:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 12.27.2006 ::

:: "ANALYSIS-Bush digging in heels on Iraq course change" ::

Reuters AlertNet, UK
By Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON, Dec 27 (Reuters) - Just weeks after pledging a new approach in the Iraq war in the wake of his party's defeat in congressional elections, U.S. President George W. Bush seems to be digging in his heels against any major change of course.

Bush is spending the holiday week in consultations at his Texas ranch preparing for one of the most fateful moments of his presidency, a policy speech early in the new year charting what he has called "a new way forward" in Iraq.

Even as he gives the impression of seriously considering a range of ideas on how to handle an increasingly unpopular war that has killed nearly 3,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis, Bush has made clear some options are off-limits.

He has brushed aside a proposal from a bipartisan panel to ask U.S. foes Iran and Syria for help in stabilizing Iraq and, instead of talking about a U.S. troop reduction, he is said to be looking closely at a temporary increase.

That has critics predicting that Bush, who prides himself in sticking to decisions, will announce little real change.

"He is now caught between admitting the war was a mistake and his policy has failed, or trying to tough it out," said Joseph Cirincione, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

"It looks like the president would rather let the whole operation go down in flames than admit he was wrong."

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:53:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "JAMES BROWN: 1933-2006" ::

San Francisco Chronicle

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, whose career spanned more than 50 years and who influenced the evolution of rap, funk and disco, died early Christmas morning in an Atlanta hospital. He was 73.

Brown, who had been admitted to Emory Crawford Long Hospital on Saturday for treatment of pneumonia, died at about 1:45 a.m. Monday of pneumonia and congestive heart failure, according to his agent, Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music. The music legend, known for an exhausting touring schedule and sweat-drenched, hard-charging live shows, had seemed to be on the mend at first, even telling people he planned to be on stage in New York on New Year's Eve at B.B. King's nightclub.

Brown's long string of hits tells only part of the story of why he mattered so much in R&B and pop music. Among his hits were "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)."

The rest of the story has to do with his drive, his inexhaustible power to reinvent himself and his indelible impact on other performers and pop music of many varieties. Performers as varied as Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, David Bowie and Public Enemy were influenced by Brown's musicality and unique style.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:52:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Experts fear ‘Scream’ suffered lasting damage" ::

Edvard Munch masterpiece stolen 2 years ago may be too damaged to fix
msnbc.com

OSLO, Norway - Experts fear that theft damage to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” one of the world’s most famous images, may be too extensive to completely repair, according to a report to be released Friday.

The painting and another Munch masterpiece, “Madonna” were recovered by police in August, two years after they were stolen from Oslo’s Munch Museum by masked gunmen in a brazen daylight heist on Aug. 22, 2004. Police have refused to say how they recovered the artworks, or where they had been for the two years.

After extensive study, museum experts are turning over a 200-page assessment to Oslo police, which, among other things, expresses concern about moisture damage to a swath of “The Scream.”

poted by me

:: 4:00:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Researchers Find Surprise in Makeup of a Comet" ::

New York Times

WASHINGTON — Comets are not all made of interstellar dust and ice, but instead may contain material shot from the heart of the solar system during its tumultuous birth, scientists reported Thursday after examining pristine particles of a comet that were brought back by the Stardust spacecraft.

The evidence suggests that comets did not form in isolation in the outer parts of the solar system as it coalesced from a swirling mass of primal material, the researchers said. Instead, they said, some of the hot material that formed planets around the Sun seems to have spewed off into distant areas and become a component of distant comets.

“Many people imagined that comets formed in total isolation from the rest of the solar system; we have shown that’s not true,” said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer who is the lead scientist for the Stardust mission.

“As the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago,” Dr. Brownlee said, “material moved from the innermost part to the outermost part. I think of it as the solar system partially turning itself inside out.”

The first results of Stardust, appearing in seven reports published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Science, were reported in San Francisco on Thursday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

NASA launched Stardust in 1999, and the robot spacecraft met comet Wild 2 beyond the orbit of Mars in January 2004. The craft flew within 150 miles of the comet’s nucleus and trapped particles spewing from the body in a light, porous foam called aerogel. After a 2.88-billion-mile journey, Stardust returned to Earth last January with a payload of thousands of tiny particles from Wild 2.

The comet formed more than 4.5 billion years ago and had remained preserved in the frozen reaches of the outer solar system until 1974, when a close encounter with Jupiter shifted its orbit to a path between Jupiter and Mars.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:45:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Support for War Dives as Bush Seeks New Iraq Plan" ::

Don Gonyea
NPR

The White House on Tuesday pushed back until January a major policy address from President Bush on the war in Iraq. The delay comes as several major national polls on the war, all of which became public Tuesday, show plummeting public support.

The president's speech had been promised before Christmas; the delay until next month comes as Mr. Bush continues to debrief policy experts from inside and outside his administration and weigh his options on a new U.S. strategy for Iraq. But one consideration could have been the combined weight of the polls, which offered numbers sure to be disturbing to the president and his advisers.

All the polls found that backing for the war -- already weak enough to hurt Republican candidates in the November midterm elections -- continues to decline. They also found that the general public wants the president to pay heed to key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a 10-member bipartisan panel commissioned by Congress. Among its 79 recommendations, the group urged the Bush administration to begin direct talks with Iran and Syria and to set a goal of withdrawing most U.S. ground troops over the next 15 months.

This week, the president has been holding a series of high-profile meetings behind closed doors at the Pentagon and State Department, as well as with prominent Iraqi politicians. The White House has said the president is seeking a new approach that might stem the tide of sectarian violence in Iraq. But the president and his spokespersons have said these meetings are not about the ISG report or its specific recommendations.

The White House's resistance to the report reflects the attitude of conservatives generally, who have denounced the report as a defeatist. But the more general public is clearly dissatisfied with the situation in Iraq and interested in policy alternatives.

The CBS poll, based on interviews conducted Dec. 8-10, shows that 21 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling the situation in Iraq. Further, the polls shows that 75 percent disapprove. (A scant 4 percent is undecided on this point.)

The poll also shows that 70 percent are "uneasy" about the president's "ability to make the right decisions about the war in Iraq." A majority also believe, according to the CBS survey, that it was wrong to take military action against Iraq and that the United States should have stayed out.

Other polls tell a similar story.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:58:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Protests and parties after Pinochet's death" ::

Reuters.uk

SANTIAGO, Chile - The body of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government killed thousands during his 17-year-rule, was taken to a military college in the capital Santiago on Monday after his death sparked violence, tears and celebration.

Pinochet, who polarised Chile during his 1973-1990 dictatorship and spent his old age fighting human rights, fraud and corruption charges, died on Sunday.

He suffered a heart attack a week ago and, just when he appeared to be recovering, his health suddenly deteriorated, doctors said.


News of his death prompted an outpouring of emotion in Chile where, a third of a century after he swept to power, Pinochet's legacy is still hotly disputed.

More than 5,000 people took to the streets, the Interior Ministry said. Some mourned a man who they say saved Chile from communism while others revelled in the death of South America's most notorious Cold War dictator.

Some demonstrations turned violent, and military police used tear gas to disperse anti-Pinochet protesters who tried to march to the presidential palace, a potent symbol for many Chileans since it was bombed during the 1973 coup which brought the general to power.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:38:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "The Iraq Study Group: A Fatal Flaw" ::

A report from The Nation
Robert Dreyfuss

There's good news and bad news in the long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group. Happily, it starts the United States down the path of withdrawal. Unhappily, its most basic premise--that the United States can somehow support the nonexistent Iraqi government and bolster its viciously sectarian armed forces--is fatally flawed.

