Information Warfare's topics - tribe.net

freeallmusic privacy policy

acoustichrmny — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:55:48 GMT

www.freeallmusic.com
Free All Music Privacy Policy

Last revised: November 24, 2009

Free All Media, LLC (“us”, “we” or “our”) is the provider of www.freeallmusic.com. This Privacy Policy discloses the information collected when you visit or use our website, why it is collected, and what is done with it. This Privacy Policy reflects our current information practices. If and when there are future changes to our Privacy Policy, we will post them on this page. By registering with our website, you agree that you have read, understand and freely consent to the information collection, use and disclosure practices described in this Privacy Policy.

Overview of website. To better understand how and why we collect and disclose information about your use of the website, let's start by describing generally how the website functions. Once you register, you can select music files you wish to download. Before you can download each music file, however, you must view a brief advertisement from one of our advertisers or sponsors. If you agree to share information about your music file download with others, we may (but do not always) create an advertisement or other announcement which identifies (i) the music file you downloaded (i.e., song title), (ii) your screen name, and (iii) the entity, product or service who sponsored your download. This advertisement or announcement will be distributed on the Internet and seen by others. In addition, you may use the website to notify friends about the music files you have downloaded.

1. Registration Information. We collect the following information from you when you register with this website: name, e-mail address, gender, birth date and your ZIP code. These are used by us to create a user profile for you on our website, complete transactions between you and the website, administer individual accounts, provide customer support (including e-mails regarding our website, unless you choose to opt out of certain of those e-mails), conduct internal analysis and administration regarding the usage of our website and to meet government regulatory requirements. We may disclose this information to our third party service providers who directly help us perform these functions and make the website available to you, or as otherwise set forth in this Privacy Policy.

1A. Name and Email Addresses. Generally, we do not share your name or your e-mail address without your consent. We may use your e-mail address to contact you to market our goods and services or to provide updates with respect to this website. In addition, certain providers of the content we distribute on our website or sponsors of advertising seen on our site may wish to contact you via e-mail and market their goods or services. Unless and until you opt-in to having your e-mail address disclosed to these third parties, your email address will not be given to sponsors or content providers (such as music distributors.) You can opt-out of receiving e-mail from us to market our goods and services, or make changes to your email address and preferences by accessing your account profile on the website.

Our website includes a feature that allows you to notify a friend that you downloaded a music file from our website. You do this by entering your friend's e-mail address, which we will use only for purpose of sending the specific notification you requested. So that your friend will recognize you as the sender of the notification, the notification may include your name, user name (“screen name”) and e-mail address. By using this notification feature, you consent to us disclosing this information to the person you choose to send the notification to.

1B. Gender, Birth Date and ZIP Code. We do not share your gender, birth date and ZIP code with third parties in such a way that you can be identified or contacted - in other words, we do not include your name or e-mail address when disclosing your gender, birth date or ZIP code. We may share your gender, birth date and/or ZIP code with third parties for purposes of providing anonymous geographic or demographic information about the users of our website.

2. Screen Names. During registration, you get to pick a screen name under which to access our website. We recommend that you do not include any portion of your real name or other personally-identifiable information about you in your screen name. Generally, we do not share your screen name with anyone without your consent. However, as noted above, if you agree to share information about the music files you download using the FAM Share Icon (star logo) next to the Twitter and Facebook share icons on the download page, you consent to us disclosing your screen name (but not your real name or other personally-identifiable information about you) as part of the advertisements we may create about your music file download. Again, we recommend that you do not include any portion of your real name or other personally-identifiable information about you in your screen name. However, if you choose to include some or all of your real name or other personally-identifiable information about you in your screen name, then you also consent to us sharing that information as part of your screen name when you agree to let us share your screen name.

3. Information We Automatically Collect. Certain information may be automatically collected by our computer systems or those of our service providers when you access or use our website, such as the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; computer and connection information (such as browser type and version, operating system, and platform); state and country from which you accessed the site; the date and time of your visit and the web page from which you linked to our site; and the name of your Internet service provider. At times, we or our service providers may use tools to measure and collect information regarding use of the website, including page response times, errors, length of visits to certain pages, information on interaction with the website (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used to browse to, or away from, the website. One specific tool we or our third party service providers, advertisers or our sponsors may use is sometimes called a “web beacon”, which is a 1x1 clear pixel tracking image which is embedded in certain content by our content providers. This tool tracks how certain content on our website is accessed or to deliver a cookie to the browser of a visitor viewing that page, and the resulting data allows our content providers to gauge the usage of the content they provide. Web beacons may be used to count the users who visit a web page.

4. Cookies. To enhance your online experience, we use “cookies” or similar technologies. “Cookies” are text files that we or third parties transfer to your computer's hard drive through your web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser when you visit the website and to provide certain functionalities. You may not be able to access or use certain features of the website (including downloading music files) if you choose to not accept cookies. Cookies themselves generally do not contain personally-identifiable information; however, once you choose to furnish a site with personally-identifiable information, that information may be linked to the data stored in the cookie. We use cookies to understand site and Internet usage, to remember your preferences, and to improve or customize the content, offerings or advertisements on our website. We also may use cookies to help us offer you products, programs, or services that may be of interest to you and to deliver relevant advertising.

Most web browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether; you should consult the “Help” menu on your browser. However, as mentioned above, you may not be able to access or use certain features of the website (including to download music files) if you choose to not accept cookies.

5. Disclosure of Certain Information to, and Collection of Information by, Third Parties; Advertising Based On Information About Your Online Activities. From time to time we may share the cookies and other non-personally-identifiable information we create or collect regarding your use of the website (but not your real name, screen name or e-mail address) with third parties (such as third party websites, advertising servers or our service providers, advertisers and sponsors) for purposes of providing us with services or to allow such third parties to offer you products, programs, or services that may be of interest to you and to deliver relevant advertising or content when you visit our website or other websites, based on information about your online activities.

Our third party service providers, advertisers or our sponsors also may use cookies and web beacons to collect information when you visit our website to manage and measure the performance of advertisements displayed on or delivered by or through the website and/or other networks or sites, or to provide more relevant content and advertising when you visit other websites, based on information about your online activities. The information privacy and security practices of these third parties may be different than ours, so you should consult their privacy notices to determine how they may use the information collected from you by them.

You may opt-out of allowing us to collect or share information about your online activities for the purpose of us or third parties providing more relevant content and advertising to you based on information about your online activities. However, you may not be able to access or use certain features of the website (including the ability to download music files) if you choose to opt-out of allowing us to collect or share information for this purpose.

6. External Links. Similarly, the website may contain links to other sites or content provided by third parties. If you decide to follow those links, different privacy policies may apply, and we are not responsible for the privacy policies of those sites. You should contact the provider of the particular site or content with any questions about their privacy policies.

7. Watermarks in Music Files. To protect copyright owners' rights in the music files we allow you to download, each music file you download may contain an embedded “watermark”, which is a unique digital identifier. This watermark is invisible to you, does not limit your ability to use the downloaded music files, and does not contain personally-identifiable information; however, the watermark may be linked to your personally-identifiable information in our systems to allow us to investigate or report unauthorized copies of the music file, and you agree that we may share this information with third parties in the course of such investigation or report.

8. Data Security and Integrity. We take your security seriously and take reasonable steps to protect your information. No data transmissions over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, though. Consequently, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us and you do so at your own risk. We take reasonable, appropriate steps to protect against unauthorized access to and disclosure of personal information. Once we receive your transmission, we make reasonable efforts to ensure security on our systems. However, we cannot guarantee that such information may not be accessed, disclosed, altered or destroyed by breach of any firewalls or secure server software we may employ. Our employees who handle confidential or proprietary information belonging to us or our customers must treat it accordingly and may not disclose it to unauthorized third parties.

We review our data collection, storage and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services or as otherwise permitted under this Policy. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate, complete, and current, but we depend on our users to update or correct their personal information whenever necessary.

9. Use and Disclosure to Comply with Law or Protect Legal Rights. We are committed to complying with law and so we reserve the right to disclose information we collect for purposes of complying with any applicable law, rule, regulation, subpoena or lawful request of law enforcement or other regulatory authority. We may also disclose information if appropriate to protect our website or our legal rights or the legal rights of others, including our third party service providers, content providers, advertisers or sponsors.

10. How You can Access or Correct Information or Request Further Details. Access to personally-identifiable information that is collected from our sites may be accessible for a limited period of time from the point of collection. For example, if you created a password-protected account on our website, you can access that account through Member Details to review the information you provided.

You may also send an e-mail or letter to the following e-mail or street address requesting access to or correction of your personally-identifiable information or deletion of such data if it is not otherwise required to be retained by law or for legitimate business purposes. For verification purposes, please include your first name, last name, e-mail address and the password you use for the website.

Privacy Officer Free All Media, LLC 888 3rd St. Suite A Atlanta, GA 30318

privacy@freeallmedia.com

California law permits residents who have provided personally-identifiable information to us to request information about our disclosure of personally-identifiable information to third parties for their marketing purposes. If you are a California resident and wish to make such a request, please contact us at the addresses above.

11. Changes to this Privacy Policy. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically to stay informed about our information collection and use practices and how we are helping protect the personal information we collect. We reserve the right, from time to time, to update this Privacy Policy. We will notify you of significant changes to this Privacy Policy through the e-mail address associated with your account. Your continued use of our service constitutes your continued agreement to this Privacy Policy and any updates.

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

privacy

Eva — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:37:12 GMT

Hello, Im not sure how relevant this is, but I've heard about trackMeNot software, which is supposed to help protect your privacy online. NO clue here on how it actually works. Do you feel like it is something worth checking out at all or a bunch of nonsense? Anyone?

posted in Information Warfare - 5 replies

inhumane customs

Ommanipadmehum — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:56:37 GMT

just wondering about the searches conducted in airports etc.. why are these invasive procedures in place when there is plenty of technology available to do scans and such from a respectable distance?

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

Critical Thinking

turtle — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:38:24 GMT

Suppose you were a participant in an information war. Would it be wise, then, to join this tribe? I think not. I imagine that any useful or safe information would be better disguised than this.THen again, it might be an example of the "hide in plain sight" method...

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Ukraine Flu links

dakat — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:09:17 GMT

http://vactruth.com/

http://digg.com/search?s=ukraine+flu&sort=newest

http://thebirdflupandemic.com/

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread493785/pg1

http://projectcamelot.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OYVws9uJbk http://www.recombinomics.com/

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Have you heard of this?

Zen — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:58:58 GMT

They have explosive (or at least self destructing) e-mails. Made me think of you. Has anyone else checked out Peoplestring? http://www.peoplestring.com/?u=pono

It's free to sign up and offers all kinds of features that I (and probably most of us) use anyway. It seems to be a new startup social network / e mail service and a few other things that pays a percentage of the ad revenues to it's users. I did some searching for someone complaining about it, but I can't find any. Does anyone have any experience with it? Positive or negative.

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

privacy on internet connection sharing ?

bolade gbadamosi — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:21:22 GMT

hello, does anyone know if the people with whom i share my internet connection can see or spy my internet activities?, i know that they tell if i am online or not, but not if they can actually see what sites i visit . thanks

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Hmmm?

dakat — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:33:12 GMT

http://serpo.org/intro.php

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Legalize Hemp and Cannabis in California

Fully — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:44:49 GMT

Hi Family,

Right now there are two competing signature drives to put Cannabis legalization initiatives on the ballot in California in

November 2010.

One is found at www.taxcannabis2010.org

The other is found at www.CaliforniaCannabisInitiative.org

Please look carefully at the text of both laws (the text of each is finalized) and make up your own mind which one you support.

I am supporting www.CaliforniaCannabisInitiative.org because our law will protect Cannabis users from discrimination in

healthcare, employment, and housing. It is a full legalization measure for industrial hemp and recreational cannabis which will restore full human rights to Hemp farmers and Cannabis users all across California. Of course supplying Cannabis to children will remain illegal just as it is today. Driving vehicles under the influence will remain illegal just as it is today. Cannabis users will still be fired from their jobs if they show up to work impaired.

There are two parts to our plan. The first part is to publicly post and personally distribute our "Freedom Lover's Call to Arms" in order to recruit volunteers. This document is available here-

www.imgur.com/dbU83

The second part of our plan is to ask everyone who volunteers to make a pledge for how many signatures they can collect in

the next 30 days or so. 15-30 signatures is a good number. If enough volunteers show this level of commitment we can succeed. You can probably get that number from your family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors without having to solicit in public too much. This is an "out of the closet" movement. We will have to proudly advocate human rights for responsible, honest, hard-working Cannabis smokers in order to convince legitimate people to support us. I can supply stickers equivalent to each persons pledge number. These stickers can be used to generate interest and be given to voters who sign the petition. Here is the sticker design-

www.imgur.com/2cjvb

Feel free to distribute and use these images. Just don't copyright them.

We have 145 days in order to get the number of signatures that we need. Our petition is hot off the press on 9/11 and we

have started collecting the first signatures yesterday 9/12.

We are polling 56% public support for Cannabis legalization in California which menas that this is an initiative which is not doomed. Its time has finally arrived; we are at the tipping point right now. Now is the time to do this and to do it right. We may only get one chance. If a law which is not exactly what we want is implemented then we may lose our critical mass and our ability to set it right.

I believe that less adults will smoke cannabis after it is legal. This is the case in the Netherlands where it has been

available over-the-counter for 30 years yet only half as many citizens (percentage-wise) smoke as do citizens here. My economics professor has taught for years that prohibition has not succeeded in decreasing usage by increasing penalties. Instead it has destroyed lives and families without substantial benefit to society. After legalization hard-drug usage will decrease due to a "separation of the markets," a decline in the price of Cannabis relative to hard-drugs, and the restoration of honesty and common sense in drug education. Violence, thievery, and the incarceration of honest people will decrease as well. I also believe that a well regulated market will decrease the availability and appeal of cannabis to children. In fact teenage Cannabis use in California has fallen steadily since the passage of Proposition 215. Furthermore the adults who smoke Cannabis after legalization will be better able appreciate the majesty of nature in peace and unity without learning to fear and disrespect authority figures. This will be better for their spirits and better for society. Finally the human rights of legitimate medical Cannabis patients will be better protected than they are today. Legalizing Cannabis will create a safer, healthier, and more humane California for us all to live in.

If you want to help me in any way please contact the CCI campaign at www.CaliforniaCannabisInitiative.org or write me at
deep_space_underground@yahoo.com I give you my encouragement to modify this message if necessary and distribute it to anyone who might help on any forum or by any mechanism.

Love,
-Fully Committed

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Transfiguration

Lalala — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:56:37 GMT

I am new here but I'm going to jump right in and ask for opinions on other mind control. This may seem way, way out there but I can't help that as I'm particularly interested to hear from anyone who has experience of transfiguration as produced by technological mind control weapons. By transfiguration I mean changing physical features as a result of psycho-electro attack.

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Chronic Illnesses and Toxic Chemicals Database + Reality of Tacit Conspiracies

ToxicReverend — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:10:08 GMT

Database lists illnesses with toxic chemicals
that can cause them is now linked in at my
profile with a review and comments at :>
http://people.tribe.net/toxicreverend
Or just Google;
"Toxic Reverend"
I have other profiles and blogs, all of which
have the same red and white skull and cross bones.
With the exception of the "Straightedge" profile :>

Note the blog titled;
"Osho : The "Love Guru" and Non-lethal Biological Weapons"
posted at
Straightedge - Mister Kinkster
http://www.myspace.com/misterkinkster

..................................

In "other news":

Realities and tacit conspiracies of today's health care and political system
http://toxicreverend.blogspot.com/2009/06/realities-and-tacit-conspiracies-of.html

This posting could still use some editing.
Feel free to use it as you see fit.
My macular degeneration is forcing me to stop working
on this for now. But I feel the information is too
important not to send out. Please feel free to forward
to journalists that can make use of it, with or with out
credit to myself.

Blessings,

The Toxic Reverend

......................................................................

Realities and tacit conspiracies of today's health care and political system
Sunday, June 7, 2009
http://toxicreverend.blogspot.com/2009/06/realities-and-tacit-conspiracies-of.html

Reference material is linked into the blog, but is not linked into this posting - TR

Excerpts from the above blog:>

Medical bills play a role in 62% of bankruptcies, study says
By Lisa Girion, June 4, 2009 Los Angeles Times

Quotes from the LA Times Nespaper article:
The study found that medical bills, plus related problems
such as lost wages for the ill and their caregivers,
contributed to 62% of all bankruptcies filed in 2007.

Medical insurance isn't much help, either. About 78% of
bankruptcy filers burdened by healthcare expenses were
insured, according to the survey, to be published in the
August issue of the American Journal of Medicine.

End of quotes from the LA Times newspaper.

The article appears to have been moved to their archives.
A copy is posted at: Physicians for a National Health Program,
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/june/medical_bills_play_a.php

The article can also be found with the Google search terms;
"Medical bills play a role in 62% of bankruptcies, study says By Lisa Girion, June 4, 2009 Los Angeles Times"

The entire study can be downloaded from:

Physicians for a National Health Program,
http://pnhp.org/
at
http://pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/

.........

“As an Environmental Technologist, I can not imagine
a health care system that could be viable, when it
ignores the common toxic chemical exposures” -
The Toxic Reverend

The realities and tacit conspiracies of today's health care and political system
By The Toxic Reverend
(No copyright claimed. Edit, post, forward and reproduce at will)

..............................
.........

Please consider this information with the following moral:

Tacit Conspiracy Of Complicity - Simplified:

While walking to work each day, I had to cross a stream. I tossed a

rock in to step on and help myself cross each day, on the way to and from work.

Others saw this and did the same. We never discussed it or talked about it.

It was a tacit conspiracy of complicity.

Most of us never imagined that we would create a damn that would flood our

community and kill so many people.

But the few that did realize the impending disaster, set about preparing to

profit off of the coming tragedy, rather than attempt to prevent it. And what

is even worse, are the "measures" they took to keep the information

concealed so the disaster could not be avoided and they could

"make a killing", in profits.

End of quoted moral from a work in progress titled-
Toxic Revelations
..........................................................................

Leading medical providers like the Cleveland
Clinic and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are
establishing special programs to give platinum
service to the well-heeled. Depending on the
program, the super-rich customers may receive
massages and sauna time along with their
physical, house calls, and step-to-the- front-
of-the-line service in testing facilities (158).

While Linda Peeno MD (featured in the movie
"Sicko") gave sworn testimony to the House of
Representatives on the subject of "Denial of
Health Care Services" to insured American's
(20a).

A Congressional Report states that of the
1,400 chemicals known to cause cancer,
less than 6% are tracked (145B).

The huge transnational companies that
produce toxic chemicals found in
pesticides, herbicides and industrial and
household products profit not only from
the sale of these products, but also from
the symptoms and chronic illnesses that
they can trigger (157).
________

157 :POISON FOR PROFIT
CHEM/PHARM HAS NO EQUAL - WHAT A
BUSINESS PLAN!
By Ashley Simmons Hotz May 15, 2002

This report has been censored from the
Internet and removed from the
Archives Wayback Machine. But a
number of advocates have been
re-posting the report and copies can be
found with a simple Google search on
the title and author:>
"POISON FOR PROFIT Ashley Simmons Hotz"

________ ........................

Even more disturbing is what is termed "the revolving door" from
these companies and their executives into many of the high ranking
administration offices of our government, in Washington DC. From
the National Institute of Health to the Food and Drug Administration
and beyond.

"The revolving door" is easily shown with an Internet www.google.com

search term, "revolving door washington DC drugs chemical companies".

In short, "Justice has been sold" (101) and millions of dollars put

into "fixing the sale" ( 49). The Los Angeles Times reported that,

"Drug Companies, HMO's Spend Big To Stop New Laws". They

donated hundreds of millions of dollars to political election

campaigns (49, 159 ).

To quote Senator Amy Klobuchar;

The debate on health care in Washington has been dominated by

the drug companies and the insurance companies for way too long.

When our health care policies are written for the insurance companies

and the drug companies instead of America's families, we get things

like Medicare Part D. Medicare Part D gave the prescription drug

companies something like $90 billion a year in Christmas presents

by banning the federal government from negotiating drug prices.

End of quote from Senator Amy Klobuchar

Drug companies are apparently buying out "grass root

organizations like NAMI (68). While they do the

"Poison for Profit" ( 157).

Use this Google search terms to find copies

"POISON FOR PROFIT Ashley Simmons Hotz"
.............................

To simplify the complexity of the
controversy, I will give this example. Bill
Moyers of the Public Broadcasting System
did a show named Trade Secrets and has
created a web page of the same name
(26). There is to much documentation
there to list, in regard to "industry"
covering up the damage to OUR HEALTH
from toxic chemicals, for over fifty years
(26).

Bill Moyers was tested for over 800 toxic
chemicals and over 80 chemicals (at
various levels of exposure) were found, in
him. That presents the potential for more
viable chemicals reaction variations than
the pick six lottery in one patient from the
perspective of Low Dose Cumulative
Effects of Toxic Chemical's ! But
regardless of this, many of the "tolerable
levels of exposure" to a (singular) toxic
chemical have been fraudulently produced
for decades (81).

Current events on this topic of "The Toxic Lotto" that
revolves around the "Toxic Soup" that all of us live in
are at my MySpace profile with links to the
California Biomonitoring Program
and the
"Cumulative Impacts".

Just as toxic chemicals can multiply in their toxicity
when mixed, so can infectious agents increase in their
pathogenic impact. And the the two (toxic chemicals
and infectious agents) usually work in a synergistic
manner.

It is suspected that
Camp Mandalay of the Bohemian Grove
might very well have "inside knowledge" that
other members of the Bohemian Grove are not
aware of.

Many camps in the Bohemian Grove contain very
prestigious visitors. You have camps like Cave Man,
Hideaway, Hill Billies, Hillside, Isle of Aves, Lost
Angels, Mandalay, Midway, Owl's Nest,
Sempervirens, Silverado Squatters, and Stowaway.
Mandalay seems to be the camp for international
relations and consists of many members officially or
otherwise connected to the intelligence agencies.
Mandalay is the only camp you cannot just walk into
and before you are allowed on the compound
someone will ask you who you have an appointment
with. If you're cleared for access, you are taken up the
hill with a Bechtel-designed electric pulley. Many
members of camps like Hill Billies or Stowaway
(Rockefellers and Morgans) have been to Mandalay at
one time or another.

It is believed that camp Mandalay was central to
the "Manhattan Project" (the nuclear bomb),
"Project Paper Clip" (that gave Nazi scientists
new identities and continued their research on
American's) and a host of other well document
experiments on hundreds of American cities.

I am all for telling the other members of the
Bohemian Grove what camp Mandalay has been
up to with the Non-Lethal Biological
Weapons known as Incapacitating Agents,
playing a part in Chronic Illnesses and cancers.
A video titled,
"Biological Weapons Experiments On The American People"
explains it rather well.

Copy / paste of a posting at
"Sex for the sake of sex" #83 (permalink)

When it comes to the effects of toxic chemicals on our gonads
and or our sex drive, there appears to be a cover up and
a conspiracy. Unfortunately, it is much worse than that. After
careful investigation, it seems to me that the circumstance are
due more to incompetence and greed.

This membership list of the Bohemian Grove does list
some of the deceased and their causes of death. Such as
John Du Pont (now deceased) of whom was diagnosed as
"insane". He was heir to the Du Pont chemical empire.
Ralph Bailey was a member of Camp Mandalay and Vice-Chairman
of Du Pont Chemical Company. John Du Pont (heir to the Du Pont
fortune) was a member of the "Isle of Aves" Camp.
John Du Pont was not a member of the Mandalay Camp.

I'll get back to that angle, after I clarify a few points....... Maybe
you could ask Mary Moore and Peter Phillips what they think about this ?

The elite of our society (The Bohemian Grove
crowd) can get caught up and effected by this "Toxic Lotto", too.
Only they have the money (cash) or a different type of health
insurance, that enables them to get properly evaluated at
clinics like the
Environmental Health Center-Dallas

I'll clarify a key point. A peer reviewed medical
journal has shown that the majority of mental
illness is due to toxic chemical exposures
and is not as genetic as they had thought.

________________________________________
In reference:
Article titled;
Environmental Connections: A Deeper Look into Mental Illness
Journal: Environmental Health Perspectives
Volume 115, Number 8, August 2007
http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2007/115-8/focus-abs.html
Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP ) is a a monthly journal
of peer- reviewed research and news on the impact of the
environment on human health.

End of copy / paste excerpts of posting from;
"Sex for the sake of sex" #83 (permalink)

____________________

Also note the excerpt from :>

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/10504
Nazi T4 Genocide Model Openly Touted By Obama Administration Officials

June 3, 2009 (LPAC)—When Adolf Hitler set up his T4 program, dedicated to eliminating "useless eaters" from Germany's hospitals and nursing homes, he turned to a "non-political" body of medical experts to make the decisions as to who should live, and who should die. It is becoming increasingly obvious that this same model is being adopted by the Obama Administration, in its zeal to ram through its genocidal health care "reform."
End of excerpt from:>
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/10504

____________________

The rough draft of "Toxic Revelations"
has been re-posted at
http://www.puppstheories.com/tr.html

---- End of additional information message -----

--
...-- End Of Forwarded Message -----

End of excerpts from:

Realities and tacit conspiracies of today's health care and political system
Sunday, June 7, 2009
http://toxicreverend.blogspot.com/2009/06/realities-and-tacit-conspiracies-of.html

_________________________________________________

Database lists illnesses with toxic chemicals
that can cause them is now linked in at my
profile with a review and comments at :>
http://people.tribe.net/toxicreverend
Or just Google;
"Toxic Reverend"
I have other profiles and blogs, all of which
have the same red and white skull and cross bones.

Note:

Sunday, March 23, 2008
Easter Sermon 08:
Red Collar Criminals Playing American Roulette With Our Lives
http://toxicreverend.blogspot.com/2008/03/easter-sermon-08-achilleas-heel-of.html

Blessings,

The Toxic Reverend
http://people.tribe.net/toxicreverend
aka
Tom Krohmer
Environmental Technologist
http://toxicreverend.blogspot.com/
aka
The Toxic Reverend
http://www.myspace.com/toxicreverend
aka
Justice Is Homeless
http://www.myspace.com/justiceishomeless
aka
Straightedge - Mister Kinkster
http://www.myspace.com/misterkinkster

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Phoenix OWASP July/August Meetings

obnosis — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:40:47 GMT

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Phoenix

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists

dakat — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:45:36 GMT

June 24, 2009

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.

Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least through 2006.

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself.

Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader.

And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants’ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda.

Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case.

The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.

Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

“In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks,” Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. “It’s an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger,” Mr. Kellogg said of the victims’ families. “They want to find those responsible, but I think they’ve been disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people.”

The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal.

The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed.

“Cases like this put the U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims,” said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to finance terrorism.

Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity.

And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims’ families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public.

But she said she had not heard from the White House since then.

The other evidence that may not be admissible consists of classified documents leaked to one of the law firms representing the families, Motley Rice of South Carolina, which is headed by Ronald Motley, a well-known trial lawyer who won lucrative lawsuits involving asbestos and tobacco.

Lawyers for the firm say someone anonymously slipped them 55 documents that contained classified government material relating to the Saudi lawsuit.

Though she declined to describe the records, Jodi Flowers, a lawyer for Motley Rice, said she was pushing to have them placed in the court file.

“We wouldn’t be fighting this hard, and we wouldn’t have turned the material over to the judge, if we didn’t think it was really important to the case,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/middleeast/24saudi.html?_r=1

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Iran phone monitoring a 'standard architecture'

dakat — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:24:47 GMT

From the BBC, reporting on phone monitoring in Iran:

"Nokia Siemens Network has confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls.

"It told the BBC that it sold a product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran Telecom in the second half of 2008.

"Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish and German companies, supplied the system to Iran through its Intelligent Solutions business, which was sold in March 2009 to Perusa Partners Fund 1LP, a German investment firm.

"The product allows authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and Web traffic.

"But Nokia Siemens says the product is only being used, in Iran, for the monitoring of local telephone calls on fixed and mobile lines.

"Rather than just block traffic, it is understood that the monitoring system can also interrogate data to see what information is being passed back and forth.

"A spokesman described the system as 'a standard architecture that the world's governments use for lawful intercept.' "

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Looking Back: Dancing plagues and mass hysteria

dakat — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:39:02 GMT

John Waller on how distress and pious fear have led to bizarre outbreaks across the ages

The year was 1374. In dozens of medieval towns scattered along the valley of the River Rhine hundreds of people were seized by an agonising compulsion to dance. Scarcely pausing to rest or eat, they danced for hours or even days in succession. They were victims of one of the strangest afflictions in Western history. Within weeks the mania had engulfed large areas of north-eastern France and the Netherlands, and only after several months did the epidemic subside. In the following century there were only a few isolated outbreaks of compulsive dancing. Then it reappeared, explosively, in the city of Strasbourg in 1518. Chronicles indicate that it then consumed about 400 men, women and children, causing dozens of deaths (Waller, 2008).

Not long before the Strasbourg dancing epidemic, an equally strange compulsion had gripped a nunnery in the Spanish Netherlands. In 1491 several nuns were ‘possessed’ by devilish familiars which impelled them to race around like dogs, jump out of trees in imitation of birds or miaow and claw their way up tree trunks in the manner of cats. Such possession epidemics were by no means confined to nunneries, but nuns were disproportionately affected (Newman, 1998). Over the next 200 years, in nunneries everywhere from Rome to Paris, hundreds were plunged into states of frantic delirium during which they foamed, screamed and convulsed, sexually propositioned exorcists and priests, and confessed to having carnal relations with devils or Christ.

These events may sound wildly improbable, but there is clear documentary evidence that they did in fact happen. The dancing plagues were independently described by scores of physicians, chroniclers, monks and priests, and for the 1518 outbreak we can even read the panicky municipal orders written by the Strasbourg authorities at the time of the epidemic (Midelfort, 1999; Waller, 2008). Similarly, trial documents and the archives of the inquisition provide copious, in-depth accounts of nuns doing and saying the strangest of things (Sluhovsky, 2002).

Writers then and now have offered various interpretations of these strange and sometimes deadly crises. It has been suggested that the dancing maniacs of 1374 and 1518 were members of a heretical dancing cult. Contemporary observers, however, made clear their view that the dancing was a sickness. Nor did the Church, at a time when heresies were quickly suppressed, believe the dancers to be anything but victims of a terrible affliction, natural or divine. In recent decades a vogue for simple biological explanations has inspired the view that epidemic madnesses of the past were caused by the ingestion of ergot, a mould containing psychotropic chemicals (Backman, 1952; Matossian, 1989).

But scholarship in the fields of psychology, history and anthropology provides compelling evidence that the dancing plagues and the possession epidemics of Europe’s nunneries were in fact classic instances of a very different phenomenon: mass psychogenic illness.

Altered states
An important clue to the cause of these bizarre outbreaks lies in the fact that they appear to have involved dissociative trance, a condition involving (among other things) a dramatic loss of self-control. It is hard to imagine people dancing for several days, with bruised and bloodied feet, except in an altered state of consciousness. But we also have eyewitness evidence that they were not fully conscious. Onlookers spoke of the dancing maniacs of 1374 as wild, frenzied and seeing visions. One noted that while ‘they danced their minds were no longer clear’ and another spoke of how, having wearied themselves through dancing and jumping, they went ‘raging like beasts over the land’ (Backman, 1952). The hundreds of possessed nuns described in chronicles, legal records, theological texts or the archives of the Catholic Inquisition were equally subject to dissociative trance (Newman, 1998; Rosen, 1968). Some may have simulated the behaviour of the demoniac as a means of eliciting positive attention (Walker, 1981), but the detailed descriptions of astute and cautious inquisitors leave little doubt that most were genuinely entranced.

How might we explain these epidemics of dissociation? Ergot could have induced hallucinations and convulsions in nuns who ate bread made from contaminated flour, but it is highly unlikely that ergotism would cause remorseless bouts of dancing (Berger, 1931). Nor is there any evidence that what the victims of mass possession ate or drank made any difference. Rather, as explained below, there are very strong indications that fearful and depressed communities were unusually prone to epidemic possession. And given that there is a well-established link between psychological stress and dissociation, this correlation is immediately suggestive of mass psychogenic illness.

Fear and loathing
The years preceding the dancing epidemics were exceptional in their harshness. The 1374 outbreak maps on to the areas most severely affected, earlier in the same year, by one of the worst floods of the century. Chronicles tell of the waters of the Rhine rising 34 feet, of flood waters pouring over town walls, of homes and market places submerged, and of decomposing horses bobbing along watery streets (Backman, 1952). In the decade before the dancing plague of 1518, famine, sickness and terrible cold caused widespread despair in Strasbourg and its environs (Rapp, 1974). Bread prices reached their highest levels for a generation, thousands of starving farmers and vine growers arrived at the city gates, and old killers like leprosy and the plague were joined by a terrifying new affliction named syphilis.

These were intensely traumatic times. Nuns were protected from many of the indignities of daily life, but nunneries could also become toxic psychological environments. Even in well-managed communities, some nuns were inevitably unhappy. Sisters were often consigned to lives of quiet contemplation in accordance with the wishes of their parents rather than any conspicuous piety on their own part. Once inside the cloisters it was very hard for them to get out. But those who keenly embraced the spiritual life were often the most desperate. Tormented by a feeling of falling short of the exacting standards of holiness imposed by their orders, plenty reflected with terrible fear on the fiery destiny awaiting those impure in mind or deed.

A notable example is that of Jeanne des Anges, Mother Superior of the Loudun nunnery in southern France, who became infatuated with a local priest, Father Grandier, in the year 1627. ‘When I did not see him’, she later confessed, ‘I burned with desire for him.’ In consequence, Jeanne felt overwhelming worthlessness and guilt. After weeks of painful penance and introspection, she fell into a dissociative state during which she repeatedly accused Grandier of plotting with Satan to make her lust after him. Within days, several more nuns had followed suit, all deliriously pointing the finger at the hapless priest. After an investigation by the Inquisition, Grandier was burnt alive (de Certeau, 2000). As in the case of the Loudun nunnery, a deep, guilty longing for human intimacy could trigger collective breakdowns. This is in part why, during their possession attacks, dissociating nuns often behaved with alarming lewdness: lifting their habits, simulating copulation, and giving their demons names such as Dog’s Dick, Fornication, even Ash-Coloured Pussy. Guilt and desire could drive a nun to distraction (Sluhovsky, 2002).

The fortitude of many a nun was most severely tested during the evangelical reform movement that swept their communities from the early 1400s. Striving to restore the harsh spiritual codes of earlier centuries, reformers instructed the nuns to consume only the blandest fare, to spurn all vanity, to adopt exacting regimes of abstinence and self-abasement, and to meditate routinely on the evils of Satan and the flames of Hell. Often the younger daughters of nobles or rich burghers, many nuns did not adjust well to tasteless meals, pillow-less beds and evenings bereft of music and conversation. Hence the arrival of reformist Mother Superiors precipitated a significant number of mass possessions. Take, for example, the Ursuline nuns of Auxonne in eastern France who experienced a possession crisis in 1658 after the appointment of the evangelical Barbe Buvée to their nunnery. For several years, distressed and dissociating nuns accused her of being a witch, of killing babies and of being a lesbian. Barbe Buvée was exonerated but judiciously assigned to an alternative nunnery. The possession crisis petered out (Sluhovsky, 2002).

Mass possession also affected secular communities, and here too the role of stress is abundantly clear. The girls whose ‘grievous fits’ and ‘hideous clamors and screeching’ set off the Salem witch panic in New England in 1692 were the members of a community rent by factional strife (Demos, 1983). They were also terrified of attacks by the Native American tribes which had already slaughtered the parents and relatives of several of those at the heart of the witchcraft accusations (Norton, 2003).

Fear and anguish were the common denominators of dancing plagues and possession crises. But this is only part of the story.

Rude devils and cursing saints
Studies of possession cults in hundreds of modern cultures, from Haiti to the Arctic, reveal that people are more likely to experience dissociative trance if they already believe in the possibility of spirit possession (Rouget, 1985). Minds can be prepared, by learning or passive exposure, to shift into altered states. The anthropologist Erika Bourguignon (1991) speaks of an ‘environment of belief’, the set of accepted ideas about the spirit world that members of communities absorb, thus preparing them later to achieve the possession state. It is not necessary, however, to be formally trained. The dancers of 1374 and 1518 occupied an environment of belief that accepted the threat of divine curse, possession or bewitchment. They didn’t intend to enter trance-like states, but their metaphysical beliefs made it possible for them to do so.

Similarly, it is only by taking cultural context seriously that we can explain the striking epidemiological facts that possession crises so often struck religious houses and that men were far less often the victims of mass diabolical possession. The daily lives of nuns were saturated in a mystical supernaturalism, their imaginations vivid with devils, demons, Satanic familiars and wrathful saints. They believed implicitly in the possibility of possession and so made themselves susceptible to it. Evangelical Mother Superiors often made them more vulnerable by encouraging trance and ecstasy; mind-altering forms of worship prepared them for later entering involuntary possession states. Moreover, early modern women were imbued with the idea that as the tainted heirs of Eve they were more liable to succumb to Satan, a misogynistic trope that often heightened their suggestibility.

So when one especially distressed nun began to faint, foam, convulse and speak in strange tongues, there was always a chance that the more suggestible of her sisters would begin to experience the same kind of dissociation, convinced that Satan was stalking their cloisters in search of impure souls.

Modern anthropology and psychology also reveal how beliefs and expectations can shape the individual’s experience of dissociation. In societies where people are encouraged to enter trance states so as to make contact with a spirit world, they typically behave in ways prescribed by their cultures (Katz, 1982; Sharp, 1993). We have every reason to think that the victims of dancing plagues and possession epidemics were also acting in accordance with the rich theology of their worlds.

That the dancing plagues were reliant on cultural belief-systems is apparent from the fact that they were concentrated in just those communities where we know there to have been a pre-existing belief in the possibility of dancing curses being sent down from Heaven or Hell. In 1374 the dancers believed that Satan had unleashed an irresistible dance, hence they not only danced interminably, but also begged for divine intercession, hurried to holy sites, and submitted gladly to exorcism (Backman, 1952). The people of Strasbourg in 1518 were convinced that a saint called Vitus had unleashed a dancing curse (Martin, 1914; Waller, 2008). And so, having entered the possession state, it seems that they acted according to the conventions of the St Vitus myth: dancing for days on end. The dance turned epidemic, as it had in 1374, because each new victim lent further credibility to the belief in supernatural agency. Indeed, the Strasbourg epidemic exemplifies the awesome power of suggestion: the city authorities ensured that the outbreak got out of control by having the dancers gathered together and left to dance in some of the most public spaces in the city (Waller, 2008).

Theological conventions also conditioned the behaviour of demoniac nuns. This is apparent from the fact that nearly all possession epidemics occurred within a single 300-year period, from around 1400 to the early 1700s. The reason is that only during this period did religious writers insist that such events were possible (Newman 1998). Theologians, inquisitors and exorcists established the rules of mass demonic possession to which dissociating nuns then unconsciously conformed: writhing, foaming, convulsing, dancing, laughing, speaking in tongues and making obscene gestures and propositions. These were shocking but entirely stereotypical performances based on deep-seated beliefs about Satan’s depravity drawn from religious writings and from accounts of previous possessions. For centuries, then, distress and pious fear worked in concert to produce epidemics of dancing and possession.

Body and mind
In 1749 a German nunnery in Würzburg experienced an epidemic of screaming, squirming and trance which led to the beheading of a suspected witch. By this period, however, the dancing plagues had disappeared and possession crises were rarities. The incidence of possession declined with the rise of modern rationalism (Bartholomew, 2001). Thereafter, mass outbreaks of dissociation tended to be confined to harshly managed settings such as factories and schools, and to be triggered by groundless fears of poisoning or exposure to toxic chemicals (see box opposite). For a variety of reasons, even these outbreaks are now uncommon in the Western world.
But the dancing plagues and the experiences of demoniac nuns still have something to tell us about human responses to stress. For these events place in bold relief the extraordinary power of context to shape how anguish and fear are expressed. What the historian Edward Shorter calls the ‘symptom pool’ for psychosomatic illness has varied significantly over time and between cultures (Shorter, 1992), and the changing incidences of conversion disorder, somatoform disorder and dissociative trance are all attributable, at least in part, to shifting norms and expectations (Nandi et al., 1992). Madnesses of the past of course tell us much about the worlds that sustained them. But wild epidemics of dancing and possession can also serve as powerful reminders of the instability of many psychiatric conditions.

John Waller is in the Department of History at Michigan State University, and is the author of A Time to Dance, a Time to Di wallerj1@msu.edu

BOX: Modern hysterias

Even if dancing plagues are things of the past, mass psychogenic illness (MPI) remains a part of the human condition. MPI has been defined as the ‘collective occurrence of physical symptoms and related beliefs among two or more persons in the absence of an identifiable pathogen’ (Colligan & Murphy, 1982). Simon Wessely (1987) has usefully separated outbreaks of MPI into two different kinds: ‘mass anxiety hysteria’ and ‘mass motor hysteria’.

Mass anxiety hysteria usually involves the sudden expression of intense anxiety in response to a false threat. In Western settings, plausible fears of poisoning or exposure to toxic chemicals have been known to trigger classic stress-reactions such as fainting, nausea, weakness and hyperventilation. In a school in Blackburn in 1965, for instance, as many as 141 pupils were affected by psychogenic dizziness, nausea, spasms and shortness of breath after several girls had publicly fainted (Bartholomew & Wessely, 2002). Unless the initial fear is given credibility by the media or authorities, cases of mass anxiety hysteria seldom last more than a few days.

Mass motor hysteria, in contrast, typically requires a prolonged build-up of psychological tension which then manifests itself in dissociative states, conversion symptoms and other psychomotor abnormalities. These can persist for weeks or months. Such outbreaks are often shaped by the kinds of supernaturalist beliefs that were responsible for the dancing mania and the possession crises of European nunneries. In modern-day Malaysia and Singapore, for example, factory workers are often drawn from rural communities steeped in beliefs about the spirit world. Those who find it hard to adjust to the regimentation of factory life sometimes enter a dissociative state in which they behave in a manner shaped by their culture’s understanding of spirit possession. MPI may arise where fellow-workers share the same beliefs and are also experiencing severe psychological strain. These outbreaks are often brought to an end with a religious ritual involving the slaughter of a goat (Phoon, 1982).
In both Western and non-Western settings, mass motor hysteria usually occurs in schools. In 1962, for example, several girls at a mission school near Lake Tanganyika developed a compulsion to laugh and cry by turns. The affliction soon spread to neighbouring populations (Rankin & Philip, 1963). Similar outbreaks of laughing have been recorded in both Zambia and Uganda. In fact, schools in central Africa are especially prone to outbreaks of mass motor hysteria. Late in 2008 several girls in a Tanzanian school responded to the pressure of taking important exams by dissociating: some fainted, while other sobbed, yelled or ran around the school.

In other cases, conversion symptoms predominate. Thus in 2006 around 600 students in an emotionally austere all-girls school in Mexico City developed paralysis and nausea lasting days or weeks. Analogous forms of MPI have been described in European and North American schools. In a school in North Carolina in 2002 a dozen pupils experienced seizures or other paroxysmal episodes over the course of four months (Roach and Langley, 2004). In many such cases, the victims receive extensive medical treatment before a failure to identify a pathogenic cause leads to a diagnosis of MPI.

More properly described as ‘mass hysteria’ are cases in which groups of people act upon beliefs which gain exaggerated credence in times of social and economic distress. For example, parts of south-east Asia are periodically struck by epidemics of a fear among men and women that their genitals are shrinking into their bodies. ‘Koro’ is fuelled by a belief in the existence of an evil spirit that causes genital retraction. Death is said to ensue once the penis, nipples or vulva have fully disappeared into the body: hence men have been known to drive pegs through their penises in the attempt to prevent complete retraction (Bartholomew, 2001). A similar phenomenon has been recorded in parts of western Africa where men claim their penises to have been shrunk or stolen through evil magic. Individuals accused of stealing or shrinking genitals are sometimes beaten to death or lynched: at least 14 suspected penis-thieves were killed in Nigeria in 2001 (Dzokoto & Adams, 2005).

Mass anxiety hysteria and mass motor hysteria can be hard to distinguish from the effects of actual exposure to environmental hazards. Experts have therefore identified several features that are indicative of a psychogenic origin for a sudden outbreak of illness symptoms in a group of people. These include the lack of a plausible organic basis, their occurrence in a relatively closed group, and the prior existence of high levels of stress. It is always necessary, however, to test fully for potential toxic or pathogenic exposures. This point is underscored by a case in 1990 when several children at a London primary school fell sick with typical symptoms of MPI: nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain and over-breathing. It looked like a classic case of hysteria. However, it turned out that they were actually suffering from poisoning from pesticides used on cucumbers (Bartholomew, 2001).

