The Ominous Parallels

The Military Industrial Complex Government Staff :o

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:48:00 +0000

By Anonymous :o - Posting #195

Members of US Government Connected To The Top 5 Company's of the Military Industrial Complex

The People: David Kay "Honorable Mention"

Rozanne L. Ridgway Asst. Secy. of State for Europe, 1985-89
James O. Ellis, Jr. C-in-C of US Strategic Command, 2001-02
John T. Chain C-in-C, Strategic Air Command, 1986-91
Charles R. Larson C-in-C, US Pacific Command, 1991-94
Walter F. Doran C-in-C, US Pacific Fleet, 2002-05
Thomas Pickering Career US Ambassador
Nicholas D. Chabraja CEO of General Dynamics
James R. Mellor CEO of General Dynamics, 1994-97
Lester Crown CEO of Henry Crown & Co.
Vance D. Coffman CEO of Lockheed Martin, 1998-2004
Douglas C. Yearley CEO of Phelps Dodge, 1989-99
Kenneth C. Dahlberg CEO of SAIC
Richard Myers Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2001-05
Carlisle Trost Chief of Naval Operations, 1986-90
John Deutch CIA Director, 1995-96
Lester L. Lyles Commander, USAF Materiel Command, 2000-03
Gwendolyn S. King Commissioner of Social Security, 1989-92
Norm Mineta Congressman from California, 1975-95
Vic Fazio Congressman from California, 1979-99
Robert F. Ellsworth Congressman from Kansas, 1961-67
Robin Beard Congressman from Tennessee, 1973-83
John N. McMahon Deputy Director CIA, 1982-86
James Comey Deputy US Attorney General, 2003-05
William J. Haynes II DOD General Counsel, 2001-08
Joseph J. Sisco Kissinger's Mideast Deputy
William O. Studeman NSA Director, 1988-92
Vannevar Bush Pre-internet visionary
Ken Duberstein Reagan's Chief of Staff, 1988-89
William R. Spivey Retired AT&T executive
Robert Walmsley Retired Royal Navy Admiral
Thomas A. Corcoran Senior Advisor, Carlyle Group
Walter M. Oliver Senior VP at General Dynamics
George A. Joulwan Supreme Allied Commander, 1993-97
Joseph W. Ralston Supreme Allied Commander, 2000-03
Lawrence J. Korb The Joint Chiefs of Staff
Pete Aldridge Under Secretary of Defense, 2001-03
Theodore L. Eliot, Jr. US Ambassador to Afghanistan, 1973-78
L. Craig Johnstone US Ambassador to Algeria, 1985-88
Barbara M. Barrett US Ambassador to Finland
John B. Craig US Ambassador to Oman, 1998-2001
John M. Keane US Army Vice Chief of Staff, 1999-2003
Jay L. Johnson US Chief of Naval Operations, 1996-2000
Vernon E. Clark US Chief of Naval Operations, 2000-05
James M. Loy US Coast Guard Commandant, 1998-2002
Gordon R. England US Deputy Secretary of Defense
Richard Armitage US Deputy Secretary of State, 2001-05
James Thomas Lynn US HUD Secretary, 1973-75
James L. Jones US National Security Advisor, 2009-10
William J. Crowe, Jr. US Navy Admiral
William M. Daley US Secretary of Commerce, 1997-2000
Frank Carlucci US Secretary of Defense, 1987-89
Michael W. Wynne US Secretary of the Air Force, 2005-08
Donald C. Winter US Secretary of the Navy, 2006-09
Anthony J. Principi US Secretary of Veterans Affairs, 2001-05
Warren Rudman US Senator from New Hampshire, 1980-93
Carl E. Mundy, Jr. USMC Commandant, 1991-95
Eugene F. Murphy Vice Chairman of GE, 1997-99

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its "OUR" country!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References: Top Secret America

Washington Technology Top 100 US Defense Contractors (2011)

Weapons R Us: Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds

Behind The Pentagon’s Budget Cuts :o

Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense [.pdf]

SAIC - The one "They" don't talk about :o SAholesIC

Boeing

General Dynamics

Lockheed Martin

Northrop Grumman

Raytheon

The FBIdiot's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" FOIA Files

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:11:00 +0000

By Jason Leopold - Posting #194 :o

Have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and received a written response from the agency stating that it could not locate records responsive to your request?

If so, there's a chance the FBI may have found some documents, but for unknown reasons, the agency's FOIA analysts determined it was not responsive and "blackballed" the file, crucial information the FBI withholds from a requester when it issues a "no records" response.

The FBI's practice of "blackballing" files has never been publicly disclosed before. With the exception of one open government expert, a half-dozen others contacted by Truthout said they were unfamiliar with the process of "blackballing" and had never heard of the term.

Trevor Griffey learned about "blackballing" last year when he filed a FOIA/Privacy Act request with the FBI to determine whether Manning Marable, a Columbia University professor who founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, sought the FBI's files on Malcolm X under FOIA. At the time of his death last April, Marable had just finished writing an exhaustive biograph y on the late civil rights activist. Griffey filed the FOIA hoping he would receive records to assist him with research related to a long-term civil rights project he has been working on.

In a letter the agency sent in response to his FOIA, the FBI told Griffey that it could not locate "main file records" on Marable responsive to his request. Last November, in response to a FOIA request Truthout filed with the FBI for a wide-range of documents on the Occupy Wall Street, the agency also said it was unable to "identify main file records responsive to [our] FOIA," despite the fact that internal FBI documents related to the protest movement had already been posted on the Internet. The FBI has been criticized in the past for responding to more than half of the FOIA requests the agency had received by claiming it could not locate responsive files.

Griffey, who also teaches US history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is co-editor of the book, "Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action and the Construction Industry," was baffled. He found it difficult to believe that Marable would not have filed a FOIA for Malcolm X's FBI file. So, he sent an email to an FBI FOIA analyst asking for clarification.

The FBI FOIA analyst responded to Griffey in an email, asking him to supply additional "keywords" to assist in a search of the agency's main file records for documents on Marable responsive to his FOIA request. The analyst then disclosed to Griffey, perhaps mistakenly, that a search for previous requests for records on Marable turned up a single file that was "blackballed" per the agency's "standard operating procedure."

So last May, Griffey again turned to FOIA, this time to try and gain insight into the blackballing process. He filed a FOIA request with the FBI seeking a copy of the agency's standard operating procedure for "blackballing" files.

Two months later, he received five pages from an untitled and undated PowerPoint presentation that outlined procedures for blackballing files from FOIA requests. The FBI cited three exemptions under the law to justify withholding a complete and unredacted copy of the PowerPoint:

(b)(6) Personnel and medical files and similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

(b)(7) Records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information:

C. Could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy;

E. Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law ...

Griffey appealed the FBI's decision to withhold information contained in the PowerPoint under the (b)(7)(E) exemption, but it was denied.

Still, the PowerPoint pages the FBI did turn over to Griffey provide insight into the "blackballing" process. On a page titled, "Blackball Files," it says files identified as 190 and 197 "main files," which are FBI classifications pertaining to FOIA/Privacy Act requests for files on people and civil litigation, are blackballed unless "specifically ask[ed] for" by the requester when an initial FOIA request is made.

Moreover, the agency deems certain "control files," "separate files which relate to a specific matter and is used as an administrative means of managing, or 'controlling' a certain program or investigative matter," that pop up and are unresponsive to a FOIA to be ripe for blackballing. However, a FOIA analyst must first get permission from a supervisor before a "control file" can be blackballed.

Finally, according to the PowerPoint, some files are automatically blackballed by an FBI FOIA analyst, but the public is not permitted to know the classification of files that fall into that category because the FBI redacted that part of the PowerPoint, claiming disclosure would reveal "techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations and procedures."

"Not only are we not told when the FBI withholds material from FOIA requests, but we are not even allowed to know all of the kinds of material it withholds," Griffey told Truthout. "The law itself and not just its enforcement, is now effectively secret."

But Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman, told Truthout in an interview that "blackballing" is not about secrecy nor is the process used in any way to conceal responsive records, which the Justice Department revealed it has been doing for more than two decades in certain cases.

"Blackball is a term of art used by the [FBI's] FOIA section people in the records management division," he said. "It's an unfortunate term. It applies to people and events. It means that we pulled a file that initially looked responsive but after a review it turned out it wasn't because the file didn't match the requesters' specific request" for records.

Carter sent Truthout an email that contained an explanation of the blackballing process as provided to him by Dennis Argall, the assistant section chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section, FBI's Records Management Division:

"[B]lackball" is a term we typically use to describe a file (not a request) that initially looked responsive but upon review we find it's for a different guy or event. It can also be used to describe a file that we won't process because, i.e., a guy makes a request for his "FBI file" in 2005 and [we] process it for him. When he makes another request for his "FBI file" in 2011, we will only process his "records" but will not process the file that was created to respond to the 2005 FOIA request, which is 190 file series [the classification the FBI uses for files requested on people].

That's exactly how the FBI described the blackballing process to attorney Kel McClanahan, executive director of Arlington, Virginia-based National Security Counselors, a public interest law firm.

McClanahan told Truthout in an email interview that he first learned about blackballing when the term was used in a set of FBI "processing notes" he requested from the agency to determine how FBI FOIA analysts had handled one of his FOIA requests.

Although McClanahan believes there is "definitely a place for blackballing in the FOIA process" he said the way the FBI "does blackballing leaves a lot to be desired."

"First of all, even though [the FBI] may blackball 50 records and release 3, they never tell the requester about the 50," McClanahan said, hitting on Griffey's main complaint about blackballing. "They never mention word one about 'and we found other records that we deemed non-responsive.' The requester is left to wonder why the FBI only found 3 records about the subject in question and he will never know that they found 50 others that they ultimately deemed non-responsive unless he has the foresight to FOIA the FBI's processing notes for his request. Knowledge like that is very important when a requester is trying to decide whether or not to tie up [the FBI's Office of Information Policy] with an administrative appeal, let alone litigation."

McClanahan said his concerns would largely be addressed if the FBI "only blackballed records for good reasons."

"If I could trust the FBI only to blackball things that were clearly non-responsive, I don't need to know that they found completely unrelated records," he added. "However, that's not what the FBI does. I have seen it blackball records because they 'weren't FBI records,' even though they were in FBI files (they were FBI copies of other agencies' records, which any FOIA person worth his salt knows are still responsive to a FOIA request made to FBI). I've seen it blackball records because the request asked for 'internal FBI records' and the records in question were sent outside of the FBI, based on a strained interpretation of the word 'internal.'"

The FBI will be forced to make a choice "if it wants to apply FOIA correctly," McClanahan said.

"The agency can either limit its blackballing to records that nobody would think are responsive (e.g. different people with the same name, records outside a set time frame); or it can tell requesters in the administrative stage that it determined that certain records were non-responsive and why," he said. "Failing to do either, however, is bad FOIA."

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its "OUR" country!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References:

Trevor Griffey

Manning http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifMarable

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Pacific Northwest. Labor and Civil Rights Projects

FBI Claims It Does Not Have Any Documents on Occupy Wall Street

Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD

2009 Rosemary Award for Worst FOIA Performance Goes to FBI

Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry

Is The File A Blackball File?

FOIA Exemptions

§ 552. Public Information; Agency Rules, Opinions

Current FBI File Classification List

What Do They "Think" They Know About You?

DOJ Lies about Its FOIA Lies

National Security Counselors

The Real Terrorits - Assassination of a Iranian Nuclear Scientist

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:42:00 +0000

By Finian Cunningham - Posting #193

It’s not just an act of war; it’s a taunt for response

The US covert war against Iran raised the stakes even higher today with the assassination of yet another nuclear scientist, with some analysts saying that the Islamic Republic is being pushed into a corner to either back down in its confrontation with the US or retaliate – the latter most certainly triggering an all-out war.

Thirty-two-year-old chemical engineer Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was inside his small Peugeot car when two assailants on motorbike rode up alongside and planted a magnetic bomb on his vehicle in the capital, Tehran. The scientist was killed instantly by the explosion. His driver died later from injuries. And elderly bystander was also killed in the attack.

Roshan was head of technical procurements at Iran’s first uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. His killing bears all the hallmarks of a targeted assassination by foreign covert military agents. Iranian state-owned media and parliamentarians immediately denounced “Mossad”, “Zionists” and the Western proxy-terrorist group, the Mujahedine-e Khalq Organisation (MKO), for having a role in the murder.

Such involvement is likely true, but ultimately the author must have been Washington. None of the groups would dare carry out this high-profile hit without clearance from handlers in Washington. Noticeably, Iranian sources shied away from articulating this obvious conclusion, perhaps realizing the gravity of the consequences.

For the past two years at least it is an open secret that Washington (along with British MI6, Mossad and local proxies) has been orchestrating a campaign of terrorist subversion in Iran – the ultimate aim being to overthrow the 33-year-old Islamic Republic, which replaced the West’s favourite client, the Shah of Iran in 1979. This is the real reason for the contrived confrontation over Iran’s nuclear activities.

Dozens of Iranian scientists, engineers and academics have either been abducted or assassinated by US-led covert ops. Most of them have been closely involved in Iran’s nuclear research. Two years ago, Professor Massoud Ali Mohammed was killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle exploded outside his home in Tehran. Last year, in an attack identical to the latest, nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari was murdered when motorcyclists planted magnetic bombs on his car. Another scientist, Fereydoun Abbassi, who is now head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, was seriously wounded in a simultaneous attack.

On 12 November last year, a massive explosion ripped through a military installation at Bid Kaneh, near Tehran, killing 17 personnel, including Brigadier Hassan Moghadam who is believed to have been a senior missile technician. In that attack, there is suspicion that the explosive payload may have been fired from a CIA aerial drone. Then two weeks later, another explosion hit a nuclear facility in Isfahan, Western Iran.

Combined with CIA cyber-attacks on Iranian research networks and increasing drone incursions into Iranian territory, it is clear that the cold-blooded murder of the country’s nuclear experts is part of a deliberate cover campaign of terrorist subversion – orchestrated by Washington.

The latest assassination in Tehran comes only two days after an Iranian court sentenced a former US marine to death after he was convicted of operating in Iran as a CIA spy. That announcement provoked condemnation from the White House and an irate response in the American media. A US state department spokeswoman lashed out at the Iranian regime accusing it of committing routine political abductions of American citizens.

The details on the convicted man, Amir Mirzae Hekmati (28) from Flint, Michigan, seem murky. But it appears that he was given due process since his arrest in August, including access to a lawyer. He has 20 days to appeal the verdict. It should be noted that three other American citizens arrested previously in Iran on suspicion of espionage were eventually released by the Iranian authorities. It has been mooted that the government in Tehran released those detainees as a gesture for diplomatic dialogue with the Obama administration. The rebuff from Washington may have hardened Tehran to push for the full prosecution in the case of Hekmati.

But the wider context is the concerted efforts by Washington to overthrow the Islamic Republic’s government headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The sentencing of Hekmati is another twist in the spiraling tensions between Iran and the US and its Western allies – tensions that have escalated because of relentless Western aggression over unsubstantiated claims about Iran’s nuclear programme. According to Tehran and undisputed by countless UN inspections, Iran’s nuclear programme is for civilian energy and medical applications and is legitimately within the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

With tightening US-led sanctions bearing down on Iran’s Central Bank and oil industry, the naval war of nerves in the Strait of Hormuz, and the constantly amplified, provocative threats of pre-emptive military strikes against Iran, it is any wonder that Tehran needs to show defiance and assert its sovereign rights with regards to foreign nationals suspected of covert operations.

However, in the climate of hostility, any such move by Tehran is immediately portrayed as a provocation – just as its warning was last week over the closing of territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz to oil trans-shipments if the West proceeds with sanctions. If the murder of the Iranian scientist is a US strike over the sentencing of the alleged CIA spy, then the Iranians are being told that they have no room for manoeuvre – even when the manoeuvre is covered by a claim to sovereign rights.

It seems that the near decade-long Western confrontation with Iran has now shifted gear to an irrevocable vicious cycle where war is all but inevitable.

The latest murder of a senior Iranian scientist seems to be a trenchant ultimatum dispatched from Washington to Iran. The assassination campaign on Iranian territory against its citizens and scientific experts is not just as an act of war. It is a premeditated taunt for a response.

Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa correspondent cunninghamfinian@gmail.com

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its "OUR" country!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References:

[1] Iran and the Terrorism Game

[2] 'Terrorism, Ductile Term For Israel, US'

[3] 'Nuclear assassinations disgrace IAEA'

[4] War Plan Iran: The US Finally Admits Its Criminal Bankruptcy

[5] The Next War on Washington’s Agenda

[6] UK, Israel 'Share' Iran Terror Agenda?

[7] 'Marines Urinating on Taliban' - Behavior Of Terrorists

[8] BFP - “Heroes” – A Poem by Gary Corseri

What's Really Behind The U.S. Sword Rattling With Iran ? ? ?

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:01:00 +0000

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya - Posting #192

Would the US be defeated in the Persian Gulf in a War with Iran?

Providing precious insight into the dynamics around the Iran-US standoff playing out in the strategically crucial Strait of Hormuz, Nazemroaya describes a situation that inevitably brings to mind the story of David and Goliath. With geography and international law standing resolutely on the side of Iran, we may be in store for a similarly amazing ending.

After years of U.S. threats, Iran has started to take very public steps to demonstrate that it is willing and capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz. On December 24, 2011 Iran started its Velayat-90 naval drills in and around the Strait of Hormuz and extending from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman (Oman Sea) to the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea in the Indian Ocean. Since these drills took place there has been a growing war of words between Washington and Tehran. Nothing the Obama Administration or the Pentagon had done or said deterred Tehran from continuing the naval drills.

The Geo-Political Nature of the Strait of Hormuz

Besides the fact that it is a vital transit point for global energy resources and a strategic chokepoint, two additional things should be noted in regards to the Strait of Hormuz’s relationship to Iran. The first point is about the geography of the Strait of Hormuz. The second point is about the role of Iran in co-managing the strategic strait on the basis of international law and its sovereign rights.