Let's start with the good news. The ISG has delivered a stunning body blow to the White House. Stripped of its details, the ISG's message is that President Bush's Iraq policy is a complete failure that has brought Iraq and the Middle East to the brink of catastrophe. As a result, the United States must execute an about-face. Almost immediately, the United States must begin withdrawing virtually all of its combat forces from Iraq, a withdrawal that should be completed early in 2008. At the same time, it says, the United States will have to scramble to launch a diplomatic effort involving Iraq's neighbors--including Syria and Iran--the Arab League, the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other world powers to prevent Iraq from spiraling into chaos.

Further, says the ISG report--which was handed personally to Bush by Hamilton and his co-chair, former Secretary of State Jim Baker, Wednesday--the United States must renounce any idea of permanent bases in Iraq, "reject the notion that the United States seeks to control Iraq's oil" and urgently seek national reconciliation in Iraq. To that latter end, the ISG proposes that the United States "must also try to talk directly to Muqtada al-Sadr, to militia leaders, and to insurgent leaders"--in other words, instead of seeking to crush the Iraqi resistance and smash Sadr's Mahdi Army, it's time to talk to them. And to top it all off, the ISG proposes a vigorous effort to restart the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

It's hard to imagine a more sweeping rebuke to the President's disastrously misguided Middle East policy. The report breathes not one word about "victory" in Iraq. Ever the master of understatement, Baker said that the idea of staying the course in Iraq "is no longer viable."

The Baker-Hamilton report instantly isolated President Bush against a snowballing consensus among the mainstream political establishment. In a collective I-told-you-so, Democrats mostly heaped praise on the ISG report. "If the president is serious about the need for change in Iraq, he will find Democrats ready to work with him in a bipartisan fashion to find a way to end the war as quickly as possible," said Nancy Pelosi, the incoming speaker of the House, who added that the ISG report echoed virtually all of the Democrats' main talking points on Iraq.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 4:35:00 PM [+] ::
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:: The Dark Side of the Moon ::

NASA to build permanent base on the moon
Daily Telegraph

NASA says it plans to build a permanently occupied base on the moon, most likely at the lunar south pole

The habitat will serve as a science outpost as well as a testbed for technologies needed for future travel to Mars, and construction will follow a series of flights to the moon scheduled to begin by 2020.

"We're going for a base on the moon," Scott "Doc" Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for exploration, said from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
Plans for what the base will look like and what astronauts would do there have yet to be determined. Similarly, NASA has not projected a date when the base would go into operation.

The moon's polar sites are preferred to equatorial regions because of more moderate temperatures and longer periods of sunlight, which is critical for the solar-powered electrical systems NASA plans to develop. Eventually, nuclear power may be used to augment or replace the solar energy systems.

Scientists also suspect the poles have resources such as hydrogen, ice and other materials that could be used for life support.

"It's exciting," said NASA deputy administrator Shana Dale. "We don't know as much about the polar regions."

The US had already announced plans to develop new spacecraft to travel to the moon and land on its surface for the first time since the last Apollo flight there in 1972. It also plans to provide a communications system linking Earth and the moon.
But NASA doesn't plan to go to the moon alone. The United States will look for international and commercial partners to share the expense and possibly provide components such as extra power systems, living quarters and resources for surface travel on the moon.

NASA is not expecting a budget increase to pay for the program. Rather, it will use funds that will become available as the space shuttle fleet is phased out.

Read more here.

A L S O

America's Race to the Moon
California Literary Review

posted by me

:: 1:04:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Bad Day? ::

Bush says he's 'not happy' to have to accept Bolton resignation as U.N. ambassador
International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON: Lacking the votes to keep his job, embattled U.N. Ambassador John Bolton is resigning, a defeat for a chagrined President George W. Bush who had clung to hopes of Senate confirmation.

Bolton got the position in August 2005, appointed by Bush when Congress was in recess. With that temporary assignment about to expire, and his long fight for confirmation going nowhere, Bolton made it official Monday.

He handed in a resignation letter that did not mention the political fight behind it. It said simply: "I have concluded that my service in your administration should end when the current recess appointment expires."

"I accepted. I'm not happy about it," Bush said Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, with Bolton at his side. Bush did not name a replacement, and officials offered no timetable for an announcement.

The setback for the White House seemed to put a hold on talk of bipartisanship after last month's election gave control of the Senate and the House of Representatives to Democrats. Both formerly were in the hands of Bush's Republican Party.

Bush considered Bolton a strong voice as the United Nations dealt with crises in Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea and other complex matters around the world. Bolton also pushed the administration's effort to reform the United Nations.

Most Democrats strongly opposed Bolton, whom they viewed as a brusque, ill-suited diplomat. Some Republicans helped scuttle his nomination, including moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.

The president had stinging words for Bolton's opponents.

"They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time," Bush said in a statement. "This stubborn obstructionism ill serves our country."

Democrats, though, said Bolton's resignation signaled a fresh start.
"Hopefully this change marks a shift from the failed go-it-alone strategies that have left America less safe," said the incoming Senate majority leader, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada.

"With the Middle East on the verge of chaos and the nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea increasing, we need a United Nations ambassador who has the full support of Congress and can help rally the international community to tackle the serious threats we face," said Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats' 2004 presidential candidate.

Read more here.

:: 1:01:00 AM [+] ::
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:: RE Rummy ::

Rumsfeld Memo Proposed ‘Major Adjustment’ in Iraq
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction.

“In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course, he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.

“Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis,” he wrote. “This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not ‘lose.’ ”

“Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist,” he added. The memo suggests frustration with the pace of turning over responsibility to the Iraqi authorities; in fact, the memo calls for examination of ideas that roughly parallel troop withdrawal proposals presented by some of the White House’s sharpest Democratic critics.

The memo’s discussion of possible troop reduction options offers a counterpoint to Mr. Rumsfeld’s frequent public suggestions that discussions about force levels are driven by requests from American military commanders.

It also puts on the table several ideas for troop redeployments or withdrawals, even as there have been recent pronouncements from American commanders emphasizing the need to maintain troop levels for the time being.

Read more here.

A L S O

Text of the Memo

Doubts on Iraq, Even From Rumsfeld (Letters)

posted by me

:: 12:56:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Civil War? ::

UN Secretary Says Iraq Is Engulfed in Deadly Civil War
New York Times

BAGHDAD — Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said Sunday that Iraq had descended into a civil war that was even deadlier and more anarchic than the 15-year sectarian bloodshed that tore apart Lebanon.

“When we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war; this is much worse,” Mr. Annan said in an interview with the BBC.

In making his remarks, Mr. Annan joined a growing number of foreign and Iraqi leaders, policy makers and news organizations who say that Iraq is in the grip of civil war. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said last Wednesday at a conference in the United Arab Emirates that Iraq is in a civil war. A former Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said the same last March.

The Bush administration has not characterized the conflict as a civil war.

The debate over the term raged last week in the United States, after NBC and other major news organizations said they were ready to apply it to Iraq. Scholars say that the widening sectarian conflict meets the common scholarly definition of a civil war and that when measured by deaths per year, Iraq is among the top civil wars of the last half-century. The civilian death toll is believed to be at least 50,000.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:51:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Evaluating Firefox 2" ::

From ZDNet

Firefox 2 is officially shipping. Following on Robert Vamosi's evaluation of IE 7, here is his take on the new open source browser:

The good: Firefox 2 adds built-in antiphishing protection, search engine suggestions, session festore, inline spell-checking, and Live Titles; the browser is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux; localized versions available in many different languages.

The bad: The Firefox 2 uninstall leaves behind a mess; some 1.5 version add-ons will break in 2.0; there are no thumbnail previews of open tabs; the browser doesn't yet pass the Web Standards Project Acid2 test.

The bottom line: Mozilla Firefox 2 is a winner, beating Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on security, features, and overall cool factor and deserving our Editors' Choice award.

