Cabal Communique

Three Carrier Groups En route To Middle East - WWIII

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:23:00 -0600

The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt is on the move in Atlantic Ocean and is possibly headed towards the Mediterranean Sea. The convergence of three carrier groups in the corridor of the Middle East will send very strong message to the Syrians and Iranians. There are indications that soon US is moving two more aircraft carrier battle groups to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. This will spell a formidable strike force for Iran and Syria who are in defiance on issues of Lebanon and Nuclear weapons development.

Outbound from Singapore, the USS Carl Vinson is currently crossing the Indian Ocean headed towards Middle-East. This will be the first time since February 2004 that US will have three major carrier groups stationed on and around Middle East.

Each of these carrier groups carry nearly 85 aircrafts and is capable of deliver precision-guided munitions. In addition there are anti-submarine aircrafts, airborne-early-warning and rotary-wing aircrafts. Because in the air refueling capabilities these aircrafts can operate from a long distance. The carrier groups are independent and can operate indefinitely.

U.S. military air bases in Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and the three carrier groups will create a formidable force far superior to any military in the region.

In addition more than 100,000 battle hardened force in Iraq will be another major force in case US has to use force against Iran and Syria.

It seems American are preparing to deal with Syria and Iran in the next several months. The first priority right now is diplomacy in association with the Europeans and the rest of the world. But the leadership in Teheran and Damascus are taking notice of the power build up in the region.

There are seeds of democracy in Lebanon, Iran and Syria. The whole regions is getting a quick lesson on the benefits of democracy.

Continued...

AIPAC Spy Probe Continues - Big Brother

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:18:00 -0600

Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin was reinstated a few weeks ago, after sitting at home for half a year and being barred from returning to his job on the Iranian desk in the Department of Defense's policy division. Franklin was at the center of a lengthy FBI investigation after suspicions arose that he transfered classified information about U.S. policy on Iran to members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
In the seven months since the affair made headlines on the CBS evening news, the investigation has been kept under tight wraps, but its ramifications are already being felt.

While Franklin is back at work, and, say well-placed sources, is expected to reach a plea bargain, the spotlight has moved to the AIPAC officials - two senior members were suspended for the duration of the case and four other senior officials were forced to testify at length before the special investigative jury in Virginia (whose proceedings are classified) appointed for the case.

Even if the investigation is nowhere near completion, it has definitely reached a crossroads, at which investigators must decide on the suspects in the case - Larry Franklin alone; Franklin and two AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman; or whether, on top of those three, the entire AIPAC organization has acted unlawfully.

Sources close to the investigation suggested recently that it would end in a plea bargain. Franklin would plead to a lesser crime of unauthorized transfer of information, Rosen and Weissman would be charged with receiving classified information unlawfully, and AIPAC would remain unstained. Franklin's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, yesterday denied the reports, stating: "We have not entered any plea of defense with the Justice Department."

AIPAC refused to say anything about the possibility of a plea bargain.

As for Franklin's reinstatement, a Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergrosz, confirmed that "Dr. Franklin is still a U.S. government employee," bud declined to identify his position. Haaretz has learned that Franklin has been moved to a post different from the one he held previously and kept from handling classified information.

From AIPAC's standpoint, the issue at hand is containment: can the affair be limited to Rosen and Weissman, or is the investigation directed at the lobby as a whole? It is clear that the FBI has as its objective an extensive investigation against AIPAC. Investigators have been looking into AIPAC's entire manner of operating, not just in the Franklin instance. An official questioned twice by the FBI, as a witness, was astounded by investigators' intimate familiarity with AIPAC.

The intended breadth of the investigation is also evident from the FBI's dramatic moves - raiding AIPAC offices in December and issuing subpoenas to its four top executives. Executive Director Howard Kohr, Managing Director Richard Fishman, Research Director Rafael Danziger and Communications Director Renee Rothstein appeared before the investigative jury and were questioned at length.

Investigators also reportedly tried to use Franklin, after the affair erupted, to incriminate as many senior AIPAC officials as possible. The Jerusalem Post reported four months ago that investigators informed Franklin of the suspicions against him and asked for his cooperation. In a sting operation, he received information from the FBI agents that Iran was planning to attack Israelis operating in the Kurdish region in Iraq. Franklin, on the FBI's instructions, telephoned AIPAC's Rosen and Weissman and gave them the information, and they rushed to pass it on to Israeli diplomats, thereby falling into the FBI trap.

AIPAC refuses to comment on the case, saying, "We do not comment on personnel matters." A spokesman for AIPAC, Patrick Dorton, said yesterday that "it would not be appropriate for AIPAC to comment on issues that have to do with an ongoing federal investigation."

The suspension of the two AIPAC officials, though never officially explained, is certainly a key turning point in the case. According to one assessment, AIPAC understands that regardless of whether a plea bargain is reached, it will be tough to get those two off the hook, so AIPAC is keeping its distance for now. Their lawyer refused requests from Haaretz for a comment.

A source close to the case said that since the investigation began, AIPAC's ability to maintain good ties with U.S. administration officials has suffered.

Egyptian, Iranian Diplomats Get Life for Assassination Plot and Spying - Geo-Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:10:00 -0600

A security court Sunday convicted an Egyptian of plotting to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites) and spying for Iran (news - web sites)'s elite Revolutionary Guards, then sentenced him to 35 years in prison.

A fugitive Iranian diplomat also was convicted in absentia at the end of a trial that further strained relations between the two Muslim countries.

The State Security Court gave Mahmoud Mohammed Eid Dabous, an Egyptian citizen, a life sentence - which means 25 years in Egypt - for the assassination plot and an additional 10 years for espionage. Iran has denied any involvement in the case.

Dabous' co-defendant, Mahmoud Reda Hussein, an Iranian, was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison.

"This is unfair. I'm innocent," Dabous said.

He said he confessed after being tortured in police custody.

"I shall complain to God about the injustice done to me," he said.

Dabous told reporters he had been promised a presidential pardon if he co-operated with the investigation, but Judge Adel Abdul-Salam Goma'a denied that.

"He was involved in a vicious attempt to assassinate the leader of this nation in full disregard of the feelings of the Egyptian people," Goma'a said in handing down the verdict. Dabous and Hussein, he said, did not know "the real love Egyptians have for their leader."

Sunday's hearing was the first time Mubarak was named as the target of the plot.

The charge sheet said Dabous planned a "major" assassination in Egypt but did not specify the target. Police also charged Dabous with providing the Revolutionary Guards with information to carry out terrorist attacks in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The prosecution said Dabous tried to gather information about Mubarak's residence in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik and send it to the Revolutionary Guard.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi on Sunday rejected the verdicts against both defendants as "ridiculous." The spokesman said Egypt had "set up a kangaroo court just to please Israel."

After the hearing, Dabous' brother, Ayman, said the defendant travelled to Iran in 1999 to attend a cultural conference with the knowledge of the Egyptian authorities. Later he tried to set up an Egyptian-Iranian friendship association.

"What he was doing was in daylight. (The authorities) were aware of each step he took," the brother said.

Dabous' mother and sisters wept after the verdict.

Relations between Iran and Egypt have been tense since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran was offended when Egypt gave sanctuary to its ousted shah after the revolution.

Egypt repeatedly has accused Iran of supporting the militants who killed president Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Al-Qaida Video Shows Purported Shooting - War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:07:00 -0600

Al-Qaida's arm in Iraq posted a video Sunday showing militants shooting an Iraqi Interior Ministry official held hostage.

The video, posted on a militant Web site, showed a man identifying himself as Col. Ryadh Katie Olyway seated between two masked men wearing black. He displayed his Interior Ministry identification card and said he was a liaison officer with the American forces.

There was no way to independently authenticate the video.

Olyway, dressed in a brown shirt and jacket and beige pants, said he provided the U.S. military with the names "of officers of the former Iraqi army, who are Sunnis, and their addresses."

Behind the men was the black banner of al-Qaida in Iraq, the militant group led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The hostage also said female Iraqis held prisoner by coalition forces were tortured.

Al-Qaida in Iraq has said many of its latest killings were in revenge for female Iraqi prisoners; the American military denies it is holding any Iraqi women.

A third masked man was then shown behind Olyway, reading from a statement that "the legal committee of the al-Qaida in Iraq decided to kill this apostate."

Olyway was then shown blindfolded, and the man shot him once in the head.

Bush's Napoleon Complex - War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 01:51:00 -0600

No two wars are ever the same any more than you can step on the same banana peel twice. That said, Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of Spain, from 1808 to 1814 - the war that gave us the word "guerrilla" and was immortalized in Goya's "Third of May," the war that drained France's army, smashed Napoleon's reputation for invincibility, and left Spain thrashing like a broken-backed snake for decades - has striking similarities to our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Both wars started under the influence of similar delusions. Napoleon thought that the Spanish would roll over and play dead as so many other European states had; he thought marching to Madrid and placing his brother Joseph on the throne would complete the subjugation of Spain. We pretty much thought the same: crushing Saddam's army would be easy; we would then install a pro-American government (Ahmad the Thief) and have most of our Army home by fall.

The invasions went well, as expected, but in each case a tiresome guerrilla war broke out. The French eventually lost over a quarter of a million men in "the Spanish ulcer," as Napoleon called it, while Iraq has tied down half of the Army and is costing us more than $75 billion a year. What went wrong? As it turns out, Boney and Bush made some of the same mistakes.

