Antifluff Superstar Blog

Professor Paul Connett: Your Toxic Tap Water

2011-01-28T00:53:00.001-06:00

If you drink water, you need to watch this fantastic video by Dr. Paul Connett, created on December 24, 2010.

We have a mandate in Louisiana stating that we have to drink Fluoridated water. We are being forcibly medicated with a super poison (Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & now imported from from CHINA and being used in many places in the US and in Crowley and Oakdale, Louisiana presently!) without any way to control the dose, and without our permission.

I worked with Dr. Connett in March 2009 when he came to Baton Rouge to help us. He's the most well known anti-fluoridation scientist in the world.

Today I learned that Dr. Connett considers this his best video he's done to date. It's VERY comprehensive. Please take some time and educate yourself about the truth regarding the dangers of water fluoridation. You will be shocked with what you learn.

Thanks,

Mark

Antifluff Supergirls Beauty Police Patrol

2010-10-31T02:43:00.001-05:00

World Class Police, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Beauty Police Patrol

Halloween 2010 LSU Carlotta Street Party October 30, 2010. Photo by: Mark Galasso © 2010 Galasso Photogrpahy. Galassophotography.com

DHH Secretary Alan Levine resigns - WAFB Channel 9, Baton Rouge, LA |

2010-07-16T01:59:00.001-05:00

Good riddance, Louisiana thanks you for leaving.

DHH Secretary Alan Levine resigns - WAFB Channel 9, Baton Rouge, LA |

Jindal’s Louisiana Secretary of Health & Hospitals Deceives Newspapers Regarding Country of Origin for Water Fluoridation Chemicals

2010-04-20T23:42:00.004-05:00

Here is a photo provided by COF of Lafayette (Citizens Opposing Fluoride) which was obtained (secretly) from a Louisiana city water department. Prominently displayed are the usual poison warning of skull and bones, the safety precautions and first aid procedures for handling toxic substances, and the acknowledgement that it is made in Japan.

The American Water Works Association (AWWA) suggests in their standards that water operators should ask for country of origin.

Jindal’s (suspiciously appointed over many more qualified applicants form Louisiana) appointed Louisiana Secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals Alan Levine ( MBA) has gone on record in two articles now stating that fluoridation chemicals used in Louisiana come from within the USA.

Here is his comment in Baton Rouge’s The Advocate :
www.2theadvocate.com/news/90808519.html

“Those public water systems in Louisiana that add fluoride use a chemical that was processed in the United States, he said.”

And here in New Orleans Times Picayune he said this:
www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2010/04/dumbest_bill_of_t...

“Alan Levine, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, points out that fluoride is heavy and costly to transport. Because of that, Louisiana water systems that fluoridate their water use chemicals manufactured in the United States.”

The photo posted here proves that DHH Secretary Alan Levine is either lying or he’s so incompetent that he says things he has no idea whether they are even accurate or not. And this is the man in charge of the Department of Health and Hospitals for Louisiana?

This is the guy we’re supposed to trust what he says and does with regard to dumping Fluoride Toxins into Louisiana water supplies?

Levine is grossly incompetent. He also stated in a meeting in March 2009 that he had no idea of any dangers associated with water fluoridation. Another lie?

He knows, because he was told in a conference meeting by fluoridation expert Dr. Paul Connett in March 2009 that fluoridation has been proven toxic to humans. And yet still, Levine has ignored all valid scientific studies that have since been sent to him regarding the dangers of fluoridating public water supplies.

Levine is an inept & dishonest Jindal operative that should be sent packing.

Louisiana Senator Dan Claitor's SB 638 Advances Legislation to Provide Notice to Citizens re: Fluoridation Dangers

2010-04-16T20:50:00.004-05:00

Fluoridation warning advances

By MARK BALLARD
Advocate Capitol News Bureau
Published: Apr 14, 2010 - Page: 9A

www.2theadvocate.com/news/90808519.html

A state Senate committee on Tuesday advanced legislation that would require water companies to inform their customers of plans to fluoridate their water supplies and to forbid the purchase of the chemical additive from China.

State Sen. Dan Claitor said his Senate Bill 638 is about notification, not stopping fluoridation. The Baton Rouge Republican said each consumer should be able to make an informed choice about whether to drink the fluoridated water or just to use it for washing.

Adding the chemical fluoride to public water supplies reduces dental decay in the community, according to advocates of the practice, which includes the American Dental Association. (It also causes Cancer)

Opponents question whether the benefits of fluoride outweigh its toxic effects, which they say include risks to the brain, thyroid gland, bones and to infants.

The Senate Environmental Quality Committee recommended SB 638 to the full Senate without objection. Baton Rouge lobbyist Randy Hayden (Scum Bag gets paid to poison) represents Healthy Smiles Louisiana, which is a coalition of dentists, physicians and business leaders.

He said tying fluoridation to the health risks of Chinese drywall is designed to hinder future efforts to fluoridate water supplies in Louisiana.

“This will make it more difficult,” said Hayden, adding that Baton Rouge is one of the largest cities in the country that does not add fluoride to its public water supply.

Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine (Jindal Political Pundit/Plant/MBA? running LA Health Dept.) agreed. “It might create some real bureaucracies for the department that I don’t think is necessary or intended,” said Levine in a phone interview after the hearing.

If the legislation becomes law, Levine’s DHH would have to track the source of the fluoride from its source to ensure the chemical did not come from the People’s Republic of China, he said. Because the federal government doesn’t track the origins of fluoride, the state would have to create its own system, Levine said. The result likely would mean the state could not approve fluoridation projects, he said. (what a shame)

Levine said fluoride is heavy and expensive to transport, making the chemical processed in China too expensive for American water companies. (Guess that's why all over the US cities are using China Fluoride Chemical now?) Those public water systems in Louisiana that add fluoride use a chemical that was processed in the United States, he said.

Don't Drink the Water: FOX News Story About Water Fluoridation

2010-04-16T20:39:00.001-05:00

Here is a National Story on FOX News about Water Fluoridation being Fought in Maine: liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/04/16/dont-drink-the-water/This is GOOD NEWS!

Bird of Paradise

2010-04-16T20:35:00.001-05:00

Bird of Paradise, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

This Pic Makes a Great Desktop Photo

Taken at Highland Coffee's, Baton Rouge, LA 9-9-09

Uploaded by Antifluff Superstar on 21 Feb 10, 11.05PM CST.

Professional Perspectives: Fluoride in Tap Water

2010-03-17T15:32:00.001-05:00

Ron Paul about 1976 Vaccination Same as 2009 - Fear and Forced Vaccination

2009-10-17T03:01:00.001-05:00

Fear and Advertising sponsored by the United States Government and Homeland security.

The US Gov. has been in the business of medicating americans for many years. For example, Water Fluoridation is a waste child of the Department of Defense.

The Gov. is in the vaccine business, with the military, who is also tied to water fluoridation.

Fascism.

And yet if we don't change health care in America, it's people will perish, and if we are forced to have the government administer health for all we’re really screwed.

How in God's name could anyone even begin to think that the US Government has your best interest at heart, when they mandate hydrofuorosilicic acid in your drinking water and Vaccines (mandates coming as we speak) for your children and elderly, the most, immune system vulnerable.

The FDA has been politicized to a point where the Drug co.’s are allowed to release slews of drugs not tested properly because the FDA rushed the approval process. Swine Flu Vaccination testing and safety is no different in this case. Think of the Zetia scam, Vioxin, etc.. The FDA was like a Circle K. One drug scam after another in W. Bush 8yrs.

Anyone in America who would trust the US government to administer shots of live viruses into your body, is nuts.

Watch some of these videos about the 1976 Flu Vaccines.

David Icke - DONT TAKE SWINE FLU VACCINE !!!!

2009-10-17T02:20:00.001-05:00

***This is Important!

-Repeated Vaccination Process in America, 1976

PLEASE families take charge of your right to be vaccine free and fluoride free with your drinking water.

No one should ever allow the government tell them anything about what they are forced to take as a medication.
This has been going on with water fluoridation for over 60 yrs. And now the new vaccine push in America, 2009.

1976 Footage - "60 Minutes" Swine Flu shot expose' part 2

2009-10-17T02:13:00.001-05:00

Don't Vaccinate for the Swine Flu. And don't allow Fluoridation of your Water by any government entity. These two issues are birds of a feather.

Save Louisiana's Pristine Water! - Stop Bobby Jindal from Poisoning our Natural Water Aquifers with Fluoride Waste Chemical: Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate - REVOKE SB 312 - 2008 Legislative Session

2009-06-21T04:25:00.001-05:00

Save Louisiana's Pristine Water! - Stop Bobby Jindal from Poisoning our Natural Water Aquifers with Fluoride Waste Chemical: Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate - REVOKE SB 312 - 2008 Legislative Session, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

For further reading & to educate yourself about the TRUTH regarding WATER FLUORIDATION VISIT: www.fluoridealert.org

The Phosphate Fertilizer Industry: An Environmental Overview

www.fluoridealert.org/phosphate/overview.htm

gypsum stack sinkholes

www.fluoridealert.org/phosphate/sinkhole.htm

PLEASE READ THIS BELOW:

It’s a summary of how Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals (DHH), the Louisiana & American Dental Associations (LDA/ADA ) and Senator Willie Mount of Lake Charles created a mandate to dump the super toxin, Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate into Louisiana’s Drinking water

- Bobby Jindal hired Alan Levine & Rony Francois, Md, MSPH, Phd to head up the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals. Both of these men worked for Jeb Bush in Florida's department of Health & Hospitals. Florida is home to the largest Fertilizer Industry in the US where 95% of the Fluoride waste chemical comes from that is used to fluoridate water in the USA.

At a meeting (where I was present) with the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals (DHH) in Baton Rouge on April 22, 2009 Secretary of DHH Alan Levine, and his Assistant to the Secretary Rony Francois (Md, MSPH, Phd) claimed to have NO KNOWLEDGE of any of the dangers and hazards surrounding water fluoridation.

And yet it is these two men who worked for Jeb Bush in Florida, home to the largest producers of Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate fertilizer waste product, which is used to fluoridate Humans Drinking water.

These men have been put in charge of administering this fluoride waste toxin to all citizens of Louisiana, to include: babies, pregnant women, the sick, the poor, Kidney dialysis patients, people with immunity disorder issues, Thyroid disorders, Diabetics.... etc and yet they admitted that they knew of no dangers or hazards regarding water fluoridation.

Dr. Paul Connett, (Emeritus Environmental Chemistry Phd. & founder of www.fluoridealert.org) a widely recognized anti-fluoridation expert was present at this meeting to explain to the heads of Louisiana's Department of Health & hospitals that Water Fluoridation is extremely toxic to humans and under no circumstances should water fluoridation be mandated without the consent of the citizens of Louisiana.

So, I ask all of you, is Bobby Jindal anything other than a social climbing politician? Another politician who will say anything, do anything to advance his political ambitions, (-Didn’t his unbelievable speech to the nation point out just what a GOON Jindal really is.) even if it means poisoning Louisiana Citizens drinking water, without their consent.

The people of Louisiana have no idea this is even happening and have no education about water fluoridation other than the Fluoridation influence peddling from their dentists and the LDA/ADA. Specifically, DDS, Ward Blackwell the head of the LDA. This dentist went before the Louisiana Legislature and flat out lied to them about the safety of water fluoridation. There were no opposing experts there during the legislative session to present the known dangers of water fluoridation; Data, studies and statistics that have been there for over 60yrs demonstrating that Water Fluoridation is not only NOT necessary, it's terribly toxic to humans.

You can watch DDS, Ward Blackwell on Video making what is tantamount to medical malpractice statements before the Louisiana Legislature:

DDS, Ward Blackwell’s words:

"there simply are no documented safety issues with fluoridation".

www.wesawthat.blogspot.com/2008/07/sb312-how-mandatory-fl...

This is the fight to fight. It's for the safety of your drinking water.

Jindal should be impeached for signing SB 312 into law. He ignored all of the emails and phone calls from those who did know about SB 312. (I only found out thanks to www.flouridealert.org)

And to make things worse, the people Jindal has appointed to head DHH in Louisiana claimed to know NOTHING about the dangers surrounding Water Fluoridation.

How medically irresponsible and incompetent can you get? Especially regarding something as important as the safety of your drinking water.

Jindal signed SB 312 into law, and it’s a MANDATE to poison what is some of the best drinking water in the world, Baton Rouge's water comes from natural well water aquifers.

The unthinkable is happening, Six months after Jindal became governor there appears a law mandating that Hydrofluorosilicic Acid be added as medication to citizens drinking water WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT. And with NO WAY to CONTROL the DOSE

JINDAL = MASS MEDICATION of CITIZENS via DRINKING WATER with a SUPER TOXIN - WITHOUT THE ABILITY TO CONTROL the DOSE

And the SB 312 law is designed so that it is almost impossible to have it overturned in your city. You’d have to get 15% (they initially wanted it to be 30% but the congress rejected it) of the people in your city to sign a legitimate petition and THEN force a vote where over 50% of the citizens would have to vote out the fluoridation mandate. This is no easy task. This is why Louisiana must force Jindal To REVOKE SB 312.

All citizens of Louisiana, please get involved and demand that Jindal REVOKE
SB 312.

DON”T WAIT !!

**** If the citizens of Louisiana rest on our laurels, grant funding or some other way to implement water fluoridation will no doubt happen.

__________________________________________________________

Text Body of Flyer:

In July, 2008 Bobby Jindal signed into law SB 312 sponsored by Senator Willie Mount of Lake Charles & the Louisiana Dental Association (LDA) & the American Dental Association (ADA).

This insidious law mandates that Louisiana’s water supplies be poisoned with fluoride waste chemical (by-product of the Fertilizer industry) known specifically as, Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate -which contains Arsenic, Lead, Mercury and even highly radioactive Uranium which is found in phosphate rock used to make fertilizer.

In the middle of a historic depression in the US Jindal & DHH (Department of Health & Hospitals) is creating a tax on your water to the tune of millions of dollars to add Fluoride Waste Super Toxins to your water. Why is this? Ask Jindal & Secretary of DHH, Alan Levine,. - FACT: If you dump this same waste in a river you’ll go to jail, and yet these people intend to put this same chemical in your drinking water. Claiming that when sufficiently diluted in water these super poisons are rendered harmless. † Malpractice false.

The costs to add Hydrofluorosilicic Acid or Sodium Fluorosilicate to Baton Rouge’s 80 separate and pristine natural water aquifers will be $8,553,559.90 for the first six months. The state is supposed pay (** often outside grants or funding is obtained to quietly begin the fluoridation) for the first six months costs for water fluoridation. Thereafter, the citizens of Baton Rouge will pay a huge price tag for adding Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate to your water. The PRICE OF YOUR WATER WILL GO UP SIGNIFICANTLY. Baton Rouge Water Co. Just announced it’s first price increase in 17 yrs. Think of what you will be paying if DHH fluoridates our Great World Class water in Baton Rouge.

****Call & Email: Governor Jindal, (DHH) Department of Health & Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine, your Senators ( Willie Mount) & Representatives, Mayor Kip Holden, Baton Rouge Water Company, The Advocate, Local TV News Stations and your local Churches and DEMAND that SB 312 (2008) be REVOKED.