The maritime traffic that goes through the Strait of Hormuz has always been in contact with Iranian naval forces, which are predominately composed of the Iranian Regular Force Navy and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy. In fact, Iranian naval forces monitor and police the Strait of Hormuz along with the Sultanate of Oman via the Omani enclave of Musandam. More importantly, to go through the Strait of Hormuz all maritime traffic, including the U.S. Navy, sails through Iranian territory. No country can enter the Persian Gulf and transit the Strait of Hormuz without sailing through Iranian waters and territory. Almost all entrances into the Persian Gulf are made through Iranian waters and most exits are through Omani waters.

Iran allows foreign ships to use its territorial waters in good faith and on the basis of Part III of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea’s maritime transit passage provisions that stipulate that vessels are free to sail through the Strait of Hormuz and similar bodies of water on the basis of speedy and continuous navigation between an open port and the high seas. Although Tehran in custom follows the navigation practices of the Law of the Sea, Tehran is not legally bound by them. Like Washington, Tehran signed this international treaty, but never ratified it.

American-Iranian Tensions in the Persian Gulf

Now the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) is re-evaluating the use of Iranian waters at the Strait of Hormuz. Legislation is being proposed by Iranian parliamentarians to block any foreign warships from being able to use Iranian territorial waters to navigate through the Strait of Hormuz without Iranian permission; the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee is currently studying legislating this as an official Iranian posture on the basis of Iranian strategic interests and national security. [1]

On December 30, 2011, the U.S.S. John C. Stennis passed through the area where Iran was conducting its naval drills. The Commander of the Iranian Regular Forces, Major-General Ataollah Salehi, advised the U.S.S. John C. Stennis and other U.S. Navy vessels not to return to the Persian Gulf while Iran was doing its drills, saying that Iran is not in the habit of repeating a warning twice. [2] Shortly after the stern Iranian warning to Washington, the Pentagon’s press secretary responded by making a statement saying: “No one in this government seeks confrontation [with Iran] over the Strait of Hormuz. It’s important to lower the temperature.” [3]

In an actual scenario of military conflict with Iran it is very likely that U.S. aircraft carriers would actually operate from outside of the Persian Gulf and from the southern Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Unless the missile systems that Washington is erecting in the petro-sheikhdoms of the southern Persian Gulf are fully capable and active, the deployment of large U.S. warships may be unlikely in the Persian Gulf. The reasons for this are tied to geographic realities and the defensive capabilities of Iran.

Geography is against the Pentagon: U.S. Naval Strength has limits in the Persian Gulf

U.S. naval strength, which predominately includes the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, essentially has primacy over all the other navies and maritime forces in the world. Its deep sea or oceanic capabilities are unparalleled or unmatched by any other naval power. Nevertheless, primacy does not mean invincibility. U.S. naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are very vulnerable to Iran.

Despite its might and shear strength, geography literally works against U.S. naval power in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. The relative narrowness of the Persian Gulf makes it like a channel, at least in a strategic and military context. Figuratively speaking, the aircraft carriers and warships of the U.S. are confined to narrow waters or are closed in within the coastal waters of the Persian Gulf.

This is where the Iranian military’s advanced missile capabilities come into play. The Iranian missile and torpedo arsenal would make short work of U.S. naval assets in the waters of the Persian Gulf where U.S. vessels are constricted. This is why the U.S. has been busily erecting a missile shield system in the Persian Gulf amongst the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the last few years.

Even the small Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf, which appear pitiable and insignificant against a U.S. aircraft carrier or destroyer, threaten U.S. warships. Looks can be deceiving; these Iranian patrol boats can easily launch a barrage of missiles that could significantly damage and effectively sink large U.S. warships. Iranian small patrol boats are also hardly detectable and hard to target.

Iranian forces could also attack U.S. naval capabilities merely by launching missile attacks from the Iranian mainland on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf. Even in 2008 the Washington Institute for Near East Policy acknowledged the threat from Iran’s mobile coastal missile batteries, anti-ship missiles, and missile-armed small ships. [4] Other Iranian naval assets like aerial drones, hovercraft, mines, diver teams, and mini-submarines could also be used in asymmetrical naval warfare against the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Even the Pentagon’s own war simulations have shown that a war in the Persian Gulf with Iran would spell disaster for the United States and its military. One key example is the Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) war game in the Persian Gulf, which was conducted from July 24, 2002 to August 15, 2002 and took almost two years to prepare. This mammoth drill was amongst the largest and most expensive war games ever held by the Pentagon. Millennium Challenge 2002 was held shortly after the Pentagon had decided that it would continue the momentum of the war in Afghanistan by targeting Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and finishing off with the big prize of Iran in a broad military campaign to ensure U.S. primacy in the new millennium.

After Millennium Challenge 2002 was finished, the war game was presented as a simulation of a war against Iraq under the rule of President Saddam Hussein, but this cannot be true. [5] The U.S. had already made assessments for the upcoming Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Moreover, Iraq had no naval capabilities that would merit such large-scale use of the U.S. Navy.

Millennium Challenge 2002 was conducted to simulate a war with Iran, which was codenamed “Red” and referred to as an unknown Middle Eastern rogue enemy state in the Persian Gulf. Other than Iran, no other country could meet the perimeters and characteristics of “Red” and its military forces, from the patrol boats to the motorcycle units. The war simulation took place because Washington was planning on attacking Iran soon after invading Iraq in 2003.

The scenario in the 2002 war game started with the U.S., codenamed “Blue,” giving Iran a one-day ultimatum to surrender in the year 2007. The war game’s date of 2007 would chronologically correspond to U.S. plans to attack Iran after the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, which was suppose to expand into a broader war against Syria too. The war against Lebanon, however, did not go as planned and the U.S. and Israel realized that if Hezbollah could challenge them in Lebanon then an expanded war with Syria and Iran would be a disaster.

In Millennium Challenge 2002’s war scenario, Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels – an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this happened in reality, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been dead after the attack within a single day. [6] Next, Iran would send its small patrol boats – the ones that look insignificant in comparison to the U.S.S. John C. Stennis and other large U.S. warships – to overwhelm the remainder of the Pentagon’s naval forces in the Persian Gulf, which would result in the damaging and sinking of most of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and the defeat of the United States. After the U.S. defeat, the war games were started over again, but “Red” had to operate under handicapping restraints so that U.S. forces would be allowed to emerge victorious from the drill. [7] This would hide the reality of the fact that the U.S. would be overwhelmed as an outcome of a conventional war with Iran in the Persian Gulf.

Hence, the formidable naval power of Washington is handicapped by geography coupled with Iranian military capabilities when it comes to fighting Tehran in the Persian Gulf or even in much of the Gulf of Oman. Without open waters, like in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. will have to fight under significantly reduced response times and, more importantly, will not be able to fight from a stand-off (militarily safe) distance. Thus, entire tool boxes of U.S. naval defensive systems, which were designed for combat in open waters using stand-off ranges, are rendered unpractical in the Persian Gulf.

Making the Strait of Hormuz Redundant to Weaken Iran?

The entire world knows the importance of the Strait of Hormuz and Washington and its allies are very well aware that the Iranians can militarily close it for a significant period of time. This is why the U.S. has been working with the GCC countries – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the U.A.E. – to re-route their oil through pipelines bypassing the Strait of Hormuz and channelling GCC oil directly to the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, or Mediterranean Sea. Washington has also been pushing Iraq to seek alternative routes in talks with Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Both Israel and Turkey have also been very interested in this strategic project. Ankara has had discussions with Qatar about setting up an oil terminal that would reach Turkey via Iraq. The Turkish government has attempted to get Iraq to link its southern oil fields, like Iraq’s northern oil fields, to the transit routes running through Turkey. This is all tied to Turkey’s visions of being an energy corridor and important lynchpin of transit.

The aims of re-routing oil away from the Persian Gulf would remove an important element of strategic leverage Iran has against Washington and its allies. It would effectively reduce the importance of the Strait of Hormuz. It could very well be a prerequisite to war preparations and a war led by the United States against Tehran and its allies.

It is within this framework that the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline or the Hashan-Fujairah Oil Pipeline is being fostered by the United Arab Emirates to bypass the maritime route in the Persian Gulf going through the Strait of Hormuz. The project design was put together in 2006, the contract was issued in 2007, and construction was started in 2008. [8] This pipeline goes straight from Abdu Dhabi to the port of Fujairah on the shore of the Arabian Sea. In other words it will give oil exports from the U.A.E. direct access to the Indian Ocean. It has openly been presented as a means to ensure energy security by bypassing Hormuz and attempting to avoid the Iranian military. Along with the construction of this pipeline, the erection of a strategic oil reservoir at Fujairah was also envisaged to also maintain the flow of oil to the international market should the Persian Gulf be closed off. [9]

Aside from the Petroline (East-West Saudi Pipeline), Saudi Arabia has also been looking at alternative transit routes and examining the ports of it southern neighbours in the Arabian Peninsula, Oman and Yemen. The Yemenite port of Mukalla on the shores of the Gulf of Aden has been of particular interest to Riyadh. In 2007, Israeli sources reported with some fanfare that a pipeline project was in the works that would connect the Saudi oil fields with Fujairah in the U.A.E., Muscat in Oman, and finally to Mukalla in Yemen. The reopening of the Iraq-Saudi Arabia Pipeline (IPSA), which was ironically built by Saddam Hussein to avoid the Strait of Hormuz and Iran, has also been a subject of discussion for the Saudis with the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

If Syria and Lebanon were converted into Washington’s clients, then the defunct Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) could also be reactivated, along with other alternative routes going from the Arabian Peninsula to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea via the Levant. Chronologically, this would also fit into Washington’s efforts to overrun Lebanon and Syria in an attempt to isolate Iran before any possible showdown with Tehran.

The Iranian Velayat-90 naval drills, which extended in close proximity to the entrance of the Red Sea in the Gulf of Aden off the territorial waters of Yemen, also took place in the Gulf of Oman facing the coast of Oman and the eastern shores of the United Arab Emirates. Amongst other things, Velayat-90 should be understood as a signal that Tehran is ready to operate outside of the Persian Gulf and can even strike or block the pipelines trying to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Geography again is on Iran’s side in this case too. Bypassing the Strait of Hormuz still does not change the fact that most of the oil fields belonging to GCC countries are located in the Persian Gulf or near its shores, which means they are all situated within close proximity to Iran and therefore close Iranian striking distance. Like in the case of the Hashan-Fujairah Pipeline, the Iranians could easily disable the flow of oil from the point of origin. Tehran could launch missile and aerial attacks or deploy its ground, sea, air, and amphibious forces into these areas as well. It does not necessarily need to block the Strait of Hormuz; after all preventing the flow of energy is the main purpose of the Iranian threats.

The American-Iranian Cold War

Washington has been on the offensive against Iran using any means at its disposal. The tensions over the Strait of Hormuz and in the Persian Gulf are just one front in a dangerous multi-front regional cold war between Tehran and Washington in the broader Middle East. Since 2001, the Pentagon has also been restructuring its military to wage unconventional wars with enemies like Iran. [10] Nonetheless, geography has always worked against the Pentagon and the U.S. has not found a solution for its naval dilemma in the Persian Gulf. Instead of a conventional war, Washington has had to resort to waging a covert, economic, and diplomatic war against Iran.

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its "OUR" country!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References: Sanctions Do More Harm Than Good

1] Fars News Agency, “Foreign Warships Will Need Iran’s Permission to Pass through Strait of Hormoz,” January 4, 2011.

[2] Fars News Agency, “Iran Warns US against Sending Back Aircraft Carrier to Persian Gulf,” January 4, 2011.

[3] Parisa Hafezi, “Iran threatens U.S. Navy as sanctions hit economy,” Reuters, January 4, 2012.

[4] Fariborz Haghshenass, “Iran’s Asymmetric Naval Warfare,” Policy Focus, no.87 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, September 2010).

[5] Julian Borger, “Wake-up call,” The Guardian, September 6, 2002.

[6] Neil R. McCown, Developing Intuitive Decision-Making In Modern Military Leadership (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College, October 27, 2010), p.9.

[7] Sean D. Naylor, “War games rigged? General says Millennium Challenge ‘02 ‘was almost entirely scripted,’” Army Times, April 6, 2002.

[8] Himendra Mohan Kumar, “Fujairah poised to become oil export hub,” Gulf News, June 12, 2011.

[9] Ibid.

[10] John Arquilla, “The New Rules of War,” Foreign Policy, 178 (March-April, 2010): pp.60-67.

[11] Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline - Link (B) (C)

[12] Kazakh-China Pipeline - Link (B) (C) :o

[13] Habshan-Fujairah Oil Pipeline - Link (B)

[14] Petroline (East-West Saudi Pipeline)

[15] Iraq-Saudi Arabia Pipeline (IPSA) - Link (B)

[16] Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) - Link (B)

[17] Pipeline projects in the Middle East

[18] Persian Gulf Oil & Gas Exports Fact Sheet

[19] All Active and Planned Pipelines in Middle East and Africa

New York Times Misleads On Iran's Nuclear Program

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:32:00 +0000

By Judy Miller - Posting #191 - The Obama Deception

Weapons Of Mass Deception

It's deja vu all over again. AIPAC is trying to trick America into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party's colonial ambitions, and the New York Times is misleading its readers about allegations that said country is developing "weapons of mass destruction."

In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 ("Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil"), this paragraph appeared:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign. [my emphasis]

The claim that there is "a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective" is not true.

As Washington Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton noted on December 9,

But the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.

Indeed, if you try now to find the offending paragraph on the New York Times website, you can't. They took it down. But there is no note, like there is supposed to be, acknowledging that they changed the article, and that there was something wrong with it before. Sneaky, huh?

But you can still find the original here.

Indeed, at this writing, if you go to the New York Times website, and search on the phrase, "military objective," the article pops right up. But if you open the article, the text is gone. But again, there is no explanatory note saying that they changed the text.

This is not an isolated example in the Times' reporting. The very same day -- January 4 -- the New York Times published another article, attributed to Clifford Krauss ("Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz "), that contained the following paragraph.

Various Iranian officials in recent weeks have said they would blockade the strait, which is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, if the United States and Europe imposed a tight oil embargo on their country in an effort to thwart its development of nuclear weapons. [my emphasis]

At this writing, that text is still on the New York Times website.

Of course, referring to Iran's "development of nuclear weapons" without qualification implies that it is a known fact that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But it is not a known fact. It is an allegation. Indeed, when U.S. officials are speaking publicly for the record, they say the opposite.

As Washington Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton noted on December 9,

This is what the U.S. director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March: "We continue to assess [that] Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

To demand a correction, you can write to the New York Times here. To write a letter to the editor, you can write to the New York Times here. To complain to the New York Times' Public Editor, you write him here.

UPDATE: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has an alert here.

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its "OUR" country!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References: The Manipulation of Fear

Imminent Iran Nuclear Threat? A Timeline Of Warnings Since 1979

Why Is Britain Ramping Up Sanctions Against Iran?

Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: Bush’s “big lie” and the crisis of American imperialism

Getting Ahead Of The Facts On Iran

Europe Nears Embargo On Iran Oil

Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz

NYT Misleads Readers on Iran Crisis

The Small World of 9/11 Players: LS2, Vidient and AMEC

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:01:00 +0000

By Kevin Ryan - Posting #190 - Awesome Mr. Ryan !!!

Detailed investigation reveals unexpected connections among people who played critical roles related to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Earlier articles have covered some of those connections with respect to the World Trade Center (WTC) and the official reports which were produced to explain the WTC events.[1] This article will begin to outline a wider set of connections that encompasses more aspects of 9/11. Readers may find that, with respect to the 9/11 attacks and those who were responsible for protecting us from terrorism, it is a small world after all.

Barry McDaniel came to the WTC security company Stratesec, in 1998, to become its Chief Operating Officer. In the years before 9/11, Stratesec had contracts to provide security services not only for the WTC, but also for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes hijacked on 9/11, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off that day.

At the WTC, McDaniel was in charge of the security operation in terms of what he called a “completion contract,” to provide services “up to the day the buildings fell down.”[2] McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business “in an area the Navy called Black Projects,” or budgets that were kept secret.[3]

The company that McDaniel now leads is called Lancaster Systems & Solutions (LS2). As CEO at LS2, McDaniel has a board of directors which is led by Bruce Bradley.[4] This is an astounding connection due to the fact that Bradley is the founder of Bradley Woods, where Dick Cheney got his start. Cheney worked for Bradley Woods as Vice President during intermittent periods between the times he and Donald Rumsfeld were working for Nixon and running the Ford White House.

It seems an incredible coincidence that the “number two” man for Barry McDaniel today was formerly the closest of colleague of Dick Cheney forty years ago. Of course, people who have studied the attacks in detail no longer believe in coincidences related to 9/11.

It is also odd that LS2 is a company that is so focused on the “response” to 9/11. In fact, few companies are more focused on the 9/11 aftermath than LS2, whose mission is to “deliver a diversified suite of responsive defense solutions to government organizations and multinational corporations who provide military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and emergency response operations across the globe.”[5] The company’s subsidiary, Global Service and Trade, provides equipment for police state operations around the world.

Between the years that he worked with Cheney and McDaniel, Bradley was a director for UBS (mentioned in the review of WTC connections) and Legg Mason, where he was a colleague of Cheryl Krongard, the wife of CIA Executive Director, Buzzy Krongard.

The board of directors which Bradley leads for McDaniel at LS2 includes another former VP of BDM, Ronald Riggin, and several other very interesting people. One such person is Larry Johnson, a former CIA employee and State Department official. Johnson was a paramilitary CIA officer from 1985 to 1989, but he also directed crisis management for hijackings and helped investigate the Lockerbie Bombing (Pan Am 103).