Despite his tremendous organizational skills, Napoleon never managed to establish authority in Spain. He smashed the Bourbon state without ever being able to replace it with his own. We've done the same in Iraq. We have been much more systematic about it, sacking the Iraqi army and banning most of the top layer of Ba'athist civil servants from government employment. The French made their mistakes rather casually: "Who wouldn't want to have my big brother as king?" Napoleon seems to have thought. On the other hand, our administration seems to have tried to fail, going out of its way to alienate and radicalize the entire Iraqi ruling class.

Like the French, we've managed not to have much of a side in Iraq: few Iraqis seem eager to wage war in our interest. Some of them are against us, while for the most part the others just watch as if it's not their fight. We hear a lot about how Iraqi National Guard units need more training. The true problem is that they're short on motivation. The insurgents manage to fight without years of professional training. The French too had some Spanish troops, who usually deserted at the first opportunity. They didn't make up fantasies about a training deficiency to explain it.

Both Spain and Iraq had notoriously inefficient armies, and that must have made the idea of invasion seem more plausible. The Spanish were certainly weaker and easier to beat (in conventional battles) than the Prussians or Austrians, while the Iraqis - some of the worst soldiers the world has ever seenn - have been known to surrender to a film crew in an unarmed helicopter back in 1991. Compared to them, the Italians of World War II were unkillable demons of battle.

The odd thing is that the same qualities that make an army fight well - strong central control, discipline, and a grassroots inclination to co-operate and obey orders - also allow it to surrender completely, rather like a CEO and his dominatrix. According to historian John Tone in The Fatal Knot, the French in Napoleon's time found the - Germans and Austrians, conditioned by militarism and centralization, unable or unwilling to act without the permission of their superiors. We've seen it too, more recently: the Germans fought all too well in World War II but once defeated were quiet as mice under Allied occupation. The Japanese went further in that direction: willing, even eager, to die for the Emperor, more fanatical than any other army in history, they were utterly peaceful after surrender. Of course, Donald Rumsfeld seems to think that those post-World War II occupations were plagued by guerrilla resistance - but then, he also thinks that Iraq is a lot like colonial America: you know, prosperous, bourgeois, literate, British, Protestant, used to self-government and rule of law. Most likely he's from some other dimension. If only we could get him to say his name backwards.

The general disorganization in Spain and Iraq seems paradoxical. The Bourbons were autocratic by the standards of the day, while Saddam's Iraq was a notorious dictatorship. But that hardly means that their central governments controlled everything. It just means that they wanted to. In Spain, attachment to village and province was more robust than national feeling, while most Iraqis are still tribalists. There obviously can be a number of reasons for the lack of a strong attachment to the state - considering Verdun and Stalingrad, maybe we'd all be better off without one - but Iraq and Spain shared at least one reason: they were rentier states. Most government revenue came from an exterior source, not from the sweat of taxpayer brows - Latin American silver for Spain, oil for Iraq. European governments (for example, Prussia) had modernized, built efficient administrations, and forged strong ties to the middle classes that paid the bills. They had to in order to compete. As long as the mines in Potosi held out, Spain didn't have to. Saddam didn't have to either, not as long as he held the second-largest oil reserves in the world.

Such countries are weak in actual combat, even when their hardware looks impressive. The Spanish had the largest ship in the world at Trafalgar, the Santissima Trinidad, while Saddam had all kinds of fancy toys in the Gulf War. How did that work out? The two countries' high cash flow, combined with military weakness, made them tempting targets. Napoleon certainly expected to get a lot of revenue from Spain, and although the U.S. government denies it, I have to think that we would have had trouble staying interested in Iraq if it had nothing but sand.

There were many young Spaniards with idle hands back in 1808. Much of the regular Spanish army had disintegrated, and the economy was generally depressed because of the economic warfare between Britain and France. Iraq is like that - only more so. Iraqi oil is valuable, but Iraqi labor is not: if not for oil, the per capita GDP of Iraq would be less than Haiti's. There was hardly any Iraqi economy at all during most of the 1990s, thanks to the sanctions, and the Keynesian stimulus effect of an invasion is overrated. There are few private-sector jobs in Iraq, nothing to keep young men busy. (By few, I mean that unemployment is much worse than in our Great Depression - postwar estimates range from 30 to 70 percent.) Iraq is a welfare state, with most of the population receiving government food rations. There is no work, yet at the same time, you can get by without working. Guerrillas don't have to worry about starving. The French ruined the Spanish economy, but they never came up with anything as perverse as this. Of course, they didn't have PowerPoint in those days.

Religion mattered in Spain. It matters in Iraq, too. Napoleon didn't think it would, and certainly the seers who created our Iraq policy didn't. In Spain, priests told the peasants that the invaders threatened their festivals, their saints, and the heart of their way of life. They portrayed the French as unwholesome enemies of God who deserved any punishment the peasants could come up with. We're a lot milder than French. We aren't bayoneting mullahs, but we are definitely a lot less wholesome. After Abu Ghraib, it's pretty easy to portray us as giggling perverts. You can get much the same impression just watching prime-time TV. (Note to our guys running al-Iraqiya TV: do not show the Everclear video "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom." Try "Gunsmoke." Titles can fool you.)

Wolfowitz of Arabia said, "The Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab world. They are by and large quite secular. They are overwhelmingly Shia, which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory." He really said that, on Feb. 26, 2003. He forgot that 40 percent of Iraqis are illiterate (more than any of their neighbors), forgot that Najaf and Karbala are the holy cities of the Shi'ite majority, forgot that Islam would be the only ideology left in Iraq with the fall of the Ba'athists. We now hear about martyrs and jihad every day of the week, while Sistani, a mullah's mullah, acts as the unofficial powerbroker of Iraq. I can't read men's souls, but it certainly looks as if our decision makers and Napoleon mirror-imaged the foe: they personally didn't take religion seriously and so found it hard to believe that anyone else did either.

Napoleon's army in Spain ended up controlling only the ground it stood on. The roads weren't safe - every supply convoy needed an armed escort. The struggle against guerrillas was never-ending. The French, who had thought of themselves as bringing enlightenment, ended up hating the Spanish. This all sounds terribly familiar, but the parallels do end. France lost, but the U.S. won't. Spain was weaker than France but not militarily insignificant, and it had Great Britain backing it with money, troops, and Wellington. We're hundreds of times stronger than Iraq. The U.S. may tire of a pointless war and leave, but we certainly won't lose battles.

The big question is why these mistakes were made. Napoleon didn't have much excuse: Spain was France's next-door neighbor. Their histories had been intertwined for hundreds of years. Plenty of Frenchmen knew Spain, lived in Spain, and spoke Spanish. But Napoleon was probably beginning to suffer from megalomania: he had succeeded to such a tremendous extent that perhaps all things seemed possible.

The Bush administration can always plead ignorance. Certainly few of the players knew much about Iraq, the Middle East, or Islam. Judging from their frequent confused historical references, it seems as if Condi and Rummie really don't know any history at all. But the administration didn't check with anyone who did know. In fact, it rejected every form of expert advice. I'm sure someone said "wouldn't be prudent" - but Bush wasn't in a mood to listen, and no advice, no intelligence briefing, can trump that.

F.B.I. Mishandles Terror Files - War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 03:27:00 -0600

The FBI admitted Saturday it accidentally gave classified documents back to the American translator who pleaded guilty to taking them from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, who was released from jail earlier this month, contacted the FBI's Boston office Tuesday after he realized agents had inadvertently given him the compact disc containing the secret files along with his personal property.

Mehalba had the disc in his possession for only a "matter of hours" before the FBI retrieved it, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Ricciuti.

"Someone in the bureau obviously made a serious mistake," Ricciuti said.

Mehalba's lawyer, Michael Andrews, said the FBI's mistake was "very upsetting" to his client.

The FBI's Boston bureau disclosed its error in a press release Saturday.

FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz said the disc wasn't labeled "secret" as all classified data should be because prosecutors had to keep it in the same condition as when it was seized from Mehalba.

Authorities haven't said what type of information was stored on the disk, other than it concerns "national defense," said Ricciuti, who prosecuted Mehalba.

Mehalba, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen who was working as a civilian Arabic translator at Guantanamo, was arrested at Boston's Logan International Airport on Sept. 29, 2003, after Customs agents found the disc in his possession.

The disc, one of 132 found in his luggage, contained hundreds of documents labeled "SECRET" or "SECRET/NOFORN," meaning no foreign government was allowed to see them. The disc itself wasn't labeled classified.

Last month, Mehalba pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized possession of classified materials and two counts of lying to federal investigators and was sentenced to 20 months in prison. He was given credit for time already spent in jail and was released on March 10.

Mehalba told the judge he exercised "very poor judgment" in taking the disc from the base but meant no harm.

"There is no allegation he was involved in any kind of espionage," Ricciuti said.

U.S. to Recruit Non-citizens? - War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 03:14:00 -0600

As the Roman Empire went into terminal decline, and fewer Roman citizens enlisted to fight the endless imperial wars, Roman rulers turned increasingly to the services of foreign mercenaries -- ultimately, with disastrous results. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has urged Washington to emulate that self-destructive policy.