References

Backman, E.L. (1952). Religious dances in the Christian Church and in popular medicine (Trans. E. Classen). London: Allen & Unwin.
Bartholomew, R.E. (2001). Little green men, meowing nuns, and head-hunting panics: a study of mass psychogenic illness and social delusion. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Bartholomew, R.E. & Wessely, S. (2002). Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness – From possessed nuns to chemical and biological terrorism fears. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180, 300–306.
Berger, G. (1931). Ergot and ergotism. London: Gurney and Jackson.
Bourgignon, E. (1991). Possession. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Colligan, M.J. & Murphy, L.R. (1982). A review of mass psychogenic illness in work settings. In M.J. Colligan, J.W. Pennebaker & L.R. Murphy (Eds.) Mass psychogenic illness: A social psychological analysis (pp.33–52). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
de Certeau, M. (2000). The possession at Loudun (Trans. Michael B. Smith). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Demos, J. (1983). Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the culture of early New England. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dzokoto, V.A. & Adams, G. (2005). Understanding genital-shrinking epidemics in West Africa: Koro, Juju, or mass psychogenic illness? Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 29, 53–78.
Katz, R. (1982). Boiling energy: Community healing among the Kalahari Kung. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Martin, A. (1914). Geschichte der Tanzkrankheit in Deutschland. Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, 24, 113–134 & 225–239.
Matossian, M.K. (1989). Poisons of the past: Molds, epidemics and history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Midelfort, H.C.E. (1999). A history of madness in sixteenth-century Germany. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nandi, D.N., Banerjee, G., Nandi S. & Nandi, P. (1992). Is hysteria on the wane? A community survey in West Bengal, India. British Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 87–91.
Newman, B. (1998). Possessed by the spirit: Devout women, demoniacs, and the apostolic life in the thirteenth century. Speculum, 73, 733–770.
Norton, M.B. (2003). In the devil's snare: The Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Phoon, W.H. (1982). Outbreaks of mass hysteria at workplaces in Singapore: Some patterns and modes of presentation. In M.J. Colligan, J.W. Pennebaker & L.R. Murphy (Eds.) Mass psychogenic illness: A social psychological analysis (pp.21–32). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Rankin, A.M. & Philip, P.J. (1963). An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba district of Tanganyika. Central African Medical Journal, 9, 167–170.
Rapp, F. (1974). Réformes et réformation à Strasbourg: Église et société dans le diocèse de Strasbourg (1450–1525). Strasbourg: Association des Publications près les Universités de Strasbourg.
Roach, E.S. & Langley, R.L. (2004). Episodic neurological dysfunction due to mass hysteria. Archives of Neurology, 61, 1269–1272.
Rosen, G. (1968). Madness in society: Chapters in the historical sociology of mental illness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Rouget, G. (1985). Music and trance: A theory of the relations between music and possession. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Sharp, L.A. (1993). The possessed and the dispossessed: Spirits, identity, and power in a Madagascar migrant town. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Shorter, E. (1992). From paralysis to fatigue: A history of psychosomatic illness in the modern era. New York: Free Press.
Sluhovsky, M. (2002). The devil in the convent. American Historical Review, 107, 1379–1411.
Walker, D.P. (1981). Unclean spirits: Possession and exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Waller, J. (2008). A time to dance, a time to die: The extraordinary story of the dancing plague of 1518. Cambridge: Icon Books.
Wessely, S. (1987). Mass hysteria: Two syndromes. Psychological Medicine, 17, 109–120.

http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=22&editionID=177&ArticleID=1541

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

WANTED now: Offsite AND Onsite Rainbow Press Crew SALARY: Good Karma

Rainbow press crew — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:48:27 GMT

The officers involved in last year's Kid Village Incident probably wouldn't have opened fire if television news cameras were pointed at them first. Our own cameras certainly didn't stop them. This year, kind folks like yourself can help ensure that future gatherings will exist for our children to enjoy when they're grown and that gatherings will once again be safe.

The Rainbow press crew seeks volunteers to help achieve these goals. Last year we sent out a request for off site volunteers. http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.gathering.rainbow/2008-07/msg00005.html This year we sent out a request for on site volunteers. http://groups.google.com.ag/group/alt.gathering.rainbow/browse_thread/thread/37380484d41625d6# The press crew needs you; the press crew IS you.

At this point we're in need of both on site and off site helpers, but firstly we're seeking off site volunteers to lend a hand as soon as possible to help get the ball rolling for this year. If you're interested in helping and can commit, please contact rpcrew09 at gmail.com . We have tasks that need to be done in the next week and on through mid July. Any contribution is a big help.

Last but not least our new site is up. http://rpcnews.us/ It's mostly for the press to view our old press releases. Have a look if you like, and hear one of our favorite songs there!

Thanks in advance for anything you can do. To the woods!

Please forward

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Obama Dares Judge to Order Release Of NSA Spy Document

dakat — Sat, 16 May 2009 07:03:02 GMT

By David Kravets May 15, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Setting the stage for a constitutional showdown, the Obama administration dared a federal judge here late Friday to do what no judge has yet done: disclose classified data the government has declared a national security state secret.

The administration urged (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to order such a disclosure in a 3-year-old lawsuit weighing whether a sitting U.S. president may bypass Congress and adopt a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. Such an order, the administration said, could halt three years of convoluted litigation and force the appellate courts to weigh in on the hotly contested issue.

The classified data in question shows that telephone calls by two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were intercepted by the government without warrants in 2004. Without the classified documents admitted as evidence in the case, the aggrieved lawyers for the al-Haramain charity, which the Bush administration designated as a terror group, cannot establish a legal basis to earn them a day in court.

The eavesdropping evidence in the Islamic charity’s case came to light after the Treasury Department accidentally disclosed a classified document to the plaintiffs five years ago.

The evidence, which the Bush and Obama administrations have declared a state secret, has never been made public. Counsel for the charity lawyers returned the document to the government, but have continued fighting to use the document to challenge Bush’s spy program, which was adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks. Bush acknowledged the program in 2005, and Congress legalized it in July.

Judge Walker has ordered the government twice to work with the plaintiff’s lawyers to craft a so-called “protective order” by which only the plaintiffs lawyers would have access to the document to enable the case to be litigated. There would be no public disclosure of the evidence.

Walker, in January and again in April, demanded the Justice Department, in conjunction with plaintiff’s lawyers, to craft the protective order like those used to prosecute Guantanamo Bay detainees.

But Walker has never pulled the trigger and actually ordered the disclosure of the documents to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case.

So in a court filing late Friday, the Obama administration again refused to cooperate in creating a protective order. Instead, the administration challenged Walker to go beyond a protective order and actually demand disclosure of the records.

That would commence the first constitutional showdown surrounding the disclosure of state secrets in a bid to get the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review Walker’s decision.

Walker’s earlier orders in the case have not been ripe enough for the San Francisco appellate court to review.

“Accordingly, the government respectfully requests that, before the court grants plaintiffs’ counsel access to state secrets, the court enter an order directing disclosure or otherwise provide adequate notice of any disclosure to enable the government to seek a stay and take an appeal,” Anthony Coppolino, the Justice Department’s special litigation counsel, wrote Judge Walker.

The state secrets defense was first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in a McCarthy-era lawsuit in 1953, and has been increasingly and successfully invoked by federal lawyers seeking to shield the government from court scrutiny. Lawsuits in which national-security information may be divulged are always tossed by judges at the request of the government –- often by judges who never reviewed any classified data.

In this case, Walker reviewed the classified material and said the evidence pointed toward illegal spying.

A George H. W. Bush appointee, Walker has defied the government on state secrets before, but has never ordered the disclosure of evidence the government has declared classified.

He rejected the Bush administration’s state secrets claim in lawsuits challenging the nation’s telecommunication companies’ complicity with Bush’s once-secret electronic eavesdropping program. But Congress stepped in and immunized the telcos from the lawsuits.

With then-Sen. Barack Obama’s vote in July, Congress also sanctioned Bush’s spy program that authorized warrantless wiretapping on Americans if they are communicating overseas with suspected terrorists.

Walker is also weighing a challenge to that immunity legislation.

Jon Eisenberg, an attorney for the al-Haramain lawyers – Wendell Belew and Asim Gafoor — is urging Walker to disclose the information without the government’s consent.

“For this case to resume forward progress, the court can simply adopt a protective order under which the court will afford plaintiffs access to the classified filings,” Eisenberg wrote Walker late Friday.

But if Walker obliges Eisenberg, another constitutional crisis may surface. The Justice Department, in an earlier filing, suggested it may “withdraw” the documents at issue regardless of Walker’s orders.

That’s because the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation material likely remains locked under the control of the Obama administration’s Litigation Security Section of the Justice Department, according to the record in the case.

Last month, the government acknowledged that, in 2005, it purposely destroyed 92 videotapes to cover up evidence of mistreatment of U.S. terror suspects — evidence the American Civil Liberties Union was trying to bring to light in a New York federal court lawsuit against the Defense Department.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/nsa/

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

WANTED now: Onsite AND Offsite Rainbow Press Crew SALARY: Good Karma

Rainbow press crew — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:06:56 GMT

The officers involved in last year's Kid Village Incident probably wouldn't have opened fire if television news cameras were pointed at them first. Our own cameras certainly didn't stop them. This year, kind folks like yourself can help ensure that future gatherings will exist for our children to enjoy when they're grown and that gatherings will once again be safe.

The Rainbow press crew seeks volunteers to help achieve these goals. Last year we sent out a request for off site volunteers. http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.gathering.rainbow/2008-07/msg00005.html
This year we sent out a request for on site volunteers. http://groups.google.com.ag/group/alt.gathering.rainbow/browse_thread/thread/37380484d41625d6# The press crew needs you; the press crew IS you.

At this point we're in need of both on site and off site helpers, but firstly we're seeking off site volunteers to lend a hand as soon as possible to help get the ball rolling for this year. If you're interested in helping and can commit, please contact rpcrew09 at gmail.com . We have tasks that need to be done in the next week and on through mid July. Any contribution is a big help.

Last but not least our new site is up. http://rpcnews.us/ It's mostly for the press to view our old press releases. Have a look if you like, and hear one of our favorite songs there!

Thanks in advance for anything you can do. To the woods!

Please forward

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Mysterious virus strikes FBI

dakat — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:51:42 GMT

By Steven Musil CNET News
Posted on ZDNet News: May 22, 2009 4:44:36 AM

The FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service were forced to shut down parts of their computer networks after a mystery virus struck the law-enforcement agencies Thursday, according to an Associated Press report.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that it had disconnected from Justice Department computers as a precaution after being hit with the virus, while an FBI spokesperson would only say that it was experiencing similar issues, according to the report.

"We too are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that's affecting several government agencies," FBI spokesman Mike Kortan told the AP.

The virus' type and origin are unknown, but spokespeople for both agencies said agencies' access to the Internet and e-mail was shut down while the issue was evaluated.

Government regulations require agencies to report any security issues to US-Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), but a call to CERT late Thursday for comment was not immediately returned.

This article was originally posed on CNET News.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-304150.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Kaspersky impressed with Conficker botnet's slickness

dakat — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:47:54 GMT

By Liam Tung ZDNet Australia
Posted on ZDNet News: May 21, 2009 6:05:10 AM

Cybercrime fighter Eugene Kaspersky can't help but be impressed by the slick operations behind the Conficker botnet, and says that it could have been worse had the botnet been after more than just money.

"They are high-end engineers who write code in a good way," Kaspersky told ZDNet.com.au yesterday. "They use cryptographic systems in the right way, they don't make mistakes — they are really professional."

Kaspersky says he's "60 per cent certain" that Conficker is being controlled from the Ukraine, but can't be certain. And while the threat posed by Conficker seems serious enough, Kaspersky says, "It could be worse. We are lucky they are just cybercriminals looking to make money and not worse than that."

The unknown threat posed by Conficker, which hit 10 million Windows machines prior to the suspected D-Day of 1 April, prompted a coordinated response. Kaspersky, Symantec, Microsoft, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and the Federal Bureau of Investigations' Cyber Division, amongst others, began a campaign to frustrate Conficker's attempt to download a software update.

One reason for ICANN's involvement, according to its CEO and president Paul Twomey, was that Conficker was targeting the internet's Domain Name Service layer, which is equivalent to the address book of the internet.

During a keynote delivered at the AusCERT 2009 conference held on the Gold Coast this week, Twomey noted the change in tack by botnet operators. "The application layer has typically been used as the attack vector, but we are beginning to see the DNS resolution used as the command and control," said Twomey.

Conficker is the current darling of the internet's dark-side, preceded by others such as Storm, and spam-machine McColo. But all botnets maintain an edge over their various opponents: they are centrally controlled, "located" potentially anywhere, generally don't rely on third-parties, and are free of regulations.

Botnet operators in Russia, however, have started to cooperate with each other according to Dmitry Levashev and Ruslan Stoyanov, network security experts from Russian ISP RTComm.ru. At the AusCERT 2009 conference, via a translator, the two gave a sobering account of what lies ahead for Australia in the next three years.

"The different botnets work in cooperation. One would say, 'I'm just a bot herder, I don't care about money laundering'. Or 'I do fraud, we just do our own task'. So, one is doing spam, like advertising services and another is doing money laundering. It's like a manufacturing business," they said.

Indeed it appears to have occurred when Conficker adopted the Waldec virus, previously used by the Storm botnet as a mechanism to self-propagate.

Meanwhile, the group working to frustrate Conficker's attempt to complete a software upgrade on April Fools' Day fought to coordinate themselves. While ICANN was responsible for coordinating Top Level Domains, Microsoft pushed out patches to non-pirated versions of Windows.

Kaspersky says of his company's role that they had found Conficker was using an algorithm to generate random URLs that it would target in order to download updates to its malware.

"The worm used an algorithm which generated a list of domains. Every day it produced a new list. It looked for these URLs, and if they were online, the worm was designed to download upgrades form the URL. The initial version of the 10 million machine botnet would just wait and download. That's why we were really scared on April Fool's Day. We didn't know what was going to happen."

The group was able to exploit that algorithm and second guess the URLs that would be targeted, and block requests to those URLs. But, says Kaspersky, it was only partially successful.

"We blocked all the URL names which the worm was going to generate. It's an algorithm, so we generated all these URLs and registered these domain names, except ones which were already owned by someone. And because of that — the domain names not owned by those in this process — the Conficker authors managed to take control of one of these domains and upgraded the worm. That was scary," he said.

ICANN's Twomey insisted the group's efforts against Conficker proved that key internet players, such as Top Level Domain registrants, are capable of coordinating a response to such threats. Still, the Conficker response was the exception and not the rule.

It wasn't the first time a botnet operator has attempted to compromise DNS servers to magnify its capacity to add to its army.

At an ICANN conference held in Mexico in March this year, Rod Rasmussen, chief technology officer of phishing take-down firm Internet Identity, showed evidence of a recent nine-hour attack on CheckFree, an online bill payment provider to 22 US financial institutions, which resulted in a two-day shut down of affected online services and an estimated 10,000 infections over 48 hours.

"Somebody came in and took over the CheckFree's domain name portfolio at their registrar. They changed the DNS servers for those domains and pointed [...] basically every host name that would resolve under their domain names to a malware server that was in the Ukraine. Anybody who tried to go to CheckFree.com or any of their other domain names were redirected, instead, to a malware server and were exposed to getting malware download on their computer," Rasmussen said.

In a similar vein to the attack on CheckFree, hackers targeted MelbourneIT's New Zealand subsidiary, Domainz. The hackers, who appeared to be politically motivated, defaced Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Xerox and F-Secure's websites by injecting name server records for the domains in question by compromising Domainz' infrastructure. It didn't knock out critical national infrastructure, but it was able to take down several large companies' websites for a few days.

Kaspersky says, "It's a major example of their internet weapon, because the bad guys can use a botnet this size, not just for commercial interests, but other interest also."

He insists, "I don't admire them" yet there is an undeniable sense of respect he conveys.

This article was originally posted on ZDNet Australia.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-303959.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

any body interested in laptops…

Tue, 19 May 2009 03:43:32 GMT

Well if any1 interested in buying new laptops, eBooks, PC projectors do visit this site http://www.jointech.com.hk, you will find different models of Laptops, Laptops with educational software, eBooks, and PC Projectors, (must visit)

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

EU quarantines London in flu panic

dakat — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:03:17 GMT

http://bouncewith.me.uk/europe/8027043.htm

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Twitter can make you immoral, claim scientists

dakat — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:00:36 GMT

By Jenny Hope

Social networks such as Twitter may blunt people's sense of morality, claim brain scientists.

New evidence shows the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people's brains.

A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the 'moral compass' of the brain to process.

The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become 'indifferent to human suffering' because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people's feelings.

US scientists from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California (USC) say the brain can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.

But they show it takes longer to activate processing of social emotions such as admiration and compassion, which are critical for developing a sense of morality.

The study raises questions about the emotional cost of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

The impact could be most damaging for youngsters whose brains are still developing.

USC researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang said 'For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection.

'If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.'

Mature celebrity users of Twitter such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are behind the growing popularity of the site used by around 10 million people worldwide.

Barack Obama used it as a tool during last year's US presidential elections to talk directly and quickly - only 140 characters can be posted at any time by website or mobile phone - to thousands of followers.

Celebrities of all types - from rugby players to chefs to pop stars - are becoming hooked on the instant updates

But a new study led by Antonio Damasio, director of the USC's Brain and Creativity Institute, suggests that digital media may be better suited to some mental processes than others.

The study used compelling, real-life stories to induce admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain, in 13 volunteers.

The emotions felt were verified by researchers in a series of interviews before and after, conducted using a careful protocol.

Brain imaging showed the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain.

However, once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers' reactions to stories focused on physical pain.

The study will appear next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.

Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC, said 'Damasio's study has extraordinary implications for the human perception of events in a digital communication environment.

'Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention.'

'In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.'

Although normal life events provide opportunities to feel admiration and compassion, the researchers fear heavy social networkers may not have time for traditional ways of developing a moral sense such as reading books and seeing friends.

The study showed physical and social pain both engage the posteromedial cortex, the region of brain related to the sense of self and consciousness, but in different areas.

Professor Damasio said 'The brain is honouring a distinction between things that have to do with physicality and things that have to do with the mind.

'When it comes to emotion, because these systems are inherently slow, perhaps all we can say is, not so fast.'

He said humans 'separate the good from the bad' largely thanks to the feeling of admiration.

It is also deeply rooted in the brain and the sense of the body, the study found, engaging primal neural systems that regulate blood chemistry, the digestive system and other parts of the body.

Prof Damasio called it proof, pending replication of the findings, that social emotions have deep evolutionary roots.

He said 'People generally don't think of emotions like admiration and compassion as having forerunners in evolution.

'We reveal that these emotions engage the basic systems of our physiology.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1169788/Twitter-make-immoral-claim-scientists.html#

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Bartcop.com on The New American Dream

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 01:12:26 GMT

http://www.newamericandream.net/index.html

The New American Dream

Feature Interview
The Weekend
April 17

Bartcop.com's Terry Coppage, from Tulsa:

"Well, as you might know, I've got a smart mouth, always had a smart mouth.

And in 1993 my boss said, 'Bart, you ought to try this Internet thing, it's brand-new.' "

Poetry:
by Doug Draime
by Del "Abe" Jones

Columns:
A Progressive Pondering Healthcare — Joe Mayer of Rochester, Minnesota
Who's Killing Americans? Is it Dick Cheney? — Jim Fetzer, of Duluth, Minnesota

Political Art by Ben Heine of Brussels

and some other stuff ....

Thanks for stopping by.

The Dream Team
http://www.newamericandream.net/index.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

This Week on The New American Dream

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:44:59 GMT

http://www.newamericandream.net/index.html

The New American Dream
... well ... because we're dreaming of Dick Cheney and George Bush in a big black car limousine motorcade with those little American flags on the front quarter panels on their way to prison

... we're dreaming of a USA truth commission and Cub Scout tours of the "secret" FBI and CIA

and some other stuff

This Week's Feature Interviews:

Monday - Timbre Wolf, a musician who moved from Tulsa to Hawaii

Tuesday - Al Markovitz, of Norfolk, Virginia, the Tulsa of the east coast, editor of the Blue Collar Review, "journal of working class literature"

Wednesday - Aimee England, the mayor of Tulsa — no, actually, Aimee lives in Michigan and spent over twenty years working in an independent, radical bookstore

Thursday - Lee Rayburn, radio show host, formerly of Air American Radio and also Madison, Wisconsin. [never been to Tulsa.]

Friday - Bartcop, of Bartcop.com, from where else? Tulsa.

Columns:
Steve Clemens of the Twin Cities
Lydia Sems from Atlanta

Poetry:
More from Ava Bird of Berkeley

and some other stuff

Thank you.

The Dream Team
http://www.newamericandream.net/index.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's ownership of government

dakat — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:12:27 GMT

Saturday April 4, 2009 08:35 EDT

White House officials yesterday released their personal financial disclosure forms, and included in the millions of dollars which top Obama economics adviser Larry Summers made from Wall Street in 2008 is this detail:

Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees by several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations. . . .

Financial institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.

That's $135,000 paid by Goldman Sachs to Summers -- for a one-day visit. And the payment was made at a time -- in April, 2008 -- when everyone assumed that the next President would either be Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and that Larry Summers would therefore become exactly what he now is: the most influential financial official in the U.S. Government (and the $45,000 Merrill Lynch payment came 8 days after Obama's election). Goldman would not be able to make a one-day $135,000 payment to Summers now that he is Obama's top economics adviser, but doing so a few months beforehand was obviously something about which neither parties felt any compunction. It's basically an advanced bribe. And it's paying off in spades. And none of it seemed to bother Obama in the slightest when he first strongly considered naming Summers as Treasury Secretary and then named him his top economics adviser instead (thereby avoiding the need for Senate confirmation), knowing that Summers would exert great influence in determining who benefited from the government's response to the financial crisis.

Last night, former Reagan-era S&L regulator and current University of Missouri Professor Bill Black was on Bill Moyers' Journal and detailed the magnitude of what he called the on-going massive fraud, the role Tim Geithner played in it before being promoted to Treasury Secretary (where he continues to abet it), and -- most amazingly of all -- the crusade led by Alan Greenspan, former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin (Geithner's mentor) and Larry Summers in the late 1990s to block the efforts of top regulators (especially Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission) to regulate the exact financial derivatives market that became the principal cause of the global financial crisis. To get a sense for how deep and massive is the on-going fraud and the key role played in it by key Obama officials, I highly recommend watching that Black interview (it can be seen here and the transcript is here).

This article from Stanford Magazine -- an absolutely amazing read -- details how Summers, Rubin and Greenspan led the way in blocking any regulatory efforts of the derivatives market whatsoever on the ground that the financial industry and its lobbyists were objecting:

As chairperson of the CFTC, Born advocated reining in the huge and growing market for financial derivatives. . . . One type of derivative—known as a credit-default swap—has been a key contributor to the economy’s recent unraveling. . .

Back in the 1990s, however, Born’s proposal stirred an almost visceral response from other regulators in the Clinton administration, as well as members of Congress and lobbyists. . . . But even the modest proposal got a vituperative response. The dozen or so large banks that wrote most of the OTC derivative contracts saw the move as a threat to a major profit center. Greenspan and his deregulation-minded brain trust saw no need to upset the status quo. The sheer act of contemplating regulation, they maintained, would cause widespread chaos in markets around the world.

Born recalls taking a phone call from Lawrence Summers, then Rubin’s top deputy at the Treasury Department, complaining about the proposal, and mentioning that he was taking heat from industry lobbyists. . . . The debate came to a head April 21, 1998. In a Treasury Department meeting of a presidential working group that included Born and the other top regulators, Greenspan and Rubin took turns attempting to change her mind. Rubin took the lead, she recalls.

“I was told by the secretary of the treasury that the CFTC had no jurisdiction, and for that reason and that reason alone, we should not go forward,” Born says. . . . “It seemed totally inexplicable to me,” Born says of the seeming disinterest her counterparts showed in how the markets were operating. “It was as though the other financial regulators were saying, ‘We don’t want to know.’”

She formally launched the proposal on May 7, and within hours, Greenspan, Rubin and Levitt issued a joint statement condemning Born and the CFTC, expressing “grave concern about this action and its possible consequences.” They announced a plan to ask for legislation to stop the CFTC in its tracks.

Rubin, Summers and Greenspan succeeded in inducing Congress -- funded, of course, by these same financial firms -- to enact legislation blocking the CFTC from regulating these derivative markets. More amazingly still, the CFTC, headed back then by Born, is now headed by Obama appointee Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive (naturally) who was as instrumental as anyone in blocking any regulations of those derivative markets (and then enriched himself by feeding on those unregulated markets).

Just think about how this works. People like Rubin, Summers and Gensler shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting. When in government, they ensure that the laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall St. firms, literally abolishing all safeguards and allowing them to pillage and steal. Then, when out of government, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented when in government. Then, when their party returns to power, they return back to government, where they continue to use their influence to ensure that the oligarchical circle that rewards them so massively is protected and advanced. This corruption is so tawdry and transparent -- and it has fueled and continues to fuel a fraud so enormous and destructive as to be unprecedented in both size and audacity -- that it is mystifying that it is not provoking more mass public rage.

All of that leads to things like this, from today's Washington Post:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials. . . .

The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials. . . .

In one program, designed to restart small-business lending, President Obama's officials are planning to set up a middleman called a special-purpose vehicle -- a term made notorious during the Enron scandal -- or another type of entity to evade the congressional mandates, sources familiar with the matter said.

If that isn't illegal, it is as close to it as one can get. And it is a blatant attempt by the White House to brush aside -- circumvent and violate -- the spirit if not the letter of Congressional restrictions on executive pay for TARP-receiving firms. It was Obama, in the wake of various scandals over profligate spending by TARP firms, who pretended to ride the wave of populist anger and to lead the way in demanding limits on compensation. And ever since his flamboyant announcement, Obama -- adopting the same approach that seems to drive him in most other areas -- has taken one step after the next to gut and render irrelevant the very compensation limits he publicly pretended to champion (thereafter dishonestly blaming Chris Dodd for doing so and virtually destroying Dodd's political career). And the winners -- as always -- are the same Wall St. firms that caused the crisis in the first place while enriching and otherwise co-opting the very individuals Obama chose to be his top financial officials.

Worse still, what is happening here is an exact analog to what is happening in the realm of Bush war crimes -- the Obama administration's first priority is to protect the wrongdoers and criminals by ensuring that the criminality remains secret. Here is how Black explained it last night:

Black: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.

These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...

Moyers: What do you mean?

Black: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator. . . .

The Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we have to learn the facts. What caused this disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future disasters?" Where's our investigation?

What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking. Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. . . .

Moyers: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

Black: Absolutely.

Moyers: You are.

Black: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. . . . What we're doing with -- no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG.

Where Congress said, "We will not give you a single penny more unless we know who received the money." And, you know, when he was Treasury Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG. And he put Goldman Sachs on it.

Moyers: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.

Black: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.

This is exactly what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson warned about in his vital Atlantic article: "that the finance industry has effectively captured our government -- a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises." This is the key passage where Johnson described the hallmark of how corrupt oligarchies that cause financial crises then attempt to deal with the fallout:

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique -- the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large. . . .

As much as he campaigned against anything, Obama railed against precisely this sort of incestuous, profoundly corrupt control by narrow private interests of the Government, yet he has chosen to empower the very individuals who most embody that corruption. And the results are exactly what one would expect them to be.

* * * * *

I was on the Moyers program last night after the Black interview -- along with Amy Goodman -- discussing the media's role in this establishment corruption (that segment can be viewed here), and yesterday morning I was on C-SPAN's Washington Journal with the primary topic being this blatant, sleazy oligarchical control of both the Executive and legislative branches (which can be seen here).

UPDATE: Just to get a sense for how propagandistic, sycophantic and fact-free are the most extreme Obama worshippers in our "journalist" class, consider this recent article from The New Republic's Noam Scheiber in which he urged the White House to "free its economic oracle" -- Summers -- and defended and praised Summers on the ground that "his exposure to Wall Street over the years has been limited." As Jonathan Schwarz asks, citing the massive compensation on which Summers engorged himself by feeding at the Wall Street trough last year: "I wonder what would have constituted 'significant' exposure to Wall Street? Maybe if he'd worked for D.E. Shaw full time? (Amazingly, Summers was paid $5.2 million for a part-time position.)"

-- Glenn Greenwald

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Dreaming the NEW American Dream

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:19:05 GMT

California poets Ava Bird & Rex Butters, and....

Santa Cruz artist Russell Brutsche - Karen Kwiatkowski of Virginia

Protests to stop immigration raids ... and more.
____________________

http://www.newamericandream.net

The New American Dream

What's New?

* Karen Kwiatkowski column
* Ava Bird poetry
* Rex Butters poetry
* Gary Mennie poetry

Columns:
Sherwood Ross — why not shut down a few prisons in the United States as well?
Mickey Z — Americans are cowards, too comfortable, will never-ever-not-in-one-million-years revolt-or-even-bother-to-stand-up — no matter what the rich folks do to them.
Lydia Sems — It's The American Dream that is the problem.

and more from Jack Saunders ...

Resistance:
* Planned civil disobedience in Minnesota to stop raids against immigrants
* Protests at Creech AFB against U.S. drone terroristic activity
*100 days of protest against Guantanamo to culminate

All this, Northern Exposure, The Big Lebowski, Paradise by the Dashboard Lights ... a certificate for free toast ... and more.

Join us.

The New American Dream
Dude.
... because ... Sister Mary Anne told us, "There are no wrong questions, if you don't know the answers."

... from the Dream Team

http://www.newamericandream.net

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

who is buying organic?

skooter — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:17:08 GMT

This is a real eye opener I highly recommend that you give a once over. At first it may seem off topic here, but once you start reading it a bit it will dawn on you how this is dead on the right place for it.

It's a good run down of the creation, incorporation, merger and acquisitions, and distribution of organic products and their companies. It's quite an eye opener. I'm told it came from the Arianna Huffington blog.

http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/organicindustry.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

This is Fucked Up

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:48:05 GMT

I sort of feel like reacting in an irrational way when I read this kind of stuff.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/10/23/state/n145556D05.DTL&type=politics&tsp=1

You know, just laying into those half-wits distributing the WatchTower; yelling at the dumbshit Mormons on their missions in those stupid little outfits; telling Catholics to fuck off.

You know, just reactive.

Sort of like, why be tolerant and respectable of people or entities that preach discrimination; hate...intolerance.

Sort of like give them exactly the energetic response they're preaching.

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

Former Gitmo Guard Tells All--What is this anal fixation with conservatives?

dakat — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:26:09 GMT

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore Toto!

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004409

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Crackulous is released, chaos imminent

dakat — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:53:53 GMT

by Christina Warren on Feb 2nd 2009

iPhone developers who already have to fight for app approval, exposure and marketing techniques now have a new hurdle to overcome: instantaneous app-cracking. Although cracking iPhone applications for use on a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch is not new, the method has never been so easy or so accessible.

Crackulous, an application developed on the Hackulous forums (Hackulous is a community dedicated to cracking iPhone apps; back in my day we called these warez boards), makes it possible to "crack" any purchased App Store application. That app can then be transferred for use on other devices.

Although the larger discussion of intellectual property, DRM, peer-to-peer transfers and what constitutes "piracy" is filled with large gray areas, Crackulous strikes me as about as black and white as you can get. Any way you slice it, this is piracy. This isn't about fighting DRM or fighting what some see as a draconian application platform, this is theft.

While pirated applications are hardly a new phenomenon, we still have relatively unsullied ground in the world of mobile applications. The Symbian platform appears to have a warez community, but BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android (though Android is currently not selling any pay apps at this time) are relatively piracy free.

What makes App Store piracy different from other types of software piracy (mobile or otherwise) is that developers don't have the opportunity to strengthen or change the protection scheme that ties an application to a user account. Because all applications must go through Apple in order to reach the App Store (which is equally controlled by Apple), developers can't fight back, they can only wait for Apple to try to strengthen the protection scheme or introduce other counter-piracy measures.

What are developers supposed to do, other than lobby Apple to make changes to make this sort of decryption more complex? Because devices must be jailbroken in order to run cracked applications, an obvious answer could be for Apple to try to make devices more difficult to jailbreak.

To be clear, jailbreaking does not equal piracy, but to deny that there are many users who jailbreak for the sole purpose of running cracked applications is just naive. By taking potential sales away from the App Store, Crackulous takes potential money away from Apple. Apple will respond. How successful the cat and mouse game will ultimately be, only time will tell, but Apple will respond.

The defenders of applications like Crackulous say that if Apple offered a trial period on apps, this wouldn't be necessary. Perhaps. But I think it is far more likely that developments like this will only make trial periods less and less likely.

Think about it: Right now the only way to crack an application is to buy it. What happens when you can download apps for a "trial" without paying anything? Not even the initial purchase has to be made before the application is cracked and ready to be downloaded by the masses.

I agree that Apple needs to develop a better way for users to either try apps, or conversely, have the ability to request a refund for apps that don't work as promised, but cracking the apps hardly seems to be the solution. All applications like Crackulous really seem to do is undermine the legitimate uses for jailbreaking that may exist, and encourage Apple to make its process more closed, rather than more open.

[Editor's Note: This is a thorny issue on a lot of levels and we know reader response will be passionate in both directions. While we're open to discussing the issue of piracy, ethics and jailbreaking in the comments, please know that any comments containing torrent links to warez or direct downloads for cracked apps will be removed. Repeated infractions will force us to block the offending users and/or close comments to the post.]

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/02/02/crackulous-is-released-chaos-imminent/

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Another Victory in the War on Drugs

dakat — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:30:58 GMT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012302935.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009013002471&s_pos=

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Whistleblower: NSA spied on everyone, targeted journalists

dakat — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:02:50 GMT

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. ... What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata ... and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."

According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.

"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. ... I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."

When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."

"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"

Tice did not answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything." He added, however, that he had no idea what was ultimately done with the information, except that he was sure it "was digitized and put on databases somewhere."

Tice first began alleging that there were illegal activities going on at both the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in December 2005, several months after being fired by the NSA. He also served at that time as a source for the New York Times story which revealed the existence of the NSA's wireless wiretapping program.

Over the next several months, however, Tice was frustrated in his attempts to testify before Congress, had his credibility attacked by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in an apparent attempt at intimidation.

Tice is now coming forward again now because George Bush is finally out of office. He told Olbermann that the Obama administration has not been in touch with him about his latest revelations, but, "I did send a letter to, I think it's [Obama intelligence adviser John] Brennan -- a handwritten letter, because I knew all my communications were tapped, my phones, my computer, and I've had the FBI on me like flies on you-know-what ... and I'm assuming that he gave the note to our current president -- that I intended to say a little bit more than I had in the past."

http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=13973

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Throw a Shoe at the White House Day: Bush shoe-thrower 'tortured'

dakat — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:11:30 GMT

Bush shoe-thrower 'tortured'

An Iraqi journalist arrested after throwing his shoes at the US president has been tortured during his detention, his brother has said.

Muntazer al-Zaidi, who called George Bush "a dog" during his attack, was beaten by security guards after his arrest, Durgham al-Zaidi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

"We know that [Muntazer] has been tortured and his hand was broken. I asked them to go and check on him in the Green Zone [in Baghdad]," he said.

Al-Baghdadia television, Muntazer's employer, reported that al-Zeidi had been "seriously injured" while in custody.

The channel has urged the Iraqi government to allow lawyers and the Iraqi Red Crescent to visit him.

The Iraqi military has denied that al-Zaidi has been mistreated while in detention.

Al-Zaidi has admitted "aggression against a president" during an appearance before a judge, a judicial spokesman said on Tuesday.

"Al-Zaidi was brought today before the investigating judge in the presence of a defence lawyer and a prosecutor," Abdul Satar Birqadr, a spokesman for Iraq's High Judicial Council, said.

"He admits the action he carried out."

The referral of the case to the Iraqi judiciary is usually the first stage of review proceedings that could lead to a criminal trial being held.

Al-Zaidi will remain in custody until the judge has completed his investigation, Birqadr said.

The court may send him for trial under a clause in the Iraqi penal code that makes it an offence to try to murder Iraqi or foreign presidents.

The sentence could be up to 15 years jail, Birqadr said.

Support for attack

Al-Zaidi's attack on Bush, who ordered the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, has been met with broad support across the Arab world.

Iraqis calling for al-Zaidi's release from custody held a second day of protests on Tuesday, with hundreds of students marching in Baghdad.

The demonstrations came a day after thousands of people turned out in Baghdad's Sadr City in a show of support for al-Zaidi.

But the Iraqi government on Monday called al-Zaidi's outburst against Bush a "barbaric and ignominious act".

The outgoing US leader, who was making a surprise visit to Baghdad, had just told reporters that while the war in Iraq was not over "it is decisively on its way to being won," when al-Zeidi hurled abuse - and his footwear - at Bush.

Bush, who had been giving a joint press statement with Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, ducked behind a podium as the shoes narrowly missed his head.

In Arab culture, showing the soles of the feet is a sign of contempt and the shoe-throwing incident is a reminder of the widespread opposition to the US-led invasion.

Bush's visit to the Iraqi capital came just 37 days before he hands the presidency over to Barack Obama, who has vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

posted in Information Warfare - 6 replies

Gaza's strategic offshore gas reserves

EM — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:58:24 GMT

"The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline. British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority."

GlobalResearch.ca Centre for Research on Globalisation
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11680

Breaking the Silence, Israeli Soldiers Speak.
Courage to Refuse (The Combatants Letter)
The organization was founded in 2002 by a group of 50 combat officers and soldiers after its members realized that their missions had nothing to do with defending Israel. They're to colonize Palestine and oppress its people. They further believe that many commands issued them harm Israel's strategic interests and they refuse to obey them. by Stephen Lendman
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8777

ALPHABETIZED BOYCOTT LIST OF ISRAELI CORPORATIONS/AFFILIATES and BANKING INSTITUTIONs
http://www.palestinianmothers.com/profiles/blogs/alphabetized-boycott-list-of

hello there everyone. hmm.

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Obama's new BlackBerry: The NSA's secure PDA?

dakat — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:05:53 GMT

By Declan McCullagh CNET News.com
Posted on ZDNet News: Jan 13, 2009 11:52:21 AM

Bill Clinton sent only two e-mail messages as president and has yet to pick up the habit. George W. Bush ceased using e-mail in January 2001 but has said he's looking forward to e-mailing "my buddies" after leaving Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama, though, is a serious e-mail addict. "I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry," he said in a recent interview with CNBC. "They're going to pry it out of my hands."

One reason to curb presidential BlackBerrying is the possibility of eavesdropping by hackers and other digital snoops. While Research In Motion offers encryption, the U.S. government has stricter requirements for communications security.

"Without more details I would have to say that putting sensitive or classified information on a BlackBerry is a risky proposition," said Greg Shipley, chief technology officer at Neohapsis, a governance, risk, and compliance consultancy.

Fortunately for an enthusiastic e-mailer-in-chief, some handheld devices have been officially blessed as secure enough to handle even classified documents, e-mail, and Web browsing.

One is General Dynamics' Sectera Edge, a combination phone-PDA that's been certified by the National Security Agency as being acceptable for Top Secret voice communications and Secret e-mail and Web sites. Through three separate interchangeable modules, it works with Wi-Fi, GSM, or CDMA networks, and is dust-proof, waterproof, and rugged enough to survive repeated 4-foot drops onto concrete. Physically, it's a chunkier second cousin to the Palm Treo 750, though with an additional LCD display below the keyboard.

The price is $3,350 with a two-year warranty, a princely sum that's reflected in the Pentagon-worthy price tags for accessories: a simple adapter for a lighter plug costs $100. (Never again should you complain about how much your civilian analogue costs.)

The Sectera runs a mobile version of Microsoft Windows, including versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Windows Media Player. The NSA claims that the installed versions of Internet Explorer, WordPad, and Windows Messenger are good enough for data that's classified at a level of Secret. Presumably the federal spooks have found a way to protect IE from the numerous security flaws that continue to plague the Internet's most popular browser.

The NSA declined to comment on Monday.

L-3 Communications' Guardian, still in development, is similar, but sports a chunkier antenna and a slightly less conventional keyboard shaped like a V. It, too, runs Windows, boasts a stylus and QWERTY keyboard, supports desktop synchronization, and can be used on secure data plans with AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and, internationally, Worldcell. Files stored locally are encrypted.

Both PDA-phones owe their existence to a Defense Department project called SME-PED, meaning Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device. Because the SME-PED was explicitly designed to act as a classified-information-friendly replacement for a BlackBerry, it should be an easy switch for a President Obama.

That's assuming he still feels like e-mailing after Inauguration Day. Even though President Bush enjoys the same access to NSA-certified handhelds, he has never resumed his daily e-mail habit from the days when he went by the humble moniker of G94B@aol.com. (On January 17, 2001, Bush sent out this sad farewell: "Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.")

At the time, Karen Hughes, one of Bush's closest aides, said that the president chose to abandon e-mail because of public records laws. That includes the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, and the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

Obama may find the convenience of wireless e-mail a pleasure difficult to give up. News reports during the presidential campaign described how he relied on his BlackBerry to bypass aides, which was even satirized by the Onion.

He checked e-mail during his daughter's football games, e-chatted with actress Scarlett Johansson, and before the New Hampshire primary told CNET News that the BlackBerry was his favorite gadget. On the other hand, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail breach is still within recent memory, as are the Bush White House's legal troubles stemming from the use of Republican National Committee e-mail systems.

"It's not just the flow of information," Obama said in the recent interview. "I mean, I can get somebody to print out clips for me, and I can read newspapers. What it has to do with is having mechanisms where you are interacting with people who are outside of the White House in a meaningful way. And I've got to look for every opportunity to do that--ways that aren't scripted, ways that aren't controlled, ways where, you know, people aren't just complimenting you or standing up when you enter into a room, ways of staying grounded."

Federal law does explicitly exempt from disclosure any "personal records" that do not relate to the president's official function. Those include electronic records that are "of a purely private or non-public character" and don't relate to official duties; the law lists diaries, journals, notes, and presidential campaign materials as examples. Similarly, FOIA prevents files from being released if the disclosure would significantly jeopardize "personal privacy."

In other words, Obama could choose to keep e-mailing judiciously, and trust his lawyers and the law to fend off overly nosy journalists and historians.

Wireless devices: What price convenience?
One thing that security experts can agree on is that despite RIM's efforts, a BlackBerry probably isn't up to the security standards for a leader of the free (or even unfree) world.

BlackBerrys can become infected with viruses that install spyware or turn the microphone on and record conversations, malware can be inadvertently downloaded, e-mail and text messages can be intercepted, and, of course, they can be lost or stolen, said Dan Hoffman, chief technology officer of SMobile Systems, which sells antivirus software for the devices.

The National Vulnerability Database, which is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division, lists 14 vulnerabilities for BlackBerrys. Those include ways that a malicious attacker can install malware, and perhaps crash the device through a so-called denial of service attack.

It's not like snoopy computer utilities are difficult to find. Flexispy.com sells spyware that can be installed by someone with physical possession of a phone for 15 minutes. The creators boast that their software, once installed, can "bug a room or person" and "catch cheating husbands."

The U.S. government uses special ciphers for secret information and they use different data networks from the public data networks, said Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive of encryption provider PGP Corp. "Unless you're using point-to-point encryption technology...or the mail itself is encrypted, you would have exposure to people administering the network." And, on a related note, we know that Obama's cell phone records through Verizon were improperly accessed last year.

There's also the risk of someone tracking the coordinates of a BlackBerry through the device's built-in GPS or the carrier's ability to triangulate on the signal--something that police, for instance, claim they should be able to do without a search warrant or evidence of criminal activity. Bush White House aides say that security concerns prompted them to disable the GPS feature on their BlackBerrys.

James Atkinson, president of Granite Island Group, an engineering firm that helps the government protect classified networks and equipment, pointed this out as a possible security vulnerability. "You can identify where a person is without gaining access to the cell phone network just by the timing of the signals, Atkinson said. "You can identify who is sitting in which seat in a conference room from a couple thousand feet away."

Then again, it's not like the president of the United States and his entourage travel incognito that often.

If nothing else works, Obama can always turn to Bush for some tips. Not his immediate predecessor, but former President George H.W. Bush, a late-in-life convert to the joys of e-mail. Bush the Elder has been quoted as saying: "I'm what you might call a black belt wireless e-mailer."

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-262060.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Sad Stupid American Shit

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:51:56 GMT

this is a thread for sad, stupid american shit.

It overflow...eth

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=28003#comments

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 5 replies

ManFeelings

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:48:13 GMT

lol

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20081107/sc_livescience/steamymagazinesmakemenfeelasbadaswomen

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Finance

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:35:08 GMT

reasonably good expose:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/business/22target.html?pagewanted=1#

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

dakat — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:36:58 GMT

By Mark Baard
Published Saturday 23rd June 2007 09:02 GMT

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest

Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.

Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc (http://www.simulexinc.com).

SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.

Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.

The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.

Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA (http://www.darpa.mil) and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (http://www.dhs.gov), where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.

In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to simulate crises on the US mainland.

The Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM-J9) in April began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces over "Noble Resolve 07", (http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/nobleresolve.html) a homeland defense experiment.

SEAS (as will SWS) provides figures for specific economic sectors, and helps military, intel and marketing people visualize their global connections. Users can vary export and import figures for manufactured goods, for example, to gauge the potential impacts on other sectors

In August, the agencies will shift their crises scenarios from the East Coast to the Pacific theatre.

JFCOM-J9 completed another test of SEAS last year. Called Urban Resolve (http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/uresolve.htm), the experiment projected warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015, eight years from now.

JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.

Military and intel officials can introduce fictitious agents into the simulations (such as a spike in unemployment, for example) to gauge their destabilising effects on a population.

Officials can also "inject an earthquake or a tsunami and observe their impacts (on a society)", Chaturvedi added.

Jim Blank, modelling and simulation division chief at JFCOM-J9, declined to discuss the specific routines military commanders are running in the Iraq and Afghanistan computer models. He did say SEAS might help officers determine where to position snipers in a city square, or to envision scenarios that might emerge from widespread civil unrest.

SEAS helps commanders consider the multitude of variables and outcomes possible in urban warfare, said Blank.

"Future wars will be asymetric in nature. They will be more non-kinetic, with the center of gravity being a population."

The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.

The other SEAS models are far less detailed, encompassing only a few thousand nodes altogether, Blank said.

Feeding a whole-Earth simulation will be a colossal challenge.

"(SWS) is a hungry beast," Blank said. "A lot of data will be required to make this thing even credible."

Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.

Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.

One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.

Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a "like someone" with the same stats, but not the same name.

Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.

And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.

"There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS," Chaturvedi said.

SEAS bases its AI "thinking" on the theories of cognitive psychologists and the work of Princeton University professor Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioural economics.

Chaturvedi, as do many AR developers, also cites the work of positive psychology guru Martin Seligman (known, too, for his concept of "learned hopelessness") as an influence on SEAS human behaviour models. The Simulex website says, if a bit vaguely, SEAS similarly incorporates predictive models based upon production, marketing, finance and other fields.

But SWS may never be smart enough to anticipate every possibility, or predict how people will react under stress, said Philip Lieberman, professor of cognitive and linguistic studies at Brown University.

"Experts make 'correct' decisions under time pressure and extreme stress that are not necessarily optimum but work," said Lieberman, who nevertheless said the simulations might be useful for anticipating some scenarios.

JFCOM's Blank agreed that SWS, which is using computers and code to do cultural anthropology, does not include any "hard science at this point".

"Ultimately," said Blank, "the guy to make decision is the commander." ®
Related stories

Living with robots: The $3.5m DARPA Urban Challenge (3 November 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/03/darpa_uc_blog/
AMD gives itself Web 2.0rhea (14 September 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/14/twitter_amd/
Jock Stirrup: Eco apocalypse will mean more wars (25 June 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/25/climate_change_means_war_say_forces/
UK invades California in cyber MMORPG wargame (16 June 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/16/cwid_uk_thin_pipe_mmorpg/
Military love affair with videogames intensifies (9 June 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/09/xbox_controller_warbot_n_military_gaming/
Role-players amok in Second Life (18 April 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/18/role_play_in_sl/
Military thinktank sees dark future (11 April 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/11/admiral_nostradamus_parry/

© Copyright 2008

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

homeland army brigade

SkOrPiTaRiO — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:16:32 GMT

Army deploys combat unit in US for possible civil unrest
by Bill Van Auken, WSWS via Uruknet

For the first time ever, the US military is deploying an active duty regular Army combat unit for full-time use inside the United States to deal with emergencies, including potential civil unrest.

Beginning on October 1, the First Brigade Combat Team of the Third Division will be placed under the command of US Army North, the Army's component of the Pentagon's Northern Command (NorthCom), which was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with the stated mission of defending the US "homeland" and aiding federal, state and local authorities.

The unit—known as the "Raiders"—is among the Army's most "blooded." It has spent nearly three out of the last five years deployed in Iraq, leading the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and carrying out house-to-house combat in the suppression of resistance in the city of Ramadi. It was the first brigade combat team to be sent to Iraq three times.

While active-duty units previously have been used in temporary assignments, such as the combat-equipped troops deployed in New Orleans, which was effectively placed under martial law in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this marks the first time that an Army combat unit has been given a dedicated assignment in which US soil constitutes its "battle zone."

The Pentagon's official pronouncements have stressed the role of specialized units in a potential response to terrorist attack within the US. Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, attended a training exercise last week for about 250 members of the unit at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The focus of the exercise, according to the Army's public affairs office, was how troops "might fly search and rescue missions, extract casualties and decontaminate people following a catastrophic nuclear attack in the nation's heartland."

"We are at war with a global extremist network that is not going away," Casey told the soldiers. "I hope we don't have to use it, but we need the capability."

However, the mission assigned to the nearly 4,000 troops of the First Brigade Combat Team does not consist merely of rescuing victims of terrorist attacks. An article that appeared earlier this month in the Army Times ("Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1"), a publication that is widely read within the military, paints a different and far more ominous picture.

"They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control," the paper reports. It quotes the unit's commander, Col. Robert Cloutier, as saying that the 1st BCT's soldiers are being trained in the use of "the first ever nonlethal package the Army has fielded." The weapons, the paper reported, are "designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them." The equipment includes beanbag bullets, shields and batons and equipment for erecting roadblocks.

It appears that as part of the training for deployment within the US, the soldiers have been ordered to test some of this non-lethal equipment on each other.

"I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered," Cloutier told the Army Times. He described the effects of the electroshock weapon as "your worst muscle cramp ever—times 10 throughout your whole body."

The colonel's remark suggests that, in preparation for their "homefront" duties, rank-and-file troops are also being routinely Tasered. The brutalizing effect and intent of such a macabre training exercise is to inure troops against sympathy for the pain and suffering they may be called upon to inflict on the civilian population using these same "non-lethal" weapons.

According to military officials quoted by the Army Times, the deployment of regular Army troops in the US begun with the First Brigade Combat Team is to become permanent, with different units rotated into the assignment on an annual basis.

In an online interview with reporters earlier this month, NorthCom officers were asked about the implications of the new deployment for the Posse Comitatus Act, the 230-year-old legal statute that bars the use of US military forces for law enforcement purposes within the US itself.

Col. Lou Volger, NorthCom's chief of future operations, tried to downplay any enforcement role, but added, "We will integrate with law enforcement to understand the situation and make sure we're aware of any threats."

Volger acknowledged the obvious, that the Brigade Combat Team is a military force, while attempting to dismiss the likelihood that it would play any military role. It "has forces for security," he said, "but that's really—they call them security forces, but that's really just to establish our own footprint and make sure that we can operate and run our own bases."

Lt. Col. James Shores, another NorthCom officer, chimed in, "Let's say even if there was a scenario that developed into a branch of a civil disturbance—even at that point it would take a presidential directive to even get it close to anything that you're suggesting."

Whatever is required to trigger such an intervention, clearly Col. Cloutier and his troops are preparing for it with their hands-on training in the use of "non-lethal" means of repression.

The extreme sensitivity of the military brass on this issue notwithstanding, the reality is that the intervention of the military in domestic affairs has grown sharply over the last period under conditions in which its involvement in two colonial-style wars abroad has given it a far more prominent role in American political life.

The Bush administration has worked to tear down any barriers to the use of the military in domestic repression. Thus, in the 2007 Pentagon spending bill it inserted a measure to amend the Posse Comitatus Act to clear the way for the domestic deployment of the military in the event of natural disaster, terrorist attack or "other conditions in which the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."

The provision granted the president sweeping new powers to impose martial law by declaring a "public emergency" for virtually any reason, allowing him to deploy troops anywhere in the US and to take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of state governors in order to "suppress public disorder."

The provision was subsequently repealed by Congress as part of the 2008 military appropriations legislation, but the intent remains. Given the sweeping powers claimed by the White House in the name of the "commander in chief" in a global war on terror—powers to suspend habeas corpus, carry out wholesale domestic spying and conduct torture—there is no reason to believe it would respect legal restrictions against the use of military force at home.

It is noteworthy that the deployment of US combat troops "as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters"—in the words of the Army Times—coincides with the eruption of the greatest economic emergency and financial disaster since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Justified as a response to terrorist threats, the real source of the growing preparations for the use of US military force within America's borders lies not in the events of September 11, 2001 or the danger that they will be repeated. Rather, the domestic mobilization of the armed forces is a response by the US ruling establishment to the growing threat to political stability.

Under conditions of deepening economic crisis, the unprecedented social chasm separating the country's working people from the obscenely wealthy financial elite becomes unsustainable within the existing political framework.

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

What?

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:43:06 GMT

As someone who listens to their mp3 player frequently, this is a good reminder:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081013/sc_nm/us_eu_music

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

oppose wall street bailout

Thaabit — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:59:40 GMT

For anyone who hasn't taken a position on the bailout lemme try to convince you that you should oppose it. The assets they are proposing to buy with our money are worth a lot less than we're being told. These assets are headed by the same people who led us to the current dilemma. Bankruptcy by contrast would force a change in leadership. This is a case where the market really should be allowed to do its thing. I hope everyone sees the irony in this; those who praised the free hand of the market loudly and persistently for since Gringrich's Republican revolution are now on bended knee, asking us, the taxpayers for approx 1 trillion dollars, i.e. increasing the national debt by 25 %. For years we've been told we didn't have the money for education, because taxes reduce the creation of wealth. The same people who now ask us permission to borrow, together as a nation, an amount greater than the net worth of greater south asia, used to brag about their prowess in cutting programs for education, infant mortality, nutrition, scientific research, infrastructure...... you get the idea:

UNMITIGATED GAUL!

Let wall street crash and burn, or sink into the mire, whatever your metaphor. I'm so disappointed in the democrats. They are so afraid of being blamed for the destruction of the existing financial paradigm, when in fact they should be celebrating their participation in the system's demise. Our overheated economy has stalled, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate the whole thing, from the ground up. Now is not the time to try to reinflate ideas that have proven themselves incorrect with a short sighted Trillion Dollar Hail Mary. How are the democrats letting themselves get railroaded into this thing?

One more bit. The scarcity of credit that they propose will occurr in the wake of a financial collapse is just a bogeyman. With or without a scarcity of credit, the economy is going to go through a re-adjustment. A lot of houses are going to change hands. A lot of people are going to be forced into abject poverty. This is the reality that no one wants to face. The bailout will have the immediate effect of massive inflation, something on the scale of 10 - 15 percent within the first year is my wild guess. They tell us they can avoid inflation because of the fancy financial instruments they have, but its the same voodoo that led them to believe risk no longer existed in home mortgages, houses can not go down in value, and the stock market is a more stable investment for social security than treasure bonds. Inflation is inevitable. I can't believe no one is talking about it yet.

oppose oppose oppose the bailout

posted in Information Warfare - 4 replies

advice? call to arms?

Thaabit — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:11:16 GMT

As I am against the bailout plan, I would like to ask advice on what one could do to go about trashing it.

My thought is that if you could slip just the right metaphor into the media's discourse, one could affect change at a national level. Let's say for instance that I wanted to slip in my metaphor for the bailout as a 4th down trillion dollar hail mary. What outlets would you contact and how? What websites? Anyone wanna help me try to trash this thing?

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

Mudslinging

jmparker — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:01:56 GMT

So, what do you think of Obama's responses to McCain's ads as lies?

Does giving lies a rebuttal help? Or does it just draw one deeper into the mire?

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

Obama Sued in Philadelphia Federal Court on Grounds he is Constitutionally Ineligible for the Presidency

dakat — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:02:42 GMT

http://www.americasright.com/2008/08/obama-sued-in-philadelphia-federal.html

Thursday, August 21, 2008

by Jeff Schreiber
America's Right.com

A prominent Philadelphia attorney and Hillary Clinton supporter filed suit this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission. The action seeks an injunction preventing the senator from continuing his candidacy and a court order enjoining the DNC from nominating him next week, all on grounds that Sen. Obama is constitutionally ineligible to run for and hold the office of President of the United States.

Philip Berg, the filing attorney, is a former gubernatorial and senatorial candidate, former chair of the Democratic Party in Montgomery (PA) County, former member of the Democratic State Committee, and former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania. According to Berg, he filed the suit--just days before the DNC is to hold its nominating convention in Denver--for the health of the Democratic Party.

"I filed this action at this time," Berg stated, "to avoid the obvious problems that will occur when the Republican Party raises these issues after Obama is nominated.".

Berg cited a number of unanswered questions regarding the Illinois senator's background, and in today's lawsuit maintained that Sen. Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen or that, if he ever was, he lost his citizenship when he was adopted in Indonesia. Berg also cites what he calls "dual loyalties" due to his citizenship and ties with Kenya and Indonesia.

Even if Sen. Obama can prove his U.S. citizenship, Berg stated, citing the senator's use of a birth certificate from the state of Hawaii verified as a forgery by three independent document forensic experts, the issue of "multi-citizenship with responsibilities owed to and allegiance to other countries" remains on the table.

In the lawsuit, Berg states that Sen. Obama was born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii as the senator maintains. Before giving birth, according to the lawsuit, Obama's mother traveled to Kenya with his father but was prevented from flying back to Hawaii because of the late stage of her pregnancy, "apparently a normal restriction to avoid births during a flight." As Sen. Obama's own paternal grandmother, half-brother and half-sister have also claimed, Berg maintains that Stanley Ann Dunham--Obama's mother--gave birth to little Barack in Kenya and subsequently flew to Hawaii to register the birth.

Berg cites inconsistent accounts of Sen. Obama's birth, including reports that he was born at two separate hospitals--Kapiolani Hospital and Queens Hospital--in Honolulu, as well a profound lack of birthing records for Stanley Ann Dunham, though simple "registry of birth" records for Barack Obama are available in a Hawaiian public records office.

Should Sen. Obama truly have been born in Kenya, Berg writes, the laws on the books at the time of his birth hold that U.S. citizenship may only pass to a child born overseas to a U.S. citizen parent and non-citizen parent if the former was at least 19 years of age. Sen. Obama's mother was only 18 at the time. Therefore, because U.S. citizenship could not legally be passed on to him, Obama could not be registered as a "natural born" citizen and would therefore be ineligible to seek the presidency pursuant to Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution.

Moreover, even if Sen. Obama could have somehow been deemed "natural born," that citizenship was lost in or around 1967 when he and his mother took up residency in Indonesia, where Stanley Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian citizen. Berg also states that he possesses copies of Sen. Obama's registration to Fransiskus Assisi School In Jakarta, Indonesia which clearly show that he was registered under the name "Barry Soetoro" and his citizenship listed as Indonesian.

The Hawaiian birth certificate, Berg says, is a forgery. In the suit, the attorney states that the birth certificate on record is a forgery, has been identified as such by three independent document forensic experts, and actually belonged to Maya Kasandra Soetoro, Sen. Obama's half-sister.

"Voters donated money, goods and services to elect a nominee and were defrauded by Sen. Obama's lies and obfuscations," Berg stated. "If the DNC officers ... had performed one ounce of due diligence we would not find ourselves in this emergency predicament, one week away from making a person the nominee who has lost their citizenship as a child and failed to even perform the basic steps of regaining citizenship as prescribed by constitutional laws."

"It is unfair to the country," he continued, "for candidates of either party to become the nominee when there is any question of the ability to serve if elected."

posted in Information Warfare - 5 replies

Peaceful Protest Gets Dangerous...

ha li,i — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:21:56 GMT

So, one of the things I've been waiting to see unravel is the unfortunate twist a protest of a small group on the Chinese Consulate went down several days ago. Nothing. Just a tiny blip on the wide map of seemingly random shit that goes down every day. Looks like it is being overlooked and/or dismissed.

Most complete video I've seen, here:

http://video.nbc11.com/player/?id=283328#videoid

What do you think?
An elaborate hoax that the rappelling girl wasn't in on, her group sacrificing her to the 'greater good' of trying to make China look worse to gain national attention to Tibet's cause, or do you think that China will hide behind 'they got what was coming to them' , that local SF police should have been there to protect them?

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

Obama and the Bilderbergers--Disinformation?

dakat — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:46:36 GMT

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread360930/pg1

posted in Information Warfare - 32 replies

Internet Censorship is On it's Way. The i-Patriot Act

dakat — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:46:37 GMT

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

During a group panel segment titled “2018: Life on the Net”, Lessig stated: There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.

The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

Of course, the Patriot Act is filled with all sorts of insanity about changing the way civil rights are protected, or not protected in this instance. So I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent, is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works. He said “of course there is”.

Lessig is the founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. He is founding board member of Creative Commons and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.
These are clearly not the ravings of some paranoid cyber geek.

The Patriot Act, as well as its lesser known follow up the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as USA Patriot Act II, have been universally decried by civil libertarians and Constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum. They have stripped back basic rights and handed what have been described by even the most moderate critics as “dictatorial control” over to the president and the federal government.

Many believed that the legislation was a response to the attacks of 9/11, but the reality was that the Patriot Act was prepared way in advance of 9/11 and it sat dormant, awaiting an event to justify its implementation.

In the days after the attacks it was passed in the House by a majority of 357 to 66. It passed the Senate by 98 to 1. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was even allowed to read the legislation.

Now we discover that exactly the same freedom restricting legislation has already been prepared for the cyber world.

An i-9/11, as described by Lawrence Lessig, would provide the perfect pretext to implement such restrictions in one swift motion, as well as provide the justification for relegating and eliminating specific content and information on the web.

Such an event could come in the form of a major viral attack, the hacking of a major city’s security or transport systems, or some other vital systems, or a combination of all of these things. Considering the amount of unanswered questions regarding 9/11 and all the indications that it was a covert false flag operation, it isn’t hard to imagine such an event being played out in the cyber world.

However, regardless of any i-9/11 or i-Patriot Act, there is already a coordinated effort to stem the reach and influence of the internet.

We have tirelessly warned of this general movement to restrict, censor, control and eventually completely shut down the internet as we know it, thereby killing the last real vestige of free speech in the world today and eliminating the greatest communication and information tool ever conceived.

Our governments have reams of legislation penned to put clamps on the web as we know it. Legislation such as the PRO-IP Act of 2007: H.R. 4279, that would create an IP czar at the Department of Justice and the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act of 2007: S. 522, which would create an entire ‘Intellectual Property Enforcement Network’. These are just two examples.

In addition, we have already seen how the major corporate websites and social networks are decentralizing and coming together to implement overarching identification, verification and access systems that have been described by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as “the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”

Some of these major tech companies have already joined efforts in projects such as the Information Card Foundation, which has proposed the creation of a system of internet ID cards that will be required for internet access. Of course, such a system would give those involved the ability to track and control user activity much more effectively. This is just one example.

In addition, as we reported yesterday, major transportation hubs like St. Pancras International, as well as libraries, big businesses, hospitals and other public outlets that offer wi-fi Internet, are blacklisting alternative news websites and making them completely inaccessible to their users.

These precedents are merely the first indication of what is planned for the Internet over the next 5-10 years, with the traditional web becoming little more than a vast spy database that catalogues people’s every activity and bombards them with commercials, while those who comply with centralized control and regulation of content will be free to enjoy the new super-fast Internet 2.

We must speak out about this rampant move to implement strict control mechanisms on the web NOW before it is too late, before the spine of the free internet is broken and its body essentially becomes paralyzed beyond repair.

http://www.yff365.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2162281%3ABlogPost%3A5863

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Beeeooooch

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:59:21 GMT

http://cdn.funnyordie.com/videos/4178033806

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

The Briton Facing 60 years In US Prison After Hacking Into Pentagon

dakat — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:19:10 GMT

The Observer - London, UK

http://tinyurl.com/67agpa

Sunday July 27 2008

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
The Observer

On the eve of a Lords ruling over US demands for his extradition, a British computer hacker claims that American prosecutors threatened to haul him before a military tribunal

When he wakes up this morning, Gary McKinnon will be 72 hours from learning whether he is on the fast track to a 60-year prison sentence, thanks to his obsession with aliens.

McKinnon, 42, from Enfield in north London, is accused by American prosecutors of illegally accessing top-secret computer systems in what they claimed in one legal document was 'the biggest military computer hack of all time'.

The self-taught IT expert insists he was simply looking for information the US government had on UFOs and is adamant that he never damaged any of its computer systems. This argument, however, cuts little ice with the Americans, who are trying to extradite him. Five years after being told by British police that he would probably get a six-month community service order for his exploits, McKinnon finds himself still wanted by the US authorities. A 2006 High Court ruling granted the extradition request, and on Wednesday the House of Lords will decide on McKinnon's appeal against that ruling.

That it should come to this is little short of outrageous, say his supporters. Soon after he was arrested in 2002, US prosecutors appeared to offer McKinnon a deal: if he agreed to extradition and admitted his guilt, he would get a sentence of three to four years, most of which could be served in the UK. When McKinnon rejected the offer - made in confidential meetings at the US embassy - his lawyers were told 'all bets were off'. They claim the US prosecutors upped the stakes, suggesting he would be 'treated like a terrorist' if he did not agree to face trial and plead guilty in the US.

McKinnon claims that at one stage there were suggestions that he would face a military tribunal, possibly at Guantánamo Bay. 'They said they wanted to see me fry,' he said.

McKinnon's lawyers claim that attempts to force him to accept a plea bargain constituted 'an unlawful abuse of the court process'.

A Lords ruling in favour of McKinnon, who has become a cause celebre for UFO enthusiasts, computer users and civil liberties groups, would force US prosecutors to restart their extradition process in the magistrates' courts, a major setback that could have ramifications for other Britons resisting removal to the US. A ruling against him would mean an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and leave him in legal limbo, banned from travelling abroad, forced to report to police every Friday, and barred from accessing the internet.

In a further twist, it has emerged that a crucial file containing details of the early meetings with the US prosecutors, at which the offers were apparently made, has gone missing from the office of McKinnon's solicitor. A laptop holding details of the same meetings was stolen from the car of one of his barristers.

The revelations have prompted febrile speculation among McKinnon's supporters, who fear that events have taken a sinister turn. McKinnon believes his phone has been bugged and claims to have been followed. As a result of his exploits, no IT company will now offer McKinnon a job. 'I think it's bloody ridiculous,' he said. 'They should employ me to bust paedophile rings or credit card frauds rather than stick me in jail for the rest of my life.'

These days he earns a living driving a fork-lift truck. It seems a mundane job for a man who between 1999 and 2002 broke into the most secure computer systems in the world from his north London flat. Using a computer language called Perl and a cheap PC, McKinnon linked a number of computer systems to search for US databases that were not protected by a password. 'I could scan 65,000 machines in less than nine minutes,' McKinnon said.

McKinnon unearthed unprotected computer systems operated by the US army, the navy, the Pentagon and NASA. On every system he hacked, he left messages. 'It was frightening because they had little or no security,' he said. 'I was always leaving messages on the desktop saying, "your security is really crap".'

One message has come back to haunt him. 'I said US foreign policy was akin to government-sponsored terrorism and I believed 9/11 was an inside job. It was a political diatribe,' he admitted.

In the end, the ease with which he could hack the systems became his undoing. 'I got sloppy. I went to places directly rather than jump through systems. NASA tracked back my IP address.'

McKinnon's interest in aliens was started by an internet-based group of UFO enthusiasts called The Disclosure Project. The group had collected more than 200 testimonies - some from people who have served in the US military - that 'confirm' that extra-
terrestrials exist. Not only that but, according to McKinnon, some of the testimonies offered proof that 'certain parts of Western intelligence had acquired and reverse-engineered their technology, mainly weaponry and free energy'.

Intrigued, McKinnon used the testimonies to help him search top-
secret US databases for information about free energy. 'I felt if it existed it should be publicly available,' he said. He says he came across many other hackers in the supposedly secure systems, many with Chinese and Russian internet addresses. Since his exploits were exposed, consecutive government reports have confirmed that the US military's computer systems remain poorly protected.

McKinnon was caught before he could find any confidential information on 'free energy', but he saw enough to believe the US authorities are suppressing what they know about aliens. He says he came across a document written by a NASA official who claimed the agency has to airbrush UFOs out of satellite photos because 'there are so many of them'.

With only a 56k modem, he found that downloading the huge volume of documents was too time-consuming. But McKinnon claims that he managed to capture almost two-thirds of an image of what he believes was either a UFO or a top-secret US craft operating in space.

The picture was confiscated, along with all the other material McKinnon downloaded. The material included an Excel spreadsheet entitled 'non-terrestrial officers' and a list of names. 'It was a really weird phrase,' McKinnon said. 'Maybe it was the secret development of a space force. Space is the next frontier and it's already being weaponised.'

His hacking career came to an abrupt end one morning in March 2002. The National High Tech Crime Unit searched his flat and arrested McKinnon and his then girlfriend. 'They said "you'll probably get six months' community service",' McKinnon claimed.

In the end the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute, but two years later, after crime unit officials visited Washington, apparently taking McKinnon's hard drive, the US government began extradition proceedings. 'Now I'm facing 60 years in prison,' McKinnon said. 'I believe my case is being treated so seriously because they're scared of what I've seen. I'm living in a surreal, nutter's film.'

The greatest hackers

Jonathan James At 16 he was the first juvenile to be jailed (for six months) for hacking in 2000. He targeted high-profile organisations including NASA, stealing more than $1.7m worth of software.

Adrian Lamo Broke into organisations such as the New York Times and Microsoft between 2002-2003 using internet connections at coffee shops and libraries. He had to pay $65,000, serve six months of home confinement and two years' probation.

Kevin Mitnick The Department of Justice called him 'the most wanted computer criminal in United States history' for his hacking activities between 1982 and 1992. He served five years, eight months in solitary confinement.

Kevin Poulsen Known as Dark Dante, he hacked into LA radio's KIIS-FM phone lines, earning himself a Porsche. Called 'Hannibal Lecter of computer crime' for his hacking activities between 1985 and 1991, he served five years in prison.

Listen to 'Strange Days... Indeed' - The PodCast

See:

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/sdi/program/subscribers/

\_______________________________________________/

UFO UpDates - Toronto - ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net
A UFO & Related Phenomena E-Mail List operated by
Errol Bruce-Knapp

UFO UpDates Archives are available at
The Virtually Strange Network:

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/subscribers/

To unsubscribe send a message to this address:

ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net

with 'Unsubscribe' in the Subject: line

MUFON Ontario
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/mufonontario/mufonindex.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Book Cites Secret Red Cross Report of C.I.A. Torture of Qaeda Captives

richardfash — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:07:59 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/washington/11detain.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1216627558-m5/NS2DUtKGIIRMXFPDXew&oref=slogin

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON — Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

The book says Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position” and was one of several prisoners to be “slammed against the walls,” according to the Red Cross report. The C.I.A. has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

The book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for The New Yorker, offers new details of the agency’s secret detention program, as well as the bitter debates in the administration over interrogation methods and other tactics in the campaign against Al Qaeda.

The book is scheduled for publication next week by Doubleday. The New York Times obtained an advance copy.

Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Bernard Barrett of the International Committee of the Red Cross declined to comment on the book except to say that the committee “regrets that any information has been attributed to us” because it believes its work is more effective when confidential.

He did confirm that committee personnel “are regularly visiting” the high-level Qaeda prisoners, now at Guantánamo Bay. “We have an ongoing confidential dialogue with members of the U.S. intelligence community, and we would share any observations or recommendations with them.”

The book says Abu Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he had been waterboarded at least 10 times in a single week and as many as three times in a day.

The book also reports that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, told the Red Cross that he had been kept naked for more than a month and claimed that he had been “kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room.”

The report says the prisoners considered the “most excruciating” of the methods being shackled to the ceiling and being forced to stand for as long as eight hours. Eleven of the 14 prisoners reported prolonged sleep deprivation, the book says, including “bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds 24 hours a day.”

Ms. Mayer acknowledges that Red Cross investigators based their account largely on interviews with the prisoners. But she writes that several C.I.A. officers she spoke with confirmed parts of the Red Cross description.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, confirmed that Red Cross workers had been “granted access to the detained terrorists at Guantánamo and heard their claims.” He said the agency’s interrogations were based on “detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice” and had “produced solid information that has contributed directly to the disruption of terrorist activities.”

“The Dark Side” also describes a frightening false alarm at the White House on Oct. 18, 2001, when, it says, an alarm went off on a machine designed to detect biological, chemical or radiological attacks. According to the book, among those who believed they might have been exposed to a pathogen was Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ms. Mayer quotes an unnamed “former administration official” as saying, “They thought that Cheney was already lethally infected.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said his office had not seen the book and could not comment. An administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to comment on the issue said aides had investigated the book’s account at Ms. Mayer’s request and that “no one recalls such an incident.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 12, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about a new book on American counterterrorism efforts omitted two responses from Bush administration officials to an assertion that Vice President Dick Cheney believed he might have been exposed to a pathogen in October 2001. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said the vice president’s office had not seen the book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” by Jane Mayer, and could not comment on it. An administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that officials had investigated the book’s claim at Ms. Mayer’s request and that “no one recalls such an incident.”

Because of an editing error, the article also failed to attribute the assertion about Mr. Cheney’s fears; it should have specified that “the book said” that Mr. Cheney was among those who believed he might have been exposed to a pathogen after a false alarm at the White House on Oct. 18, 2001 on a machine designed to detect biological, chemical or radiological attacks.

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

X-Files Doubletalk--Morgellons disease: Managing a mysterious skin condition

dakat — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 01:44:30 GMT

Morgellons disease is mysterious and controversial. Here you'll find answers to common questions about Morgellons disease — and suggestions for coping with it.

Morgellons disease is a mysterious skin disorder characterized by disfiguring sores and crawling sensations on and under the skin. Although Morgellons disease isn't widely recognized as a medical diagnosis, experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are investigating reports of the condition.

If you suspect that you have Morgellons disease, you may have many questions about the condition. Here's what you need to know about Morgellons disease, including practical tips for managing your signs and symptoms.
What are the signs and symptoms of Morgellons disease?

According to the Morgellons Research Foundation, primary signs and symptoms of Morgellons disease include:

* Skin lesions, often accompanied by pain or intense itching
* Fibers — which may be white, blue, red or black — in and on the lesions
* Crawling sensations on and under the skin, often compared to insects moving, stinging or biting
* Joint and muscle pain
* Fatigue significant enough to interfere with daily activity
* Inability to concentrate and difficulty with short-term memory
* Behavioral changes

Other signs and symptoms may include:

* Changes in vision
* Stomach pain or other gastrointestinal symptoms
* Changes in skin texture and color

Morgellons disease shares characteristics with various recognized conditions, including attention-deficit disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder and a mental illness involving false beliefs about infestation by parasites (delusional parasitosis).
How long has Morgellons disease been around?

In 1674, English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne used the term "Morgellons disease" to describe "black hairs" emerging from childhood skin lesions. Today, the Morgellons Research Foundation doesn't claim that the disorder described by Browne is the same as Morgellons disease. Rather, the foundation adopted the term as a convenient label for a set of signs and symptoms.
How widespread is Morgellons disease?

Reports of Morgellons disease have been made in every state in the United States and various countries around the world. Most reported cases are clustered in California, Texas and Florida.
What do researchers know about Morgellons disease?

Beyond anecdotal reports, researchers know little about Morgellons disease. The Morgellons Research Foundation reports no known causes of Morgellons disease and no successful treatment for the condition. Whether Morgellons disease is contagious remains a mystery.
How controversial is Morgellons disease?

Current attitudes toward Morgellons disease fall into various categories:

* Some health professionals believe that Morgellons disease is a specific condition likely to be confirmed by future research.
* Some health professionals believe that signs and symptoms of Morgellons disease are caused by another condition, often mental illness.
* Other health professionals don't acknowledge Morgellons disease or are reserving judgment until more is known about the condition.

Some people who suspect Morgellons disease claim they've been ignored, criticized as delusional or dismissed as fakers. In contrast, some doctors say that people who report signs and symptoms of Morgellons disease typically resist other explanations for their condition.
How can you cope with the signs and symptoms of Morgellons disease?

The signs and symptoms linked to Morgellons disease can be distressing. Even though health professionals disagree about the nature of the condition, you deserve compassionate treatment. While research continues, take positive steps to manage your signs and symptoms.

* Establish a caring health care team. Find a doctor who acknowledges your concerns and does a thorough examination. Since Morgellons disease often requires frequent follow-up visits, a local health care team may be most convenient.
* Be patient. Your doctor will likely look for known conditions that point to evidence-based treatments before considering a diagnosis of Morgellons disease.
* Keep an open mind. Consider various causes for your signs and symptoms, and follow your doctor's recommendations for treatment — which may include long-term mental health therapy.
* Seek treatment for other conditions. Get treatment for anxiety, depression or any other condition that affects your thinking, moods or behavior.
* Keep track of the latest news about Morgellons disease. Supplement the information you find online with articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals. Remember that some sources are more reputable than are others.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/morgellons-disease/SN00043

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

DNA ~ a slam dunk?

maryellenmarshall — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:20:41 GMT

A discovery leads to questions about whether the odds of people sharing genetic profiles are sometimes higher than portrayed. Calling the finding meaningless, the FBI has sought to block such inquiry.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dna20-2008jul20,0,5133446.story?page=1

<thanx www.metafilter.com >

love all-ways,
mem

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

SF IT System Lockout Continues

dakat — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:52:53 GMT

By Chris Preimesberger
2008-07-17

Administrators still cannot access San Francisco's main IT system, thanks to a now jailed employee who changed all the passwords and won't give them to authorities.

An IT employee who is charged with gumming up the works at the City and County of San Francisco's main data center by changing access passwords for administrators could have been stopped short of crippling access to the system if IT management had had the right security software in place.

Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, Calif., pleaded not guity in court July 17 at his arraignment on four felony counts of computer tampering. Childs remains in custody in lieu of $5 million bail. Childs, who makes $127,000 per year and has worked for the city for five years, has a bail hearing set for July 23.

Childs, a computer network administrator for the Department of Technology, is charged with tampering with the system's FiberWAN [Fibre Channel-connected wide area network], which contains San Francisco's sensitive Human Resources, payroll and other personal data. He created an administrative password that provided him superior access to the network.

Childs, who was arrested July 13, refuses to divulge to authorities the new secret password he concocted—even four days after his arrest.

Childs is accused of "tampering with the City and County of San Francisco's FiberWAN network system in such a way as to deny other authorized administrators access to the network and to set up devices to gain unauthorized access to the system," according to a statement from District Attorney Kamala Harris's office.

The city system—which handles most of the city's digital records, including confidential law enforcement documents, inmates' bookings, payroll records, and departmental e-mail—apparently has no back door access, even for highly authorized administrators. City officials were still trying to figure out how to get back into the FiberWAN Thursday afternoon.

City and County of San Francisco technology department manager Ron Vinson declined to return numerous messages left on his office phone by eWEEK. Mayor Gavin Newsom has had little or nothing to say publicly about the case thus far. Law enforcement officials have been tight-lipped with the media.

Security companies that sell into this market are beginning to come forward with their expertise to discuss the incident. EMC's RSA Security—which also uses a relatively new security approach called dynamic security—Hewlett-Packard, Sun StorageTek, IBM and NetApp are the larger IT companies that sell centralized key management.

Cyber-Ark, an identity management specialist based in Newton, Mass., said that the network lockout could have been avoided if managers had operated a high-security approach to master passwords.

"This is yet another example of the power privileged identities, such as administrative passwords have and the havoc they can cause in the wrong hands," said Cyber-Ark vice-president Adam Bosnian.

Hackers, or rogue employees such as this case, are savvier on how to create the most damage with the least effort, and the use of admin passwords does just that. Unfortunately, the San Francisco department left themselves wide open by not taking their privileged identity management seriously."

A city spokesperson estimated that this internal breakdown will cost millions of dollars in repairs. Though the network is running, there is still no way for IT administrators to access it at this time.

"It is critical to take a more proactive approach to secure company back doors," Bosnian said. "Companies install complex systems for personal passwords and overlook the more numerous privileged passwords and identities that provide even more system access. These security breakdowns will continue to occur until these keys to the kingdom are securely centralized and managed."

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/SF-IT-System-Lockout-Continues/

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

GOP cyber-security expert suggests Diebold tampered with 2002 election

dakat — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:23:44 GMT

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
Published: Friday July 18, 2008

A leading cyber-security expert and former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he has fresh evidence regarding election fraud on Diebold electronic voting machines during the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and senatorial elections.

Stephen Spoonamore is the founder and until recently the CEO of Cybrinth LLC, an information technology policy and security firm that serves Fortune 100 companies. At a little noticed press conference in Columbus, Ohio Thursday, he discussed his investigation of a computer patch that was applied to Diebold Election Systems voting machines in Georgia right before that state's November 2002 election.

Spoonamore is one of the most prominent cyber-security experts in the country. He has appeared on CNN's Lou Dobbs and ABC's World News Tonight, and has security clearances from his work with the intelligence community and other government agencies, as well as the Department of Defense, and is one of the world’s leading authorities on hacking and cyber-espionage.

In 1995, Spoonamore received a civilian citation for his work with the Department of Defense. He was again recognized for his contributions in 2004 by the Department of Homeland Security. Spoonamore is also a registered Republican and until recently was advising the McCain campaign.

Spoonamore received the Diebold patch from a whistleblower close to the office of Cathy Cox, Georgia’s then-Secretary of State. In discussions with RAW STORY, the whistleblower -- who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation -- said that he became suspicious of Diebold's actions in Georgia for two reasons. The first red flag went up when the computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds. The source states that Cox was not privy to these changes until after the election and that she became particularly concerned over the patch being installed in just those two counties.

The whistleblower said another flag went up when it became apparent that the patch installed by Urosevich had failed to fix a problem with the computer clock, which employees from Diebold and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office had been told the patch was designed specifically to address.

Some critics of electronic voting raised questions about the 2002 Georgia race even at the time. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who was five percentage points ahead of Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss in polls taken a week before the vote, lost 53% to 46%. Incumbent Democratic Governor Roy Barnes, who led challenger Sonny Perdue in the polls by eleven points, lost 51% to 46%. However, because the Diebold machines used throughout the state provided no paper trail, it was impossible to ask for a recount in either case.

Concerned by the electoral outcome, the whistleblower approached Spoonamore because of his qualifications and asked him to examine the Diebold patch.

McCain adviser reported patch to Justice Department

The Ohio press conference was organized by Cliff Arnebeck and three other attorneys, who had filed a challenge to the results of that the 2004 presidential election in Ohio in December, 2004. That challenge was withdrawn, but in August 2006 Arnebeck filed a new case, King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, alleging civil rights violations in the 2004 voting. The case was stayed in 2007. On Thursday, Arnebeck filed a motion to remove the stay and allow fresh investigation.

Individuals close to Arnebeck's office said Spoonamore confirmed that the patch included nothing to repair a clock problem. Instead, he identified two parallel programs, both having the full software code and even the same audio instructions for the deaf. Spoonamore said he could not understand the need for a second copy of the exact same program -- and without access to the machine for which the patch was designed, he could not learn more. Instead, he took the evidence to the Cyber-Security Division of the Department of Justice and reported the series of events to authorities. The Justice Department has not yet acted on his report.

Allegations surrounding Ohio in 2004

At the Ohio press conference yesterday, the former McCain adviser said Michael Connell, of the Republican Internet development firm New Media Communications, had designed a system that made possible the real-time "tuning" of election tabulators once Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell had outsourced the hosting of vote counting on the same server which hosted GOP campaign IT systems. He said he didn't believe Connell was behind the alleged fraud, but that he should be considered a key witness.

Spoonamore also confirmed he's working with Connell on overseas election issues and that Connell is now working as John McCain's IT developer.

Connell has a long history with the Republican Party's IT infrastructure. In 2001, for example, he set up MajorityWhip.gov for then House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. He also helped built georgewbush.com, as well as the Ohio GOP site Spoonamore referenced.

Sources close to Spoonamore said he was very concerned that he would lose his contracts as a result of coming forward and would take a "large financial hit." These sources added that, despite his concerns, Spoonamore felt obligated to reveal what he knows to the public. "He felt he had no choice as an American citizen but to come forward, and he also knows the likely consequences of him doing so," one source said.

http://rawstory.com//news/2008/Cybersecurity_expert_raises_allegations_of_2004_0717.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Bohemian Grove

marvindublin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:12:06 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_grove

I have friends working there now. It's a two week affair.

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren't Allowed to See on Google Maps

dakat — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:18:35 GMT

Well this probably will help narrow it down for our enemies--some odd choices also, like so many sites in the Netherlands.

http://www.itsecurity.com/features/51-things-not-on-google-maps-071508/

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side

dakat — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:31:49 GMT

Harper's interview with the writer about Bush regime torture and coverup.

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/07/hbc-90003234

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Most Things are not what they Appear

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:53:31 GMT

including your Obama puppet, an icon for all of your hopes.

~V~

Published on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 by Salon.com
Today’s Coverup of Surveillance Crimes and Barack Obama
by Glenn Greenwald

What we learned in December, 2005 that George Bush and the telecoms were doing — listening in on the private conversations of American citizens without warrants — is a felony under clear U.S. law, punishable by up to 5 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine for each offense. Anyone can go read the section of FISA — right here — that says that as clearly as can be:
A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally — (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; . . .
An offense described in this section is punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.
It was also as clear a violation of the Fourth Amendment as can be. For the Government to invade our communications with no probable cause showing to a court is exactly what the Founders prohibited as clearly as the English language permitted.

But today, the Democratic-led Congress — with the support of both John McCain and Barack Obama, neither of whom will even bother to show up and vote — will cover-up those crimes. Law Professor and Fourth Amendment expert Jonathan Turley was on MSNBC’s Countdown with Rachel Maddow last night and gave as succinct an explanation for what Democrats — not the Bush administration, but Democrats — will do today.

Anyone with any lingering doubts about what is taking place today in our country should watch this:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/09/10243/print/

As Turley says, and as I’ve written many times over the last two weeks, what is most appalling here beyond the bill itself are the pure falsehoods being spewed to the public about what Congress is doing — and those falsehoods are largely being spewed not by Republicans. Republicans are gleefully admitting, even boasting, that this bill gives them everything Bush and Cheney wanted and more, and includes only minor changes from the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill passed last February (which Obama, seeking the Democratic Party nomination, made a point of opposing).

Rather, the insultingly false claims about this bill — it brings the FISA court back into eavesdropping! it actually improves civil liberties! Obama will now go after the telecoms criminally! Government spying and lawbreaking isn’t really that important anyway! — are being disseminated by the Democratic Congressional leadership and, most of all, by those desperate to glorify Barack Obama and justify anything and everything he does. Many of these are the same people who spent the last five years screaming that Bush was shredding the Constitution, that spying on Americans was profoundly dangerous, that the political establishment did nothing about Bush’s lawbreaking.

It’s been quite disturbing to watch them turn on a dime — completely reverse everything they claimed to believe — the minute Obama issued his statement saying that he would support this bill. They actually have the audacity to say that this bill — a bill which Bush, Cheney and the entire GOP eagerly support, while virtually every civil libertarian vehemently opposes — will increase the civil liberties that Americans enjoy, as though Dick Cheney, Mike McConnell and “Kit” Bond decided that it was urgently important to pass a new bill to restrict presidential spying and enhance our civil liberties. How completely do you have to relinquish your critical faculties at Barack Obama’s altar in order to get yourself to think that way?

The issues implicated by this bill — government spying, lawbreaking, manipulation of national security claims for secrecy and presidential power, the extreme privileges corporations inside Washington receive — have been at the very heart of progressive complaints against the Bush era for the last seven years. The type of capitulation and complicity which Jay Rockefeller and Steny Hoyer embraced is exactly what progressives have spent the last seven years scathingly attacking.