In 1994, Johnson started scripting Special Operations exercises for the State Department. From 1996 to 2006, as Deputy Director of Counterterrorism within the State Department, he led terrorism training for senior-level government officials and served as an expert witness in cases against al Qaeda suspects.[6]

Another director working with Bradley and McDaniel at LS2 is David Pillor, the former director and Executive VP of InVision Technologies (InVision). As the leading provider of bomb detecting equipment for airports, InVision had an interesting history which included installation of its equipment at most major airports prior to 9/11, including those from which the hijacked planes took off.

Sergio Magistri was the CEO of InVision from 1992 through 2004. In a court case related to this period, InVision was charged “with authorizing improper payments to foreign government officials in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).”[7] The case represented the first, and perhaps only, time that the U.S. Department of Justice decided to not prosecute a company which had violated the FCPA.

Magistri and LS2’s Pillor are now both board members at Vidient Systems, Inc (Vidient), a video surveillance company that serves the “homeland security” industry. Vidient is in strategic partnership with Autonomy Corp, where we find the “Prince of Darkness,” Richard Perle. Fellow directors at Vidient include several people who played critical roles related to the events of September 11.

One director at Vidient is Richard Clarke, the former “Counterterrorism Czar,” whose job for nine years prior to 9/11 was to protect the United States from a terrorist attack. There are many important questions that need to be answered regarding Clarke and his associations and actions leading up to 9/11.[8] Clarke’s role in the international failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is another matter that needs further investigation.[9]

At Vidient we also find The Lord Paul Condon. In September 2000, Condon became a director at the British security company, Securicor (now G4S). Three months later, in December 2000, Securicor bought a company called Argenbright which ran security on 9/11 at Dulles and Newark airports where Flight 77 and Flight 93, respectively, took off that day. Argenbright also managed some, perhaps unrelated, security checkpoints at Logan Airport in Boston, where the two other 9/11 planes took off.

The year before 9/11, Securicor was allowing criminals to operate security, and three of its executives pled guilty to conspiracy.[10] And prior to 9/11, Argenbright pled guilty to falsifying employee records so that it could hire those convicted of drug possession and assault.[11] These facts are startling considering that, just weeks after 9/11, officials were evaluating the possibility that the hijackings might have been “inside jobs” in that “the hijackers may have had accomplices deep within the ‘secure’ areas of airports.”[12]

Securicor faced about 30 lawsuits from victim’s families after 9/11. Another director that Condon supervised at Securicor, Trevor Dighton, said of the company’s liability – “I’m not worried about it (the litigation) one little bit. The two planes involved weren’t those that crashed into the towers – that’s the first thing.” Dighton’s confidence might have had something to do with his opinion of Condon, whom Dighton said was “brilliant and knows what he’s doing.”[13]

Vidient director Condon came to Securicor directly from having served as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London for seven years. Corruption was rampant in Condon’s police force during the time he led it.[14] Condon himself was accused of being a racist and of withholding evidence related to the death of Princess Diana. Although the official report on the racism accusations (The MacPherson Report) found that the police force that Condon led for years was “institutionally racist,” British Home Secretary Jack Straw refused to fire Condon.

Another Vidient director working with Pillor, Clarke and Condon is Michael Sheehan, the former U.S. State Department Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism. Sheehan was a long time member of the U.S. Army Special Forces. He also served on the National Security Council for two presidents, George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1992, and Clinton from 1995 to 1997. After 9/11, Sheehan became the Deputy Commissioner of Counter Terrorism for the New York City police department.

Today, Sheehan is primarily associated with Torch Hill Investments. Recently, Stephen Kappes, the “unusually powerful deputy CIA director” who was also the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence from 2000 to 2002, joined Torch Hill. When signing on with Sheehan, Kappes claimed that — “Many of the al-Qaeda seniors still maintain that another crippling blow to New York City will cripple the United States. They think that this is the key.”[15]

Hopefully, Kappes is not as good at predicting these things as Sheehan has been. After the bombing of the USS Cole, Sheehan asked Richard Clarke –“What’s it going to take to get them to hit al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al-Qaeda have to hit the Pentagon?”[16] That certainly seems like a prescient statement considering that, less than one year later, that was exactly what happened.

Speaking of the Pentagon, the little discussed British company called AMEC had some interesting personnel. It was AMEC’s subsidiary AMEC Construction NA that was responsible for reconstructing Wedge 1 of the Pentagon just before (and after) Flight 77 hit that exact spot in the building. AMEC Construction NA was also immediately hired to clean-up the WTC site at Ground Zero, within hours of the destruction there.[17]

The British parent company, AMEC, provides “engineering and project management services to the world’s energy, power and process industries.”[18] It is a major international player in the oil and gas industry, as well as in other natural resource industries. AMEC had a significant presence in Saudi Arabia dating back to the late 1970s, providing support to the national oil company Saudi Aramco, which is by far the richest company in the world.[19] Executives and board members at AMEC included former directors of NM Rothschild, Kellogg Brown and Root (now Halliburton), and SG Warburg.

AMEC Construction NA was run out of Toronto, Ontario by a man named Peter Janson. The company had offices in New York, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix.

From 1990 to 2001, Janson was a fellow director of Donald Rumsfeld at the Swiss-Swedish engineering company, ABB. For the 11 years prior to 9/11, Rumsfeld was the only American director at ABB. In an alarming turnabout, Rumsfeld helped ABB sell nuclear technology to North Korea in 2000 and, two years later, declared the same country a terrorist state and part of the “axis of evil.”[20]

Janson had been the president and CEO of an ABB predecessor, the Swedish company ASEA. Interestingly, ASEA had used the swastika as its company logo until the 1930s. Today, Janson is enjoying the fruits of the “War on Terror” as a director of Teekay Corporation, an oil and gas transport company that operates throughout the world. Additionally, he “reports to the Prime Minister of Canada in his role as a member of the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology.”[21]

There will be more about AMEC and the Pentagon renovation project in future articles, but it is sufficient to say that much has been left uncovered in the official investigations into 9/11. A simple review of the people whose roles were critical to the success of the attacks, and their associations before and after 9/11, brings to light surprising connections between companies that were responsible for security and construction, and the people most responsible for protecting the nation.

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its "OUR" country!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References:

[1] Kevin R. Ryan, “Demolition Access to the World Trade Center”

The Top Ten Connection Between NIST and Nanothermite,” Journal of 9/11 Studies

[2] History Commons page for Stratesec

[3] The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of The Carlyle Group p. 35.

[4] Website for LS2 A

[5]Website for LS2 B

[6] Website for Berg Associates, profile for Larry C. Johnson

[7] U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION, Litigation Release No. 19078

[8] Kevin R. Ryan, “Questions for Richard Clarke on COG, the UAE, and BCCI

[9] “9/11 Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke and the Rwandan Genocide

[10] Audrey Gillan and Stuart Millar, “Securicor could face legal claims over hijack airports

[11] Michele Orlecklin, “Airlines: Why Argenbright Sets Off Alarms”

[12] Sally Donnelly, “TIME Exclusive: An Inside Job?” Time, September 22, 2001,

[13] Tom Berry, “The Financial Director interview – Making crime pay,”

continued........###

Change We Can Believe In - Obama Signs The NDAA Act

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:37:00 +0000

By Huffington Post - Posting #189 - Happy New Year Amerika

Hitler's Reichstag speech promoting the bill:

The Enabling Act (German: Ermächtigungsgesetz) was passed by Germany's Reichstag and signed by President Paul von Hindenburg on March 23, 1933. It was the second major step, after the Reichstag Fire Decree, through which Chancellor Adolf Hitler legally obtained plenary powers and became Führer.

The Act granted the Cabinet the authority to enact laws without the participation of the Reichstag for four years. The formal name of the Enabling Act was Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (English: "Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation").

In "Parallel" with Nazi Gernmany the United States government has made into law the following Acts since 11 September 2001:

* The USA PATRIOT Act 2001

* The Military Commission Act 2006

* The John Warner Act 2007

* The Protect America Act of 2007

* National Defense Authorization Act 2011

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!....Its "OUR" country!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References: How Congress Has Signed Its Own Arrest Warrants in the NDAA Citizen Arrest Act

Who Voted Yes In Congress

Who Voted Yes In The Senate

United States Constitution

United States Bill of Rights

Legislation Related to the Attack of September 11, 2001

U.S. ANTI-TERRORISM LAWS

Top 10 Government Changes Since 9/11

Civil Liberties and the War on Terror: The First Decade (2009)

2011 Another Hard Year For Muslims in America

OLier Signs Defense Bill Despite 'Serious Disillusions'

9/11 Iran Charges, Tapestry of Lies - IRAQ WMD Replay

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:24:00 +0000

By PressTV - Posting #188

A senior US analyst believes Western media reports about Iran's complicity in the 9/11 terror attacks are nothing more than “a tapestry of recycled fabrications and distortions of fact from a bizarre cast of characters.”

In an article posted on Truthout, Gareth Porter said the story first published by the Associated Press on December 23, about Iran having assisted al-Qaeda in the planning of 9/11 attacks suffers on the side of evidence and witnesses.

“The lawyers" and the 'expert witnesses' behind the accusation of Iran in regard to 9/11 hoped to sell the press and public on recycled claims first made by Iranian defectors several years ago that they had personal knowledge of Iranian participation in the 9/11 plot,” he added.

Porter noted that the main body of evidence in the case has been provided by two allegedly defectors of Iran's intelligence apparatus, later identified as Abolqasem Mesbahi and Hamid Reza Zakeri.

Both of them, he adds, had tried to contact the US intelligence officials through the right-wing journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman, who is a brazen supporter of White House's neocon policies.

Mesbahi claimed to have inside information about Iranian involvement in the terrorist attacks and had tried to warn the US Embassy in Berlin but was “unsuccessful” in several attempts.

Later investigations, however, revealed that Mesbahi had no contact with high-level Iranian intelligence officials throughout the 1990s and later.

The FBI Hezbollah Office's James Bernazzani later noted that the Bureau considered Mesbahi as “someone who was desperate for money and ready to provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran.”

The second defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, claimed that he had been an officer of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and had provided security for a meeting at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001, attended by high-ranking Iran and al-Qaeda officials, including Osama bin Laden's son, Saad bin Laden.

He claimed that he had told the US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, on July 26, 2001, about the alleged meeting and had warned its officials about a possible plan by Iranians and al-Qaeda to attack some US targets on September 11, 2001.

The CIA officials, however, categorically denied that Zakeri had given any such warning to the embassy and called Zakeri “a fabricator of monumental proportions.” He also failed an FBI polygraph test in 2003.

According to Porter, the second area of weakness which further discredits the story about Iran's part in 9/11 attacks is composition of “expert witnesses” who were asked to judge the testimony of Iranian defectors.

They included Clare M. Lopez and Bruce Tefft, both former CIA covert operations case officers.
Both of them, Porter said, are also staunch advocates of neocon ideas who explicitly argue that there is a worldwide war against Islam.

“The most egregious allegations of Iranian complicity in 9/11 come from three former staff members of the 9/11 Commission - Daniel Byman, Dietrich Snell, and Janice Kephart,” he added.

They claimed that Iran has provided “material support” to al-Qaeda operatives by facilitating their passage through the country and failure to stamp their passports.

Contradicting their claims, Porter says, the 9/11 Commission report has noted on page 169 that the Iranian practice of not stamping visas directly into passports applied to everyone, not simply to al-Qaeda operatives.

The Commission report further acknowledged that there was no evidence of Iranian foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Therefore, the visa policy did not support the thesis that Iran provided “material support” for the al-Qaeda plot.

Refuting claims that Tehran provided a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda operatives, Porter said, Iran actually arrested 300 al-Qaeda operatives and gave a dossier with their names, passport pictures, and fingerprints to the United Nations while repatriating 200 of them to the new government in Afghanistan.

“One of the senior al-Qaeda detainees apparently detained by Iran during 2002-03 period, Saif al-Adel, later told a Jordanian journalist that Iran's operations against al-Qaeda had 'confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plans'” Porter added.

Wrapping up his analysis, Porter concluded that the only real effect of the case against Iran is to promote right-wing political myths about the country because in such cases, the witnesses are not subject to cross examination in court and, therefore, indulge in false testimony, knowing that there will be no one to challenge them.

He noted that “the ostensible purpose” of the case brought by families of 9/11 terror attack victims against Iran is to win compensation for alleged damages as has happened in many other cases where “default judgments” have been made against Iran by US courts.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References: BFP: Iraq Began with Big Lies; Ending with Big Lies; Never Forget

Perception Management

9/11 Fraud

9/11 Commisson Is A Fraud

Al Qaeda Is a Complete Fabrication – a Made in the USA production

New 9/11 Timeline Entries: Nuclear War Exercise on 9/11, NORAD Commanders’ Delayed Response to Attacks, Increase in Military Alert Status

9/11 Hijackers Passports were issued by the CIA :o

Time To Attack Iran

Crackpot Anti-Islam Activists, "Serial Fabricators" and the Tale of Iran and 9/11

Judge: Iran, Taliban, al Qaeda liable for 9/11 - LOL LOL LOL

Demonizing The Enemy: Preparing Americans And The World for an All Out Attack Against Iran

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:35:00 +0000

by Russ Baker - Posting #187

A growing body of evidence points to a concerted campaign to prepare Americans and the world for war against Iran. This is not idle speculation. It fits a pattern that repeatedly preceded previous hostilities.

Here are the recent examples on Iran:

-The claim that Iran is a WMD threat. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the long-term, continuing efforts to paint Iran as some kind of nuclear threat. This ignores the possibility that Iran is telling the truth in contending it is embarked on solely non-military nuclear research (debatable), and serious doubts among many experts that Iran is preparing nuclear weapons. Perhaps most important, it discounts the fact that many countries (including Iran’s arch-enemy Israel) have nuclear weapons, and disregards the undoubted truth that if a country like Iran ever did launch nuclear weapons, it would be wiped out in a nanosecond, creating a very strong disincentive for offensive use. At the same time, by encouraging other countries and internal foes to believe that it has nuclear weapons, Iran creates an inexpensive protective shield for its regime. A dangerous game, to be sure, but without further evidence of Iranian nukes, hardly a reason to launch a war that would surely cause even more death and destruction than the misguided Iraq invasion.

-The claim that Iran tried to hire Mexican drug cartel hit squads to kill a Saudi ambassador on US soil (fizzled). Remember this one? So ludicrous that even ultra-cautious corporate news organizations laughed it out of the spotlight. Still, it may have been a test of what will fly—and likely did impact a percentage of the population, particularly those getting their info from jingoistic outlets like Fox.
-The claim that Iran was complicit in the 9/11 attacks (current). A federal judge, reviewing evidence presented in a lawsuit on behalf of 9/11 victims, concluded this month that it proved Iran “provided direct support to Al Qaeda specifically for the attacks…on September 11, 2001.” This one may gain traction due to powerful lingering emotions on the topic. Because this ruling and the underlying lawsuit are based largely on the claims of defectors (and past experience shows that defectors frequently trade politically valuable assertions for personal benefits), more research is needed on this. (Remember discredited CIA Iraq source “Curveball”?) The cited “NSA intercepts” also bring to mind the intercepts put forward as proof that Saddam had WMDs.

It is further worth noting that the defendant, Iran, was not present to challenge the assertions. In addition, examination of many of the plaintiff assertions shows that they may misrepresent circumstantial evidence. (Example: “Several of the 9/11 hijackers transited Iran on their way to or from Afghanistan, taking advantage of the Iranian practice of not stamping Saudi passports.” This ignores the fact that Iran, which is an enemy of Saudi Arabia, makes a practice of not stamping Saudi passports so that Saudi nationals, especially minority Shiites, do not get in trouble with Saudi authorities on their return—similar to Cuba’s practice of not stamping American passports.)

This story has yet to break big, but count on the ruling to be cited increasingly in the months ahead by those pushing for war.

And here are a few past examples of fake accusations and media distortions (1990 to 2011).
Blame Saddam for Incubator baby deaths and plots against Bush’s father; provoke him by slant drilling from Kuwait, then imply no objection if he takes action; blame him for 9/11 complicity, falsely tie him to Al Qaeda, claim he possesses WMDs and poses an imminent threat, misrepresent claims to make it seem that he did not destroy WMD stocks as ordered.. More here and here and here.

-Blame Qaddafi for Lockerbie bombing, mass rapes, mass murder, fund an uprising, then bomb him for “humanitarian” reasons when he responds in order to assure his survival. Click here and here for more on this.

You don’t have to approve of these regimes to see that these appear to be (and in many cases certainly were) false provocations that reek of ulterior motives (hint: how many of these countries are oil exporters?) In fact, you can abhor these regimes and hope that they will not survive, and still realize how problematical it is for the American government to repeatedly foist big lies on its own people. This kind of thing is beneath any administration claiming lofty ideals and purporting to serve the public interest—and something that none of us should feel comfortable being party to.

If the public interest is defined as “seizing oil wherever it may be found,” then, well, that’s a conversation we need to have…and quick. There are severe consequences of this definition. Among them, the empowerment of those forces, both corporate and governmental, that profit most from the unbridled development of fossil fuels—and that have good reasons to block the development of renewable sources of energy. They’re known today as the One Percent, and they are destroying our world.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References: The US-Iran Economic War

BFP: Imperialism & the “Anti-Imperialism of the Fools”

Tensions Rise as U.S. Imposes 'Nuclear Option' on Iran's Economy

Sayanim: Israeli Operatives in the U.S.

The Big LIE

How PR Sold The War In IRAQ

The Proof Is In The Padding

Libya: Connect The Dots And You Get A Big Dollar Sign

The Libya Secret: How The West Cooked Up "Peoples Uprising"

Red Lines and Ticking Clocks: U.S. War Plans Against Iran

'Israel Prime Culprit In 9/11 Attacks' - Tempus Omnia Revelat

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:25:00 +0000

By PressTV - Posting #186

The latest US allegation against Iran accusing the country of being involved in the 9/11 incident is utterly “preposterous,” as numerous independent probes have established Israel's key role in the deadly attacks, a political analyst tells Press TV.

