:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 5.31.2005 ::

:: "Bush says Amnesty report 'absurd'" ::

From BBC News, UK

But Amnesty hit back. Executive director William Schulz said: "What is 'absurd' is President Bush's attempt to deny the deliberate policies of his administration."

"What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is the Bush administration's failure to undertake a full independent investigation."

Read the entire story here.

posted by me

:: 10:59:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "CIA: Take That, Cyberterrorism!" ::

From Wired News
WASHINGTON -- The CIA is conducting a war game this week to simulate an unprecedented, Sept. 11-like electronic assault against the United States. The three-day exercise, known as "Silent Horizon," is meant to test the ability of government and industry to respond to escalating internet disruptions over many months, according to participants.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because the CIA asked them not to disclose details of the sensitive exercise taking place in Charlottesville, Virginia, about two hours southwest of Washington.

The simulated attacks were carried out five years in the future by a fictional new alliance of anti-American organizations that included anti-globalization hackers. The most serious damage was expected to be inflicted in the closing hours of the war game Thursday.

The national security simulation was significant because its premise -- a devastating cyberattack that affects government and parts of the economy on the scale of the 2001 suicide hijackings -- contradicts assurances by U.S. counterterrorism experts that such effects from a cyberattack are highly unlikely.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:41:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Quote of the Day" ::

Via AlternativeTentacles.com
Satan's Public School System Roolz!
"Our job is to save our Christian church children from our nation's materialistic, evolutionary dialectic destruction of all truth in the minds of Jesus' "little ones." Satan has chosen public schools as his forum to derationalize our precious young children's minds, turning them over to a collapsed and irrational model of atheism, immorality and the spiritism of the "New Age" in public schools."
From Robert L. Simonds , President of the National Association of Christian Educators, in his January 2005 President's Report.

posted by me

:: 1:15:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Guantanamo Bay branded the new gulag" ::

From The Age, Australia

Amnesty International has branded the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times".

Amnesty's annual report, which blamed governments around the world for abandoning the protection of human rights, called on the United States to close the Guantanamo Bay camp, Cuba, where about 540 men accused of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or the al-Qaeda terrorist network are held.

Some have been jailed without charge for more than three years, among them Australian David Hicks.

"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time," Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said in a reference to Stalin's Soviet-era prisons.

The comparison came as the London-based group launched its 308-page annual report, which accused the US of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections.

The prison camp has been in the spotlight over the past year since the FBI cited cases of aggressive interrogation techniques and detainee mistreatment.

The US government has also been criticised for its failure to charge or try prisoners who are classified as enemy combatants, a vague distinction with less legal protection under the Geneva Conventions than prisoners of war.

Some have challenged their detentions in US courts but their cases have been stalled by appeals from the US government, which says the men do not have the right to challenge the detentions.

"Not a single case from some 500 men has reached the courts," Khan said.

Read more here.

ALSO

Amnesty accuses US over 'torture'
BBC News, UK

Amnesty takes aim at Gitmo
Newsday, NY

Amnesty condemns a world of deepening brutality
Scotsman, UK

posted by me

:: 9:02:00 PM [+] ::
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:: May the force of the marketing campaign be with you??? ::

: From the silly, silly, silly news dept. :

Burger King Star Wars Promotion Criticized
USA Today reports:

The Force may - or may not - be with Burger King's latest Star Wars-themed Kids Meals.

One day after a record-shattering weekend for Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, an advocacy group is asking Burger King to stop the tie-in of its Kids Meals with the film because it is rated PG-13.

The same group, Dove Foundation, got McDonald's 13 years ago to apologize for "confusion" from its promotion of PG-13 Batman Returns with Happy Meals. Now, it's going after BK's latest Kids Meal promotion - targeted at kids ages 4 to 9. The meals feature characters from Sith or other Star Wars films.

"When Burger King puts that in a Kids Meal, there's an implicit endorsement of the movie," says Dick Rolfe, chairman of Dove Foundation.