Facts about Fluoridation & Important Questions to ask Jindal, DHH Alan Levine & the politicians who voted MANDATORY Fluoridation into law:

1. Baton Rouge has 80 separate well water aquifers. It is extremely IMPRACTICAL & EXPENSIVE to fluoridate all these water sites. Does DHH have test results indicating that each of these 80 water sites are fluoride deficient? If not, what is the basis for adding additional fluoride waste chemical to perfectly healthy drinking water? Especially since Hydrofluorosilicic Acid is extremely toxic.

2. Since DHH will be medicating citizens by adding supplemental Fluoride to their drinking water, who is legally & medically responsible for this program? Can DHH provide contact information for the physician in charge of administering fluoride “medication” to the population?

3. What dose of Fluoride does DHH plan to prescribe to each citizen? How does DHH plan to administer & control fluoride doses for individual citizens who may drink more water than others?

4. Given that there is ample public access to fluoride products such as toothpaste, mouth wash, dental floss and pharmaceutical fluoride pills, what need could there possibly be to add Hydrofluorosilicic Acid to drinking water? Especially since 99 1/2% of water goes down the drain. Water fluoridation is a wasted & significant expense for taxpayers.

5 .Since DHH is claiming that all citizens are fluoride deficient and need to have fluoride chemical added to their water, how does DHH intend to prove which patients need additional fluoride supplements & those who clearly do not? If DHH cannot TEST all CITIZENS BLOOD to determine why DHH might medicate them, with anything, let alone additional fluoride in their system, how is it legal to administer fluoride as a medication via citizens drinking water, without their consent ? Is this the year 2009 or 1650? Water Fluoridation is a Medieval practice.

6. Can DHH provide toxicity studies done on Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate that prove definitively that adding these specific chemicals to drinking water is safe for infants, children, pregnant women, the elderly and citizens with compromised immunity issues such as Kidney & Thyroid disorders etc...

7. Will DHH educate the public re: the fact that 95% of the fluoride chemical used in water fluoridation in the US comes in the form of a chemical waste product (Silicofluorides) produced by manufacturing Fertilizer? - THIS is a KEY FACT that the PUBLIC NEEDS TO KNOW about.††

8 . It is illegal to dump Silicofluorides into a river or ocean & yet it is these chemicals, Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate that DHH will be adding to your drinking water. Like I said, CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.

9. What business do dentists, LDA & ADA have advocating (and spending a lot of money to do so) mass medication of citizens, without their consent, via their drinking water? The "It's good for your teeth argument" is a fraud, it's been proven time and again all over the world, water fluoridation is completely unnecessary for optimal dental health

10. In 2006, the ADA began warning dentists and it's constituents (not publicly) that using fluoridated water with baby formula for infants is dangerous & toxic to the babies blood/brain barrier. So, it's poisoning them. Adults are no different.

Save Louisiana's Water! - Stop Bobby Jindal from Poisoning our Natural Water Aquifers with Fluoride Waste Chemical -REVOKE SB 312

2009-05-22T01:16:00.001-05:00

Save Louisiana's Water! - Stop Bobby Jindal from Poisoning our Natural Water Aquifers with Fluoride Waste Chemical -REVOKE SB 312, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

For further reading & to educate yourself about the TRUTH regarding WATER FLUORIDATION VISIT: www.fluoridealert.org

PLEASE READ THIS BELOW: It’s a summary of how Jindal, DHH, the LDA/ADA and Senator Willie Mount of Lake Charles created a mandate to dump Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate into Louisiana’s Drinking water

- Bobby Jindal hired Alan Levine & Rony Francois, Md, MSPH, Phd to head up the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals. Both of these men worked for Jeb Bush in Florida's department of Health & Hospitals. Florida is home to the largest Fertilizer Industry in the US where 95% of the Fluoride waste chemical comes from that is used to fluoridate water in the USA.

At a meeting (where I was present) with the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals (DHH) in Baton Rouge on April 22, 2009 Secretary of DHH Alan Levine, and his Assistant to the Secretary Rony Francois (Md, MSPH, Phd) claimed to have NO KNOWLEDGE of any of the dangers and hazards surrounding water fluoridation.

And yet it is these two men who worked for Jeb Bush in Florida, home to the largest producers of Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate fertilizer waste product, which is used to fluoridate Humans Drinking water.

These men have been put in charge of administering this fluoride waste toxin to all citizens of Louisiana, to include: babies, pregnant women, the sick, the poor, Kidney dialysis patients, people with immunity disorder issues, Thyroid disorders, Diabetics.... etc and yet they admitted that they knew of no dangers or hazards regarding water fluoridation.

Dr. Paul Connett, (Emeritus Environmental Chemistry Phd. & founder of www.fluoridealert.org) a widely recognized anti-fluoridation expert was present at this meeting to explain to the heads of Louisiana's Department of Health & hospitals that Water Fluoridation is extremely toxic to humans and under no circumstances should water fluoridation be mandated without the consent of the citizens of Louisiana.

So, I ask all of you, is Bobby Jindal anything other than a social climbing politician? Another politician who will say anything, do anything to advance his political ambitions, (-Didn’t his unbelievable speech to the nation point out just what a GOON Jindal really is.) even if it means poisoning Louisiana Citizens drinking water, without their consent.

The people of Louisiana have no idea this is even happening and have no education about water fluoridation other than the Fluoridation influence peddling from their dentists and the LDA/ADA. Specifically, DDS, Ward Blackwell the head of the LDA. This dentist went before the Louisiana Legislature and flat out lied to them about the safety of water fluoridation. There were no opposing experts there during the legislative session to present the known dangers of water fluoridation; Data, studies and statistics that have been there for over 60yrs demonstrating that Water Fluoridation is not only NOT necessary, it's terribly toxic to humans.

You can watch DDS, Ward Blackwell on Video making what is tantamount to medical malpractice statements before the Louisiana Legislature:

DDS, Ward Blackwell’s words:

"there simply are no documented safety issues with fluoridation".

www.wesawthat.blogspot.com/2008/07/sb312-how-mandatory-fl...

This is the fight to fight. It's for the safety of your drinking water.

Jindal should be impeached for signing SB 312 into law. He ignored all of the emails and phone calls from those who did know about SB 312. (I only found out thanks to www.flouridealert.org)

And to make things worse, the people Jindal has appointed to head DHH in Louisiana claimed to know NOTHING about the dangers surrounding Water Fluoridation.

How medically irresponsible and incompetent can you get? Especially regarding something as important as the safety of your drinking water.

Jindal signed SB 312 into law, and it’s a MANDATE to poison what is some of the best drinking water in the world, Baton Rouge's water comes from natural well water aquifers.

The unthinkable is happening, Six months after Jindal became governor there appears a law mandating that Hydrofluorosilicic Acid be added as medication to citizens drinking water WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT. And with NO WAY to CONTROL the DOSE

JINDAL = MASS MEDICATION of CITIZENS via DRINKING WATER with a SUPER TOXIN - WITHOUT THE ABILITY TO CONTROL the DOSE

And the SB 312 law is designed so that it is almost impossible to have it overturned in your city. You’d have to get 15% (they initially wanted it to be 30% but the congress rejected it) of the people in your city to sign a legitimate petition and THEN force a vote where over 50% of the citizens would have to vote out the fluoridation mandate. This is no easy task. This is why Louisiana must force Jindal To REVOKE SB 312.

All citizens of Louisiana, please get involved and demand that Jindal REVOKE
SB 312.

DON”T WAIT !!

**** If the citizens of Louisiana rest on our laurels, grant funding or some other way to implement water fluoridation will no doubt happen.

__________________________________________________________

Text Body of Flyer:

In July, 2008 Bobby Jindal signed into law SB 312 sponsored by Senator Willie Mount of Lake Charles & the Louisiana Dental Association (LDA) & the American Dental Association (ADA).

This insidious law mandates that Louisiana’s water supplies be poisoned with fluoride waste chemical (by-product of the Fertilizer industry) known specifically as, Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate -which contains Arsenic, Lead, Mercury and even highly radioactive Uranium which is found in phosphate rock used to make fertilizer.

In the middle of a historic depression in the US Jindal & DHH (Department of Health & Hospitals) is creating a tax on your water to the tune of millions of dollars to add Fluoride Waste Super Toxins to your water. Why is this? Ask Jindal & Secretary of DHH, Alan Levine,. - FACT: If you dump this same waste in a river you’ll go to jail, and yet these people intend to put this same chemical in your drinking water. Claiming that when sufficiently diluted in water these super poisons are rendered harmless. † Malpractice false.

The costs to add Hydrofluorosilicic Acid or Sodium Fluorosilicate to Baton Rouge’s 80 separate and pristine natural water aquifers will be $8,553,559.90 for the first six months. The state is supposed pay (** often outside grants or funding is obtained to quietly begin the fluoridation) for the first six months costs for water fluoridation. Thereafter, the citizens of Baton Rouge will pay a huge price tag for adding Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate to your water. The PRICE OF YOUR WATER WILL GO UP SIGNIFICANTLY. Baton Rouge Water Co. Just announced it’s first price increase in 17 yrs. Think of what you will be paying if DHH fluoridates our Great World Class water in Baton Rouge.

****Call & Email: Governor Jindal, (DHH) Department of Health & Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine, your Senators ( Willie Mount) & Representatives, Mayor Kip Holden, Baton Rouge Water Company, The Advocate, Local TV News Stations and your local Churches and DEMAND that SB 312 (2008) be REVOKED.

Facts about Fluoridation & Important Questions to ask Jindal, DHH Alan Levine & the politicians who voted MANDATORY Fluoridation into law:

1. Baton Rouge has 80 separate well water aquifers. It is extremely IMPRACTICAL & EXPENSIVE to fluoridate all these water sites. Does DHH have test results indicating that each of these 80 water sites are fluoride deficient? If not, what is the basis for adding additional fluoride waste chemical to perfectly healthy drinking water? Especially since Hydrofluorosilicic Acid is extremely toxic.

2. Since DHH will be medicating citizens by adding supplemental Fluoride to their drinking water, who is legally & medically responsible for this program? Can DHH provide contact information for the physician in charge of administering fluoride “medication” to the population?

3. What dose of Fluoride does DHH plan to prescribe to each citizen? How does DHH plan to administer & control fluoride doses for individual citizens who may drink more water than others?

4. Given that there is ample public access to fluoride products such as toothpaste, mouth wash, dental floss and pharmaceutical fluoride pills, what need could there possibly be to add Hydrofluorosilicic Acid to drinking water? Especially since 99 1/2% of water goes down the drain. Water fluoridation is a wasted & significant expense for taxpayers.

5 .Since DHH is claiming that all citizens are fluoride deficient and need to have fluoride chemical added to their water, how does DHH intend to prove which patients need additional fluoride supplements & those who clearly do not? If DHH cannot TEST all CITIZENS BLOOD to determine why DHH might medicate them, with anything, let alone additional fluoride in their system, how is it legal to administer fluoride as a medication via citizens drinking water, without their consent ? Is this the year 2009 or 1650? Water Fluoridation is a Medieval practice.

6. Can DHH provide toxicity studies done on Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate that prove definitively that adding these specific chemicals to drinking water is safe for infants, children, pregnant women, the elderly and citizens with compromised immunity issues such as Kidney & Thyroid disorders etc...

7. Will DHH educate the public re: the fact that 95% of the fluoride chemical used in water fluoridation in the US comes in the form of a chemical waste product (Silicofluorides) produced by manufacturing Fertilizer? - THIS is a KEY FACT that the PUBLIC NEEDS TO KNOW about.††

8 . It is illegal to dump Silicofluorides into a river or ocean & yet it is these chemicals, Hydrofluorosilicic Acid & Sodium Fluorosilicate that DHH will be adding to your drinking water. Like I said, CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.

9. What business do dentists, LDA & ADA have advocating (and spending a lot of money to do so) mass medication of citizens, without their consent, via their drinking water? The "It's good for your teeth argument" is a fraud, it's been proven time and again all over the world, water fluoridation is completely unnecessary for optimal dental health

10. In 2006, the ADA began warning dentists and it's constituents (not publicly) that using fluoridated water with baby formula for infants is dangerous & toxic to the babies blood/brain barrier. So, it's poisoning them. Adults are no different.

Antifluff Supergirls

2009-01-21T22:56:00.001-06:00

Antifluff Supergirls, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Slumbergasted!

Antifluff Supergirls

2008-11-27T05:10:00.003-06:00

Antifluff Supergirls, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Photo by: Mark Galasso © 2008

Galasso Photography
Antifluff Supergirls

Antifluff Supergirls on Flickr
Mark Galasso Photos on Flickr.com
Model Mayhem Profile

Look

2008-11-27T05:10:00.001-06:00

Look, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Photo by: Mark Galasso © 2008

Galasso Photography
Antifluff Supergirls

Antifluff Supergirls on Flickr
Mark Galasso Photos on Flickr.com
Model Mayhem Profile

Antifluff Supergirls

2008-11-27T05:09:00.001-06:00

Antifluff Supergirls, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Photo by: Mark Galasso © 2008

Galasso Photography
Antifluff Supergirls

Antifluff Supergirls on Flickr
Mark Galasso Photos on Flickr.com
Model Mayhem Profile

Antifluff Supergirls

2008-11-27T05:08:00.001-06:00

Antifluff Supergirls, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Photo by: Mark Galasso © 2008

Galasso Photography
Antifluff Supergirls

Antifluff Supergirls on Flickr
Mark Galasso Photos on Flickr.com
Model Mayhem Profile

Hurricane Gustav Aftermath, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

2008-09-20T23:35:00.001-05:00

Hurricane Gustav Aftermath, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Taken around Highland Rd. Area of South Baton Rouge, Louisiana on September 1-3 2008.

Photos by: Mark Galasso

Probably one of the largest Live Oak tree roots I saw. Must have been 20ft here...

This neighborhood is named University Acres (South Baton Rouge) and it's an old subdivision with beautiful trees everywhere and it was just trees down everywhere and trees on houses and across the roads.

"BUSH GUILTY OF 1ST DEG MURDER" - BUGLIOSI TELLS CONGRESS

2008-08-15T21:18:00.003-05:00

I don't ever recall a time in American history where Congress was told publicly, that it's president George W. Bush, was a War Criminal. How refreshing.

How is it possible that this truth can be overlooked by America at Large?

Pay attention to the Congressman on the right... when he tries to stop Bugliosi because there were so many people in the room cheering against Bush. It was like watching one of the third Reich's own lose composure to hear such ardent truths about the Nazi Bush really is.

How can the media show Bush on TV every day, walking around like he's some kind of moral diplomat that represents America? What a crazy and pitiful time for America.

How can we listen to an Obama when no one will hold accountable the Treason done to America by the Bush administration. Obama turned around and supported Bush's Illegal Wire Tapping by supporting retroactive immunity for the Telecom Co.'s... Amazingly blatant and obvious who Obama represents... even if it's clearly against the law.

The only sign of any democracy has been in the American courts thankfully. At least for now, there are still justices like Kennedy who have struck down Bush's anti-human policies... torture, Military Tribunals and stripping of civil rights, first the bad guys then yours.

They have some crazy rule in congress that says you can't say anything demeaning about the President, even is he's a crook and a murderer? What kind of democracy is that? Clinton got impeached for having Sex? Now you can't say anything bad about a asshole like Bush?

Bush should have been reigned in long ago, and certainly for the way his administration handled Katrina. That was much more than inept. That was deliberate. Just like it was deliberate to ignore all the people sick and who have died from the 911 ruble that was full of all kinds of very hazardous substances. And Bush had the EPA lie about that too. All of this has been reported... totally ignoring the soldiers' hospitals left in shambles... it's all about lack of humanity, no respect a person.