"It is hard to pick up a newspaper without reading about Army and Marine Corps recruiting and retention woes," wrote Boot in a recent syndicated column. "Nonstop deployments and the danger faced by troops in Iraq are making it hard for both services to fill their ranks. The same goes for the National Guard and Reserves."

Rather than rethinking our foreign policy to bring our military commitments into balance with our resources (and into harmony with constitutional principles), Boot argues that the military

"would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones and, as important, to untold numbers of young men and women who are not here now but would like to come. No doubt many would be willing to serve for some set period in return for one of the world’s most precious commodities - U.S. citizenship. Open up recruiting stations from Budapest to Bangkok, Cape Town to Cairo, Montreal to Mexico City."

Most native-born and naturalized American citizens regard citizenship as a blessing. To Boot, it’s a commodity, and those who enlist in his proposed "Freedom Legion" would be disposable cannon fodder:

"U.S. politicians, wary (and rightly so) of casualties among U.S. citizens, might take a more lenient attitude toward the employment of a force not made up of their constituents."

Boot apparently assumes that most Americans share his view that foreign lives are cheaper and more expendable than ours.

Of course, implicit in Boot’s suggestion is the possibility of recruiting foreigners to carry out homeland defense missions presently left begging because of prolonged overseas deployment of Guard and Reserve units.

U.S. Guards Find 600 ft Escape Tunnel in Key Iraqi Prison - War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 02:04:00 -0600

U.S. military guards discovered a 600-foot tunnel dug with makeshift tools leading out of the main prison facility for detainees in Iraq before anyone had the opportunity to escape, officials said Friday.

The tunnel at Camp Bucca was 12 to 15 feet deep and as wide as 3 feet and had reached beyond the compound fence, said Army Maj. Flora Lee, a spokeswoman at the Army's Combined Press Information Center in Iraq said by telephone. She did not know when guards discovered the tunnel.

Camp Bucca holds 6,049 detainees, nearly two-thirds of all those in Iraq, Lee said. Situated near the southern city of Umm Qasr, it is one of three detainee facilities in Iraq.

A bucket cut from a water container and a shovel made of tent material were used to dig the tunnel, Lee said. The opening was under a floorboard of the compound and was concealed with dirt.

Authorities in charge of the compound realized a tunnel was under way after they found dirt in latrines and other places, Lee said. It may have been the most extensive effort aimed at a mass escape, she said.

"I'm not aware of any other instances where this has happened," Lee said. "There have been a few other attempts at digging a tunnel but nothing of this size."

U.S. guards fired on prisoners during a riot at Camp Bucca on Jan. 31, killing four detainees and injuring six others.

The guard detachment at Camp Bucca includes military police of the 105th Military Police Battalion and Air Force security forces personnel with the 586th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron, she said.

Iraqi Police Raid on Insurgent Stronghold Disputed - War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 01:59:00 -0600

A Washington Post report on Friday giving new details about a battle between Iraqi police commandos and anti-US forces has cast doubt on Iraqi government claims that 85 fighters were killed.

The daily quoted two US military officials who said US troops had found no bodies when they arrived on the scene.

Major Richard Goldenberg, spokesman for the 42nd Infantry Division, told the Post: "I can't confirm the [Iraqi] estimate ... the insurgent forces who had fled ... were able to recover their casualties and take them with them."

On Thursday, an AFP reporter who travelled to the camp overlooking Lake Tharthar, 200km north of Baghdad, reported 30 to 40 fighters roaming its streets.

The remains of three burnt vehicles were seen on a dusty road leading to the camp in the village of Ain al-Hilwa. A few mud huts were partly destroyed and a few big craters were seen on the ground.

One of the fighters, who called himself Muhammad Amir and claimed to belong to the Secret Islamic Army, said they had never left the base.

He denied that scores of his fighters had been killed and said only 11 of his comrades perished in air strikes on the site.

Goldberg confirmed that Apache attack and Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance helicopters had engaged the fighters and offered support to the Iraqi commando force.

"I would tell you that somewhere between 11 and 80 lies an accurate number," he told the Post.

"We could spend years going back and forth on body counts," he said. "The important thing is the effect this has on the organised insurgency."

A spokesman for the interim Iraqi Interior Ministry said he "presumed" the reported toll was accurate.

However, he dismissed the raid on the camp as a major incident, highlighting that it was the first major Iraqi police operation with US forces acting in a supporting role only.

Local hospitals said they had received no casualties from the battle.

China Increases Military Budget 12.6 Percent - Geo-Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 01:51:00 -0600

China's military budget will rise 12.6 percent this year to 247.7 billion yuan ($29.9 billion), parliament spokesman Jiang Enzhu said Friday.

He said the figure was contained in the budget report to be presented to China's parliament, or National People's Congress (NPC), which opens its annual session on Saturday.

The move potenitally feeds a modernization drive that is sparking concern in rival Taiwan of invasion, and U.S. worries about stability.

The budget, to be revealed by Finance Minister Jin Renqing during the NPC, will appear relatively modest -- about half that of regional power Japan.

But analysts say the official numbers are an incomplete indicator of the actual scale of resources China is pouring into defense.

Many estimate real expenditure is likely to be two to four times what the government says.

Even so, the official growth figure is a stark reminder of the ambitious buildup by the 2.3-million-strong People's Liberation Army, the world's largest standing army but one that would have to pay dearly to retake a well-armed Taiwan.

China has boosted defense spending steadily in the past 15 years to transform the military into a high-tech force with the muscle to back its threat to attack Taiwan if the island declares independence.

Among the clearest signs of that plan are purchases from Russia of advanced fighter jets, submarines and destroyers.

It has also produced as many as 700 short-range missiles that analysts say are aimed at Taiwan, which China has considered a breakaway province since the civil war in 1949.

Now, China plans to step up modernization, a defense white paper said in December.

"If they want to achieve that objective, they have got to spend more money," said Andrew Yang, a defense analyst at a private think-tank in Taipei.

Officially, defense spending grew about 11 percent last year from 2003, hitting 211.7 billion yuan ($25.6 billion), according to the white paper.

By comparison, the U.S. defense budget is about $400 billion this year and Japan's is about $47 billion.

Many big ticket items included in other countries' budgets, such as arms procurement and research and development, are not counted by China.

"It's essentially a smoke and mirrors game," said Robert Karniol, Asia-Pacific editor for Jane's Defence Weekly.

No one outside knows the true number due to the opacity and complexity of the military, defence analysts say, helping to stoke regional fears about the precipitous rise of China's military.

The director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said this month the buildup was tilting the balance with Taiwan.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that China's naval expansion was a concern to the Pentagon and could challenge U.S. dominance in the Pacific.

Taiwan, whose defense budget for 2005 is a third of Beijing's official figure, is considering a special $15 billion arms budget to buy submarines, anti-missile systems and submarine-hunting aircraft aimed at warding off an attack by the mainland.

A nervous Japan, too, is revamping its defense policy with a more wary eye on China.

A three-day incursion into Japanese waters by a Chinese nuclear submarine last November did not help matters, even though China said it was a mistake.

Both Japan and the United States oppose European Union plans to lift a 16-year-old arms embargo on China.

On the whole, however, the People's Liberation Army remains inefficient and low-tech.

Analysts estimate only 10-15 percent of its troops are deployable in combat.

Still, China is rapidly closing the gap with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a part of Chinese territory to be united with the mainland at all costs, and is even gaining on the United States.

As an indicator of where the military is training its sights, the budget is key, reflecting Beijing's efforts to build a more professional fighting force, Karniol said.

And its growth outstrips that of the defense budgets of many other countries, including the United States.

"You only have a very ambiguous sum," Shi Yinhong, a Chinese expert on foreign policy. "But the growth rate is impressive."

Kyoto Impossible for Some Nations - Science & Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 03:12:00 -0600

It will be impossible for emerging industrial powers such as China and South Korea ever to comply with the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, South Korea's environment minister said.

After years of delays, the plan to fight global warming went into force last month, but key countries such as the United States and Australia have refused to join the 1997 pact because they say it unfairly excluded developing countries. The U.N. pact legally binds 39 developed countries to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels by 2012, but excludes big developing countries from mandatory cuts.

Despite criticism, there is no blueprint to include large developing countries, which are considered some of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases.

Developing countries have come a long way since 1990 in terms of economic development, and critics argue it would be unrealistic to expect them to be able to cut greenhouse gas emissions based on that year's levels, South Korea's environment minister said.

Cash-strapped African states should spend more money on research and training to tackle diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, international scientists said.

The World Health Organization says less than 1 percent of total funds spent on health research has been devoted to pneumonia, diarrhea, tuberculosis and malaria, which account for more than 20 percent of the world's disease burden, and are particularly hard-felt on the African continent.

African governments say they have no spare money for research and are already struggling to provide basic services on the only continent where living standards have declined in the past two decades.

The government will start keeping track of all the "greenhouse" gases that farmers and foresters voluntarily reduce to help combat global warming.

Officials in the Energy and Agriculture departments issued guidelines for counting those efforts. They said the action indicates how seriously the Bush administration views the problem of gases that trap heat in the atmosphere like a greenhouse.

David Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate center, called the reporting registry a "charade that is intended to allow the government and the participants to portray that they are doing something about global warming, when they are not."

In 2003, the Agriculture Department said it would start rewarding farmers and ranchers whose tilling and planting practices help reduce greenhouse gases by increasing carbon sequestration. It was not clear whether those rewards are linked in any way to the voluntary reporting.

North Korea Ready for War - WWIII

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 01:45:00 -0600

North Korea is ready to go to war with the United States over the communist country's nuclear programme, a newspaper on Friday quoted a North Korean envoy as saying.

But O Song Chol, North Korea's ambassador to Thailand, also said his country was prepared to enter into negotiations to resolve the dispute.

"We are ready to talk peace and we are ready for war with the Americans," he told the English-language The Nation in an interview on Thursday.

Chol said his government has formulated a contingency plan in case of war and would hit back hard.

The envoy urged Washington not to refer the stalled, six-nation talks on Pyongyang's nuclear programme to the UN Security Council, saying the move would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

Chol said the talks could only resume if the United States apologised for labeling his country an "outpost of tyranny" and ended its hostile policy toward North Korea.

Dismissing reports that China has been pressuring Pyongyang to return to the multilateral talks, Chol said Beijing had only made "some suggestions" about the negotiations but no demands.

Man Gets Booked for Bag of Clothes - Police State

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 01:28:00 -0600

With a burst of high-pressure water, Omega the robot made sure a backpack in a Downtown bank was not a threat.

That blast from the robot's water cannon opened the backpack, showing it contained only clothes.

The pack belonged to a man upset by a dispute with the bank; police chose to treat the object as a threat, just in case.

"In today's world you can never be too careful," said Lt. Paul Ciesielski, Indianapolis Police Department spokesman.

The incident blocked two Downtown Indianapolis streets and closed an office building for 21/2 hours.

Kevin McDermott, 44, 100 block of East Ninth Street, was booked on a preliminary charge of terroristic mischief, a felony, and was being held Thursday at the Arrestee Processing Center. No bond was immediately set.

Police said McDermott had a dispute with Fifth Third Bank about a check and had previously complained at the bank branch at 251 N. Illinois St. in the Capital Center. McDermott returned to that branch just before noon Thursday, wandering around the bank and the Capital Center lobby.

After 11/2 hours, bank workers called police, who got to the bank around 1:15 p.m. Thursday. They found McDermott sitting in the bank lobby; his backpack was in a chair next to him.

McDermott was handcuffed and taken from the bank, while police called a bomb squad dog to check the backpack. When the dog sniffed the bag, the animal indicated something suspicious, police said.

That led police to call for the Marion County Emergency Management Agency, which sent Omega. The remote-controlled robot is designed to handle security and ordnance disposal. The Emergency Management Agency has a twin robot named Alpha.

"I was just pushing the buttons," said Steve Robertson, Omega's operator. "The whole purpose was that the human bomb technician doesn't have to be exposed."

Brought to the scene in a truck, Omega was directed inside the bank branch, where it X-rayed the pack. Those X-rays proved inconclusive, so the water cannon blasted open the backpack to reveal only clothes inside.

When all doubts about the backpack were removed, the office building was reopened. The first three floors of the Capital Center's north tower had been evacuated; workers on the remaining floors were told not to leave.

Outside, traffic was blocked on New York and Illinois streets until 4:15 p.m. Thursday.

10% of Sponsors 'manipulate' Scientists - Science & Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 01:20:00 -0600

One in 10 research scientists is under pressure to tailor findings to suit the work's sponsor, a survey suggests.

Women are more likely to be targeted than men, according to the poll of 358 scientists carried out by two unions.

Unions say the findings were "extremely worrying" and called for research to be properly financed, and for an end to fixed-term contracts for scientists.

The Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, is drawing up guidelines to combat the problem.

More than 10% of scientists have been asked by their commercial backer to tailor their research conclusions to meet the sponsor's requirements, according to the survey of university and government laboratories.

Research, carried out jointly by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and the public service union Prospect, found that women were under even greater pressure.

However, most (84.5%) of the 358 respondents (58% male and 38% female) said they had never been asked by a sponsor to skew their research.

A total of 7.9% of those who took part in the online poll said they had been asked in general terms to tailor their conclusions to the funder's preferred outcome.

A further 1.2% of the total said they were asked to tailor their results so that they might obtain further contracts, and another 1.7% said they had been discouraged from publishing their findings by their backer.

When the figures were broken down, 11.5% of women (compared to 6% of men) said they had been asked to tailor conclusions to suit their sponsor's preferred outcome; 1.5% of women (compared to 1% of men) were asked to do so to obtain further contracts and 2.3% of women (compared to 1.5% of men) had been discouraged from publishing their findings.

Prospect Head of Research and Specialist Services Sue Ferns says the findings reinforced union concerns.

"Given that all the survey's respondents considered that their key role was to provide impartial and objective advice, any evidence to suggest some members feel under pressure to modify their results is extremely worrying."

"Prospect has been arguing for some years that the contract culture is a real barrier to developing a long-term strategic approach to science, and it is disappointing that our warnings over the dangers of commercialisation and loss of independence are still going unheeded in some quarters."

"Any request to falsify results brings science into disrepute, threatens the integrity of scientific advice to government and damages public trust in government itself."

"Science, above all else, is about a pursuit for the truth."

An AUT spokesman said: "These findings are worrying and indicate a possible problem when research projects involve some commercial money."

"The fact that many researchers are also on fixed-term contracts and whose continued employment also relies on the funding of the research is not good for those staff, or for the long-term future of British research."

"One message we think government and employers should take from this is to end the practice of fixed-term contracts and properly finance research."

The Royal Society is equally concerned about the survey results.

Sir Patrick Bateson, chair of the Royal Society working group on best practice in communicating research results said: "It is clear that some researchers are influenced by their affiliations, be they to funders, sponsors or employers, when carrying out or reporting their work.

"In many cases these biases are introduced unknowingly, but can be avoided if researchers become more aware of the potential problems."

"There are also occasions when biases, for instance on the selection of evidence, are deliberate, and such practices are clearly undesirable."

"The Royal Society will shortly be publishing recommendations to overcome some of the problems of affiliation bias when research results are communicated to the public."

The survey looked at other issues relating to scientists' work, including job satisfaction and volume of work.

Corruption in Homeland Security - Secret Societies

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 01:12:00 -0600

Clark Kent Ervin was stirring up trouble right until the end. Late last year - just weeks before he was unceremoniously dismissed from his job as the chief internal watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - he reported that the federal government still could not keep foreigners from using stolen passports to enter the country. In the weeks and months before that, he’d released reports that found the federal air marshal program in disarray, warned that shipping containers were entering U.S. ports every day without even superficial screening for nuclear material, and chastised the department for failing to fulfill its congressional mandate to come up with a centralized watch list of suspected terrorists. Even Homeland Security’s single most publicized initiative, the screening of passengers and bags at the nation’s airports, had failed to make it any more difficult to sneak guns, knives, and explosives onto planes, Ervin’s investigators in the Office of Inspector General had found.

None of those disclosures, however, seemed to be of much interest to department leaders. Secretary Tom Ridge, Ervin notes, met with him only twice, both times to complain about negative publicity generated by his reports.

Never once, he says, did Ridge so much as request a face-to-face briefing on the continued problems in airport security. It was only after Congress put pressure on the department that Ervin was asked to present his findings to Admiral James Loy, then head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). "His response was to say, ‘Why are you calling it a failure rate at this airport? Why not say success rate?" Ervin remembers.

At 45, Ervin is a tidy man with deep-set eyes, tortoiseshell glasses, and graying hair. When he spoke to Mother Jones, a few weeks after his dismissal, he had traded the suit-and-tie uniform of a senior federal official for a cable-knit sweater and slacks. His political allegiances, however, had not changed. "I am a Republican who is supportive of this president," he said. "Please write that down."

But loyalty didn’t prevent Ervin from doing his job. "He was really the citizens’ last chance of ensuring that vitally important money was being spent well," says Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group that has been critical of the department. "Often it wasn’t."

Ervin was born to a Democratic family in Houston, the child of a union bricklayer. It was his older brother, he says, who chose to name him after Superman’s alter ego. On the recommendation of his teachers, he was offered a scholarship as the first black male student at Kinkaid, an elite Houston prep school. He had always been interested in politics - When I was two years old in 1961, I remember Kennedy’s news conferences - but it wasn’t until he became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and then a student at Harvard Law School, that he began to question the Democratic Party for, in his view, going soft on defense and embracing a radical social agenda.

His new political views attracted him to the administration of George H.W. Bush, where he worked on the "Thousand Points of Light" volunteer initiative and soon afterward became friendly with George W. Bush, a fellow Kinkaid alum. He made failed bids for Congress and then the Texas Legislature during the early 1990s before joining the administration of then Texas Governor Bush. In 2001, he returned to Washington as inspector general at the State Department, moving to Homeland Security in 2003. He served nearly two years in the job - in an acting capacity, because the Senate had failed to vote on his confirmation.