ALSO

Firefox 2 Launch - Interview With Chris Beard
Slashdot

posted by me

:: 11:26:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Get Your Daily Plague Forecast" ::

From Wired News
A new website mashes health data with Google Maps to track global disease outbreaks.
By Seán Captain.

posted by me

:: 11:21:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Bush drops 'stay the course' slogan as political mood sours" ::

Takeover could come in a year, but more troops may go to Bagdhad, says US general
Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
From Guardian Unlimited

The top US general in Iraq said yesterday he might send more troops into the battle for Baghdad, after an announcement that the Iraqi government had agreed to a timetable for political and military measures aimed at curbing the violence.

General George Casey said the US-led coalition was three-quarters of the way through the process of training Iraqi forces, and predicted that those forces would be "completely capable of taking over responsibility for their own security" in 12 to 18 months.

The White House, meanwhile, announced that George Bush had stopped using the slogan, "Stay the course", while the president himself hammered a new buzzword: "Change". "We're constantly changing. The enemy changes, and we change. The enemy adapts to our strategies and tactics, and we adapt to theirs. We're constantly changing to defeat this enemy," he said, after visiting a Florida company making a device for sniffing out roadside bombs.

"I don't hear anything that would suggest change in policy, just a restatement of it," Rand Beers, a former strategist in the Bush administration's national security council, said, pointing out that there had been previous promises about Iraqi troop training and political reforms.

In an indication of the mounting pressure for a change of course, the New York Times yesterday devoted its entire leader column to calling for a new solution to the "disaster" of Iraq and the sacking of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:13:00 PM [+] ::
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:: News from Smallville? ::

Rare meteorite found in Kansas field
Seattle Post Intelligencer

GREENSBURG, Kan. -- Scientists located a rare meteorite in a Kansas wheat field thanks to new ground-penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on Mars.

The dig Monday was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find, with researchers painstakingly using brushes and hand tools to preserve evidence of the impact trail and to date the event of the meteorite strike. Soil samples also were bagged and tagged and organic material preserved for dating purposes.

Even before they had the meteorite out of the ground, the scientific experts at the site were able to debunk prevailing wisdom that the spectacular Brenham meteorite fall occurred 20,000 years ago. Its location in the Pleistocene epoch soil layer puts that date closer to 10,000 years ago.

"We know it is recent," said Carolyn Sumners, director of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as she surveyed progress on the dig. "Native Americans could have seen it."

Read more here.

ALSO

Does world-record meteorite await unearthing in Kansas?
Kansas City Star

AND

Doubts cast on meteorite
The Kansas City Star

posted by me

:: 11:23:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "State Dept. Confirms Rice-Tenet Meeting" ::

By ANNE GEARAN
The Associated Press
via The Washington Post

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did receive a CIA briefing about terror threats just about two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, but the information was not new, her chief spokesman said.

In doing so, Sean McCormack confirmed a meeting _ on July 10, 2001 _ that his boss had said repeatedly she could not specifically recall. She had said earlier that there were virtually daily meetings at the time.

A new book by reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame describes the White House meeting as an emergency wakeup call that Rice had brushed off. Rice was President Bush's national security adviser at the time and was promoted to the top diplomatic job last year.

posted by me

:: 9:18:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Iraq has fuelled terror threat, US intelligence warns" ::

Independent, UK

President Bush's rationale for the invasion and occupation of Iraq has taken a heavy blow with a new assessment by the country's intelligence community that the war and its aftermath have fuelled Islamic extremism, and increased - not diminished - the terrorist threat to the US.

Top Republicans yesterday leapt to the administration's defence, insisting that the US had no option but to stay in Iraq. "Either we're going to be fighting this battle, this war, overseas or its going to be right here in this country," said Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader.

But the findings could scarcely have come at a more delicate time, weeks before mid-term congressional elections in which Mr Bush's claim to have made the country safer will be a central theme. They also contradict Mr Bush's recent assertions, on the fifth anniversary of the 11 September attacks, that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had been vital to win the "war on terror". Instead the document, the gist of which appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post yesterday, makes clear that if Iraq has turned into the "central front" in that war, as the President insists, that front is largely of the administration's making.

The report warns that militants who had taken part in the anti-US fight in Iraq could go back to their own countries "exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies".

The conclusions are contained in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which reflects the considered and collective wisdom of the CIA and 15 other agencies. Precise details of the report, entitled Trends in Global Terrorism, Implications for the United States, remain top-secret.

Read more here.

ALSO

Battle Breaks Out in Media Over Bleak NIE Iraq Assessment
Editor & Publisher

His own NIE says Bush is the Terrorist's Best Friend. When will the Democrats?
Huffington Post

posted by me

:: 1:09:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Pirate Radio Stations Challenge Feds" ::

An AP story
via The Washington Post
By MARTHA MENDOZA

OAKLAND, Calif. -- To Stephen Dunifer, it was yet another revolutionary moment. But to the untrained eye, it looked more like a geek fest. Over four days, a dozen men and women shyly bumped shoulders as they studied schematics and tinkered with romex connectors, resistors, microphone cords, meters, sockets and capacitors _ the stuff of illegal radio stations.

In the corner of this cluttered electronics lab, hunched over a computer, sat Dunifer, their teacher, "the patron saint of pirate radio." Part rock star, part Johnny Appleseed and fully the bane of the Federal Communications Commission, Dunifer has long, gray hair, large, clear glasses and a deep commitment to what he calls "Free Radio."

"We're not stealing anything. We're claiming something that's rightfully ours," he says.

His goal is to create FM radio stations faster than the FCC can shut them down.

"It's always been our position that if enough people go on the air with their stations, the FCC will be overwhelmed and unable to respond," he says.

Pirate radio is radio without a license, radio without government regulations. It's "america the criminal" at midnight on Human Rights Radio in Springfield, Illinois and pre-dawn erotica on Freak Radio in Santa Cruz, Calif. It's an inordinate amount of Frank Zappa at WFZR in West End, Pa. (a station dedicated to playing his music) and the "Voice of the American Patriot" ("no support for liberals disguised as wannabe Conservatives") at NLNR in Butte, Mont.

The rapidly proliferating scofflaws _ and there are now hundreds of them broadcasting at any given moment in this country _ are usually only audible within a few miles of their "home-brewed" transmitters. They find unused sections of the FM dial, fire up their mini-transmitters, raise their antennas and set up their station.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 1:06:00 AM [+] ::
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:: There's Always Room for Jello ::

Biafra bashes Bush bill
From the Alternative Tentacles site

According to Senator Patrick Leahy on the Bill of Rights Defense Committee website, the US Congress is trying to shield the President from future criminal prosecution while making torture and rigged trials legal and unreviewable by the US Judicial system!

After reviewing the facts, Jello Biafra said, "This is the most corrupt thing I've heard of congress doing ever. Hey kids, can you say coup?" He suggests "Faxes, e-mails, polite but firm prank calls to the offices of your congress creatures" to let 'em know what you think about this shameful move on the part of the Republican leadership!

posted by me

:: 8:09:00 PM [+] ::
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:: TRUTHOUT ::

Global Media Abhors US Response to 9/11
Agence France Presse
via truthout.org

Newspapers across the world have strongly criticised the US response to September 11, accusing the Bush administration of bungling its "war on terror" and squandering global goodwill by invading Iraq.

On the fifth anniversary of Al-Qaeda's assault on New York and Washington, editorials united Monday in condemning the attacks and expressing revulsion for the Islamic extremists who carried out the atrocity.

While papers said many people were still grappling with the immensity of what happened on that day, nearly all agreed the world had since become a more dangerous and uncertain place.

Much criticism, especially in the Midde East and Europe, was reserved for US President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq under the banner of the "war on terror".

The New York Times acknowledged the United States had lost the feeling of unity and purpose which gripped the nation in the aftermath of the attacks, and lamented a lost opportunity.

"When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy," said the paper's editorial.