Will we ever see the day when America holds these people accountable? The people have not gotten fed up enough yet. And the media apparently thinks it can play people indefinitely, it's worked so far.

Just the other night on Charlie Rose the writer Phillip Gourevich said he thought that taking America through War Crimes trials for Bush and his people was not what the country needed. He couldn't be more wrong. You can't just shove crimes of humanity like this under a rug and think America will somehow magically regain moral and ethical composure simply because another administration takes over. If Obama was any kind of true leader or reformer he would be advocating criminal prosecution for Bush and his administration.

Instead we have Bush waving a little American flag & being interviewed by Bob Costas at the Bejing Olympics. Totally absurd. Here is the man who has overseen the murder of hundred's of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, on TV waving his flag and at the same time condeming (rightly so) the Russians for Human rights violations in Georgia.

So, here we are, we have videos of Bugliosi and Kucinich saying in front of congress that Bush is a war criminal. We have writers and intellectuals of all kinds lining up on PBS to affirm the crimes of the Bush administration... It is known, it has been said to the people... and alas, nothing has be done.

And think back about the arrogance of the Bush administration. Tragically, it appears that they can do whatever they want and not have any consequences. Libby got pardoned, Gonzales, Rove and Miers have been allowed to ignore congressional Subpoenas... they deleted millions of emails that are protected by law... they violated laws by using republican email accounts...tapped your phones/email and then gave the Telecom Co.'s immunity from breaking the law... take your computers at the air port...

Unbelievable. It just goes on & on.... It would take years to prosecute all the crimes of this administration and guess who foots the bill?... the good sense folks of America.

Was it necessary to murder thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, over four thousand Americans and tens of thousands of injured because of a small minority of terrorists in the world? who at the time were not even in Iraq when we invaded.

Bush has made it so much worse for all of us. Now, those that have contempt for America have good reason to feel that way. Now, other enemies that capture our soldiers can feel justified to torture our soldiers and ignore the Geneva Convention laws that WE created.

LOUISIANA ****WE ONLY HAVE UNTIL THE 23rd of JUNE to STOP WATER FLUORIDATION BILL 312 Sponsored by Louisiana Senator Willie Mount

2008-06-18T01:20:00.006-05:00

This Blog Post is about an open letter to Louisiana Senator Willie Mount, author of Louisiana Senate Bill 312 which is a law mandating adding FLUORIDE in the drinking water in Louisiana.

LOUISIANA ****WE ONLY HAVE UNTIL THE 23rd of JUNE to STOP WATER FLUORIDATION BILL 312

I was told they are going to address it THIS WEEK!

CALL OR EMAIL YOUR SENATORS AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES members
TELL THEM THAT YOU OPPOSE LOUISIANA WATER FLUORIDATION BILL 312

This should be a crime, that somebody would try to get away with doing this,
without any debate by Louisiana citizens up till a few days before they ram it through.

*********************************************

Contact for Senator Willie Mount sponsor of Fluoridation
in drinking water mandate Bill 312 : senate.legis.state.la.us/Mount/

Link to email contact for Louisiana Senators, senate.legis.state.la.us/Senators/Default.asp
the people who passed the first bill before it was amended by the House of Representatives. The senate REJECTED the House of Rep.’s changes to the law and now I am told they will both convene to decide if they are going to poison our drinking water with Fluoride, to help the poor folks with their cavities, courtesy of who? What corporation maker/disposer of hydrofluosilicic acid (the toxic sludge they use) needs to help us in this way please? And to spend money to do this, building machines to poison the water you drink!!

The Louisiana House of Representatives contact: house.louisiana.gov/H_Reps/H_Reps_FullInfo.asp

At least the House amended the Water Fluoridation bill 312 as I understand it to allow communities a way to opt-out... not totally sure what’s going on, but LOUISIANA WE ONLY HAVE UNTIL THE 23rd of JUNE to STOP WATER FLUORIDATION BILL 312

-It’s even worse that they are trying to ram this through as fast as possible it seems, people have no idea, walking around stating, “well isn’t fluoride good for your teeth?”. And that’s as far as it goes sadly with most people.

Links: Baton Rouge, Channel 2 & The Advocate about Fluoridation Law 312
www.2theadvocate.com/news/politics/19343394.html?showAll=...

_________________________________________________________

Body of discussion & Letter to Willie Mount:

This Blog Post is about an open letter to Louisiana Senator Willie Mount, author of Louisiana Senate Bill 312 which is a law mandating adding FLUORIDE in the drinking water in Louisiana.

In the law there are op-outs that a city or parish can take, but they are asking each of us in our parishes to sign a petition to opt-out. You have to actually do some work to get the Government not to poison your own water. And there is only ONE reason this is happening. MONEY. It’s cheaper to put Fluoride in people’s drinking water, then to dispose of it properly and LEGALLY. FACT. Anyone who doesn’t believe, do some reading about the by-products of chemical processes like Fertilizer, Aluminium, enrichment of Uranium and Plutonium. Fluoride waste is a big part of all these processes all the way back to the Manhattan Project and the production of the first Nukes. And so what will they do with all this Fluoride waste product?

They invoke laws over communities asking them to take part in the disposal of Fluoride waste. And guess who’s behind this bill? The American Dental Association, of all people huh? The guys that care about the Fluoride SO MUCH, that they’d have an organization to invoke the support of dumping hydrofluosilicic acid (the toxic sludge they use) in your drinking water. If you can’t make sense out of this it’s because it’s SENSELESS.

So, here is Bobby Jindal freshly in office. And out appears suddenly a bill to MANDATE WATER FLUORIDATION. From a senator who represents, Lake Charles. What will Jindal do? Let’s make him answer. If he’s really for reform, and he’s a rhodes scholar, he should know more than you or I that Water Fluoridation is a medieval practice that has no basis in the year 2008.

These are the kinds of things, these insidious ideas introduced as law over people, that are so dangerous.

They want budget requests from the water suppliers, and the Baton Rouge Water Co. is privately owned. They won’t specify clearly where the money is to come from to pay for the equipment and cost involved in equipping the water co’s to be able to POISON your water, without you even knowing, how or what goes in it. And if there were mistakes, could people die? (YES)

This law gives, let’s say the Military Industrial Complex (they make a lot of Fluoride waste, Nukes etc), an outlet via the Federal Government to legally poison the very water that you need to survive, and pass it off by saying it’s medicine for your cavities.
It’s frankly scary to me, that people who live in Baton Rouge, or anywhere would be so aloof about such an important and fundamental part of their lives WATER. I didn’t even know about this until a day ago. And yet here is this law coming out of Lake Charles by senator named Mount wanting to mandate that I suddenly start taking Fluoride with my public water.

You might say I took this personally!

If you think it’s your sovereign right to put something I know is poison, in what I drink, same water that children drink in the schools, then you are not American. You are a traitor to all people.

It all starts in the communities. If there is any community that exists in Baton Rouge, I hope it will stand up now and Reprimand this WATER FLUORIDATION MANDATE

LOUISIANA SENATE BILL 312

_____________________________

Dear Senator Mount,

I am writing to you to express my outrage regarding your creation of a bill to Fluoridate our water supply in Louisiana. Especially, given that we have some of the best natural water aquifers in the Nation.
Anyone who would actually sit down to create a law mandating such a thing has no interest in the health and well being of people.

You don't put one of the most toxic chemicals on earth into people's drinking water to prevent tooth decay.
It should be considered a crime against humanity to “medicate” people via their drinking water with Fluoride.
Why not put antibiotics in our water too?

Other than naturally occurring Fluoride (which is too much naturally in some water and must be removed) there is no justification for putting rat poison in our drinking water.

The water fluoridation fraud is one of the most insidious assaults on the public health ever devised. The first advocacy for water Fluoridation came from a scientist who
worked for the Mellon institute, owned by Alcoa Corp. (1939) which mass produced Fluoride as waste. And presently there are mountains of evidence to support
the toxic effects of water Fluoridation on humans. Note: (the first Fluoride testing on humans was done on the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps)

Below is a link and excerpt to one of the many articles about the detrimental effect of Fluoride on the Human Thyroid gland:

thyroid.about.com/od/drsrichkarileeshames/a/fluoridechang...

"We learned that the source of fluoride for municipalities is not sodium fluoride, the compound used by researchers to determine benefit versus risk. Instead, surprisingly, we found that what is added to almost all city water when it is fluoridated is the industrial waste product hydrofluosilicic acid. This scrubber waste item, generally from phosphate fertilizer production, is frequently contaminated with varying amounts of cadmium, aluminum, arsenic, lead, or mercury. We found serious studies showing that minute amounts of these heavy metals (much less than would generally be considered toxic) are harmful in various ways when combined with fluoride. Moreover, we were amazed to find out that not a single safety test has ever been performed on hydrofluocilicic acid!"

Senator Mount, please familiarize yourself with the sordid history of water Fluoridation, if you have not already.
This is the year 2008, we are not living in Medieval times. People learned the cold hard truth during Katrina; the Government doesn't care about people.
Much less whether they have cavities.

A vote for this bill means a vote to poison the people and children of Louisiana.
You should be reprimanded for creating a bill advocating Mass Fluoridation of people's drinking water.
And even worse, it will be the poor and helpless who will have no alternative but to drink water poisoned with hydrofluosilicic acid (the toxic sludge they use) under the guise that it's good for their Teeth.

Mark Galasso
Resident of EBRP

Three Record Companies Team Up With MySpace for Music Web Site

2008-04-04T03:56:00.001-05:00

April 4, 2008

By JEFF LEEDS and BRAD STONE
SAN FRANCISCO — In the latest effort by the ailing music industry to bolster its declining prospects, three of the industry’s four major companies have struck a deal with the social networking site MySpace to start a music Web site.

MySpace said on Thursday that as part of the deal it would turn its popular MySpace Music site into a joint venture, bringing in Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group as minority owners. The music companies are expected to make their entire digital music catalogs available for listening and downloading on the new site, which will be introduced later this year.

The deal highlights the music companies’ scramble to keep pace as consumers migrate toward the fast-changing market for digital downloads, upending the industry’s traditional approach to marketing and distribution. It is also an attempt to encourage competition to Apple’s iTunes Store, which some music executives have criticized for exercising too much control in pricing and on other business terms.

In a sign of how quickly the landscape is shifting, Apple said Thursday that it had surged to become the nation’s largest music retailer, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time, based on data from research firm NPD Group for the first two months of this year.

The latest deal also comes as MySpace is angling to differentiate itself from rivals like Facebook and retain its role as a central site for music fans. Many thousands of musical artists, from top stars to garage bands, have pages on MySpace where fans can interact with them and listen to songs. But Web surfers have been flocking to music-oriented social networks like Buzznet and Imeem, where listeners can also hear music free.

Chris DeWolfe, chief executive of MySpace, a division of the News Corporation, described the new service as a one-stop source for all music, in all its various digital incarnations.

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like those from Apple, Amazon.com and eMusic.

A subscription-based music plan, where users pay a monthly amount for unlimited access to downloadable tracks, is also being considered, Mr. DeWolfe said. Additional products like tickets, T-shirts, ring tones and other music merchandise will also be available.

“This is really a mega-music experience that is transformative in a lot of ways,” he said. “It’s the full 360-degree revenue stream.”

Some artists already offer ways to buy T-shirts and other items from their MySpace pages, but music executives involved in the planning of the new venture suggest that its marketing efforts will be much more comprehensive. MySpace Music will be run by an executive team that will report to a board composed of representatives from MySpace and the music labels.

EMI Group, the fourth major music corporation, was not part of the deal, but people involved in the negotiations said it would probably join soon.

The major record companies, who have suffered a long slump as CD sales have declined, are eager to prop up digital sales. Sales of albums in the United States, including digital sales, have declined roughly 11 percent so far this year, and sales of individual digital tracks, though up about 29 percent, have not increased enough to make up for that drop. Overall music sales dropped to $11.5 billion in 2006, from a peak in 1999 of nearly $14.6 billion.

The decline has forced the industry into a new age of experimentation. All four major record labels dropped copy restrictions for Amazon’s new music service, partly in an effort to counterbalance Apple’s strong position.

In another approach, the industry is seeking revenue that does not come directly from its customers, like the ad-supported element of the MySpace service. Music executives have also recently embraced such concepts as tacking extra fees onto the cost of portable music players or Internet access to compensate the industry for rampant piracy.

Michael Nash, Warner Music’s executive vice president for digital strategy, said it would be simplistic to view the MySpace venture as a gambit to challenge iTunes, which is closely tied into the iPod player. Unlike iTunes, he said, MySpace Music “is kind of a hardware-agnostic play” that wants to convert the existing social-networking audience into paying customers.

“It’s about being in business with that construct,” Mr. Nash said, referring to MySpace’s music site, which has emerged as the pre-eminent site for fans seeking to sample music from current artists.

Rich Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital, said MySpace was offering a big opportunity to the music companies.

“They have a huge community that wants to talk, share and learn about music,” Mr. Greenfield said. “Nobody else has that. There is music discovery happening on MySpace that is far deeper and broader than what’s going on iTunes.”

But first MySpace will have to prove that it can actually sell music. Though the company earns $70 million a month in advertising for the News Corporation, according to estimates by Pali Capital, it has never successfully sold products on a wide scale. A download service for independent music, begun in 2006 with Snocap, a music start-up, was considered a disappointment.

MySpace has not always had a friendly relationship with the music companies. Universal Music sued MySpace on the grounds of copyright infringement in 2006, saying the site’s users were illegally sharing music and videos. Universal has decided to drop the lawsuit in exchange for an unspecified cash settlement, according to people briefed on the negotiations.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

The Intelligence Cover-Up

2008-03-16T02:52:00.002-05:00

THE COLD HARD TRUTH:

"The real danger is for Mr. Bush. A good law — like the House bill — would allow Americans to finally see the breathtaking extent of his lawless behavior.

What Mr. Bush wants is to be able to listen to your international telephone calls and read your international e-mail whenever he wants, without a court being able to prevent it or judge the legality of his actions.

Finally, Mr. Bush said it was vital to national security to give amnesty to any company that turned over data on Americans without a court order. The purpose of this amnesty is not to protect national secrets — that could be done during a trial — but to make sure that the full damage to Americans’ civil liberties is never revealed. "

NY TIMES
March 16, 2008
EDITORIAL

The Intelligence Cover-Up

For more than two years now, Congress, the news media, current and former national security officials, think tanks and academic institutions have been engaged in a profound debate over how to modernize the law governing electronic spying to keep pace with technology. We keep hoping President Bush will join in.

Instead, the president offers propaganda intended to scare Americans, expand his powers, and erode civil liberties — and to ensure that no one is held to account for the illegal wiretapping he ordered after 9/11.

Consider last Thursday’s performance, as the House debated a sound bill that closes some technology gaps in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and gives government agencies new flexibility to eavesdrop, but preserves constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. Mr. Bush distorted the contents of the bill and threatened to veto it.

He accused House leaders of “putting in place a cumbersome court approval process that would make it harder to collect intelligence on foreign terrorists.” Actually, the bill merely ensures that special judges continue to supervise surveillance of American citizens. The “cumbersome process” is really a court that acts swiftly and has refused only a half-dozen of more than 21,000 wiretap requests in its nearly 30 years of existence.

What Mr. Bush wants is to be able to listen to your international telephone calls and read your international e-mail whenever he wants, without a court being able to prevent it or judge the legality of his actions.