All of that magically changed for many people — by no means all — the day that Obama announced that he supported this “compromise,” when these issues were suddenly relegated to nothing more than inconsequential, symbolic distractions, and complicity with Bush lawbreaking magically morphed into shrewd pragmatism. It’s the same rationale that the dreaded Blue Dogs have been using since 2001 to justify their complicity which is now pouring out of the mouths of Obama defenders (we need to win elections first and foremost, and can only do that if we don’t challenge Republicans on National Security and Terrorism).
* * * * *
Stanford Professor Larry Lessig has been a hard-core Obama supporter since before the primaries even began. He knows the candidate himself and has all sorts of contacts at high levels of the campaign. Yesterday, Lessig wrote a scathing criticism of what the Obama campaign has been doing over the past several weeks: “All signs point to an Obama victory this fall. If the signs are wrong, it will be because of events last month.” This is what Lessig said about the Obama campaign’s attitude towards the FISA bill:
Yet policy wonks inside the campaign sputter policy that Obama listens to and follows, again, apparently oblivious to how following that advice, when inconsistent with the positions taken in the past, just reinforces the other side’s campaign claim that Obama is just another calculating, unprincipled politician.
The best evidence that they don’t get this is Telco Immunity. Obama said he would filibuster a FISA bill with Telco Immunity in it. He has now signaled he won’t. When you talk to people close to the campaign about this, they say stuff like: “Come on, who really cares about that issue? Does anyone think the left is going to vote for McCain rather than Obama? This was a hard question. We tried to get it right. And anyway, the FISA compromise in the bill was a good one.”
So the highest levels of the Obama campaign believe this bill is “a good one.” Lessig adds that the perception of Obama’s craven, nakedly calculating behavior as illustrated by his support for the FISA bill is by far the largest threat to his candidacy as it “completely undermine Obama’s signal virtue — that he’s different”:
The Obama campaign seems just blind to the fact that these flips eat away at the most important asset Obama has. It seems oblivious to the consequence of another election in which (many) Democrats aren’t deeply motivated to vote (consequence: the GOP wins).
I can’t count the number of emails I’ve received demanding that I stop criticizing Obama for his support of this bill on the ground that such criticisms harm his chances for winning — as though it’s the fault of those who point out what Obama is doing, rather than Obama himself for completely reversing his position, abandoning his clear, prior commitments, and helping to institutionalize the destruction of the Fourth Amendment and the concealment of Bush crimes.

Ultimately, it’s the sheer glibness of the support for this corrupt and Bush-enabling bill among Obama and his supporters that is most striking. Revealingly, Lanny Davis — a pure symbol of everything that is rotted and broken in our political culture — wrote an Op-Ed yesterday lavishly praising Obama for his support of the FISA bill on the ground that it “provided the senator an important chance to demonstrate his ‘Sister Souljah moment.’”

Beltway operatives like Davis can only understand the world through the prism of this finite set of clichés — Stand up the Left. Sister Souljah. Move to the Center. That’s the same oh-so-sophisticiated political analysis one finds everywhere to justify what Obama is doing. As Dan Larison put it yesterday:
In Obamaworld, apparently wrecking the Fourth Amendment is roughly equivalent to ridiculing some obscure rapper. The only thing more depressing than the conceit that supporting unconstitutional measures is a way to “signal” to swing voters that you are not a radical loon bent on “ideological purity,” which is basically to make defending the Constitution a position held only by radicals and extremists, is the dishonest representation of support for the compromise legislation as being a pro-civil liberties position.
John Nichols of The Nation — one of the most pro-Obama media organs in the country — pointed out yesterday that Obama won the critical Wisconsin primary in large part by holding himself out to Democratic voters there — for whom civil liberties is a vital issue — as a steadfast ally of Feingold on these issues:
Before the February 19 Wisconsin primary, which confirmed his front-runner status in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Illinois Senator Barack Obama went out of his way to associate his candidacy with the name of Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. . . .
Obama wanted to secure the support of the substantial portion of Democrats nationally who, in polls conducted in 2006, indicated that they would back Feingold if he entered the presidential race. Internal polls by the various campaigns indicated that Feingold drew as much as 15 percent of the vote in a number of key states, coming mostly from anti-war and pro-civil liberties progressives. . . .
“I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grass-roots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty,” declared Obama, who indicated that he would support efforts to filibuster any attack on the ability of citizens to use the courts to defend their privacy rights.
Obama’s stance helped him. It was cited in endorsements by prominent progressives and newspapers in Wisconsin and other later primary states. No doubt, it contributed to his landslide victory in the Badger State, where the Illinoisan won a vote from Feingold himself.
Yet, now that he is the presumptive nominee, Obama is standing not with Feingold, but with Bush and the special interests Obama once denounced. He says he’ll vote for a White House-backed FISA rewrite — which is likely to be taken up by the Senate this week — in opposition to the position taken by civil liberties groups, legal scholars on the left and right and, of course, Russ Feingold.
Who can justify that?
* * * * *
Ultimately, what’s most amazing about all of that is that — as Senate Intelligence Committee member Russ Feingold pointed out yesterday — even the vast majority of the Congress, let alone Obama apologists, have no idea what these spying programs even entail or how they work. As someone who isn’t on the Intelligence Committee, does Obama even know?

Either way, here’s what the ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson wrote to The Washington Post yesterday in response to Fred Hiatt’s latest Editorial praising Obama and the FISA bill:
The fact is that the revisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under consideration in the Senate this week would virtually do away with the role of the FISA court in overseeing new dragnet surveillance. Its role would be reduced to little more than serving as a rubber stamp.
It is a shame that the paper that uncovered the Watergate scandal, which helped lead to more congressional oversight of executive authority and the checks and balances of FISA, now believes that the president once again should have unfettered power to spy on Americans.
Sen. Feingold — who, as a member of both the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, probably knows as much about the NSA program as any member of Congress — added:
The government absolutely must be able to wiretap suspected terrorists to protect our security, and every member of Congress supports that. With this bill, however, for the first time since FISA was adopted 30 years ago, the government would be authorized to collect all communications into and out of the United States without warrants. That means Americans e-mailing relatives abroad or calling business associates overseas could be monitored with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing by anyone. This bill overturns the laws and principles that have governed surveillance for the past 30 years.
The San Fransisco Chronicle editorialized today:
Warrantless wiretapping of Americans should outrage Congress into banning the practice. But, in a display of political expediency, the Senate is about to bless it, following a similar cave-in by the House last month.
Making matters worse, both likely presidential candidates — Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain - plan to reverse their opposition and vote for the White House-backed rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The bigger of the two reversals is Obama, who earlier this year had promised a filibuster to defeat the bill.
These are just facts — facts about Barack Obama, the FISA bill he supports and which the Democratic Congress will approve today. Recall that James Comey testified last year that what he and other DOJ officials learned in 2004 about Bush’s spying activities for the several years prior was so extreme, so unconscionable, so patently illegal that they all — including even John Ashcroft — threatened to resign en masse unless it stopped immediately.

We still have no idea what those spying activities were. We know, though, that even the right-wing DOJ ideologues who approved of the illegal “Terrorist Surveillance Programs” that we know about found those activities indisputably illegal and wrong. But Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Congress will today enact a bill to immunize all of that, to protect the lawbreakers who were responsible.

As I’ve said many times before, there are clear differences between an Obama and McCain presidency. Denying that is just as irrational as those for whom the only political rule is Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Obama.

But it’s equally clear that politicians like Obama are unable within the prevailing political establishment to do much to stop the continued growth of the lawless surveillance state and our two-tiered system of justice, even if they wanted to stop it, even if they were willing to expend political capital to take a stand against it.

And Obama — with his support for this wretched assault on the Constitution and the rule of law — is demonstrating that, contrary to his many prior statements, these issues are anything but a priority for him (Larry Lessig: Obama aides say “the FISA compromise in the bill was a good one”). Differences between Republican and Democrats exist and are important in many cases, but those differences are often dwarfed by the differences between those entrenched in and dependent upon the Washington Establishment and those — the vast, vast majority of American citizens — who are not.

UPDATE: The Savannah Morning News has an article on the ads running against Democratic Rep. John Barrow.
The vote on the Dodd-Feingold-Leahy amendment to remove telecom immunity from the bill is taking place now. I will post the vote total and details as soon as it is done.

UPDATE II: The Dodd-Feingold amendment to remove telecom immunity from the bill just failed by a vote of 32-66.
I was mistaken about Obama’s not showing up to vote (that was the case, as I understood it, when the vote was scheduled for yesterday). He is in the Senate and, as he said he would, just voted (along with Hillary Clinton) in favor of the amendment to remove telecom immunity from the bill.

From listening, these are the Democrats who have voted in favor of removing immunity from the bill: Akaka - Baucus - Biden - Bingaman - Boxer - Brown - Byrd - Cantwell - Cardin - Casey - Clinton - Dorgan - Durbin - Feingold - Harkin - Inyoue - Kerry - Klobuchar - Lautenberg - Leahy - Levin - Mendenez - Murray - Obama - Reed - Reid - Sanders (I) - Schuemer - Stabenow - Tester - Whitehouse -Wyden.

Every Republican voted against removing immunity (including Arlen Specter, who spent all day arguing against immunity). Democrats voting against removing immunity: Bayh - Carper - Conrad - Feinstein - Johnson - Kohl - Landrieu - Lincoln - McCaskill - Mikulski - Nelson (FL) - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar - Webb.

Specter’s amendment is next (to ban immunity if the spying was unconstitutional). Then they will vote on the Bingaman amendment (which I wrote about yesterday). They will both fail, and then they will vote on the final bill in its unchanged form.

UPDATE III: Specter’s amendment — merely to require the court to determine the constitutionality of the NSA spying program and condition immunity on a finding of constitutionality — just failed 37-61. Obama voted in favor of the amendment, and Specter was the only Republican to do so.

All Republicans voted against, and these were the Democrats voting against: Bayh - Carper - Johnson - Landrieu - Lincoln - Mikulski - Nelson (FL) - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar. [NOTE: I’m recording these roll calls from watching the proceedings, and so it’s unlikely there are some errors and omissions. I will correct them as they are brought to my attention and will link to the official roll call vote once it is available. The Bingaman amendment is next.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.

posted in Information Warfare - 4 replies

Is TOU really a contract ?

RPMcMurphy — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:30:40 GMT

And have any of you had problems with TOU ...
due to the content of your posts ?

Not just trolling or flaming...
but ... because

Tribe found the content unseemly...
and perhaps... it was dangerous in some way ?

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

U.S. CONCENTRATION CAMPS - FEMA AND THE REX 84 PROGRAM

@-}-- — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:54:48 GMT

http://www.freedomfiles.org/war/fema.htm

What is the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Simply put, it is the "secret government". This agency has powers and authority that go well beyond any other agency in the nation. What can FEMA do? It can suspend laws. It can move entire populations. It can arrest and detain citizens without a warrant and can hold them without a trial. It can seize property, food supplies, and transportation systems. And it can even suspend the Constitution of the United States.

There over 600 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States.

The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a mass exodus of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose. Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this operation.

The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.

Once a major disaster occurs (whether it is a real event or manufactured event does not matter) Martial Law is hurriedly put in place and we are all in the hands of the government agencies (FEMA) who thus portray themselves as our protectors. Yet what happens when we question those in authority and how they are taking away all of our freedoms? Will we be the ones detained in these camp sites? And who are they going to round up? Those with guns? Those who ask questions? Those that want to know what’s really going on? Does that include any of us? The seekers of truth?

When first coming across this information I was in a state of total denial. How could this be? I believed our country was free, and always felt a sense of comfort in knowing that as long as we didn’t hurt others in observing our freedom we were left to ourselves. Ideally we treated everyone with respect and honored their uniqueness and hoped that others did likewise.

It took an intensive year of searching into the hidden politics to discover that we are as free as we believe we are. If we are in denial, we don’t see the signs that are staring at us, but keep our minds turned off and busy with all the mundane affairs of daily life.

We just don’t care enough to find out the real truth, and settle for the hand-fed stories that come our way over the major media sources television, radio, newspaper, and magazines. But it’s too late to turn back to the days of blindfolds and hiding our heads in the sand because the reality is becoming very clear. The time is fast approaching when we will be the ones asking "What happened to our freedom? To our free speech? To our right to protect ourselves and our family? To think as an individual? To express ourselves in whatever way we wish?"

Once we challenge that freedom we find out how free we really are. How many are willing to take up that challenge? Very few indeed, otherwise we wouldn’t find ourselves in the situation that we are in at the present time. We wouldn’t have let things progress and get out of the hands of the public and into the hands of those that seek to keep us under their control no matter what it takes, and that includes the use of force and detainment for those that ask the wrong questions.

Will asking questions be outlawed next? Several instances have recently been reported where those that were asking questions that came too near the untold truth (the cover up) were removed from the press conferences and from the public’s ear. Also, those that wanted to speak to the press were detained and either imprisoned, locked in a psychiatric hospital, slaughtered (through make-believe suicides) or discredited.

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Information Control For Social Manipulation

Killa Cham — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:57:01 GMT

Information Control For Social Manipulation

The news and entertainment we consume, and thus our thoughts and opinions, are shaped not just by the media and entertainment corporations but by governments, their agencies and the military-industrial complex.

Information Control

It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.
—Joseph Goebbels

The United States is the most media-saturated country in the world. We are bombarded daily with thousands upon thousands of images and sounds designed to get our attention, entertain, and inform us of everything from shoes to food to celebritydom to political ideology. Its been estimated that the average American is exposed to more than 3000 advertisements every day, but on top of that, there are the news programs, sitcoms, films, radio and other forms of media that we choose to consume. All of this works to shape our opinions of the world and a great deal of time, effort, and money is spent to guide our opinions down particular avenues. This used to be called "propaganda".

Today, with the negative, Nazi-esque connotation which comes with that word, euphemisms such as misinformation, disinformation, image consulting, political consulting, news consulting, advertising, infomercials, public relations, damage control, and the art of spin have taken its place in the English lexicon, all but concealing its true nature and omnipresence. And omnipresent, it is. The industries that deal with information control – in both the commercial and governmental sectors—work with hundreds of millions of dollars annually, for Schoolhouse Rock was right on target when it said, "Knowledge is Power!" Is it any wonder that our schools are suffering so badly while corporate CEOs and members of our government continually allot themselves raises? Uninformed, ignorant masses are far easier to manipulate then educated, thinking masses.

Who has the information? How is it being distributed? How is it contextualized?
Corporations and the US government have spent many decades and hundreds of billions of dollars researching how best to effect the American people. Much of this information is kept secret from the public (in the case of corporate research, it is their private property) and what is known has come from the more recent work done by scholars around the world – work that is dramatically under-funded by comparison. So, the information available to the average citizen – including the aforementioned academic scholars – is radically less than that which is available to the producers of media or information campaigns (i.e. advertising agencies, public relations firms, political consultants, etc.). However, an important fact that is known is that the human brain processes different mediums in different ways. Written and spoken words are put through a type of decoding process wherein the brain deciphers the words and the sentence structure in order to properly interpret what it is reading/hearing. In this process, both the conscious and unconscious mind go through an internal debate comparing what its interpreting with what it already knows to be true. With the image, however, the brain instantly processes it as truth, which means information presented in a visual format has a much greater impact on the unconscious. Over long periods of time, recurring imagery has a built-up effect on the viewer which allows for unconsciously conceived notions of truth to manifest as though from nowhere (keep this in mind as you read #69). Naturally, then, whomever has control over the mediums of communication has a tremendous amount of power over the populations who consume it.

NOTE: In no way is this intended to convince readers of any particular conspiracy theory, but rather to present a collection of facts – all of which are readily available to the average American – and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

Part I: Media Intents, Capabilities, Practices, and Origins

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
- Voltaire

1.) The radio, the computer, and the Internet are all products of the military. The radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in the mid-1890's and his first sale was to the British War Office in 1896 during the Boer War. Three years later, he made sales to the US Navy. During World War I, the United States put all commercial, amateur, and military (except for the Army's) radio equipment under the control of the Navy, a monopoly pursued immediately after the war, as well. Marconi, by the way, was a staunch supporter of the Neo-Fascism which dominated Italy beginning in the 1920's and Benito Mussolini was the best man at Marconi's 1927 wedding. The first operational electronic computer, Colossus, was built as a part of the ULTRA project for the British Department of Communication in the Foreign Office to assist in the decoding of intercepted Nazi transmissions. The first electronic digital computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) came out of a relationship between The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and the Ballistics Research Lab operated by the Army Ordinance Department at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. It was "designed expressly for the solution of ballistics problems and for the printing of range tables." The grandparent of the Internet is the ARPAnet, which came about in 1969. The Defense Agency Research Projects Administrations (DARPA) of the Department of Defense wished to create a communications infrastructure for the US military that could survive a nuclear attack. "Many of the best attributes of the Internet – including its architecture, technology, and gestalt – are the children of this military prototype," (Sussman, 1997, pp. 87, 89 and 90; Slater, 1987, pp. 16-17; Stern, 1981, pp. 1 and 15; Reid, 1997, p. xx).

2.) At the outset of World War I in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) had to devise a way to convince the primarily pacifistic American public (still reeling from the effects of the Civil War) to want to send their boys thousands of miles away to fight a war that didn't involve them. President Wilson came up with the Committee of Public Information, also known as the Creel Commission. Made up of cartoonists, writers, editors, publishers and others whose profession was to convey information to the masses (including Edward Bernays, the father of the public relations industry, and Walter Lippmann, the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy critic, and an important theorist of liberal democracy), they were, within a year, able to turn the American people into a fervent anti-German population. This exceedingly positive result caught the attention of two groups in particular. One was the intellectual community who saw these new propaganda techniques – and it was openly called propaganda at the time as there wasn't a negative connotation to that word until the Nazi's used many of the same techniques on their militaristic conquests thirty years later – as a general means by which they could control the population on a regular basis. The other were the business leaders, who saw a new window to increase their sales by turning the American people into a population of consumers. What was ultimately learned from all this was that in order to adequately persuade a population to do something, whether to go to war or buy a hamburger, one needed to appeal to them on levels of which they are unconscious (Chomsky, 1991, pp. 7-10 and 17-18; Chomsky & Barsamian, 2000, pp. 151-152; Boihem & Emmanouilides, 1996).

3.) Walter Lippmann "argued that what he called a 'revolution in the art of democracy,' could be used to 'manufacture consent,' that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn't want by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought that this was a good idea, in fact, necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, 'the common interests elude public opinion entirely' and can only be understood and managed by a 'specialized class' of 'responsible men' who are smart enough to figure things out. This theory asserts that only a small elite…can understand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things 'elude the general public.' This is a view that goes back hundreds of years," (Chomsky, pp. 10-11).

4.) German television in the early 1930's had been conceived as primarily a tool of propaganda rather than a means of entertainment. "A limited number of cinemas were equipped with 180-line projector receivers so that Nazi Party propaganda could be disseminated easily, and cinema television was used throughout the war for troop entertainment," (Hugill, 1999, p. 197).

5.) Its been noted that "violence is to a dictatorship, what propaganda is to a democracy," and the Nazis used both. Joseph Goebbels, appointed Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on March 14, 1933, combined the press, radio, film, theater, and propaganda into a single, large-scale organization and considered the media as "a piano…in the hands of the government" on which the government could play. Although monotony may set in if all means reported the same information, he developed a theory that the media should be "uniform in principles" but "polyform in nuances." This is a concept that has carried over to our media today. Although we have a tremendous amount of magazines and newspapers available to us, most of them are "highly centralized outlets that proffer a remarkably homogenized fare. News services for dailies throughout the entire nation are provided by the Associated Press…The New York Times and [the] Los Angeles Times-Washington Post wire services, and several foreign wire services like Reuters. The ideological viewpoint of these news conduits are pretty much the same, 'marked by a prefabricated standardization of news which is constricting and frightening,'" (Neale, Murphy, Mansky, Wintonick, & Achbar, 1992; Reuth, 1993, p. 174; Parenti, 1986, pp. 30-31).

6.) Fear is a powerful means for establishing social control over a population and the negative effects of media on its consumers are doing just that, for its been widely established for decades that regular viewers of violent films and/or television programming often look upon the world as being much more frightening, dangerous, and violent than those who view the same media in much less quantities or not at all. The same, by the way, is also true of regular viewers of the evening news. Furthermore, "psychiatrist Robert Coles writes that children in some parts of America are more frightened [about the world] than children in Lebanon or Northern Ireland;" this may very well have to do with the fact that some of the most violent programming on television are cartoons aimed at very young children. The potential consequences to this are staggering. A generation brought up to fear the world may be willing to do unhealthy things in order to protect themselves from things that aren't there, such as a readiness to sacrifice their basic civil liberties for a false sense of security (Jhally & Dinozzi, 1994; Pipher, 1994).

7.) Those who advocated the blacklisting practice in Hollywood did so on the grounds that "Communist and pro-Communist infiltration into the entertainment industries represented a serious peril to the American system of law and governance, and therefore to the freedoms which it enshrines." This clearly implies that both the government and Hollywood insiders considered the entertainment industry a powerful means of effectively communicating political thought (Cogley, 1956, p. viii).

8.) On October 24, 1947, Walt Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that films could be used successfully as a tool of propaganda and admitted his studios had already made several dealing with subjects such as the Treasury Department, the use of air power, and Hitler (Vaughn, 1972, p. 84).

9.) In the early 1950's, Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (which eventually merged together) were organized by the CIA as nothing more than outlets of propaganda. Headed by General Rodney C. Smith of the US Army, its intent was to broadcast into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe "to keep hope alive among our friends…to confuse, divide and undermine our enemies…" and, "…to encourage uprisings against their governments." Bing Crosby, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Rock Hudson, and Barbara Stanwyck all made propaganda films or radio broadcasts in support of RFE. This use of radio for propaganda purposes is happening today, as well (see 38). The November 8, 2001, Wall Street Journal mentioned that the Army's Fourth Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group (see 108) designed leaflets and radio broadcasts inside Afghanistan "to persuade enemy fighters to quit, and to convince civilians that U.S. bombs raining down on their country will result in a better future for their families" and an official of the US State Department told The New York Times that they wished to establish a radio station in either Iraq or Iran to "broadcast programs to many homes in Iraq. The content will be supporting democracy and freedom, identifying agents of the regime and mobilizing general support to get rid of Saddam," (Nelson, 1997, pp. 48-49, 52, and 144; Sussman, p. 169; Miller & Rampton, 2001; "Talk Radio", 2002).

10.) In the 1950's, ABC, CBS, and NBC offered Joseph McCarthy hours of free air time on television and the radio. Of course, he accepted (Bayley, 1981, p. 185).

11.) In his book The No Spin Zone, the right-wing host of FoxNews channel's The O'Reilly Factor wrote, "If you were a kid in the late 1950's, there's a good chance your thinking was shaped by two television programs, The Mickey Mouse Club and Howdy Doody. If you had asked me back then what I thought of these shows, I would have mocked them. Little wise guy that I was, I smirked at the sight of a bunch of kids wearing large rodent ears and grinning themselves into road maps of wrinkles. That, if you have to be told, was Mickey's gang, the Mouseketeers. As for the hokey puppet show, I was annoyed enough to talk back to the black-and-white TV. 'Hey, kids, what time is it?' some guy named Buffalo Bob yelled. A studio audience packed with kids screamed back, 'Howdy Doody time!' This gave me such a headache, I can't tell you. And my reply to Buffalo Bob's time line was, 'It's time for you to leave, buckskin man,' or words to that effect. The whole thing enthralled my sister but put me in a foul mood. I can still hear Sis singing, 'M-I-C – see you real soon – K-E-Y – why? Because we like you!' I was outraged! However, you will notice that more than forty years after first hearing these lines, I still remember them. That's the power of the tube," (O'Reilly, 2001, pp. 25-26).

12.) In the early 1980's, the US Army asked Atari to create a special version of the game Battle Zone as a training tool for drivers of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Since then, "talent and product have flowed between the two [the US military and video game manufacturers], creating a symbiotic relationship" in what has been coined the Military-Nintendo Complex. For example:
A. J.W. "Wild Bill" Stealy, the chairman of Interactive Magic, a North Carolina software company, is an Air Force Academy graduate and retired Air Force officer. His company produced Carrier Strike Fighter, a flight and combat simulator of the iF/A-18E, a fighter jet that had yet to be put into general operation.
B. MAK Technologies won a 1997 Department of Defense contract to make Marine Exed Unit 2000, an amphibious assault game intended for both military and commercial markets.
C. Every year, the US Government hosts the Connections Conference, which is intended to unite members of the Department of Defense and video game makers. "Attendees include personnel of the Defense Intelligence Agency and game companies like GT Interactive… Conference agendas have included such topics as 'Wargaming Design Fundamentals' and 'Department of Defense Wargaming 101' (Naisbitt, Naisbitt, & Philips, 1999, pp. 77-79).

13.) Its very difficult for a human being to kill a member of their own species; they have to be manipulated to do so. During World War II, its been estimated that, when left to their own devices, only 15-20% of individual riflemen would fire their weapon at an exposed enemy target. This was blamed primarily upon the training they received in which they would practice shooting at a bull's-eye. Of course, bull's-eyes don't appear on the battlefield and after the war, the military switched to human-shaped targets. By the Vietnam War, 95% of the riflemen fired their weapons when the right opportunity arose. Today, the Marine Corps use a modified version of the first-person action game Doom (known as Marine Doom) as a training device, along with the traditional live ammunition range targets as a means of normalizing killing amongst their personnel. In fact, this has been so successful, the Marine Corps Combat and Development Command in Quantico, VA have evaluated more than thirty commercially available electronic games for their potential use as training tools. This brings up a very disturbing question. If the US military has acknowledged for decades the success of using human-like targets to normalize killing, what, then, is the effect of the same or similar games on kids, where the objective is the near indiscriminate killing of "the enemy" using toy guns? With this in mind, the rise of school shootings should come as no surprise (Jhally & Huntemann, 2000; Naisbitt, et al., p. 76-77).

14.) "As the United States prepared in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States, and Western Europe, organized into 'The Trilateral Commission', issued a report. It was entitled 'The Governability of Democracies.' Samuel Huntington, a political science professor at Harvard University and a long-time consultant to the White House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with the United States. He called it 'The Democratic Distemper' and identified the problem he was about to discuss: 'The 1960's witnessed a democratic upsurge of democratic fervor in America.' In the sixties, Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of citizen participation 'in the forms of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and cause organizations.' There were also 'markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women, all of whom became mobilized and organized in new ways…' There was a 'marked expansion of white-collar unionism,' and all this added up to 'a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life.' Huntington pointed to the signs of decreasing government authority: The great demands in the sixties for equality had transformed the federal budget. In 1960 foreign affairs spending was 53.7 percent of the budget, and social spending was 22.3 percent. By 1974 foreign affairs took 33 percent and social spending 31 percent. This seemed to reflect a change in public mood: In 1960 only 18 percent of the public said the government was spending too much on defense, but in 1969 this jumped to 52 percent. Huntington was troubled by what he saw:

'The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960's was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.'
All this, he said, 'produced problems for the governability of democracy in the 1970's…' Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President. And:

'To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's Establishment.'

This was probably the frankest statement ever made by an Establishment advisor. Huntington further said that the President, to win the election, needed the support of a broad coalition of people. However: 'the day after his election, the size of his majority is almost – if not entirely – irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions in a society and government… This coalition must include key people in Congress, the executive branch, and the private-sector Establishment,'" (Zinn, 1999, pp. 558-560).

15.) At the forefront of White House thinking is the global command and direction of the world economy through information control. While World War II was still ongoing, "U.S. leadership recognized the centrality of information control for gaining world advantage. Well before most of the world could do much about it, U.S. groups, private and governmental, were actively promoting information and cultural primacy on all continents." US films and television programs are "the primary fare of national systems in most countries. News programs, especially CNN, offer U.S. perspectives, sometimes the only perspective provided, to world audiences. U.S. recorded music, theme parks, and advertising now conspire a major part of the world's cultural environment." News consultants, a major part of US news programs, have spread their particular brand of program structure to television stations all over the world, resulting in a more Americanized style (shorter news segments, a de-emphasis on government and politics, fewer talking heads, more visual material, "warm and fuzzy" stories, etc.) and more American content. "No less remarkable is the ad hoc adoption of English as the world's second language, facilitated by the waves of U.S. pop culture that have washed across all frontiers for forty years. And once the preeminence of English had been established, Anglo-American ideas, values, and cultural products generally have been received with familiarity and enthusiasm. All this is well known and amply documented, though the domestic media and political establishments are shy about acknowledging their de facto cultural domination of what they like to refer to as 'the global market.' What is of special interest here, however, is the skillful combination of information instrumentation with philosophic principle – a mix that fuels the push toward concentrated cultural power. Not the laws of chance but strategic planning, rarely identified as such, underlies this development. It has succeeded well beyond the initial expectations of its formulators," (Schiller, 1995, pp. 18-19; Allen, 2000, pp. 87 and 89-99).

16.) One of the many by-products of news consultancy on the news industry has been the decreased time spent by news programs on individual stories. This emphasis on concision is a very subtle, but very real form of censorship in that only accepted truths may be told. For example, if Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, or Diane Sawyer say that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden are bad guys, the viewing audience just silently agrees; no evidence to support such claims are needed. However, if something out of the ordinary is told, something that contradicts common understanding, then the audience very rightly wants to know more: "Why did you say that? I've never heard that before. How can you support such a statement?" Such evidence cannot be presented in the allotted 30 seconds given to the topic. So, when dissenters from the mainstream appear on such programs, they often appear as radicals, because they aren't given the time necessary to adequately establish their claims (Allen, p. 87; Neale, et al).

17.) "Ripped from the headlines!" Although millions of Americans watch the evening news, even more watch the entertainment programming that surrounds it; and those who do watch the news are only getting a sound bite or two as a substitute for any real knowledge or contextual understanding of the events described. However, programs dedicated to bringing fictionalized accounts of real events give considerably more. For those viewers, reality is tainted with a blurring of fact and fiction. Generally speaking, this is nothing new; Hollywood has been skimming stories from headlines for decades and television has certainly followed suit, from three different renditions of the Amy Fisher/Joey Buttofucco story (one on each major network), to four different versions of the teenage, Kentucky, blood-sucking, thrill-kill, vampire cult (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox), though, never has a program been so flagrant as to incorporate this practice into its own hype as NBC's Law & Order (see 92), which currently has four variations on the theme in production simultaneously (all of which are created and executive produced by Dick Wolf): Law & Order (L&O), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (CI), and Crime & Punishment (C&P). Essentially, what these programs do – with the exception of C&P – is to take real crime stories from the news, fictionalize them just enough to avoid lawsuits (several of the programs' writers are lawyers), and air them as entertainment (despite their efforts, Carolyn Condit – Gary Condit's wife – sued NBC and the producers of L&O for their depiction of "her" as she appeared in their fictionalized account of the Chandra Levy case). According to Rene Balcer, executive producer of CI, "People see the headline, see what the story is supposedly about, and there's already a built-in set of expectations from the audience that when we write the stories we can play off of and play against." If this is true, then could not the reverse also be true? Could not fictional programming create a series of expectations as to what the real case is/was about? What pushes the blur even further is the fourth series, C&P, which even uses the same theme music as L&O and airs immediately following CI. With this show, cameras follow the lives of city prosecutors – in and out of court – as they prepare for and try a case. After editing weeks of footage to fit the forty-five minute remainder – after commercials – of a sixty minute time-slot, what the viewer ultimately gets is a highly sanitized version of reality: the prosecutors never lose and rarely make mistakes, the defendant is always evil incarnate, etc. In what ways are these programs altering the American public's views of the world under the guise of pseudo-reality? I think this is a question worth asking (Boychuk, 1996; Levin, 2002).

18.) On average, individuals in industrialized nations spend three hours a day watching television – roughly half their leisure time; only to work and sleep is more time devoted. At this rate, someone who lives to be seventy-five would spend more than nine years of their life just watching TV. Why do we watch so much? In studies, subjects claimed that television was a means of relaxation, to which electroencephalograph (EEG) readings confirmed via brain waves, skin resistance and heart rates of subjects while watching television. However, even though relaxation is associated with TV by the viewers, research also has shown that passivity and a lowered level of alertness also correlate. Furthermore, once the television is turned off, the sense of relaxation dissipates rather quickly, but the passivity and lowered alertness remain for a considerable time. "Within moments of sitting or lying down and pushing the 'power' button, viewers report feeling more relaxed. Because the relaxation occurs quickly, people are conditioned to associate viewing with rest and lack of tension. The association is positively reinforced because viewers remain relaxed throughout viewing, and it is negatively reinforced via the stress and dysphoric rumination that occurs once the screen goes blank again. Habit forming drugs work in similar ways. A tranquilizer that leaves the body rapidly is much more likely to cause dependence than one that leaves the body slowly, precisely because the user is more aware the drug's effects are wearing off." Like a drug, heavy television use has long-term negative effects. Generally, heavy viewers are more easily bored, more easily distracted, have poorer attentional control, are less likely to participate in community activities or sports, and are more likely to be obese; they're more anxious and less happy than light viewers in unstructured situations, such as doing nothing, day-dreaming, or waiting in line. "The difference widens even more when the viewer is alone." Part of the human attraction to television has to do with our biological orienting response. "First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, the orienting response is our instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus. It is part of our evolutionary heritage, a built-in sensitivity to movement and potential predatory threats. Typical orienting reactions include dilation of the blood vessels to the brain, slowing of the heart, and constriction of blood vessels to major muscle groups. The brain focuses its attention on gathering more information while the rest of the body quiets…. In 1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of television – cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises – activate the orienting response, thereby keeping attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were affected by formal features, the researchers concluded that these stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses and 'derive their attentional value through the evolutionary significance of detecting movement…. It is form, not the content, of television that is unique'…. Annie Lang's research team at Indiana University has shown that heart rate decreases for four to six seconds after an orienting stimulus. In ads, action sequences and music videos, formal features frequently come at a rate of one per second, thus activating the orienting response continuously." Perhaps its time we heeded the wisdom of Umberto Eco who once wrote, "A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection – not an invitation for hypnosis," (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002; Boihem & Emmanouilides).

19.) A standard argument made by media executives is that broadcast television is offered without charge to the viewer. "However, to assume therefore that TV is free also assumes that the viewers' time is not valuable, because viewers pay for TV with their time. For every forty-five minutes of programme, we have to tolerate [approximately] fifteen minutes of commercials. [Media scholar Sut] Jhally…even goes so far as to argue that a TV viewer is a type of 'labourer' in the political economy of television. Viewers 'work' by watching commercials in exchange for a 'salary' consisting of entertainment and information programming." With such deregulation established in the mid-1980's allowing for greater advertising content per hour (one result of which was the creation of the infomercial), this metaphor of viewer as laborer implies that television is demanding increased productivity with an accompanying cut in pay (McAllister, 2000, pp. 112-113).

20.) Antonio Mendez, a retired member of the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS), wrote an article in the Winter 1999/2000 issue of the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, where he documents his involvement in the rescuing of six Americans trapped in Iran during the 1979-1981 hostage crisis. Apparently, he and other operatives posed as a Canadian film crew scouting locations near Tehran. Although posing as Canadians, the establishment of their false identities was done with the complete cooperation of Hollywood, including the use of Columbia Studios for their "production offices" and, as part of their disguise team, an award-winning makeup artist given the pseudonym of "Jerome Calloway", who was recently awarded the CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit. The question arises, then, as to how unusual this cooperation was. In his twenty page article, not once is there a mention of the uniqueness of either the situation nor the Hollywood/government cooperation and, in fact, he even mentions that his relationship with "Jerome" at the time was already ten years in the making. It's not surprising, then, that the president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America since 1966, Jack Valenti (see 22, 26, and 77), is a former White House insider. In fact, a man like him in such a position of power may have been necessary to guarantee the cooperation governmental agencies required – and still require—from Hollywood. Upon a search of the webpage for the Hollywood trade paper Variety, the name Tony Mendez came up as a technical advisor for the CBS drama about the CIA, The Agency (see 24). Originally supposed to air on September 14, 2001, it was delayed for ten days because of references to Osama bin Laden and a different episode was chosen to kick off the series. However, that episode had to be replaced, as it dealt with an Anthrax attack on Washington D.C. Instead, one concerning an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro was aired in its place (Mendez, 1999-2000; "Tony Mendez", 2003; "Project: The Agency", 2002).

21.) Upon the release of Top Gun (1986), the United States Navy set up recruiting booths in theaters where the film was being shown to capitalize on the pro-military fervor the film encapsulated. It's been speculated by some that the film "single-handedly wipe[d] out the post-Vietnam image of the military," (Campbell, 2001, August 29; Rooney, 2002).

22.) In August of 1999, the US Army signed a five-year, $45 million deal with the University of Southern California, chosen because of its close proximity to Hollywood, to have the school's movie, special-effects and other technology experts help with troop training, including battle scenarios, virtual-reality combat, and large-scale simulations creating settings similar to Operation Desert Storm. This partnership is known as the Institute for Creative Technologies (see ). "The digital world, the world of virtual reality…is going to be part of the embrace of this great, new cooperative venture," said Jack Valenti (see 20, 26, and 77). However, according to James Der Derian, professor of international relations at Brown University, "What we're witnessing here today is perhaps not only the announcement of a new sort of technological center, but the creation of a military-industrial-media-entertainment complex," ("U.S. Army", 1999 [italics mine]).

23.) Col. Kenneth "Crash" Konwin, head of the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, and Larry Tuch, a writer and designer with Paramount Digital Entertainment "detailed…how their organizations have adapted Hollywood multimedia technology and blockbuster movie storytelling skills to create realistic simulations that teach military officers how to make better decisions during international crises." This is a completely separate collaboration from the Institute for Creative Technologies (Brewin, 1999).

24.) In October of 1999, the CIA held a lavish gala film premier for In the Company of Spies, the first spy thriller ever to bear the CIA's stamp of approval. Starring Tom Berringer and Ron Silver, directed by Tim Matheson (Otter from Animal House), written by Roger Towne who wrote the screenplay for The Natural, and produced by David Madden and Robert W. Cort (who is, himself, a former CIA official), it was made directly for Showtime, a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, the world's largest media corporation. "Never before has the CIA so fully embraced a movie – it even allowed [the] director…to shoot inside the agency's sprawling Langley headquarters and provided 60 off-duty employees to serve as extras." Bill Harlow, the CIA's director of public affairs, said "senior CIA officials realized several years back that assisting sympathetic filmmakers and authors was one way the agency could be more open and accountable to the tax-paying public without divulging operational secrets. They even persuaded Chase Brandon, a veteran paramilitary officer who has jumped out of airplanes for the CIA all over the world, to take a job in the public affairs office as the agency's liaison to Hollywood in 1996." This has proven most effective, "with scriptwriters even rewriting history to present an upbeat portrait of the agency." In 2001, three new television series (The Agency [see 20], Alias, and 24) and seven films (including Bad Company, The Bourne Identity, and The Sum of All Fears) were made with the CIA's approval (Loeb, 1999; Campbell, 2001, September 6; Patterson, 2001).

25.) Hollywood film-makers and the Pentagon have a long history of cooperation. The Pentagon sees the film industry as an important part of public relations; according to a recently released memo, "military depictions have become more of a 'commercial' for us,'" which explains the Air Force's eagerness to be a part of the short-lived 2002 CBS reality series, American Fighter Pilots, which followed three men as they trained to fly F-15s, and was executive produced by Tony Scott (director of Top Gun) and his brother Ridley Scott (director of Black Hawk Down). Due to the enormous expense of military equipment, it makes financial sense for a film-maker to get military cooperation. However, this often entails the altering of scripts to fit the needs and desires of the Pentagon (i.e. military and government personnel are to be depicted in more positive and heroic ways, American ideologies are re-enforced and not criticized, etc.). For example:
A. In Goldeneye (1995), "the original script had a US Navy admiral betraying state secrets, but this was changed to make the traitor a member of the French navy."
B. The Jackal (1997) "received help after the marines were given a better role. Major Nancy LaLuntas had objected that the helicopter pilots had no 'integral part in the action – they are effectively taxi drivers.' A letter from the film's director, Michael Caton-Jones, stated: 'I am certain that we can address the points that you raised…and effect the appropriate changes in the screenplay that you requested.'"
C. Cooperation had been given to the production of Top Gun after the character portrayed by Kelly McGillis had been changed from an enlisted person to someone outside the military, as relationships between officers and enlisted personnel are against the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
D. Although Hearts in Atlantis (2001) had no military in the plot, the film-makers wished to use land belonging to the Army. "The Pentagon agreed and suggested that the film could include a shot of an Army recruiting booth in a carnival scene."
E. Despite having made changes to characters in Independence Day (1996), the Department of Defense refused help because, "the military appears impotent and/or inept; all advances in stopping aliens are the result of actions by civilians."
F. Other films to have received assistance from the Pentagon are: Air Force One (1997), A Few Good Men (1992), Armageddon (1998), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Pearl Harbor (2001), Patriot Games (1992), Windtalkers (2002), Hamburger Hill (1987), The American President (1995), Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Apollo 13 (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and A Time to Kill (1996).
G. Some films that were denied: Apocalypse Now (1979), Catch-22 (1970), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Full Metal Jacket (1987), The Last Detail (1973), Lone Star (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Platoon (1986), and The Thin Red Line (1998) (Campbell, 2001, August 29; Weiss, 2002).

26.) In November, 2001, President George W. Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, met with many entertainment executives to discuss the war on terrorism and ways that Hollywood stars and filmmakers might work together with the administration's communications strategy. It was spearheaded by Rove and Jack Valenti (see 20, 22, and 77), and organized by Sherry Lansing of Paramount Pictures. Among those represented at the meeting were CBS, Viacom, Showtime, Dreamworks, HBO, and MGM. According to the CNN article on which this section is based, "Valenti is a periodic visitor to the White House for briefings on major issues and initiatives. He was described as eager to help arrange [the] meeting," (King, 2001).

27.) To assist in the preparedness of possible future terrorist attacks, the Pentagon "put out a mayday call to filmmakers skilled at imagining potential terrorist acts," including writers Steven E. DeSouza (Die Hard) and David Engelbach (TV's MacGyver), and directors Joseph Zito (Invasion U.S.A.), David Fincher (Fight Club), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Mary Lambert (The In Crowd), and Randal Kleiser (Grease). They were asked "to engage in apocalyptic brainstorming of the kind that has yielded acts of cinematic terrorism." The group, a part of the Institute for Creative Technologies, was assembled by Army Brigadier General Kenneth Bergquist (Roberts, 2002; Grossberg, 2001).

28.) On February 19, 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was "developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations in an effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries." The OSI was created just after 9/11 "to publicize the U.S. government's perspective in Islamic countries and to generate support for the U.S.'s 'war on terror.' This latest announcement raises grave concerns that far from being an honest effort to explain U.S. policy, the OSI may be a profoundly undemocratic program devoted to spreading disinformation and misleading the public, both at home and abroad….The government is barred by law from propagandizing within the U.S., but the OSI's new plan will likely lead to disinformation planted in a foreign news reports being picked up by U.S. news outlets," ("Media Advisory", 2002).

29.) Usamah bin Mohammad bin Laden, known to the world as Osama bin Laden, has degrees in management and economics from King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. With such an education, its not surprising that he has a firm understanding of the purposes of the mass media, for he has been quoted as saying, "The media sector…strives to beautify the persons of the leaders, to drowse the community and to fulfill the plans of the[ir] enemies through keeping the people occupied with the minor matters, and to stir their emotions and desires until corruption becomes widespread." I don't think I could have said it any better, myself ("The New Powder Keg", 1996).

30.) In early 2003, ABC aired a short-lived reality series entitled Profiles from the Front Line. Executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down) and Bertram van Munster (The Amazing Race), it followed various members of the armed forces as they took part in the invasion of Afghanistan during the summer of 2002. It was made with the complete cooperation with the Pentagon who insisted upon screening the series before it was aired, though Bruckheimer insists no changes were made. "Vince Ogilvie, who was the Pentagon's project officer for the series, said the interactions of the film crews and military personnel provided 'a prelude to the process of embedding' media representatives in military units for war coverage." As of February, 2003, Bruckheimer and van Munster already had two crews assigned to accompany troops into Iraq (Gillies, 2003; Young, 2003).

31.) On a recent trip to Havana, actors Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte criticized the Hollywood corporate machine and claimed the war movies and violent films that are now so prevalent are "molded by the interests of the Pentagon and the White House." This is not the first time Glover has been critical of the Bush administration or its actions. In October of 2001, he compared Secretary of State Colin Powell to a "house slave," (Burns, 2002).

Part II: Corporate Media and Content Control

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
—A. J. Liebling

32.) In 1953, the infamous Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was harassing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) "over the assignment of television licenses in Wisconsin, trying to switch channel 10 in Milwaukee from educational use to commercial so that it could be assigned to the Hearst Corporation, publishers of the Milwaukee Sentinel, the largest paper supporting him in Wisconsin and trying to prevent the assignment of a UHF channel in Milwaukee to Bartell Broadcasters, a Madison group that included persons active as Democrats," (Bayley, p 178).