Summing up the mood in the British press, the Financial Times said: "The way the Bush administration has trampled on the international rule of law and Geneva Conventions, while abrogating civil liberties and expanding executive power at home, has done huge damage not only to America's reputation but, more broadly, to the attractive power of Western values."

German daily Handelsblatt said the war in Iraq had been erroneously started in the name of September 11, while Spain's El Pais said the Bush administration used the attacks to impose a neo-conservative foreign policy.

"The result, five years after, is a more dangerous world," El Pais said.

Read more here.

ALSO

September 11th, Our Report
By Marc Ash
t r u t h o u t | Executive Director

Iraq and 9/11: The Truth Is Out

The Hidden Scope of Domestic Spying Since 9/11

For US Troops and Their Families, Iraq War's Invisible Costs Keep Piling Up

posted by me

:: 9:34:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Report from The Nation ::

Cheney, 9/11 and the Truth about Iraq
By David Corn

Dick Cheney commemorated the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by sticking to the MO that he and his running-mate used to lead the nation into the current mess in Iraq.

Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Cheney encountered a decent grilling from host Tim Russert, who pressed him on how Cheney and George W. Bush had justified the war in Iraq. "Based on what you know now, that Saddam did not have the weapons of mass destruction that were described, would you still have gone into Iraq?" Russert asked. Yes, indeed, Cheney said, hewing to the company line. And he pointed to what appeared to be evidence that supported that no-regrets stance:

Look at the Duelfer Report and what it said. No stockpiles, but they also said he has the capability. He'd done it before. He had produced chemical weapons before and used them. He had produced biological weapons. He had a robust nuclear program in '91. All of this is true, said by Duelfer, facts.

Well, let's look at the report of Charles Duelfer who headed up the Iraq Survey Group, which was responsible for searching for WMDs after the invasion. (Duelfer took the job following David Kay's resignation in late 2003.) It just so happens that in our new book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Michael Isikoff and I quote from that report, and it noted that Saddam's WMD capability


was essentially destroyed in 1991.

That is the opposite of what Cheney told Russert the report said. Cheney went on to remark,

Think where we'd be if [Saddam] was still there...We also would have a situation where he would have resumed his WMD programs.

Yet Duelfer reported that at the time of the invasion, Saddam had no

plan for the revival of WMD.

Cheney even justified the invasion of Iraq by citing an allegation that was just debunked in a Senate intelligence committee report released on Friday. Claiming there was a significant relationship between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda, he cited the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who was recently killed in Iraq). After the US attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Cheney said, Zarqawi fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.

The implication here is that Baghdad sanctioned the terrorist activity of Zarqawi, a supposed al Qaeda associate. But the Senate intelligence committee report--released by a Republican-run panel--noted that prior to the invasion of Iraq Zarqawi and his network were not part of al Qaeda.

Read more here.

ALSO

9/11 in a Movie-Made World
By Tom Engelhardt
What if the Twin Towers hadn't collapsed? Would the Bush Administration have so easily advanced its fear-inspired "war on terror" without the images that played on a culture's secret fears?

Knock on Wood
By David Cole
The Bush Administration's illegitimate use of renditions, disappearances, torture and an illegal war has fostered the growth of a loose-knit global band of fanatics willing to do unspeakable violence against us.

posted by me

:: 9:22:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Americans to mark 9/11 attacks five years on" ::

Reuters.uk
By Tabassum Zakaria

NEW YORK - Americans will mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Monday with sombre ceremonies across the country and at the sites of the devastation in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

The milestone has revived traumatic memories of the day when nearly 3,000 people were killed by al Qaeda and has sharpened an election-year debate over whether America, caught in a vicious conflict in Iraq, is any safer.

His approval ratings weighed down by the unpopular Iraq war, President George W. Bush planned to attend the ceremonies at the sites and use the anniversary to renew his vow to pursue the war on terrorism.

"There's still an enemy out there that would like to inflict the same kind of damage again," Bush said on Sunday after visiting Ground Zero in New York where the World Trade Center's twin towers had stood.

He said the anniversary was "also a day of renewing resolve."

The hijacked airplane attacks on a crisp late summer day transformed Bush into a war president and he initially received high marks from Americans by attacking al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But the warm glow cooled as American casualties mounted in the Iraq war and the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden foundered.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 8:00:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Senate Panel Releases Report on Iraq Intelligence" ::

From The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — The Central Intelligence Agency last fall repudiated the idea that there were pre-war ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, according to a report issued on Friday by the Senate intelligence committee.

The disclosure undercuts continuing claims by the Bush administration that such ties existed, and that they provided evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Republican-controlled committee also sharply criticized the administration for its reliance on the Iraqi National Congress during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

The findings, in two new reports, are part of an ongoing inquiry by the Senate committee into pre-war intelligence about Iraq. The conclusions went beyond the committee’s earlier findings, issued in the summer of 2004, by including criticism not just of American intelligence agencies but also the administration.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:52:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Where’s Osama been Hidin’?" ::

The Culling By D. Allan Kerr
From Seacoastonline

Where is the outrage? Where is the sense of frustration and humiliation?

Most important, where is the accountability?

The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is drawing near and it seems the prevailing atmosphere in this country is one of nostalgia and reflection.

People are discussing the impact that terrifying day had on them and on the world, but I find myself, still, mired in the same question – why is Osama bin Laden a free man?

More than 1,800 days after that f@*&ing day, Osama bin Laden is still alive.

It’s a concept I can’t begin to comprehend.

Why isn’t this the lead story of every major news show this week? Why isn’t George W. Bush hammered with this question every time he steps before a microphone? Why isn’t the White House press corps ripping into this failure like a pack of wild dingoes, the way it went after the story of Dick Cheney mistaking his hunting buddy for a quail?

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 1:19:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Methane bubbles climate trouble" ::

From BBC News online

Thawing Siberian bogs are releasing more of the greenhouse gas methane than previously believed, according to new scientific research.

Scientists from Russia and the US measured methane bubbling from a number of thawing lakes.

Writing in the journal Nature, they suggest the methane release is hastened by warmer temperatures, positively feeding back into global warming.

Methane's contribution to present-day global warming is second only to CO2.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that atmospheric concentrations are about two and a half times those seen in pre-industrial times.

Read more here.

ALSO
Methane Belches in Lakes Supercharge Global Warming, Study Says
National Geographic, D.C

posted by me

:: 10:49:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Pentagon bans abusive interrogation methods" ::

Reuters AlertNet, UK

WASHINGTON, Sept 6 (Reuters) - Forced nudity, hooding, using dogs, conducting mock executions or simulated drownings were among eight abusive interrogation practices banned under new rules unveiled by the U.S. military on Wednesday.

The Pentagon, still facing international criticism over the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners two years after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, unveiled long-awaited changes to the 1992 Army Field Manual governing interrogation of detainees held by the military.

The manual explicitly prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. But it keeps 16 long-standing interrogation techniques and adds three new ones, said Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence.

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices," he said. Intelligence obtained under duress, he added, would have "questionable credibility" and do more harm than good when the abuse inevitably became public.

Practices still permitted include rewarding detainees for cooperation, flattery and instilling fear. Two of the new techniques were the use of a good-cop, bad-cop approach and allowing interrogators to portray themselves as someone other than a U.S. interrogator.

A third new technique, called "separation," can be used only on detainees deemed "enemy combatants" to keep them away from one another, and only with high-level military approval.

The Pentagon also issued a directive affirming that detainees designated as "unlawful enemy combatants," including accused al Qaeda and Taliban members, would receive fewer rights than traditional prisoners of war.

Read more here.

ALSO
Army releases new interrogation manual
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Sept. 6, 2006) – The Army announced today the publication of Field Manual 2-22.3, “Human Intelligence Collector Operations.”

The old one.

posted by me

:: 10:30:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "A Challenge From Bush to Congress" ::

From The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — In calling for public war-crime trials at Guantánamo Bay, President Bush is calculating that with a critical election just nine weeks away, neither angry Democrats nor nervous Republicans will dare deny him the power to detain, interrogate and try suspects his way.