Mr. Bush said the House bill would “cause us to lose vital intelligence on terrorist threats.” But he has never offered credible evidence of any operation that was hobbled because officials had to request a warrant. The law already allows the government to eavesdrop first and then seek a warrant. As for that technology gap, Congress fixed it last year. The authority has expired, but wiretapping operations started under it can continue.

Finally, Mr. Bush said it was vital to national security to give amnesty to any company that turned over data on Americans without a court order. The purpose of this amnesty is not to protect national secrets — that could be done during a trial — but to make sure that the full damage to Americans’ civil liberties is never revealed. Mr. Bush also objects to a provision that would create a committee to examine his warrantless spying program.

Mr. Bush wanted the House to approve the Senate’s version of the bill, which includes Mr. Bush’s amnesty and does not do nearly as good a job of preserving Americans’ rights. We were glad the House ignored his bluster. If the Senate cannot summon the courage and good sense to follow suit, there is no rush to pass a law.

The president will continue to claim the country is in grave danger over this issue, but it is not. The real danger is for Mr. Bush. A good law — like the House bill — would allow Americans to finally see the breathtaking extent of his lawless behavior.

Inslee floor speech on FISA

2008-03-15T04:20:00.001-05:00

Thank you Sir, I applaud, encore, encore
All I can say is it's long since been time for people to throw the Bush administration to the criminal history archives.

New Telecom Whistleblower Describes Possible Gateway for Massive Surveillance of Wireless Communications

2008-03-08T23:56:00.002-06:00

Related Issues NSA Spying, Privacy

Trio of Commerce Chairmen Call for Further Investigation Based on Latest Spying Allegations

Washington D.C. - Three powerful House Commerce Committee Chairmen strongly urged their colleagues Thursday to defer acting on requests for retroactive immunity and to demand more information from the White House and the telecommunications companies in the wake of disclosures by another whistleblower that the government apparently has been granted an open gateway to wireless communications by a major telecommunications company.

Babak Pasdar, a computer security consultant, has gone public about his discovery of a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" while working for an unnamed major wireless carrier. Pasdar believes that this circuit gives the U.S. government direct, unfettered access to customers voice calls and data packets. These claims echo the disclosures from retired AT&T technician Mark Klein, who has described a "secret room" in an AT&T facility.

The White House is putting heavy pressure on lawmakers to grant the telecoms immunity from lawsuits over the spying as part of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) legislation pending in Congress. But in today's letter -- written by John Dingell, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce; Ed Markey, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet; and Bart Stupak, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations -- the congressmen argue lawmakers must not "vote in the dark" on the immunity issue when "profound privacy and security risks" are involved.

"When you put Mr. Pasdar's information together with that of AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, there is troubling evidence of telecom misconduct in massive domestic surveillance of ordinary Americans," said Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "Congress needs to have hearings and get some answers about whether American telecommunications companies are helping the government to illegally spy on millions of us. Retroactive immunity for telecom companies now ought to be off the table in the ongoing FISA debate."

EFF represents the plaintiffs in Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit brought by AT&T customers accusing the telecommunications company of violating their rights by illegally assisting the National Security Agency in widespread domestic surveillance. The Hepting case is just one of many suits aimed at holding telecoms responsible for knowingly violating federal privacy laws with warrantless wiretapping and the illegal transfer of vast amounts of personal data to the government.

For the full letter:
http://www.eff.org/files/newwhistleblower.pdf

For more on the telecoms' role in warrantless spying:
http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying

Naomi Wolf with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now": The End of America -Part 1 of 2

2008-03-01T00:03:00.001-06:00

Naomi Wolf with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now": The End of America

2008-02-29T23:53:00.002-06:00

White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone

2008-01-19T03:18:00.000-06:00

What an amazing, blatant breach of the law this is. Nixon erased some analog tapes and he was impeached. Came on TV as the criminal nut case he was.

Bush has been erasing, distorting, & destroying evidence since he got in office. On so many levels you can't prosecute them all.

The legal buck has to stop somewhere. The digital intellectual property of the government is a part of our legal system. You can’t eliminate it at will, to avoid disclosure. And it’s the same thing with the Republicans using their party email, another violation, and it’s disappeared too.

When is America going to address the crimes of the Bush administration?

Bush says he can record all our information, our email, phone, Internet and they can save all this data, and yet they can't abide by the simple process of data back up of the government infrastructure?

The only way this much email and information could be missing is if it was deliberately destroyed. It most certainly was, same with the CIA torture tapes.

Bush is in violation of the law . He broke the FISA law and started recording everything, all our communications and banking in America with one swipe of the pen, the “Patriot Act.” And what a contradiction that term is for a law that broke our constitution, the “Patriot “Act.

So much life, blood and resource has been wasted during the Bush dictatorship. Shameful and disappointing time for America.

White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone

By Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 18, 2008; Page A01

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said.
The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records -- including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions -- for history and in case of any future legal demands.
Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.

Another official in that office on Tuesday challenged the study's credibility in a court affidavit, contending that current White House employees have been unable to confirm the veracity of the analysis or to recreate its findings. Waxman's disclosure provides the first details about the study's findings.

The White House is required by law to preserve e-mails considered presidential or federal records, and it is the target of several lawsuits seeking information about missing data and efforts to preserve electronic communications.

The internal study found that for Bush's executive office, no e-mails were archived on 12 separate days between December 2003 and February 2004, Waxman said. Vice President Cheney's office showed no electronic messages on 16 occasions from September 2003 to May 2005.

Archived e-mails were missing from even more days in other parts of the White House, the analysis found. The Council on Environmental Quality and the Council of Economic Advisers, for example, showed no stored e-mails for 2 1/2 months beginning in November 2003. The Office of Management and Budget showed no messages for 59 days -- including the period from Nov. 1, 2003, to Dec. 9, 2003 -- and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative showed no e-mail for 73 days.

The administration has so far refused to release the study and a number of documents related to it, including a large summary chart used in a closed-door briefing conducted for Waxman and other lawmakers last September by Emmet T. Flood, special counsel to the president.

The briefers took the chart with them when they left, Waxman said, but committee staffers had copied many of the details.

Waxman described the findings in a letter to Fielding, which he released. "Mr. Fratto's statements have added to the considerable confusion that exists regarding the status of White House efforts to preserve e-mails," Waxman's letter said.

Two advocacy groups suing the Bush administration over its e-mail policies, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive, also said yesterday that the White House's new statements are incomplete and contrary to earlier acknowledgments that some e-mails are missing.

CREW also asserted in court papers filed yesterday that "critical and highly relevant evidence may have been destroyed" by the White House.

The group's chief counsel, Anne Weismann, said the chart referenced in Waxman's letter corresponded to information from an informant who contacted the group and described nearly 500 days between 2003 and 2005 when no e-mails from several White House offices were archived.

Weismann said the source further described many more days during the same period when the volume of archived e-mail was unusually low. "The example I was given is that the average volumes per day in the White House office, for example, was 60,000 to 100,000, yet there were entire weeks when it was as low as five a day," she said.
Fratto said yesterday that "we tried to reconstruct some of the work . . . and could not replicate that or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart." In an e-mailed response to questions, he also said the e-mails in question may exist on backup tapes that are separate from the archival system.

Theresa Payton, chief information officer in the White House Office of Administration, also said in her court affidavit that her office has "serious reservations about the reliability of the chart" and has "so far been unable to replicate its results or to affirm the correctness of the assumptions underlying it."

Payton also disclosed that e-mail backup tapes were routinely "recycled" during the first three years of the Bush administration. The White House stopped the practice in October 2003, when it "began preserving and storing all back-up tapes," Payton said.
Technology experts say recycled data is often impossible to recover, especially if the tapes have been written over repeatedly, raising the possibility that some e-mails could be gone forever.

The special counsel who oversaw the investigation of the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, wrote in a letter to defense counsel in January 2006 that some e-mail in the offices of Bush and Cheney was not preserved through "the normal archiving process" in 2003.

When asked yesterday about a previous statement by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino that some White House e-mails are indeed missing, Fratto demurred. "I'm not sure what was said on that," he said. "I could tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any e-mail at all are missing."

Sean O’keefe, Bohemian Grover, Magically & Secretly Steps down from LSU, Good Riddance...

2008-01-19T03:03:00.001-06:00

LSU Chancellor Sean O’keefe (former NASA head) admits being Bohemian Grove Member, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Just as strange as O'keefe's appointment as Chancellor of LSU was, so is his sudden stepping down. It's was all two close to home. He brought Dick Cheney (whom I consider a war criminal) into the Pete Maravich LSU Assembly Center, to shake hands with academics and students.

Now that may be okay for some people. But Cheney is a man that is responsible, to a degree we cannot know, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Iraq.

Anyone that has close ties to the Bush administration cronies cannot be a good thing for Louisiana, it’s like hiring a conflict for the public interest, immediately. And the state of America bears out the Bush cronies expeditious disregard for Humanity. Truly.

So, I don't know why O'Keefe was brought to LSU. LSU does a lot of progressive stuff in many areas. And the Bush administration has been notorious for censoring and silencing scientists (i.e., in the global warming area, and actually one of them was a scientist from NASA, where O’keefe came from) who had policy contrary to Bush doctrine.

And like I mentioned below in O'Keefe's Bio. He comes from a "Defense Industry" background so it makes perfect sense that the CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, was invited on the LSU campus (May 19, 2006) for the LSU graduation ceremony as some kind of role model. There were academics who refused to attend the commencement ceremonies.

And again, Dick Cheney broke the law with the Halliburton No Bid 5yr contracts in Iraq where they have made Billions, while murdering innocent people... see this post about Bunnatine Greenhouse who is from Louisiana and lost her job for whistle blowing Halliburton : www.flickr.com/photos/antifluff/52323896/in/set-1237029/

So, why was O’Keefe placed at LSU and why is he so suddenly is disappearing?
__________________________

LSU Chancellor Sean O’keefe (former NASA head) admits being Bohemian Grove Member

PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG POST:

1. To point out the Sean O’keefe (formerly head of NASA) connection with Bush and Bohemian Grove.

Read this O’keefe interview in the LSU Reveille about Bohemian Grove:

An Elite Alliance
Chancellor confirms membership in club
By Amy Brittain
March 07, 2006

www.lsureveille.com/media/storage/paper868/news/2006/03/0...

DARK SECRETS INSIDE BOHEMIAN GROVE:

(WATCH THE VIDEO)

Some of the most powerful people in the US government (George Bush, Alan Greenspan. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan Jimmy Buffet?, Clint Eastwood, Henry Kissinger, Reagan, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Nixon) attend occult worship events every July at "Bohemian Grove". Is that funny? Do you think it's true? Does that sound like the kind of thing professed Christians and followers of Jesus would do? Decide for yourself.

It's surprising how few people seem to know about Bohemian Grove.
What it is, what it's about. Sex, drugs, women and world Policy all polished off at the end with a scene straight out of a KKK rally. Do I care? Not a lick. But I do care
that they try to pass themselves off as "Christians". It's sickening.

Movies of it exist:

Alex Jones was the first person to sneak in Bohemian Grove
and get the “Cremation of Care” ceremony on video. Watch it here:

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1358319439993514946

The Associated Press December 26, 2004
LSU and O'Keefe: mysteries of his hiring
By Adam Nossiter

www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2004/041226-lsu-okeefe.htm

Sean O’keefe Bio
www.lsu.edu/chancellor/biography.htm

_________________________________

2. To Protest Sean O’keefe selecting Dick Cheney to speak at the May 19, 2006 LSU graduation ceremony. This was strange and inappropriate to say the least. I'd go so far as to say inviting Dick Cheney (in reality) to speak at LSU was about like having Mussolini:

Benito Mussolini
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"He created a Fascist state through the use of diplomacy and propaganda. Using his charisma, total control of the media, and outright violence and intimidation against political rivals, he disassembled the existing democratic government system."

SEE: Dick Cheney: "Torture Man" : read about Cheney the man who lobbied a year for the ability to torture beyond any limits of world law. The US is not even a member of the International Courts of justice, Bush signed off on it first thing when he got in office. The US is not accountable to anyone for anything on this planet. And with the people involved in what is the Bush administration, there has been nothing but destruction, exploitation and breakdown of the foundations of all that was good about America. Their "New World Order" PNAC plans include nothing that has anything to do with the preservation and well being of Humanity. (Just ask the Katrina victims New Orleans)

You can't raise the legal limit of the national debt 4 times, a record in American history and not expect the people of that country to pay hell for it at some point. All that military/defense spending, oil/energy and cleanup of the destruction they have created is going right back into the pockets of those that made it happen. It's been a very lethal system. And most people agree that the architect of all this is Dick Cheney.

AND THIS IS THE MAN O'Keefe invited to LSU commencement.
It's deplorable, ridiculous that a man like Dick Cheney would be allowed anywhere near a serious academic institution.

SEE: Dick Cheney: "Torture Man"
www.flickr.com/photos/antifluff/63137909/in/set-1237029/

_________________________________

3. To Point out that David Gergen of the Clinton Admin. had to step down when
his being a member of Bohemian Grove was exposed:

*** Watch David Gergen former Clinton Adviser talk about Bohemian Grove:
www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/wm_bb.htm
www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/qt_bb.htm

Some of the most powerful people in the US government attend occult worship events every July at "Bohemian Grove". Is that funny? Do you think it's true? Decide for yourself. Movies of it exist:

BOHEMIAN GROVE EXPOSED! BUSH=OCCULT or JESUS?

DARK SECRETS INSIDE BOHEMIAN GROVE:

Alex Jones was the first person to sneak in Bohemian Grove
and get the “Cremation of Care” ceremony on video. Watch it here:

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1358319439993514946

________________________

More Bohemian Grove Info:

CHECK THIS OUT: (REAL PLAYER CLIP)
www.infowars.com/Video/BG/BG_Trailer_fast.ram
www.infowars.com/bg1.html

Occult Activities at the Elite Bohemian Grove in Northern California Exposed!
www.propagandamatrix.com/archivebohemiangrove.html

-More on Bohemian Grove: www.rotten.com/library/conspiracy/bohemian-grove/
www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=b...
www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/bohos/bohofact.html
_______________________________________________

Thyseen & Prescott Bush Nazi Banking Connection:

antifluffsuperstar.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_antifluffsuper...

"It's for Your Saftey...Honest!!"

2008-01-19T02:09:00.001-06:00

"It's for Your Saftey...Honest!!", originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Posted on January 4, 2006

A friend sent me this.
I thought it was perfect... sums it up quite nicely.

They have control of the communications and visual aspects of what all
these people in America have bought as some kind of an acceptable image from the American leadership.

The government is opening people's mail, only for our protection of course.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10740935/

Google Rebuffs Feds on Search Requests

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
The Associated Press
Thursday, January 19, 2006; 8:07 PM

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine _ a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.

Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to hand over the requested records.

The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week _ a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.

In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yahoo Inc., which runs the Internet's second-most used search engine behind Google, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.

Although the government says it isn't seeking any data that ties personal information to search requests, the subpoena still raises serious privacy concerns, experts said. Those worries have been magnified by recent revelations that the White House authorized eavesdropping on civilian communications after the Sept. 11 attacks without obtaining court approval.
"Search engines now play such an important part in our daily lives that many people probably contact Google more often than they do their own mother," said Thomas Burke, a San Francisco attorney who has handled several prominent cases involving privacy issues.

"Just as most people would be upset if the government wanted to know how much you called your mother and what you talked about, they should be upset about this, too."