33.) The FCC was created to regulate interstate communications that run over radio, television, wire, satellite, or cable. Its authority is based on the idea that its decisions will serve the "public interest, convenience, or necessity…. The public owns the airwaves that radio and TV stations use and profit from. Media companies are allowed to use them on the condition that they serve the public; its part of the FCC's job to enforce that." However, their record for doing so is hardly impressive. Its current chairman, Michael K. Powell, a free-market zealot ("my religion is the market") – who happens to be the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell—isn't even trying to maintain the illusion he's upholding the standards he's supposed to. Upon his appointment as FCC chair, he was asked what the public interest was; Powell replied, "I have no idea," (see 36). It should be of no surprise, then, that the National Association of Broadcasters referred to him as "an outstanding choice" when he was nominated by George W. Bush. Michael Powell (Republican), Kathleen Q. Abernathy (Republican), Michael J. Copps (Democrat), Kevin J. Martin (Republican), and Jonathan S. Adelstein (Democrat) are the five members on the FCC commission and are "unknown to the general public and have virtually no contact with them. They are surrounded instead by corporate CEOs, lawyers and lobbyists. As one FCC Chairman put it, 'the job of the FCC is to regulate fights between the super wealthy and the super, super wealthy. The public has nothing to do with it.'" Members of the FCC tend to move on to extremely lucrative careers working for the very firms they once regulated. "When a firm comes before the FCC, FCC members don't know whether to regard it as an entity to be regulated or as a prospective future employer. This applies across the board, to Republicans and Democrats alike. The FCC Chair who preceded Michael Powell, Democrat William Kennard, has gone on to making big bucks working on telecommunication deals for the Carlyle Group," ("Speak Out", n.d. [italics mine]; "FCC Homepage", 2003; McChesney, 2003).

34.) In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Reform Act, which amended the Communications Act of 1934 and drastically reduced the restrictions placed upon media owners as to just how much they could own. "The 1996 Telecom Act was a corrupt piece of work, being the product of the largest corporate lobbies" like the National Association of Broadcasters and corporations like News Corporation and Viacom, "all salivating at the prospect of rewriting the law to provide them a larger slice of the action." The public played no role and it received virtually no news media coverage, except in the business and trade papers where it was covered as an issue of importance to owners and investors, not citizens in a democracy (McChesney, 2003).

35.) "The FCC conducted biennial reviews of the ownership rules in 1998 and 2000, and determined the rules should remain in place. At this point the biennial review was regarded as a benign and unreviewable process. The industry lobby went through the court system to get the rules thrown out. In 2002 a right wing federal appeals court demanded that the FCC provide a justification for keeping the ownership rules, or else they would have to be thrown out. Be clear that it was the appeals court, acting as the advocate of corporations that put the new aggressive pro-industry spin on the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The appeals court interpreted the law to mean that unless the FCC could provide compelling, even overwhelming evidence to justify keeping media ownership rules, they should be scrapped." Michael Powell is supposed to go before the courts and make the case on behalf of keeping media ownership rules in the public interest; Powell is famous for his pro-industry "rah-rah sentiments" and his hostility to regulation in the public interest. Furthermore, "the research that the FCC has developed to justify relaxing the media rules has been kept top secret; members of Congress and leading media scholars have asked to see it and been turned down," (McChesney, 2003).

36.) FCC commissioner Michael Copps has "pressed FCC chairman Powell to hold public hearings around the nation on the matter. Powell attended a portion of the first unofficial hearing in New York in January and convened one official public hearing in Richmond in February. But otherwise he has refused to attend any of the ten public hearings that have been held subsequently all across the nation. None of the three Republicans has attended any of these ten hearings. Copps, on the other hand, has attended all of them, and [John] Adelstein some of them…. Powell has explained his absence from the ten media ownership hearings on the grounds the he is too busy to attend them and that he knows enough about what the public thinks [see 33]. At the same time, Powell finds time to address the corporate media trade association meetings and he has an open door policy for corporate media CEOs like Rupert Murdoch." Most likely, Powell hasn't attended the hearings because their outcome is irrelevant. Even though, as of May 8, 2003, 9,065 statements on media ownership were submitted to the FCC by citizens unaffiliated with a self-interested corporation or trade organization and only eleven of them supported the proposed changes, "Commerce Secretary Donald Evans wrote to Powell telling him to move full speed ahead with the rules changes regardless of Congressional or public opposition." "Most people in this country have no idea what's about to happen to them," says dissenting FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, "even though their very democracy is at stake." One of the impending rule changes would allow a single company to own TV stations reaching 45% of the nationwide audience (instead of the current on-paper limit of 35%). But that understates the impact, as Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project pointed out: "The 45% number that has been floated is a fake number. It will realistically be much higher." Another FCC change would end the ban on a single firm's cross-ownership of daily newspapers and TV stations in four-fifths of the country's media markets. Commissioners Copps and Adelstein requested that Powell publicly air the proposed media concentration rules and allow a brief postponement to allow public reaction, but Powell refused. In response, Copps said, "This is really disappointing. The Chairman's decision not to make these proposals public, nor even to grant a short delay in voting, runs roughshod over the requests of the American people and the precedents of this Commission. This rush to judgment means that we will not fully understand the impact of the specific proposals on our media landscape before we are forced to vote. We are rushing to passage of new rules without letting the American people know who is going to own and control the public airwaves for years to come and without gaining the benefit of their input on what is being proposed. This is no way to do business when critical issues affecting every American are at stake. I am disappointed that the Chairman refuses to heed the calls of colleagues, as well as many Members of Congress, to let the sun shine on his proposals before the Commission decides on further media concentration." (McChesney, 2003[italics mine]; Solomon, 2003; "FCC Commissioner", 2003).

37.) Before he retired, AOL Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin told MSNBC that his company's Internet division had already helped terror investigators, "apparently providing access to e-mail traffic." According to Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, "there's an implicit quid pro quo here…the industry seems to be saying to the administration, 'we're patriotic, we're supporting the war…now free us from constraints.'" Although that may or may not be true, on June 2, 2003, the FCC voted 3-2 to relax the rules on media ownership (Roberts; Kirkpatrick, 2003).

38.) Whereas the FCC was developed to oversee the commercial sector of media, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), with an annual budget of $544.5 million, was developed to oversee all civilian, non-military international broadcasting funded by the US government. This includes such outlets as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) (a creation of the CIA [see 9]), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Voice of America (VOA), and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). Their mission statement spells out their purpose very clearly: "to promote and sustain freedom and democracy by broadcasting accurate and objective news and information about the United States and the world to audiences overseas," with an ultimate goal of creating a "Worldwide US International Broadcasting System." Some of their current projects include: Voice of America, with programming in 53 languages to more than 90 million listeners and television and Internet viewers around the world, "broadcasts daily editorials reflecting the views of the U.S. government", with a recent creation of programs for North Koreans, "including North Korean Periscope and North Korean Defectors' Odyssey to provide a forum for defectors"; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty "continued its emphasis on regions in the front line of the U.S.-led war on terrorism. The result: more than half the languages broadcast by RFE/RL are aimed at areas where the majority populations are Muslim"; the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio and TV Marti, "emphasize[s] U.S.-Cuba relations, the state of the Cuban economy, international human rights, [and] dissident movement on the island…" Clearly, this is all designed for the purposes of propaganda, despite the fact that the terms "balanced" and "objective(ly)" are used many times throughout their 32 page 2002 Annual Report. Among the board of directors for the BBG are Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, a former managing editor of Reader's Digest who was appointed director of VOA by Ronald Reagan in 1982; Joaquin F. Blaya, a former CEO of the Telemundo Group, Inc., the nation's second largest Spanish-language television network; D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, a former special attorney of the US Justice department and deputy chief of the criminal division's special litigation section; Norman J. Pattiz, founder and Chairman of Westwood One, America's largest radio network (owner, manager or distributor of the NBC Radio Network, CBS Radio Network, the Mutual Broadcasting System, CNN Radio, and Metro Networks, among others); Steven J. Simmons, Chairman and CEO of Patriot Media and Communications, LCC, a new company formed to purchase cable companies in the US; and as an ex-officio member of the Board, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. With this, then, Colin Powell and his son, Michael, have a controlling influence in a tremendous section of the media available throughout the world ("Strategic Plan", n.d.; "2002 Annual Report"; 2003).

39.) Conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly, in an interview with CBS News anchor Dan Rather, stated that news on the corporate owned networks refused to challenge "people of power" (presumably of the government or corporate world) because "the corporations have to do business with the powerful and they don't want to make enemies" to which Dan Rather responded, "You're absolutely accurate about that," (O'Reilly, pp. 153-154).

40.) After World War II, Allied forces restricted media concentration in occupied Germany and Japan "because they noted that such concentration promoted anti-democratic, even fascist, political cultures." In the 1950's, the majority of the American mass media (i.e. television stations, radio stations, film studios, magazine publishers, newspaper publishers, book publishers, advertising agencies, etc.) were owned by more than 1,500 corporations. By 1981, they were owned by less then fifty. Today, that number is six; they are: AOL Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corporation, and Vivendi Universal – with Sony, Liberty Media Corporation, and General Electric close behind (for a thorough listing of media owners and what they own, see The Columbia Journalism Review at ). In our current electoral process, "reaching audiences has become the substitute for what used to be called garnering constituencies. Just as advertisers sell products to audiences, political consultants market candidates to those same audiences. In contemporary media-driven elections, programme, advertising, and film audiences become targeted markets of voters. In the larger sense, citizens are transmuted into consumers, connecting with a media product instead of a political platform." According to The Alliance for Better Campaigns, a non-profit co-chaired by Walter Cronkite, television broadcasters earned around $771 million from political ads in 2000 (McChesney, 2000, p. 61; Nichols & McChesney, 2000, p. 28; Bagdikian, 2000, pp. 21-22; Andersen, 2000, p. 251; Taylor, 2002).

41.) William J. Casey was Reagan's CIA director and considered by many to be the second most powerful person in the Reagan administration; he was also one of Capital Cities' "founders, long-time counsel, board member[s] and largest stock holders." He had put pressure on ABC and all of the major US news organizations to be more supportive of the Reagan administration's conservative agenda. "In November 1984, he asked the FCC to revoke all of ABC's TV and radio licenses in retaliation for the network's airing of an ABC News report suggesting that the CIA had attempted to assassinate a U.S. citizen." Four months later, Capital Cities bought ABC for $19.2 billion, while Casey owned 34,000 shares of Capital Cities stock worth about $7 million (Mazzocco, 1994, pp. 2-3; Sussman, p. 189).

42.) Proctor & Gamble is one of television's largest advertisers, which gives them a great deal of power. If they don't like the content of a program, they can—and will—pull their sponsorship, potentially costing the offending network millions of dollars. They had a policy for many years that stated, in part, "There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking in all sentimental or spiritual motivations… Members of the armed forces must not be cast as villains. If there is any attack on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the same show." In 1990, Neighbor to Neighbor, a peace organization, got actor Ed Asner (of The Mary Tyler Moore Show [1970-1977] and Lou Grant [1977-1982] fame) to do a public service spot calling for a boycott of Folgers Coffee for buying its coffee beans from El Salvador, which was ruled by a brutal military regime at the time. Proctor & Gamble, owners of Folgers, threatened to pull its sponsorship from any station airing it. Boston television station WHDH ran the ad and lost about $1 million in advertising revenues (Parenti, 1992, pp. 186-189).

43.) News Corporation, the fifth largest media corporation in the world (owner of 20th Century Fox, Fox Television Broadcasting Corp. [including all subsequent Fox channels such as Fox Sports Channel, Fox Movie Channel, etc., as well as F/X and The National Geographic Channel]; magazines such as The Weekly Standard, Inside Out and TV Guide; newspapers such as The New York Post in the U.S., 22 papers in Australia and nine in England, including The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun; furthermore, it owns the publishing houses HarperCollins and Regan Books) is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has used his media power to nuzzle up to some of the most influential leaders of recent history, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair. Or, rather, they have nuzzled up to him. In the case of Tony Blair, in exchange for the support and endorsement of Blair in Murdoch's publications during his campaign, once elected, Blair was able to change British policy on media ownership to Murdoch's favor. In fact, Murdoch, himself, has been quoted as saying, "When you are the monopoly supplier, you are inclined to dictate," (Williams, 2000; "News", 2003; Jhally, 1997).

44.) Upon the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq on August 2, 1991, the Kuwaiti government hired at least twenty law and lobby firms to help shape the opinion of the little known country in the eyes of the American people. Hill & Knowlton (H&K), at the time the largest PR firm in the world, organized most of Kuwait's publicity, including the official Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which sponsored "Kuwaiti Liberation Day" on college campuses across the nation – passing out tens of thousands of T-shirts and bumper stickers – and costing the Kuwaiti government more than eleven million dollars, of which $10.8 million was billed to H&K as "service fees". H&K was soundly connected to both Washington and the news industry. The senior vice-president, Thomas Ross, was a Pentagon spokesman during the Carter administration; vice-chairman Frank Mankiewicz was a former press secretary and advisor to both Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern and had served as president of National Public Radio; Robert Gray, the chairman of H&K's US offices had leading roles in both of Reagan's presidential campaigns and was rumored to have been on the payroll of the CIA; Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, who was the supervisor of the Kuwait account, was a former Foreign Service Officer at the US Information Agency and a former associate of the Democratic lobbyist Ron Brown as he represented Haiti's Duvalier dictatorship; Lew Allison, producer of H&K's video news releases – which were distributed to news channels and often broadcast unedited as "news" – was a former producer of both CBS and NBC news. The president of H&K was a man by the name of Craig Fuller, who had been Reagan's Chief of Staff and a longtime friend of George Bush, Sr. After Reagan's second term, Fuller left the White House for his position at H&K, which was immediately hired by the Bush, Sr. presidential campaign team to handle his PR during the 1988 elections. After his stint at H&K, Craig Fuller went on to become Phillip Morris' top public relations executive. This governmental use of public relations firms is not uncommon in the least, either before or after Desert Storm. The Rendon Group's (see 98) past clients "include the CIA, USAID [United States Agency for International Development], the government of Kuwait, Monsanto Chemical Company, and the official trade agencies of countries including Bulgaria, Russia, and Uzbekistan. 'Through its network of international offices and strategic alliances,' the Rendon Group website boasts, 'the company has provided communications services to clients in more than 78 countries, and maintains contact with government officials, decision-makers, and news media around the globe.'" In post-Desert Storm Iraq, "Rendon was…a major player in the CIA's effort to encourage the overthrow of Saddam Hussein." They hired them "to run a covert anti-Saddam propaganda campaign. Rendon's postwar work involved producing videos and radio skits ridiculing Saddam Hussein, a traveling photo exhibit of Iraqi atrocities, and radio scripts calling on Iraqi army officers to defect… A February 1998 report by Peter Jennings cited records obtained by ABC News which showed that the Rendon Group spent more than $23 million dollars in the first year of its contract with the CIA. It worked closely with the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition coalition of 19 Iraqi and Kurdish organizations whose main tasks were to 'gather information, distribute propaganda and recruit dissidents.' According to ABC, Rendon came up with the name for the Iraqi National Congress and channeled $12 million of covert CIA funding to it between 1992 and 1996…. ClandestineRadio.com, a website which monitors underground and anti-government radio stations in countries throughout the world, credits the Rendon Group with 'designing and supervising' the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) and Radio Hurriah, which began broadcasting Iraqi opposition propaganda in January 1992 from a US government transmitter in Kuwait. According to a September 1996 article in Time magazine, six CIA case officers supervised the IBC's 11 hours of daily programming and Iraqi National Congress activities in the Iraqi Kurdistan city of Arbil. These activities came to an abrupt end on August 31, 1996, when the Iraqi army invaded Arbil and executed all but 12 out of 100 IBC staff workers along with about 100 members of the Iraqi National Congress." As with H&K, The Rendon Group hires people with experience in both government and media. Rick Rendon, the firm's creator and senior partner, "has served as a senior communications consultant to tens of dozens of government, corporate, union, trade association, and non-profit organizations, including the Government of Aruba, United States Department of Labor, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, and the Islamic Society of Boston." Furthermore, he previously served as a Public Information Officer for the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and as a member of President Jimmy Carter's national political staff. Phil Angellis, the Director of Operations, spent 22 years working in the Massachusetts State Senate and eleven years in a senior administrative position as Assistant Clerk and Parliamentarian. Kari Johnson, an account executive, currently works at the Boston affiliate of the WB; Jeff Schmidt, the Rendon Group Productions (RGP) producer/editor/videographer, was once on staff at ESPN; and Tara Haggett, RGP's production manager, has "coordinated various levels of marketing campaigns and post production for over 40 movies such as Toy Story, 101 Dalmatians, Conair, Speed II, Kingpins, Volcano, and Grosse Point Blank" as well as videos for Celine Dion and Mary Chapin Carpenter. A completely separate campaign headed by Charlotte Beers, "a former Madison Avenue advertising executive who was recently named the State Department's Undersecretary of State for 'Public diplomacy' (the official government euphemism for 'public relations')," was reported by The New York Times as "planning a television and advertising campaign to try to influence Islamic opinion." One part could feature American celebrities, including sports stars and a more emotional message. "In an October interview with Advertising Age, Beers said public diplomacy 'is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time. All of a sudden, we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves under this kind of attack, but also for the outside world.' The corporate-funded Advertising Council is reportedly working with Beers on developing the campaign. According to Advertising Age, the Ad Council 'has boiled its message down to one strategic idea: freedom.'" With so much of the information the public gets being nothing more than prepackaged, PR produced propaganda disguised as news, is it any wonder, then, that on Thursday, May 15, 2003, French officials formally complained in letters to the White House, State Department, and Congress, that their country was the victim of a campaign of "repeated disinformation," which they say is being fed to the press by Bush administration officials. Among the false claims, they say, is that France and Germany supplied Iraq with precision switches that could be used in nuclear weapons, that French companies sold Iraq spare parts for warplanes and military helicopters, that France possessed prohibited strains of human smallpox, and that France most recently helped Iraqi leaders escape to Europe by providing them with travel papers. Nathalie Loiseau, a spokeswoman at the French Embassy in Washington, "didn't point to anyone specifically in the administration as the source of the article, but said that France could only assume that journalists were being truthful when they cited unnamed officials in the administration." Responding to the claims, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "Certainly, there's no such campaign out of this building," which may very well be true, for its more likely that if there is such a campaign, its coming out of offices of the likes of Hill & Knowlton and The Rendon Group (Stauber & Rampton, 1995, pp. 169-171; MacArthur, 1992, pp. 49-51; Sussman, p. 157; Carlisle, 1993; Miller & Rampton, 2001; "The Rendon Group", 2003; Knowlton, 2003).

45.) During the first Gulf War, each of the big three networks had profound financial ties to the war. ABC was owned by Capitol Cities (which is now owned by The Walt Disney Company), whose chair was on the board of directors of Texaco Oil. CBS, at the time owned by Westinghouse, though now owned by Viacom, also owned the RAND Corporation and the Honeywell Corporation, both of which were and are major defense contractors and stood to make a great deal of money out of the war. NBC was – and still is—"wholly owned" by General Electric, which had a $2 billion weapons contract with the US military, making both the Tomahawk and the staggeringly unsuccessful Patriot missiles, and estimated that they'd make hundreds of millions more with the rebuilding of Kuwait after the war. Also, the Kuwaiti royal family were major GE stockholders. General Electric CEO John Welch reportedly once told NBC president Lawrence Grossman "Remember, you work for GE," (Naureckas, 1991; Williams; "Corporate Info", 2003; Jhally, 1997).

46.) In his 1995 autobiography, Lawrence Grossman (president of PBS [1976-1984] and NBC [1984-1988]) wrote, "The corporate culture came to dominate the news business, treating news as a commodity or service no different from 'toasters, light bulbs, or jet engines,' to quote John F. Welch, chairman of General Electric, which bought NBC in 1986. Welch insisted that NBC News had no greater responsibility for public service than any of GE's more traditional lines of business, regardless of news' special Constitutional standing and the broadcast company's historic FCC license obligations… They [Welch and a good many of his colleagues] had no qualms about doing whatever was necessary to achieve that goal [the profit-making requirements of the NBC news department], with little regard for journalistic standards, integrity, or taste," (Grossman, 1995, p. 75).

47.) "The simple fact is that in most traditional newsrooms the culture of journalism is to determine the basic nature of a story before assembling all, or even most of, the facts. Just as many theorists develop a working hypothesis before collecting the data, many journalists are used to formulating the angle, or frame, of a story before they interview anyone, read a document, or collect any other facts. Sometimes they are more apt to follow the adage, 'Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.'" Why is this? There are many reasons, but a major one continues to be that "the changing economic structure of the television networks has eroded the[ir] newsroom values… Where once a culture committed to great journalism flourished, a culture dominated by MBAs and financial accountability has taken its place. Accountability to shareholders [to make money] has replaced accountability to democracy and the citizens it serves," (Pavlik, 2001, pp. 312-314).

48.) The Fox network, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, was sued by two veteran journalists under Florida's whistleblower law. Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, working for Fox 13 in Tampa Bay, uncovered an important story "critical of Monsanto, the world's largest agrochemicals company, second largest seed company, fourth largest pharmaceutical company, and a main advertiser on Fox Television nationally. Monsanto produces a synthetic bovine growth hormone (BGH) marketed under the name Prosilac. Prosilac is banned in Canada and Europe because of its links to cancers of the colon, breast and prostate, and the bacterial and antibiotic residues left in milk. Akre found that virtually all milk sold in Florida comes from cows injected with Prosilac, and even though labeling is required, to offer consumers a choice, consumers were not being informed. After two months of investigation, the reporters produced a hard-hitting story." According to Steve Wilson in an article he wrote for The Nation (8 June 1998) about this experience, "We learned that routine tests for drug residue in milk don't screen for a wide variety of antibiotics. We confirmed that two Canadian government regulators have charged that Monsanto offered a $1-2 million bribe in exchange for approval of the drug without further testing. We documented a revolving door between Monsanto and the FDA. We followed the money trail to the University of Florida, where Monsanto sent millions in gifts and research grants; FDA approval was granted. Meanwhile, we found farmers who said the company wasn't properly reporting the drug's adverse effects on animals, a charge Monsanto eventually acknowledged." Despite the quality documentation of their story, it was pulled. Monsanto had hired a lawyer to pressure the head of Fox News Network in New York. As it turned out, Monsanto is a client of Actmedia, an advertising firm also owned by Rupert Murdoch. "After the story was pulled, the station's general manager reviewed the report's content, found it accurate and set another air date. The general manager was then fired and replaced by a News Corp. executive, David Boylan, who told the two journalists, 'We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We'll decide what the news is. The news is what we say it is.' After refusing a cash settlement that would have silenced them on the issue, and rewriting the story over eighty times, both journalists were fired in December 1997." As an interesting aside, Monsanto's genetically modified New Leaf Superior potato is engineered to produce the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). "Bt kills the Colorado potato beetle but it is also in every one of the New Leaf Superior's cells. Thus, it is legally registered with the Environmental Protection Agency as a pesticide, not a food and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cannot regulate the New Leaf Superior potato because the FDA does not have the authority to regulate pesticides." Mmm Mmm Good (Andersen, 2000, p. 11, Mickey Z, 2003).

49.) When a film is first released, it's not uncommon for someone to sneak a camcorder into the theater and record the film in its entirety and transfer the footage to bootlegged DVDs to be sold on the street. In an attempt to thwart such efforts, some theaters are "now sending in enforcers with night vision goggles [like you might find in the Army] to ferret out the pirates." But, as camcorders get increasingly smaller, that solution is not always reliable. That's why the film industry is working on the development of a system that would "create an annoying flicker that would be picked up by the camera, but not seen by the naked eye…The research for that technology is being funded by the U.S. government, which underscores the size of the piracy problem," ("Hollywood Cracks", 2003).

50.) In 1906, Congress enacted a landmark copyright law that allowed artists to protect their creations. However, there was a time limit placed upon that protection, after which, it would become a part of the public domain, and time was running out for Disney over its copyright of Mickey. But, thanks to the racist Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who got behind and aided in the passing of a bill that extended Mickey's copyright until 2022, Disney needn't worry about a dip in their $2 billion in annual product revenue. This is thanks, in part, to the recently formed Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (Solomon, 1999).

51.) Think we have free speech in this country? Not if you're on television; just ask Bill Maher. Soon after the September 11th attacks, Maher, in response to the labeling of the hijackers as cowards, said on his late night ABC program Politically Incorrect, "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." Less than a week later, his show was cancelled. ABC (whose parent company is Disney) claimed the cancellation had nothing to do with Maher's statements but was exclusively about his ratings, which had been sagging for some time. "That was just the straw that broke the camel's back," said Maher. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who hadn't actually seen the broadcast, said Maher's comments were "a terrible thing to say" and that it was a reminder that Americans "need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." That's a pretty extreme statement, and even one of Bush's media consultants, Mark McKinnon, called Fleischer's comments "Big Brother-ish," (Armstrong, 2001, September 20; "Maher Tapes", 2002; Armstrong, 2001, September 27; Hirsen, 2002, March).

52.) During a March 10th, 2003, concert in London, the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, Natalie Maines, told her audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas!" As a result, there have been many organized boycotts across the nation. Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the U.S. (more than 1,200), pulled the Dixie Chicks from their stations' play lists. Clear Channel is also involved with organizing grass-roots demonstrations in favor of the war and against anti-war voices. The company's Vice Chair, Tom Hicks, is a member of the Bush Pioneer Club for elite—and very generous – campaign contributors and was once the Regent of the University of Texas. During that time, he "was responsible for granting endowment management contracts of the newly created [under legislation signed by then Governor George W. Bush] UT Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO). The contracts were given to firms politically connected to both Hicks and Bush, including the Carlyle Group – a firm which has the first President Bush on the payroll [and had previously had the second one, as well]. The board of UTIMCO also included the Chair of Clear Channel, L. Lowey Mays. [Mays has been quoted as saying "If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't have been someone from our company. We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."] In addition, Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers from [George W.] Bush, making him a millionaire through a deal that was partially sweetened by a shiny new taxpayer financed stadium, which included valuable land obtained at below market rates through the use of eminent domain." Along with the 1,200+ radio stations, Clear Channel also owns 36 television stations, 41 amphitheaters, and annually puts on more than 26,000 stage shows including concerts, Broadway productions, touring productions, and sports and motor events (Ali, 2003; Fitzgerald, 2003; "CORRECTED", 2003; Nichols & McChesney, 2003; "Radio Ga Ga", 2003; "Clear Channel", 2003).

53.) Richard Perle, a former assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration and the current chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, which advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was also employed as an advisor to Global Crossing, a major telecommunications company with strong financial interest in lobbying the Defense Department. He was being paid $750,000 by the company, including $600,000 if the government would approve the company's sale to Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Technologies Telemedia Pte. Once Perle's involvement with Global Crossing was exposed by The New York Times ("Pentagon Advisor is Also Advising Global Crossing, March 21, 2003), he resigned his position with them (Labaton, 2003; "Senate", 2003).

Part III: Individuals—Actions and Connections

It's possible the entertainment industry could help the government formulate its message to the rest of the world about who Americans are and what they believe.
—Bryce Zabel, chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences

54.) John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, dabbled in Hollywood quite extensively in his youth. In 1927, Robert Kane, one of the directors of First National Pictures, asked the senior Kennedy to help get Gloria Swanson's "faltering career (she had set up her own production company) back into financial order so that, in 'proper hands', she could 'become the artist again and stop trying to be a business woman producing her own pictures.'" Over dinner one evening, Joseph proposed that he become her "secret business partner." Their business relationship eventually resulted in a passionate, year-long affair (Hamilton, 1992, pp. 63-64 and 69).

55.) Upon America's entry into World War II, Hollywood film-makers were hired by the US government to make propaganda films for home and abroad. Among those whose talents were used were John Huston, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Frank Capra. England was no different; three of Alfred Hitchcock's classics (Foreign Correspondent [1940], Saboteur [1942], and Lifeboat [1944]) were made as propaganda films. After the war, Hitchcock directed two short documentaries in England, filmed in French and shown in France after the Liberation. No prints were released in English-speaking countries. Renowned filmmaker Akira Kurosawa did the same for his home country of Japan with his film The Most Beautiful (1944) (Rhodes, 1976, pp. 152 and 158; Katz, 1994, pp. 471-472; Harris & Lasky, 1976, pp. 10 and 12; Maltin, 2001, p. 923).

56.) J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924-1972, had a special liking for all things Hollywood. A majority of his friends were celebrities and most of them were movie stars; Dorothy Lamour, Greer Garson, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple and Judy Garland were all lifelong friends. Of those on his Special Correspondents list were radio and television network presidents such as William S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC/RCA, Lawrence Welk, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, as well as executives of Ford, Sears, The US Chamber of Commerce, and Warner Brothers. When WB was planning to make The F.B.I. Story (1959) with James Stewart, Mervyn LeRoy wasn't approved as the film's director until Hoover was satisfied that he "had enough dirt on him," (Gentry, 1991, p. 384).

57.) From the 1920's to the 1950's, Walter Winchell was one of the most influential newsmen in the country, both in print and on the radio. It's been estimated that at the height of his popularity, nearly two-thirds of all adults in the United States either listened to his weekly radio program or read his daily column. He was such a popular and trusted figure, that Louis "Lepke" Buchalter (a Jewish mob boss who had been eluding authorities for nearly two years at the time, and who was also a member of Murder, Inc., a group of professional killers) used him as a go-between (with the FBI) in the negotiations of his surrender. Hoover eventually wrote Winchell a letter in which he stated, "When I was in New York last week, Mr. Frank Fay, the special agent in charge of the New York office of this division, told me of the assistance which you have been to him and of the interest which you have taken in our work…I wanted to write you a personal note and let you know how deeply appreciative I am, not only officially, but personally…" (For an impressive collection of nearly 4,000 pages of Hoover/Winchell communiqués compiled by the FBI – under the Freedom of Information Act – see .) In fact, Winchell's relationship with the FBI – and Hoover in particular – became so friendly that from time to time Hoover would ask Winchell to withhold the release of news stories for a myriad of reasons. For example, when the FBI made an arrest in the Linbergh baby kidnapping, for example, Winchell learned of Bruno Richard Hauptmann's capture less than an hour after it had occurred. Hoover requested that he sit on the story for 24 hours and Winchell agreed. Later, Hoover reciprocated the favor by providing him with information as to evidence the FBI had amassed against Hauptmann (Gabler, 1995, pp. xi-xvi and 197; Winchell, 1975, pp. 136-148; Klurfeld, 1976, pp. 68-69).

58.) Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons provided Hoover with thousands of confidential reports, from which he learned which stars supposedly had marital, drug or alcohol problems, venereal diseases, were homosexual, or involved with under-aged girls (Gentry, p. 384).

59.) From 1940 until his death in 1966, Walt Disney was a secret informer for the Los Angeles office of the FBI, he was even appointed as a Special FBI Agent with the code name "S.A.C. Contact". Because of his fervent anti-communism stance, he developed a very friendly relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, even going so far as to allow him to censor and modify scripts, including Moon Pilot (1962) and That Darn Cat! (1965) (Mittgang, 1993; Giroux, 1999, pp. 128-129).

60.) The first known reference of Ronald Reagan's name in an FBI file is on September 17, 1941, written by Hugh Clegg, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles Division. "He wrote that he'd become 'intimately acquainted' with Ronald Reagan, of Warner Brothers Studios, 'who might be of some assistance to the Bureau'"; Reagan was given the code name of T-10. Louis B. Mayer (head of MGM) selected Reagan as a member of a committee – also headed by Mayer—whose purpose was to "purge" the motion picture industry of Communist Party members. Reagan "stated it is his firm conviction that Congress should define what organizations are communist-controlled so that membership therein could be construed as an indication of disloyalty." Reagan and Mayer, along with Dick Powell, Ray Milland and Adolphe Menjou, were also involved with the Hollywood Committee for the Re-Election of Joe McCarthy. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States from 1981-1989, with a former head of the CIA (1976-1977), George H.W. Bush, as his Vice-President (Moldea, 1987, pp. 78-79; Oshinsky, 1983, p. 243; Zinn, 1998, p. 366).

61.) Sir Laurence Olivier was already a major Hollywood presence when, in 1939, he volunteered for – and was rejected by – the Royal Air Force. "Undaunted, he piled up 200 flight hours on his own and in 1941 joined the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy. He was released twice to make propaganda films," That Hamilton Woman (1941), 49th Parallel (1941), and The Demi-Paradise (1943), "and in 1944 he was discharged." That Hamilton Woman was an American movie made to gather pro-British support from the American people and was supposedly Winston Churchill's favorite film (Katz, pp. 1033-1034; Maltin, 2001, pp. 342, 480, and 1376).

62.) Sir Alec Guinness, an accomplished actor with a career spanning more than 60 years (including Oliver Twist [1948], The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957], Lawrence of Arabia [1962], and Dr. Zhivago [1965]) will forever be remembered for his role in the original Star Wars trilogy as Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi. He was already an established stage actor when he joined the Royal Navy in 1941; he enlisted as an ordinary seaman and obtained a commission the following year. "In 1942 he was given special leave to make his New York stage debut in a propaganda play," (Katz, p. 570).

63.) During World War II, Jimmy Stewart "flew 20 missions over Germany as a bomber pilot, rising from a Private to a Full Colonel." He retired in 1968 from the Air Force Reserves as a Brigadier General, "the highest-ranking entertainer in the US military," (Katz, pp. 1300-1301).

64.) Actor Neville Brand (D.O.A. [1949], Stalag 17 [1953], Love Me Tender [1956], The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [1960], Birdman of Alcatraz [1962], That Darn Cat! [1965], and Tora! Tora! Tora! [1970]) spent ten years in the US Army. He was discharged in 1946 as the 4th most decorated GI of World War II (Katz, p. 164).

65.) Actor Lee Marvin (The Wild One [1954], The Killers [1964], The Dirty Dozen [1964], Paint Your Wagon [1967], The Iceman Cometh [1973], The Big Red One [1980], Gorky Park [1983], and Delta Force [1986]), who'd made nearly sixty films in a career that spanned more than forty years, is buried at Arlington National Cemetery alongside some of the highest ranking soldiers in the history of the American armed forces. Although his marker only gives his name, rank (Private), and service (USMC), it fails to mention his part in the infamous battle of Iwo Jima, for which he won the Navy Cross, the second highest award a soldier can receive. His Sergeant in that battle was another person of note and Marvin relayed the following story on The Tonight Show:

JOHNNY CARSON: "Lee, I'll bet a lot of people are unaware that you were a Marine in the initial landing at Iwo Jima…and that during the course of that action you earned the Navy Cross and were severely wounded."

LEE MARVIN: "Yeah, yeah…I got shot square in the ass and they gave me the Cross for securing a hot spot about halfway up Suribachi…bad thing about getting shot up on a mountain is guys gettin' shot hauling you down. But, Johnny, at Iwo, I served under the bravest man I ever knew…We both got the cross the same day, but what he did for his Cross made mine look cheap in comparison. The dumb bastard actually stood up on Red beach and directed his troops to move foreword and get the hell off the beach…That Sergeant and I have been lifelong friends. When they brought me off Suribachi, we passed the Sergeant and he lit a smoke and passed it to me lying on my belly on the litter and said, 'Where'd they get you, Lee?' 'Well, Bob…if you make it home before me, tell Mom to sell the outhouse!' Johnny, I'm not lying…Sergeant Keeshan was the bravest man I ever knew…Bob Keeshan…You and the world know him as Captain Kangaroo," ("Lee Marvin", n.d.).

66.) In the 1940's, John F. Kennedy hobnobbed with the likes of Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Gary Cooper, Walter Huston, Sonja Hennie, Gene Tierney, Peggy Cummins, and legendary producer Sam Spiegel. "He was a celebrity – a minor celebrity, but a celebrity nonetheless. In Hollywood they all knew or knew of his father" who, by this time, was an American ambassador, a confidant of FDR, and a friend of Winston Churchill (Hamilton, pp. 380, 684, and 777-778).

67.) Robert Montgomery, who'd made more than 55 films in an acting career that spanned between 1929-1960 (including Blondie of the Follies [1932], Riptide [1934], Mr. and Mrs. Smith [1941], Here Comes Mr. Jordan [1941], They Were Expendable [1945], and The Gallant Hours [1960]), also served as President Dwight Eisenhower's (1953-1961) speech writer and advisor who later appointed him as a special consultant to the President on television and public communications. In 1947, he headed the Hollywood Republican Committee to Elect Thomas E. Dewey President and in the 1960's, served as a communication consultant to John D. Rockefeller, III. His daughter is Elizabeth Montgomery, of TV's Bewitched fame ("Robert Montgomery", 2003; Vaughn, p. 76; Katz, pp. 962-963).

68.) In 1950, Irvin Kershner, the director of such films as The Flim-Flam Man (1967), The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976), The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Robocop II (1990), was a documentary filmmaker for the United States Information Service working in Iran and Jordan (Katz, p. 744).

69.) In April 1953, Cecil B. DeMille, then working out of Paramount Studios, was appointed as a special consultant to the government on cinema. As far as propaganda was concerned, DeMille believed that the most effective use of American films was not to design an entire picture to cope with a certain problem, but rather to see to it that in a regular film, the right line, aside, inflection, or eyebrow movement was introduced to reflect desired American attitudes to whatever subject was at hand. DeMille once said to C.D. Jackson, of Eisenhower's Committee of International Information Activities—who also had ties to the CIA—that, "anytime I could give him [Luigi Luraschi, a longtime senior executive at Paramount Studios] a simple problem for a country or an area, he would find a way of dealing with it in a picture," (Eldridge, 2000).

70.) In 1956, The Joint Chiefs of Staff met with John Ford, John Wayne, and Ford's producer, Merian Cooper, to discuss how Hollywood could promulgate the concept of "militant liberty." They agreed on the imperative to produce films which would "explain the true conditions existing under Communism…and to explain the principles upon which the Free World way-of-life is based," (Eldridge).

71.) President John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) was considered quite the womanizer during his White House years and rumors abound that he had been romantically involved with Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson (a member of the Rat Pack), Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, and Marilyn Monroe – Grace Kelly visited him in the hospital after he had back surgery. JFK's brother, Robert Kennedy, was also supposedly involved with Monroe and even visited her shortly before her death accompanied by a doctor who injected her with a tranquilizer while Robert held her down. Just hours before she died in August of 1962, she reportedly whispered to Peter Lawford, "Say good-bye to the President [for me]," (Parmet, 1983, p. 304; Martin, 1983, pp. 403-404).

72.) Former ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger was once the press secretary for President Kennedy ("Salinger", 1997).

73.) Former Rat-Packer Peter Lawford, who appeared is such films as Little Women (1949), It Should Happen to You (1954), Exodus (1960), Ocean's Eleven (1960), and The Longest Day (1962), was married to Patricia Kennedy, sister of John F., Robert F., and Eunice Kennedy ("Peter", 2003).

74.) Upon the assassination of JFK, the Dallas, Texas police arrested anyone that looked even remotely suspicious; hundreds of men were arrested, photographed, finger-printed and released. Among them were three hobos who were arrested on a train near Dealy Plaza. Upon further investigation by Jim Garrison, it was revealed that two of those hobos—who, it turned out, weren't hobos at all – were known hit men with mafia connections. One of those men was Charles Harrelson, who is currently serving a life sentence for the hit of San Antonio judge, John Wood, Jr. Charles Harrelson is Woody Harrelson's father ("Harrelson's", 1999; Jones, 2003).

75.) Kirk Douglas was a Goodwill Ambassador for the State Department and the United States Information Agency beginning in 1963. In 1981, he was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, "the highest honor bestowed on a private citizen," (Katz, p. 384).

76.) Actor George L. Murphy, who'd made more than 35 films between 1930-1952 (including Broadway Melody of 1938 [1937], Broadway Melody of 1940 [1940], The Navy Comes Through [1942], Having a Wonderful Time [1945], Battleground [1949], and Border G-Man [1950]), went on to a successful career as a Republican U.S. Senator for the State of California from 1965-1971. Furthermore, he was a Delegate to the Republican National Convention from California in 1948, 1952, and 1956 ("George", 2003; "Political Graveyard", 2002).

77.) Jack Valenti (see 20, 22, and 26) was born in Houston, Texas and began work at the age of 16 as an office boy for the Humble Oil Co., which is now Exxon. In 1952, he co-founded the advertising and political consulting agency, Weekly & Valenti, which was in charge of the press during that fateful visit of President John F. Kennedy to Dallas, Texas in November of 1963. Within an hour after the assassination, he flew on Air Force One back to Washington as the Special Assistant to President Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969). He remained a close aid to the president from 1963-1966 and is one of only two special assistants to the president who have lived in the White House (the other being FDR assistant Harry Hopkins). According to Valenti, himself, "I sat in on every Vietnam meeting in which President Johnson was engaged, from the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination to the day I left the White House in mid-1966. I think I know as well as anyone the ebb and flow of the Vietnam tides inside the White House." This is rather disturbing to know, considering one of the most blatant and manipulative lies ever told to the American people came out of the White House during this time. According to historian Howard Zinn, "In early August 1964, President Johnson used a murky set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, to launch full-scale war on Vietnam. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told the American public there was an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on American destroyers. 'While on routine patrol in international waters,' McNamara said, 'the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack.' It later turned out that the Gulf of Tonkin episode was a fake, that the highest American officials had lied to the public… In fact, the CIA had engaged in a secret operation attacking North Vietnamese coastal installations – so if there had been an attack it would not have been 'unprovoked.' It was not a 'routine patrol,' because the Maddox was on a special electronic spying mission. And it was not in international waters but in Vietnamese territorial waters. It turned out that no torpedoes were fired at the Maddox, as McNamara said. Another reported attack on another destroyer, two nights later, which Johnson called 'open aggression on the high seas,' seems also to have been an invention." The next day, President Johnson sent a joint resolution to Congress seeking approval for him to take "all necessary measures" to end the Communist aggression in SE Asia. It was passed in the House of Representatives, in less than an hour, on a vote of 414 to 0. The Senate was less quick to approve the measure, but eventually did so at 88 to 2, with Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon in dissent. Thus, the war in Vietnam was escalated. Since 1966, Jack Valenti has been president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), one of the most powerful controlling organizations in Hollywood that just happens to have offices in Washington D.C. Since he took over the role of MPAA head, "the film industry as a whole has adopted…a more tolerant attitude in matters of self-censorship," (University of Florida, 1998-1999; University of Texas, 2000; "Jack", n.d.; Valenti, 2001; Zinn, 1999, pp. 475-476; O'Neill, 1987, p. 189; Katz, p. 1400).

78.) Respected news personality Bill Moyers, host of such programs as This Week (1970), Our Times with Bill Moyers (1983), Moyers: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (1988), Listening to America with Bill Moyers (1992), and NOW with Bill Moyers (2002- present), was once involved in politics, himself. In the late 1950's, he was a special assistant to Senator Lyndon Johnson. He served as Deputy Director of The Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration and was later a special assistant to President Johnson from 1963-1965 before serving as his presidential press secretary from 1965-1967 ("Bill", n.d.).

79.) Shirley MacLaine, "in 1968, was a Bobby Kennedy-pledged delegate from California at the Democratic convention and in 1972 campaigned with equal zeal for [George] McGovern," (Katz, p. 874).

80.) In the late 1960's, Shirley Temple (officially known as Shirley Temple Black after her 1950 marriage to TV executive Charles Black) unsuccessfully ran for the vacant Republican congressional seat of her home district of San Mateo, California. "In 1968 she was appointed by President Nixon (1969-1974) as a US representative at the United Nations. She served as US ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976, when she became US Chief of protocol. In 1989 President George Bush [Sr.] (1989-1993) appointed her ambassador to Czechoslovakia," (Katz, pp. 1337-1338).

81.) On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley met with Richard Nixon at the White House. The meeting was initiated by Elvis via a six-page hand-written letter requesting a visit with the President and suggesting that he be made a "Federal Agent-at-Large" in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). His letter stated, in part: "I am Elvis Presley and admire you and have a great respect for your office… The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it, the establishment. I call it American and I love it… I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques, and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good… I am glad to help just so long as it is kept very private…" Before the meeting's end, Presley was given a "specially prepared" badge from the BNDD. To read the letter in its entirety, see the National Security Archives at George Washington University at (Loughlin, 2002; "Transcription", n.d.).

82.) From 1973-1974, game show host (Win Ben Stein's Money [1997-present]) and sometime actor (Ferris Bueller's Day Off [1986]), Ben Stein, was a speechwriter and lawyer for Richard Nixon at the White House and then for President Gerald Ford (1974-1977) ("Ben", 2003).

83.) ABC's Diane Sawyer was an assistant to Richard Nixon for eight years, including the bitter end of his presidency. She was not only an aid, but an absolute loyalist who was one of the faithful on the plane that took Nixon to San Clemente when he finally resigned in disgrace (Solomon, 2000).

84.) In a 1975 lecture in Hong Kong, Barry Zorthian—the head of JUSPAO (Joint US Public Affairs Office), which ran the propaganda of the Vietnam War – "complained that some of the 'embedded' journalists of that time were so dumb that they could not take signals when something was going wrong." He was so angered by this, that he gave up his position, where he had a near-equal ranking with the CIA Station Chief and General Westmoreland in terms of hierarchy in propaganda, "and went back to his old job as vice-president of Time Magazine," (Sainath, 2003).

85.) Now, he may be fibbing, or he may be revealing a startling truth in his 1982 autobiography, but the creator of such television programs as The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, Chuck Barris, claims to have been an assassin for the CIA (Barris, 2002, pp. 42-51).