For years now, Guantánamo has been a political liability, regarded primarily as a way station for outcasts. By transforming Guantánamo instead into the new home of 14 Qaeda leaders who rank among the most notorious terror suspects, Mr. Bush is challenging Congress to restore to him the authority to put the United States’ worst enemies on trial on terms he has defined.

But the gambit carries with it a potential downside by identifying Mr. Bush even more closely with a detention system whose history has been marked by widespread accusations of mistreatment.

Mr. Bush had more than one agenda at work when he announced on Wednesday that the country should “wait no longer’’ to bring to trial those seized by the C.I.A. and accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

He is trying to rebuff a Supreme Court that visibly angered him in June when it ruled that his procedures for interrogation and trials violated both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

And he is trying to divert voters from the morass of Iraq and to revive the emotionally potent question of what powers the president should be able to use to defend the country.

Read more here.


ALSO from The New York Times
A Sudden Sense of Urgency

AND from The San Jose Mercury News
Bush confirms use of secret CIA prisons

posted by me

:: 10:25:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: No need to scream... ::

Police recover famed paintings
From Chicago Sun-Times

OSLO, Norway -- Police recovered the Edvard Munch masterpieces "The Scream" and "Madonna" on Thursday, two years after masked gunmen grabbed the national art treasures in front of stunned museum visitors.

Art lovers had feared the priceless paintings were gone for good. Norwegian news media spent the months speculating about the works' fate -- whether they had been burned to escape the police hunt, sold to a wealthy collector for private viewing or suffered harm in their hiding place.

"I saw the paintings myself today, and there was far from the damage that could have been feared," said Iver Stensrud, the police inspector who headed the investigation since the paintings were taken from the Munch Museum on Aug. 22, 2004.

"I am almost crying from happiness," said Gro Balas, chairwoman of the Munch Museum board.

posted by me

:: 2:58:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "THE YEAR THE LEVEES BROKE" ::

By Greg Palast in New Orleans.
August 24, 2006

America went through a terrible year. The levees broke in New Orleans. When bodies floated in the streets, the Republican Congress saw an opportunity for more tax cuts and consolidation of the corporatopia they had created for their moneyed donors. The Democratic Party was clueless, written off, politically at death's door.

The year was 1927.

Back then, when the levees broke, America awoke. Public anger rose in a floodtide, and in that year, the USA entered its most revolutionary period since 1776. The thirty-four-year-old utility commissioner of Louisiana, Huey P. Long, conceived of a plan to rebuild his state based on a radical program of redistributing wealth and power. The ambitious Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, adopted it, and later named it The New Deal. America got rich and licked Hitler. It was our century.


It's 1927 again.

But this time, the Haves and Have-Mores have something better for you than a New Deal. They are offering "opportunity" -- a lottery ticket instead of a guarantee. Like double-or-nothing in the stock market instead of Social Security -- will the suckers go for it? There's one born every minute. I can't believe they're the majority, but at last count, they numbered over 59 million. And they vote.

Years from now, in Guantánamo or in a refugee relocation "Enterprise Zone," your kids will ask you, "What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?" We may have to admit that conquest and occupation happened before we could fire off a shot.

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they're under attack. That's how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

On Tuesday, your President, George W. Bush, will return to New Orleans, on the anniversary of the levee breach.

There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican president going for the photo op as the Mississippi rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and President Calvin Coolidge sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, "a little fat man with a notebook in his hand," who mugged for the cameras and promised to build the city a wall of protection. They had their photos taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay or, rather, the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of his day.

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial.
As The Depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for, of all things, balancing the budget.

Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician, the state's electricity regulator, stood up on the back of a flatbed truck rigged with loudspeakers, and said, roughly,

"Listen up! They're lying! The President's lying! The rich fat jackals that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope, and when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they drown your kids. I say, Kick'm in the ass and take your share of the wealth you created."

Huey Long was our Hugo Chávez, and he laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, Social Security old age pensions, veterans benefits, regulation of the big utility holding companies, an end to what he called, "rich men's wars," and an end to the financial royalism of the elite One Percent.

Huey Long even had the audacity to suggest that the poor's votes should count, calling for the end to the poll tax four decades before Martin Luther King succeeded in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical anthem: "Everyman a King." The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928, Huey "Kingfish" Long was elected Governor of Louisiana.

At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. The elite liked it that way, but Long didn't. To pay for the books, the Kingfish levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies refused to pay for the textbooks. Governor Long then ordered the National Guard to seize the oil fields in the Delta.

It was Huey Long who established the principle that a government of the people must protect the people, school them, build the infrastructure, regulate industry and share the nation's wealth -- and that meant facing down "the concentrations of monopoly power" of the corporate aristocracy -- "the thieves of Wall Street," as he called them.

In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party.

FDR and the party establishment, scared witless of Long's ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted, called it the New Deal and later the New Frontier and the Great Society. America and the party prospered.

What happened to the Kingfish? The oil industry and local oligarchs had few options for responding to Governor Long's populist appeal and the success of his egalitarian economic program. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a U.S. Senator,
was shot dead. He was 42.

It's 1927 again.

**********
Excerpted from Greg Palast's just-released New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War."

posted by me

:: 10:38:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Judge strikes down the warrantless eavesdropping program" ::

From The San Jose Mercury News
By Ron Hutcheson and Margaret Talev

WASHINGTON - In a scathing rebuke, a federal judge ruled Thursday that the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program is unconstitutional and should be shut down, but legal scholars said the administration has a good chance of reversing the decision on appeal.

"There are no hereditary kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution," U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit said in a 43-page opinion blasting the program.

Taylor said that the program, which President Bush secretly approved after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, violated the rights of free speech and privacy and went far beyond the president's authority. Administration officials say the surveillance program targets telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and suspected terrorists overseas.

The Justice Department immediately appealed the ruling, and all the parties agreed that the Bush administration is free to keep eavesdropping without warrants pending the Sept. 7 appeals-court hearing.

While the ruling was a clear victory for Bush's critics, it didn't end the legal battle over the government's secret eavesdropping. Legal scholars said the administration had a good chance of winning its appeal to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which handles cases from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

"This isn't the definitive word," said Bruce Fein, a Washington lawyer who agreed with Taylor's conclusions. "This is going to the 6th Circuit. If the 6th Circuit goes against the government, it's going to the Supreme Court."

Read more here.

ALSO

Anti-terror wiretaps ruled illegal
Guardian Unlimited, UK
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

The White House's so-called war on terror was dealt a blow yesterday when a federal judge ruled that a controversial wiretapping programme, authorised by President George Bush, was unconstitutional.

"It was never the intent of the framers [of the US constitution] to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," wrote Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her decision.

The decision came in the first court challenge to the government's wiretapping programme. The ruling represented "another nail in the coffin in the Bush administration's legal strategy in the war on terror," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers.

Read more here.

AND
From Wired News:
Judge Halts NSA Snooping
Watergate Echoes in NSA Courtroom

posted by me

:: 11:12:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Power From the People" ::

From Wired News
By iMomus
Japan Railways' plans to harvest electricity from its passengers' bipedal locomotion points to a possible future where no step goes to waste.

ALSO by iMomus

The Curse of Storage
02:00 AM Jul. 18, 2006 -0400 Our ever-growing collections of information and objects can lead to thoroughly modern crises that echo the past.

Art School Inflatable
02:00 AM Jul. 4, 2006 -0400 Along with the angst and proving of talent, art schools' annual year-end shows reveal unexpected treasures. Where else will you see a party dress that inflates into a rubber dinghy?

posted by me

:: 6:16:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: "Catch the Sky Falling" ::

Peter Jenniskens, Meteor Storm Chaser
From Space.com
By Edna DeVore

The Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend. The best night to go out is Saturday night, August 12/13. The first hour of the night will be dark and a small number of Perseids will streak long tracks when they fall into Earth’s atmosphere at a grazing angle. Later in the night, the Moon will light up the sky; it’s just a few days past full Moon this weekend.