The content of search request sometimes contain information about the person making the query.

For instance, it's not unusual for search requests to include names, medical profiles or Social Security information, said Pam Dixon, executive director for the World Privacy Forum.

"This is exactly the kind of thing we have been worrying about with search engines for some time," Dixon said. "Google should be commended for fighting this."

Every other search engine served similar subpoenas by the Bush administration has complied so far, according to court documents. The cooperating search engines weren't identified.

Page 2 of 2 < Back
Google Rebuffs Feds on Search Requests

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo stressed that it didn't reveal any personal information. "We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy," Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said Thursday. "In our opinion, this is not a privacy issue."

Microsoft Corp. MSN, the No. 3 search engine, declined to say whether it even received a similar subpoena. "MSN works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested," the company said in a statement.

As the Internet's dominant search engine, Google has built up a valuable storehouse of information that "makes it a very attractive target for law enforcement," said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The Department of Justice argues that Google's cooperation is essential in its effort to simulate how people navigate the Web.

In a separate case in Pennsylvania, the Bush administration is trying to prove that Internet filters don't do an adequate job of preventing children from accessing online pornography and other objectionable destinations.
Obtaining the subpoenaed information from Google "would assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users, (and) to estimate how often Web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches," the Justice Department wrote in a brief filed Wednesday Google _ whose motto when it went public in 2004 was "do no evil" _ contends that submitting to the subpoena would represent a betrayal to its users, even if all personal information is stripped from the search terms sought by the government.

"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services. This is not a perception that Google can accept," company attorney Ashok Ramani wrote in a letter included in the government's filing.

Complying with the subpoena also wound threaten to expose some of Google's "crown-jewel trade secrets," Ramani wrote. Google is particularly concerned that the information could be used to deduce the size of its index and how many computers it uses to crunch the requests.
"This information would be highly valuable to competitors or miscreants seeking to harm Google's business," Ramani wrote.

Dixon is hoping Google's battle with the government reminds people to be careful how they interact with search engines.

"When you are looking at that blank search box, you should remember that what you fill can come back to haunt you unless you take precautions," she said.

___
On the Web:
www.worldprivacyforum.org/
Electronic Privacy Information Center: www.epic.org/

Japanese Parliament Questions Official 9/11 story -no subs

2008-01-14T01:57:00.001-06:00

Japan thinks the Bush/Cheney Lies about 911 are worth talking about in their Parliment.

And yet they are not worth mentioning in Washington even though Nancy Polosi promised she would open investigations into the 911 attacks.

Endless Reason to Incarcerate Bush

2008-01-13T03:05:00.000-06:00

NY TIMES EDITORIAL

Notes From the Global War on Terror
Published: December 14, 2007

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/opinion/14fri1.html

During the presidential campaign, candidates from both parties will warn of the risk of another terrorist attack on this country. Americans should insist that they also explain how they will repair the damage President Bush has done to America’s intelligence-gathering capabilities in the name of fighting terrorism.

Congress certainly has not done the job. For six years, it stood by mutely or actively approved as President Bush’s team cooked the books to justify war, drew the nation’s electronic spies into illegal wiretapping and turned intelligence agents and uniformed soldiers into torturers at outlaw prisons.

Now, with the opposition party in control on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have a chance to start setting right some wrongs in these areas. But there are disturbing signs that they will once again fail to do what is needed.

EAVESDROPPING After the disclosure that Mr. Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail messages without a court warrant, Congress has been struggling to write a law that does three important things: force the president to obey the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA; preserve the power of judges to approve and monitor surveillance of Americans; and update FISA to keep pace with technology. Last summer, Congress gave Mr. Bush a bill that had the needed updates but made it easier to spy on Americans.

That law expires in February, and the House has passed a bill that updates FISA while doing a great deal to ensure real judicial and Congressional oversight of any eavesdropping. The Senate Judiciary Committee also wrote a bill that does those things — with a sensible two-year expiration date.

Mr. Bush, of course, wants fewer, not more, restrictions and wants those powers to be made permanent. He also wants amnesty for telecommunications companies that gave Americans’ private data to the government for at least five years without a warrant.
Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, seems intent on doing the president’s bidding. He has indicated that instead of the Judiciary Committee’s bill, he may put on the floor a deeply flawed measure from the Senate Intelligence Committee that dangerously expands the government’s powers and gives undeserved amnesty to the telecommunications companies. The White House says amnesty is intended to ensure future cooperation but seems truly aimed at making sure the public never learns the extent of the companies’ involvement in illegal wiretapping.

That will leave Democratic senators like Christopher Dodd and Russ Feingold in the absurd position of having to stage filibusters against their own party’s leadership to try to forestall more harm to civil liberties.

INTERROGATIONS AND TORTURE The recent disclosure that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of two Al Qaeda prisoners was a stark reminder of the catastrophic blunder that Congress made by enacting the Military Commissions Act of 2006. In addition to creating kangaroo courts to try the Guantánamo detainees, the bill permitted Mr. Bush to abrogate the Geneva Conventions by creating secret, extra-legal rules for interrogations by intelligence agents.
It was obvious that the tapes were destroyed to protect interrogators or their bosses from being held responsible for illegal acts like waterboarding. Congress must investigate the destruction of the tapes, using subpoenas, if necessary, to officials like John Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s senior lawyer, and Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of clandestine services, who ordered the tapes’ destruction in 2005.

USE AND MISUSE OF INTELLIGENCE Americans were stunned when the White House released a new intelligence assessment that said that Iran had halted its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003. Beyond those startling facts were questions about whether Mr. Bush knew of this assessment when he was warning about World War III if Iran were allowed to get a nuclear weapon.

And that was a reminder of another time when Mr. Bush misled the nation about Iraqi weapons programs that had long disappeared. The Senate Intelligence Committee was supposed to have an investigation years ago into what Mr. Bush and other officials knew about the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons when they used it to stampede the country into war.

For more than two years, the Republican chairman of the committee, Senator Pat Roberts, made sure that a report would never be finished. It has now been in the hands of his replacement, Democrat Jay Rockefeller, for nearly a year, and there is still no report. That means Americans still don’t know whether Mr. Bush deliberately hyped and distorted the intelligence on Iraq or was also misinformed.
Americans need to know what Mr. Bush knew on both Iraq and Iran, and when he knew it. Anything less is unacceptable.
•
Resolving these issues will require leadership, political courage and candor — from Congress and the president. The country has had enough acquiescence, excuse-making and obfuscation.

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

2007-12-05T02:06:00.001-06:00

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

Naomi Wolf outlines the "10 Step" blueprint for the closing down of a democracy. She cites repeated historical examples from Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, Mussolini.

And she closes with the same view that I share. Bush should not only be impeached, he must be incarcerated along with the rest of the criminals in his administration. America is asleep at the wheel and it won’t be much longer before it’s to late to do anything about any of this.

Since she gave this lecture the most egregious law since the Patriot Act, “Home Grown Terrorism” HR 1955 has passed the House of Representatives 404 to 6.

9/11 Truth vs Mainstream Media

2007-11-13T04:10:00.001-06:00

Bill Maher is an arrogant asshole who should not be syndicated. Boycott this guy's show. He's a Media Mole for the Corporations.

Bush Administration Insider Says 9/11 Was An Inside Job

2007-11-13T03:52:00.001-06:00

Dr. Morgan Reynolds was the Chief Economist for the Bush admin. for a period. He came out I believe in the summer of 2005 with a paper describing that the World Trade Centers had to have been demolitioned. And he's from Texas!

9/11 Coincidences (Part Seven)

2007-09-19T16:06:00.001-05:00

World Trade Center Building 7 Demolition admitted by Larry Silversteen, lease holder. He made 7 Billion off or the 911 debacle. Watch this!

The Truth about Flight 93

2007-09-19T16:00:00.001-05:00

Explain this?

9/11 Flight 93 Rare Footage

2007-09-19T15:55:00.001-05:00

How is it possible that a plane crashed with so little wreckage? No bodies... And there is another video of the coroner of the city showing up astonished that nothing was there.

Antifluff Supergirls

2007-08-28T03:21:00.001-05:00

Antifluff Supergirls, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Beautiful & Charming

Photo by: Mark Galasso
Spanish Moon Baton Rouge, Louisiana
August 27, 2007

Galasso Photography Website
Flickr Photos
Antifluff Supergirls

Antifluff Superstar
Antifluff Superstar on MySpace Music
Antifluff Superstar Blog

Hope Within Light & Darkness

2007-08-28T00:55:00.001-05:00

Hope Within Light & Darkness, originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Inspired by this knew knowledge about Mother Theresa of Calcutta: Her struggle with her faith in crisis and darkness for half a century.

www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

Photo by: Mark Galasso
LSU Lakes, Baton Rouge, La
8-23-07

Galasso Photography Website
Flickr Photos

I have a song called “Di is Dead” from the CD "Spirit Play". It is about the fanaticism that surrounded the death of Princess Diane. It was amazing to me. One of the strangest things I'd ever seen in the media. And Then there was the the O.J. Simpson Trial. But Princess Di transcended the world it seemed to so many. I was working on "Di is Dead" during Diana's Funeral and in that same week Mother Theresa died. It was very "hope Taking" to see that they hardly mentioned it in the news. So I made one of the choruses of "Di is Dead" a dedication to Mother Theresa. It's the 3rd Chorus. Words are:

So Princess Di is Dead what was that Nun to you
Was she not pretty enough to get her face on the news
She tried to save the world, something nobody could do
The purest soul is gone, it seems like something is wrong
But I got my money

Below is an iTunes link of the song, "Di is Dead":
phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/DirectAction/...

Antifluff Superstar
Antifluff Superstar on MySpace Music
Antifluff Superstar Blog

Commentary:

I was once able to be in Mother Theresa’s presence publicly within arms reach. I went to hear her speak in Baton Rouge, Louisiana when she came to open a house for unwed mothers. She left some nuns here. I wanted to be close enough to feel what her spirit felt like. She did seem far away to me...in her own world. Focused, preoccupied.

When she spoke it was shockingly brief to me. Only these words I clearly remember. She said:

"We live in a world full of selfishness. We are very selfish people. We should all strive to be less selfish".

My reaction was We all know that?

But it was about ten years later in a bowling alley music bar in New Orleans (The Rockin’ Bowl) when I realized what Mother Teresa meant. She meant that people are selfish not only with their money, but their very selves, their sharing of souls, of compassion and kindness.

So, after all of my own questions and inner battles I come to find the torment within Mother Teresa. And as of now it's not at all unusual. What else could she have felt. How could any kind of really tangible god allow what she had to work with everyday, her whole life; and not have her experience emptiness. When you know you are living within the middle of a vacant, deceitful world that would let people die, kill them outright, let them suffer and be sick, create wars for profit and power. We've been reading, learning and repeating the same things forever as the people of "earth".

Will this cycle of suffering, "samsara" ever be broken? Thus, the "hope" within Light & Darkness.

When you look at the history of sires and profits they all had these spiritual dichotomies going on. And perhaps that is the lesson to learn from Mother Theresa. It exists, it always will and yet you move on and within this varied existence between Dark and Light. Something I’ve always thought a lot about. There were periods in the universe we live in where for millions of years there was nothing but darkness. No movement of anything. No light.

Mississippi River Industrial Sunset

2006-12-25T22:17:00.000-06:00

Mississippi River Industrial Sunset
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I really like the colors of the orange and yellows in this one.
And the industrial machinery adds interest.

Photo by: Mark Galasso

Galasso Photography Website
Flickr Photos

Antifluff Superstar
Antifluff Superstar on MySpace Music
Antifluff Superstar Blog

Deep Blue w/ Cloud Waves

2006-12-20T18:22:00.000-06:00

Deep Blue w/ Cloud Waves
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Sunset, LSU Lakes -Baton Rouge, Louisiana 12-19-06

Today, the cloud waves were really interesting...enough so that I got the triopod back out... GLAD I DID!

Smitten w/ Hadia!

2006-12-11T17:55:00.000-06:00

Hadia & Antifluff
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Hadia is a well known Belly Dancer and Teacher. She performs and does dance workshops all over the world. I had the pleasure of fimling her dance recently. She's a great dancer, really wonderful with a great spirit!!

Her website: www.hadia.com

U.S. Gov't Terror Ratings Draw Outrage

2006-12-03T02:04:00.000-06:00

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!

BUSH YOU'VE GOT TO STEP DOWN FOOL!

AMERICA CAN'T SEE FIT TO IMPRISON OR INCARCERATE IT'S PRESIDENTS

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer
Sat Dec 2, 6:16 AM ET

WASHINGTON - A leader of the new Democratic Congress, business travelers and privacy advocates expressed outrage Friday over the unannounced assignment of terrorism risk assessments to American international travelers by a computerized system managed from an unmarked, two-story brick building in Northern Virginia.

Incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record) of Vermont pledged greater scrutiny of such government database-mining projects after reading that during the past four years millions of Americans have been evaluated without their knowledge to assess the risks that they are terrorists or criminals.

"Data banks like this are overdue for oversight," said Leahy, who will take over Judiciary in January. "That is going to change in the new Congress."
The Associated Press reported Thursday that Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders since 2002 have been assessed by the

Homeland Security Department's computerized Automated Targeting System, or ATS. The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years. Some or all data in the system can be shared with state, local and foreign governments for use in hiring, contracting and licensing decisions. Courts and even some private contractors can obtain some of the data under certain circumstances.

"It is simply incredible that the Bush administration is willing to share this sensitive information with foreign governments and even private employers, while refusing to allow U.S. citizens to see or challenge their own terror scores," Leahy said. This system "highlights the danger of government use of technology to conduct widespread surveillance of our daily lives without proper safeguards for privacy."

The concerns spread beyond Congress.

"I have never seen anything as egregious as this," said Kevin Mitchell, president of the Business Travel Coalition, which advocates for business travelers. It's "evidence of what can happen when there isn't proper oversight and accountability."

By late Friday, the government had received 22 written public comments about its after-the-fact disclosure of the program last month in the Federal Register, a fine-print compendium of federal rules. All either opposed it outright or objected to the lack of a direct means for people to correct any errors in the database about themselves.

"As a U.S. citizen who spends much time outside the U.S., I can understand the need for good security," wrote one who identified himself as Colin Edmunds. "However, just as I would not participate in a banking/credit card system where I have no recourse to correct or even view my personal data, I cannot accept the same of my government."

Privacy advocates also were alarmed.

"Never before in American history has our government gotten into the business of creating mass `risk assessment' ratings of its own citizens," said Barry Steinhardt, a lawyer for the

American Civil Liberties Union. "We are stunned" the program has been undertaken "with virtually no opportunity for the public to evaluate or comment on it."

The Homeland Security Department says the nation's ability to spot criminals and other security threats "would be critically impaired without access to this data."

And on Friday as the normal daily flow of a million or more people entered the United States by air, sea and land, the ATS program's computers continued their silent scrutiny. At that Virginia building with no sign, the managers of the National Targeting Center allowed an Associated Press photographer to briefly roam their work space.