James Fetzer, founder of Scholars for the 9/11 Truth, questioned the legality of a Thursday ruling by a US federal judge in Manhattan, alleging Iran's involvement in the terrorist attacks, describing the judicial ruling as “quite preposterous on its face.”

In an extraordinary move, the court also withdrew Saudi Arabia from the ten-year-old case, even though 15 of the 19 September 11 attackers were Saudi nationals.

Fetzer pointed to multiple investigations on the 9/11 incident by independent journalists, including Alan Subrosky, Christopher Bolyn, Wayne Madsen as well as other websites exclusively devoted to probe into the issue, insisting all those researches have revealed that “Israel, the MOSSAD, have played a key role on 9/11.”

The political analyst also made reference to the proposal by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his address to the UN General Assembly, calling for an independent international probe into the 9/11 incident.

In his September 22 speech, Ahmadinejad said the US government has been involved in the 9/11 attacks or has allowed them to happen to find an excuse to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fetzer referred to Washington's massive media campaign to put the blame of 9/11 on al-Qaeda in the wake of Ahmadinejad's proposal, and questioned, “So who was it - Iran or al-Qaeda?”

On September 11, 2001, a series of coordinated attacks were carried out in the United States, reportedly leaving nearly 3,000 people dead.

The US government claimed that 19 terrorists, allegedly affiliated with the shadowy, Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda group, had hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners to carry out the attacks.

The official US account of the September 11 events has, however, been widely challenged by various quarters in the US and worldwide.

The US, under the administration of former President Bush, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after claiming that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the members of al-Qaeda harbored by the then Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The US also attacked Iraq in 2003, insisting that the oil-rich country was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don 　　　

References: BFP: The Origins of Imperial Israel- Part II :o

BFP: The Origins of Imperial Israel- Part I :o

US silent war, loud weapons on Iran

Israeli Spying in the United States

After 10 years, US blames Iran for 9/11

'9/11 allegation US ploy for Iran war'

Iran rejects US allegations as baseless

AIPAC and Israel Compromised Sensitive US Industry Secrets

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:34:00 +0000

By IRmep - Posting #185

Washington, DC-Following a three year Freedom of Information Act battle, US Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk has been forced to publicly release a secret report about America's first bilateral trade agreement. The 1984 report predicted which US industries would be most harmed by massive trade preferences for Israel.

In 2009 the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep), a Washington nonprofit that works to improve policy formulation, sought public release of the report. The USTR refused. IRmep appealed to an outside review panel arguing that declassified FBI files revealed both the Israeli government and American Israel Public Affairs Committee unlawfully obtained the report in 1984. A declassified FBI investigation uncovered AIPAC's receipt of the report from Israel's Economics Minister, who refused to divulge how he obtained it. IRmep successfully argued that Americans most harmed by the data theft should also have access to the report.

The International Trade Commission compiled "Probable Economic Effect of Providing Duty-Free Treatment for Imports from Israel" by soliciting confidential business information from all concerned industries. US tomato growers and canners wanted to protect domestic production and jobs while discounting Israel as a significant market for US products. Arkansas bromine producers were concerned that Israel's state-owned producer would displace private sector US jobs in an economically challenged region.

According to the secret trade report "Opposition to the duty-free tariff treatment for jewelry was voiced by the largest national jewelry trade association and several domestic producers...Support for the elimination of jewelry tariffs came from an importer and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee....The implementation of this proposal would eliminate uncertainty about the future of the GSP program, a program which is the key to Israel's competitiveness in the US market."

Passage of Israel trade preferences into law in 1985 created a chronic US deficit averaging $10 billion per year. In May of 2011, IRmep's Center for Policy and Law Enforcement filed a petition with the USTR Section 301 Committee demanding $6.64 billion in compensation for exporters that suffered confidential business information loss to AIPAC and Israel. Although USTR refused to pursue the petition, the report's public release now provides crucial evidence for civil damage claims to be filed in court against AIPAC. Stakeholders may now download released sections of the report and links to FBI files at: http://www.irmep.org/ILA/ustr/

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: T he diversion of US weapons-grade uranium to Israel

Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP)

Investigation of AIPAC for Espionage and Theft of Government Property

Probable Economic Effect of Providing Duty Free Treatment for Imports from Israel

From America to Amerika: The End Game - TIs - Heads Up

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:38:00 +0000

By James Fetzer - Posting #184

According to James Fetzer, the progressive erosion of civil rights in the United States started with "Operation Paperclip" and the recruitment of criminal Nazi scientists for employment by U.S. intelligence. The further trashing of the Bill of Rights under the Patriot Act, in the wake of 9/11, has now been surpassed by a Gestapo-like bill that legalizes arrest, indefinite detention, torture and interrogation of U.S. citizens without any charge or trial. On the back of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, the U.S. government may be taking its citizens down the road to tyranny.
___

The brutal suppression of the exercise of freedom of speech and of the right to petition our government for redress of grievances of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement by local and campus police departments, who are clad in riot gear and helmets with masks, appears to be a manifestation of the increasing militarization of police departments at the local, state, and federal level through the creation of “fusion centers” supervised by the Department of Homeland Security.

These events, in turn, reflect the increasingly fascistic character of the national police state into which the US has evolved, not least of all as a consequence of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which was justified by the fabricated events of 9/11. Those who have any concerns about the ramifications of the Patriot Act in subverting the U.S. Constitution, at this point in time, should have no lingering doubts.

The most striking indication that all is not well turns out to be the activation of FEMA detention facilities across the county upon 72 hours notice, which has been taking place over the past few years, with bids now being taken for vendors to supply these centers. Staffing those facilities represents the final step preparing for their opening along with arranging for vendors contracted to start service with that same 72 hours notice. This has now been confirmed by published Army advertisements for “Internment Specialists”, which, it now appears, is being given legal cover by Senate Bill 1867, better known as the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA), which authorizes holding U.S. citizens in indefinite detention with no legal rights of representation or due process provisions.

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), has now explained on the floor of the Senate that language which would have precluded those conditions from applying to U.S. citizens (in its Section 1031) was removed at the request of the administration, which thus reflects President Obama’s position.

Empowering the military to implement these policies represents the death throes of the Posse Comitatus Act, which was meant to delimit and constrain the powers of local and state governments and law enforcement agencies from the use of federal military personnel to enforce federal laws, which, as RT has reported, is being done by transforming local and state police agencies into an ersatz “standing army”.

Much of this represents the culmination of corrupt practices since World War II, including special “Operation Paperclip,” by which high-level Nazi intelligence operatives along with research scientists were brought to the U.S. and integrated into our intelligence agencies and research operations. While some of us expected Barack Obama to repeal the Patriot Act, rescind the Military Commissions Act and close Guantanamo, none of that has come to pass and the situation has only grown more grave.

I therefore invited Dennis Cimino to join me in addressing these issues from an historical point of view and reflecting on what, if anything, U.S. citizens can do about it.

America: The End Game with Dennis Cimino

If you haven’t heard, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) gives the U.S. military the authority to indefinitely detain without charge and incarcerate any U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, for reasons and on grounds that the military does not have to disclose. It is stunning that this act subverts habeas corpus, originally formalized by an Act of Parliament in England (1679), but which recognized the long standing practice that a citizen cannot be detained for prosecution by a court of law without due process, including the right to know the charges being brought against him and the right to legal representation. If you ask perhaps how this Senate bill and the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor are related, the answer is not difficult to discern for multiple reasons, including the treatment of Japanese-Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor, but especially because of the early warnings involved.

Warning the American people that the American military is coming for them may initially appear to be comparable to the Japanese warning the United States that it was about to attack Pearl Harbor. Were the Japanese aware that we had broken their code, sending President Franklin D. Roosevelt an advisory message warning him of Japan’s intention to attack would have been a rather odd thing to have done. Looking at the McCain and Levin amendments to this appropriations bill may bear comparison to Hirohito telling an Adversary who has embargoed his country’s access to oil that he planned to retaliate.

In the case of the McCain/Levin amendment, this is a warning to every U.S. citizen who takes issue with this corrupt, murderous, even illegitimate government in Washington, D.C., no matter where they are here in the United States, that the military now has a hunting license to come to get you and ferret you off to a secret stalag for torture and indefinite incarceration.

Internment Camp Services Bid Arrives After NDAA

On 6 December 2011, Kurt Nimmo and Alex Jones reported that infowars.com has received a document originating from KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, that offers details of plans to activate FEMA and U.S. Army camps around the United States. Entitled "Project Overview and Anticipated Project Requirements," the document describes services that KBR is looking to farm out to subcontractors. As they explain, “Services up for bid include catering, temporary fencing and barricades, laundry and medical services, power generation, refuse collection, and other services required for temporary ‘emergency environment’ camps located in five regions of the United States.” This means that the activation of those camps is not a distant event but has become imminent.

KBR’s call for FEMA camp service bids arrived soon after the Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which permits the military to detain and interrogate supposed domestic terror suspects (including Occupy Wall Street movement protesters) in violation of the Fourth Amendment and Posse Comitatus. Section 1031 of the NDAA bill declares the whole of the United States as a "battlefield" and allows U.S. citizens to be arrested on U.S. soil and incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay.

The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American civil and human rights organization, which is not surprising given the treatment Japanese-Americans received in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Thus, “In a letter addressed to Congress, S. Floyd Mori, the national director of JACL, said the NDAA is the first time that Congress has scaled back on the protections provided by the Non-Detention Act of 1971, including Section 1031. Mori said the legislation, if enacted and put into use, would be reminiscent of the unconstitutional indefinite detention of Japanese Americans during World War II.”

KBR Instrumental in Establishing Camps in 2006

As they also explain, “In 2006, KBR was awarded a contingency contract from the Department of Homeland Security, allegedly to support its Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the event of an emergency, Market Watch reported. The contract was effective immediately and provided for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to expand existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs, KBR said. The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster, the company explained."

The sentence alluding to “the rapid development of new programs”, of course, offers no indication of what those “new programs” might be. But, at this point in time, given the inclusion of language in NDAA 2012 authorizing the apprehension and indefinite detention of American citizens in violation of habeas corpus at the request of the Obama administration, there can be scant reason to doubt that these “new programs” are intended to suppress dissent by the most powerful possible means, no matter how much the Constitution and Bill of Rights are thereby obviated. There are precursors for these events in European history, of course, including the Enabling Act passed by the German Parliament at the insistence of then-Chancellor Adolph Hitler. Most U.S. citizens are ignorant of those developments, even though they paved the way for The Third Reich. And others remain infatuated with the notion of “American exceptionalism”, which is a form of mass delusion that “it can’t happen here.” Unfortunately, it not only can but actually is “happening here”!

Army Civilian Inmate Labor Program

As Nimmo and Jones also report, “Soon after KBR’s announcement, a little-known Army document surfaced. Entitled the ‘Civilian Inmate Labor Program’, the unclassified document describes in detail Army Regulation 210-35. The regulation, first drafted in 1997, underwent a "rapid act revision" in January 2005 and now provides a policy for the creation of labor programs and prison camps on Army installations.” Moreover, “In 2009, the National Emergency Centers Act or HR 645 was introduced in Congress. It mandates the establishment of ‘national emergency centers’ to be located on military installations for the purpose of providing ‘temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster’, according to the bill. In addition to emergencies, the legislation is designed to ‘meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security’, an open ended mandate which many fear could mean the forced detention of American citizens in the event of widespread rioting after a national emergency or total economic collapse, as Paul Joseph Watson noted in January of 2009.” Those fears, alas, are now coming to fruition.

Pearl Harbor and the "New Pearl Harbor”

As history records, the U.S. Navy took one massive pasting in Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. B-17 bombers were arrayed in neat rows at the Naval Air Station, Ford Island, in the middle of the harbor, while battleships—which were no longer the core of the fleet and thus were moderately expendable, while the carriers, which would be necessary to a war in the Pacific, had been put to sea—were left at pier side. The military was not on any alert status of any kind, in spite of the fact that the intelligence community in the United States had plenty of reason to do so. The old “Pearl Harbor” has now been succeeded by the "new ‘Pearl Harbor’” as a fabricated attack intended to instill fear into the American people in order to manipulate us to promote a political agenda.

The first event was allowed to happen to induce the citizens of this nation to abandon isolationism and engage with our allies in World War II. The second event was made to happen to induce us to support wars of aggression against nations that had never attacked us, with regard to our foreign policy, and to surrender civil rights guaranteed under the Constitution, as a matter of domestic politics, both of which were strikingly contrary to our values and traditions. The consequences of the “new” Pearl Harbor are now coming to their culmination in the complete abdication of our Constitution and the emplacement of a national security/police state.

The question thus becomes what we should do about it.

Telegraphing the actions that the government is about to take may have been an unavoidable consequence of securing Congressional approval by the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011. It was something that those who are about to enslave us simply could not avoid. But we have to ask ourselves:

If you were issued advance warning that your government was about to “go rogue” and abandon the last vestiges of the rule of law by shredding the Constitution in front of you, would you not be disposed to take certain actions to make it , if not “very difficult”, at least “very stupid” for them to send soldiers to seize you for exercising your right of dissent? Is our own government counting on our naivete to take for granted that our Senators and Representatives are looking out for our best interests, just as Bush and Cheney were looking our for us on 9/11? And when Sen. Carl Levin has explained Obama himself wanted these provisions, how dumb are we?

We would guess that the number of citizens who have valid and quite genuine disagreement with the outrageous and criminal policies of the government in Washington, D.C., might represent as much as 20-30% of the adult population and possibly more. Applied to 300,000,000 citizens, that might equal roughly 60,000,000. If it’s half that, around 30,000,000; and half that, only 15,000,000. Calculations done on the basis of the number of railroad cars that Halliburton has been commissioned to construct times the number of those they can carry using the shackles with which they are equipped approximates 15,000,000 detainees. So maybe that number is the closer approximation.

Estimates have it that some 80,000,000 American citizens are armed, where the certainty is that more than a hundred and fifty million households in the U.S. have some form of firearm beyond a .22 caliber “Saturday night special”, and at least two or three members of that household may well be able to aim and fire it at an intruder, be they a thief or a person in a police or a military uniform. In any case, since 9/11, we have had the government put every one of us on the highest paranoia alert status in American history with a series of fear mongering, wholly unjustified reasons for us to either look for Muslims coming from every nook and cranny, as well as the recent advice by Janet Napolitano, who would have each of us conduct surveillance on our friends and neighbors

Where do we go from here?

We have experienced the FBI having set up dozens of fake terror suspects, and have had to endure insane scenarios such as “underpants” and “shoe” bombers who either can’t get the loads in their pants to go off or effectively light a cigarette with repeated attempts. We are told that a guy with no passport was waltzed past security to board an international flight without any problems, apparently because he was escorted by some official no one has been able to identify. We were conned about 19 Arab hijackers magically overcoming the totality of the entire North American Defense Command on 9/11 using box cutters as their weapons. But it turns out that the government has never been able to prove that they were actually aboard any of those planes. And the alleged phone calls from all four planes turn out to have been faked. How dumb are we supposed to be?

The government, it now appears, has given us a two year head start on arming and loading to protect ourselves, even if it would have preferred not to have done so. By putting an advertisement for "Internment Specialists with an MOS of 31 ECHO" in the advertising section of The Wall Street Journal and in other printed media, when, since the Patriot Act was morphed three times, they didn’t have to say a public word and could have hired these specialists in secret with a far more covert approach than by announcements in these publications. But the point may be to make it appear as though these moves were undertaken in the public interest. After all, if something terrifying and subversive were going on, it could be argued, why would it be done in such a public fashion? But to ask the question is to answer it. As Hitler observed, BIG LIES are simply beyond the comprehension of most citizens—of Germany or of any other country.

Tactically, it doesn’t make any sense. Militarily the U.S. does not have the troop strength to quell massive civil unrest without the use of non-conventional force application. Which is it? Is it another Pearl Harbor “let it happen on purpose” like 7 December 1941 and, for that matter, also similar to the 9/11 “made it happen on purpose” gambit used to psychologically traumatize and induce fear into the the American public by fabricating a non-existent enemy striking from the caves of Tora Bora? The threat of NDAA appears to be ‘real’ but, to those of us who understand what it represents, as ludicrous as Emperor Hirohito calling FDR on the phone and telling him that on Sunday, 7 December 1941, he was going to attack the U.S. fleet. Something is seriously wrong with this picture. Perhaps they want to provoke a civil war that would justify to complete deconstruction of America. Perhaps they are simply playing us for saps. It has worked before. It can work again.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

S.1867 NDAA [.pdf]

Internment / Resettlement Specialist (31E)

Posse Comitatus Act

Operation Paperclip

Military Commissions Act

The secret behind Guantánamo

Project Overview and Anticipated Project Requirements [.pdf]

Japanese American Citizens League

The Non-Detention Act 1971

ICE Detention and Removal Operations Program

The Enabling Act 1933

Civilian Inmate Labor Program [.pdf]

CIA Use of Nazi War Criminals - Worse Than Most People Realize

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:27:00 +0000

By Gibrielle Pickard - Posting #183

The severity and the extent of the CIA’s involvement with Nazi war criminals has remained undisclosed for years, with the U.S. Department of Justice stifling masses of pages and documents of a frank and open history of how the U.S. government collaborated and even protected Nazis.

In 2005, the National Security Archive finally posted formerly classified secret documents that linked the CIA to the notorious Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen, despite the fact that Gehlen had employed numerous known Nazi war criminals.

The released two-volume history, known as the “Secret Relger”, was compiled by Kevin Ruffner, a CIA historian. In 1999, the report was presented to the German Intelligence Service by Jack Downing, CIA Deputy Director for Operations, in remembrance of the “new and close ties” formed between the CIA and German officials during post-war Germany.