There are some that do everything in their means to try to see such outbursts. At the SETI Institute, Dr. Peter Jenniskens studies meteor showers. Over the past several years, he’s led several airborne research campaigns to travel to the right place on Earth and study these ephemeral bits of glowing debris as they plunge into our atmosphere. Jenniskens studies meteors in order to better understand comets and their contribution to the origin of life on Earth, as meteoroids are samples of the material that rained down on the Earth the carbon needed for life.

Read more here.

ALSO

Make the most of the meteor shower
MSNBC

posted by me

:: 10:28:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "World wide web is 15 years old" ::

From ComputerWeekly.com, UK
by Tash Shifrin
Monday 7 August 2006

The world wide web has quietly passed its 15th anniversary.

The web began as a project dubbed ENQUIRE, started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN physics laboratory on the France Switzerland border.

The project aimed to help researchers share information across computers, using the concept of hypertext links.

Links to the code behind the web were first posted to the alt.hypertext discussion board in August 1991. The first website went online later that year.

In 1993, CERN declared that the world wide web would be free for use by anyone. The html web page programming language was released the same year.

But despite the 15-year anniversary, Berners-Lee told this year’s World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh that these are still early days. “We are at the embryonic stages of the web. The web is going to be more revolutionary,” he said.

He predicted “a huge amount of change to come” highlighting recent developments such as the Google search algorithm, the blogging online diary phenomenon and collaborative wikis.

ALSO

Remember, people are the threat, not the web
The Herald, UK

Readers' panel: Web anniversary
BBC News

The future of the internet according to Tim Berners-Lee
PC Authority, Australia

posted by me

:: 3:48:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: RE: "Uncle Sam and the Swastika" ::

Press release from The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
New Records Now Available as a Result of IWG Extension
CIA Agrees to Disclose Operational Materials

Washington, DC…The Central Intelligence Agency has withdrawn its prior objections and has declassified 174 additional CIA Name and Subject files relating to Nazi and Japanese Imperial Government war crimes. The Interagency Working Group (IWG), tasked by Congress with opening U.S. government records related to Nazi and Japanese Imperial Government war crimes, announced that roughly 27,000 pages have been declassified and are available for research at the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. The release adds to the 60,000 pages of CIA records previously opened by the IWG and is a direct result of the March 2005 extension of the IWG by Congress. It reflects the Central Intelligence Agency’s broader, more inclusive disclosure of relevant records and a willingness to disclose relevant records under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act.

Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein said, "More than eight million pages of records have been declassified as a result of the IWG. I commend the hard work of the federal agencies, the IWG, and National Archives staff. I especially want to thank Senator Mike DeWine, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, and Senator Dianne Feinstein for their continued support. The documents that are being released will make a lasting contribution to our knowledge of the war crimes committed in Europe and the Far East and to our understanding of the shift in intelligence goals taking place after WWII during the Cold War."

The name and subject files of this release include everyday reports, correspondence, memorandums, and translations created and collected by the CIA. They include the following highlights:

* New records of the CIA provide a clearer outline of Tscherim Soobzokov’s involvement with the CIA as an agent in Jordan, and they show how the Agency in the mid-1970s misled INS about its suspicions concerning possible Soobzokov involvement in war crimes.
* CIA reports related to Heinz Felfe, a former SS intelligence officer who served in the Gehlen Organization, indicate to a greater extent than ever before the level at which former SS officials were hired and exploited on both sides of the Cold War Divide.
* The CIA organized stay-behind networks of German agents in the American zone of Germany, one of which involved at least 2 former members of the SS. Also the files show that West German intelligence had the information needed to capture fugitive war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s but feared the consequences of what he might say about State Secretary Dr. Hans Globke, a highly-placed former Nazi in the Adenauer government.
* The CIA files provide new information about Dr. Gustav Hilger, a figure with a high-level wartime German past who nonetheless was considered a valuable contribution by some in American intelligence about the postwar Soviet Union.
.

Additional descriptions of the files, including a name and subject listing, can be accessed through the IWG webpage at: http://www.archives.gov/iwg/ and by clicking on the CIA link.

Since 1999, the IWG has overseen the identification, declassification, and release of roughly 8 million pages of U.S. Government records related to war criminals and crimes committed by the Nazi and Japanese Imperial Governments during World War II. The IWG is composed of representatives from eight federal agencies and three public members. In April 2004 the group published U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, a collection of studies based on newly released documentation. Two additional volumes, Researching Japanese War Crimes: Introductory Essays and an accompanying electronic Guide to Japanese War Crimes Records are forthcoming. The IWG web site.

# # #

For more information, contact Giuliana Bullard at 703-532-1477 or duetto@verizon.net

posted by me

:: 10:13:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "BLOOD IN BEIRUT: $75.05 A BARREL" ::

The failure to stop the bloodletting in the Middle East, Exxon's record second-quarter profits and Iran's nuclear cat-and-mouse game have something in common -- it's the oil.
From an e-newsletter
By Greg Palast

I can't tell you how it started -- this is a war that's been fought since the Levites clashed with the Philistines -- but I can tell you why the current mayhem has not been stopped. It's the oil.

I'm not an expert on Palestine nor Lebanon and I'd rather not pretend to be one. If you want to know what's going on, read Robert Fisk. He lives there. He speaks Arabic. Stay away from pundits whose only connection to the Middle East is the local falafel stand.

So why am I writing now? The answer is that, while I don't speak Arabic or Hebrew, I am completely fluent in the language of petroleum.

More...What? You don't need a degree in geology to know there's no oil in Israel, Palestine or Lebanon. (A few weeks ago, I was joking around with Afif Safieh, the Palestinian Authority's Ambassador to the US, asking him why he was fighting to have a piece of the only place in the Middle East without oil. Well, there's no joking now.)

Let's begin with the facts we can agree on: the berserkers are winning. Crazies discredited only a month ago are now in charge, guys with guns bigger than brains and souls smaller still. Here's a list:

-- Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's approval rating in June was down to a Bush-level of 35%. But today, Olmert's poll numbers among Israeli voters have more than doubled to 78% as he does his bloody John Wayne "cleanin' out the varmints" routine. But let's not forget: Olmert can't pee-pee without George Bush's approval. Bush can stop Olmert tomorrow. He hasn't.

-- Hezbollah, a political party rejected overwhelmingly by Lebanese voters sickened by their support of Syrian occupation, holds a mere 14 seats out of 128 in the nation's parliament. Hezbollah was facing demands by both Lebanon's non-Shia majority and the United Nations to lay down arms. Now, few Lebanese would suggest taking away their rockets. But let's not forget: Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a fundamentalist street gang. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can stop Hezbollah's rockets tomorrow. He hasn't.

-- Hamas, just days before it kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers, was facing certain political defeat at the hands of the Palestinian majority ready to accept the existence of Israel as proposed in a manifesto for peace talks penned by influential Palestinian prisoners. Now the Hamas rocket brigade is back in charge. But let's not forget: Hamas is broke and a joke without the loot and authority of Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah can stop these guys tomorrow. He hasn't.

Why not? Why haven't what we laughably call "leaders" of the USA, Iran and Saudi Arabia called back their delinquent spawn, cut off their allowances and grounded them for six months?

Maybe because mayhem and murder in the Middle East are very, very profitable to the sponsors of these characters with bombs and rockets. America, Iran and Saudi Arabia share one thing in common: they are run by oil regimes. The higher the price of crude, the higher the profits and the happier the presidents and princelings of these petroleum republics.

