“Not every contrail you see that stays up there might be a chemtrail,” he said. “But we do know that there are weather modification programs. We do know that they are cloud seeding. And we do know that they have experimented on their own people in the past.”
It isn’t the end of McBreen’s video-making. Next, he plans to tackle the topic of depleted uranium, used in munitions and considered controversial because of what some believe could be potential long-term health effects.
SOURCE: Reporter News
Anger at extra police powers for Papal tour
AAP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
NEW South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione says extra police powers for World Youth Day are neccessary for security at outdoor public events.
Mr Scipione said the changes, which have drawn fire from the NSW Bar Association and civil libertarians, were merely an extension of existing powers for officers patrolling sporting facilities.
“What’s happened here is we are using venues that are not normally used for sporting or entertainment-type events,” Mr Scipione said of the July 15-20 World Youth Day events, which include the visit of the Pope.
“If we were running one of these events in a normal sporting arena, the powers that we would need onsite would already be there.
“So these are the powers to stop people taking things in … like a paint bomb, all of those sort of things that … certainly you couldn’t take to the football on Saturday.”
The changes will allow police to direct people to stop any activity which “causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event” or face a possible $5500 fine.
FULL ARTICLE @ AAP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
NEW South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione says extra police powers for World Youth Day are neccessary for security at outdoor public events.
Mr Scipione said the changes, which have drawn fire from the NSW Bar Association and civil libertarians, were merely an extension of existing powers for officers patrolling sporting facilities.
“What’s happened here is we are using venues that are not normally used for sporting or entertainment-type events,” Mr Scipione said of the July 15-20 World Youth Day events, which include the visit of the Pope.
“If we were running one of these events in a normal sporting arena, the powers that we would need onsite would already be there.
“So these are the powers to stop people taking things in … like a paint bomb, all of those sort of things that … certainly you couldn’t take to the football on Saturday.”
The changes will allow police to direct people to stop any activity which “causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event” or face a possible $5500 fine.
FULL ARTICLE @ AAP
9/11 canine hero to be cloned: California lab
AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A dog that sniffed out survivors from under the rubble of New York’s World Trade Center after the 2001 terror strikes is to be cloned, the California-based firm conducting the procedure said.
Trakr, a German shepherd who lives with his owner James Symington in Los Angeles, was picked by BioArts International as the most “clone-worthy” canine in a competition offering an owner a free chance to replicate their pet.
Symington said he and Trakr were among the first search and rescue teams to arrive at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks, and were responsible for locating the last human survivor under about 30 feet (nine meters) of debris.
Now aged 15, the dog no longer has use of his back legs due to a degenerative neurological disorder. According to BioArts, experts believe the condition may be linked to exposure to toxic smoke at the World Trade Center site.
FULL ARTICLE @ AFP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A dog that sniffed out survivors from under the rubble of New York’s World Trade Center after the 2001 terror strikes is to be cloned, the California-based firm conducting the procedure said.
Trakr, a German shepherd who lives with his owner James Symington in Los Angeles, was picked by BioArts International as the most “clone-worthy” canine in a competition offering an owner a free chance to replicate their pet.
Symington said he and Trakr were among the first search and rescue teams to arrive at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks, and were responsible for locating the last human survivor under about 30 feet (nine meters) of debris.
Now aged 15, the dog no longer has use of his back legs due to a degenerative neurological disorder. According to BioArts, experts believe the condition may be linked to exposure to toxic smoke at the World Trade Center site.
FULL ARTICLE @ AFP
Afghanistan deadlier than Iraq
Jason Straziuso
AP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan - Militants killed more U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq last month, as they did in May.
The grim milestone capped a run of headline-grabbing insurgent attacks that analysts say underscore the Taliban’s growing strength. The extremist militia in June staged a sophisticated jailbreak that freed 886 prisoners, then briefly infiltrated a strategic valley outside the city of Kandahar.
Last week, a Pentagon report forecast that the Taliban would maintain or increase its pace of attacks, which is already up 40 percent this year from 2007 in the area along the Pakistan border where U.S. troops operate.
Last month also saw the international community meet in Paris to pledge $21 billion in aid to Afghanistan, but Barnett Rubin, an expert on that country at New York University, warns that there is still no strategy to turn that commitment into success.
While the two-month casualty trend is in part due to falling violence in Iraq, it also reflects rising violence in Afghanistan.
FULL ARTICLE @ AP
AP
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan - Militants killed more U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq last month, as they did in May.
The grim milestone capped a run of headline-grabbing insurgent attacks that analysts say underscore the Taliban’s growing strength. The extremist militia in June staged a sophisticated jailbreak that freed 886 prisoners, then briefly infiltrated a strategic valley outside the city of Kandahar.
Last week, a Pentagon report forecast that the Taliban would maintain or increase its pace of attacks, which is already up 40 percent this year from 2007 in the area along the Pakistan border where U.S. troops operate.
Last month also saw the international community meet in Paris to pledge $21 billion in aid to Afghanistan, but Barnett Rubin, an expert on that country at New York University, warns that there is still no strategy to turn that commitment into success.
While the two-month casualty trend is in part due to falling violence in Iraq, it also reflects rising violence in Afghanistan.
FULL ARTICLE @ AP
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