Close Ties Between CIA and Nazi Criminals

The history of these close ties was made public by work carried out by The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG). The IWG had lodged public grievances stating that the CIA had not conformed to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, and was concealing documents that proved close ties between the CIA and Nazi war criminals.

In 2010, the entire document that had earlier been censored by the Department of Justice was leaked to the New York Times.

The 600-page report was published in the New York Times, and revealed new evidence that numerous notorious Nazi war criminals had been involved with the CIA in the last three decades.

While previous government reports had emerged which recognized, “the CIA’s use of Nazi for post-war intelligence purposes”, the Justice Department report published in the New York Times just over a year ago is by far the most damning expose of those activities.

The shocking report provides the world with evidence about the U.S. government’s posthumous pursuit of the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele. In a surreal revelation, the report revealed that part of Josef’s scalp was being kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer.

The report also detailed the government’s mistaken identity of ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a Treblinka concentration camp guard, as well as the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey.

More Evidence on Operation Paperclip

But the report’s most incriminatory revelation, as highlighted by the New York Times, was its assessment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s association with Nazi émigrés.

Nazi’s, according to the report, were given a “safe haven” in the U.S. This isn’t really news to the many so-called conspiracy theorist that have been investigating activities related to Project Paperclip, however these documents finally provide conclusive and undeniable evidence that the U.S. government knowingly and willingly harbored known Nazi war criminals.

The investigators that produced the report discovered that some Nazis, “were indeed knowingly granted entry” into the United States, and that:

“America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became – in some small measure – a safe haven for persecutors as well.”

Alongside the numerous cases chronicled, describing American intelligence officials aiding and protecting Nazis, the report also disclosed that in 1954, the CIA provided help to Otto Von Bolschwing. Otto was an associate of Adolf Eichmenn, who had assisted the plan to “purge Germany of the Jews,” and who had later worked for the CIA in the United States.

Another shocking case highlighted by the report that implicates the CIA with Nazi war criminals was made in a memo written by the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, urging immigration officers to let the notorious Nazi scientist Arthur L. Rudolph back into the country.

The motivation behind his immigration in 1945 was to bring him to the U.S. to be involved in the rocket-making operation well-known as “Operation Paperclip”. The memo stated that a failure to let him in would be a “detriment to the country.”

The Cover-Up by the Justice Department

It does seem somewhat baffling that the Justice Department would attempt to keep such an important part of history a secret for so long, but as Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive said on the Archive’s website:

“Embarrassment suffered by public officials is the price they pay for power. It goes with the territory, but here, their cover-up is not nearly as bad as the crime, which was to shelter Nazi war criminals in the name of national security. This the public needs to know and has a right to know.”

In the wake of the accountability investigations for Holocaust victims, Elizabeth Holtman, former congresswoman and member of the IWG said in an interview with the New York Times:

“I think that the CIA has defied he law, and in so doing has also trivialised the holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II.”

In light of the damning report, with content that has been kept secret for far too long, it is hardly surprising that the CIA is now developing an “ethical inventory”, as Kent Pekel, Special Adviser to the Deputy Secretary of State, said on the CIA website’s Need for Improvement article:

“Given our shared conviction that ethics is as much an organizational as a personal issue, the members of our working group decided that an ‘ethical inventory’ of the Agency’s operating culture might be useful in our effort to design a new Agency-wide program of ethics education.”

It is a sentiment that feels hollow and empty, given the nature of what the CIA has done. It also begs the important question, if it took so long for the truth about this activity to make it into the public domain – just how many other unethical activities are being hidden away in the deep, dark recesses of the Intelligence Community?

And if such actions could take place so long ago in the name of America, without the permission of Americans – what sort of practices are taking place today by the CIA without the oversight and consent of the American people?

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

Operation Paperclip

The American Nazi Party

The Lost Von Braun

The CIA and Nazi War Criminals

Justice Department Censors Nazi-Hunting History

The Terrible Nazi Medical Experiments of WWII

Air Force Dumped Ashes Of Troops’ Remains In Virginia Landfill

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:56:00 +0000

By Craig Whitlock and Mary Pat Flaherty - Posting #182

The Air Force dumped the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops in a Virginia landfill, far more than the military had acknowledged, before halting the secretive practice three years ago, records show.

The landfill dumping was concealed from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner, Air Force officials said. There are no plans, they said, to alert those families now.

The Air Force had maintained that it could not estimate how many troops might have had their remains sent to a landfill. The practice was revealed last month by The Washington Post, which was able to document a single case of a soldier whose partial remains were sent to the King George County landfill in Virginia. The new data, for the first time, show the scope of what has become an embarrassing episode for vaunted Dover Air Base, the main port of entry for America’s war dead.

The landfill disposals were never formally authorized under military policies or regulations. They also were not disclosed to senior Pentagon officials who conducted a high-level review of cremation policies at the Dover mortuary in 2008, records show.

Air Force and Pentagon officials said last month that determining how many remains went to the landfill would require searching through the records of more than 6,300 troops whose remains have passed through the mortuary since 2001.

“It would require a massive effort and time to recall records and research individually,” Jo Ann Rooney, the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary for personnel, wrote in a Nov. 22 letter to Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.).

Holt, who has pressed the Pentagon for answers on behalf of a constituent whose husband was killed in Iraq, accused the Air Force and Defense Department of hiding the truth.

“What the hell?” Holt said in a phone interview. “We spent millions, tens of millions, to find any trace of soldiers killed, and they’re concerned about a ‘massive’ effort to go back and pull out the files and find out how many soldiers were disrespected this way?” He added: “They just don’t want to ask questions or look very hard.”

Senior Air Force leaders said there was no intent to deceive. “Absolutely not,” said Lt. Gen. Darrell D. Jones, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for personnel.

This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary’s electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.

An additional group of 1,762 unidentified remains were collected from the battlefield and disposed of in the same manner, the Air Force said. Those fragments could not undergo DNA testing because they had been badly burned or damaged in explosions. The total number of incinerated fragments dumped in the landfill exceeded 2,700.

A separate federal investigation of the mortuary last month, prompted by whistleblower complaints, uncovered “gross mismanagement” and documented how body parts recovered from bomb blasts stacked up in the morgue’s coolers for months or years before they were identified and disposed of....continued here

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

Dover mortuary landfill dumping: Congressman asked Pentagon about practice in Sept

The Remains Of The Fallen Return Home

Remains Of War Dead Dumped In Landfill

Bringing the ‘War on Terror’ Home - Can Ya Hear Me Now?

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:22:00 +0000

By Coleen Rowley - Posting #181 - The Enabling Act REMIX

The American TI Issue Comes Front and Center

U.S. intelligence says the terror threat from al-Qaeda is receding, but Congress keeps on expanding the scope of this “war” so as not to look “weak on terror,” now adding new military powers that could be used against American citizens, writes ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley.
___
The political, military industrial, corporate class in Washington DC continues to re-make our Constitutional Republic into a powerful, unaccountable Military Empire.

The U.S. Senate has just voted 93 to 7 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012, which allows the military to operate domestically within the borders of the United States and to possibly (or most probably) detain U.S. citizens without trial.

U.S. Capitol Building

Forget that the ACLU called it “an historic threat to American citizens,” this bill is so dangerous not only to our rights but to our country’s security that it was criticized by the Directors of the FBI and the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Defense Secretary!

For the first time in our history, if this Act is not vetoed, American citizens may not be guaranteed their Article III right to trial. The government would be able to decide who gets an old-fashioned trial (along with right to attorney and right against self-incrimination) and who gets detained without due process and put into a modern legal limbo.

Does anyone remember that none of the first thousand people the FBI rounded up after 9/11, and who were imprisoned for several months (some brutalized) were ever charged with terrorism? Does anyone remember that hundreds of the Gitmo detainees who were handed over to their American military captors in exchange for monetary bounties were found, after years of imprisonment, to have no connection to terrorism?

When in doubt about a case, what do you think the government will again do? Does it prefer to submit its evidence to a jury’s scrutiny and its witnesses to the trouble of being cross-examined in court by a defense attorney or would it be easier to have no questions asked and dump the accused into detainee prison without rights? I think we already know that answer from the nearly ten years of experience at Guantanamo.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, declared that suspected citizens open themselves up “to imprisonment and death” He added: “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”

Of course, the politicians will say we are just talking about a few cases. But in fact the sky’s probably the limit given the current legal ambiguity in the Patriot Act expansion of “material support for terrorism” to now include humanitarian aid and even mere advocacy speech without any need to prove an accused person intended to support any kind of terrorist violence.

The Department of Justice has been currently using this ambiguity for over a year to investigate 23 American citizens [Bullshit, this has been going on for years] who are anti-war activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. Additionally, the “war on terror” will undoubtedly expand even more when it is de-linked from 9/11.

See “The War on Terrorism Congress Never Declared — But Soon Might” by Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor, expert on these issues and associate dean for scholarship at American University Washington College of Law, which states:

“An individual may be detained for providing ‘direct support’ (which, in the government’s view, may be nothing more than minor financial or logistical assistance) in aid of ‘associated forces’ that are ‘engaged in hostilities against … coalition partners.’

“Thus, the NDAA effectively authorizes the military detention of any individual who provides such assistance anywhere in the world to any group engaged in hostilities against any of our coalition partners, whether or not the United States is in any way involved in (or even affected by) that particular conflict.”

Given this expansion of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force contained in the 2012 NDAA to encompass undefined “associated forces,” we could witness the U.S. government targeting a large range of political dissidents, human rights activists, humanitarians, and maybe even “occupiers.”

The NDAA is deliberately confusing for political purposes but much is at stake. President Barack Obama’s determination as to whether or not he will veto the problematic 2012 war funding bill will determine how Benjamin Franklin’s glib response to the woman waiting outside the Constitutional Convention is ultimately answered. Franklin and other founding fathers had created “a Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

But a lawless Military Empire could now await where U.S. “emergency war powers” trump the Constitution, where the Commander in Chief becomes king for a term(s), the military enters into domestic police-state actions in violation of 130 years of Posse Comitatus law, and the Constitution becomes as quaint as the Geneva Conventions were for Alberto Gonzalez and the Bush Administration.

Corrupted, compliant politicians have already allowed their fears to get the better of them by going along with pre-emptive war in violation of the Nuremberg Principles and international law and torturing in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture.

So why should they also not go for detaining American citizens without constitutional rights or trial?

You can tell President Obama he needs to live up to his threat to veto this legislation or you can sign Sen. Mark Udall’s petition.

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She wrote a “whistleblower” memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI’s pre 9-11 failures. She retired at the end of 2004, and now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: The Ominous Parallels Orginal Report

The Peter Collins Show Interview With Susan Lindauer And Coleen Rowley [.mp3]

National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

The War on Terrorism Congress Never Declared — But Soon Might

Senate Votes Not To Vote On Indefinite Detention On Americans

Guantanamo on Main Street? Tell the President No.

Former US Senator Condemns Israel's Lies about Iran

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:57:00 +0000

By FARS News Agency - Posting #180

TEHRAN (FNA)- Ex-Senator and former US presidential candidate Mike Gravel condemned Israeli lies about Iran's nuclear activities, and warned Tel Aviv and the US that threatening Iran means playing with fire.

Gravel underlined that beating the drums about attacking Iran is very dangerous and marks the irresponsibility of the Israeli leadership.

"I'm not saying anything new - Sarkozy says Netanyahu is a liar - so in my humble status as a private citizen - I tell you Netanyahu is a liar, because he has made statements about Iran that are absolutely ridiculous - all this to create fear among people in Israel," he said.

Gravel recalled the Bush-created syndrome of 'bunker mentality' that rules people with fear.

"Iran is neither Syria nor Lebanon. Iran is a proud nation and they have missile capabilities - not nuclear-capable - that can rain down on Tel Aviv. I can tell you: if they are attacked - they would attack back. And (because) Israel is so vulnerable and so small that it (Israel) would retaliate with nukes - because they cannot suffer to be destroyed," Gravel predicted, adding that Pakistan and China would join in, with the US to follow - and that is a ready scenario for a nuclear WWIII.

"The best way to solve the problem with Iran is to leave it alone to build a democracy of its own."

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: Nuclear Experts Reject IAEA Iran Report :o

War With Iran Would Be Madness

IAEA Exposed as Israeli Spy Front

Iran Controlling US Warships Passing Through Strait of Hormoz

All of Israel Within Iran Missile Reach

Iran Will Not Sit Back And Watch Threats

Illicit Israeli Military Technology Transfers Continued Amidst US State Department Infighting

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:19:00 +0000

By IRmep - Posting #179

In March of 1992 US State Department inspector general Sherman Funk issued a classified report about illegal Israeli transfers of US military technology.

The report finds Israel "is systematically violating U.S. arms control laws." The "Blue Lantern" system used in-country checks conducted by Customs officials or other qualified US embassy personnel to verify that "sensitive U.S. Munitions List items and technology are used only for authorized purposes."

The audit uncovered a breakdown in US inspection regimes. The State Department relied on "government to government" assurances that items were not "retransferred" or "used for unauthorized purposes." Shipments to non-government entities could only be checked if Israeli government officials granted permission.

The auditor discovered that "After reviewing the end use procedures, we stated to post officials that relying entirely on government-to-government assurances is an inadequate verification procedure. This is especially true for a country which, according to numerous intelligence reports, is systematically violating U.S. arms control laws." But the US State Department's own Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs (PM) reined in Blue Lantern investigators stating "investigations were generally not to be conducted unless authorized." One Blue Lantern audit found US telemetry equipment being put to prohibited uses. When notified, the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Control refused to take action and closed the Blue Lantern case.

At the time, the executive and some members of the legislative branch were deeply concerned about the ongoing Israeli diversion to China of military technology from the controversial American-funded Lavi jet fighter project. But /Report of Audit/ reveals a highly dysfunctional inspection regime dominated by political infighting. An attached memo from the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs (PM) challenged the inspector general's premises. "There are two glaring
deficiencies in this section. First, the report is premised on two notions; that if a story appears in an intelligence publication, it must be true; that if some agency not charged with responsibility for a program (in this case low level officials in ACDA) [U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency], they must be correct. As is indicated below, these assumptions do not always pertain. It is not PM's job to react in a knee-jerk fashion to intelligence reports, but to analyze and investigate."

Release notes. On August 14, 2009 the US State Department "denied in full" IRmep's February 14, 2009 Freedom of Information Act request for the Funk audit. IRmep appealed twice to the US Department of State Appeals Review Panel, winning a redacted release on August 1, 2011. IRmep then appealed that Israel, the subject of the entire report, be restored to all areas of the document where State Department censors redacted the country reference.

On September 28, 2011 the State Department refused, responding that "the decision of the Appeals Review Panel is the final decision for the Department of State. Your only available option is litigation." The Wall Street Journal allegedly obtained the report in 1992, but never made it available to the public.

Document/File Date: March of 1992 (PDF)

Contents: Report of Audit - Defense Controls Annex, 2-CI-016A United States Department of State Office of Inspector General, Sherman M. Funk - 3.2 MB

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

Arms-Export Reports Further Strain U. S. - Israeli Ties

Americans Pay Dearly to Maintain Israel's Nuclear Secrets

Secret CIA/FBI files of NUMEC nuclear diversions to Israel could aid $170 million toxic cleanup

Tribunal Finds Bush - Blair Guilty of War Crimes

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:02:00 +0000

By Mathaba - Posting #178 - Yessssssssssssss!!!

Kuala Lumpur International War Crimes Tribunal Hearing Issues Verdict: Former Prime Minister Blair and Former President Bush Guilty of War Crimes

KUALA LUMPUR, 22 November 2011 - The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (Tribunal) entered its fourth and final day of hearing war crimes charge of Crimes against Peace against George W Bush (former U.S. President) and Anthony L Blair (former British Prime Minister) in Kuala Lumpur. For the first time a war crime charge has been heard against these two former heads of state in compliance with due legal process, wherein complaints from war victims had been received, duly investigated and formal charges instituted by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (Commission).

The Tribunal had decided the previous day that a prima facie case had been made out against both the accused. The Defense team presented their case and submission defending the accused. Some of the points submitted and argued are stated in the following paragraphs.

The Defense adopted their prior submissions and proceeded to raise additional grounds, relying additionally on the memoirs of the first and second accused. The Defence highlighted that as an amicus curiae, his function is to assist the Tribunal by raising points of law that are in doubt and to organise information or raise awareness of some aspect of the case that the Tribunal otherwise may miss.

No one knows what it is like to have the weight of the nation on his shoulders except a head of state. Both the accused, as former heads of state, took their nations to war. The question now is whether their actions amounted to the offence of Crimes against Peace. Did they ‘plan, prepared and invaded Iraq on 19 March 2003 in violation of the UN Charter’?

9/11 changed the world and cast it into a new atmosphere of fear. The world would be a different place. The Prosecution objected to the Defence attempts to show a video recording of the 9/11 attack, as there is no factual basis for the association of 9/11 with Iraq. The fact that the war occurred had been admitted. The war has taken its toll. The question is, was a crime committed by the accused. The Tribunal ruled that it has taken judicial notice (not having to tender evidence to established a fact) of the 9/11 attack and there was no need for the showing of the video.

The Defence submitted, that the first accused in his memoirs, on the issue of the absence of WMD, the accusation that ‘Bush lied, and people died’, would be illogical because he would not lead his nation to war on a lie which would be easily discernible after the war.

The second accused in his memoir said that he understood the need for the 2nd UN resolution for political legitimacy but knew the difficulty in getting one due to the politics within the UN Security Council permanent members. And also that there was no UN resolution for the action in Kosovo. While the first accused was of the view that Saddam had not adhered to numerous UN Security Council resolutions

There was a moral ground that many critics of the war do not appreciate. Liberating the people of Iraq from Saddam seems to be lost on the critics. The Defence also referred that the first accused had said that Saddam was a threat. Saddam had invaded two neighbours, Iran in the 1980s and Kuwait in the 1990s. He had killed his own people. Had used chemical weapons. Had links with terrorists. And Saddam was developing WMD. And after 9/11, Saddam was a threat that could no longer be ignored.