But he couldn't reveal the building's exact location. None of the dozens of workers under the bright fluorescent lights could be named. Some could not be photographed. The only clue he might have entered a government building was a montage of photos in the reception area of President Bush's visit to the center. But there was only one guard and a sign-in book. Inside, red digital clocks on the walls showed the time in Istanbul, Baghdad, Islamabad, Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney. Although billboard-size video screens on the walls showed multiple cable news shows, there was little noise in the basketball-court-sized main workroom. Each desk had dual computer screens and earphones to hear the video soundtrack. Conferences were held in smaller workrooms divided by glass walls from the windowless main room.
Round the clock, the targeters from Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection agency analyze information from multiple sources, not just ATS. They compare names to terrorist watch lists and mine the Treasury Enforcement Communications System and other automated systems that bring data about cargo, travelers and commercial workers entering or leaving the 317 U.S. ports, searching for suspicious people and cargo.

Almost every person entering and leaving the United States by air, sea or land is assessed based on ATS' analysis of their travel records and other data, including items such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

Government officials could not say whether ATS has apprehended any terrorists. Based on all the information available to them, federal agents turn back about 45 foreign criminals a day at U.S. borders, according to Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection spokesman Bill Anthony. He could not say how many were spotted by ATS.

Officials described how the system works: applying rules learned from experience with the activities and characteristics of terrorists and criminals to the traveler data. But they would not describe in detail the format in which border agents see the results or in which the databases store the results of the ATS risk assessments.

Acting Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Paul Rosenzweig told reporters Friday they could call it scoring. "It can be reduced to a number," he said, but he clearly preferred the longer description about how the rules are used.
___

Germany says WAR CRIMES for Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Tenet, Addington

2006-11-14T21:36:00.000-06:00

Better late that not at all!

finally... WAR CRIMES.... one of the words that describes the crimes of the Bush administration.

The only way America can ever have any real victory over what the Bush administration has done to America's image in the world is to see these men prosecuted for war crimes. But Bush prepared for this. It doesn't matter what the ICC (international Criminal Court) thinks because Bush signed off being a member right away when he took office. So, they knew early on they were gonna do some awful things to an awful lot of people.

www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1557842,00.html

Time Magazine:

Exclusive:

Charges Sought Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse
A lawsuit in Germany will seek a criminal prosecution of the outgoing Defense Secretary and other U.S. officials for their alleged role in abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo

By ADAM ZAGORIN
Posted Friday, Nov. 10, 2006

Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The plaintiffs in the case include 11 Iraqis who were prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as well as Mohammad al-Qahtani, a Saudi held at Guantanamo, whom the U.S. has identified as the so-called "20th hijacker" and a would-be participant in the 9/11 hijackings. As TIME first reported in June 2005, Qahtani underwent a "special interrogation plan," personally approved by Rumsfeld, which the U.S. says produced valuable intelligence. But to obtain it, according to the log of his interrogation and government reports, Qahtani was subjected to forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation and other controversial interrogation techniques.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs say that one of the witnesses who will testify on their behalf is former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq. Karpinski — who the lawyers say will be in Germany next week to publicly address her accusations in the case — has issued a written statement to accompany the legal filing, which says, in part: "It was clear the knowledge and responsibility [for what happened at Abu Ghraib] goes all the way to the top of the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ."

A spokesperson for the Pentagon told TIME there would be no comment since the case has not yet been filed.

Along with Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Tenet, the other defendants in the case are Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone; former assistant attorney general Jay Bybee; former deputy assisant attorney general John Yoo; General Counsel for the Department of Defense William James Haynes II; and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Senior military officers named in the filing are General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top Army official in Iraq; Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of Guantanamo; senior Iraq commander, Major General Walter Wojdakowski; and Col. Thomas Pappas, the one-time head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib.

Germany was chosen for the court filing because German law provides "universal jurisdiction" allowing for the prosecution of war crimes and related offenses that take place anywhere in the world. Indeed, a similar, but narrower, legal action was brought in Germany in 2004, which also sought the prosecution of Rumsfeld. The case provoked an angry response from Pentagon, and Rumsfeld himself was reportedly upset. Rumsfeld's spokesman at the time, Lawrence DiRita, called the case a "a big, big problem." U.S. officials made clear the case could adversely impact U.S.-Germany relations, and Rumsfeld indicated he would not attend a major security conference in Munich, where he was scheduled to be the keynote speaker, unless Germany disposed of the case. The day before the conference, a German prosecutor announced he would not pursue the matter, saying there was no indication that U.S. authorities and courts would not deal with allegations in the complaint.

In bringing the new case, however, the plaintiffs argue that circumstances have changed in two important ways. Rumsfeld's resignation, they say, means that the former Defense Secretary will lose the legal immunity usually accorded high government officials. Moreover, the plaintiffs argue that the German prosecutor's reasoning for rejecting the previous case — that U.S. authorities were dealing with the issue — has been proven wrong.

"The utter and complete failure of U.S. authorities to take any action to investigate high-level involvement in the torture program could not be clearer," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a U.S.-based non-profit helping to bring the legal action in Germany. He also notes that the Military Commissions Act, a law passed by Congress earlier this year, effectively blocks prosecution in the U.S. of those involved in detention and interrogation abuses of foreigners held abroad in American custody going to back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a result, Ratner contends, the legal arguments underlying the German prosecutor's previous inaction no longer hold up.

Whatever the legal merits of the case, it is the latest example of efforts in Western Europe by critics of U.S. tactics in the war on terror to call those involved to account in court. In Germany, investigations are under way in parliament concerning cooperation between the CIA and German intelligence on rendition — the kidnapping of suspected terrorists and their removal to third countries for interrogation. Other legal inquiries involving rendition are under way in both Italy and Spain.

U.S. officials have long feared that legal proceedings against "war criminals" could be used to settle political scores. In 1998, for example, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — whose military coup was supported by the Nixon administration — was arrested in the U.K. and held for 16 months in an extradition battle led by a Spanish magistrate seeking to charge him with war crimes. He was ultimately released and returned to Chile. More recently, a Belgian court tried to bring charges against then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for alleged crimes against Palestinians.

For its part, the Bush Administration has rejected adherence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on grounds that it could be used to unjustly prosecute U.S. officials. The ICC is the first permanent tribunal established to prosecute war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity.

Guardian article: How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

2006-11-11T15:46:00.000-06:00

Hitlers Angel has $3Million in US BANKS
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Note: I heard last night on NPR that Germany was involved in accompanying US warships to and from Iraq in the War.
It immediately reminded me of the history of the Bush family with Germany, specifically Thyseen, Hitlers Financier.

www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004
The Guardian

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Tantalising
Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in 1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.
The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.
The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".

Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.

In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany's most powerful industrial family.
August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.
Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.
There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.
There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.

May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush's name, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Red-handed
Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.
Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.
Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.
In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.
The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.

The petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.
Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."

The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.

"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.

"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."

"There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it," said Loftus. "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."
Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. "My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn't care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks."

What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in "the banking and intelligence communities" and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.

The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline "Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush's Grandfather Traded With the Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor". He expands on this in his book to be published next month - Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.

In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that "the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes".

Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as "traitors to the truth".

Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.

Biography
Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.

The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.

The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would "deal honestly with Prescott Bush's alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations".

In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that "a person of less established ethics would have panicked ... Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was 'an unpaid courtesy for a client' ... Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill."

The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.
However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman's "performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends".
The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.

Authoritarianism: Bush's Politics of Fear, Anger and Division

2006-11-02T03:12:00.001-06:00

Wikipedia:
Authoritarianism - "There are various degrees of authoritarianism; even very democratic and liberal states will show authoritarianism to some extent, for example in areas of national security."

New York Times
EDITORIAL

The Great Divider

Published: November 2, 2006

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.” In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero.

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office. And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/opinion/02thu1.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Medical Views of 9/11’s Dust Show Big Gaps (a.k.a. "Cover Ups")

2006-10-27T00:19:00.000-05:00

Medical Views of 9/11’s Dust Show Big Gaps (a.k.a. "Cover Ups")

By ANTHONY DePALMA
Published: October 24, 2006

In 2004, Kenneth R. Feinberg, special master of the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, awarded $2.6 million to the family of a downtown office worker who died from a rare lung disease five months after fleeing from the dust cloud released when the twin towers fell. That decision made the worker, Felicia Dunn-Jones, a 42-year-old lawyer, the first official fatality of the dust, and one of only two deaths to be formally linked to the toxic air at ground zero.

The New York City medical examiner’s office, however, has refused to put her on its official list of 9/11 victims, saying that by its standards there was insufficient medical evidence to link her death to the dust.
Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s case shows how difficult it can be to prove a causal connection with any scientific certainty — and how even government agencies can disagree. With thousands of people now seeking compensation and treatment for dust exposure, the debate about the relationship between the toxic particles and disease will be a central issue in the flood of Sept. 11-related lawsuits. Health experts are starting to document the connections, but any firm conclusion is still years away.

Most of the suits involve workers who spent weeks and months on the pile at ground zero and say the city and other agencies failed to protect them from the toxic dust. Others involve residents who say they were made sick by dust that settled in their homes. Mrs. Dunn-Jones was among those downtown office workers caught in the initial fallout.
The question that arises in all these cases is straightforward: Can a link between the dust and disease be proved with scientific certainty? The answer is anything but simple.

“Certainty is a word we always dance around,” said Joseph Graziano, associate dean for research at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. For him, searching for the cause of disease is like developing film. “At first you see a faint image of what the real picture is,” Dr. Graziano said, “and then, over time, you see it with much more clarity. In these relatively early times, the image is still faint.”

It can take decades to approach any degree of certainty. For instance, only after years of observation did doctors agree that there was a strong link between asbestos and diseases like asbestosis and mesothelioma.

In legal cases, “a reasonable degree of medical certainty” is considered the gold standard in making a causal connection. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for thousands of workers’ lawsuits to go to trial. When the cases are heard, any proof that does not meet that legal standard is likely to be challenged.

But outside the courtroom, scientists say, even a less rigorous link could be sufficient to warrant expanding the range of illnesses covered by treatment programs, and to serve as the basis for issuing cautions to people in high-risk groups. When the health effects are too new or the evidence is too vague for a strong link, lesser indicators like the concurrence of different studies have to be relied on.

For example, nearly every ground zero study shows that workers and residents exposed to the dust in the hours after the collapse have suffered the worst health problems. The consistency in that data has helped doctors monitor and treat people since Sept. 11.

And it may also help explain why Mrs. Dunn-Jones, a dynamic civil rights lawyer with the United States Department of Education, became so sick so quickly. As she was swallowed by a whirling dust plume filled with asbestos, benzene, dioxin and other hazards when the first tower fell, all she could do was cover her nose and mouth as she fled from her office one block north of the World Trade Center.
It was night by the time she got home to Staten Island. “She was in a state of shock,” her husband, Joseph Jones, recalled. Her clothes were still dusty, but he didn’t pay much attention. “I was just so happy to see her,” he said.

For the next few months, life returned to normal, until Mrs. Dunn-Jones developed a cough. In January 2002, the cough grew worse. On Feb. 10, she suddenly stopped breathing and died.

Mr. Jones, 54, an assistant manager at a Brooklyn pharmacy, was stunned. Then, when he received the official death certificate months later, he was shocked to see an unfamiliar word — sarcoidosis.
“Even though I was in the medical field, I had never heard of it,” he said.

After reading several medical reports on sarcoidosis — including one by Dr. David J. Prezant, deputy chief medical officer of the New York Fire Department — Mr. Jones and his lawyer, Richard H. Bennett, wondered if Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s mysterious death could be linked to 9/11 dust because sarcoidosis, which produces microscopic lumps called granulomas, on vital organs, is often associated with exposure to environmental hazards.

They took the case to Mr. Feinberg and the victim compensation fund, which gave $7 billion to the families of those killed or injured on 9/11.
Mr. Feinberg initially expressed doubts about the claim and demanded to see definitive medical evidence linking Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s sarcoidosis to the dust.

Dr. Prezant, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was one of two experts who testified at a hearing conducted by Mr. Feinberg. In the first four years after 9/11, he found 20 cases of sarcoidosis in the Fire Department, a rate of 80 per 100,000 in the first year (with treatment, all are now stable), compared with a national rate of fewer than 6 per 100,000, according to the American Thoracic Society.

The other expert was Dr. Alan M. Fein, a clinical professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. He, too, was skeptical at first, but he said he changed his mind after reviewing Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s medical record, including the autopsy report. “I’m comfortable saying her death was caused by exposure to the dust,” Dr. Fein said in an interview.
In March 2004, Mr. Feinberg agreed, making Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s death the only dust-related fatality recognized by the fund. Only one other death has been formally linked to the dust: In April, a New Jersey coroner determined that James Zadroga, 34, a New York City police detective, had died of a disease similar to sarcoidosis, also caused by his exposure to ground zero dust.

Mr. Jones welcomed the settlement from the victim compensation fund, and believes that his wife was a 9/11 victim as surely as if she had died in the towers. He sent Mr. Feinberg’s decision to the city’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, and asked that his wife be put on the official list so that her name could be read on Sept. 11. Dr. Hirsch refused, a spokeswoman said, because the available evidence did not prove the connection “with a reasonable degree of medical certainty”— the highest medical standard generally used in legal cases.

Mr. Feinberg’s decision had been based on a different standard: a preponderance of medical evidence.
That was proof enough for the Staten Island Memorial Commission, which has engraved Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s name on the bone-white memorial on the island’s north shore.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, who has fought to get medical care for 9/11 victims, said the contradictory conclusions about Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s death underscored the importance of deciding who has the final say on causal links. “They should be medical decisions, not political ones,” she said, suggesting that city officials may have a conflict of interest in making such determinations since the city is a defendant in the ground zero workers’ lawsuits.
She has introduced a bill to reopen the federal compensation fund to people whose illnesses became known after the original eligibility period ended in 2003.

In the effort to collect definitive data, Dr. John Howard, the federal government’s 9/11 health coordinator, recently circulated a draft set of autopsy protocols that directs pathologists to use a standard of proof that establishes both biological plausibility and unequivocal evidence of a causal connection to the dust. But doctors and elected officials have said those standards are so restrictive that almost no death could be linked to the dust for years to come. A spokesman for Dr. Howard said the guidelines were being refined.

In another effort, the Mount Sinai Medical Center, which has screened thousands of ground zero workers, has begun a long-term study of the incidence of diseases to identify any rates that exceed national averages.

“Right now we’re in the process of confirming every case of interstitial lung disease, every cancer, every sarcoidosis that has been reported to us by responders in their visits,” said Dr. Jeanne M. Stellman, director of the public health program at Columbia University, is leading the data collection project.

“We are actively trying to determine whether Detective Zadroga and Mrs. Dunn-Jones are alone,” she said. “And we are trying to find a way to do this that is scientifically correct while also being responsive to the needs and fears of the communities involved.”

Report Warns of Potential Voting Problems in 10 States

2006-10-27T00:11:00.000-05:00

Report Warns of Potential Voting Problems in 10 States

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 25, 2006; Page A03

Two weeks before the midterm elections, at least 10 states, including Maryland, remain ripe for voting problems, according to a study released yesterday by a nonpartisan clearinghouse that tracks electoral reforms across the United States

The report by Electionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on Election Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules -- and close races.

The report cautions that the Nov. 7 elections, which will determine which political party controls the House and Senate, promise "to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections -- a divided body politic, an election system in flux and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls nationwide."

In a state-by-state canvass, the 75-page report singles out places, such as Indiana and Arizona, where courts have upheld stringent new laws requiring voters to show poll workers specific forms of identification. It cites states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have switched to electronic voting machines whose accuracy has been challenged. And it points to states such as Colorado and Washington, which have departed from the tradition of polling sites in neighborhood precincts.