At Homeland Security, Ervin’s team of 459 auditors and investigators uncovered not just security lapses, but extensive waste. By the time Ervin arrived, the Department of Transportation had already uncovered one massive cost overrun: A $100 million contract granted to hire new airline screeners had ballooned to more than $600 million. Ervin’s subsequent reports revealed that Boeing Company had received at least $49 million in extra profits for a contract to do nothing more than oversee other contracts. And executives at the cash-strapped TSA awarded themselves $1.5 million in year-end bonuses in 2003, and then spent another $462,000 on an awards ceremony for departmental brass, including nearly $2,000 for seven sheet cakes and $1,500 for three cheese displays.

Yet over and over again, department leaders ignored Ervin’s calls for action. "Basically, the focus there at the top was, let’s put out press releases touting advances and let’s minimize problems," says Ervin, "because we want DHS to be a good news story."

Perhaps it’s that focus on positive spin that has kept officials from explaining Ervin’s dismissal. Either Congress or the White House could have acted to keep him in office when his term as acting inspector general expired in December. But neither did.

"The decision not to renominate Clark Kent Ervin was purely a White House decision," says Elissa Davidson, a spokeswoman for Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), though Collins herself held up Ervin’s confirmation for two years because of a dispute over an investigation he’d conducted at the State Department. White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to comment, saying simply, "We appreciate the job he has done."

For his part, Ervin says he’s not bitter. "I don’t have an ax to grind," he insists, adding that he plans to continue drawing attention to the department’s problems - most of which, he says, could be fixed with the right management. "I don’t take any joy in saying what I am saying - but you have to tell the truth when you are in a job like this."

Proof You Are Getting Robbed at the Gas Pump - Secret Societies

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 04:25:00 -0600

Here's all you need to know to understand that Americans are getting screwed at the gas pump.

Fact 1: The inventory of crude oil in the U.S. right now is 8 percent larger than it was this same week last year. And that's the biggest amount of crude on hand since the middle of 2002.

Fact 2: That the 8 percent increase doesn't include all the oil purchased by Washington and put into the emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which now has 685 million barrels. That's up from 650 million barrels last year and 599 million in '03.

Fact 3: There is 7.5 percent more gasoline in stock right now in this country than during the same week last year. And you'd have to go back to this same week in 1999 to find more gasoline inventory - when the average price at the pump was only $1.01 a gallon.

Fact 4: Including everything made of oil, there is 4.9 percent more supply this year than when Spring began in 2004. And there's about 10 percent more of all petroleum products in stock today than when the Iraqi war began.

And, finally, Fact 5: American consumers are being conned by speculators - and a media that doesn't ask enough tough questions - into thinking there is some sort of supply problem.

Now here's my No.1 Prediction: If the greedy bottom-feeders who are causing prices to rise end up being responsible for damaging the U.S. economy there will be as much hell to pay on Wall Street as there was when the stock market bubble destroyed people's dreams.

Crude oil prices were down nearly $4 a barrel over the past two days because the goon speculators are starting to lose their grip on the market.

The next question in the AIG investigation should be: What exactly was the insurance company doing in the Caribbean?

Yesterday both The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that investigators were looking into American International Group's actions in Barbados and other Caribbean Islands.

If you read my column last Thursday I suggested that's where the investigation should head next because Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr was setting his sights on a company called Coral Reinsurance that was mysteriously connected to AIG The was right before Starr took a wrong turn and made his probe about sex. But here's what everyone is missing.

Starr wasn't investigating AIG He was looking into the Clintons, Arkansas and what that state was getting in return for bankrolling operations like Coral Re that it had no business funding.

My point: if investigators start peeling this onion, it could make a lot of people cry.

Wrong Way Al did it again. As expected, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates Tuesday and Wrong Way Greenspan implied that he'd keep doing it. What was the result? As I suspected would happen - and I think will continue happening - the stock market gave up a decent gain mid-day on Tuesday and ended up with a big loss.

More importantly, the price of bonds also sank, sending interest rates much higher that single day than even the Fed could have wanted.What's next? Be very careful next week.

The government could report very good (although statistically inaccurate) employment numbers next Friday, which could send rates much higher again and could tag stocks with another big loss.

But there is something funny about this whole situation.

Since Greenspan says the economy is only growing moderately (which I agree with) and that inflation is only now becoming a problem (which I think has been a concern for a while), the only real reason for raising interest rates this aggressively would be to put a stop to the bubble in the housing market.

Low interest rates helped cause the housing bubble, but it was also the result of investors losing interest in the stock market after that bubble busted. So they invested in real estate instead.

So, it's possible that if Greenspan causes another big decline in stock prices people will continue to take money away from Wall Street and park it - you guessed it - in housing.

And all Wrong Way's effort will be wasted.

Here's an idea for a new video game that'll satisfy both the sports enthusiast as well as entice kids into more violent activities.

It's a typical Major League Baseball game with the usual suspects (sorry, I mean stars), except that the kid controlling the game is playing the role of the team doctor and he's allowed to administer steroids whenever he wants.

But the kid loses points if a star goes into a coma, suffers liver or kidney damage, or suddenly become sterile and can't produce offspring - which, of course, would deprive the next generation of steroid-abusing performers.

If one person on your team actually dies, that's OK. But three deaths - like in the game itself - and you're out. OK, seriously.

City-Snoop Program Returns? - Big Brother

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 04:10:00 -0600

Back in the summer of 2003, Noah Shachtman wrote a little story for the Village Voice on the Pentagon's plan to track everything that moves in a city. Since then, there hasn't been much word from the Defense Department about "Combat Zones that See," or CTS. A planned demonstration at Ft. Belvoir never came about – or was kept very quiet. Last year, Congress moved to yank funds from the program's budget.

But now, CTS may be on the way back, if Tony Tether -- the head of Defense Department far-out research arm Darpa -- has his way. The agency's proposed 2006 budget calls for $20 million over three years for CTS. It's part of an expanded, $340 million push by Darpa to develop technologies for urban battles (see Falluja, Najaf, etc.)

Here's what Tether told the Senate Armed Services committee last week about CTS:

We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers, or IEDs (improvised explosive devices). We need to watch a great variety of things, activities, and people over a wide area and have great resolution available when we need it. And this is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data. Closely related to this are tagging, tracking, and locating (TT&L) systems that help us watch and track a particular person or object of interest. These systems will also help us detect the clandestine production or possession of weapon of mass destruction in overseas urban areas. There was a recent incident in Iraq where one of our UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] spotted some insurgents firing a mortar. Then the insurgents climbed back into their car and drove away. The good news was that the UAV was able to track the car so U.S. helicopters could go after it and destroy it. The bad news was that, at one point, some of the passengers got out. Then we had to decide whether to follow those individuals or the car because we simply did not have enough coverage available. If we’d had other sensors available, we would have had a better chance of getting all of those insurgents.

If we could quickly track-back where a vehicle came from, it would greatly help us deal with suicide car bombers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to deter the bombers themselves, just as you cannot deter a missile that has already been launched. But, one key to deterrence that has been missing is reliable attribution, or a “return address.” If we knew where the car came from, using, for example, RSTA [reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition] systems that allowed us to quickly trace the car carrying the explosives back to the house or shop it came from, we could then attack that place and those people.

CTS is one of a bunch of Darpa urban ops programs that skates the fine line between creepy and cool. The agency would also like $10 million to build robotic, flying spies that weight less than 10 grams and are just two inches across. The "Home Field" program would "develop networked video and LADAR [laser radar] processing technology that rapidly and reliably updates a 3D model of an urban area. [Such an] urbanscape will provide 3D situational awareness with sufficient detail and accuracy to remove the 'home field advantage' enjoyed by opponents." Meanwhile, the "Pre-Conflict Anticipation and Shaping" (PCAS) could help American counterinsurgents predict where conflicts might boil up next.

The project will combine computational social science modeling and simulation, scenario generation, evolutionary programming, planning, and multiplayer gaming. When integrated, these technologies allow combatant commanders and senior decision makers to understand and anticipate the societal/regional indicators that precipitate instability and conflict within an area of responsibility, then mitigate the impact of that instability... The goal of PCAS' more powerful societal/regional models is an integrated perspective encompassing, in a consistent way, all the dimensions of social change.

The Iranian Threat: The Bomb or the Euro?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 04:02:00 -0600

Iran does not pose a threat to the United State because of its nuclear projects, its WMD, or its support to "terrorists organizations" as the American administration is claiming, but in its attempt to re-shape the global economical system by converting it from a petrodollar to a petroeuro system. Such conversion is looked upon as a flagrant declaration of economical war against the US that would flatten the revenues of the American corporations and eventually might cause an economic collapse.

In June of 2004 Iran declared its intention of setting up an international oil exchange (a bourse) denominated in the Euro currency. Many oil-producing as well as oil-consuming countries had expressed their welcome to such petroeuro course. The Iranian reports had stated that this bourse may start its trade with the beginning of 2006. Naturally such an oil bourse would compete against London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), as well as against the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), both owned by American corporations.

Oil consuming countries have no choice but use the American Dollar to purchase their oil, since the Dollar has been so far the global standard monetary fund for oil exchange. This necessitates these countries to keep the Dollar in their central banks as their reserve fund, thus strengthening the American economy. But if Iran — followed by the other oil-producing countries — offered to accept the Euro as another choice for oil exchange the American economy would suffer a real crisis. We could witness this crisis at the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006 when oil investors would have the choice to pay $57 a barrel of oil at the American (NYMEX) and at London’s (IPE), or pay 37 Euros a barrel at the Iranian oil bourse. Such choice would reduce trade volumes at both the Dollar-dependent (NYMEX) and the (IPE).