Thanks to skylover and Arkbear for the alerts.

ALSO
The Marketplace Report: 'Sith' Burger King Promotion
NPR (audio)

AND
Empire of nutritionists strikes back at childhood obesity
By Stephanie Schorow
BostonHerald.com

Luke, give in to the fat side.

That's the message being sent to kids by grocery shelves full of junk food emblazoned with their favorite Star Wars characters, contends a Cambridge-based coalition that opposes child-targeted marketing.

Even though a rise in childhood obesity is turning the nation's kids into mini versions of Jabba the Hut, "every single Star Wars promotion is for food of little or no nutritional value," according to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a group of educators, parents and health-care professionals.

posted by me

:: 10:07:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Star Wars Ends With Solid Sith" ::

From Wired News
Movie Review » George Lucas' interstellar saga draws to a close with the strongest film the series has seen in 20 years. Christopher Null reviews Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

posted by me

:: 10:59:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Black Arts" ::

From The New York Review of Books
Volume 52, Number 8 · May 12, 2005

Have the billions spent on satellite collection systems and computer programs like Echelon delivered value for money? Have they made America safer? Intelligence professionals whisper about seldom-touted successes and Patrick Keefe concedes in effect that even a blind hog will find the occasional acorn. But his final judgment is harsh: "Chatter is, as it turns out, a perfect word for the conversations culled from the airwaves: fickle, misleading, most often inconsequential." September 11 was the test. No matter how success is defined by the intelligence world, the Anglophone countries and their listening posts fell short. Comint, Keefe states bluntly, "had its day and failed."

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe? Keefe has no idea. Sounding a little dispirited after his years of research and writing, he urges Americans to think hard about where to draw the line between liberty and security, but it's an odd note on which to conclude. It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything—more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy. Is more what we really need? In my opinion not. Ordinary reporters scooped Yardley in 1921, and ordinary spies—human agents, run by case officers in the field —are most likely to penetrate the heart of terrorist circles now. But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Read the entire article here.

posted by me

:: 10:53:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Rice-A-Roni ::

Suicide bombings and drive-by shootings on day Rice makes surprise visit to Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The bodies of 34 men shot execution-style were found in three locations in less than 24 hours, police said Sunday, a day when drive-by shootings and suicide bombings killed at least eight Iraqis, including a senior Industry Ministry official and a top Shiite cleric.

The spree of attacks came as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a heavily guarded surprise visit to Iraq to meet leaders of the new national government and urge patience for Iraqis weary of repeated bombings and insecurity.

Read more here.

ALSO
Rice Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq
Washington Post

posted by me

:: 10:34:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "America has failed to win the war..." ::

But has it lost it?
The Independent, UK
via Infoshop News
Ten US troops were killed in action across Iraq last week. The fighting is now sustained and ferocious. Patrick Cockburn, winner of the Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism, reports from the frontline of America's war on terror.

posted by me

:: 1:12:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "The Missing Patriot Debate" ::

From The Nation
David Cole advocates a human rights-based opposition to the Patriot Act.

posted by me

:: 1:03:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "MOVE Marks Police Bombing Anniversary" ::

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Under the watchful eyes of police and neighbors, the militant group MOVE marked the 20th anniversary Saturday of the police bombing that destroyed the organization's home and killed 11 members.

Group members and supporters gathered in West Philadelphia near the site where police trying to evict armed MOVE members from a rowhouse dropped an explosive from a helicopter. Officers then ordered firefighters to keep their distance as flames killed six adults and five children and consumed 61 adjacent homes.

"We will never allow another May 13, 1985," MOVE supporter Orie Ross shouted through a bullhorn to about 75 people. "Our family can't be replaced."

The group, which once espoused equality with animals, had clashed with neighbors and police long before the bombing. Neighbors complained that group members shouted from bullhorns late into the night, were confrontational and unsanitary, and jogged on people's roofs.