The report of the clearinghouse, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is the latest of several warnings in recent weeks and months by organizations and scholars who say that electoral problems persist in spite of six years of efforts by the federal government and states to correct voting flaws. The flaws gripped the public's attention after the close 2000 presidential election, which led to recounts in Florida and the intervention of the Supreme Court.
The election shambles of 2000 prompted Congress to pass in 2002 legislation intended to help states make significant election changes, such as by replacing outdated voting equipment. Some of the changes, including making sure that databases of registered voters are accurate, were required to be in effect by this year.

Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, said "things are getting better over time." But he said many of the changes in recent years have led to new problems and disputes. For instance, the decisions by many states to convert to electronic voting machines have yielded new concerns about whether they are secure and accurate, about paper records as backup proof and -- this year -- about whether the electronic or paper record should be considered the official tally if a candidate demands a recount.

The report cites Maryland for what it calls a "dismal primary" in September that "included human and machine failures galore," in part because Montgomery County election officials forgot to distribute to polling places the access cards needed for its electronic machines to work. The study raises questions about whether Montgomery officials are prepared for the bigger crowds in the general election and whether large numbers of mistrustful voters will resort to absentee ballots.

NY Times Editorial: Money Down the Drain in Iraq

2006-10-26T18:26:00.000-05:00

Commentary: The Bush administrations actions with respect to Iraq are not merely misfeasance and incompetence. Bush's actions are criminal. The 600,000+ people murdered in Iraq under the guise of freedom are properly called War Crimes. Dress it up any way you like, but the money the US taxpayers have spent in Iraq has been used for murder and enrichment of American interests (like Halliburton). We're going to be paying for a long time for what Bush started and can never finish.

EDITORIAL

Money Down the Drain in Iraq

Published: October 26, 2006

When the full encyclopedia of Bush administration misfeasance in Iraq is compiled, it will have to include a lengthy section on the contracting fiascos that wasted billions of taxpayer dollars in the name of rebuilding the country. It isn’t only money that was lost.

Washington’s disgraceful failure to deliver on its promises to restore electricity, water and oil distribution, and to rebuild education and health facilities, turned millions of once sympathetic Iraqis against the American presence.

Their discovery that the world’s richest, most technologically advanced country could not restore basic services to minimal prewar levels left an impression of American weakness and, worse, of indifference to the well-being of ordinary Iraqis. That further poisoned a situation already soured by White House intelligence breakdowns, military misjudgments and political blunders.

The latest contracting revelations came in a report issued Tuesday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The office reviewed records covering $1.3 billion out of the $18.4 billion that Congress voted for Iraq reconstruction two years ago. Reported overhead costs ran from a low of 11 percent for several contracts awarded to Lucent to a high of 55 percent for, you guessed it, the Halliburton subsidiary, KBR Inc.

On similar projects in the United States, overhead is typically just a few percent. Given the difficult security environment in Iraq, overhead was expected to run closer to 10 percent. But in many of the contracts examined, it ran much, much higher, in some cases consuming over half the allocated funds. And the report may have actually underestimated total overhead because the government agencies that were supposed to be supervising these reconstruction projects sometimes failed to systematically track overhead expenses.

The main explanation for these excessive overhead rates turned out to be not special security costs but simply the costly down time that resulted from sending workers and equipment to Iraq months before there was any actual work for them to do. That is yet another example of the shoddy contract writing, lax oversight and absent supervision that has consistently characterized Washington’s approach to Iraq reconstruction from the start.

Bush administration incompetence, not corporate greed, is the chief culprit. Still, these charges are one more example of how the favored American companies lucky enough to be awarded reconstruction contracts made large sums of money while the Iraqis failed to get most of the promised benefits.

As Americans now look for explanations of how things went so horribly wrong in Iraq, they should not overlook the shameful breakdowns in reconstruction contracting. They need to insist that Congress impose tough new rules on the Pentagon to ensure more competitive bidding, tighter contract writing and more rigorous supervision. That is the best way to ensure that such a costly and damaging failure never happens again.

Bush War Crimes Billboard Advertisement

2006-10-23T20:56:00.000-05:00

911 Propaganda Billboard
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

This is a photo of an electronic billboard taken on July 14, 2005 along interstate I-10 in a spot where traffic backs up for hours every day in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

PENTAGON PLANTED PROPAGANDA; BUYING OF NEWS BY BUSH'S AIDES IS RULED ILLEGAL - "Covert Propaganda"

2006-10-23T20:43:00.000-05:00

BUYING OF NEWS BY BUSH'S AIDES IS RULED ILLEGAL - "Covert Propaganda"
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Bush has been caught breaking the media laws for quite a while now (Click on the photo and see the other huge Dictator 911 Propaganda Billboards straight from Baton Rouge, La.).

And the Pentagon has been spending Millions for years now on "covert progaganda". This was especially wrong when those millions were first discovered being spent right after Katrina devastated New Orleans. And we all know how Bush handled that. So, let's be clear: Bush is spending your tax dollars to advertise and support the justifcation of an illegal war that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women and children. For freedom of course. At what point does this paradox become a war crime?

Washington Post: EDITORIAL

Planted Propaganda
It's a bad idea, whether or not it violates regulations. Too bad the Pentagon won't say that.
Monday, October 23, 2006; Page A20

THE DEFENSE Department inspector general has concluded that having a Pentagon contractor secretly pay Iraqi journalists and news organizations to run positive news stories about the war doesn't violate any laws or regulations. It's almost impossible to tell whether that conclusion is correct: The scanty, two-page summary released by the Pentagon provides no details about the activities of the contractor, the Lincoln Group, the contract under which it was operating or the applicable rules.

We won't dwell too long, though, on the irony that an assessment of the military's secret propaganda operations is itself -- except for the largely exculpatory conclusion -- secret. The more important point is that, assuming the inspector general's legal assessment is right, it only makes the problem worse. The U.S. government has a legitimate interest in conveying its point of view. The problem is when it does so in secret. The government shouldn't be in the business of covertly peddling propaganda -- especially in a war based on the notion of seeking to export democratic values such as, say, a free press.

But don't just take it from us. Take it from, among others, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, who criticized the program in comments to the Los Angeles Times in March. "I think there are ways to get your message out, but get it out in a form that people understand how the message got there," Gen. Pace said. "They need to know that, so they can make their own judgment about what they believe and don't believe in the article. The worst thing you can have is people feeling like somehow they've been snookered."

Or take it from Defense Secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld, who told PBS's Charlie Rose in February, "When we heard about it, we said, 'Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing.' " Or take it from Mr. Rumsfeld's former chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, who said in December of the inspector general's investigation, "If somebody comes back to me and says there's nothing wrong with the Department of Defense paying journalists, I'll say, 'Even if there's nothing wrong, does it make sense?' "

No, it doesn't. But when we called the Pentagon to determine its policy position, the response we received -- even after citing the statements of Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Pace -- reflected no understanding of that bedrock principle. "The current situation in Iraq necessitates that the coalition maintain the capability to communicate with the Iraqi people via the Iraqi media," the statement said. "A thorough investigation concluded that the U.S. followed established doctrine by paying to place truthful articles and advertisements in Iraqi newspapers. The IG report made no recommendations to the contrary." But making recommendations wasn't the inspector general's job. If this is "established doctrine," it needs swift reexamination.

CONSUMER WATCHDOGS DEMAND RECALL OF SPYCHIPPED CREDIT CARDS

2006-10-23T16:47:00.000-05:00

Synopsis: RFID Payment Card Vulnerabilities Technical Report
“There is a certain amount of privacy that consumers expect, and I believe that credit card companies have crossed the line.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 23, 2006

Advises Consumers to Immediately Remove Cards from Wallets

Consumer watchdog group CASPIAN is demanding a recall of millions of
RFID-equipped contactless credit cards in light of serious security
flaws reported today in the New York Times. The paper reports that a
team of security researchers has found that virtually every one of these
cards tested is vulnerable to unauthorized charges and puts consumers at
risk for identity theft.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a controversial technology that
uses tiny microchips to transmit information at a distance. These RFID
microchips have earned the nickname "spychips" because the data they
contain can be read silently and invisibly by radio waves without an
individual's knowledge or consent. The technology has long been the
target of criticism by privacy and civil liberties groups.

"For these financial institutions to put RFID in credit cards, one of
the most sensitive items we carry, is absolute lunacy," said Dr.
Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of CASPIAN, a consumer group
with over 12,000 members in 30 countries worldwide.

Researchers are showing how a thief could skim information from the
cards right through purses, backpacks and wallets. This information
includes the cardholder's name, credit card number, expiration date and
other data that would be sufficient to make unauthorized purchases. They
say the information could even be used to identify and track people, a
scenario Albrecht and co-author Liz McIntyre lay out in their book,
"Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your
Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move."

Despite earlier assurances by the issuing companies that the data
contained in the credit cards would be secure, researchers found that
the majority of cards they tested did not use encryption or protect the
data in any way. The information on them was readily available to
unauthorized parties using equipment that could be assembled for as
little as $50, the researchers said.

"We cautioned companies against using item-level RFID, and they didn't
heed us. Now the credit card industry is facing an unprecedented PR and
financial disaster," says McIntyre, who is also a former bank examiner.
She points to the astronomical cost to replace the cards, not to mention
the potential financial losses, litigation expenses, and erosion of
consumer trust.

Albrecht and McIntyre are calling on the industry to issue a public
alert detailing the dangers of the cards they've issued, institute an
active recall, and make safe versions without RFID available to
concerned consumers.

"This recall has to be very clear and very directed since consumers may
not know their cards contain RFID tags," says Albrecht. "The industry
has repeatedly resisted calls to clearly label the cards. Rather,
they've given the cards innocent-sounding names like 'Blink.'"

CASPIAN is advising consumers to immediately remove the credit cards
from their wallets and call the 800 number on the back to insist on an
RFID-free replacement card. The group is cautioning consumers not to
mail the cards back or simply throw them away due to the risk of their
personal information being skimmed.

Today's New York Times article by John Schwartz can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/business/23card.html?ref=business

A research report detailing the findings can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/20061023_CARD/techreport.pdf

New York Times:

RFID Payment Card Vulnerabilities Technical Report

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: October 23, 2006

AMHERST, Mass. — They call it the “Johnny Carson attack,” for his comic pose as a psychic divining the contents of an envelope.

Tom Heydt-Benjamin tapped an envelope against a black plastic box connected to his computer. Within moments, the screen showed a garbled string of characters that included this: fu/kevine, along with some numbers.

Mr. Heydt-Benjamin then ripped open the envelope. Inside was a credit card, fresh from the issuing bank. The card bore the name of Kevin E. Fu, a computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was standing nearby. The card number and expiration date matched those numbers on the screen.

The demonstration revealed potential security and privacy holes in a new generation of credit cards — cards whose data is relayed by radio waves without need of a signature or physical swiping through a machine. Tens of millions of the cards have been issued, and equipment for their use is showing up at a growing number of locations, including CVS pharmacies, McDonald’s restaurants and many movie theaters.

The card companies have implied through their marketing that the data is encrypted to make sure that a digital eavesdropper cannot get any intelligible information. American Express has said its cards incorporate “128-bit encryption,” and J. P. Morgan Chase has said that its cards, which it calls Blink, use “the highest level of encryption allowed by the U.S. government.”

But in tests on 20 cards from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, the researchers here found that the cardholder’s name and other data was being transmitted without encryption and in plain text. They could skim and store the information from a card with a device the size of a couple of paperback books, which they cobbled together from readily available computer and radio components for $150.
They say they could probably make another one even smaller and cheaper: about the size of a pack of gum for less than $50.

And because the cards can be read even through a wallet or an item of clothing, the security of the information, the researchers say, is startlingly weak. “Would you be comfortable wearing your name, your credit card number and your card expiration date on your T-shirt?” Mr. Heydt-Benjamin, a graduate student, asked.

Companies that make and issue the cards argue that what looks shocking in the lab could not lead to widespread abuse in the real world, and that additional data protection and antifraud measures in the payment system protect consumers from end to end.

“This is an interesting technical exercise,” said Brian Triplett, senior vice president for emerging-product development for Visa, “but as a real threat to a consumer — that threat really doesn’t exist.”

The finding comes at a time of strong suspicion among privacy advocates and consumer groups about the security of the underlying technology, called radio frequency identification, or RFID. Though the systems are designed to allow a card to be read only in close proximity, researchers have found that they can extend the distance.

The actual distance is still a matter of debate, but the claims range from several inches to many feet. And even the shortest distance could allow a would-be card skimmer to mill about in a crowded place and pull data from the wallets of passersby, or to collect data from envelopes sitting in mailboxes.

“No one’s going to look at me funny if I walk down the street and put a flier in everybody’s mailbox,” Mr. Heydt-Benjamin said.

The experiment was conducted by researchers here working with RSA Labs, a part of EMC, an information management and storage company. The resulting paper, which has been submitted to a computer security conference, is the first fruit of a new consortium of industry and academic researchers financed by the National Science Foundation to study RFID.

Security experts who were not involved in the research have praised the paper, and said that they were startled by the findings. Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer security at Johns Hopkins University, said, “There is a certain amount of privacy that consumers expect, and I believe that credit card companies have crossed the line.”

The companies, however, argue that testing just 20 cards does not provide an accurate picture of the card market, which generally uses higher security standards than the cards that were tested. “It’s a small sample,” said Art Kranzley, an executive with MasterCard. “This is almost akin to somebody standing up in the theater and yelling, ‘Fire!’ because somebody lit a cigarette.”

Chips like those used by the credit card companies can encrypt the data they send, but that can slow down transactions and make building and maintaining the payment networks more expensive. Other systems, including the Speedpass keychain device offered by Exxon Mobil, encrypt the transmission — though Exxon came under fire for using encryption that experts said was weak.

Though information on the cards may be transmitted in plain text, the company representatives argued, the process of making purchases with the cards involves verification procedures based on powerful encryption that make each transaction unique. Most cards, they said, actually transmit a dummy number that does not match the number embossed on the card, and that number can be used only in connection with the verification “token,” or a small bit of code, that is encrypted before being sent.

“It’s basically useless information,” said David Bonalle, vice president and general manager for advanced payments at American Express. “You can’t steal that data and just play it back and expect that transaction to work.”

While the researchers found that these claims were true for some of the cards they tested, other cards gave up the actual credit card number and did not use a token or change data from one transaction to another. They also took data in from some cards and transmitted it to a card-reader in the lab and tricked it into accepting the transaction. Mr. Heydt-Benjamin, in fact, was able to purchase electronic equipment online using a number skimmed from a card he ordered for himself and which was sealed in an envelope.

(Page 2 of 2)

(None of the cards transmits the additional number on the front or back, known as the card validation code, that some businesses require for online purchases; Mr. Heydt-Benjamin chose a store that does not require the code.)

Mr. Kranzley said the MasterCard-issuing banks decided how much security they wanted to implement, but said that with 10 million of the company’s chip-bearing cards on the market, some 98 percent of them used the highest standards.

“Today, there’s an extremely small percentage of cards that have the characteristics that RSA has looked at in this report,” he said. Visa and American Express representatives said all their cards conformed to the highest security standard.

Beyond the security on the cards themselves, the companies said, they have deployed fraud detection and prevention measures that block suspect purchases. And each company stressed that cardholders were not liable for fraud.

Dr. Fu acknowledged that the research involved a small sample, and added, “We would be happy to examine cards that have better security so that we can verify these claims.” He added, however, that all of the cards they tested were issued this year, and all were felled by at least one of the attacks that they attempted.