Some have seen the brutality of war while many are fortunate to have experienced peace. In any event the Defence urged the Tribunal to evaluate the evidence and return a verdict of non-guilty.

Prosecution in their reply stated that everyone has a right to lead unmolested lives governed by law. And in the case before the Tribunal that law is international law. We have to adhere to treaties and conventions that govern international relations. From the documents tendered the first accused had conducted himself in manner that showed that he had decided to invade Iraq long before 2003. And this is also evident from his memoir, which amounts to an admission.

In a criminal trial such as this, there are two elements that need to be proven. The actus rea (the act), which was the war, which is an accepted fact. The mens rea (intention) is shown clearly from the planning and preparation as early as November 2001 when he had asked his Secretary of Defence to draw up plans for the invasion of Iraq. And that in September 2002, the Defence Secretary had informed the first accused, who was the commander in chief that it would take six months to mobilise for invasion. On 4 November 2002, the UN resolution 1441 was passed and the invasion was launched on 19 March 2003. On 17 March 2003 the first accused stated “…Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing”. And on 19 March, the ‘shock and awe’ campaign called Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched.

The same is true of the second accused who had attacked Iraq. And that he had planned and prepared to invade since 1998. The reason is to bring freedom to the Iraqi people from Saddam through the use of military action.

There are 40 UN Security Council Resolutions against Israel but no action is taken. But Saddam had not adhered to 16 resolutions and Iraq is invaded. This is gangsterism.

This is a historic moment for the Tribunal to hear the distance drums of war rumbling even today due to the actions of the first and second accused. War criminals have to be dealt with, convict Bush and Blair as charged. A guilty verdict will serve as a notice to the world that war criminals may run but can never ultimately hide from truth and justice.

The Verdict - Guilty!

The Tribunal deliberated over the case and decided unanimously that the first accused George W Bush and second accused Anthony L Blair have been found guilty of the Crimes against Peace.

The second accused at the material time as heads of state launched an invasion on Iraq on 19 March 2003. The charge was duly served in accordance with the Charter of the Commission. The accused did not appear and an amicus curiae was appointed.

The evidence showed that as far back as 15 September 2001 the accused had planned to invade Iraq. Documents showed that this plan was conveyed by the first accused to the second accused. The accused had attempted to seek he UN approval for invasion. On 2 November 2002, UN Security Council Resolution 1441 did not authorise the use of force against Iraq. Weapons investigators had confirmed that there were no WMD. It was also established that the Iraq had no WMD. Iraq was not posing any threat to any nation at the relevant time that was immediate that would have justified any form of pre-emptive strike.

Humanitarian intervention was not a basis for the invasion. The UN Security Council must authorise any use of force. An individual state cannot replace the UN in deciding the use of force. The 9/11 attack did not show any connection with Iraq but instead the US had used this as a pretext to invade Iraq. Invasion to effect regime change has no legal basis under international law.

The Evidence showed that the drums of wars were being beaten long before the invasion. The accused in their own memoirs have admitted their own intention to invade Iraq regardless of international law. Unlawful use of force threatens the world to return to a state of lawlessness. The acts of the accused were unlawful.

The charge is proven beyond reasonable doubt. The accused are found guilty. The Tribunal orders that the names of the 2 convicted criminals be included in the war register of the KL War Crimes Commission. And the findings of this Tribunal be publicised to all nations who are signatories of the Rome Statue.

Despite all the facts both the accused had nevertheless invaded Iraq. A detailed written judgment will be published at a later date.

The trial was held in an open court from November 19-22, 2011 at the premises of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War (KLFCW) at 88, Jalan Perdana, Kuala Lumpur.

Further Information

For further information, please contact:

Dato’ Dr Yaacob Merican
Secretary General of the KLWCC Secretariat
Tel: +6012-227 8680

Ms Malkeet Kaur
Media Representative of KLWCC
malkeet@dbook.com.my
Tel: +6012-3737 886

The Tribunal Members

Dato’ Abdul Kadir Sulaiman
Dato' Zakaria Yatim (Recused)
Tunku Sofiah Jewa
Prof Salleh Buang
Mr Alfred Lambremont Webre :o
Prof Emeritus Datuk
Dr Shad Saleem Faruqi
Prof Niloufer Bhagwat (Recused)

The Prosecution

Prof Gurdial S Nijar
Prof Francis Boyle
Mr Avtaran Singh

Amicus Curiae (appointed Defence team)

Mr Jason Kay and (((3))) other counsels.

The Charge

Crimes Against Peace filed against George W Bush (former President of the U.S.) and Anthony L Blair (former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) wherein they are charged as follows:

The Accused persons had committed Crimes against Peace, in that the Accused persons planned, prepared and invaded the sovereign state of Iraq on 19 March 2003 in violation of the United Nations Charter and international law.

The Tribunal will adjudicate and evaluate the evidence presented on facts and law as in any court of law. The judges of the Tribunal must be satisfied that the charge is proven beyond reasonable doubt and deliver a reasoned judgement. The verdict and the names of the persons found guilty will be entered in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and publicised worldwide.

“WHY is it that the murder of one man is considered a criminal act whereas the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people committed in wars, is not considered so?" -- Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: Report: Pentagon Assists Mossad in Assassination of Iraqi Scientists, Elites

Government, Parliament and military of Sweden reported for war crimes in Libya

On 9/11, U.S. Military Was Preparing for a Simulated Nuclear War

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:04:00 +0000

By Shoestring 9/11 - Posting #177

While September 11, 2001 is well known as the day when the U.S. suffered its worst terrorist attack, what is little known is that it was also a day when large sections of the armed forces around the nation had been preparing to fight a simulated nuclear war, as part of major training exercises being conducted at the time.

In their annual exercises "Vigilant Guardian" and "Global Guardian," the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the United States Strategic Command (Stratcom) were scheduled to carry out what has been described as a "simulated air war," a "full-blown nuclear war" exercise, a "fictional nuclear war," and a "practice Armageddon."

No official attempts have been made to fully investigate these exercises and what effect they had on the military's response to the 9/11 attacks. But evidence indicates they caused at least some confusion over what was "real-world" and what was simulation, and they may also have been a factor behind the communication problems experienced by military personnel that day. Other evidence suggests that some actions that have been presented as reactions to the terrorist attacks may actually have been related to these exercises--actions such as raising the alert status of American armed services to Defcon 3 and closing the huge "blast doors" to NORAD's operations center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. There is also evidence that other "practice Armageddon" exercises were being conducted at the time of the 9/11 attacks, but details of these are unknown.

AMERICA'S AIR DEFENDERS WERE SET TO FIGHT A 'SIMULATED AIR WAR' ON 9/11

Perhaps the most important exercise to consider is NORAD's exercise called "Vigilant Guardian." Close examination of this exercise is imperative due to the crucial role NORAD had to play in responding to the 9/11 attacks.

NORAD is the military organization responsible for monitoring and defending U.S. airspace. It was created during the Cold War, to protect North American airspace against nuclear attacks from the Soviet Union. Its Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC) in Colorado, where numerous staffers were involved in Vigilant Guardian, was described by the BBC as "the nerve centre of North America's air defense." [1] The center's role, according to the Toronto Star, was "to fuse every critical piece of information NORAD has into a concise and crystalline snapshot." [2] And NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) in Rome, New York, which was also participating in the exercise, was responsible for trying to coordinate the military's response to the hijackings on September 11. [3]

Vigilant Guardian, described as a "Cold War-style training exercise," was held annually by NORAD. It was reportedly scheduled to last two weeks and was several days underway on September 11. [4] All of NORAD, including its subordinate units, was participating in the exercise that day. [5] NORAD's CMOC was fully staffed for the exercise, with more than 50 members of staff in the Battle Management Center taking part. [6] According to Ken Merchant, NORAD's joint exercise design manager, the National Military Command Center (NMCC) at the Pentagon--which also played a key role in the military's response to the 9/11 attacks--regularly contributed to NORAD exercises. It was therefore presumably set to play a role in Vigilant Guardian on September 11. [7]

EXERCISE SIMULATED A 'FULL-BLOWN NUCLEAR WAR' AGAINST RUSSIA

Full details of Vigilant Guardian are unknown, but various accounts have given indications of what it involved. The 1st Air Force's book about the 9/11 attacks described Vigilant Guardian as a "simulated air war" and as "an air defense exercise simulating an attack on the United States." [8] It was a "transition to wartime operations command post exercise," according to an information page for exercise participants. [9] Ken Merchant called Vigilant Guardian a "full-blown nuclear war" exercise. [10] According to the Denver Post, it would involve "ever-escalating scenarios, from strained diplomacy to the outbreak of conventional warfare that headed inexorably toward nuclear conflict." [11]

Lieutenant Colonel William Glover, the commander of NORAD's Air Warning Center on September 11, said Vigilant Guardian involved NORAD "simulating war," with "attacks coming from the outside, Soviet-style bombers coming in, cruise-missile attacks, that type of thing." [12] The 9/11 Commission Report said the exercise "postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union." [13] According to Merchant, it included "bomber response and intercontinental ballistic missile response." [14]

The imagined enemy in Vigilant Guardian was Russia. [15] Merchant told the 9/11 Commission that "NORAD must use Russia in its exercises at the strategic level since no other country poses a great enough threat to NORAD's capabilities and responsibilities." [16]

EXERCISE INCLUDED A SIMULATED HIJACKING

Full details of what scenarios were scheduled for September 11 are unknown, but some information has been revealed. Vanity Fair reported that Vigilant Guardian had been "designed to run a range of scenarios" that day, "including a 'traditional' simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum." [17] Jeff Ford, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was working in the CMOC on September 11, recalled that it involved "air exercise events and then some scripted inputs that we were reacting to ... whether it be unknown aircraft that we scramble aircraft for to intercept, or whatever." According to Ford, "The big event that day was supposed to be a B-1 bomber that was flying out of Fairchild Air Force Base [in Washington State] and going out over the Pacific." [18]

'GLOBAL GUARDIAN' EXERCISE TESTED STRATCOM'S ABILITY TO FIGHT A NUCLEAR WAR

The other major exercise simulating a nuclear war that is known to have been taking place on September 11 was Global Guardian. This annual exercise was run by Stratcom, which is "the single U.S. military command responsible for the day-to-day readiness of nuclear forces." [19] Like Vigilant Guardian, Global Guardian was scheduled to last about two weeks and had already been running for several days by September 11. [20]

Global Guardian was in fact held "in cooperation with" a number of other military exercises, including Vigilant Guardian. [21] Ken Merchant told the 9/11 Commission that it "was coordinated with Vigilant Guardian so the combined Stratcom offensive abilities and the NORAD defensive abilities could be exercised." [22]

Global Guardian, according to an official after-action report on the exercise, was designed to exercise Stratcom "and supporting forces during a simulated crisis, validate war-fighting procedures, and verify command relationships." [23] Military analyst William Arkin described it as an "all-out game involving multiple regional conflicts that lead to a global nuclear war." [24]

The goal of the exercise, according to the Omaha World-Herald, was to test Stratcom's "ability to fight a nuclear war." [25] One reporter said it would involve America fighting "a fictional nuclear war," and would test the "response to a fictional attack from another nation." [26] The adversary preparing this nuclear attack on the United States was a fictional rogue nation called "Slumonia," a small nuclear power in northeast Asia. [27]

SUBMARINES, BOMBERS, AND HUNDREDS OF PERSONNEL PARTICIPATED IN GLOBAL GUARDIAN

Numerous military units were participating in Global Guardian in September 2001. [28] Around the U.S. and off its shores, bombers, missile crews, and submarines were taking part, following orders from Stratcom's command bunker at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. [29] As well as Offutt, other Air Force bases around the U.S. that were involved in the exercise included Barksdale, Minot, and Whiteman Air Force bases, where "dozens of aircraft and hundreds of personnel" were participating. [30]

"Other support" for the exercise was provided by personnel at the Pentagon, Camp H. M. Smith in Hawaii, Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, and NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. [31] According to William Arkin, several senior civilian and military leaders participated in Global Guardian exercises, including individuals from the offices of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so presumably this was the case in the September 2001 Global Guardian. [32]

STRATCOM WAS AT INCREASED STATE OF ALERT, AIRCRAFT WERE 'SIMULATING THEIR WARTIME ROLES'

Admiral Richard Mies, at that time the commander in chief of Stratcom, has described how Global Guardian was proceeding when the 9/11 attacks took place. He said Stratcom had been "ready to respond to a potential attack from a hypothetical adversary. ... We had intelligence indicating that they were preparing to attack us." Stratcom was positioning its forces "to be ready to offer the president the ability to respond in a wide variety of ways. A lot of our command and control systems that, in peacetime, are normally not on alert were at a much, much higher state of alert and we had a number of aircraft, manned control aircraft that were airborne that were simulating their wartime roles." Preparations underway in the exercise included "elevating our readiness status to a heightened state of readiness," "preparing bombers to potentially launch, if required," and "getting submarines that were in port ready to go to sea."

Mies added that Global Guardian involved "a lot of the elements of what ultimately would be the nuclear command and control system in support of a national emergency." It included "an exercise secretary of defense" and "an exercise president." [33] Among the exercise's objectives were disseminating "presidential nuclear decisions ... to the forces," and preparing and issuing National Command Authority directives, so presumably the participants acting as the president and the secretary of defense were involved in these activities. [34] (The National Command Authority refers collectively to the president and the secretary of defense.)

CREWS LOADED LIVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS ONTO BOMBERS

At Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, according to journalists Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, air crews taking part in the exercise were "pulling nuclear bombs and missiles out of their heavily guarded storage sites and loading them aboard B-52s" on the morning of September 11. Real, live nuclear weapons were being used, but "their triggers were not armed." [35]

American History magazine described the scene at the base: "Even though it was only a drill, the command center was tense, everyone proceeding as if the planes would soon take off on bombing runs, instead of just idling at the end of the runway." Then, at precisely 9:00 a.m. (Eastern time), "an alarm sounded across the base and the crews raced to their planes." After news was received about the terrorist attacks in New York, the base's command staff "ended the drill, but left the fueled and armed planes where they were." [36]

Also as part of Global Guardian, three E-4B National Airborne Operations Center planes that were based at Offutt Air Force Base were airborne on September 11. The E-4B, nicknamed the "Doomsday" plane during the Cold War, is a militarized version of a Boeing 747-200. It is equipped with advanced communications equipment, and in times of national emergency can act as an alternative command post from which top government officials can direct forces, execute war orders, and coordinate actions by civil authorities. Even after Global Guardian was terminated, the three E-4Bs remained in the air. [37]

AIR FORCE COMMANDER THOUGHT FIRST ATTACK WAS EXERCISE SIMULATION

That these training exercises were being conducted on the morning of September 11 raises important questions. As the Omaha World-Herald noted, the fact that Global Guardian was "in full swing" when the United States came under attack was "at least an odd coincidence." [38]

We need to investigate how much confusion military personnel experienced because they were preparing for a simulated attack on America at the time an actual attack on America took place. We already know of some instances of confusion caused by the exercises. For example, when Lieutenant General Thomas Keck, the commander of the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base, who had been monitoring the Global Guardian exercise, was told a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, he initially thought this was a simulated scenario. He therefore told the junior officer who had brought him the news: "That's not the way you interject a situation into a training exercise! When you have a scenario injection, you say, 'Sir, this is an exercise input,' and then you give me the information."

Additionally, some of the airmen at Barksdale who had been participating in the exercise appear to have been only vaguely aware of the real-world crisis. American History noted that after Global Guardian was called off, the crews in the B-52 bombers knew only "that something very serious was happening and they were not being ordered to stand down." Even by early afternoon, they had only heard "the most basic reports about the attacks on New York and the Pentagon." [39]

EXERCISE INCLUDED SIMULATED COMMUNICATION OUTAGES

We also need to consider whether actions incorporated into the training exercises affected lines of communication that would have been critical for enabling a swift response to the terrorist attacks. Some evidence indicates this may have been the case. For example, one of the listed objectives of the September 2001 Global Guardian was to "simulate outages between NC2 [nuclear command and control] nodes requiring alternate routes to maintain connectivity." Another objective was for participants to "determine operational impacts and work-arounds to simulated C4I [command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence] outages." The official after-action report on the exercise did not elaborate on what these "simulated C4I outages" involved. [40]

Certainly, those in NORAD's CMOC, who had been participating in Vigilant Guardian, appear to have experienced significant communication problems. William Glover recalled that the time of the 9/11 attacks was his "first time, you know, thinking about the fog of war, because we didn't know what was going on." [41] Major General Rick Findley, NORAD's director of operations, commented, "I wouldn't call it flat-footed, but we were a little bit behind the power curve most of that morning as we were trying to figure out exactly what transpired." [42] And Lieutenant Colonel Steven Armstrong, NORAD's chief of plans and forces, has complained that he and his colleagues "were out there in an information void, just looking for anything that we could find." He said, "All the information we were getting at the time was really off the TV." [43]

The causes of this "information void" surely need to be investigated. Might it have been the result, at least partly, of an attack on military communications systems that was incorporated into one (or more) of the exercises that day?

Some actions carried out on September 11 have been reported as if they were responses to the terrorist attacks, but evidence suggests they may actually have been conducted as part of an exercise, or at least perceived within the military as being part of an exercise. Two such actions, described below, are the closing of the blast doors to NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center and the order to raise the military's alert status to Defcon 3. If these actions were connected to the exercises taking place that day, it would raise further questions about how much confusion was caused by these exercises, and would indicate that the exercises continued even after it became obvious the U.S. was suffering a major terrorist attack.