This Thursday, Exxon is expected to report the highest second-quarter earnings of any corporation since the days of the Pharaoh, $9.9 billion in pure profit collected in just three months -- courtesy of an oil shortage caused by pipelines on fire in Iraq, warlord attacks in Nigeria, the lingering effects of the sabotage of Venezuela's oil system by a 2002 strike... the list could go on.

Exxon's brobdingnagian profits simply reflect the cold axiom that oil companies and oil states don't make their loot by finding oil but by finding trouble. Finding oil increases supply. Increased supply means decreased price. Whereas finding trouble -- wars, coup d'etats, hurricanes, whatever can disrupt supply -- raises the price of oil.

A couple of examples from today's Bloomberg newswire are:

"Crude oil traded above $75 a barrel in New York as fighting between Israeli and Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon entered its 14th day... Oil prices rose last month on concern for supplies from Iran, the world's fourth largest producer, may be disrupted in its dispute with the United Nations over its uranium enrichment ... [And, said a trader,] 'I still think $85 is likely this summer. I'm really surprised we haven't seen any hurricanes.'''

In Tehran, President Ahmadinejad may or may not have a plan to make a nuclear bomb, but he sure as heck knows that hinting at it raises the price of the one thing he certainly does have -- oil. Every time he barks, 'Mad Mahmoud' knows that he's pumping up the price of crude. Just a $10 a barrel "blow-up-in-the-Mideast" premium brings his regime nearly a quarter of a billion dollars each week (including the little kick to the value of Iran's natural gas). Not a bad pay-off for making a bit of trouble.

Saudi Arabia's rake-in from The Troubles? Assuming just a $10 a barrel boost for Middle Eastern mayhem and you can calculate that the blood in the sand puts an extra $658 million a week in Abdullah's hand.

And in Houston, you can hear the cash registers jing-a-ling as explosions in Kirkuk, Beirut and the Niger River Delta sound like the sleigh-bells on Santa's sled. At $75.05 a barrel, they don't call it "sweet" crude for nothing. That's up 27% from a year ago. The big difference between then and now: the rockets' red glare.

Exxon's second-quarter profits may bust records, but next quarter's should put it to shame, as the "Lebanon premium" and Iraq's insurgency have puffed up prices, up by an average of 11% in the last three months.

So there's not much incentive for the guys who supply the weaponry to tell their wards to put away their murderous toys. This war's just too darn profitable.

We are trained to think of Middle Eastern conflicts as just modern flare-ups of ancient tribal animosities. But to uncover why the flames won't die, the usual rule applies: follow the money.

Am I saying that Tehran, Riyadh and Houston oil chieftains conspired to ignite a war to boost their petroleum profits? I can't imagine it. But I do wonder if Bush would let Olmert have an extra week of bombings, or if the potentates of the Persian Gulf would allow Hamas and Hezbollah to continue their deadly fireworks if it caused the price of crude to crash. You know and I know that if this war took a bite out of Exxon or the House of Saud, a ceasefire would be imposed quicker than you can say, "Let's drill in the Arctic."

Eventually, there will be another ceasefire. But Exxon shareholders need not worry. Global warming has heated the seas sufficiently to make certain that they can look forward to a hellacious -- and profitable -- season of hurricanes.

*****

Greg Palast is the author of ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.

posted by me

:: 9:56:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: NET NEUTRALITY ::

TIME TO ACT
from remhq.com

The Net Neutrality issue is still alive, with the United States Senate poised to vote as early as (tomorrow) Tuesday on the Snowe-Dorgan amendment to the House Bill that passed last week.

This is an issue with a lot of information (and disinformation) flying around cyberspace, and we urge you to read up on the ramifications of the tiered pricing being advocated by the telecomms and their lobbyists. Certainly the fundamental premise that all internet content be treated equally is one of the underpinnings of the internet and its explosive growth as an all-important medium for communications and commerce.

For some excellent resources on the importance of Net Neutrality in our laws, please see the following sites:

democraticmedia.org

cdt.org

wikipedia

and for an excellent film on the subject, check this out:

youtube

finally, for some lighter-hearted takes on the subject (but still making serious points in their own way) try these:

rocketboom.com

youtube

Anyway, please read, reflect, then email or call your senator (in support the of Snowe/Dorgan amendment (S. 2917))...

here's how

posted by me

:: 9:47:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Space ..." ::

Man must conquer other planets to survive, says Hawking
Daily Mail - UK

We're used to seeing them as stars in the sky, but planets could soon be home to humans if Stephen Hawking has his way.

The world-renowned scientist believes humans must colonise planets elsewhere in the universe because of the risk a disaster will destroy the Earth.

Astrophysicist Professor Hawking insists the survival of the human race depends on it finding new homes on other planets. He believes global warming, nuclear war or a genetically engineered virus could wipe out the earth.

Speaking at a news conference in Hong Kong the 64-year-old scientist said humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and colony on Mars in the next 40 years.

He said: "We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system. It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species.

"Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The author of the global best seller "A Brief History of Time" added if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:43:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Domestic Eavesdropping ::

Judge defers decision on US wiretap suit
Computerworld

June 12, 2006 (Reuters) -- DETROIT -- A federal judge today deferred making an immediate decision on a request that the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program be halted as a violation of law.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit in January, asked U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor to stop the National Security Agency from intercepting international phone calls and e-mails without a warrant in its fight against terrorism, saying it violates Americans' free speech and privacy rights.

But the government responded that the program is key to helping protect U.S. security.

Taylor deferred any ruling. Another hearing is scheduled for July 10.

"Our clients have suffered concrete harm," Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, told the court, saying lawyers now have to travel overseas to gather information they would have previously received on the phone and that journalists are beginning to lose sources.

"The framers [of the U.S. Constitution] never intended to give the president the power to ignore the laws of Congress even during wartime and emergencies," she said.

The case was filed in Detroit because the area is home to one of the largest Arab populations outside the Middle East.


Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:11:00 PM [+] ::
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:: RE Net Neutrality ::

Senate negotiations continue over Net neutrality
From ZDNet

WASHINGTON--Key senators who are planning to overhaul the nation's communications laws remain at odds on the controversial topic of Net neutrality.

At a briefing for reporters Monday, Republican aides to the Senate Commerce Committee released a revised version of a sweeping telecommunications bill--but said the portions related to Net neutrality would not be available until later this week. An earlier version of the bill includes no Net neutrality regulations, reflecting the position supported by broadband providers such as Verizon Communications and AT&T.

Aides to Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who serves as chairman of the committee, and Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, the committee's senior Democrat, are still negotiating new language about whether broadband providers should be allowed to give special treatment to certain types of content or Internet sites, the aides said.

"Does Congress want to get into regulating how much Google pays to Verizon or what deals it makes with Yahoo?...(Stevens') view is that's a matter better left to these multibillion-dollar companies and Congress should focus on protecting the consumer," said Lisa Sutherland, the committee's Republican staff director.

Last Thursday, the House of Representatives approved its own communications bill but rejected a Democratic-sponsored amendment--backed by companies like eBay, Amazon.com and Google--that would have enacted detailed prohibitions against blocking, impairing, degrading or prioritizing content. The final version authorizes the Federal Communications Commission to police violations of its broadband use principles (click here for PDF) and to levy fines if appropriate, but it bars the regulators from making new rules.

In an interview with CNET News.com published Monday, Verizon lobbyist Thomas Tauke said: "It's fair to say that Stevens is committed to moving a bill. He'll probably have a new draft in the next few days. He seems anxious to have the committee move in the next few weeks and have it to the (Senate) floor in July."

Net neutrality, which has emerged as one of the most contentious issues as Congress attempts to rewrite the nation's telecommunications laws, is the idea that network operators should not be allowed to prioritize Internet content and services that travel across their pipes or to make deals with companies seeking special treatment. The concept has received backing from some of the largest Internet companies, a wide array of consumer groups, and entertainers like Moby and Alyssa Milano.