86.) Nancy Kulp who, despite her many film roles and numerous television appearances, will forever be remembered as Miss Jane Hathaway on The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971). In 1984, she made an unsuccessful political bid for the seat of the Ninth Congressional District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives ("Nancy", 1996).

87.) In 1986, Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California; he served for two years. In 2002, he was appointed by Governor Gray Davis to be on the California State Park and Recreation Commission, a four year unpaid position. (Maltin, 1994; Hirsen, 2002 November).

88.) Fred Grandy, better known as Gopher from his role on the television series The Love Boat (1977-1986), went on to become a United States Congressman of the Republican party for the state of Iowa from 1987-1995. On October 26, 1992, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in Biogen, a leading pharmaceutical manufacturer. Four days later, President George H.W. Bush signed P.L. 571 "to authorize human drug application, prescription drug establishment, and prescription drug product fees." On November 5, 1992, Grandy sold his Biogen stock with a probable capital gain of between 6-8%. At the time, he sat on the House Ways and Means Health subcommittee, was a member of the House Biomedical Research Caucus, and was a ranking minority member on the House Ethics committee. He is now the President of Goodwill Industries ("Fred Grandy", n.d.; "Rep. Fred", n.d.).

89.) Sonny Bono, of Sonny and Cher fame, left the entertainment industry and went into politics. A registered Republican, he was elected the mayor of Palm Springs, California in 1988, elected to the House of Representatives seat representing Palm Springs in 1992, and re-elected in 1996 ("Sonny", 2003).

90.) In 1988, Pat Robertson (born Marion Gordon Robertson), creator and host of The 700 Club (1966-present) and founder of The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in 1960, wanted to run for President under the Republican banner. His platform included the promise of getting all Soviet warheads out of Cuba, despite the fact the White House had no evidence Cuba had any. When confronted with this in a debate with George H.W. Bush and Jack Kemp, he revealed that it was only a hunch. Furthermore, he made such claims as AIDS could be transmitted by kissing and that God had told him to run for President. On his resume, he noted that his combat duty in the Korean War was an "indispensable prerequisite for the office," despite the fact that his father, Absalom Willis Robertson (a US Congressman and Senator from 1932-1966 – 14 years in the House of Representatives and 20 in the Senate) had pulled some strings with General Lemuel Shepherd, the Marine Corps commandant, to get him off combat duty before he saw any. Four years after his campaign failed, the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) released a detailed audit of his campaign. The list of violations of federal campaign guidelines included allegations that his campaign exceeded spending limits in Iowa and New Hampshire, that he had used campaign funds to pay federal and local tax penalties, and that he had spent nearly $75,000 to "send supporters to the Republican National Convention and attempted to count the money as a campaign expense even though [he] had been out of the race for at least three months by the time the convention occurred." Furthermore, he was told to reimburse various news media organizations more than $100,000 for overcharging them for airline flights and the Federal Government $380,000 (Foege, 1996, pp. 218-221; Boston, 1996, pp. 24 and 58-59).

91.) NBC's Maria Shriver (a registered Democrat) is the daughter of Eunice Kennedy, sister of John F., Robert F., and Patricia Kennedy. She is married to actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (a registered Republican), who served for many years as the Chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness under Bush, Sr. and told Talk magazine (in the November 1999 issue) that he was contemplating a run for the California governorship. Furthermore, his father was a member of the Nazi Party ("Maria", n.d.; Bellone, 2002; "Arnold", 2003; "Schwarzenegger's", n.d.).

92.) Senator Fred Dalton Thompson, a Republican from Tennessee (1994-2003), has appeared in roughly twenty films, including Feds (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Bed of Lies (1992), In the Line of Fire (1993), and Baby's Day Out (1994) and has guest-starred on such television programs as Wiseguy (1988), Roseanne (1989), and Law & Order (1990). His "acting career intersected in a lucrative law practice, in which he was of counsel to a major Washington law firm," and he even considered a run for the 2000 Presidential election. He's also been an assistant U.S. attorney (1969-1972); minority counsel, Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (also known as "The Watergate Committee") (1973-1974); special counsel to Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander (1980); special counsel, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (1980-1981); special counsel, Senate Intelligence Committee (1982); member, Tennessee Appellate Court Nominating Commission (1985-1987). Since his retirement from the Senate, he's taken a co-starring role in the NBC drama Law & Order as District Attorney Arthur Branch, whose character will also appear in the program's spin-off series Special Victim Unit and Criminal Intent (see 17) ("Thompson", n.d.; "Fred Dalton Thompson", 2003; Drew, 1999, p. 5; "Fred Thompson", n.d.; "Law & Order", 2003; Hirsen, 2002, October).

93.) Former professional wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura successfully ran for the governorship of Minnesota in 1998 under the Reform Party (switching to the Independent Party of Minnesota in 2000). He has appeared in several films, including the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger hit, Predator. Following his stint as governor, he will be hosting his own talk show on MSNBC ("Minnesota", 2003; "Minneapolis Star", 2003).

94.) Suzanne Morrison, the mother Matthew Perry, one of the stars of NBC's Friends, was once the press secretary for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. After Matthew's parents divorced, his mother married Keith Morrison, an NBC newscaster ("Matthew", 2003).

95.) Mark McKinney, one of the members of the now classic Canadian sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall, is the son of a career Canadian diplomat, Russell McKinney ("Biography for Mark McKinney", 2003).

96.) Academy Award winning actor Tommy Lee Jones was a roommate of former Vice-President Al Gore whilst attending Harvard University ("Tommy", 2003).

97.) NBC's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, is married to US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan ("Knighted", 2002).

98.) CNN's Chief International Correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, is married to James Rubin, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief Spokesman for the US State Department from 1997-2000, and who is now a partner at the London-based PR firm, Brunswick Group. As with Hill & Knowlton and The Rendon Group (see 44), The Brunswick Group utilize the talents and skills of people connected to both the government and media. This includes Michael Buckley, a former National Director of Hill and Knowlton's Litigation Group; Steve Lipin, a Pulitzer Prize nominated Finance Editor of The Wall Street Journal; Tim Payne, a former PR manager and editor supporting Westminster Chamber of Commerce and campaign director for the UK's Liberal Democrat party; Fiona Antcliffe worked at the House of Commons for MPs George Gardiner and Colin Moynihan in the 1980's; Tom Buchanan and Jonathan Glass both worked at Price Waterhouse, the accountancy firm responsible for the tabulation and secrecy of the results of the votes for the Academy Awards; Simon Holberton had an eleven year career at the London-based Financial Times; Susan Gilchrist was a retail correspondent at The Times of London; James Hogan worked for BBC News & Current Affairs where he was in charge of Question Time, Elections, and Documentaries; David Shapiro had been a press secretary to US Senator Richard Lugar and an award-winning television journalist with the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour; Richard Jacques once worked at the UK Cabinet Office and the DTI (Department of Trade & Industry), advising on European regulations, industry competitiveness, government privatizations and UK trade relations with North America, he later became a diplomat based in Brussels representing the UK government on industry and competition issues; JeanneMarie Prost was Group Finance Director of France Television, the public broadcasting group overseeing the three channels France 2, France 3, and France 5 (Cockburn, 2000; "James Rubin", n.d.; "The Partners", 2003).

99.) Film-maker Kevin Rafferty, who's made such films as The Atomic Café (1982), Feed (1992), and The Last Cigarette (1999), and had been a camera operator for Roger & Me (1989) and The War Room (1992), is President George W. Bush's cousin. Barbara Bush's sister is Kevin Rafferty's mother, making a former head of the CIA his uncle (Moore, 2000).

100.) Child star Charlie Korsmo (Dick Tracy [1990], Men Don't Leave [1990], What About Bob? [1991], The Doctor [1991], and Hook [1991]) retired from the film industry in 1992 and went on to earn a degree in physics from M.I.T. in 2000. Since then, he's accepted a position with the Missile Defense Team of the US Government, worked as a special assistant with the Environmental Protection Agency, and currently serves as Deputy Domestic Policy Analyst for the House Republican Policy Committee of the US House of Representatives ("Biography for Charlie Korsmo", 2003).

101.) Spike Jones, born Adam Spiegel, has been the director of numerous music videos and the film Being John Malkovich (1999). Although it doesn't give her name, according to an October 18, 1999, Newsweek article, Spike's mother works for the communications department of the World Bank. The World Bank, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was established during World War II and is essentially a link between Washington, D.C. and underdeveloped third world countries in need of financial assistance. "The central function of these multilateral lending institutions has been to draw the rulers and governments of weaker states more tightly into a world economy dominated by large, transnational corporations." Furthermore, they have a horrible record of supporting brutal military regimes and governments (Schoemer, 1999; Danaher, 1994, pp. 1-2; Rich, 1994, pp. 7-9).

102.) In 2002, Angelina Jolie was recruited by the United Nations to be the U.N. Goodwill ambassador. Some other celebrities who have been involved with the U.N. over the past year include Danny Glover, Roger Moore, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter Ustinov, U2's Bono (who went on a four nation aid and debt fact-finding tour with US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill), and former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell (Hirsen, 2002, August; Hirsen, 2002, September).

103.) Richard D. Parsons, the Chairman and CEO of AOL Time Warner, was once counsel for Nelson Rockefeller and a senior White House aide under Gerald Ford. He is also currently the Chairman of the Apollo Theatre Foundation and serves on the board of directors of the Museum of Modern Art (AOL Time Warner, 2003).

104.) Jennifer Garner, star of the hit series Alias, has been asked by the real CIA to appear in a CIA recruitment video which would be shown to college graduate students. Although she hasn't done it yet, according to Chase Brandon, the CIA's liaison to Hollywood, she has a "standing invite." This is not the first contact between the actual CIA and the fictionalized one depicted on the television program. "The [real] agency has provided valuable insights about life on the job," with the program's creators, writers, and executive producers asking about the CIA's interworkings and being provided with answers ("Jennifer", 2003).

Part IV: Journalism and the Threat of the First Amendment

Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
—Napoleon Bonaparte

105.) In 1970, Peter Dale Scott, a professor of English at UC Berkley, published The War Conspiracy, a scathing investigation of the CIA, oil companies, and their manipulation of US foreign policy in order to escalate the Vietnam War for their own ends. Before the book could be made public, however, the CIA intervened and successfully stopped its release ("The War Conspiracy", n.d.).

106.) In 1971, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart wrote How to Read Donald Duck, a scathing examination of the symbolic magery of the (then) popular Disney comics. "The book sought to raise basic questions about corporate culture, routinely accepted and often adored" by children and adults alike. Translated into a dozen of languages and selling 500,000 copies before the end of the 1970's, few of those books made it inside the borders of the US. "Arguing that [the book] infringed on its copyrights, Disney kept putting up roadblocks. In 1975, the U.S. Customs Bureau seized a shipment of the English edition. Attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights contended that 'the seizure of the books is a classic case of abuse of the laws to suppress political dissent and unpopular opinions.' The publisher won the case. But Disney's deep corporate pockets and fervent hostility had a chilling effect in Uncle Donald's homeland. Many potential booksellers seemed wary." In an odd, but rather frightening demonstration of how far-reaching Disney's pull extends, after General Augusto Pinochet seized power from Chile's democratically elected government in September of 1973, "his dictatorship went out of its way to burn copies of the book." This is just one of many examples of the origins of "pop culture", for it "is less culture than acculturation. Styles of competitive acquisition prevail over humanistic values. And the symbols foisted on the public remain under tight private control." Disney, in general, is very protective of its name. When three academics compiled "a collection of postmodern essays with the working title Doing Disney, Disney scared them into changing it, claiming even this mention of its name was actionable," (Solomon, 1999, March 10; Levin, 2003, p. 242).

107.) By June of 1973, the revelations of Watergate had firmly shaken the foundations of the Nixon administration. Nixon's man for telecommunications policy at the time, Clay T. Whitehead, was going around the country publicizing a congressional bill that would have placed a local station's license in jeopardy if the station was unable to show "meaningful service to the community." One way to demonstrate such service, Whitehead was suggesting, was to eliminate reporting and analysis of the administration. As if to show the others what to do, CBS voluntarily dropped its "instant analysis" of administration speeches, angering the likes of Walter Cronkite and Roger Mudd. In an interview in the June 1973 issue of Playboy magazine, Cronkite claimed that this and other measures amounted to "a well-directed campaign against the press, agreed upon in secret by members of the administration…This administration has tried to bring, and may have succeeded in bringing the press to heel," (Powers, 1977, pp. 196-197).

108.) After the war in Vietnam, believing that the free reign of the press had often undermined the official party line, "America's future war planners decided not to risk uncensored press coverage of their own conflicts. They determined – evidently beginning in the Reagan Administration – that reporters would never again have the opportunity to confuse the American public about the government's war aims" and cited British tactics with journalists during the Falklands War of 1982. Twenty-nine correspondents, photographers, and technicians, subjected to strict censorship of their dispatches, were placed by the Thatcher government in various pools on Royal Navy ships in the South Atlantic. Lieutenant Commander Arthur A. Humphries, in the May-June 1993 issue of Naval War College Review, placed the Falklands War news management in an insightful perspective for his military peers, stating that "in spite of a perception of choice in a democratic society, the Falklands War shows us how to make certain that government policy is not undermined by the way a war is reported," (MacArthur, p. 138).

109.) Vladimir Pozner was a Parisian-born Soviet commentator and an international television celebrity who was one of the Soviet Union's leading interpreters of Glasnost and Perestroika and is currently serving as the president of the Russian Academy of Television. In his 1990 autobiography, he had this to say about the art of journalism: "…the realities of journalism don't involve just facts, for if they did, computers would replace journalists. Journalism always involves choices – choices among subjects, treatment, words. As a result, the claim of objective reporting functions simply to camouflage what is in fact a value-laden activity. It is not only the readers who are misled by the claim. The journalists too can be blinded by their own cover." In a March, 2003, interview with the Russian newspaper Pravda, Pozner asserted that in his view, current Russian television is more liberal and freer than American TV. Furthermore, he posited that as far as television was concerned, "it is the USA that has the least freedom of speech amid other democratic countries at the moment," (Pozner, 1990, pp. 187-188; "Vladimir", n.d.; Pozner & Novikova, 2003).

110.) "MYTH: Freedom of the Press in the U.S. exists even in times of war. The U.S. news media has been extremely skeptical of the official stories put out by the government, in order to uphold the truth.

RESPONSE: The last 20 years have seen a trend towards 'management' of the press by the government: restricted access press pools, fabricated stories, fake letters to the editor, and even violence against U.S. war reporters. According to the Winter 2002 Naval War College Review, citing the book America's Team: Media and the Military, the military had assigned reporters to a pool to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, but the Defense Secretary at the time, Dick Cheney, 'delayed calling out the pool'. During the 1991 Gulf War, according to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Patrick J. Sloyan, 'The Associated Press, which benefited most from a system that turned all journalists into wire service reporters, sent photographer Scott Applewhite to cover victims of a SCUD missile attack near Dhahran. The warhead had hit an American tent, killing 25 Army reservists and wounding 70… Applewhite, an accredited pool member, was stopped by US Army military police. When he objected, they punched and handcuffed him while ripping the film from his cameras. Dick Cheney, quoted in America's Team, was honest after the Gulf War about his treatment of the media. 'Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed,' he said after the war. 'The information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence that I could leave that to the press,'" (Cowan, 2003 [see source for complete references]).

111.) Gary Webb is a very decorated journalist. In a career that spanned more than nineteen years, he was the recipient of more than thirty awards for his journalistic prowess, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, the H.L. Mencken Award from the Free Press Association in 1994, and the Media Hero's Award in 1997. In 1996, he wrote a series of articles entitled Dark Alliances that revealed how a "US-backed terrorist army, the Nicaraguan Contras, had financed their activities by selling crack cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles to the city's biggest crack dealer. [It] documented direct contact between drug traffickers bringing drugs into Los Angeles and two Nicaraguan CIA agents who were administering the Contras in Central America. Moreover, it revealed how elements of the US government knew about this drug ring's activities at the time and did little, if anything, to stop it. The evidence included sworn testimony from one of the drug traffickers – a government informant – that a CIA agent specifically instructed them to raise money for the Contras in California." His article was posted on the website of his newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, and was quickly read by people all over the world – getting as many as 1.3 million hits in a single day (see to read all the articles in his series, including many follow-ups and related links) The fallout for this was immense, with the country's three largest newspapers – The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times – putting out stories on Webb, rather than his article. "Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the hell out of a story by another newspaper." Why? "Primarily because the series presented dangerous ideas. It suggested that crimes of state had been committed. If the story was true, it meant the federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighborhoods in the 1980's… The scary thing about this collusion between the press and the powerful is that it works so well. In this case, the government's denials and promises to pursue the truth didn't work. The public didn't accept them, for obvious reasons, and the clamour for an independent investigation continued to grow. But, after the government's supposed watchdogs weighed in, public opinion became divided and confused, the movement to force congressional hearings lost steam." Once enough people came to believe that the story had been exaggerated or distorted, it could be quietly buried and forgotten. Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how this could so easily happen: "The readiness with which the media and intellectuals adapt to and serve their leaders' rampaging surprises many who don't grasp the extent to which the corporate media are a part of the imperial enterprise and structure, and how naturally the intellectual community accepts and works within the parameters fixed by imperial needs. If the structure of imperialism gives the United States the power to impose its will in many foreign locales, its institutions and intelligentsia will, as a matter of course, normalize and support the ensuing projection of power," (Edwards, 2003; Webb, 2002, pp. 306 and 309).

112.) In February of 2000, the Dutch newspaper Trouw and France's Intelligence Newsletter reported that the US Army's Fourth Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg, NC, worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters during the end of the 1999 Kosovo War. "In the 1980's, officers from…PSYOPS…staffed the National Security Council's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies. A senior US official described OPD as a 'vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory.' (Miami Herald, 7/19/87) An investigation by the congressional General Accounting Office found that OPD had engaged in 'prohibited, covert propaganda activities," and the office was soon shut down as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations…. According to Intelligence Newsletter, Rear Admiral Thomas Steffens, a psychological warfare expert in the Special Operations Command, recently told a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to 'gain control' over commercial news satellites to help bring down an 'informational cone of silence' over regions where special operations were taking place [During the Afghanistan war, the Pentagon found a very direct way to "gain control" – it simply bought up all commercial satellite images of Afghanistan, in order to prevent media from accessing them.]… An unofficial strategy paper published by the…Naval War College [Review] in 1996 and written by an Army officer ('Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier') urged military commanders to find ways to 'leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate' for the purpose of communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection.'" Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service has been quoted as saying that PSYOPS "personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program 'Training with Industry'. They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news." CNN had five interns from PSYOPS, two in television, two in radio, and one in satellite operations. This wasn't the first time CNN has allowed government officials into their newsrooms. In 1991, Pentagon "trainees" were allowed in during Operation Desert Storm for reasons that were never made entirely clear. This follows what Colonel Christopher St. John, commander of PSYOPS, has stated. He "called for greater cooperation between the armed forces and media giants" and that's exactly what's happened ("Action Alert", 2000; Cockburn; "Media Advisory", 2002; Fisk, 2003, February 25).

113.) On April 27, 1999, Amy Goodman of the Pacifica radio network interviewed Frank Sesno, CNN's senior vice president for political coverage, on the media's use of retired military personal as "analysts":

Amy Goodman: "If you support the practice of putting ex-military men – generals – on the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different opinion during a time of war? To be sitting there with the military generals talking about why they feel that war is not appropriate?"

Frank Sesno: "We bring the generals in because of their expertise in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don't bring them in as advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them about that – they're not there as advocates."

His response is very interesting. CNN may very well be calling them "analysts" rather than "advocates", but advocating the use of military force is precisely what they do. Exactly one week before Sesno made his remarks, one of CNN's military "analysts", retired Army Lieutenant General Dan Benton, made the following statement in regards to the war in Serbia: "I don't know what our countrymen, [those] that are questioning why we're involved in this conflict, are thinking about. As I listened to this press conference this morning with reports of rapes, villages being burned, and this particularly incredible report of blood banks…I just got madder and madder. The United States has a responsibility as the only superpower in the world, and when we learn about these things, somebody has got to stand up and say, that's enough, stop it, we aren't going to put up with this. And so the United States is fulfilling its leadership responsibility with our NATO allies and are trying to stop these incredible atrocities." Apparently, that doesn't constitute advocacy (Cockburn).

114.) In an impressive collection of news reports, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) showed that in 1998, ABC World News This Morning, NBC's Today, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Newsday all reported the fact that the U.N. weapons inspection teams were removed from Iraq by order of the U.N. However, four years later, every one of those sources reported that Saddam had forced the inspectors out. Did they forget their own reporting or were they consciously assisting the United States government as outlets of propaganda by effectively re-writing history in a way that aided the Bush administration's war aims ("What a Difference", 2002)?

115.) Dan Rather, often cited as the poster child for the "liberal media" (see Bernard Goldberg's 2001book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News), has been anything but liberal in his stance towards the president and his war aims. In an interview with the BBC in May, 2002, he said, "What we are talking about here – whether one wants to recognize it or not, or call it by its proper name or not – is a form of self-censorship. It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole…felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.'" He's also been quoted as saying, "George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, [if] he wants me to line up, just tell me where," and "Whatever arguments one may or may not have had with George Bush the younger before September 11th, he is our commander in chief, he's the man now. And we need unity, we need steadiness. I'm not preaching about it. We all know this," and "I would willingly die for my country at a moment's notice and on the command of my president." Do these sound like the words of a professional unbiased journalist who is committed to reporting the truth? Do these even sound like the words of a liberal journalist? Theodore Roosevelt once said, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Edward R. Murrow must be spinning in his grave (Arnove, 2003).

116.) "In past wars including the 1991 Gulf War, the pool system has been the main means of control of journalists 'in theatre' – a propaganda term adopted by many journalists. The pool allows the military to control the movement of journalists as well as almost everything they see. In 1991 the Pentagon tried to bully journalists not to operate outside the pool and some adopted the value system so fully that they turned in any journalists who tried to report independently. This time the Pentagon has [become] more sophisticated and more determined to eliminate the possibility of independent reporting. They have pressured journalists to leave Baghdad and by 18 March about half of the 300 there had left, including many of the key UK and US journalists…who would likely have more credibility in their own countries. The rules issued by the Pentagon were themselves part of a process of spin. They are presented as voluntary and appeared to some to offer 'unprecedented freedom to report the facts'. But on closer inspection, a number of clauses buried in the text indicate the iron fist in the velvet glove. While the rules state that there is 'no general review process' of reports by the Pentagon, a later section notes that 'if media are inadvertently exposed to sensitive information they should be briefed after exposure on what information they should avoid covering'. A security review also becomes compulsory if any sensitive information is released deliberately. In a classic passage attempting to present strict censorship rules as voluntary, the Pentagon notes that 'agreement to security review in exchange for this type of access must be strictly voluntary and if the reporter does not agree, the access may not be granted'. The pool this time has a new feature known as 'embedding' which entails that reporters operate in close proximity to military units. They will not be allowed to travel independently and some suggest that control of the technology of communication will be controlled by the military, too. These new rules mean that journalists will don military uniform and protective clothing and, the Pentagon hopes, start to identify with the military. According to reports there are 903 journalists embedded with US and UK forces, six times the number of journalists in Baghdad. At US military headquarters in Qatar, the daily briefings will be delivered from a huge press centre complete with a mocked up studio with five large TV screens to show accurate bombing runs. Topped off by tastefully deployed camouflage netting installed by a specially flown in Hollywood designer, the centre cost in the region of $250,000," (Miller, 2003, March 28 [see source for complete references]).

117.) The Geneva Conventions forbid the targeting of civilian installations – whether state-owned or not – unless they are being used for military purposes (the broadcasting of propaganda does not constitute military use). However, this didn't stop "the coalition of the willing" from launching missiles at the Iraqi TV offices on March 25, 2003. Despite this violation, US media applauded the action without a single reference to its illegality ("U.S. Media", 2003).

118.) BBC war correspondent Kate Adie revealed in an interview on Irish radio in early March of 2003, that the Pentagon's attitude is "entirely hostile to the free spread of information." Furthermore, she was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon, "that if uplinks [satellite telephone or television methods of distributing information] were detected by any planes…above Baghdad, they'd be fired down on. Even if they were journalists… Who cares," he said, "They've been warned," (Dunne, 2003).

119.) Bill Hammond, a historian with the Army's Center of Military History, has noted that in the more than 10 years of the War in Vietnam, only 54 journalists were killed of the more than 6,000 who'd spent time in the war zone. In the first three weeks of the new War on Iraq, 12 journalists have died, with a majority of them the result of Allied munitions. (DO THE MATH: 54 deaths divided by approximately 10 years equals 5.4 deaths per year; 12 deaths multiplied by the product of approximately 1 month times 12 months equals 144 deaths per year.) On Tuesday, April 7th, 2003, two reporters and one cameraman were killed when an American tank fired into the Palestine Hotel, known to be the base of operations of non-"embedded" journalists in Baghdad. General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry Division – whose tanks were the ones that fired into the hotel – announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the hotel. However, footage shot of the attack from the roof of the hotel by a French journalist, "records…silence before the tank's armament is fired." Al-Jazeera, which has incurred the wrath of both the American and Iraqi governments for its live coverage of war, gave the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad office in February, 2003, and were given assurances that the bureau would not be attacked. Then, on April 7th, the US State Department's spokesman in Doha, Nabil Khoui, visited al-Jazeera's offices in the city and once again told them they would not be attacked. "Within 24 hours, the Americans had fired…into the Baghdad office" killing journalist Tareq Ayyoub and wounding another staff member. Saudi Arabian newspapers on the 9th condemned the killing and charged that they were "deliberately targeted by US gunfire to silence the truth." Al-Jazeera's daily newspaper stated, "It is clear the shelling of television and press offices in Baghdad was not random, but rather targeted because it was carried out in two instalments [sic]…It appears that some people did not like the media contradicting lies issued by war generals…Unfortunately, those who expose the lies get the message by missiles." Although the military claims the al-Jazeera bombing an accident, it just so happens that at the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001, the US military "accidentally" bombed the al-Jazeera offices there, too. The ill-fated Tareq Ayyoub was wounded in that illegal attack (Kurtz, 2003; Miller, 2003, April 3; Fisk, 2003, April 9; "Saudi Media", 2003; Shalom, 2003).

120.) In order for reporters to become "embedded", they must sign a contract with the government that explicitly requires them to "follow the direction and orders of the government" and prohibits them from suing for injury or death even where this "is caused or contributed to" by the military. They are almost completely controlled by the military and "agree to give up most of their autonomy in exchange for access to the fighting on military terms." Christina Lamb of the London Times noted that "embedded" journalists are "giving a more positive side, because they're with the troops…and they're not out in the streets or out in the countryside seeing what's actually happening there." Since the war began, the British populace in general has become more supportive of the war, and of that, British Minister of Defense Geoff Hoon has said, "…the imagery they ["embedded" reporters] broadcast is at least partially responsible for the public's change of mood." At the end of March, 2003, Hoon stated, "One of the reasons for having journalists ["embedded"] is to prevent precisely the kind of tragedy that occurred to an ITV crew very recently when a…journalist was killed essentially because he was not part of a military organization." ITN reporter Terry Lloyd and two of his crew (cameraman Fred Nerac and local translator Hussein Othman) were killed by "friendly fire," (Miller, 2003, April 3; "Missing", 2003).

121.) Patrick J. Sloyan, who covered the 1991 Gulf War as a Newsday correspondent, recently wrote, "When the air war began in January 1991, the media was fed carefully selected footage by [General Norman] Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and [General Colin] Powell in Washington, D.C. Most of it was downright misleading." It's happening this time, too. According to Christian Lowe of the military magazine Army Times, "embedded" journalists are being "hounded by military public affairs officers who follow their every move and look over their shoulders as they interview aviators, sailors, and maintainers for their stories," (Solomon, 2002; Miller, 2003, April 3).

122.) On January 27, 2003, CNN released a document to its entire reporting staff. Entitled "Reminder of Script Approval", it relayed the fact that all stories must be submitted to an anonymous row of script editors in Atlanta who can insist upon changes. "A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorized manager and duped [duplicated] to burcopy [bureau copy]…When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority." This means that, although the reporter in Jordan, Baghdad, or the West Bank most assuredly understands the background and nuances of his or her story far better than the authorities in Atlanta, the anonymous CNN script editors will decide upon the spin the story should take. In other words, CNN is censoring itself, or is agreeing to be censored. According to CNN's Aaron Brown, this is a normal part of journalism in that every respectable news organization has an editor that checks the facts and makes sure the copy written makes sense in the big scheme of things. This is true. However, what he doesn't explain is why, since this is such a normal procedure, did CNN feel the need to remind its reporters of this fact – and in such detail—on the eve of a war deemed illegal by the United Nations (Fisk, 2003, February 25; Goodman & Rendall, 2003).

123.) Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a quantitative study from January 30, 2003, to February 12, 2003, concerning ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. They concluded that of the 393 on-camera sources who appeared in nightly news stories about Iraq, more than two-thirds (267) of the guests were from the US and 75% of those (199) were either current or former government or military officials with only one expressing skepticism or opposition to the war. "Such a predominance of official sources virtually assures that independent and grassroots perspectives will be underrepresented." In fact, only 20 of the 393 represented the Iraqi government and only 3 represented anti-war organizations. At a time when 61% of US respondents were telling pollsters that more time was needed for diplomacy and inspections, only 6% of US sources on the four networks were skeptics regarding the need for war, half of them were people on the street, and half of them were unnamed ("In Iraq", 2003).

124.) During the first Desert Storm, the British Ministry of Defense referred to the relationship between the government and the press as "buddy-buddy". This is no different today. Members of the press are being "embedded" in various military units, thus, certainly bringing about questions of bias. Here is a brief list of things to look out for when watching reporters on the frontlines during these next few wars:
A. Reporters who wear items of American or British military costume – helmets, camouflage jackets, weapons, etc..
B. Reporters who say "we" when they are referring to the U.S. or British military unit in which they are "embedded".
C. Those who use the words "collateral damage" instead of "dead civilians".
D. Those who commence answering questions with the words: "Well, of course, because of military security, I can't divulge…"
E. Those who, reporting from the Iraqi side, insist upon referring to the Iraqi population as "his" (i.e. Saddam's) people.
F. Journalists reporting from either side who use the god-awful and creepy phrase "officials say" without naming, quite specifically, who these often lying "officials" are.
G. "Allegedly" – for all carnage caused by Western Forces; not used for carnage caused by "enemy" troops.
H. "Officials here are not giving us much access" – a clear sign that reporters are confined to their hotels.
I. "Remnants" – allegedly "diehard" Iraqi troops still shooting at the Americans but actually the first signs of a resistance movement dedicated to the "liberation" of Iraq from its new western occupiers.
J. "Newly liberated" – for territory and cities newly occupied by the Americans or British.
K. "What went wrong?" – to accompany pictures illustrating the growing anarchy in Iraq as if it were not predicted (Fisk, 2003, January 21; Fisk, 2003, March 16).

125.) Shamed (and retired) Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was once Reagan's point man for crisis management and coordinator of US counter-terrorism efforts in the 1980's, a staff member of Reagan's National Security Council, and one of the main players of what has become known as the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved the illegal selling of weapons to the government of Iran, was a frontline "embedded" war correspondent for FoxNews during the 2003 war on Iraq, although his bio on the Fox webpage makes no reference to his shameful past. Other on-air Fox journalists even referred to him as "Col. North" from time to time. He's also the host of War Stories on the Fox network, a weekday radio program, Common Sense Radio, and the author of Mission Compromised, a fictionalized account of the October, 1993, raid on Mogadishu, Somalia – the first of a proposed trilogy. Even though he is clearly a media-man today, he openly admitted on The 700 Club the not so surprising fact that he has "a great many friends who are still serving in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marines, as well as the FBI, CIA, DIA [Department of Internal Affairs], and the NSA," ("Oliver", 2002; "Guest: Oliver North", 2003).

126.) Television reporter Pat Dooris of KGW News in Portland, Oregon, was one of the 30 journalists "embedded" on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. However, he, unlike so many others then and now stationed in the Persian Gulf, was not away from his entire family. According to The New York Times, "When Pat Dooris…had a chance to interview the captain of this aircraft carrier, there was one question he was determined to ask. What would he do…if in an attack on Iraq, one of the carrier's fighter jets did not come back? Mr. Dooris's question was driven by more than professional curiosity. His older brother, Cmdr. Bill Dooris, is a pilot and second in command of one of the carrier's F-18 Hornet squadrons, which would play a critical role in any air assault. The risks his brother faces have been on his mind for a while." Did KGW really expect him to present an unbiased journalistic view of the events going on around him when he was so closely tied to them (Clemetson, 2003)?

127.) Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Peter Arnett, an NBC and National Geographic correspondent in Baghdad, was fired at the end of March, 2003, for granting an interview with state controlled Iraqi television. In his short interview, he stated, in part, that "the first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly the war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces… President Bush says he is concerned about the Iraqi people. But if Iraqi people are dying in numbers, then American policy will be challenged very strongly." Reporters are supposed to be unbiased and report the truth as they see it. If a reporter is patriotic or takes sides, he or she cannot fulfill his or her duties properly. In his first piece in The Daily Mirror, his new employer, Arnett wrote, "…my…NBC reporting career was turned to ashes. And why? Because I stated the obvious to Iraqi television; that the US war timetable [to be in Baghdad by the end of March] has fallen by the wayside… I don't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy – I just want to be able to tell the truth," (Ruttenberg, 2003, March 31; Ruttenberg, 2003, April 1; Arnett, 2003).

128.) The current Bush administration has taken their communications department very seriously, utilizing the skills of several television professionals. Of those, one is Scott Sforza, "a former ABC producer who was hired by the Bush campaign in Austin, Tex., and who now works for Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director." Sfozra created "the White House 'message of the day' backdrops and helped design the $250,000 set at the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraq war." Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman "whom the Bush White House hired after seeing his work in the 2000 campaign," has the title of associate director of communications for production. A third player is Greg Jenkins, "a former FoxNews television producer in Washington who is now the director of presidential advance. [He] manages a small army of staff and volunteers who move days ahead of Mr. Bush and his entourage to set up the staging of all White House events. "We pay particular attention to not only what the president says but what the American people see," said Dan Bartlett. When the president gave a speech in Indianapolis regarding his economic policy, White House aides had the people in the background remove their ties so they'd look more like ordinary folks, the kind Bush claims will benefit from his tax cut. At a speech given at Mt. Rushmore during the summer of 2002, the platform set up for the television cameras was on the president's right, rather than directly in front, as had been done with other presidents. Why? So the president would be captured in profile with his face alongside those on the mountain. More recently, in his now (in)famous Top Gun-esque landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, Sforza – who had been "embedded" on the ship for several days at the time – had orchestrated everything from the fact that members of the Lincoln crew "were arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder" to the "'Mission Accomplished' banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call 'magic hour light,' which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush. 'If you looked at the T.V. picture, you saw there was flattering light on his left cheek and a slight shadowing on his right...It looked great,' said Joshua King, director of production of presidential events in the Clinton administration." Bush's communications department "understand the visual as well as anybody ever has," commented Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan's chief image maker, who was convicted of perjury in 1987 under the then newly-signed Ethics Act. "They watched what we did, they watched the mistakes of Bush I, they watched how Clinton kind of stumbled into it, and they've taken it to an art form," (Bumiller, 2003; Kutler, 1990, pp. 583-584).

References:

2002 annual report. (2003). Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Action alert: Why were government propaganda experts working on news at CNN? (2000, March 27). Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Ali, L. (2003, March 31). Music: Caught between rock and a hard place [Electronic version]. Newsweek.
Allen, C. (2000). Sold American: US news consultants and news issues abroad. In R. Andersen & L. Strate (Eds.), Critical studies in media commercialism (pp. 84-100). NY: Oxford University Press.
Andersen, R. (2000). Introduction. In R. Andersen & L. Strate (Eds.), Critical studies in media commercialism (pp. 1-21). NY: Oxford University Press.
Andersen, R. (2000). The commercial politics of the 1996 US Presidential campaign. In R. Andersen & L. Strate (Eds.), Critical studies in media commercialism (pp. 250-263). NY: Oxford University Press.
AOL Time Warner. (2003). Richard D. Parsons: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AOL Time Warner.
Armstrong, M. (2001, September 20). Maher causes "cowardly" flap. E! Online.
Armstrong, M. (2001, September 27). White House politically corrects Maher. E! Online.
Arnett, P. (2003, April 1). This war is not working [Electronic version]. The Daily Mirror.
Arnold Schwarzenegger. (2003). E! Online.
Arnove, A. (2003, March 19). Pro-war propaganda machine: Media becomes branch of war effort [Electronic version]. Socialist Worker.
Bagdikian, B.H. (2000). The media monopoly (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Barris, C. (1982). Confessions of a dangerous mind: An unauthorized autobiography. NY: Hyperion.
Bayley, E.R. (1981). Joe McCarthy and the press. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Bellone, D. (2002, October 29). Arnold Schwarzenegger: At Chapman University [Electronic version]. MSNBC.
Ben Stein. (2003). Premiere Speakers Bureau.
Bill Moyers. (n.d.). Hollywood.com.
Biography for Charlie Korsmo. (2003). Internet Movie Data Base.
Biography for Mark McKinney (I). (2003). Internet Movie Data Base.
Boihem, H., & Emmanouilides, C. (Producers). Boihem, H. (Director). (1996). The Ad and the Ego [Motion Picture]. (Available from Parallax Pictures, Inc., 715 Fitzwater Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147).
Boston, R. (1996). The most dangerous man in America? Pat Robertson and the rise of the Christian Coalition. NY: Prometheus Books.
Boychuk, B. (1996, December 11). Ripped from today's headlines! Teevee.
Brewin, B. (1999, August 31). Hollywood, DOD join forces to create realistic simulations for military officers [Electronic version]. CNN.
Bumiller, E. (2003, May 16). Keepers of Bush image lift stagecraft to new heights. The New York Times, pp. A1, A20.
Burns, J. (2002, December 13). Actors say Hollywood's being 'pressured' to make war movies. Cybercast News Service.
Campbell, D. (2001, August 29). Top Gun versus Sergeant Bilko? No contest, says the Pentagon: Scripts can often be the first casualty in Hollywood's theatre of war [Electronic version]. The Guardian.
Campbell, D. (2001, September 6). Hollywood helps CIA come in from the cold [Electronic version]. The Guardian.
Carlisle, J. (1993, spring). Public relationships: Hill & Knowlton, Robert Gray, and the CIA [Electronic version]. Covert Action Quarterly, 44.
Chomsky, N. (1991). Media control: The spectacular achievements of propaganda. NY: Seven Stories Press.
Chomsky, N., & Barsamian, D. (2000). Propaganda and the public mind. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Clear Channel. (2003). Clear Channel.
Clemetson, L. (2003, March 15). Brothers catch up on carrier in war's shadow [Electronic version]. The New York Times.
Cockburn, A. (2000, March 26). CNN and Psyops. CounterPunch.
Cogley, J. (1956). Report on blacklisting II: Radio – television. NY: Arno Press and The New York Times.
Corporate Info. (2003). NBC.
CORRECTED: Antiwar message has tough time being heard in media [Electronic version]. (2003, April 8). The New York Times.
Cowan, R. (2003, March 7). 13 myths on war in Iraq [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Danaher, K. (1994). Introduction. In K. Danaher (Ed.), 50 years is enough: The case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (pp. 1-5). Boston, MA: South End Press.
Drew, E. (1999). The corruption of American politics: What went wrong and why. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press.
Dunne, F. (2003, March 10). Pentagon threatens to kill independent reporters in Iraq.
Edwards, D. (2003, April 30). Chaining the watch dog [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Eldridge, D. N. (2000, June). 'Dear Owen': The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps reacts to refusal to allow public airing of pending media concentration rules. (2003, May 15). FCC News.
FCC Homepage. (2003).
Fisk, R. (2003, January 21). The media column: War journalists should not be cosying up to the military [Electronic version]. The Independent.
Fisk, R. (2003, February 25). How the news will be censored in this war: A new CNN system of 'script approval' suggests the Pentagon will have nothing to worry about [Electronic version]. The Independent.
Fisk, R. (2003, March 16). The war of misinformation has begun [Electronic version]. The Independent.
Fisk, R. (2003, April 9). Is there some element in the US military that wants to take out journalists [Electronic version]? The Independent.
Fitzgerald, M. (2003, March 18). Dixie Chicks axed by Clear Channel [Electronic version]. The Business Journal.
Foege, A. (1996). The empire that God built: Inside Pat Robertson's media machine. NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Fred Dalton Thompson. (2003). E! Online.
Fred Grandy. (n.d.). TV Tome.
Fred Thompson. (n.d.). TV Tome.
Gabler, N. (1995). Winchell: Gossip, power and the culture of celebrity. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Gentry, C. (1991). J. Edgar Hoover: The man and the secrets. NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
George Murphy. (2003). E! Online.
Gillies, J.S. (2003, March 9). Putting a face on those who serve [Electronic version]. The Washington Post.
Giroux, H.A. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. NY: Rowan & Littlefield Publications, Inc.
Goodman, A., & Rendall, S. (2003, April 6). CNN's Aaron Brown: CNN's Aaron Brown on the network's coverage of the anti-war movement, the media's sanitation of the invasion of Iraq and why he believes this is an inappropriate time for reporters to ask questions about war [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Grossberg, J. (2001, October 8). Hollywood helping out Pentagon? E! Online.
Grossman, L.K. (1995). The electronic republic: Reshaping democracy in the information age. NY: The Penguin Group.
Guest: Oliver North. (2003). CBN.
Hamilton, N. (1992). JFK: Reckless youth. NY: Random House.
Harrelson's father to get court hearing [Electronic version]. (1999, July 17). Jefferson City News Tribune.
Harris, R.A., & Lasky, M.S. (1976). The films of Alfred Hitchcock. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press.
Hirsen, J. (2002 March 15). Bill Maher gets a political correction. NewsMax.com, 4(3), p. 10.
Hirsen, J. (2002, August 15). Angelina & Bono, U.N. playthings. NewsMax.com, 4(8), p. 12.
Hirsen, J. (2002, September). Stars fall for the U.N. NewsMax.com, 4(9), p. 42.
Hirsen, J. (2002, October). 'Law & Order' courts Sen. Thompson. NewsMax.com, 4(10), p. 11.
Hirsen, J. (2002, November). Dirty Harry on park beat. NewxMax.com, 4(11), pp. 10-11.
Hollywood cracks down on hackers [Electronic version]. (2003, April 21). Celebrity Justice.
Hugill, P.J. (1999). Global communications since 1844: Geopolitics and technology. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.
In Iraq crisis, networks are megaphones for official views. (2003, March 18). Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Jack Valenti. (n.d.).
James Rubin. (n.d.). Washington Speakers Bureau.
Jennifer Garner recruited by the CIA [Electronic version]. (2003, August 28). Celebrity Justice.
Jhally, S. (Producer & Director). (1997). The myth of the liberal media [Motion Picture]. (Available from The Media Education Foundation, 26 Center Street, Northampton, MA 01060).
Jhally, S. & Dinozzi, R. (Producers). Jhally, S. (Director). (1994). The killing screens: Media & the culture of violence [Motion Picture]. (Available from The Media Education Foundation, 26 Center Street, Northampton, MA 01060).
Jhally, S. & Dinozzi, R. (Producers). Jhally, S. (Director). (1994). The killing screens: Media & the culture of violence [Motion Picture]. (Available from The Media Education Foundation, 26 Center Street, Northampton, MA 01060).
Jhally, S., & Huntemann, N. (Producers). Huntemann, N. (Director). (2000). Game Over: Gender, race, and violence in video games [Motion Picture]. (Available from The Media Education Foundation, 26 Center Street, Northampton, MA 01060).
Jones, T.L. (2003). The murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: There never was a Camelot. CourtTV.com.
Katz, E. (Ed.). (1994). The film encyclopedia (2nd ed.). NY: HarperCollins.
King, J. (2001, November 8). White House sees Hollywood role in war on terrorism [Electronic version]. CNN.
Kirkpatrick, D.D. (2003, June 2). New rules give big media chance to get even bigger [Electronic version]. The New York Times.
Klurfeld, H. (1976). Winchell: His life and times. NY: Praeger Publishers.
Knighted, but not 'Sir Alan' [Electronic version]. (2002, September 26). CBSNEWS.
Knowlton, B. (2003, May 16). France formally accuses U.S. of 'repeated disinformation'. The Oregonian, p. A3.
Kubey, R., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002, February). Television addiction is no mere metaphor. Scientific American, 286(2), pp. 74-80.
Kurtz, H. (2003, April 9). As more correspondents die, media rethink their positions [Electronic version]. The Washington Post.
Kutler, S.I. (1990). The wars of Watergate: The last crisis of Richard Nixon. NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Labaton, S. (2003, March 21). Pentagon advisor is also advising Global Crossing [Electronic version]. The New York Times.
Law & Order: Fred Thompson as District Attorney Arthur Branch. (2003). NBC.
Lee Marvin, the movie tough guy. (n.d.). The Patriot Files.
Levin, B. (2003). The pirates and the mouse: Disney's war against the counter culture. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books.
Levin, G. (2002, December 5). Plot ideas ripped from the headlines [Electronic version]. USA Today.
Loeb, V. (1999, October 14). The CIA's operation Hollywood: 'Company of Spies' wins raves from image-conscious agency [Electronic version]. The Washington Post.
Loughlin, S. (2002, August 16). Elvis meets Nixon: A White House memory [Electronic version]. CNN.
MacArthur, J.R. (1992). The second front: Censorship and propaganda in the Gulf War. NY: Hill and Wang.
Maher tapes final episode of 'Politically Incorrect' [Electronic version]. (2002, June 29). USA Today.
Maltin, L. (1994). Biography of Clint Eastwood. Internet Movie Data Base.
Maltin, L. (Ed.). (2001). Leonard Maltin's movie & video guide: 2002 edition. NY: Signet.
Maria Shriver. (n.d.). Hollywood.com.
Martin, R.G. (1983). A hero for our time: An intimate story of the Kennedy years. NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.
Matthew Perry. (2003). E! Online.
Mazzocco, D.W. (1994). Networks of power: Corporate TV's threat to democracy. Boston, MA: South End Press.
McAllister, M.P. (2000). From flick to flack: The increased emphasis on marketing by media entertainment corporations. In R. Andersen & L. Strate (Eds.), Critical studies in media commercialism (pp. 101-122). NY: Oxford University Press.
McChesney, R.W. (2000). The global media giants. In R. Andersen & L. Strate (Eds.), Critical studies in media commercialism (pp. 59-70). NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1997)
McChesney, R.W. (2003, May 15). Making media monopoly part of the Constitution [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Media advisory: Pentagon propaganda plan is undemocratic, possibly illegal. (2002, February 19). Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Mendez, A. J. (1999-2000, winter). CIA goes Hollywood: A classic case of deception [Electronic version]. Studies in Intelligence, 43(1).
Mickey Z. (2003, June 30). GM food for thought [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Miller, D. (2003, March 28). Eliminating truth: The development of war propaganda [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Miller, D. (2003, April 3). Embed with the military [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Miller, L., & Rampton, S. (2001). The Pentagon's information warrior: Rendon to the rescue. PR Watch.
Minneapolis Star Tribune new links. (2003).
Minnesota Governors, 1849-. (2003).
Missing ITN crew may have come under 'friendly fire' [Electronic version]. (2003, March 23). The Guardian.
Mittgang, H. (1993, May 6). Disney link to the F.B.I. and Hoover is disclosed. The New York Times, p. B1.
Moldea, D.E. (1987). Dark victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the mob. NY: Penguin Books.
Moore, M. (2000, November 2). An open letter to George W. Bush.
Naisbitt, J., Naisbitt, N., & Philips, D. (1999). High tech, high touch: Technology and our accelerated search for meaning. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Nancy Kulp. (1996). The Unofficial Beverly Hillbillies Homepage.
Naureckas, J. (1991). Gulf War coverage: The worst censorship was at home. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Neale, C., Murphy, D., Mansky, A., Wintonick, P., & Achbar, M. (Producers). Wintonick, P., & Achbar, M. (Directors). (1992). Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media [Motion Picture]. (Available from Necessary Illusions Productions, Inc., 24 du Mont-Royal Avenue West Suite 1008, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H2T 2S2).
Nelson, M. (1997). War of the black heavens: The battles of western broadcasting in the cold war. NY: Syracuse University Press.
The new powder keg in the Middle East [Electronic version]. (1996, October-November). Nida'ul Islam.
News Corporation. (2003). News Corporation.
Nichols, J., & McChesney, R.W. (2000). It's the media, stupid. NY: Seven Stories Press.
Nichols, J., & McChesney, R. (2003, May 20). Media monopoly vs. democracy. TomPaine.com.
Oliver North. (2002, October 11). FOXNews.
O'Neill, T. (with Novak, W.) (1987). Man of the house: The life and political memoirs of Speaker Tip O'Neill. NY: Random House.
O'Reilly, B. (2001). The no spin zone: Confrontations with the powerful and famous in America. NY: Broadway Books.
Oshinsky, D.M. (1983). A conspiracy so immense: The world of Joe McCarthy. NY: The Free Press.
Parenti, M. (1986). Inventing reality: The politics of the mass media. NY: St. Martin's Press.
Parenti, M. (1992). Make-believe media: The politics of entertainment. NY: St. Martin's Press.
Parmet, H.S. (1983). JFK: The presidency of John F. Kennedy. NY: The Dial Press.
The partners. (2003). The Brunswick Group.
Patterson, J. (2001, October 5). The caring, sharing CIA: Central Intelligence gets a makeover [Electronic version]. The Guardian. Retrieved June 3, 2003, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,563161,00.html.
Pavlik, J.V. (2001). News framing and new media: Digital tools to re-engage an alienated citizenry. In S.D. Reese, O.H. Gandy, & A.E. Grant (Eds.), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 311-321). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Peter Lawford: Actor. (2003).
Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. NY: Ballantine Books.
The political graveyard: Index to politicians—Murphy, G to I. (2002).
Powers, R. (1977). The newscasters: The news business as show business. NY: St. Martin's Press
Pozner, V. (1990). Parting with illusions: The extraordinary life and controversial views of the Soviet Union's leading commentator. NY: The Atlantic Monthly Press.
Pozner, V., & Novikova, I. (2003, March 19). Russian TV guru Vladimir Pozner predicts great trouble for America: The whole world, except America, knows that Iraq cannot threaten the USA (D. Sudakov, Trans.) [Electronic version]. Pravda.
Project: The Agency. (2002). Variety.com.
Radio ga ga. (2003, March 20). Take Back the Media.
Reid, R.H. (1997). Architects of the web: 1,000 days that built the future of business. NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The Rendon Group staff. (2003). The Rendon Group.
Rep. Fred Grandy (R-Io) [Electronic version]. (n.d.). Mother Jones.
Reuth, R.G. (1993). Goebbels (K. Winston, Trans.). NY: Harcourt Brace & Company. (Original work published 1990)
Rhodes, A. (1976). Propaganda – the art of persuasion: World War II. NY: Chelsea House Publishers.
Rich, B. (1994). World Bank/IMF: 50 years is enough. In K. Danaher (Ed.), 50 years is enough: The case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, pp. 6-13. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Robert Montgomery. (2003). E! Online.
Roberts, J.L. (2002, October 13). Big media and the big story [Electronic version]. MSNBC.
Rooney, B. (2002, June 12). Pentagon provides planes and military for war movies [Electronic version]. ABC News.
Ruttenberg, J. (2003, March 31). NBC News fires Arnett over Iraqi TV interview [Electronic version]. The New York Times.
Ruttenberg, J. (2003, April 1). Arnett dismissed after remarks on Iraqi TV [Electronic version]. The New York Times.
Sainath, P. (2003, September 2). War, propaganda, empire [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Salinger 'totally sure' TWA 800 missile theory is true [Electronic version]. (1997, March 13). CNN.
Saudi media accuse US of killing journalists: Arab TV journalists still trapped in Baghdad [Electronic version]. (2003, April 9). The Independent/Bangladesh.
Schiller, H.I. (1995). The global information highway: Project for an ungovernable world. In J. Brook & I.A. Boal (Eds.), Resisting the virtual life: The culture and politics of information (pp. 17-33). San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
Schoemer, K. (1999, October 18). Being Spike Jones. Newsweek, 134(16), pp. 74-75.
Schwarzenegger's sex talk: In 1977 interview, actor spoke of orgies, drugs, and homosexuality. (n.d.). The Smoking Gun.
Senate to look at Global Crossing sale [Electronic version]. (2003, April 7). The New York Times.
Shalom, S.R. (2003, April 22). Fahrenheit 451 and the problem of the US media [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Slater, R. (1987). Portraits in silicon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Solomon, N. (1999, March 10). Keeping Mickey in the private domain. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Solomon, N. (2000, March 30). Mickey Mouse network participates in abuse. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Solomon, N. (2002, December 5). Media spin can separate war from death [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Solomon, N. (2003, May 15). Why the FCC's rules matter [Electronic version]. Z Magazine.
Sonny Bono. (2003). VH1.com.
Speak out for media democracy. (n.d.). Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Stauber, J., & Rampton, S. (1995). Toxic sludge is good for you! Lies, damn lies, and the public relations industry. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.
Stern, N.B. (1981). From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly computers. Bedford, MA: Digital Equipment Corporation.
Strategic plan: Executive summary. (n.d.). Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Sussman, G. (1997). Communication, technology, and politics in the information age. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Talk radio WIRAQ – Live from the axis of evil. (2002, May 15). NewsMax.com, p. 20.
Taylor, P. (2002, March). The case for free air time. The Alliance for Better Campaigns.
Thompson, Fred, 1944-. (n.d.).
Tommy Lee Jones. (2003). E! Online.
Tony Mendez. (2003). Variety.com.
Transcription of Presley Letter, undated. (n.d.). National Security Archive.
University of Florida. (1998-1999). Motion picture association leader Jack Valenti to speak at FBK banquet; Other deadlines and events are also approaching.
University of Texas at Austin. (2000). Guest of honor Jack Valenti.
U.S. Army goes Hollywood for high-tech training [Electronic version]. (1999, August 18). CNN.
U.S. media applaud bombing of Iraqi TV. (2003, March 27). Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Valenti, J. (2001, November 28). LBJ's unwinnable war. The Washington Post, p. A35.
Vaughn, R. (1972). Only victims: A study of show business blacklisting. NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Vladimir Pozner. (n.d.). Triumph.
The War Conspiracy. (n.d.). Guerrilla News Network.
Webb, G. (2002). The mighty Wurlitzer plays on. In K. Borjesson (Ed.), Into the buzzsaw: Leading journalists expose the myth of a free press (pp. 295-310). NY: Prometheus Books.
Weiss, S.R. (2002, March 27). Top Gun gets real [Electronic version]. TV Guide.
What a difference four years makes: Why U.N. inspectors left Iraq – Then and now. (2002, October). Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Williams, G. (2000). Bestriding the world.
Winchell, W. (1975). Winchell exclusive: "Things that happened to me – and me to them". Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Young, S. (2003, February, 27). 'Front Line' a questionable dose of reality [Electronic version]. Oakland Tribune.
Zinn, H. (1998). The twentieth century: A people's history (3rd ed.). NY: HarperPerrenial.
Zinn, H. (1999). A people's history of the United States: 1492 – present (4th ed.). NY: Perennial Classics.

Still to Include:
1.) Many media corporations also own companies that are involved with the military-industrial complex, which implies a friendly working relationship between media conglomerates and Washington/the military/the pentagon.
2.) Members of both the government and the entertainment industry (particularly those involved in the film and music industry) have been working very hard to create strident measures for censoring the Internet. Jack Valenti is a key figure in this.
3.) There is a new psychological condition being studied amongst the peoples of Venezuela which is believed to be the result of an individual's surroundings drastically differing from what they are being told is real in the press and on television.
4.) Corporations have been putting our information up for sale, including insurance companies, credit card companies, cable companies, magazine publishers, and government agencies such as the DMV. Who's buying it? Well, other corporations, for one, but also the US government, which is keeping it in files on its citizens. This is a way for them to bypass such restrictions as Unlawful Search and Seizure.
5.) Several past presidents of the Screen Actors Guild have gone into politics themselves, or have attached themselves to the careers of other politicians.
6.) Robert Ryan, Liesel Matthews (AKA Liesel Pritzker), Charlie Chaplin…
7.) Guts & Glory (PN 1995.9 .W3 S93 2002)…

About the Author:
David B. Deserano is a recent graduate from Portland State University, Oregon, with an MS in Communication Theory. Much of his time has been spent researching and documenting the numerous links between the US government and a supposedly free media. He has turned this article (which originated as his Masters thesis) into an illustrated 'zine. To contact Dave Deserano, email him at fortytwoent@yahoo.com.

posted in Information Warfare - 4 replies

Gringo love Candy

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:19:57 GMT

Gringo big dumbshit

Ooga Booga

Ignorant America: Just How Stupid Are We?
By Rick Shenkman, Tomdispatch.com

Posted on July 2, 2008, Printed on July 5, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/90161/

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

Just how stupid are we? Pretty stupid, it would seem, when we come across headlines like this: "Homer Simpson, Yes -- 1st Amendment 'Doh,' Survey Finds" (Associated Press 3/1/06).

"About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey.

"The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms."
But what does it mean exactly to say that American voters are stupid? About this there is unfortunately no consensus. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who confessed not knowing how to define pornography, we are apt simply to throw up our hands in frustration and say: We know it when we see it.

But unless we attempt a definition of some sort, we risk incoherence, dooming our investigation of stupidity from the outset.

Stupidity cannot mean, as Humpty Dumpty would have it, whatever we say it means.

Five defining characteristics of stupidity, it seems to me, are readily apparent.

First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who's in charge.

Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events.

Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts.

Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country's long-term interests.

Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

American Ignorance
Taking up the first of our definitions of stupidity, how ignorant are we? Ask the political scientists and you will be told that there is damning, hard evidence pointing incontrovertibly to the conclusion that millions are embarrassingly ill-informed and that they do not care that they are. There is enough evidence that one could almost conclude -- though admittedly this is a stretch -- that we are living in an Age of Ignorance.

Surprised? My guess is most people would be. The general impression seems to be that we are living in an age in which people are particularly knowledgeable. Many students tell me that they are the most well-informed generation in history.

Why are we so deluded?

The error can be traced to our mistaking unprecedented access to information with the actual consumption of it. Our access is indeed phenomenal. George Washington had to wait two weeks to discover that he had been elected president of the United States. That's how long it took for the news to travel from New York, where the Electoral College votes were counted, to reach him at home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Americans living in the interior regions had to wait even longer, some up to two months.

Now we can watch developments as they occur halfway around the world in real time. It is little wonder then that students boast of their knowledge. Unlike their parents, who were forced to rely mainly on newspapers and the network news shows to find out what was happening in the world, they can flip on CNN and Fox or consult the Internet.

But in fact only a small percentage of people take advantage of the great new resources at hand. In 2005, the Pew Research Center surveyed the news habits of some 3,000 Americans age 18 and older. The researchers found that 59% on a regular basis get at least some news from local TV, 47% from national TV news shows, and just 23% from the Internet.

Anecdotal evidence suggested for years that Americans were not particularly well-informed.

As foreign visitors long ago observed, Americans are vastly inferior in their knowledge of world geography compared with Europeans. (The old joke is that "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.")

But it was never clear until the postwar period how ignorant Americans are. For it was only then that social scientists began measuring in a systematic manner what Americans actually know. The results were devastating.

The most comprehensive surveys, the National Election Studies (NES), were carried out by the University of Michigan beginning in the late 1940s. What these studies showed was that

Americans fall into three categories with regard to their political knowledge.

A tiny percentage know a lot about politics, up to 50%-60% know enough to answer very simple questions, and the rest know next to nothing.

Contrary to expectations, by many measures the surveys showed the level of ignorance remaining constant over time.

In the 1990s, political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter concluded that there was statistically little difference between the knowledge of the parents of the Silent Generation of the 1950s, the parents of the Baby Boomers of the 1960s, and American parents today. (By some measures, Americans are dumber today than their parents of a generation ago.)

Some of the numbers are hard to fathom in a country in which for at least a century all children have been required by law to attend grade school or be home-schooled. Even if people do not closely follow the news, one would expect them to be able to answer basic civics questions, but only a small minority can.

In 1986, only 30% knew that Roe v. Wade was the Supreme Court decision that ruled abortion legal more than a decade earlier. In 1991, Americans were asked how long the term of a United States senator is. Just 25% correctly answered six years. How many senators are there? A poll a few years ago found that only 20% know that there are 100 senators, though the number has remained constant for the last half century (and is easy to remember). Encouragingly, today the number of Americans who can correctly identify and name the three branches of government is up to 40%.

Polls over the past three decades measuring Americans' knowledge of history show similarly dismal results. What happened in 1066? Just 10% know it is the date of the Norman Conquest.

Who said the "world must be made safe for democracy"? Just 14% know it was Woodrow Wilson. Which country dropped the nuclear bomb? Only 49% know it was their own country. Who was America's greatest president? According to a Gallup poll in 2005, a majority answer that it was a president from the last half century: 20% said Reagan, 15% Bill Clinton, 12% John Kennedy, 5% George W. Bush. Only 14% picked Lincoln and only 5%, Washington.

And the worst president? For years Americans would include in the list Herbert Hoover. But no more. Most today do not know who Herbert Hoover was, according to the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey in 2004. Just 43% could correctly identify him.

The only history questions a majority of Americans can answer correctly are the most basic ones. What happened at Pearl Harbor? A great majority know: 84%. What was the Holocaust? Nearly 70% know. (Thirty percent don't?)

But it comes as something of a shock that, in 1983, just 81% knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was and that, in 1985, only 81% could identify Martin Luther King, Jr.

What Voters Don't Know
Who these poor souls were who didn't know who Martin Luther King was we cannot be sure.

Research suggests that they were probably impoverished (the poor tend to know less on the whole about politics and history than others) or simply unschooled, categories which usually overlap.

But even Americans in the middle class who attend college exhibit profound ignorance.

A report in 2007 published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that on average 14,000 randomly selected college students at 50 schools around the country scored under 55 (out of 100) on a test that measured their knowledge of basic American civics. Less than half knew that Yorktown was the last battle of the American Revolution. Surprisingly, seniors often tested lower than freshmen. (The explanation was apparently that many students by their senior year had forgotten what they learned in high school.)

The optimists point to surveys indicating that about half the country can describe some differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties. But if they do not know the difference between liberals and conservatives, as surveys indicate, how can they possibly say in any meaningful way how the parties differ?

And if they do not know this, what else do they not know?

Plenty, it turns out.

Even though they are awash in news, Americans generally do not seem to absorb what it is that they are reading and hearing and watching.

Americans cannot even name the leaders of their own government.

Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Fewer than half of Americans could tell you her name during the length of her entire tenure. William Rehnquist was chief justice of the Supreme Court. Just 40% of Americans ever knew his name (and only 30% could tell you that he was a conservative).

Going into the First Gulf War, just 15% could identify Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense. In 2007, in the fifth year of the Iraq War, only 21% could name the secretary of defense, Robert Gates. Most Americans cannot name their own member of Congress or their senators.

If the problem were simply that Americans are bad at names, one would not have to worry too much. But they do not understand the mechanics of government either.

Only 34% know that it is the Congress that declares war (which may explain why they are not alarmed when presidents take us into wars without explicit declarations of war from the legislature).

Only 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Some 49% think the president can suspend the Constitution. Some 60% believe that he can appoint judges to the federal courts without the approval of the Senate. Some 45% believe that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution.

On the basis of their comprehensive approach, Delli Carpini and Keeter concluded that only 5% of Americans could correctly answer three-fourths of the questions asked about economics, only 11% of the questions about domestic issues, 14% of the questions about foreign affairs, and 10% of the questions about geography. The highest score? More Americans knew the correct answers to history questions than any other (which will come as a surprise to many history teachers). Still, only 25% knew the correct answers to three-quarters of the history questions, which were rudimentary.

In 2003, the Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad investigated Americans' knowledge of world affairs. The task force concluded: "America's ignorance of the outside world" is so great as to constitute a threat to national security.

Young and Ignorant -- and Voting
At least, you may think to yourself, we are not getting any dumber. But by some measures we are. Young people by many measures know less today than young people forty years ago. And their news habits are worse.

Newspaper reading went out in the sixties along with the Hula Hoop. Just 20% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 read a daily paper. And that isn't saying much. There's no way of knowing what part of the paper they're reading. It is likelier to encompass the comics and a quick glance at the front page than dense stories about Somalia or the budget.

They aren't watching the cable news shows either. The average age of CNN's audience is sixty. And they surely are not watching the network news shows, which attract mainly the Depends generation.

Nor are they using the Internet in large numbers to surf for news. Only 11% say that they regularly click on news web pages.

(Yes, many young people watch Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. A survey in 2007 by the Pew Research Center found that 54% of the viewers of The Daily Show score in the "high knowledge" news category -- about the same as the viewers of the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News.)

Compared with Americans generally -- and this isn't saying much, given their low level of interest in the news -- young people are the least informed of any age cohort save possibly for those confined to nursing homes. In fact, the young are so indifferent to newspapers that they single-handedly are responsible for the dismally low newspaper readership rates that are bandied about.

In earlier generations -- in the 1950s, for example -- young people read newspapers and digested the news at rates similar to those of the general population. Nothing indicates that the current generation of young people will suddenly begin following the news when they turn 35 or 40. Indeed, half a century of studies suggest that most people who do not pick up the news habit in their twenties probably never will.

Young people today find the news irrelevant.

Bored by politics, students shun the rituals of civic life, voting in lower numbers than other Americans (though a small up-tick in civic participation showed up in recent surveys). U.S. Census data indicate that voters aged 18 to 24 turn out in low numbers.

In 1972, when 18 year olds got the vote, 52% cast a ballot. In subsequent years, far fewer voted: in 1988, 40%; in 1992, 50%; in 1996, 35%; in 2000, 36%. In 2004, despite the most intense get-out-the-vote effort ever focused on young people, just 47% took the time to cast a ballot.

Since young people on the whole scarcely follow politics, one may want to consider whether we even want them to vote. Asked in 2000 to identify the presidential candidate who was the chief sponsor of Campaign Finance Reform -- Sen. John McCain -- just 4% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 could do so.

As the primary season began in February, fewer than half in the same age group knew that George W. Bush was even a candidate. Only 12% knew that McCain was also a candidate even though he was said to be especially appealing to young people.

One news subject in recent history, 9/11, did attract the interest of the young. A poll by Pew at the end of 2001 found that 61% of adult Americans under age 30 said that they were following the story closely.

But few found any other subjects in the news that year compelling. Anthrax attacks? Just 32% indicated it was important enough to follow. The economy? Again, just 32%. The capture of Kabul? Just 20%.

It would appear that young people today are doing very little reading of any kind.

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts, consulting a vast array of surveys, including the United States Census, found that just 43% of young people ages 18 to 24 read literature. In 1982, the number was 60%.

A majority do not read either newspapers, fiction, poetry, or drama. Save for the possibility that they are reading the Bible or works of non-fiction, for which solid statistics are unavailable, it would appear that this generation is less well read than any other since statistics began to be kept.

The studies demonstrating that young people know less today than young people a generation ago do not get much publicity. What one hears about are the pioneer steps the young are taking politically.

Headlines from the 2004 presidential election featured numerous stories about young people who were following the campaign on blogs, then a new phenomenon.

Other stories focused on the help young Deaniacs gave Howard Dean by arranging to raise funds through innovative Internet appeals. Still other stories reported that the Deaniacs were networking all over the country through the Internet website meetup.com.

One did not hear that we have raised another Silent Generation. But have we not? The statistics about young people today are fairly clear: As a group they do not vote in large numbers, most do not read newspapers, and most do not follow the news. (Barack Obama has recently inspired greater participation, but at this stage it is too early to tell if the effect will be lasting.)

(N: Let alone its depth and breadth.)

The Issues? Who knows?
Millions every year are now spent on the effort to answer the question:

What do the voters want?

The honest answer would be that often they themselves do not really know because they do not know enough to say.

Few, however, admit this.

In the election of 2004, one of the hot issues was gay marriage. But gauging public opinion on the subject was difficult. Asked in one national poll whether they supported a constitutional amendment allowing only marriages between a man and a woman, a majority said yes. But three questions later a majority also agreed that "defining marriage was not an important enough issue to be worth changing the Constitution."

The New York Times wryly summed up the results: Americans clearly favor amending the Constitution but not changing it.

Does it matter if people are ignorant?

There are many subjects about which the ordinary voter need know nothing. The conscientious citizen has no obligation to plow through the federal budget, for example. One suspects there are not many politicians themselves who have bothered to do so. Nor do voters have an obligation to read the laws passed in their name. We do expect members of Congress to read the bills they are asked to vote on, but we know from experience that often they do not, having failed either to take the time to do so or having been denied the opportunity to do so by their leaders, who for one reason or another often rush bills through.

Reading the text of laws in any case is often unhelpful. The chairpersons in charge of drafting them often include provisions only a detective could untangle. The tax code is rife with clauses like this: The Congress hereby appropriates X dollars for the purchase of 500 widgets that measure 3 inches by 4 inches by 2 inches from any company incorporated on October 20, 1965 in Any City USA situated in block 10 of district 3.

Of course, only one company fits the description. Upon investigation it turns out to be owned by the chairperson's biggest contributor. That is more than any citizens acting on their own could possibly divine.

It is not essential that the voter know every which way in which the tax code is manipulated to benefit special interests. All that is required is that the voter know that rigging of the tax code in favor of certain interests is probably common. The media are perfectly capable of communicating this message. Voters are perfectly capable of absorbing it. Armed with this knowledge, the voter knows to be wary of claims that the tax code treats one and all alike with fairness.

There are however innumerable subjects about which a general knowledge is insufficient. In these cases ignorance of the details is more than a minor problem. An appalling ignorance of Social Security, to take one example, has left Americans unable to see how their money has been spent, whether the system is viable, and what measures are needed to shore it up.

How many know that the system is running a surplus? And that this surplus -- some $150 billion a year -- is actually quite substantial, even by Washington standards? And how many know that the system has been in surplus since 1983?

Few, of course. Ignorance of the facts has led to a fundamentally dishonest debate about Social Security.

During all the years the surpluses were building, the Democrats in Congress pretended the money was theirs to be spent, as if it were the same as all the other tax dollars collected by the government. And spend it they did, whenever they had the chance, with no hint that they were perhaps disbursing funds that actually should be held in reserve for later use.

(Social Security taxes had been expressly raised in 1983 in order to build up the system's funds when bankruptcy had loomed.) Not until the rest of the budget was in surplus (in 1999) did it suddenly occur to them that the money should be saved.

And it appears that the only reason they felt compelled at this point to acknowledge that the money was needed for Social Security was because they wanted to blunt the Republicans' call for tax cuts. The Social Security surplus could not both be used to pay for the large tax cuts Republicans wanted and for the future retirement benefits of aging Boomers.

The Republicans have been equally unctuous. While they have claimed that they are terribly worried about Social Security, they have been busy irresponsibly spending the system's surplus on tax cuts, one cut after another.

First Reagan used the surplus to hide the impact of his tax cuts and then George W. Bush used it to hide the impact of his cuts.

Neither ever acknowledged that it was only the surplus in Social Security's accounts that made it even plausible for them to cut taxes.

Take those Bush tax cuts. Bush claimed the cuts were made possible by several years of past surpluses and the prospect of even more years of surpluses. But subtracting from the federal budget the overflow funds generated by Social Security, the government ran a surplus in just two years during the period the national debt was declining, 1999 and 2000.

In the other years when the government ran a surplus, 1998 and 2001, it was because of Social Security and only because of Social Security. That is, the putative surpluses of 1998 and 2001, which President Bush cited in defense of his tax cuts, were in reality pure fiction.

Without Social Security the government would have been in debt those two years. And yet in 2001 President Bush told the country tax cuts were not only needed, they were affordable because of our splendid surplus.

Today, conservatives argue that the Social Security Trust Fund is a fiction. They are correct. The money was spent. They helped spend it.

To this debate about Social Security -- which, once one understands what has been happening, is actually quite absorbing -- the public has largely been an indifferent spectator.

A surprising 2001 Pew study found that just 19% of Americans understand that the United States ever ran a surplus at all, however defined, in the 1990s or 2000's. And only 50% of Americans, according to an Annenberg study in 2004, understand that President Bush favors privatizing Social Security.

Polls indicate that people are scared that the system is going bust, no doubt thanks in part to Bush's gloom-and-doom prognostications. But they haven't the faintest idea what going bust means. And in fact, the system can be kept going without fundamental change simply by raising the cap on taxed income and pushing back the retirement age a few years.

How much ignorance can a country stand? There have to be terrible consequences when it reaches a certain level. But what level? And with what consequences, exactly? The answers to these questions are unknowable. But can we doubt that if we persist on the path we are on that we shall, one day, perhaps not too far into the distant future, find out the answers?

Excerpted from Just How Stupid Are We?, by Rick Shenkman, by arrangement with Basic Books.
Copyright 2008 Rick Shenkman

Rick Shenkman, Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter, New York Times bestselling author, and associate professor of history at George Mason University, is the founder and editor of History News Network, a website that features articles by historians on current events. This essay is adapted from chapter two of his new book, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). His observations about the 2008 election can be followed on his blog, "How Stupid?" His recent appearance on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" can be viewed by clicking here.

© 2008 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/90161/

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

One Of Many

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:48:58 GMT

reasons to be concerned and paying attention:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080519/hl_nm/google_health_dc;_ylt=AvgroTb5WCFrazxr7.soa50R.3QA

I don't trust Google to do the right thing, or any other business for that matter. I think ethics has become a foreign concept in this country sometimes.

"Fuck 'em"

whatever that means

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 6 replies

The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking

tunabananas — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:00:50 GMT

Hello All!

For anyone interested in cyberanthropology, online social networking, and new ways of doing social research in this new phase of media, I welcome you to peruse my "webnography" @ www.thevirtualcampfire.org. The elevator pitch:

Based on five years of participant-observation on the social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe.net, The Virtual Campfire explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine, public and private, voyeurism and exhibitionism, the history of media and our digitized future. Woven throughout are the stories and experiences of those who engage with these sites regularly and ritualistically, the generation of "digital natives" whose tales attest to the often strange and uncomfortable ways online social networking sites have come to be embedded in the everyday lives of American youth.

I am especially interested in what you think of my portrayal of Tribe, and am open to all critiques and suggestions. Drop me a line at tunabananas@gmail.com!

Be well,
Jenny

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Snuggly the Security Bear

dakat — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:21:40 GMT

http://www.markfiore.com/snuggly_0

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Yo Gringo, How's it hangin?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:55:22 GMT

a couple of mainstream articles about how we might be:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/23/financial/f040231D24.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/23/BATE11AKBJ.DTL&tsp=1

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation

dakat — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:55:21 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/washington/22ksm.html?ex=1371873600&en=ebb954dc91ad910e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Bomb Iran? What's to stop us?

dakat — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:05:11 GMT

By Ray McGovern
June 19, 2008

It’s crazy, but it’s coming soon – from the same folks who brought us Iraq.

Unlike the attack on Iraq five years ago, to deal with Iran there need be no massing of troops. And, with the propaganda buildup already well under way, there need be little, if any, forewarning before shock and awe and pox – in the form of air and missile attacks – begin.

This time it will be largely the Air Force’s show, punctuated by missile and air strikes by the Navy. Israeli-American agreement has now been reached at the highest level; the armed forces planners, plotters and pilots are working out the details.

Emerging from a 90-minute White House meeting with President George W. Bush on June 4, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the two leaders were of one mind:

“We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat. I left with a lot less question marks [than] I had entered with regarding the means, the timetable restrictions, and American resoluteness to deal with the problem. George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House.”

Does that sound like a man concerned that Bush is just bluff and bluster?

A member of Olmert’s delegation noted that same day that the two countries had agreed to cooperate in case of an attack by Iran, and that “the meetings focused on ‘operational matters’ pertaining to the Iranian threat.” So bring ‘em on!

A show of hands please. How many believe Iran is about to attack the U.S. or Israel?

You say you missed Olmert’s account of what Bush has undertaken to do? So did I. We are indebted to intrepid journalist Chris Hedges for including the quote in his article of June 8, “The Iran Trap.”

We can perhaps be excused for missing Olmert’s confident words about “Israel’s best friend” that week. Your attention – like mine – may have been riveted on the June 5 release of the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding administration misrepresentations of pre-Iraq-war intelligence – the so-called “Phase II” investigation (also known, irreverently, as the “Waiting-for-Godot Study”).

Better late than never, I suppose.

Oversight?

Yet I found myself thinking: It took them five years, and that is what passes for oversight? Yes, the president and vice president and their courtiers lied us into war. And now a bipartisan report could assert that fact formally; and committee chair Jay Rockefeller could sum it up succinctly:

“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

But as I listened to Senator Rockefeller, I had this sinking feeling that in five or six years time, those of us still around will be listening to a very similar post mortem looking back on an even more disastrous attack on Iran.

My colleagues and I in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) issued repeated warnings, before the invasion of Iraq, about the warping of intelligence. And our memoranda met considerable resonance in foreign media.

We could get no ink or airtime, however, in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) in the U.S. Nor can we now.

In a same-day critique of Colin Powell’s unfortunate speech to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003, we warned the president to widen his circle of advisers “beyond those clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

It was a no-brainer for anyone who knew anything about intelligence, the Middle East, and the brown noses leading intelligence analysis at the CIA.

Former U.N. senior weapons inspector and former Marine major, Scott Ritter, and many others were saying the same thing. But none of us could get past the president’s praetorian guard to drop a memo into his in-box, so to speak. Nor can we now.
The “Iranian Threat”

However much the same warnings are called for now with respect to Iran, there is even less prospect that any contrarians could puncture and break through what former White House spokesman Scott McClellan calls the president’s “bubble.”

By all indications, Vice President Dick Cheney and his huge staff continue to control the flow of information to the president.

But, you say, the president cannot be unaware of the far-reaching disaster an attack on Iran would bring?

Well, this is a president who admits he does not read newspapers, but rather depends on his staff to keep him informed. And the memos Cheney does brief to Bush pooh-pooh the dangers.

This time no one is saying we will be welcomed as liberators, since the planning does not include – officially, at least – any U.S. boots on the ground.

Besides, even on important issues like the price of gasoline, the performance of the president’s staff has been spotty.

Think back on the White House press conference of Feb. 28, when Bush was asked what advice he would give to Americans facing the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline.

“Wait, what did you just say?” the president interrupted. “You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline?…That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.”

A poll in January showed that nearly three-quarters of Americans were expecting $4-a-gallon gas. That forecast was widely reported in late February, and discussed by the White House press secretary at the media briefing the day before the president’s press conference.

Here’s the alarming thing: Unlike Iraq, which was prostrate after the Gulf War and a dozen years of sanctions, Iran can retaliate in a number of dangerous ways, launching a war for which our forces are ill-prepared.

The lethality, intensity and breadth of ensuing hostilities will make the violence in Iraq look, in comparison, like a volleyball game between St. Helena’s High School and Mount St. Ursula.

Cheney’s Brainchild

Attacking Iran is Vice President Dick Cheney’s brainchild, if that is the correct word.

Cheney proposed launching air strikes last summer on Iranian Revolutionary Guards bases, but was thwarted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff who insisted that would be unwise, according to J. Scott Carpenter, a senior State Department official at the time.

Chastened by the unending debacle in Iraq, this time around Pentagon officials reportedly are insisting on a “policy decision” regarding “what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks,” according to Carpenter.

Serious concerns include the vulnerability of the critical U.S. supply line from Kuwait to Baghdad, our inability to reinforce and the eventual possibility that the U.S. might be forced into a choice between ignominious retreat and using, or threatening to use, “mini-nukes.”

Pentagon opposition was confirmed in a July 2007 commentary by former Bush adviser Michael Gerson, who noted the “fear of the military leadership” that Iran would have “escalation dominance” in any conflict with the U.S.

Writing in the Washington Post last July, Gerson indicated that “escalation dominance” means, “in a broadened conflict, the Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than we complicate theirs.”

The Joint Chiefs also have opposed the option of attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, according to former Iran specialist at the National Security Council, Hillary Mann, who has close ties with senior Pentagon officials.

Mann confirmed that Adm. William Fallon joined the Joint Chiefs in strongly opposing such an attack, adding that he made his opposition known to the White House, as well.

The outspoken Fallon was forced to resign in March, and will be replaced as CENTCOM commander by Gen. David Petraeus – apparently in September. Petraeus has already demonstrated his penchant to circumvent the chain of command in order to do Cheney’s bidding (by making false claims about Iranian weaponry in Iraq, for example).

In sum, a perfect storm seems to be gathering in late summer or early fall.

Controlled Media

The experience of those of us whose job it was to analyze the controlled media of the Soviet Union and China for insights into Russian and Chinese intentions have been able to put that experience to good use in monitoring our own controlled media as they parrot the party line.

Suffice it to say that the FCM is already well embarked, a la Iraq, on its accustomed mission to provide stenographic services for the White House to indoctrinate Americans on the “threat” from Iran and prepare them for the planned air and missile attacks.

At least this time we are spared the “mushroom cloud” bugaboo. Neither Bush nor Cheney wish to call attention, even indirectly, to the fact that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded last November that Iran had stopped nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 and had not resumed it as of last year.

In a pre-FCM age, it would have been looked on as inopportune, at the least, to manufacture intelligence to justify another war hard on the heels of a congressional report that on Iraq the administration made significant claims not supported by the intelligence.

But (surprise, surprise!) the very damning Senate Intelligence Committee report got meager exposure in the media.

So far it has been a handful of senior military officers that have kept us from war with Iran. It hardly suffices to give them vocal encouragement, or to warn them that the post WW-II Nuremberg Tribunal ruled explicitly that “just-following-orders” is no defense when war crimes are involved.

And still less when the “supreme international crime” – a war of aggression is involved.

Senior officers trying to slow the juggernaut lumbering along toward an attack on Iran have been scandalized watching what can only be described as unconscionable dereliction of duty in the House of Representatives, which the Constitution charges with the duty of impeaching a president, vice president or other senior official charged with high crimes and misdemeanors.

Where Are You, Conyers?

In 2005, before John Conyers became chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, he introduced a bill to explore impeaching the president and was asked by Lewis Lapham of Harpers why he was for impeachment then. He replied:

“To take away the excuse that we didn’t know. So that two, or four, or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, ‘Where were you, Conyers, and where was the U.S. Congress?’ when the Bush administration declared the Constitution inoperative…none of the company here present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity [or] say that ‘somehow it escaped our notice.’”

In the three years since then, the train of abuses and usurpations has gotten longer and Conyers has become chair of the committee. Yet he has dawdled and dawdled, and has shown no appetite for impeachment.

On July 23, 2007, Conyers told Cindy Sheehan, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, and me that he would need 218 votes in the House and they were not there.

A week ago, 251 members of the House voted to refer to Conyers’ committee the 35 Articles of Impeachment proposed by Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who sat on Judiciary with Conyers when it voted out three articles of impeachment on President Richard Nixon, spoke out immediately: “The House should commence an impeachment inquiry forthwith.”

Much of the work has been done. As Holtzman noted, Kucinich’s Articles of Impeachment, together with the Senate report that on Iraq we were led to war based on false pretenses – arguably the most serious charge – go a long way toward jump-starting any additional investigative work Congress needs to do.

And seldom mentioned is the voluminous book published by Conyers himself, “Constitution in Crisis,” containing a wealth of relevant detail on the crimes of the current executive.

Conyers’ complaint that there is not enough time is a dog that won’t hunt, as Lyndon Johnson would say.

How can Conyers say this one day, and on the next say that if Bush attacks Iran, well then, the House may move toward impeachment.

Afraid of the media?

During the meeting last July with Cindy Sheehan, Rev. Yearwood and me, and during an interview in December on “Democracy Now,” Conyers was surprisingly candid in expressing his fear of Fox News and how it could paint Democrats as divisive if they pursued impeachment.

Ironically, this time it is Fox and the rest of the FCM that is afraid – witness their virtual silence on Kucinich’s very damning 35 Articles of Impeachment.

The only way to encourage constructive media attention would be for Conyers to act. The FCM could be expected to fulminate against that, but they could not afford to ignore impeachment, as they are able to ignore other unpleasant things – like preparations for another “war of choice.”

I would argue that perhaps the most effective way to prevent air and missile attacks on Iran and a wider Middle East war is to proceed as Elizabeth Holtzman urges – with impeachment “forthwith.”

Does Conyers not owe at least that much encouragement to those courageous officers who have stood up to Cheney in trying to prevent wider war and catastrophe in the Middle East?

Scott McClellan has been quite clear in reminding us that once the president decided to invade Iraq, he was not going to let anything stop him. There is ample evidence that Bush has taken a similar decision with respect to Iran – with Olmert as his chief counsel, no less.

It is getting late, but this is due largely to Conyers’ own dithering. Now, to his credit, Dennis Kucinich has forced the issue with 35 well-drafted Articles of Impeachment.

What the country needs is the young John Conyers back. Not the one now surrounded by fancy lawyers and held in check by the House leaders.

In October 1974, after he and the even younger Elizabeth Holtzman faced up to their duty on House Judiciary and voted out three Articles of Impeachment on President Richard Nixon, Conyers wrote this:

“This inquiry was forced on us by an accumulation of disclosures which, finally and after unnecessary delays, could no longer be ignored…Impeachment is difficult and it is painful, but the courage to do what must be done is the price of remaining free.”

Someone needs to ask John Conyers if he still believes that; and, if he does, he must summon the courage to “do what must be done.”

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was Army intelligence/infantry officer and a CIA analyst for 27 years, and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

www.consortiumnews.com/2008/061908c.html

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Kucinich presents Bush impeachment articles

dakat — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:37:45 GMT

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich_presents_Bush_impeachment_articles_0609.html

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Senator John S. McCain is The Manchurian Candidate

dakat — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:11:50 GMT

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?noframes;read=117720

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Blackwater's Private Spies

dakat — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:36:51 GMT

By Jeremy Scahill

This past September, the secretive mercenary company Blackwater USA found its name splashed across front pages throughout the world after the company's shooters gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. But by early 2008, Blackwater had largely receded from the headlines save for the occasional blip on the media radar sparked by Congressman Henry Waxman's ongoing investigations into its activities. Its forces remained deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and business continued to pour in. In the two weeks directly following Nisour Square, Blackwater signed more than $144 million in contracts with the State Department for "protective services" in Iraq and Afghanistan alone and, over the following weeks and months, won millions more in contracts with other federal entities like the Coast Guard, the Navy and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.

Blackwater's Iraq contract was extended in April, but the company is by no means betting the house on its long-term presence there. While the firm is quietly maintaining its Iraq work, it is aggressively pursuing other business opportunities.

In September it was revealed that Blackwater had been "tapped" by the Pentagon's Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office to compete for a share of a five-year, $15 billion budget "to fight terrorists with drug-trade ties." According to the Army Times, the contract "could include antidrug technologies and equipment, special vehicles and aircraft, communications, security training, pilot training, geographic information systems and in-field support." A spokesperson for another company bidding for the work said that "80 percent of the work will be overseas." As Richard Douglas, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, explained, "The fact is, we use Blackwater to do a lot of our training of counternarcotics police in Afghanistan. I have to say that Blackwater has done a very good job."

Such an arrangement could find Blackwater operating in an arena with the godfathers of the war industry, such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon. It could also see Blackwater expanding into Latin America, joining other private security companies well established in the region. The massive US security company DynCorp is already deployed in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries as part of the "war on drugs." In Colombia alone, US military contractors are receiving nearly half the $630 million in annual US military aid for the country. Just south of the US border, the United States has launched Plan Mexico, a $1.5 billion counternarcotics program. This and similar plans could provide lucrative business opportunities for Blackwater and other companies. "Blackwater USA's enlistment in the drug war," observed journalist John Ross, would be "a direct challenge to its stiffest competitor, DynCorp--up until now, the Dallas-based corporation has locked up 94 percent of all private drug war security contracts." The New York Times reported that the contract could be Blackwater's "biggest job ever."

As populist movements grow stronger in Latin America, threatening US financial interests as well as the standing of right-wing US political allies in the region, the "war on drugs" is becoming an increasingly central part of US counterinsurgency efforts. It allows for more training of foreign security forces through the private sector--away from Congressional oversight--and a deployment of personnel from US war corporations. With US forces stretched thin, sending private security companies to Latin America offers Washington a "small footprint" alternative to the politically and militarily problematic deployment of active-duty US troops. In a January report by the United Nations working group on mercenaries, international investigators found that "an emerging trend in Latin America but also in other regions of the world indicates situations of private security companies protecting transnational extractive corporations whose employees are often involved in suppressing the legitimate social protest of communities and human rights and environmental organizations of the areas where these corporations operate."

If there is one quality that is evident from examining Blackwater's business history, it is the company's ability to take advantage of emerging war and conflict markets. Throughout the decade of Blackwater's existence, its creator, Erik Prince, has aggressively built his empire into a structure paralleling the US national security apparatus. "Prince wants to vault Blackwater into the major leagues of U.S. military contracting, taking advantage of the movement to privatize all kinds of government security," reported the Wall Street Journal shortly after Nisour Square. "The company wants to be a one-stop shop for the U.S. government on missions to which it won't commit American forces. This is a niche with few established competitors."