NORAD CLOSED DOORS PROTECTING OPERATIONS CENTER FROM A NUCLEAR ATTACK

On the morning of September 11, the thick steel doors to NORAD's operations center in Cheyenne Mountain were closed for the first time in a real-world crisis since the CMOC opened in 1966. [44] The two doors are three feet thick and each weighs 25 tons. [45] They were designed to seal the operations center, to protect it from a nuclear blast. [46]

The time the blast doors were closed at is unknown, although a BBC documentary placed the event at 10:15 a.m. [47] The reason they were shut is also unclear. A number of reports suggested they were closed in response to information the CMOC received about an aircraft that was incorrectly thought to have been hijacked and targeting Cheyenne Mountain. [48] However, as the Regina Leader-Post pointed out, "Protected by 2,600 feet of granite, the NORAD command center and hundreds of personnel in their green flight suits were actually in the safest place in North America." [49] The CMOC was therefore already safe against an aircraft crashing into the mountain.

Furthermore, the blast doors are located at the end of a tunnel, about a third of a mile into the mountain. [50] Closing them would therefore have been a needless action as protection against a threatening aircraft, as a plane could hardly have made it all the way along the tunnel to the entrance to the CMOC! Brigadier General Jim Hunter, the vice commander of the CMOC on September 11, commented on the lack of danger, saying, "They could have driven airliners into that mountain all day." [51]

BLAST DOORS WERE CLOSED DURING EXERCISES

It is worth considering if there was a different reason why the blast doors were shut. Might they have been closed as part of one of the exercises? Vigilant Guardian and Global Guardian both involved simulating a nuclear war. And since the doors were designed to protect the CMOC from a nuclear strike, it would seem logical that they might be closed during an exercise simulating a nuclear attack on the United States.

Furthermore, while the doors had never been closed in a real-world crisis before September 11, they had been closed during exercises. Air Force officer William Astore wrote that when he worked inside Cheyenne Mountain between 1985 and 1988, the blast doors were kept open, "except, of course, during 'exercises,' when the mountain 'buttoned up' its self-contained world." [52]

MILITARY'S ALERT STATUS WAS RAISED TO DEFCON 3

Another event on September 11 that has yet to be properly explained is the order to raise the defense readiness condition from Defcon 5, the lowest possible level, to Defcon 3, the highest alert level for 28 years. [53]

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld issued the order to go to Defcon 3 at around 10:45 a.m. after conferring with General Richard Myers, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld also discussed the issue with Vice President Dick Cheney over the air threat conference call, and later briefed President Bush on his actions and was given the president's approval for what he had done. [54]....continued

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe

The 911Dataset Project [Added 9/11 Studies Page]

Clear the Skies. BBC

The Scene at NORAD on Sept. 11

9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes

"NORAD" The Early Edition

Vigilant Guardian: Northeast Air Defense Sector

References continued......

The CIA Returns to Campus and Resistance Begins Again

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:03:00 +0000

By By Philip Zwerling - Posting #176 [pdf Version]

Like recurring bad dreams of Freddy Krueger in endless iterations of Nightmare on Elm Street, after 9/11 the Central Intelligence Agency and its friends in the warm-and-fuzzy sounding Intelligence Community (the 16 spy agencies constituting the ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Security) have set up shop again on university and college campuses across the U.S., procuring students, “modifying” curricula, and spying on faculty just as they did in the 1960s and 1990s. But this time, few professors raised dissenting voices, fewer students demonstrated, and academic freedom took a direct hit in the name of patriotism and jobs.

Emboldened, the spies even reached out to high school and middle school students, sponsoring free summer “spy camps,” linking government agents with impressionable teens. At one such program, Reagan Thompson, 17, told a reporter, “I want to be a spy when I grow up. You learn different perspectives and it opens your mind.” Meriam Fadli, also 17, said: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I am so joining the FBI’.”

As Former CIA Personnel Director F.W.M. Janney wrote: “It is absolutely essential that the Agency have available to it the greatest single source of expertise: the American academic community.” As CIA spokesperson Sharon Foster bragged 20 years later: “The CIA has enough professors under Agency contract to staff a large university.”

Steadfast Goals - Lest We Forget - Philip Agee - CovertAction Quarterly

The CIA has penetrated U.S. campuses for the past 60 years with 3 steadfast goals: (1) To recruit students. They target institutions like mine, the University of Texas Pan American, and 22 other racial minority majority campuses (historically black colleges, hispanic serving institutions, tribal institutions, and majority female campuses) to set up, beginning in 2006, Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence (IC/CAE) and spending millions of dollars because, as Congressperson Jane Harmon stated: “We need spies who look like their targets.” The IC/CAEs recruit minorities and the poor during an economic recession that leaves our young people few other career options: enrolling them for all of the assassinations, coups d’etat, extraordinary renditions (read kidnapping), enhanced interrogations (read torture), and “black site” imprisonment that the CIA has practiced throughout its history, as documented by the 1975 Frank Church and 1977 Otis Pike Congressional inquiries.

(2) To conduct “research.” In the past this included using LSD and other drugs in mind control experiments conducted on unsuspecting college students on 44 campuses (Project MK- ULTRA) that resulted in depressions, breakdowns and suicides—and the training of Salvadoran death squads as at Northwestern University. Today, as Stephen Soldz, President of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, has shown it means recruiting university psychology professors for CIA torture research.

(3) To spy on faculty. In MH- CHAOS, the CIA collected files on 13,000 individuals and 1,000 legal organizations. Former CIA agent Verne Lyon has recounted how he received monthly payoffs and a draft exemption to spy on faculty and students for the Agency at Iowa State University in the mid 1960s. Students on the CIA payroll played the same role on 30 other campuses.

Buying Access

Today the ODNI/CIA Centers of Academic Excellence and their millions of dollars buy access to campuses across the country. This money funds undergraduate degree programs, certificate programs, and masters degrees in innocuously titled “Global Security Studies” programs. How do we know there are strings attached to these funds? IC/CAE grants require that universities host CIA speakers at annual campus conferences, sponsor summer camps for teenagers, set aside a named room in the campus library stocked with ODNI/CIA brochures, subsidize study abroad programs in countries of national security interest, and, in the CIA’s words, “modify curriculum,” often complete with CIA officers teaching such credit-bearing classes as Officers in Residence.

Section 38 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act set up the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program with $4 million a year to recruit and train graduate students for the CIA. The identities of those participating in the program, faculty and students, are kept secret. The 2010 intelligence authorization bill “invites schools to apply for grants for courses that would meet the needs of the intelligence community. Students taking the courses would have to receive security clearances and their participation would remain secret. After graduation the students would be required to work for the CIA.

In the end, scholars who do research for the CIA find their research classified. This scholarship cannot be shared in the academic community where the very reason for research is dissemination and discussion. Such scholars simultaneously become complicit in the nefarious workings of the CIA. Imagine how suspect medical research touting a major drug benefit becomes when other researchers and the public find out it has been funded by the drug manufacturer. Imagine as well how researchers may trim their inquiries and tune their conclusions not to offend a major funding source, whether that source be Merck, R.J. Reynolds, or the CIA.

This conflict of interest extends to publication where we must wonder whether CIA-sponsored scholars who submit work to CIA-funded publications where their work is peer reviewed by other CIA-funded scholars do not find a friendlier reception than scholars who refuse CIA funding. In this manner the CIA affects not only which scholars get published (and what we get to read), but indirectly affects academic promotion and tenure which ensures that professors who go along get along.

The CIA funding largesse may also explain the absence of articles critical of CIA activities in academic journals. Researcher George Gibbs, associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona, reports: “I surveyed the five top journals in political science that specialize in international relations during the period 1991-2000. I did not find a single article in any of these journals that focused on CIA covert operations.” CIA money can publish articles and it can also ensure silence.

The CIA returned to campus with a free hand because, by and large, faculties forgot and current students never learned the dark history of the CIA on campus. Those faculty and administrators who today collaborate with the CIA in spite of this past either argue that the CIA has changed its ways or that their personal involvement may moderate future CIA activity. Both attitudes were adopted by American intellectuals in every decade since the 1950s and have proved naive and illusory every time. Clearly individuals’ scruples have had less impact than the culture, mission, history, and raison d’etre for this secret organization. A bad system does not allow much room for people to do good.

The Struggle Begins Again

So the struggle against the CIA on campus begins again. Past models of success abound. In 1984, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, civil disobedience demonstrations outside school buildings where CIA recruiters set up shop led to arrests by campus police, then more demonstrations, more arrests, and then more demonstrations. The CIA finally stopped visiting UC-Boulder for the next ten years. In April 2005, the CIA withdrew from recruiting events at New York University when they learned of planned student demonstrations.

Since 2006, the presence of an IC/CAE at the University of Washington has ignited faculty senate debates and student demonstrations. In fall 2010, at the University of Texas Pan American, the College Council of the College of Arts and Humanities unanimously passed a resolution stating the Council: “opposes...further ODNI funding for academic programs at UTPA, rejects establishing an ‘Intelligence Analysis Campus’ as incompatible with the independence of the University and the traditional mission of liberal education and asks the Faculty Senate to initiate a public inquiry into the appropriateness of the de facto collusion between the University and these intelligence agencies....”

The Senate responded by sponsoring a public debate on the subject in Spring 2011. The IC/CAE grant ended at UTPA in May 2011 and the Intelligence Analysis Campus proposal died.

Dissecting CIA’s History

I began researching this issue two years ago when I discovered the CIA on my campus. With the help of college professors across the country we produced The CIA on Campus: Academic Freedom and the National Security State (McFarland and Company). In this book, seven academics on five campuses dissect CIA history, current college outreach, and how to get the spies off campus. Perhaps the most disturbing essay is by Verne Lyon who describes step by step how, when recruited by the CIA as an apolitical college student, his life became a descent into secrecy, lies, and criminal activity that negatively impacted the careers and lives of his fellow students and corrupted the ideal of an academy that values a search for truth. _Z

Philip Zwerling is a college professor in Texas and editor of The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State. Photo credits: Sit-in at Notre Dame to protest CIA and Dow Chemical campus recruitment, 1960s. Photo from Notre Dame archives; Iraq Veterans Against the War protest CIA recruitment at the University of Illinois, Campaign-Urbana, 2009. Photo from Champaign-Urbana online magazine.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: Freeing the World to Death - The Pike Report [.pdf]

Jailed CIA Operatives Spied In Every Field (The United States of Oil Corporations Scarfices)

Secrets of the CIA Video!

CIA on Campus

The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State

American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain

The CIA slips onto campus to conduct 'a Model U.N. for the intelligence community

WC Wins High Honors at CIA Tri-State Intelligence Simulation

Intelligence Community Center of Excellent (CAE)

Church Committee Hearings

Peter B. Collins & Boiling Frogs: Prof. Philip Zwerling, The CIA On Campus Part 1

Peter B. Collins & Boiling Frogs: Prof. Stephen Soldz, The CIA on Campus Part 2

Peter B. Collins & Boiling Frogs: Prof. Roberto Gonzalez, The CIA on Campus Part 3

Recent Declassified CIA Files |-:o

The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State

Operation CHAOS

Declassified CIA Profile Requirements |-:o

Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004

Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010

A Terrible Mistake

Declassified MK-Ultra Project Documents

Declassified Internal IG Report on (A)buse |-:o

CIA Support of Death Squads

Top Secret Investigation Findings on CIA (A)buse |-:o

America's Premier International Terrorist Organization

Mapping the FBI: Uncovering Abusive Surveillance and Racial Profiling -- TIs -- Heads Up!

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:05:00 +0000

By the ACLU - Posting #175

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is collecting racial and ethnic information and “mapping” American communities around the country based on crude stereotypes about which groups commit different types of crimes.

Nationwide, the FBI is gathering reports on innocent Americans' so-called “suspicious activity” and sharing it with unknown numbers of federal, state and local government agencies.

In response, the ACLU's “Mapping the FBI” initiative seeks to expose misconduct, abuse of authority, and unconstitutional profiling and other violations of Americans' rights and liberties across the country.

As our nation's predominant law enforcement agency, the FBI should be tracking true threats, not wasting resources and inappropriately mapping American communities on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. Law enforcement programs based on evidence and facts are more effective than a system based on racial stereotypes or mass suspicion.

Yet, in the decade since 9/11, long-standing safeguards on the FBI's investigative and intelligence collection activities have been erased, allowing it to engage in racial and profiling and to initiate intrusive investigations with little or no suspicion of wrongdoing.

Taken together, the changes in the FBI's authority have vastly expanding its ability to engage in unlawful and abusive surveillance of innocent Americans. See: Expanded FBI Authority »

The ACLU is working in the courts, in Congress and in communities to expose the ways in which the FBI's expanded authority threatens civil rights and civil liberties. Our work includes:

* Eye on the FBI: Consolidating information obtained through ACLU records requests, lawsuits and reports, the ACLU's “Eye on the FBI” alerts provide regular and detailed analysis of FBI activities that pose a threat to civil liberties. These activities include the use of factually incorrect and bigoted biased counterterrorism materials and FBI racial profiling. Learn more »

* Racial and Ethnic Mapping: 34 ACLU affiliates have filed public records requests to uncover how the FBI is using racial and ethnic demographic information and data about “ethnic-oriented” business and facilities to “map” and investigate local communities. ACLU affiliates in Michigan, New Jersey and Northern California are in federal court to enforce their records requests and secure information for the public. Learn more »

* eGuardian: The ACLU has sued the FBI and the Justice Department to learn more about an FBI monitoring and information-sharing program known as “eGuardian,” through which the bureau collects so-called “Suspicious Activities Reports” (SARs) from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. Learn more »

* Spy Files: This ACLU effort paints a comprehensive picture of the vast and expanding infrastructure of surveillance in the U.S. today by local, state and federal law enforcement—including the FBI. Documents obtained by the ACLU show that through this de facto domestic intelligence system, our government is monitoring and recording Americans' First Amendment-protected beliefs and activities. Learn more »

* FBI Interviews: The ACLU is working to educate individuals and community organizations across the country about their rights when encountering law enforcement. Over the past two years, the FBI has significantly increased its use of “voluntary” interviews – especially within specific racial, ethnic, and religious communities – often encouraging interviewees to serve as informants in their communities. LOL Know Your Rights » LOL

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI 'entrapment' questioned

ACLU Spy Files

Eye on the FBI: Exposing Misconduct and Abuse of Authority

Mapping the FBI

Tell the FBI: Don't Map Me or My Community!

Expanded FBI Authority

ACLU Letter to Attorney General Holder

Learn more: Expanded FBI Authority

Yet More Spy Vultures Take Flight From The Tor Nest

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:24:00 +0000

By: Anon - Posting #174 - Original by Cryptome

Note* Anon exposes some disturbing issues concerning rouge developers working under the Tor umbrella. Can some of the security issues surrounding SSL be traced back to Tor development and developers.

An interesting bug report was filed on the Mozilla bug tracker in September. [1] It is titled ``Addons can silently disable certificate validation and alter errors that are presented to the user'' and names the Convergence Firefox plugin what it really is -- a spy tool.

But first, recall my expose of the EFF's Firefox plugin -- the Decentralized SSL Observatory. [2] This plugin was a joint effort by the EFF and the Tor Project, with Mike Perry as a developer. Another of the developers is Peter Eckersley who maintains the plugin's source code repository on Tor's servers. [3] The purpose of this plugin was to intercept all SSL certificates seen by the user's browser and secretly send them all back to EFF servers for `observation'. It was shown how all this was to be pushed to users' machines without their knowledge nor consent. I'll take this opportunity to remind the EFF -- as a legal entity in the United States -- of the possible implications of not reigning in their wannabe spy friends' behaviour.

This brings us to the Convergence Firefox plugin. [4] The author, `Moxie Marlinspike' (real name unknown) openly bragged in 2009 of intercepting Tor exit node traffic. [5] In fact, passive spying was not enough for `Moxie', he actively tampered with exit node traffic, specifically the SSL layer, removing any encryption which got in the way of his spying. This way, he was able to collect passwords and credit card numbers alike. Supposedly all this was to raise awareness of the insecurity of HTTPS. However, not only did Tor users remain oblivious to his actions -- the Tor Project kept mute -- so that they could perhaps modify their behaviour accordingly (like, say, not using Tor), but `Moxie' then went on to lecture cadets at West Point about his spying skills. [6] An anarchist security researcher wanting to raise awareness? Or a wannabe spy wanting a piece of the spy establishment's pie?

Back to that Mozilla bug. `Moxie' has been itching to push his plugin on ignorant users -- which, he openly brags, intercepts users' SSL certificates and distributes them to his network of servers (just like the EFF/Tor Project's Distributed SSL Observatory plugin). Seeing this, a Mozilla developer opened the bug to discuss how to protect users from these malicious plugins. The reply from `Moxie', apart from flames on Twitter, was:

``Addons can execute arbitrary code, and the potential for malicious addons is somewhat infinite.'' [7]

Apart from being absurd (in the logical sense), this sentence is incorrect. Something is either finite or infinite, there is no ``somewhat infinite.'' Machines are finite, and their possibilities are also finite. His reponse to developers trying to protect users by fixing a bug he exploits to spy on them is ``There's so many other bugs, and I will never give up trying to spy on people, so just give up now.''

Note that Google LOL not only makes Moxie's spying on Chrome users impossible by design (Google's policy is only NSA gets to spy on you, no one else), but Google Chrome developers have outright rejected the possibility. LOL (Does someone smell bullshit here)[8] Not because Google is concerned about user privacy, but because Google wants to own all the notaries first...

Finally, note that Jacob Appelbaum has been one of the few vocal supporters of Moxie's work. Appelbaum has also been outed as a spy of Tor users' traffic. Note also that Anonymous recently outed Mike Perry as a Tor exit spy -- and worse, as probably the target of their recent takedown of child pornography. Anonymous' expose is well worth the read. [9]

The moral of this story is that birds of a feather flock together -- `Moxie' is a one trick poney and is looking to replicate his success in spying on Tor users by bringing the spying straight to the browsers of a wider audience (maybe West Point will fly him out again and put him up in a nice hotel). This person has no integrity, they don't even use their real name.