At the rally, members called for the release of the "MOVE 9" - those they said were wrongly convicted in the 1978 death of police officer James Ramp. Eight remain in prison; the ninth died of cancer in 1998.

Read more here.

ALSO
March marks anniversary of MOVE bombing
Monsters and Critics, UK

posted by me

:: 12:51:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Boxer rebellion? ::

Boxer's hold another hitch in Bolton vote
Senator seeks access to papers, calls White House uncooperative
By Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
The San Francisco Chronicle

Washington -- Sen. Barbara Boxer of California has erected a roadblock against John Bolton, President Bush's embattled nominee for U.N. ambassador, in a fight with the administration over access to documents.

Boxer said Friday she would lift her hold on the nomination if the administration provided the additional information she was seeking. Boxer took her action to slow Bolton's nomination after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday sent Bolton's name to the full Senate without a recommendation.

The move by Boxer is the latest twist in a nomination battle that has become increasingly bitter. Democrats say Bolton -- a State Department official who has long been an outspoken critic of the United Nations -- is arrogant and undiplomatic and has tried to force intelligence analysts to twist their findings to suit his preconceived conclusions. Republican supporters say Bolton is just what the United States needs at the U.N., a diplomat who will force changes in an organization hamstrung by waste, corruption and an inability to take decisive action.

"I said at the committee meeting that I was going to do everything I could to get the information I've asked for, and I did," Boxer said Friday in an interview. "It's a way to bring attention to this matter."

Boxer's move, which the Republican Senate majority could overturn by getting 51 votes in favor of a motion to proceed despite her hold, could further raise the partisan temperature in a body already fighting over Republican efforts to curb the Democratic minority's power to filibuster Bush's judicial nominees.

Boxer and the other Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the Bush administration had failed to turn over documents in three areas: notes and drafts of a Bolton speech on Syria's military capabilities, private business records of Bolton's assistant Mathew Friedman and information from the National Security Agency and other spy services about whether Bolton tried to get the names of American officials whose communications were intercepted.

"These records may show something, or nothing," Boxer said.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:28:00 AM [+] ::
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:: RE Uncle Sam & the Swastika * ::

Project Paperclip: Nazis in America
Rutherford Institute, VA

Few Americans have heard of Project Paperclip. Among those who have, the majority do not know its true extent because the U.S. government has successfully concealed most of the facts surrounding the project. Instead, the government has passed it off as a short-term operation limited to an innocent investigation of Germany’s scientists after World War II. In reality, Project Paperclip, as documented by authors such as John Loftus in his book The Belarus Secret, was the largest and longest-running operation involving Nazis in the history of the United States, and its effects are still being felt today.

At the close of World War II, U.S. officials and the Allied countries discovered that Germany had developed a technical superiority far beyond what they had imagined. In Nazi Germany, 20,000 scientists had revolutionized the weapons of war, and reports written by Allied investigators described the Germans’ “astonishing achievement” and “superb inventions.” In order to learn about the new German technology and weaponry, Russia, France, Britain and the United States began transporting German experts to their respective countries for interrogation. The Cold War was now beginning, and U.S. officials were determined to use any means necessary to keep the scientists responsible for Germany’s scientific supremacy out of Russian hands. At the same time, they aimed to acquire a technological lead against Russia. Thus, in the name of national interest, the United States began recruiting the Nazi scientists.

In 1946, President Harry S. Truman authorized Project Paperclip, a program designed to bring selected German scientists to work for the United States during the Cold War. However, Truman expressly forbade anyone found to have been “a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism.” The War Department’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was to conduct background investigations of the scientists, to be approved by the State Department.