Many countries had studied the conversion from the ever weakening petrodollar to the gradually strengthening petroeuro system. The de-valuation of the Dollar was caused by the American economy shying away from manufacturing local products — except those of the military -, by outsourcing the American jobs to the cheaper third world countries and depending only on the general service sector, and by the huge cost of two major wars that are still going on. Foreign investors started withdrawing their money from the shaky American market causing further devaluation of the Dollar.

The keen observer of the money market could have noticed that the devaluation of the American Dollar had started since November 2002, while the purchasing power of European Euro had crept upward to reach nowadays to $1.34. Compared to the Japanese Yen the Dollar had dropped from 104.45 to 103.90 yen. The British pound climbed another notch from $1.9122 to $1.9272.

Economic reports published at the beginning of this month (March) had pointed towards the deep dive of the American economy and to the quick rise of the deficit up to $665.90 billion at the end of 2004. The worst is still to come. These numbers worried the international banks, who had sent some warnings to the Bush administration.

In its economical war Iran is treading the same path Saddam Hussein had started when he, in 2000, converted all his reserve from the Dollar to the Euro, and demanded payments in Euro for Iraqi oil. Many economists then mocked Saddam because he had lost a lot of money in this conversion. Yet they were very surprised when he recuperated his losses within less than a year period due to the valuation of the Euro. The American administration became aware of the threat when central banks of many countries started keeping Euros along side of Dollars as their monetary reserve and as an exchange fund for oil (Russian and Chinese central banks in 2003). To avoid economical collapse the Bush administration hastened to invade and to destroy Iraq under false excuses to make it an example to any country who may contemplate dropping the Dollar, and to manipulate OPEC’s decisions by controlling the second largest oil resource. Iraqi oil sale was reverted back to the petrodollar standard.

There is only one technical obstacle concerning the use of a euro-based oil exchange system, which is the lack of a euro-denominated oil pricing standard, or oil ‘marker’ as it is referred to in the industry. The three current oil markers are U.S. dollar denominated, which include the West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI), Norway Brent crude, and the UAE Dubai crude. Yet this did not stop Iran from requiring payments in the euro currency for its European and Asian oil exports since spring 2003.

Iran’s determination in using the petroeuro is inviting in other countries such as Russia and Latin American countries, and even some Saudi investors especially after the Saudi/American relations have weakened lately. This determination had also invited an aggressive American political campaign using the same excuses used against Iraq: WMD in the form of nuclear bomb, support to "terrorist" Lebanese Hezbollah organization, and threat to the peace process in the Middle East.

The question now is what would the American administration do? Would it invade Iran as it did Iraq? The American troops are knee-deep in the Iraqi swamp. The global community — except for Britain and Italy- is not offering any military relief to the US. Thus an American strike against Iran is very unlikely. Iran is not Iraq; it has a more robust military power. Iran has anti-ship missiles based in "Abu Mousa" island that controls the strait of Hermuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf. Iran could easily close the strait thus blocking all naval traffic carrying gulf oil to the rest of the world causing a global oil crisis. The price of an oil barrel could reach up to $100. The US could not topple the regime by spreading chaos the same way it did to Mussadaq’s regime in 1953 since Iranians are aware of such a trick. Besides Iranians have a patriotic pride of what they call "their bomb".

America has resorted to instigate and encourage its military bastard, Israel, to strike Iranian nuclear reactors the way it did to Iraq. Leaked reports had revealed that Israeli forces are training for such an attack expected to take place next June. Israel is afraid of an Iranian bomb. Such an "Islamic" bomb would threaten Israel’s military hegemony in the Middle East. The bomb would extract some Israeli concessions and would create an arm race that would gobble a lot of Israeli defense expenditure. Further more the bomb would force the US to enter into negotiations with nuclear Iran that may limit Israeli expanding ambitions.

Iran had invested a lot of money and effort to obtain nuclear technology and would never abandon it as evident in its political rhetoric. Unlike Iraq Iran would not keep quiet of Israel strikes its nuclear facilities. Iran would retaliate aggressively which may lead to the destabilization of the whole region including Israel, Gulf States, Iraq, and even Afghanistan.

Army Orders Further Involuntary Troop Call-Up - War on Terror

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 03:58:00 -0600

The U.S. Army is ordering more people to serve in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) involuntarily from a seldom-used personnel pool as part of a mobilization that began last summer.

They are part of the Army's Individual Ready Reserve, made up of soldiers who have completed their volunteer active-duty service commitment but remain eligible to be called back into uniform for years after returning to civilian life.

The Army, straining to maintain troop levels in Iraq, last June said it would summon more than 5,600 people on the IRR in an effort to have about 4,400 soldiers fit for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan after granting exemption requests for medical reasons and other hardships.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart said on Wednesday the Army has now increased the number of IRR soldiers it needs to about 4,650, which means a total of about 6,100 will get mobilization orders.

The IRR differs from the part-time Army Reserve and Army National Guard, whose soldiers train regularly as part of units. People on the IRR have no such training requirements.

Hart also said 370 IRR soldiers had not reported to the Army by the date ordered and have not requested an exemption from service or a delay in reporting. Hart said none have been declared absent without leave, or AWOL, and the Army was trying to determine whether all of them actually had received their mobilization orders.

"We're giving them all ample opportunity to comply with their orders," Hart said.

The Army has approved 1,866 requests for exemptions or delays in reporting, Hart said.

There are about 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, but the number is slated to decline to about 138,000 this month. The Army has defended tapping into the IRR, saying it was a legitimate personnel tool to find soldiers in a time of need.

Army officials have said that they expect to launch a second round of mobilizations from the IRR this summer on the scale of the current round to provide soldiers for future force rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pentagon Ends Investigation Into Abuse of Reuters Workers - Moral Vacuum

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 03:52:00 -0600

In a letter to Reuters, the Pentagon says it will not reopen an investigation into the case of three unembedded Iraqi journalists who say US soldiers tortured and sexually abused them while they were working for the London-based news service last year.

"I'm very disappointed that the Department of Defense has chosen not to reopen a clearly flawed investigation into a very troubling incident," Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger said Tuesday in response to the letter.

The Pentagon told Reuters it was satisfied with the results of its initial investigation, which did not include interviews with the three Iraqis. It concluded its letter to Reuters by recommending that media organizations embed their reporters with US military units.

Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division detained the three Reuters employees in January 2004 while covering the downing of an American helicopter by rebels near Fallujah. The journalists say soldiers beat them and subjected them to sexual humiliation similar to that practiced by US jailers at Abu Ghraib prison around the same time. They were released without charges three days after being detained.

Social Security Broke in 2041 - Big Brother

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:31:00 -0600

The trust fund for Social Security will go broke in 2041 a year earlier than previously estimated the trustees reported Wednesday. Trustees also said that Medicare, the giant health care program for the elderly and disabled, faces insolvency in 2020.

The new projections made in the trustees annual report were certain to be cited by both sides in the massive battle to overhaul Social Security, which President Bush has made the top domestic priority of his second term.

The go-broke date for Medicare was delayed by one year, compared to the estimate that trustees gave a year ago.

The insolvency dates represent when both trust funds will have exhausted the government bonds that have been building up to take care of the pending retirement of 78 million baby boomers.

Equally important are when benefits paid to the elderly start exceeding the payroll taxes designated to support the two programs. That's when the government will have to increase its borrowing on financial markets, raise taxes or divert money from other government programs to sustain Medicare and Social Security at current levels.

For Medicare, the threshold when benefits exceed program income occurred last year. For Social Security, that threshold will be crossed in 2017, one year earlier than the 2018 date projected in last year's report.

The administration cited that change as a sign of the urgency to act to deal with Social Security's funding woes. Democrats argue that the real crisis is in Medicare and that the administration is ignoring the health care crisis.

"The reason we are dealing with Social Security now is that it cries out for answers," Snow told reporters at a briefing on the trustees report. He predicted that Congress will deal with legislation to overhaul Social Security later this year.

Snow, chairman of the six-member board of trustees for both programs, said the estimates "leave no question that Social Security reform is needed and it is needed soon."

However, Democratic critics drew different findings from the report, arguing that it showed that Social Security was not in a crisis situation and did not require the private accounts that the administration wants to establish for younger workers.

Evolution is Flawed - Science & Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:13:00 -0600

Challenging a scientific law of inheritance that has stood for 150 years, scientists say plants sometimes select better bits of DNA in order to develop normally even when their predecessors carried genetic flaws.

The conclusion by Purdue University molecular biologists contradicts at least some basic rules of plant evolution that were believed to be absolute since the mid-1800s, when Austrian monk Gregor Mendel experimented with peas and saw that traits are passed on from one generation to the next. Mendelian genetics has been the foundation of both crop hybridization and the understanding of basic cell mutations and trait inheritance.

In the Purdue experiment, researchers found that a watercress plant sometimes corrects the genetic code it inherited from its flawed parents and grows normally like its grandparents and other ancestors.