SSL, like Tor, were designed from the bottom up as spy tools. Only once another government gets a clue and begins exploiting them (cf. Comodo/DigiNotar) do the wannabe spies take exception. Keep this pattern in mind, it is important.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

Bug 686095 - Addons can silently disable certificate validation and alter errors that are presented to the user

Planned not-so-secret Backdoor in Tor/EFF Software Exposed

In this memo, a planned not-so-secret backdoor in Tor/EFF software is exposed. ``HTTPS Everywhere'' is a Firefox extension developed by the EFF. [1] Basically, this extension forces your browser to use HTTP with SSL (HTTPS), when browsing common websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia. HTTPS Everywhere intercepts the (unencrypted) HTTP requests your browser sends when browsing various websites, and replaces these on the fly with (encrypted) HTTPS requests, whenever possible. This is great, since HTTPS is supposedly more secure than HTTP (cf. Firesheep). Note, however, that this browser extension now has access to: all your browsing habits -- visited sites, precise timestamps, etc.; all content -- whether it's encrypted on the wire or not; and specifics of the SSL connection -- SSL certificates contain a bundle of metadata. The importance and relevance of this fact will become clear briefly.

Projects / pde/https-everywhere.git / summary

An agile, distributed,and secure strategy for replacing Certificate Authorities

[Tor-talk] Tor spying

Video - Beginning at 55 minutes into the video.

Moxie 2011-09-10 08:54:27 PDT:

Agreed, I think this bug is a step backwards. Addons can execute arbitrary code, and the potential for malicious addons is somewhat infinite. Even if malicious addons were not able to intercept SSL traffic, they could simply intercept keystrokes and transmit those home instead. It'd be a lot easier.

Why not Convergence? (07 Sep 2011)

False stories were planted against the IT community LOL [I wonder WHO did this?] LOL

At-last, we cracked the lock and found the true identity of the builder and architect of Freedom Hosting. What we found was truly shocking, it was the deeds to a California, USA 'shell' company for 12 Tor Exit Nodes named Formless Networking LLC.

Top Secret America: The Rise of the Nazi American Security State

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:23:00 +0000

By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin - Posting #173
Analysis of the FY 2011 Defense Budget
State of Homelessness in America 2011
Report: Military Blew $1 Trillion on Weapons Since 9/11

A Perpetual State of Yellow

Though she could barely walk anymore at age seventy-six, Joy Whiteman remained calm as she fumbled to remove her new white tennis shoes, lift herself out of her wheelchair, and grab the side of the X-ray machine. She teetered slowly, in socks, through the security scanner at the Boise Airport in Idaho. Airport security guards folded her wheelchair and rolled it through the scanner, keeping an eye on the frail woman in a bright flowered jacket.

“Can you make it without pain?” a guard asked her.

“Oh, sure,” she replied.

Whiteman followed instructions, lifted her hands above her head, emptied her pockets of crumpled pieces of paper, then apologized for having left her driver’s license in her purse rather than having it in hand for the guards to examine with her plane ticket. The line slowed behind her. Some people sighed at the inconvenience. Others smiled in sympathy at the awkward sight. I grimaced. What were the odds that she was a terrorist?

But Whiteman didn’t mind at all. “I have no problem with it. I don’t want to blow up,” she said when I asked about the hassle. “I could be carrying a gun or something.”

“Yeah,” her husband, Bill, 72, said. “These people are always one step ahead of us.”

Whiteman’s smile faded. “Last time, they wheeled me through without looking at the X-ray,” she said. “I could have had a bomb or explosives.”

A decade of terrorism warnings about possible attacks in the United States had convinced Whiteman that she had much to fear. Walking through a body scanner without her wheelchair was a small price to pay for safety. Never mind that no terrorist had ever fit her profile or been foiled walking through a security scanner. Never mind that the Department of Homeland Security, which was responsible for setting airport security policy, was ridiculed by people at every other intelligence agency because it hadn’t learned to hone its focus and still saw threats everywhere.

The scene of Joy Whiteman holding herself up with the walls of the body scanner while a crew of security guards, paid by taxpayers, made sure she didn’t fall, seemed a perfect metaphor for what has transpired in the United States over the past ten years. Having been given a steady diet of vague but terrifying information from national security officials about the possibility of dirty bombs, chemical weapons, biotoxins, exploding airliners, and suicide bombers, a nation of men and women like the Whitemans have shelled out hundreds of billions dollars to turn the machine of government over to defeating terrorism without ever really questioning what they were getting for their money. And even if they did want an answer to that question, they would not be given one, both because those same officials have decided it would gravely harm national security to share such classified information— and because the officials themselves don’t actually know.

LOL - In the panic-filled chaos of late 2001 through 2002, this dragnet approach to terrorism was understandable, given how little the CIA, the FBI, and military intelligence agencies knew then about al(cia)-Qaeda.- LOL But in ten years, they have made vast strides in technical surveillance capabilities and intelligence analysis. They have killed so many al(cia)-Qaeda operatives that only hundreds are left in the world (in addition to the organization’s post-9/11 affiliates). The dragnet approach no longer makes much sense.

One reason America is stuck at Yellow Alert — “Significant Risk” of terrorist attack accompanied by no specific information — and stuck with such an enormous complex of organizations and agencies trying to defend the country is that being wrong is too costly for politicians in Washington. “Who wants to be the guy that says we don’t need this anymore and then three weeks later something happens?” asked Obama national security adviser James Jones, former commandant of the Marine Corps. “I don’t think you can ever get it back” to a smaller size.

We believe the primary reason for this is that the government has still not engaged the American people in an honest conversation about terrorism and the appropriate U.S. response to it. We hope our book will promote one.

Many people in the intelligence community wish this book were not being published at all. Before publishing our initial series on Top Secret America in the Washington Post in July 2010, we showed the government a database of government organizations and private companies working at the top secret level, assembled over several years as part of our research. We described how the data had been culled from publicly available information, and asked to hear any national security concerns. After detailed discussions with most of the sixteen agencies of the intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to lead those agencies, returned with a surprising request: don’t publish the database. It might harm national security, we were told. The office declined to offer specifics and issued a warning to contractors about the impending publication of the series. The Post, meanwhile, had already begun to identify possible national security issues, and executive editor Marcus Brauchli ordered appropriate changes.

We are grateful to Little, Brown for allowing us to put this case before readers in much greater detail.

Despite all the unauthorized disclosures of classified information and programs in scores of articles since September 11, 2001, our military and intelligence sources cannot think of an instance in which security has been seriously damaged by the release of information. On the contrary, much harm has been done to the counterterrorism effort itself, and to the American economy and U.S. strategic goals, by allowing the government to operate in the dark, by continuing to dole out taxpayer money to programs that have no value and to employees, many of them private contractors, who are making no significant contribution to the country’s safety. Allowing outsiders like us to signal shortcomings is one of the great protections the U.S. Constitution gives to the media.

Calling the reaction to al(cia)-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack a “war” ensured that the government could justify classifying everything associated with fighting it. Under President George Bush, journalists’ efforts to figure out how the United States was waging this war against al-Qaeda were often criticized by senior administration leaders, members of Congress, cable television pundits, even the public. Many of those journalists hoped that would change under the presidency of Barack Obama. It is true the president and his cabinet members have not publicly disparaged the news media as much as his predecessor did. But behind the scenes, the situation is actually much worse. President Obama’s Justice Department has taken a more aggressive tack against the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by pursuing more so-called leak investigations than the Bush administration. Recent indictments were issued against a former CIA employee who allegedly talked to book author James Risen, a New York Times reporter, about a botched attempt to slip faulty nuclear plans to Iran; and a former National Security Agency official, Thomas Drake, who helped a Baltimore Sun reporter detail the waste of billions of dollars at his agency. In early June 2011, the government was forced to offer Drake a deal because its lawyers said they did not want to reveal classified information related to the case in court. Drake accepted the prosecution’s offer to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor of misusing a government computer to provide information to an unauthorized person. He is expected to serve no prison time. Then there is the case of former Justice Department official Thomas Tamm. In August 2007, eighteen FBI agents, some with their guns drawn, burst into his home with only his wife and children present, to raid his files during an investigation into his alleged role in helping the New York Times develop its seminal warrantless surveillance story in 2004. The government dropped his case nearly four years later, in April 2011, after Tamm’s career had been ruined and he faced financial peril.

The Justice Department is also mulling an indictment on LOL espionage charges LOL against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing tens of thousands of pages of classified U.S. diplomatic cables and war-related field reports, some of them allegedly provided by a young army private first class, who is also under arrest. Regardless of Assange’s publicly stated bias against U.S. policies and the allegations against his personal behavior, this unprecedented trove of material has allowed reporters around the world to write some of the most insightful and revealing stories of our time. In some cases those revelations even fueled brave public protests against undemocratic, corrupt regimes, developments the U.S. government says it supports in the name of promoting democracy.

Congress has jumped on the secrecy bandwagon, too. Maryland senator Benjamin Cardin — whose state is home to the National Security Agency, the nation’s eavesdroppers — introduced a bill in 2011 making it a felony to disclose classified information to an unauthorized person. This legislation expands considerably the current law that makes it illegal to disclose information on nuclear codes, cryptography, electronic intercepts, nuclear weapons designs, and the identities of covert agents. But most important, it places even greater power into the hands of the executive branch to just declare something classified rather than to have to demonstrate that harm would be done if the information were to be made public.

Had Cardin’s law been on the books shortly after 9/11, newspapers would have had a much harder time publishing stories about the CIA’s covert prisons and waterboarding and other harsh treatment of detainees. Journalists may have been kept from revealing that many of the captives held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, turned out not to be terrorists at all; that U.S. Army soldiers were abusing Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison; that the National Security Agency was collecting communications of people living in the United States without the required permission; and even that in 2011 Pakistan had rounded up men in their country they believed had helped U.S. authorities find Osama bin Laden.

The laws under consideration also would have made it illegal for government employees to help reporters research articles in 2002 and 2003 about the weakness of evidence surrounding Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction or, seven years later, the stunning admission by the key one-time German intelligence source, code-named Curveball, that his story was entirely fabricated.

Another piece of legislation now under consideration would criminalize the disclosure and publication of information about human intelligence — spies and informants. That law may have made it illegal for newspapers to have published articles about Canadian citizen Maher Arar, whom U.S. authorities turned over to the infamously inhumane Syrian police in 2002 after mistakenly deciding he was a terrorist. Or the CIA’s bungled operation in Macedonia, where case officers mistook German citizen Khalid al-Masri for someone else and disappeared him for months, something that has cost him his sanity. He is a broken man today, one without even a public apology from the United States.

This book offers a counterproposal: that only more transparency and debate will make us safe from terrorism and the other serious challenges the United States faces. Terrorism is not just about indiscriminate violence. As its name suggests, it is about instilling paranoia and profound anxiety. It aims to disrupt economies and inspire government clampdowns. It is time to close the decade-long chapter of fear, to confront the colossal sum of money that could have been saved or better spent, to remember what we are truly defending, and in doing so, to begin a new era of openness and better security against our enemies.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: [Just for you PeRpS] [CIAIdiots following Twitter, Facebook] LOL LOL LOL

The Ominous Parallels

The Ominous Parallels [Mirror]

The Ominous Parallels [Library]

Google Complied With 93% of U.S. Law Enforcement Data Requests

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:51:00 +0000

by Dennis Fisher - Posting #172

Google complied with 93 percent of the requests for user data that it received from U.S. law enforcement agencies through the first six months of this year. In the latest update to its Transparency Report, Google for the first time not only disclosed the number of requests that it receives, but also the number of user accounts that those requests encompass.

The data disclosed by Google on Tuesday provides an unusual, if incomplete, picture of the amount and kind of requests that the company gets from law enforcement agencies, not only in the U.S., but around the world. From January through June of 2011, Google and YouTube received 5,950 requests for users data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. alone, and those requests were seeking data on 11,057 users or accounts. Google began publishing some of this data last year, but this is the first time it has disclosed the raw number of users and accounts affected by those requests.

"The number of requests we receive for user account information as part of criminal investigations has increased year after year. The increase isn’t surprising, since each year we offer more products and services, and we have a larger number of users," the company said in the notes accompanying the data.

"The statistics here reflect the number of law enforcement agency requests for information we receive at Google and YouTube, and, for the period from July-December 2010 and onward, the number of those requests where we produced at least some responsive information. We didn’t necessarily include requests that were addressed to the wrong Google company. We review each request to make sure that it complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law (LOL), and we may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases."

No other country came anywhere close to issuing as many requests as agencies in the U.S. did, with India claiming second place with 1,739 requests covering 2,439 users or accounts. Google also detailed the number of requests it received from law enforcement regarding the removal of a piece of content for one reason or another. The company got 92 such requests in the first half of this year and complied, at least in part, with 63 percent of them. Many of the removal requests were for content that was thought to be defamatory, but others were for privacy or security reasons or for copyright infringement.

In a blog post about the data release, Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, said that the company intends the data to give users a picture of how the privacy and security laws are being used.

"All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data. But by showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online," Chou wrote.

" We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernize laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago—long before the average person had ever heard of email. Yet at the end of the day, the information that we’re disclosing offers only a limited snapshot. We hope others join us in the effort to provide more transparency, so we’ll be better able to see the bigger picture of how regulatory environments affect the entire web."

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

HERDICTWEB

OpenNet Initiative

Google Public Policy

Google Transpareny Report

What Is The OpenNet Initiative

House Committee Passes Bill to Force ISPs to Retain User Data For 12 Months

Did the German Government Break The Law With Its Lawful Intercept Trojan?

Federal Trojan's Got A "Big Brother" -- Trojan Update-Button

noreply@blogger.com (Donald F. Truax) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:52:00 +0000

By Tillmann Werner - Posting #171 - Countermeasure #1

About two weeks ago, the German Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has published an analysis report of a backdoor trojan that they claim had been used by German police during investigations in order to capture VoIP and IM communication on a suspect's PC.

Our friends over at F-Secure published a blog post last week where they wrote about another file that, according to them, seemed to be the dropper component of the trojan. They were kind enough to share the MD5 hash of the file, so we could pull it from our collection. Stefan and I took a closer look.

The dropper carries five other binaries in its resource table, so there are six components in total – each with a different purpose – all of which have been analyzed by us. Amongst the new things we found in there are two rather interesting ones: firstly, this version is not only capable of running on 32 bit systems; it also includes support for 64 bit versions of Windows. Secondly, the list of target processes to monitor is longer than the one mentioned in the CCC report. The number of applications infected by the various components is 15 in total.

Target Applications

Previous discussions of R2D2 mention Skype as a target application that is monitored by the trojan. The version analyzed by us indicates that Skype is targeted as well, but also all common web browsers, various instant messaging applications and voice-over-ip software, such as ICQ, MSN Messenger, Low-Rate Voip, paltalk, SimpPro, sipgate X-Lite, VoipBuster and Yahoo! Messenger. The list of process names is:

* explorer.exe
* firefox.exe
* icqlite.exe
* lowratevoip.exe
* msnmsgr.exe
* opera.exe
* paltalk.exe
* simplite-icq-aim.exe
* simppro.exe
* sipgatexlite.exe
* skype.exe
* skypepm.exe
* voipbuster.exe
* x-lite.exe
* yahoomessenger.exe

Code injection into target processes is carried out by the dropper, two user-mode components and also a 32 bit kernel driver with extended functionality compared to the version previously analyzed, which only provided an interface for registry and file system modifications.

All target processes we found in the different user-mode components are also covered by the driver.

There are two different DLL injection methods implemented. One works by registering the user-mode library in the Windows registry as an AppInit DLL so that it gets loaded during process creation. The second creates a remote thread in already running processes and injects a piece of position-independent code that maps the mfc42ul.dll file, one of the user-mode modules, into the target process memory.

64 bit Kernel Driver

When the dropper installs the kernel-mode component, it derives the resource name from the architecture (either 32 or 64 bit) and installs an appropriate driver:

Contrary to the 32 bit version, the 64 bit driver does not contain any process infection functionality but only provides a rudimentary privilege escalation interface through file system and registry access. Similar to its brother, it creates a device and implements a basic protocol for communicating with user-mode applications.

It is well known that 64 bit kernel modules must carry a valid digital signature that can be checked by the operating system, or loading the driver fails. The driver that comes with the rootkit contains a 1024 bit RSA certificate (fingerprint e5445e4a 9c7d24c8 43f0c669 e2a8d3a1 78cf7fa8), issued by Goose Cert on April 11, 2010. However, the certificate must be installed and the trustworthiness must be confirmed in order to make the driver load.

All components are detected by Kaspersky as variants of the R2D2 trojan/rootkit. The dropper was previously heuristically detected and blocked by us as an invasive program.

"And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA....ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References: Facebook Worm Found to Serve ZeuS - No Smit!

Apple iTunes “Flaw” Allowed Government Spying for 3 Years - Woooo Hoooo

Surveillance Company Says It Sent Fake iTunes, Flash Updates LOL LOL LOL

As Washington Renews Military Threats Against Iran, Cyber Attacks Escalate

Cuba says U.S. behind illegal wireless networks

Anonymous' Fawkes Virus Found on Facebook LOL LOL LOL

Microsoft Issues [Fix it or Unfix it] for Duqu 0-Day Vulnerability in Windows Kernel

China: Don't blame us for U.S. satellite hacks :o

600,000 hacks a day, welcome to Facebook LOL LOL LOL

Example: What happens when ya hit that trojan-update button!

'Government and companies NSA/SAIC/DIA routinely abuse data privacy'

Using Stuxnet and Duqu as Words of Mass Disruption

NSA Open Sources Google Database Mimic

Federal Trojan

Magic Lantern

DODs New Stuxnet 2.0 'Cyber-Surveillance' Malware Threat - :o TOP

Exploit Kits – A Different View

Chaos Computer Club analyzes government malware

More Info on German State Backdoor: Case R2D2

Mass Injection Attack Targets ASP.NET Sites

Widespread LizaMoon Web Attacks Push Rogue Antivirus