Against Truman’s orders, however, the JIOA, Army intelligence and the CIA actively concealed incriminating information about the Germans they were hiring. Many of the 1,600 scientific and research specialists and their dependents brought to the U.S. under Project Paperclip had been deeply involved in Nazi society during the war. However, U.S. officials were determined to recruit these men and chose to ignore their appalling pasts. They sidestepped the problem of their Nazi backgrounds by “cleansing” and re-writing their information files to eliminate incriminating evidence. As a way of identifying the German scientists, American officials put an ordinary paperclip on their personnel files—thus the origin of the operation’s name.

While official American policy after the war was to prosecute war criminals for the atrocities committed under Adolf Hitler, many sectors of the U.S. government were actively concealing incriminating evidence in order to bring these very men into the U.S.

Read more here.

* Borrowed from political researcher Dave Emory.

posted by me

:: 11:37:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Open Source report ::

India eyes own open-source license
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

MUMBAI, India--In the seemingly never-ending quest to balance openness with profits, one of India's more influential professors is devising yet another open-source licensing program.

Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology has kicked off an effort to create the Knowledge Public License, or KPL, a licensing program that will let programmers share ideas with one another while at the same time allowing them to retain the rights to their own software modifications. The license will likely function much like the Berkeley Software Distribution or the MIT License programs, he added.

The idea is to create an environment where developers can take advantage of the collaborative power of the open-source movement while giving individuals the ability to exploit their own twists.

Ideally, such a program could also help ease the raging tensions between the open-source software movement and proprietary software companies.

"The free software people are afflicted by what I call the J factor, which is the jealousy factor. The proprietary people are afflicted by the G factor, the greed factor. They want to maximally extract money from the world," Phatak said in an interview here. "I am working to tell the world, 'Please permit these groups to coexist peacefully and harmoniously. There is a tremendous advantage to everyone.'"

"Legally, we have to move very carefully because the Americans have a tendency to sue anybody for anything," he added.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:43:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "National ID Card Draws Fire" ::

From Wired News
American driver's licenses will become national identification cards after the new rules, tacked on to a military spending bill, passed Congress. The federal government can expect a lot of resistance from the states.

Other news from Wired

Escargot? Oui. Google? Sacre Bleu
What's behind recent Gallic outrage over the search giant's digital library? Start with France's failure to keep pace with American geek prowess, but don't forget Europe's fears about who'll be writing the planet's history. By Bruce Gain.

posted by me

:: 11:20:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Four killed, scores wounded at anti-US Afghan riot" ::

From Globe and Mail, Canada

Kabul — Police opened fire in an eastern Afghan city to control hundreds of students rioting over the alleged desecration of Islam's holy book by U.S. forces at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Four people were killed and 71 wounded, officials said.

Shouting “Death to America,” demonstrators smashed car and shop windows Wednesday and stoned a passing convoy of U.S. soldiers in the city of Jalalabad, near the Pakistan border, in the biggest outpouring of anti-U.S. sentiment since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

The U.S. troops fired into the air before quickly leaving the area, provincial intelligence chief Sardar Shah told the Associated Press.

Four people were killed and 71 injured, including seven police officers, according to the Interior Ministry. It did not identify the victims any further or say how they were hurt.

The demonstrations began Tuesday, when protesters burned an effigy of U.S. President George W. Bush over a report in Newsweek magazine that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay placed Korans on toilets to rattle suspects, and in at least one case “flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:53:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Dubya in Georgia ::

Inactive Grenade Found at Bush Speech Site

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - Georgia's security chief said Wednesday that an inactive grenade was found near the site where U.S. President George W. Bush made a speech in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

Gela Bezhuashvili, secretary of the National Security Council, denied earlier reports that the device had been thrown near the stage during Bush's appearance before a vast crowd Tuesday and insisted that the U.S. leader had not been in any danger.

Bezhuashvili said the Soviet-era grenade was found 100 feet from the tribune where Bush spoke behind bulletproof glass.