Scientists said the discovery raises questions of whether humans also have the potential for avoiding genetic flaws or even repairing them, although they said the actual proteins responsible for making these fixes probably would be different in plants.

Details of the experiments appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"This means that inheritance can happen more flexibly than we thought," said Robert Pruitt, the paper's senior author.

In the experiment, the Purdue researchers found that 10 percent of watercress plants with two copies of a mutant gene called "hothead" didn't always blossom with deformed flowers like their parents, which carried the mutant genes. Instead, those plants had normal white flowers like their grandparents, which didn't carry the hothead gene and the deformity appeared only for a single generation.

The normal watercress plants with hothead genes appear to have kept a copy of the genetic coding from the grandparent plants and used it as a template to grow normally.

However, Pruitt's team didn't find the template in the plants' DNA or chromosomes where genetic information is stored and they did not determine whether a particular gene is encoded to carry out the recovery of the normal DNA.

Where the normal genetic template is stored and how it is triggered will take additional research and probably involve more genes, Pruitt said.

Humans and other animals do not carry the hothead gene, so if this process occurs in higher organisms it must use a different trigger, he said.

Other scientists described the results as "spectacular."

Detlef Weigel and Gerds Jurgen of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany wrote in an accompanying commentary in Nature that the mechanism for recovering the normal DNA in the watercress plants might be lurking in the plant's RNA, which carries out genetic orders in cells.

Fayetteville Protest Downplayed By Media - Big Brother

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 02:54:00 -0600

The second anniversary of the war was the impetus for major demonstrations throughout the world. In the United States, over 800 communities held events calling for an end to the occupation.

CNN, however, reported that in the United States "barely a ripple was made while large protests took place in Europe." The New York Times reported that protests in the United States ranged from 350 people in Times Square to thousands in San Francisco. Later in the same story, the Times reported that several thousand marched from Harlem to Central Park. If thousands marched in New York, why did the Times highlight the 350 in Times Square?

CNN's report was worse … nothing about US protests. While they only saw a ripple, a huge wave passed them by. If CNN had been in Fayetteville, North Carolina, they would have seen what could be a major turning point in the anti-war movement. The largest Anti-war protest ever in this heavily military town took place.

The march was led by two banners carried by family members of soldiers who died or served in Iraq. The first banner said "The World Still Says No to War" and the second banner was "Bring the Troops Home Now." A few feet behind was a banner carried by Veterans of the Iraq War. One of those veterans, Sergeant Camillo Mejia, recently served 9 months in jail for refusing to return to Iraq after leave. Mejia told the crowd: "After going to war and seeing its ugly face, I could no longer be a part of it."

Following the Iraq Veterans was Military Families Speak Out. "I can't remain silent on these issues, slap a yellow ribbon on my car and call it supporting our troops," said Kara Hollingsworth, the wife of a soldier serving his second tour of duty in Iraq. "I support our troops by making sure they are not put in harm's way unless absolutely necessary."

Many veterans of past wars were also among the ranks. Sections of the march resembled army units marching in formation calling cadence.

Speaker after speaker told stories of loved ones they had lost during the war and the now 2-year-old occupation of Iraq. Flag-draped mock coffins were carried by many.

Congresswoman Lynn Woosley of California called on the crowd to lobby Congress in support of House Concurrent Resolution 35, calling on the President to bring U.S. troops home.

The March was part of a series of events aimed at breathing new life into the anti-war movement. The first-ever Iraq Veterans Against the War national conference is also taking place, along with a Conference of Military Families Speak Out. A third major conference of Southern anti-war organizers is also taking place in Fayetteville.

CNN missed the boat … perhaps a good thing for them, since they were only prepared for a ripple and not the giant wave that formed in Fayetteville.

Coast of Ivory: : The Worst May Be Yet to Come - Geo-Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 02:35:00 -0600

The next seven months are a time of great danger for Côte d'Ivoire. Under pressure of an increasingly suspect 15 October 2004 election deadline, its political class may lose control of the cyclical violence it has orchestrated during the on-again, off-again civil war that has divided the country since September 2002. With both UN and French (Licorne) peacekeeping mandates expiring on 4 April, the international community must act decisively to renegotiate key aspects of its involvement to prevent an explosion. The African Union (AU) and its mediator, South African President Thabo Mbeki, should work to organise in close cooperation with the UN the implementation of the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) program, voter registration and a new schedule for three polls -- presidential and legislative elections preceded by a referendum on a key constitutional article determining who is eligible for the presidency. It is imperative that a clear agenda be set now to allow the international community to achieve its redefined objectives in Côte d'Ivoire within the next eighteen months.

While this may push back the electoral timetable -- presidential elections are currently set for October, legislative elections for December -- by a few months, it is necessary because the present situation is so polarised that no Ivorian electoral commission can be expected to operate independently and effectively. Taking charge of elections, as Prime Minister Seydou Diarra requested the UN do after his 3 March meeting with President Mbeki, is more than an organisational task; it is a political imperative. Those actors whose interest is not to have free and fair elections can be expected to actively block the process. The Security Council should strengthen President Mbeki by publishing immediately the report of its commission of inquiry (finished since October 2004) and making clear it is prepared to apply targeted sanctions to all who attempt to block the process, as indicated in Resolution 1572 (15 November 2004).

The international community faces a clear dilemma: it can either apply strong pressure to compel the belligerent parties to do what they will not do willingly, or disengage and let matters run their course. Since it does not appear either side is strong enough to win militarily, the most probable result in the second scenario would be a long, ugly war of attrition, accompanied by large-scale massacres. The pressures building as a result of the actions of the armed militias, the drumbeat of hate media, and the political extremism that characterise the Ivorian scene are such that a middle course between coercion and inaction is not viable.

The protagonists of the Ivorian crisis are adept at pleasing diplomats by giving the impression they are cooperating under the peace process framework. However, this has nearly always meant one step forward, two steps back. The explosion of violence that follows a period of relative calm has become more serious each time. Not many more cycles will be needed before the dynamic morphs into qualitatively worse violence, probably including large-scale ethnic cleansing. That would be a tragedy for more than Côte d'Ivoire: Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso would likely be drawn into a regional conflict. The greatest damage could be done to Liberia's fragile peace process, which is meant to culminate in presidential and legislative elections just four days before Côte d'Ivoire's scheduled presidential vote.

The composition of the international peacekeeping forces should also change, reflecting the events of November 2004, during which the Ivorian armed forces killed French troops and the French responded by destroying the Ivorian air force and killing between twenty and 57 civilians.[1] These events undermined the impartial stance of the French contingent. Without judging whether the Ivorian attack was intentional or the French response justified, the Licorne peacekeepers have become too vulnerable and controversial to be able to perform their work with the effectiveness required in the an explosive an environment as that prevailing in Côte d'Ivoire.

In order to give a peacekeeping mission that is accepted by all parties a chance to succeed, the French government should begin negotiations with the UN about a gradual drawdown of its contingent, and a parallel substantial strengthening of the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI). The new UN troop deployment must include a robust rapid reaction unit, well-equipped, with helicopters in particular, as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan requested on 9 December 2004. South Africa should play a crucial role in strengthening UNOCI, adding to its political commitment in the name of the African Union (AU), a strong military engagement. In the absence of this suggested recomposition of peacekeeping troops, it is imperative that the French government maintain its military presence in support of UNOCI.

In November 2004, a lid was placed on the bubbling violence because the UN, the AU, ECOWAS, France and the U.S. spoke with one voice. There is a grave risk that unless the international community acts in unison again to provide an alternative to the political uncertainty, Côte d'Ivoire's conflict is bound to get much worse in 2005.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union (AU):

1. Organise, with the UN, and carry out over eighteen months:

a referendum on changes to Article 35 of the constitution, determining the criteria for eligibility to run for the presidency;
presidential elections;
legislative elections; and
a comprehensive DDR process, which includes the armed militias in the south.

2. Request the UN Security Council strengthen President Mbeki's mediation and request President Mbeki allow the application of targeted sanctions against those who constitute a threat to the peace and national reconciliation process in Côte d'Ivoire, as specified in Security Council Resolution 1572.

To the United Nations Security Council:

3. Apply targeted sanctions, as specified in Resolution 1572.

4. Pass a Resolution that:

renews the UN Operation in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI) with (i) more troops and a rapid reaction unit that can effectively replace departing Licorne troops; (ii) an expanded and strengthened mandate that focuses on organising and holding elections, and organising and undertaking DDR in collaboration with the AU; and (iii) a finite, eighteen-month timeframe;
orders immediate publication of the report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Allegations of Serious Violations of Human Rights and of International Humanitarian Law in Côte d'Ivoire; and
instructs the Secretary General to (i) plan in cooperation with the French Ministry of Defence the gradual withdrawal of French Licorne troops and their simultaneous and imperative replacement by qualified UNOCI peacekeepers, including troops from South Africa and, possibly, troops from EU member states with rapid reaction units, engaged either on the basis of national decisions or as a result of common action in the context of the European Security and Defence Policy; (ii) transfer some equipment from UN Missions in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and Liberia (UNMIL) to UNOCI; and (iii) reinforce the Human Rights Division of UNOCI including by adding offices in Odienne, Korhogo, Bouna, and San Pedro.

To France:

5. Remain engaged with and continue to contribute to the Ivorian peace process and the UN peacekeeping mission in the accomplishment of its new tasks.