In addition to providing armed forces for war and conflict zones and a wide range of military and police training services, Blackwater does a robust, multimillion-dollar business through its aviation division. It also has a growing maritime division and other national and international initiatives. Among these, Blackwater is in Japan, where its forces protect the US ballistic missile defense system, which, according to Stars and Stripes, "points high-powered radio waves westward toward mainland Asia to hunt for enemy missiles headed east toward America or its allies." Meanwhile, early this year, Defense News reported, "Blackwater is training members of the Taiwanese National Security Bureau's (NSB's) special protection service, which guards the president. The NSB is responsible for the overall security of the country and was once an instrument of terrorism during the martial law period. Today, according to its Web site, the NSB is responsible for 'national intelligence work, special protective service and unified cryptography.'" Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto reportedly tried to hire Blackwater to protect her as she campaigned for the presidency in 2007. Conflicting reports indicated that either the US State Department or the Pakistani government vetoed the plan. She was assassinated in December.

What could prove to be one of Blackwater's most profitable and enduring enterprises is one of the company's most secretive initiatives--a move into the world of privatized intelligence services. In April 2006, Prince quietly began building Total Intelligence Solutions, which boasts that it "brings CIA-style" services to the open market for Fortune 500 companies. Among its offerings are "surveillance and countersurveillance, deployed intelligence collection, and rapid safeguarding of employees or other key assets."

As the United States finds itself in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history, few areas have seen as dramatic a transformation to privatized services as the world of intelligence. "This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community," says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. "My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It's outrageous."

Last year R.J. Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private contractors and US intelligence, obtained documents from the office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.5 billion in 2000. That means 70 percent of the US intelligence budget is going to private companies. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the head of DNI is Mike McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry's trade association.

Total Intelligence, which opened for business in February 2007, is a fusion of three entities bought up by Prince: the Terrorism Research Center, Technical Defense and The Black Group--Blackwater vice chair Cofer Black's consulting agency. The company's leadership reads like a Who's Who of the CIA's "war on terror" operations after 9/11. In addition to the twenty-eight-year CIA veteran Black, who is chair of Total Intelligence, the company's executives include CEO Robert Richer, the former associate deputy director of the agency's Directorate of Operations and the second-ranking official in charge of clandestine operations. From 1999 to 2004, Richer was head of the CIA's Near East and South Asia Division, where he ran clandestine operations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. As part of his duties, he was the CIA liaison with Jordan's King Abdullah, a key US ally and Blackwater client, and briefed George W. Bush on the burgeoning Iraqi resistance in its early stages.

Total Intelligence's chief operating officer is Enrique "Ric" Prado, a twenty-four-year CIA veteran and former senior executive officer in the Directorate of Operations. He spent more than a decade working in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and ten years with the CIA's "paramilitary" Special Operations Group. Prado and Black worked closely at the CIA. Prado also served in Latin America with Jose Rodriguez, who gained infamy late last year after it was revealed that as director of the National Clandestine Service at the CIA he was allegedly responsible for destroying videotapes of interrogations of prisoners, during which "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, were reportedly used. Richer told the New York Times he recalled many conversations with Rodriguez, about the tapes. "He would always say, 'I'm not going to let my people get nailed for something they were ordered to do,'" Richer said of his former boss. Before the scandal, there were reports that Blackwater had been "aggressively recruiting" Rodriguez. He has since retired from the CIA.

The leadership of Total Intelligence also includes Craig Johnson, a twenty-seven-year CIA officer who specialized in Central and South America, and Caleb "Cal" Temple, who joined the company straight out of the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he served from 2004 to '06 as chief of the Office of Intelligence Operations in the Joint Intelligence Task Force--Combating Terrorism. According to his Total Intelligence bio, Temple directed the "DIA's 24/7 analytic terrorism target development and other counterterrorism intelligence activities in support of military operations worldwide. He also oversaw 24/7 global counterterrorism indications and warning analysis for the U.S. Defense Department." The company also boasts officials drawn from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI.

Total Intelligence is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia. Its "Global Fusion Center," complete with large-screen TVs broadcasting international news channels and computer stations staffed by analysts surfing the web, "operates around the clock every day of the year" and is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorist center, once run by Black. The firm employs at least sixty-five full-time staff--some estimates say it's closer to 100. "Total Intel brings the...skills traditionally honed by CIA operatives directly to the board room," Black said when the company launched. "With a service like this, CEOs and their security personnel will be able to respond to threats quickly and confidently--whether it's determining which city is safest to open a new plant in or working to keep employees out of harm's way after a terrorist attack."

Black insists, "This is a completely legal enterprise. We break no laws. We don't go anywhere near breaking laws. We don't have to." But what services Total Intelligence is providing, and to whom, is shrouded in secrecy. It is clear, though, that the company is leveraging the reputations and inside connections of its executives. "Cofer can open doors," Richer told the Washington Post in 2007. "I can open doors. We can generally get in to see who we need to see. We don't help pay bribes. We do everything within the law, but we can deal with the right minister or person." Black told the paper he and Richer spend a lot of their time traveling. "I am discreet in where I go and who I see. I spend most of my time dealing with senior people in governments, making connections." But it is clear that the existing connections from the former spooks' time at the agency have brought business to Total Intelligence.

Take the case of Jordan. For years, Richer worked closely with King Abdullah, as his CIA liaison. As journalist Ken Silverstein reported, "The CIA has lavishly subsidized Jordan's intelligence service, and has sent millions of dollars in recent years for intelligence training. After Richer retired, sources say, he helped Blackwater land a lucrative deal with the Jordanian government to provide the same sort of training offered by the CIA. Millions of dollars that the CIA 'invested' in Jordan walked out the door with Richer--if this were a movie, it would be a cross between Jerry Maguire and Syriana. 'People [at the agency] are pissed off,' said one source. 'Abdullah still speaks with Richer regularly, and he thinks that's the same thing as talking to us. He thinks Richer is still the man.' Except in this case it's Richer, not his client, yelling 'show me the money.'"

In a 2007 interview on the cable business network CNBC, Black was brought on as an analyst to discuss "investing in Jordan." At no point in the interview was Black identified as working for the Jordanian government. Total Intelligence was described as "a corporate consulting firm that includes investment strategy," while "Ambassador Black" was introduced as "a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA," the "top counterterror guy" and "a key planner for the breathtakingly rapid victory of American forces that toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan." Black heaped lavish praise on Jordan and its monarchy. "You have leadership, King Abdullah, His Majesty King Abdullah, who is certainly kind towards investors, very protective," Black said. "Jordan is, in our view, a very good investment. There are some exceptional values there." He said Jordan is in a region where there are "numerous commodities that are being produced and doing well."

With no hint of the brutality behind the exodus, Black argued that the flood of Iraqi refugees fleeing the violence of the US occupation was good for potential investors in Jordan. "We get something like 600, 700,000 Iraqis that have moved from Iraq into Jordan that require cement, furniture, housing and the like. So it is a--it is an island of growth and potential, certainly in that immediate area. So it looks good," he said. "There are opportunities for investment. It is not all bad. Sometimes Americans need to watch a little less TV.... But there is--there is opportunity in everything. That's why you need situation awareness, and that's one of the things that our company does. It provides the kinds of intelligence and insight to provide situational awareness so you can make the best investments."

Black and other Total Intelligence executives have turned their CIA careers, reputations, contacts and connections into business opportunities. What they once did for the US government, they now do for private interests. It is not difficult to imagine clients feeling as though they are essentially hiring the US government to serve their own interests. In 2007 Richer told the Post that now that he is in the private sector, foreign military officials and others are more willing to give him information than they were when he was with the CIA. Richer recalled a conversation with a foreign general during which he was surprised at the potentially "classified" information the general revealed. When Richer asked why the general was giving him the information, he said the general responded, "If I tell it to an embassy official I've created espionage. You're a business partner."

In May, Erik Prince gave a speech in front of his family and supporters in his home state of Michigan. Security was extremely tight, and Blackwater barred cameras and tape recorders from the event. "The idea that we are a secretive facility, and nefarious, is just ridiculous," Prince told the friendly crowd of 750 gathered at the Amway Grand Plaza. In Iraq, Blackwater has banked on the idea that it is a sort of American Express card for the occupation. But for the future, Prince has a different corporate model, as he indicated in his speech. "When you send something overseas, do you use FedEx or the postal service?" he asked.

There are serious problems with this analogy. When you send something by FedEx, you can track your package and account for its whereabouts at all times. You can have your package insured against loss or damage. That has not been the case with Blackwater. The people who foot the sizable bill for its "services" almost never know, until it is too late, what Blackwater is doing, and there are apparently no consequences for Blackwater when things go lethally wrong. "We are essentially a robust temp agency," Prince told his fans in Michigan. He's right about that one. A temp agency serving the most radical privatization agenda in history.

About Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080623/scahill

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Cheney, Halliburton, Nukes and Iran

dakat — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:28:41 GMT

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-halliburton-charged-with-selling-nuclear-technologies-to-iran

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Start the Revolution Without Me

dakat — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:33:41 GMT

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6757612420128645563

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

dis blog good an FUnny 2

D'eCiduous — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:50:36 GMT

my frien she writ e dis an never promote nothin. she don wanna make $$$ jus t want peepil to read an write her an shizz. chekkit out.

xanaduxero.blogspot.com

posted in Information Warfare - 7 replies

Firestorm Cafe and Books Opening!

kim — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:53:09 GMT

Firestorm Cafe & Books Grand Opening!
Saturday, May 24
48 Commerce Street (map)
Downtown Asheville

You are invited to the grand opening of Firestorm Cafe & Books, an exciting new community events space in downtown Asheville. Worker-owned and not-for-profit, the cafe aims to provide a comfortable and inspiring venue for music, movies, fundraisers, panel discussions, workshops, and other community empowerment events. In addition to serving a unique range of gourmet food and specialty beverages, Firestorm Cafe offers free wireless Internet and computer terminals. Stop in for a hot panini sandwich or to browse our unique selection of books!

Hours of Operation
10am - 10pm

Schedule
Saturday, May 24 (Memorial Day Weekend)
Activities (and coffee!) throughout the day are free.
12:00 - 2:00pm
Live performance by Braidstream (www.braidstreammusic.com)
3:00 - 5:00pm
Nature Crafts kids' workshop with Miranda Heidler
7:00 - 9:00pm
Old Time Jam - bring your instrument or just enjoy the show!

Visit our website for more information and a list of upcoming events: www.firestormcafe.com.

The Firestorm Collective wishes to thank the countless supporters who have donated time, energy, equipment, performances, professional skills / advice and love to this project. Please look on our community board if you are interested in directing support to individuals and businesses who have helped make the project a success.

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

The Exoskeleton: Advanced Robotics

Killa Cham — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:25:35 GMT

Date posted: 04/28/2008*

Raytheon Company’s newest research facility in Salt Lake City, Utah, is developing a robotic suit for the soldier of tomorrow. Known as the Exoskeleton, it’s essentially a wearable robot that amplifies its wearer’s strength, endurance, and agility. In its May issue, Popular Science magazine likens the Exoskeleton to the “Iron Man”® in the movie of the same name and suggests a blurring of the lines between science fiction and reality.

Built from a combination of sensors, actuators and controllers, the futuristic suit enables a user to easily carry a man on his back or lift 200 pounds several hundred times without tiring. Yet the suit, which is being developed for the U.S. Army, is also agile enough to let its wearer kick a soccer ball, punch a speed bag, and climb stairs and ramps with ease.

Dr. Stephen Jacobsen leads this project and the Raytheon Sarcos team. He feels his work is a combination of art, science, engineering and design. “People call it different things. Sometimes they call it inventing, sometimes they call it engineering. Sometimes they call it being a mad scientist. To us, it’s the process of getting together, understanding the problems, goals, and then designing something to satisfy the need.” Development of the Exoskeleton has been underway since 2000, when Jacobsen realized that if humans could work alongside robots, they should also be able to work inside robots.

Exoskeleton test engineer Rex Jameson echoes his boss’ enthusiasm for this work. “As far as software engineering goes, this job is about as good as it gets. We get to write programs and we see them working on actual robots; that’s very exciting.”

Jacobsen and his team take inspiration for their work from a wide variety of disparate sources, including popular culture. Asked if he will see the Iron Man movie when it’s released on May 2, he replied: “Yes, sure. I go to see all those movies. We all do. We all like them. They’re fun. They stimulate your imagination.”

http://www.raytheon.com/newsroom/technology/rtn08_exoskeleton/

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Reverend Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch

Andre — Thu, 01 May 2008 03:51:49 GMT

"Obama is just unpredictable enough to make the parasite class nervous that he might do something crazy, like serve the public interest. ..."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19826.htm

Reverend Wright Delivers the Knockout Punch

By Mike Whitney

"Yes, there have been death threats on both myself and on Pastor Moss. And bomb threats at the church." Reverend Jeremiah Wright on the media's incitement; "Bill Moyers Journal" PBS

28/04/08 "ICH" -- - Reverend Jeremiah Wright appeared on PBS Bill Moyers Journal on Friday night and delivered a knockout punch to the bully-boys in the corporate media. It was an impressive performance that left the political assassins over at FOX News choking on their sausage-rolls. Wright showed that he is neither a fanatic nor an “America hater”; just an extremely well-read and principled man with an unshakable commitment to justice. Wright has also paid his dues; he's an ex-Marine who served in Vietnam when most of his critics were either hiding behind their student deferments or languishing in the "Champagne Unit" of the Texas National Guard. He's earned the right to say whatever he chooses.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

"And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America!

No one disputes Wright's summary of US history. His comments have simply been taken out of context to beat up on Barak Obama; everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that the media has been retooled to destroy political enemies, which means anyone who poses a challenge to America's unelected corporate oligarchy. That's why it is so frustrating to hear people say, "The media is not doing its job."

That's just plain wrong; the media IS doing its job. It's cheerleading the country to war, it is diverting attention from the main political and economic issues of the day, and it is destroying its political enemies. That's what it's paid to do. Its foolish to think the media should perform differently because of the PR nonsense about a “free press”. The media gets its marching orders from its corporate managers; that's who issues the paychecks on Fridays. It's their agenda that counts, not ours. The political assassination of Barak Obama just happens to be on the top of their list this week. That's why the media is zeroing in on Rev. Wright; he is the sacrificial lamb.

What the media is trying to do by singling out Wright is to make it look like blacks are outside of the mainstream and hostile to white American society. It's all pretty straightforward. They're trying to create the impression that blacks conceal a deep sense of grievance which expresses itself in rage. This generates feelings of fear among whites which, of course, is all part of the strategy. The message is simple; "blacks are angry, blacks are dangerous" and, oh by the way, Obama is black.

Is it fair to say that that is essentially a racist message?

What's so clever about the attack on Wright is that it was set up in a way to make it look like the Reverend—a man whose entire career has been devoted to social justice—is a racist. That took a bit of maneuvering. In fact, the media, and their friends at the right-wing think tanks, had to dig through 15 years of Wright's sermons to find just the right snippets they needed to destroy Obama. Now that's determination! The attacks on Wright bear all the earmarks of a well-engineered Karl Rove-type operation. Nothing has been left to chance. All the mud-slinging and poisonous innuendo has been arranged with the greatest attention to detail and with real professionalism. These guys are pros. They know what it takes to ruin people and they are good at it.

They decided the best way to go-after Obama was by using his "blackness" against him. It took considerable skill to invoke the "race card" without being discovered. The tables were turned in a way that made it look like Wright and his parishioners were the racists and whites were merely blameless bystanders. That's the real genius of the Wright smear-campaign.

For more than 5 months Obama had been able to run on a campaign on issues and experience, but the attacks on Wright have changed all of that. Now the public sees Obama as a black man; at least that's the intention. Race has become one of the dominant issues on the campaign-trail and Obama routinely fends off charges that blacks foster a hidden resentment towards whites because of the way they have been mistreated. Obama is no longer just a man running for office; now he's a black man. That's how swift-boating works. Like they say in the Godfather; “It's not personal; it's just business”. The business of personal destruction.

Fortunately, Bill Moyers, one of the giants of journalism, decided to give Wright a chance to acquit himself before the public. Wright took the opportunity and made the most of it.

Rev. Wright: “God is the giver of life. Let me tell you what that means. That means we have no right to take a life whether as a gang-banger living the thug life, or as a President lying about leading a nation into war. We have no right to take a life! Whether through the immorality of a slave trade, or the immorality of refusing HIV/AIDS money to countries or agencies who do not tow your political line! We have no right to take a life!”

Wright showed that the doctrine he preaches, Black Liberation Theology, is neither discriminatory nor racist as the media has suggested. Rather, it integrates the teachings of Jesus Christ with the real-time struggle for social justice and equality. Compassion is not possible if one does not have a grasp of one's own culture and identity. That's why Wright tries to reconnect his congregation to their roots, so they can be proud of who they are and have more productive lives.

Rev. Wright:

"You know, you come into the average church on a Sunday morning and you think you've stepped from the real world into a fantasy world. And what do I mean by that?" He said pick up the church bulletin. You leave a world, Vietnam, or today you leave a world, Iraq, over 4,000 dead, American boys and girls, 100,000, 200,000 depending on which count, Iraqi dead. Afghanistan, Darfur, rapes in the Congo, Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward, that's the world you leave. And you come in; you pick up your church bulletin. It says, there is a ladies tea on second Sunday. He said, "How come the faith preached in our churches does not relate to the world in which our church members leave at the benediction?”

This is the essence of Black Liberation Theology; how to make sense of the world we live in so the word of Christ can be applied in practice. Wright thinks that faith should be a transforming experience that changes behavior and shapes lives, not just a few hours of prayer every week at Sunday services. Does that make it “a race-based theology? (as Moyers asks)

Rev. Wright: “No, it is not. It is embracing Christianity without giving up Africanity. ...We're not givin' up who we are as black people to become somebody else...No mas. Nada mas. We're gonna be ourselves. We're gonna be our culture. We're gonna be our history. And we're gonna embrace it and not say one is superior to the other. Because we are different. And different does not mean deficient. We talk about God of diversity? God has diverse culture and we're proud of who we are and that's not a race-based theology.”

Wright has also been skewered in the media for suggesting there may be a connection between American foreign policy and the attacks of 9-11. The media considers any analysis that doesn't square with Bush's crackpot "they hate our freedoms” theory to be either anti-American or outright heresy. In his most famous sermon, Wright elaborates on the "blowback" theme as well as the so-called war on terror:

"We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his child. "Blessed are they who bash your children's head against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians - not soldiers - people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism."

America has blood on its hands. America, as Martin Luther King said, "is the greatest perpetrator of violence in the world today." So what else is new?

What's new, is the media is using every soapbox in the country to preach uber-nationalism and vilify America's critics as unpatriotic. Their "Love it or leave it" gibberish is being used to tar a presidential candidate who hasn't sufficiently prostrated himself before his corporate overlords to make them feel that he can be trusted to carry out their directives. That is what's really happening. Obama is just unpredictable enough to make the parasite class nervous that he might do something crazy, like serve the public interest. That would be a real disaster. It'd be better to install the appalling Ms. Clinton than take a chance on the “populist” Obama. That's why the wrath of the media has descended on Obama like a Texas hailstorm; they're afraid he doesn't understand who really runs things in America.

Wright means nothing to the media or to the men behind the curtain. If he didn't provide an avenue for denigrating Obama, he'd be treated with the same indifference as the thousands of other blacks who were herded at gunpoint into the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. It's Obama's scalp they want; that's the real prize. This is a turf war; the big-wigs are defending their fiefdom from interlopers. They're even rolling out the heavy artillery expecting a full-blown conflagration. The election season is shaping up to be a real donnybrook. Better buckle up. Obama has entered the crosshairs of America's criminal oligarchy and things are bound to get nasty.

posted in Information Warfare - 8 replies

Fields of Gold

Tue, 13 May 2008 17:31:29 GMT

I find the perspective of smart, articulate and honest women extremely refreshing.

~V~

Barbara Ehrenreich: Hillary Smashes Myth of Womens' Moral
Superiority 5-12-08 CD/Nation/HP

Published on Monday, May 12, 2008 by The Huffington Post
Hillary’s Gift to Women
by Barbara Ehrenreich

In Friday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary Clinton’s destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral superiority, hailing Clinton’s “no-holds-barred pugnacity” and her media reputation as “nasty” and “ruthless.” Future female presidential candidates will owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, “when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys.”

I share Faludi’s glee — up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn’t just break through the “glass floor,” she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have got within arm’s reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama’s face.

A mere decade ago Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous examples from chimpanzee society, “rooted in biology.” The counter-example of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first of head of state to start a war for the sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that “biology is not destiny.” But it was still a good reason to vote for a prehistoric-style club-wielding male.

Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to “obliterate” the toddlers of Tehran — along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters.

Earlier on, Clinton foreswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out — was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, and the rest of them — or I’ll rip you a new one.

There’s a reason why it’s been so easy for men to overlook women’s capacity for aggression. As every student of Women’s Studies 101 knows, what’s called aggression in men is usually trivialized as “bitchiness” in women: Men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: She’s been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can’t all have been PMS.

But did we really need another lesson in the female capacity for ruthless aggression? Any illusions I had about the innate moral superiority of women ended four years ago with Abu Ghraib. Recall that three out of the five prison guards prosecuted for the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners were women. The prison was directed by a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski, and the top U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, was Major Gen. Barbara Fast. Not to mention that the U.S. official ultimately responsible for managing the occupation of Iraq at the time was Condoleezza Rice.

Whatever violent and evil things men can do, women can do too, and if the capacity for cruelty is a criterion for leadership, as Fukuyama suggested, then Lynndie England should consider following up her stint in the brig with a run for the Senate. It’s important — even kind of exhilarating — for women to embrace their inner bitch, but the point should be to expand our sense of human possibility, not to enshrine aggression as a virtue. Women can behave like the warrior queen Boadicea, credited with slaughtering 70,000, many of them civilians, or like Margaret Thatcher, who attempted to dismantle the British welfare state.
Men, for their part, are free to take as their role models the pacifist leaders Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Biology conditions us in all kinds of ways we might not even be aware of yet. But virtue is always a choice.

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way — by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn’t really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren’t wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female — such as compassion and an aversion to violence — can be found in either sex, and sometimes it’s a man who best upholds them.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the
winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize.
Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Hey Lookie

Thu, 08 May 2008 23:55:38 GMT

more cops with pent up aggression and too much RedBull

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSs9ia4l3IU

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Clay Shirkyy Rawks Hard

00711 — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:46:00 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgeYWY09LE8

start CSRH thread here:

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Money Masters video

makhanchor — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:33:38 GMT

This is the best thing I've come across as far as the history of the struggle between centralized power and the rest of us

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Censored background information with DC Madam

ToxicReverend — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:40:22 GMT

Palfrey rejected suicide in May 2007 interview --'DC Madam:
' 'I'd never want my life to end in suicide' 01 May 2008
http://uspolitics.tribe.net/thread/f7170f24-b498-432d-bfee-3f10e85ac386

___________

From:
http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news

Palfrey rejected suicide in May 2007 interview --
'DC Madam:' 'I'd never want my life to end in suicide' 01 May 2008
Deborah Jeane Palfrey (aka the 'DC Madam,' who
was found hanged in Tarpon Springs, Florida on
Thursday) sat down in May 2007 for an interview
with Carol Joynt, host of the Q&A Cafe interview
series... For Palfrey, one thing was crystal clear
during that interview: She would never end her life
by hanging herself. Joynt brought up the subject of
Brandy Britton, a Baltimore prostitute whom had
occasionally worked for Palfrey and whom had
hanged herself in January 2007, only days away
from facing prostitution charges. Palfrey told Joynt in
no uncertain terms: "I don't want to be like her. I don't
want to end up like her." [See CLG's 'DC Madam'
Phone Records & Updates.]

One of Palfrey's former employees died by her own hand
02 May 2008
http://www.examiner.com/a-1371330%7EOne_of_Palfrey_s_former_employees_died_by_her_own_hand.html
Deborah Jeane Palfrey seems to have followed one
of her former employees to suicide -- a fate she once
prided herself on having avoided. Brandy Britton, 43,
died by suicide in January 2007, days before she
was scheduled to stand trial on prostitution
charges... Before her death, Palfrey said Britton, a
former University of Maryland Baltimore County
professor, was one of her employees.

End of excerpts from:
http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news

________________________________

The following was also sent to:
http://www.infowars.com/

__________

Censored background information:

Cheney was on her list ....

MySpace
Deborah Jeane Palfrey's (the DC Madam) list Fock Cheney ....
http://forums.myspace.com/p/2555951/35026952.aspx?fuseaction=forums.viewpost#35026952-

Censored:
STOP REPUBLICAN PEDOPHILIA
GOP = Grand Old Pedophiles
http://web.archive.org/web/20070115185302/http://www.the7thfire.com/child_sexual_abuse/grand_old_pedophiles.htm

________________________________
Censored:
Membership list of the Bohemian Grove
http://web.archive.org/web/20070223090124/home.planet.nl/~reijd050/organisations/Bohemian_Grove_members_list.htm

King, Larry : Not the guy from "Larry King Live". John deCamp - Named by Paul
Bonacci as the organiser of an off-season pedophile homosexual snuff film made at
the Bohemian Grove. Bonacci would eventually be granted 1 million dollars by the
court. King served 5 years in jail.

__________________________________________

Newspaper stories that reveal child sex parties and murders in
Sonoma County, California are presented in a manner to "connect the
dots". Guerneville is in Sonoma County,CA. near Monti Rio where the
Bohemian Grove is located. The Grove is where President Bush and the
most powerful men meet every year (145BG , 121pd).
http://web.archive.org/web/20050206201732/www.angelfire.com/hi/soberskidrow/chprosti.html

DETECTIVES CHECK FOR CONSPIRACY IN GUERNEVILLE KILLING ,
Published on March 26, 2004- The Press Democrat, PAGE: A1 .
BYLINE: STEVE HART, DEREK J. MOORE and CAROL BENFELL ,
http://web.archive.org/web/20050208091441/www.angelfire.com/hi/soberskidrow/hrm34.html

The scans of the Russian River Times newspaper do not come up at
the Archives. I have it scanned and posted at my "Justice Is Homeless"
MySpace profile, in the photo section in an album of it's own, titled
"Pimping Beyond The Law"
The profile with the scanned posted story is at
http://www.myspace.com/justiceishomeless

--
...-- End Of Forwarded Message -----

Regards,

Tom Krohmer
Environmental Technologist
http://toxicreverend.blogspot.com/
aka
The Toxic Reverend
http://www.myspace.com/toxicreverend
aka
Justice Is Homeless
http://www.myspace.com/justiceishomeless
Who's a criminal ?
http://people.tribe.net/toxicreverend

Homicide Charges For Corporations
(Rough draft posted with active reference links)
http://www.angelfire.com/nm/redcollarcrime

PLEASE NOTE::>

Peer Reviewed Medical Journal on Chronic
Illnesses, cancers and Stealth Infections
from Bio-weapons of the non-lethal variety
www.immed.org
Note:
The Gulf War Vets have posted
"Beyond Treason"
http://www.gulfwarvets.com

Toxic Revelations;
Censored information on
biological weapons and the health care
industry The censored rough draft has
been reposted
http://www.puppstheories.com/ToxicRevelations/tr.html
Reference material
http://www.puppstheories.com/ToxicRevelations/donebib.html

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Act Weird and pretend it's Normal

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:15:20 GMT

So, if everyone acts weird, it will throw off the rent-a-cop retards:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080404/ap_on_re_us/airports_behavior_agents

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 4 replies

No Shit Sherlock

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:01:51 GMT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080318/us_nm/usa_housing_consumers_dc

Households face the unthinkable: budgeting By Nick Carey
Tue Mar 18, 8:41 AM ET

After years of living large, U.S. households are finally learning what financial experts thought they never would: to live within their means.

Economists have long warned that the U.S. consumer was on an unsustainable spending frenzy and that savings rates were dangerously low. Now, families are being forced into financial responsibility by the housing downturn and a weakening economy.

"For many years people on Wall Street have refused to believe that American consumers could ever change their spending habits," said David Rosenberg, North American economist at Merrill Lynch. "But it's happening."

"Frugality is in, extravagance is out," he added.

Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy and, according to Rosenberg, 30 percent of that is discretionary spending -- that is, buying stuff you can live without.

Theresa Parks is a case in point. Parks, 36, paints lines on roads and highways for the city of Atlanta for a living. She bought a home in 2006 for herself and her three daughters in the suburb of Riverdale, but fell behind with her $669 monthly payment.

Her lender agreed last September to a repayment plan that required an additional $188 a month through to June 2008.

"We had to cut eating out at restaurants and we had to stop shopping," Parks said. "That was the hardest part for my teenage daughters because they love to shop. But I sat them down and we agreed we'd do anything to keep our home."

Regina Grant of the Atlanta Cooperative Development Corp helped Parks rework her budget and said most of her clients require help managing their spending.

"None of them have ever prepared a budget, but they have to now if they want to keep their homes," she said.

Just a few miles away, Ozell Brooklin, director of nonprofit Acorn Housing tells a room of some 15 struggling borrowers that if they want their banks to lower their interest rates or even forgive some of their debt, they must prioritize spending.

"Your first priority will be your mortgage, then food, then utility bills then one family car if you need it for work," he said, standing at a lectern and counting off those priorities on his fingers. "Everywhere else we're going to cut spending because your lender won't make a deal with you if they think you have money to spare for luxury items."

Some 700 miles further north, in Cleveland, Ohio, Mark Seifert of nonprofit East Side Organizing Project says counseling stricken borrowers means telling them harsh truths.

"We get home owners coming to us in trouble, but then we look and see they have only make $50,000 a year and yet they own an Escalade," he said, referring to a Cadillac sport utility vehicle that sells for about $55,000. "And you have to ask them 'What on earth were you thinking?"'

As the U.S. housing crisis deepens, many more Americans will be forced to budget to avoid foreclosure, with serious implications for an economy teetering on the brink of recession.

"This is going to take a bite out of consumer spending and is an ominous sign for the economy," said University of Maryland business professor Peter Morici. "We are in a recession that was manufactured on Wall Street by the major banks."

BACK TO BASICS

One of the hallmarks of the recent property boom was that buyers could get into a home with little or no money down. Those days are apparently over.

"What we're seeing a lot of is people with good income who haven't put any money aside and now have to save for a deposit on a home," said Van Johnson, president of the Georgia Association of Realtors. "When people like that don't spend, restaurants and retailers suffer and it tends to slow the economy down."

"There will be pain in that correction," he added.

Terry Kibbe of Washington, DC-based nonprofit group the Consumer Rights League -- which is campaigning against any form of government "bailout" for banks or borrowers -- said that higher down payment requirements are a natural consequence of the excesses of the boom years.

"The real estate boom was not going to last forever and it is becoming more difficult to buy a home," she said. "But the market will correct itself and this is part of that process."

There are already signs that American consumers are "trading down" in the search for bargains, with February same-store retail sales showing customers favoring discounters like Wal-Mart Stores Inc over higher-end retailers.

Merrill Lynch's Rosenberg said that in the fourth quarter of 2007, Americans' household debt almost equaled 140 percent of their after-tax income and that they were spending 14.3 percent of their after-tax income paying down that debt.

"Simply put, that means Americans are spending more on servicing their debt than they do on food," Rosenberg said. "This is not just affecting stressed-out or soon-to-be-foreclosed home owners. This hurts everybody."

Rosenberg predicted Americans will start saving more, which he said will shave 1 percentage point off annual U.S. consumer spending growth for years to come.

"It is hard to say how bad things will get," Rosenberg added. "We're in unchartered territory at this point."

As for Theresa Parks of Atlanta, she says that her days of loose spending are over.

"When I catch up with my mortgage, I aim to save every penny I can and plan for my daughters' future."

(Reporting by Nick Carey; Editing by Eddie Evans)

posted in Information Warfare - 6 replies

The Higher Road

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:05:09 GMT

Very Good.

~V~

March 18, 2008
Transcript
Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

The following is the text as prepared for delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, as provided by his presidential campaign.

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.

I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas.

I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.”

We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones.

Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world.

Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger.

Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.

That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.

But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch.

They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition.

Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.

And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.

It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news.

We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children.

This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

O on H

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:14:30 GMT

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dyO92C-Cbhc

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Karma Debt

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:33:36 GMT

as I'm sure you're all aware the Carlyle Group has an interesting history and some of the evil in the world is connected to it...

Have a look at this kids: it appears that just rewards sometimes occur:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/03/11/financial/f135040D32.DTL

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

my abstract view of the one world religion

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:41:33 GMT

okay so the nwo wants, among other things: a one world government, one world bank, and one world religion...most of us see the first two in high gear right nwo...err uhh 'now' i mean. what with the likes of the World Bank and the UN, and the NAU and the EU, and other things of the like. But, how in the name of zeuses BUTHOLE, are they going to make one world religion? especially with modern religious extremism (among ALL religions, though not all are physically violent), seems like most everyones pretty happy where they are. what i'm wondering is what if the one world religion is science? it has a creation myth, beliefs (everything has an explanation...is one belief), and it has followers, it has institutions, commandments, it permeates the very world we live in...i'm using it right now to broadcast my pirate signal so to speak ; )

its like a kansas city shuffle. people look one way, and they go the other. especially when its played off against religion on the whole..science vs. religion type stuff. i'm leaning toward a mixture of science and satanism as being the next world religion. i believe most people already are. retaliate! dessimate!, dont be patient and understand...as true christians would try, if there were any? and CRY when someone dies, there is NO heaven despite your minds desperate attempt to stick to its ego's beliefs...thats right at the subconscious level we are most certainly satanists. though not too many get it, though some do.

seing what ya think

posted in Information Warfare - 16 replies

Looking for an Earth Woman Friendly community?

Temeluch — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:06:46 GMT

Looking for an Earth Woman Friendly community?

There is a Meeting of the Kindred Spirits coming up March 29th! And
we do need to see some more Positive well integrated Female Energy in
this group who can work closely with others.

http://edenvillage.net/18.htm

We are still looking to organize a group of volunteers to
help out some good folks one day out of the week, with some
organic gardening and we still do need someone to take Minutes
at the next meeting.

It would be possible, I would think, if there is a single female or
two out there who is cool about living closer to the Earth then
I may be able to provide a place for you to live, for
maybe 6 months out of the year up where I live in Northern
California.

If you can simply come to our next meeting on March 29th. - T

http://edenvillage.net/18.htm

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

.

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:47:39 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20circumcision-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=female+circumcision+Indonesia&st=nyt&oref=slogin

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 4 replies

CT/NY area theorists

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:49:10 GMT

hey whats up all, i made a group for us if you live in this area or near it tribes.tribe.net/ctct

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

"Culture of Distraction"

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:44:48 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html?em&ex=1203224400&en=9813e31206335cfb&ei=5087%0A

~V~

posted in Information Warfare - 3 replies

listen to this and wake up

LEA — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:23:51 GMT

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/economy/phys_econ/2008/lym_inflation_art.html

http://asx.ljcentral.net/mp3/eir/tls/2008/tls080301_en_hi.mp3

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Conspiracy History compilation DVDs torrents

History — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:18:31 GMT

**************************************************

Greetings to all my relations.

This is the last step of our project History Watch. If History is
defined and known by the texts, we can now add to this definition the
recorded events of the filmed archives. Animated images are harder to
deny than printed words. Our objective is to spread out freely some of
the little broadcast, even hidden informations about our collective
History.

We put online a collection of 391 documentaries and other selected and
recut videos, to offer to a wide public the best of the infos
available on the net in english and in french. If you are interested,
you have the time, the right equipment and connection, all you have to
do is open the joint document and decompress it if needed (but normaly
your system should do it automaticaly). You'll find therein nine links
that will open the torrents for the nine DVDs we compiled (around 4.6
Gig each, for a total of a little over 41 G, being over 100 hours of
videos).

Otherwise, you can go directly to btjunkie.com and search for these titles.

11 Septembre 2001 - 9-11
Bush family & friends
Capitalist & Communist regimes
Capitalist conspiracy
Mind Kontrol - Secret Programs
New World Order - Secret Societies
Secret services - cover up - covert ops
Secret weapons - UFO
Terrorism Theories propaganda

Torrents are a system of peer to peer data transfer. The more people
download a torrent, the faster it spreads and the longer it stays on
the net. If you don't have a bittorrent software, we suggest that you
download uTorrent on utorrent.com. If you want to participate in
facilitating the diffusion of these infos about our collective
History, download these torrents on as many computers as possible,
whether it is in cybercafes. It takes one or two minutes to open up
the links and the downloading will keep proceeding on its own.

Please spread this out, take part in this action for social education
on a planetary scale. Thanks.

For more info: watch.history@gmail.com History Watch

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies

Crash and Burn the Zeppelin

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:18:11 GMT

way to go Jackass!

~V~

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080204/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_budget
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/bushsbudgetproposalwouldcutmedicarefunding

posted in Information Warfare - 5 replies

Trans-Oceanic InfoWar Now In Progress.

elumin8 — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:47:06 GMT

FROM: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153974.htm?section=world

Conspiracy theories emerge after internet cables cut
By Simon Lauder

Posted Mon Feb 4, 2008 3:14pm AEDT
Updated Mon Feb 4, 2008 4:03pm AEDT

When two cables were cut off the Egyptian port city of Alexandria last week, about a 100 million internet users were affected, mainly in India and Egypt. (AFP: Ammro Maraghi)

Audio: Third cable cuts 'a bad coincidence' (The World Today) Is information warfare to blame for the damage to underwater internet cables that has interrupted internet service to millions of people in India and Egypt, or is it just a series of accidents?

When two cables in the Mediterranean were severed last week, it was put down to a mishap with a stray anchor.

Now a third cable has been cut, this time near Dubai. That, along with new evidence that ships' anchors are not to blame, has sparked theories about more sinister forces that could be at work.

For all the power of modern computing and satellites, most of the world's communications still rely on submarine cables to cross oceans.

When two cables were cut off the Egyptian port city of Alexandria last week, about a 100 million internet users were affected, mainly in India and Egypt.

The cables remain broken and internet services are still compromised.

Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde says the situation demonstrates how interconnected the world is.

"It clearly shows we are talking about a global network and a global world that we are living in," he said.

"So wherever something happens we all get, in one way or another, affected by it."

'Information warfare?'

It was assumed a ship's anchor severed the cables, but now that is in doubt and the conspiracy theories are coming out.

Egypt's Transport Ministry says video surveillance shows no ships were in the area at the time of the incident.

Online columnist Ian Brockwell says the cables may have been cut deliberately in an attempt by the US and Israel to deprive Iran of internet access.

Others back up that theory, saying the Pentagon has a secret strategy called 'information warfare'.

But Mr Budde says it is far more likely to be a coincidence.

"It is absolutely strange, of course, that that happens. At the moment it really looks like bad luck rather than anything else," he said.

Telecommunications professor at the University of Melbourne, Peter Gerrand, says Australia is in a far better position than India to withstand a cable breakage.

"We've got, in effect, five really major separate cables, each with high capacity, most of which have plans for upgrading their capacity in the next few years," he said.

Professor Gerrand does not believe Australia is vulnerable to the types of major disruptions that India and Egypt have seen.

"I gather India has most of its capacity on two cables - one's to its west and one to its east - so when the western cable got cut near Egypt, all this traffic had to then pass through a single cable and that's what's caused these very huge delays," he said.

Australia's protection zones

As it happens, Australia's protection against such incidents was boosted just last week.

Activities that could damage submarine communications cables have been prohibited off Perth's City Beach since Friday.

Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) submarine cable protection manager Robyn Meikle says the events in the Middle East highlight the importance of submarine cables to all international communications.

"Here in Australia, over 99 per cent of all of our international communications carried through these cables lie at the bottom of the sea," she said.

"That's why the Australian Communications Authority [ACMA] has played a major role in declaring protection zones over our cables of national significance in Australia.

"Each of the zones, for instance, has restrictions to do with anchoring, which are aimed at preventing the sort of damage that has happened in recent times in the Middle East.

"ACMA declares protection zones over what are considered to be the main cables of national significance, and they're the ones that carry the bulk of the traffic," she said.

"So really, they are the most important cables that the industry relies on to carry all communications in and out of Australia."

posted in Information Warfare - 1 reply

Scalar Weapons--a little kooky

dakat — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:10:20 GMT

http://uspolitics.tribe.net/thread/dce57122-944a-49d6-ae84-ef969f3c3c4d

posted in Information Warfare - 2 replies

Bush Order Expands Network Monitoring

dakat — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:42:43 GMT

Intelligence Agencies to Track Intrusions

President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems.

The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies -- including ones they have not previously monitored.

Until now, the government's efforts to protect itself from cyber-attacks -- which run the gamut from hackers to organized crime to foreign governments trying to steal sensitive data -- have been piecemeal. Under the new initiative, a task force headed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will coordinate efforts to identify the source of cyber-attacks against government computer systems. As part of that effort, the Department of Homeland Security will work to protect the systems and the Pentagon will devise strategies for counterattacks against the intruders.

There has been a string of attacks on networks at the State, Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security departments in the past year and a half. U.S. officials and cyber-security experts have said Chinese Web sites were involved in several of the biggest attacks back to 2005, including some at the country's nuclear-energy labs and large defense contractors.

The NSA has particular expertise in monitoring a vast, complex array of communications systems -- traditionally overseas. The prospect of aiming that power at domestic networks is raising concerns, just as the NSA's role in the government's warrantless domestic-surveillance program has been controversial.

"Agencies designed to gather intelligence on foreign entities should not be in charge of monitoring our computer systems here at home," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Lawmakers with oversight of homeland security and intelligence matters say they have pressed the administration for months for details.

The classified joint directive, signed Jan. 8 and called the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23, has not been previously disclosed. Plans to expand the NSA's role in cyber-security were reported in the Baltimore Sun in September.

According to congressional aides and former White House officials with knowledge of the program, the directive outlines measures collectively referred to as the "cyber initiative," aimed at securing the government's computer systems against attacks by foreign adversaries and other intruders. It will cost billions of dollars, which the White House is expected to request in its fiscal 2009 budget.

"The president's directive represents a continuation of our efforts to secure government networks, protect against constant intrusion attempts, address vulnerabilities and anticipate future threats," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. He would not discuss the initiative's details.

The initiative foreshadows a policy debate over the proper role for government as the Internet becomes more dangerous.

Supporters of cyber-security measures say the initiative falls short because it doesn't include the private sector -- power plants, refineries, banks -- where analysts say 90 percent of the threat exists.

"If you don't include industry in the mix, you're keeping one of your eyes closed because the hacking techniques are likely the same across government and commercial organizations," said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute, a Bethesda-based cyber-security group that assists companies that face attacks. "If you're looking for needles in the haystack, you need as much data as you can get because these are really tiny needles, and bad guys are trying to hide the needles."

Under the initiative, the NSA, CIA and the FBI's Cyber Division will investigate intrusions by monitoring Internet activity and, in some cases, capturing data for analysis, sources said.

The Pentagon can plan attacks on adversaries' networks if, for example, the NSA determines that a particular server in a foreign country needs to be taken down to disrupt an attack on an information system critical to the U.S. government. That could include responding to an attack against a private-sector network, such as the telecom industry's, sources said.

Also, as part of its attempt to defend government computer systems, the Department of Homeland Security will collect and monitor data on intrusions, deploy technologies for preventing attacks and encrypt data. It will also oversee the effort to reduce Internet portals across government to 50 from 2,000, to make it easier to detect attacks.

"The government has taken a solid step forward in trying to develop cyber-defenses," said Paul B. Kurtz, a security consultant and former special adviser to the president on critical infrastructure protection. Kurtz said the initiative's purpose is not to spy on Americans. "The thrust here is to protect networks."

One of the key questions is whether it is necessary to read communications to investigate an intrusion.

Ed Giorgio, a former NSA analyst who is now a security consultant for ODNI, said, "If you're looking inside a DoD system and you see data flows going to China, that ought to set off a red flag. You don't need to scan the content to determine that."

But often, traffic analysis is not enough, some experts said. "Knowing the content -- that a communication is sensitive -- allows proof positive that something bad is going out of that computer," said one cyber-security expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the initiative's sensitivity.

Allowing a spy agency to monitor domestic networks is worrisome, said James X. Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "We're concerned that the NSA is claiming such a large role over the security of unclassified systems," he said. "They are a spy agency as well as a communications security agency. They operate in total secrecy. That's not necessary and not the most effective way to protect unclassified systems."

A proposal last year by the White House Homeland Security Council to put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of the initiative was resisted by national security agencies on the grounds that the department, established in 2003, lacked the necessary expertise and authority. The tug-of-war lasted weeks and was resolved only recently, several sources said.

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/25/AR2008012503261.html?hpid=moreheadlines

posted in Information Warfare - 0 replies