U.S. Secret Service spokesman Jonathan Cherry said Tuesday that his agency had been informed that a device, possibly a hand grenade, had been thrown near the stage during Bush's speech, hit someone in the crowd and fallen to the ground. Bezhuashvili said, however, that it was not thrown, it was "found."

RELATED
Inactive Grenade Found at Site of Bush's Speech in Georgia
NPR (audio)

posted by me

:: 10:42:00 AM [+] ::
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:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird (.900)

Government in Action

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported in April that last year's hurricane season in Florida caused 123 storm-related deaths, but that 315 families managed to convince the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for their relatives' funerals as storm-related. And in April, the scheduled elections for town offices in Monticello, Wis., never took place because, as Town Clerk Walt Weber told Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel, "We forgot." (According to Weber, none of the incumbents, including himself, would have been challenged anyway.) [Sun-Sentinel, 4-10-05] [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 4-18-05]

Are We Safe? (1) Congress' Government Accountability Office reported in March that, mainly because of gun owners' privacy rights, the FBI or state officials were unable to stop 47 of the 58 gun purchases by people who were on the FBI's own terrorist "watch list" (during a nine-month period last year). (2) A February report of the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general accused the agency of intentionally disbursing seaport-security grant money widely across the country instead of greatly increasing inspections at the 10 ports through which nearly 80 percent of trade moves (a practice that resulted in maritime grants for Oklahoma, Kentucky, New Hampshire and Tennessee). [New York Times, 3- 8-05] [New York Times, 2-20-05]

Great Art!

German artist Winfried Witt has invited about 30 people to his latest installation, which will be to observe the late-May birth of his and wife Ramune Gele's first child, in Berlin's DNA-Galerie. Though more than 100 million babies are born every year on Earth, Witt promised that his viewers will participate in "an exceptional experience" in that "man, because he is unique, is an existential object of art." Witt wants to "show living people, perceived at the same time as object and subject, through a kind of magnifying glass and to expose man in the situations of his personal life." [Agence France-Presse, 4-15-05]

To conceal an enormous open-cast mining operation about 10 miles from Newcastle, England, and to reduce the cost of carting away millions of tons of debris, the mining company recently hired artist Charles Jencks to incorporate the waste into a reclining female sculpture, a half-mile long, running along the A1 highway, with breasts forming peaks 100 feet off the ground. The "Goddess of the North" is expected to take three years to finish, will have footpaths over and around it, and be slightly larger than the "Angel of the North" metal sculpture 15 miles to the south. [The Times (London), 3-27-05]

Recurring Themes

News of the Weird has reported several times on the celebratory but bloody Easter week crucifixions practiced in the Philippines, especially in San Pedro Cutud, which has become an international tourist destination for the exhibitions. This year, Pampanga province police officials decided to fold department discipline into the ceremonies by offering 20 wayward officers who had earlier been absent without leave to do penance by carrying wooden crosses in the festival and that officers with more than 120 absent days volunteer to be crucified, after which they would be reinstated. [Manila Times, 3-23-05]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 11:03:00 PM [+] ::
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IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED."
Special to BuzzFlash
From an e-newsletter
By Greg Palast

Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it.

The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."

For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime or misdemeanor."

And if this ain't it, nothing is.

The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.

A conspiracy to commit serial fraud is, under federal law, racketeering. However, the Mob's schemes never cost so many lives.

Here's more. "Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Really? But Mr. Bush told us, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

A month ago, the Silberman-Robb Commission issued its report on WMD intelligence before the war, dismissing claims that Bush fixed the facts with this snooty, condescending conclusion written directly to the President, "After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons."

We now know the report was a bogus 618 pages of thick whitewash aimed to let Bush off the hook for his murderous mendacity.

Read on: The invasion build-up was then set, says the memo, "beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections." Mission accomplished.

You should parse the entire memo -- posted on my website -- and see if you can make it through its three pages without losing your lunch.

Now sharp readers may note they didn't see this memo, in fact, printed in the New York Times. It wasn't. Rather, it was splashed across the front pages of the Times of LONDON on Monday.