6. Do note begin withdrawing Licorne forces before they can be replaced by a credible, strengthened UN force with a rapid reaction unit.

To South Africa:

7. Deepen its political commitment to the Ivorian peace process with a strong military contribution to UNOCI.

To the Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI):

8. Cease support for armed "patriotic" militias and use the Forces Armées Nationales de la Côte d'Ivoire (FANCI) to stop all breaches of the ceasefire between those militias and the Forces Nouvelles.

9. Support a referendum organised by the UN and the AU on changes to Article 35 of the constitution.

10. Abide by results of the referendum and participate in presidential and legislative elections organised by the UN and AU.

11. Disarm all armed "patriotic" militias, including the GPP, the FLGO, and the MILOCI.

To the Forces Nouvelles:

12. Return to the Government of National Reconciliation.

13. Support a referendum organised by the UN and the AU on changes to Article 35 of the constitution and abide by results of the referendum.

14. Guarantee freedom of movement and access to all AU and UN staff working on elections and DDR.

To all other political parties in Côte d'Ivoire:

15. Support a referendum on changes to Article 35 of the constitution, organised by the UN and the AU, and campaign for a "yes" vote with a view to encouraging reunification of Ivorian society.

16. Participate to the different votes organised by the AU and the UN.

Real Unemployment is 23%: How & Why Jobs are Vanishing from America - Secret Societies

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 01:08:00 -0600

Jobs are vanishing from America. Many of us realize this from our personal experience, or that of family members or friends.

The real unemployment rate is 23%

The federal government claims the unemployment rate for 2004 was 5.5% But the government’s "unemployment rate" statistic is a propaganda device. It does not count as "unemployed" people who are "not in the labor force." According to economist Richard DuBoff, participation in the labor force by working-age males has been drifting downward for more than 40 years. Therefore, the government’s official "unemployment rate" is an increasingly misleading statistic.

According to the government’s own 2004 statistics, the civilian non-institutional population of United States males, age 16 and over, was 107.7 million people. Of those 107.7 million males, 14.7 million were estimated to be age 65 or over. Therefore, the number of men between 16 and 64, which traditionally constitutes this nation’s workforce, was 93 million.

Of those 93 million men, the government admits that 4.4 million of them are unemployed. And when I say unemployed, I mean utterly and completely inactive. The government considers someone "employed" if they work as little as one hour a week. People who do not even work one hour a week are still considered "employed" if they are "temporarily absent" from work.

But in addition to the 4.4 million men who are officially "unemployed" the government admits that 28.7 million men over 16 are "not in the labor force." Subtracting from this 28.7 million the estimated 11.9 million men 65 and over belonging to that group, results in 16.8 million men between the ages of 16 and 64 who are "not in the labor force."

Adding the 4.4 million officially unemployed to the 16.8 million who are factually unemployed yields a total of 21.2 million unemployed men between the ages of 16 and 64.

These 21.2 million unemployed men of working age represent almost 23% of the 93 million working age men in the United States.

The real rate of unemployment in the United States is the product of conscious planning. That planning is demonstrated by an intelligent coordination of various federal government policies. Most of these policies have been implemented in the last twenty-five years. These policies can be summarized as follows:

Federal Trade Policy

Starting with NAFTA and continuing with the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade, the federal government began to eliminate tariffs on imports. Without the tariffs, prices for imports manufactured with cheaper foreign labor undercut prices for products that were made in America. In order to compete, America’s manufacturers had to lay off American workers and hire workers in foreign countries. They did.

Federal Monetary Policy

American workers could still make many products that were superior to those made by foreign workers. If foreigners could afford to buy them, American workers would keep their jobs.

But foreigners couldn’t afford to buy American made products if the American dollar remained overvalued compared to other countries’ currencies.

Since first taking office in 1987, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s "strong dollar policy" overvalued the dollar relative to other nations’ currencies, especially that of Red China’s.

So, even without tariffs, most foreigners can’t afford to buy goods made in America.

Federal Immigration Policy

If the federal government didn’t allow massive legal and illegal immigration from Third World countries, there would be more and higher-paying jobs for American citizens.

But the federal government did decide to allow mass immigration, and there aren’t more or higher paying jobs for American citizens.

Federal Antitrust Policy

If the federal government enforced the antitrust laws so that American companies couldn’t consolidate using "mega-mergers", those companies would still have to compete against each other. In order to compete against each other, each company would have to hire American workers. In order to compete for workers, the companies would have to pay higher wages and salaries.

But the Republicrats seldom enforce antitrust laws. The Department of Justice (sic) routinely approves mega-mergers, knowing that the whole point of the merger is to increase profits by laying off workers.

Federal Tax Policy

The more you tax something, the less of it you get. The federal government collects Social Security payroll taxes from American employers who hire American employees. Over the past twenty-five years, those taxes have doubled. The federal government is planning a further a increase in payroll taxes, supposedly to "save social security." The real effect will be spur American employers to outsource jobs to foreign countries.

Federal Environmental Policy

Federal environmental policies are shutting down land-based production in the United States. This means a reduction in the number of jobs available in those sectors of the economy: farming, logging, mining, etc.

Coming Soon - Federal Climate Policy

The death blow to whatever jobs remain in the United States will be delivered if the federal government adopts the proposed Kyoto Treaty. This treaty is ostensibly designed to stop artificial threats such as "global warming" or "climate change." The real purpose of any Kyoto-style treaty will be to shift all remaining industrial production jobs from the United States to Third World countries.

Public opinion polls routinely report that the loss of jobs is the number one issue among voters.

The Republicrats are keenly aware that jobs are vanishing from America. They want us to think they are doing something about it. The Congress recently granted a tax amnesty to multinational corporations, but decided to call it the "Jobs Creation Act."

But in fact, as the foregoing demonstrates, the Republicrats are doing everything possible to undermine work opportunities for American citizens. Why?

As is obvious for most of us, the Republicrats no longer represent the interests of American citizens. The reelection rate for Congressional incumbents hovers around 98%. Incumbents have a huge advantage because they are in a position to solicit bribes.

Republicrats take their orders from a global elite that bankrolls their perpetual reelection. Having fewer and lower paying jobs in America serves a number of items on that elite’s agenda. That agenda revolves around creating the conditions for global government.

FEWER JOBS=LOWER STANDARD OF LIVING

Obviously, fewer and lower paying jobs for Americans will result in Americans having a lower standard of living.

Elites believe that a uniform standard of living for all the peoples of the world is a precondition to global government.

This goal requires that countries with lower standards of living be raised and that countries with higher standards of living be lowered.

After W.W.II, the United States had the highest standard of living in the world. In order to make global living standards uniform, the American standard of living has to be lowered.

Some find it hard to believe that government is trying to lower the standard of living. Yet the idea of equalizing national standards of living was being discussed almost sixty years ago.

Back in 1947, the great Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek expressed skepticism about the "great deal of muddleheaded talk about planning to equalize standards of life" throughout the world. Von Hayek, who won a Nobel prize in 1974, scoffed at the notion that "European races would voluntarily submit to their standard of life and rate of progress being determined by a World Parliament."

It’s looking like he overestimated us.

FEWER JOBS=LOWER BIRTH RATE

Elites realize that unemployment lowers the birthrate. Younger people who are jobless believe they can’t afford to have children. So they don’t.

For example, the European nations with the highest youth unemployment rates also have the lowest birthrates. http://www.techcentralstation.com/012705D.html A recent study concluded that Australia’s perilously low birth rate was caused by fear of unemployment.

Lowering the birthrate in the nations of Europe and North America has been a primary objective of elite planners since the end of W.W.II. This depopulation imperative accounts for their coordinated and intense effort to legalize abortion and homosexuality in those countries.

In countries that have higher standards of living, lowering the birthrate reduces the number of people who are born into that higher standard of living. That makes it easier for elites to equalize standards of living around the world, since there are relatively fewer people whose standard of living needs to be lowered.

FEWER JOBS=FEWER CHRISTIANS

Elites believe that lowering the birth rates in the Christian nations of Europe and North America today will result in fewer Christians being around tomorrow.

DeChristianizing the United States has been a top priority for the global elite since the end of W.W.II.

The deChristianization imperative is being carried out by America’s judicial dictatorship, which since 1947 has been mandating a "separation of Church and State" that finds no mention in the Constitution.

The deChristianization imperative was also implemented in the 1965 "Immigration Reform Act", that abolished quotas on non-European, non-Christian immigration.

Moving jobs out of the United States is yet another nail in what elites hope will be a coffin for Christian America.

The jobs that are vanishing from America do not disappear. Most of them are being moved to China and India, two nations on track to become the political and economic powers of the 21st Century.

Is it a coincidence that elites are moving the productive capacity of the United States - and the jobs that go with it - to the two most populous non-Christian nations on earth?

Or does that decision represent just another item checked off on the elite’s anti-American, anti-Christian agenda?

Conclusion

If you or someone you know is dealing with unemployment, you owe it to yourself to get the facts and understand the reasons why. More than just American jobs is at stake. Global elites and their federal government lackeys are doing everything possible to destroy America as a Christian nation.

For any part of our nation to be salvaged, Christians will have to abandon "politics as usual" and prepare to fight and survive.