Also on Monday, The Washington Post published an editorial opposing Net neutrality mandated by the federal government. It said that the dangers cited by proponents of Net neutrality "are speculative" and the government "should not burden the Internet with pre-emptive regulation."

Read more here.

The Internet's Future
Congress should stay out of cyberspace.
An editorial from The Washington Post

Deal on Net neutrality in US Senate elusive -aides
Reuters

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee so far has been unable to reach a compromise on Internet network neutrality, a week before the panel is supposed to vote on it as part of a broader communications reform bill, Senate aides said on Monday.

ALSO
From MoveOn.org

Save the Internet

Congress is now pushing a law that would end the free and open Internet as we know it. Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet's First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. So Amazon doesn't have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.

Many members of Congress take campaign contributions from these companies, and they don't think the public are paying attention to this issue. Let's show them we care - please sign this petition today.

posted by me

:: 8:55:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "UNREPORTED: THE ZARQAWI INVITATION" ::

From an e-newsletter
by Greg Palast

They got him -- the big, bad, beheading berserker in Iraq. But, something's gone unreported in all the glee over getting Zarqawi … who invited him into Iraq in the first place?

If you prefer your fairy tales unsoiled by facts, read no further. If you want the uncomfortable truth, begin with this: A phone call to Baghdad to Saddam's Palace on the night of April 21, 2003. It was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a secure line from Washington to General Jay Garner.

The General had arrives in Baghdad just hours before to take charge of the newly occupied nation. The message from Rumsfeld was not a heartwarming welcome. Rummy told Garner, Don't unpack, Jack -- you're fired.

What had Garner done? The many-starred general had been sent by the President himself to take charge of a deeply dangerous mission. Iraq was tense but relatively peaceful. Garner's job was to keep the peace and bring democracy.

Unfortunately for the general, he took the President at his word. But the general was wrong. "Peace" and "Democracy" were the slogans.

"My preference," Garner told me in his understated manner, "was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can and do it in some form of elections."

But elections were not in The Plan.

The Plan was a 101-page document to guide the long-term future of the land we'd just conquered. There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety. There was, rather, a detailed schedule for selling off "all [Iraq's] state assets" -- and Iraq, that's just about everything -- "especially," said The Plan, "the oil and supporting industries." Especially the oil.

There was more than oil to sell off. The Plan included the sale of Iraq's banks, and weirdly, changing it's copyright laws and other odd items that made the plan look less like a program for Iraq to get on its feet than a program for corporate looting of the nation's assets. (And indeed, we discovered at BBC, behind many of the odder elements -- copyright and tax code changes -- was the hand of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's associate Grover Norquist.)

But Garner didn't think much of The Plan, he told me when we met a year later in Washington. He had other things on his mind. "You prevent epidemics, you start the food distribution program to prevent famine."

Seizing title and ownership of Iraq's oil fields was not on Garner's must-do list. He let that be known to Washington. "I don't think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan, I think that what we need to do is set an Iraqi government that represents the freely elected will of the people." He added, "It's their country … their oil."

Apparently, the Secretary of Defense disagreed. So did lobbyist Norquist. And Garner incurred their fury by getting carried away with the "democracy" idea: he called for quick elections -- within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad.

But Garner's 90-days-to-elections commitment ran straight into the oil sell-off program. Annex D of the plan indicated that would take at least 270 days -- at least 9 months.

Worse, Garner was brokering a truce between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. They were about to begin what Garner called a "Big Tent" meeting to hammer out the details and set the election date. He figured he had 90 days to get it done before the factions started slitting each other's throats.

But a quick election would mean the end of the state-asset sell-off plan: An Iraqi-controlled government would never go along with what would certainly amount to foreign corporations swallowing their entire economy. Especially the oil. Garner had spent years in Iraq, in charge of the Northern Kurdish zone and knew Iraqis well. He was certain that an asset-and-oil grab, "privatizations," would cause a sensitive population to take up the gun. "That's just one fight you don't want to take on right now."

But that's just the fight the neo-cons at Defense wanted. And in Rumsfeld's replacement for Garner, they had a man itching for the fight. Paul Bremer III had no experience on the ground in Iraq, but he had one unbeatable credential that Garner lacked: Bremer had served as Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates.

In April 2003, Bremer instituted democracy Bush style: he canceled elections and appointed the entire government himself. Two months later, Bremer ordered a halt to all municipal elections including the crucial vote to Shia seeking to select a mayor in the city of Najaf. The front-runner, moderate Shia Asad Sultan Abu Gilal warned, "If they don't give us freedom, what will we do? We have patience, but not for long." Local Shias formed the "Mahdi Army," and within a year, provoked by Bremer's shutting their paper, attacked and killed 21 U.S. soldiers.

The insurgency had begun. But Bremer's job was hardly over. There were Sunnis to go after. He issued "Order Number One: De-Ba'athification." In effect, this became "De-Sunni-fication."

Saddam's generals, mostly Sunnis, who had, we learned, secretly collaborated with the US invasion and now expected their reward found themselves hunted and arrested. Falah Aljibury, an Iraqi-born US resident who helped with the pre-invasion brokering, told me, "U.S. forces imprisoned all those we named as political leaders," who stopped Iraq's army from firing on U.S. troops.

Aljibury's main concern was that busting Iraqi collaborators and Ba'athist big shots was a gift "to the Wahabis," by which he meant the foreign insurgents, who now gained experienced military commanders, Sunnis, who now had no choice but to fight the US-installed regime or face arrest, ruin or death. They would soon link up with the Sunni-defending Wahabi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was committed to destroying "Shia snakes."

And the oil fields? It was, Aljibury noted, when word got out about the plans to sell off the oil fields (thanks to loose lips of the US-appointed oil minister) that pipelines began to blow. Although he had been at the center of planning for invasion, Aljibury now saw the greed-crazed grab for the oil fields as the fuel for a civil war that would rip his country to pieces:

"Insurgents," he said, "and those who wanted to destabilize a new Iraq have used this as means of saying, 'Look, you're losing your country. You’re losing your leadership. You're losing all of your resources to a bunch of wealthy people. A bunch of billionaires in the world want to take you over and make your life miserable.' And we saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, of course, built on -- built on the premise that privatization [of oil] is coming."

General Garner, watching the insurgency unfold from the occupation authority's provocations, told me, in his understated manner, "I'm a believer that you don't want to end the day with more enemies than you started with."

But you can't have a war president without a war. And you can't have a war without enemies. "Bring 'em on," our Commander-in-Chief said. And Zarqawi answered the call.

**********

posted by me

:: 9:36:00 AM [+] ::
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:: RE Rendition ::

14 Nations Aided CIA in Abductions, Report Says
Los Angeles Times

PARIS — Fourteen European countries appear to have helped the CIA operate a global "spider's web" of abductions, clandestine flights and secret detention facilities targeting suspected Islamic extremists, the head of a European inquiry alleged Wednesday.

Presenting the findings of an eight-month inquiry, Swiss Sen. Dick Marty accused European governments of collaborating with or accepting "systematic human rights violations" on their soil as teams of U.S. spies in black ski masks allegedly spirited suspects onto planes that flew them to grueling interrogations in countries such as Morocco, Syria and Egypt.

Marty singled out Romania and Poland, saying European government flight data and circumstantial evidence support accusations that they allowed secret CIA detention facilities to operate in their countries.

Read more here.

ALSO

We need to act against rendition
Britain should not be silent about the CIA's abduction of terror suspects.r
An opinion piece from the Guardian Unlimited, UK

As another report (pdf) is published making accusations of rendition and secret prisons in Europe, Tony Blair is complaining that it adds nothing new. Calls for the allegations to be backed up by solid evidence are growing stronger. But it's not more evidence that we need, it's more open discussion.

posted by me

:: 10:10:00 AM [+] ::
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