It has effectively finished the last, sorry remnants of Tony Blair's political career. (While his Labor Party will most assuredly win the elections Thursday, Prime Minister Blair is expected, possibly within months, to be shoved overboard in favor of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, a political execution which requires only a vote of the Labour party's members in Parliament.)

But in the US, barely a word. The New York Times covers this hard evidence of Bush's fabrication of a casus belli as some "British" elections story. Apparently, our President's fraud isn't "news fit to print."

My colleagues in the UK press have skewered Blair, digging out more incriminating memos, challenging the official government factoids and fibs. But in the US press
nada, bubkes, zilch. Bush fixed the facts and somehow that's a story for "over there."

The Republicans impeached Bill Clinton over his cigar and Monica's affections. And the US media could print nothing else.

Now, we have the stone, cold evidence of bending intelligence to sell us on death by the thousands, and neither a Republican Congress nor what is laughably called US journalism thought it worth a second look.

My friend Daniel Ellsberg once said that what's good about the American people is that you have to lie to them. What's bad about Americans is that it's so easy to do.

-----------
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read the memo in its entirety here.
------------------

posted by me

:: 10:11:00 PM [+] ::
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:: The Palast Report - 5.1 ::

GROUND ZER0-ZER0-ZER0
Greg Palast reports from Center of the World, Ecuador
From his e-newsletter

The equator is far more tacky than I imagined.

I'd taken time out from the state of siege in the capitol to take the twins on a quick holiday further up the Andes (or down, I don't know which).

Anyway, the Ciudad Centro del Mundo -- City at the Center of the World -- had loudspeakers on poles scratching out some Inca-cum-New Age Muzak.

It cost a dollar and a half US to stand on the planet's belly button -- that's a buck fifty in the local currency, too -- Ecuador's been "dollarized," which is why everyone is flat broke and in a bad mood and why Quechua women in bowler hats were screaming into the cameras, "TODO FUERA! TODO FUERA !" -- Everybody out! -- in front of the Presidential Palace.

They didn't like their president last week -- the ladies in the bowler hats (about a hundred thousand of them) chased him to Brazil -- and they don't like the new one either. Or ANYONE. They want EVERYONE out. No more US dollarized governments that promise them water pipes and electricity and vaccinations for the kids.

*********
Watch video of Palast outside the Presidential Palace in Quito.
*********

They had no water, except what they could carry in jugs up the hill, and thirty dollar electric bills, when the few with jobs make $153 a month, and no shots for the kids -- and they were all in a bad mood about it.

I wanted to tell them they are rich -- this nation, once a member of OPEC -- sits on 2 billion barrels of oil and probably a lot more. However, according to the World Bank documents in my briefcase marked, "FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY," Ecuador is required to pay 70% of its new oil money to foreign bondholders.

Who ARE these guys who hold the mortgage on this once-upon-a-time Inca Empire? Inside the presidential palace, where we could barely hear the ladies telling him to get the hell out, the President told me, quietly, after the cameras were off, "We don't KNOW who they are (these guys who own the country) and THAT'S TERRIBLE."

**********
Watch part of the exclusive interview Palast obtained with the new President of Ecuador, Alfredo Palacio.
**********

What's terrible is that everyone DOES know who they are -- it's understood, a UN official told me, the bonds are held by the old oligarchs who stripped the nation's banks of their cash and re-planted themselves and Ecuador's cash in Miami; and now they hold the nation ransom by manipulating its debt securities. And of course, there's the millions Ecuador has to pay a US power company (a payment which was imposed by the USA only after the company hired Henry Kissinger).

Anyway, the indigenous women in pastel shawls and dark trilbies wanted NO ONE as president, not 'Sucio Lucio' (Dirty Lucio Gutierrez) who fled last week nor the nice Dr. Palacio, cardiologist and now accidental president. In office two days and he's already in hot water with George Bush for saying some of Ecuador's own oil money maybe should go for vaccinations before the Miami gang gets paid.

But the ladies don't want the good doctor, either. "TODOS FUERA!"

"You want NO president at all?" I asked in my atrocious Spanish.

"PODER POPULAR! PODER POULAR!" POWER TO THE PEOPLE.

OK, I said, looking at The People milling around the city square, some looking frighteningly earnest, some drunk, all angry except for the blas? soldiers rolling their eyes and shifting their automatic weapons.

I had the confidential World Bank docs under my arm to show them, but unlike Americans, these Indians and tattered Mestizos already know all about the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and "restructuring" and "hard currency reserves" and the dreaded "austerity" which means no water, high electric bills and no shots for the kids.

Anyway, to The People, No One would be better than Someone because Someone, always "un rico," (a rich guy) sold them out.

The UN man told me, "They're $5 million short for vaccines -- yet Ecuador spent $5 million on sponsoring the Miss Universe contest."

But I didn't share this North American's puritanical pragmatism. If your nation and your bank account are dropping quickly to zero, a little T & A encased in a bit of glitter can't be such a bad idea -- Ecuador's idea of "one for the road", an awkward economic quickie before entering the austerity nunnery.

At the equator, there was a tombstone-like hunk of stone reading, "Latitude 0' 0" 0'"." Ground zero zero zero. The Big Nothing.

Ignoring the happy music, the unhappy children of the Great Inca squatted next to boxes of gum for sale and huddled their babies against the gray drizzle.

I found a bathroom and forgot to check if, indeed, the water swirled down the hole the wrong way.

The twins didn't want to get out of the car and whined like ungrateful idiot banshees. But the hell if I was going to fly them halfway down the globe without taking the obligatory photo of the kids straddling the Northern and Southern Hemispheres -- marked conveniently for gringo tourists by a pathetic yellow line in the sidewalk.

But the twins shrieked horribly and neither my completely unbelievable threats nor promises of huge bribes (ice cream) could budge them.

They wanted to stay in the car and listen to the tape of Harry Potter in his magical world.

And I couldn't agree with them more.

***
Follow Palast's reports from Ecuador -- film, photos, reportage -- including an exclusive interview with the President.
************

posted by me

:: 8:13:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Ivins on Nuke Right-wingers & Dumbass Dems ::

From Alternet

Christian Right Goes Nuclear
It's a joke that the right wing claims it is against "judicial activists." What they want are judicial activists who agree with them.

AND
Dumb Dems Let GOP Run Wild
The unholy combination of theocracy and plutocracy that now rules this country is, in fact, enabled by dumb liberals.

posted by me

:: 1:23:00 PM [+] ::
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:: RE The CIA Relationship w/ Nazi War Crminials? ::

The March story - WHERE ARE THINGS NOW?
U.S. Congress Extends Effort to Open Secret WWII War Crimes Records
Two More Years to Declassify and Open CIA Documents
College Park, MD. . .The effort of the interagency working group tasked with identifying and declassifying records relating to Nazi and Japanese Imperial Government war crimes has been extended to enable it to complete the work of opening CIA records. On March 25, President George W. Bush signed into law legislation that pushes back the group’s sunset date to March 2007.

ALSO
From The National Security Archive @ GWU
The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History
Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146

Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB." [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]

The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.

This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:

"I think that the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." - Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman

"I can only say that the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept." - Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste

"Too much has been secret for too long. The CIA has not complied with the statute." - Former federal prosecutor Thomas H. Baer

The IWG was established in January 11, 1999 and has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires at the end of March 2005.

The documentation unearthed by the IWG reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers. (Note 2)

The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material last May (2004) in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis.

Read more here.

AND
Check out a previous post w/ links RE Dave Emory's engaging & provocative work.

posted by me

:: 1:52:00 AM [+] ::
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