Tom O’Donnell, a senior vice president at Chase, the largest issuer of the new cards, said that the attacks described in the paper would be too cumbersome in the real world. And the researchers said that other kinds of fraud, like so-called phishing scams in which criminals trick people into revealing credit card information through misleading e-mail messages and Web sites, were currently more effective.

Still, John Pescatore, vice president for Internet security at Gartner, a technology market research firm, said he was surprised by the lack of security in transmitting personal data. He said it was a mistake that companies often made in rolling out early versions of a technology.

“It’s the classic ‘Let’s depend on security through obscurity — who’s going to look?’ ” he said. “Then, whoops! As soon as somebody does look, you roll out the security.”

All of the card companies said that they were in the process of deleting names from the stream of data transmitted to the card readers. “As a best practice, issuers are not including the cardholder name,” Mr. Triplett of Visa said.

News Media & Gov. Pay in Scientist Wen Ho Lee Suit Raises Troubling Questions that Suggest Media is Acting in Concert with the Gov. Re: Legal Issues

2006-06-04T22:51:00.000-05:00

Synopsis:

Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist once suspected of espionage, yesterday settled an invasion of privacy lawsuit against the government for $1,645,000.

Five news organizations are paying almost half that sum to avoid contempt sanctions against their reporters.

In the suit, Dr. Lee said the government had violated privacy laws by telling reporters about his employment history, finances, travels and polygraph tests. The settlement followed seven months of unusual negotiations among Dr. Lee, the government and lawyers for the news organizations.

The five reporters were not defendants, but had been held in contempt of court for refusing to testify and ordered to pay fines of $500 a day for refusing to disclose the identities of their confidential sources.
The news organizations — ABC News, part of the Walt Disney Company; The Associated Press; The Los Angeles Times, part of the Tribune Company; The New York Times; and The Washington Post — agreed to contribute $750,000 to the settlement.

Specialists in media law said such a payment by news organizations to avoid a contempt sanction was almost certainly unprecedented. Some called it troubling.

Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, said she found the news organizations' decision to participate in the settlement "profoundly disturbing."

"These are very strange times in which we are living," Professor Kirtley said, "and it does appear that sometimes decisions have to be made that would have been unthinkable five years ago. But to make a payment in settlement in this context strikes me as an admission that the media are acting in concert with the government."

Full Text:

www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/washington/03settle.html?_r=1&...

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: June 3, 2006
___________________________

LSU Chancellor Sean O’keefe (former NASA head) admits being Bohemian Grove Member

2006-05-21T00:59:00.000-05:00

LSU Chancellor Sean O’keefe (former NASA head) admits being Bohemian Grove Member
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG POST:

1. To point out the Sean O’keefe (formerly head of NASA) connection with Bush and Bohemian Grove.

Since the Bush administration has been suppressing and censoring all kinds of scientists in America and at the Universities it is an important question why Sean O'keefe is at LSU. What is his role at the University and how it relates to the well being of Louisiana?

Or does it have to do with Bush appointments in key areas of control in America concerning the suppression of information.

This is notable in his Bio:

- "Appointed Secretary of the Navy in July 1992 by President George Bush, O'Keefe served as Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Defense since 1989. Before joining then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney's Pentagon management team in these capacities, he served on the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations staff for eight years and was Staff Director of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. "

Read this O’keefe interview in the LSU Reveille about Bohemian Grove:

An Elite Alliance
Chancellor confirms membership in club
By Amy Brittain
March 07, 2006

www.lsureveille.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/03/07/440d16...

DARK SECRETS INSIDE BOHEMIAN GROVE:

(WATCH THE VIDEO)

Some of the most powerful people in the US government (George Bush, Alan Greenspan. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan Jimmy Buffet?, Clint Eastwood, Henry Kissinger, Reagan, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Nixon...) attend occult worship events every July at "Bohemian Grove". Is that funny? Do you think it's true? Does that sound like the kind of thing professed Christians and followers of Jesus would do? Decide for yourself. The Bush family are Bohemian Grove Members.

Movies of it (the ritual not pictures of anyone you can see) exist:

Alex Jones was the first person to sneak in Bohemian Grove
and get the “Cremation of Care” ceremony on video. Watch it here:

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1358319439993514946

The Associated Press December 26, 2004
LSU and O'Keefe: mysteries of his hiring
By Adam Nossiter

www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2004/041226-lsu-okeefe.htm

Sean O’keefe Bio
www.lsu.edu/chancellor/biography.htm

_________________________________

2. To Protest Sean O’keefe selecting Dick Cheney to speak at the May 19, 2006 LSU graduation ceremony. This was strange and inappropriate to say the least. I'd go so far as to say inviting Dick Cheney (in reality) to speak at LSU was about like having Mussolini:

Benito Mussolini
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"He created a Fascist state through the use of diplomacy and propaganda. Using his charisma, total control of the media, and outright violence and intimidation against political rivals, he disassembled the existing democratic government system."

SEE: Dick Cheney: "Torture Man" : read about Cheney the man who lobbied a year for the ability to torture beyond any limits of world law. The US is not even a member of the International Courts of justice, Bush signed off on it first thing when he got in office. The US is not accountable to anyone for anything on this planet. And with the people involved in what is the Bush administration, there has been nothing but destruction, exploitation and breakdown of the foundations of all that was good about America. Their "New World Order" PNAC plans include nothing that has anything to do with the preservation and well being of Humanity. (Just ask the Katrina victims New Orleans)

You can't raise the legal limit of the national debt 4 times, a record in American history and not expect the people of that country to pay hell for it at some point. All that military/defense spending, oil/energy and cleanup of the destruction they have created is going right back into the pockets of those that made it happen. It has been a very lethal system. And most people agree that the architect of all this is Dick Cheney.

AND THIS IS THE MAN O'Keefe invited to LSU commencement.
It's deplorable, ridiculous that a man like Dick Cheney would be allowed anywhere near a serious academic institution.

www.flickr.com/photos/antifluff/63137909/in/set-1237029/

_________________________________

3. To Point out that David Gergen of the Clinton Admin. had to step down when his being a member of Bohemian Grove was exposed:

*** Watch David Gergen former Clinton Adviser talk about Bohemian Grove:
www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/wm_bb.htm
www.infowars.com/video/previews/martial_law/qt_bb.htm

Some of the most powerful people in the US government attend occult worship events every July at "Bohemian Grove". Is that funny? Do you think it's true? Decide for yourself. Movies of it exist:

BOHEMIAN GROVE EXPOSED! BUSH=OCCULT or JESUS?

DARK SECRETS INSIDE BOHEMIAN GROVE:

Alex Jones was the first person to sneak in Bohemian Grove
and get the “Cremation of Care” ceremony on video. Watch it here:

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1358319439993514946

________________________

More Bohemian Grove Info:

CHECK THIS OUT: (REAL PLAYER CLIP)
www.infowars.com/Video/BG/BG_Trailer_fast.ram
www.infowars.com/bg1.html

Occult Activities at the Elite Bohemian Grove in Northern California Exposed!
www.propagandamatrix.com/archivebohemiangrove.html

-More on Bohemian Grove: www.rotten.com/library/conspiracy/bohemian-grove/
www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=b...
www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/bohos/bohofact.html

NY Times Editorial on Bush's ILLEGAL NSA Spying Program

2006-05-12T17:55:00.000-05:00

NY Times, Editorial

Ever-Expanding Secret

Published: May 12, 2006

Ever since its secret domestic wiretapping program was exposed, the Bush administration has depicted it as a narrow examination of calls made by and to terrorism suspects. But its refusal to provide any details about the extent of the spying has raised doubts. Now there is more reason than ever to be worried — and angry — about how wide the government's web has been reaching.

According to an article in USA Today, the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting telephone records on tens of millions of Americans with the cooperation of the three largest telecommunications companies in the nation. The scope of the domestic spying described in the article is breathtaking. The government is reported to be working with AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to collect data on phone calls made by untold millions of customers.

President Bush has insisted in the past that the government is monitoring only calls that begin or end overseas. But according to USA Today, it has actually been collecting information on purely domestic calls. One source told the paper that the program had produced "the largest database ever assembled in the world."

The government has stressed that it is not listening in on phone calls, only analyzing the data to look for calling patterns. But if all the details of the program are confirmed, the invasion of privacy is substantial. By cross-referencing phone numbers with databases that link numbers to names and addresses, the government could compile dossiers of what people and organizations each American is in contact with.

The phone companies are doing a great disservice to their customers by cooperating. To its credit, one major company, Qwest, refused, according to the article, because it had doubts about the program's legality.

What we have here is a clandestine surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another. If the White House had gotten its way, the program would have run secretly until the war on terror ended — that is, forever.

Congress must stop pretending that it has no serious responsibilities for monitoring the situation. The Senate should call back Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and ask him — this time, under oath — about the scope of the program. This time, lawmakers should not roll over when Mr. Gonzales declines to provide answers. The confirmation hearings of Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee for Central Intelligence Agency director, are also a natural forum for a serious, thorough and pointed review of exactly what has been going on.

Most of all, Congress should pass legislation that removes any doubt that this kind of warrantless spying on ordinary Americans is illegal. If the administration finds the current procedures for getting court approval of wiretaps too restrictive, this would be the time to make any needed adjustments.

President Bush began his defense of the N.S.A. program yesterday by invoking, as he often does, Sept. 11. The attacks that day firmed the nation's resolve to protect itself against its enemies, but they did not give the president the limitless power he now claims to intrude on the private communications of the American people.

Beatles lose Apple court battle

2006-05-08T10:16:00.000-05:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4983796.stm

Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the families of George Harrison and John Lennon control the Apple Corps label.

They claimed the US firm broke a deal aimed at ensuring there would not be two Apples in the music industry.

But Mr Justice Anthony Mann ruled that the computer company used the Apple logo in association with its store, not the music, and so was not in breach.

The ruling means iPods and iTunes will still be able to carry the Apple name and logo.

“With great respect to the trial judge, we consider he has reached the wrong conclusion”

Neil Aspinall
Apple Corps

The Beatles' label, which wanted London's High Court to award damages and stop its rival using the Apple logo in its music operations, will appeal.

Mr Justice Mann ruled iTunes was "a form of electronic shop" and not involved in creating music.

"I conclude that the use of the apple logo ... does not suggest a relevant connection with the creative work," he wrote in his judgment.

"I think that the use of the apple logo is a fair and reasonable use of the mark in connection with the service, which does not go further and unfairly or unreasonably suggest an additional association with the creative works themselves."

Apple Corps must pay its rival's legal bill, estimated at £2m, but the judge refused an interim payment of £1.5m pending further hearings.

Exclusive rights
The record label said the rise of iTunes broke an agreement the two sides hammered out in 1991 after their last dispute.
That deal gave the record label exclusive rights to use the apple trademark for the record business, Geoffrey Vos QC, representing Apple Corps, told the court.

Apple Computer, whose products helped launch the personal computer industry, was founded in 1976 and its logo is an apple with a section removed from the side.

“We have always loved The Beatles, and hopefully we can now work together to get them on the iTunes Music Store”

Steve Jobs
Apple Computer

Apple Corps was set up by The Beatles in 1968 and is represented by a complete green Granny Smith apple.

Apple Corps manager Neil Aspinall said: "With great respect to the trial judge, we consider he has reached the wrong conclusion.

"We felt that during the course of the trial we clearly demonstrated just how extensively Apple Computer had broken the agreement.
"We will accordingly be filing an appeal and putting the case again to the Court of Appeal."

Apple Computer chief executive Steve Jobs said: "We are glad to put this disagreement behind us.

"We have always loved The Beatles, and hopefully we can now work together to get them on the iTunes Music Store."

The launch of the iPod, a portable digital music player, in 2001, and its iTunes music store two years later, prompted the latest battle.

Court download
About three million songs are downloaded from the service every day.
Tracks by The Beatles have not been licensed for downloading and are not available on the service.

Mr Vos demonstrated how to use iTunes during the hearing - downloading Chic's 1978 disco hit Le Freak in the courtroom.
He pointed out to Mr Justice Mann how many times the Apple logo appeared on the computer screen as he went through the process.

Sony Sued for iTunes Royalties

2006-05-01T00:46:00.000-05:00

Sony sued for iTunes royalties

Sony is being accused of underpaying music artists' royalties for digital downloads in a new class action lawsuit. The Allman Brothers Band and Cheap Trick are claiming millions of dollars in damages from Sony Music because the entertainment giant is not paying its recording artists half of the net licensing revenue received in connection with music licensed to digital download providers, such as Apple. The suit alleges that Sony Music handles each download as a sale of physical media, paying on only 85 percent of "sales" due to "breakage of product," and deducts another 20 percent for container/packaging charges associated with the digital downloads. Finally, Sony Music is reducing its payments by another 50 percent for an "audiofile" deduction, which results in a payment to recording artists of roughly 4 1/2 cents per digital download, according to Macworld UK.
"Sony Music is presently engaged in a widespread attempt to underpay its recording artists; with the technological advancements in the music industry, where many people download songs to their iPods and other portable devices, it is essential that artists receive the royalty income to which they are entitled," said Brian Caplan, an attorney associated with the action.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/04/28/sony.sued.for.royalties/

Sunset Color Cheer

2006-04-01T18:52:00.000-06:00

Sunset Color Cheer
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Majesty

2006-04-01T18:51:00.000-06:00

Majesty
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Mississippi River Sunset Jan. '06

Sunset Color Cheer

2006-04-01T18:48:00.000-06:00

Sunset Color Cheer
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Mississippi River Sunset

2006-04-01T18:47:00.000-06:00

Miss. River Sunset
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Flower Color Cheer

2006-04-01T18:46:00.000-06:00

Flower Color Cheer
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest of Bush's Secret Authorization of Domestic Spying Program

2005-12-31T23:24:00.000-06:00

Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Panel
By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; Page A01

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.

Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to serve on the FISA court, declined to comment when reached at his office late yesterday.

Word of Robertson's resignation came as two Senate Republicans joined the call for congressional investigations into the National Security Agency's warrantless interception of telephone calls and e-mails to overseas locations by U.S. citizens suspected of links to terrorist groups. They questioned the legality of the operation and the extent to which the White House kept Congress informed.

Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) echoed concerns raised by Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has promised hearings in the new year.
Hagel and Snowe joined Democrats Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Carl M. Levin (Mich.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.) in calling for a joint investigation by the Senate judiciary and intelligence panels into the classified program.
The hearings would occur at the start of a midterm election year during which the prosecution of the Iraq war could figure prominently in House and Senate races.

Not all Republicans agreed with the need for hearings and backed White House assertions that the program is a vital tool in the war against al Qaeda.
"I am personally comfortable with everything I know about it," Acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said in a phone interview.

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan was asked to explain why Bush last year said, "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." McClellan said the quote referred only to the USA Patriot Act.

Revelation of the program last week by the New York Times also spurred considerable debate among federal judges, including some who serve on the secret FISA court. For more than a quarter-century, that court had been seen as the only body that could legally authorize secret surveillance of espionage and terrorism suspects, and only when the Justice Department could show probable cause that its targets were foreign governments or their agents.
Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring.

"They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants -- to kind of cleanse the information," said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants. "What I've heard some of the judges say is they feel they've participated in a Potemkin court."

Robertson is considered a liberal judge who has often ruled against the Bush administration's assertions of broad powers in the terrorism fight, most notably in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld . Robertson held in that case that the Pentagon's military commissions for prosecuting terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were illegal and stacked against the detainees.

Some FISA judges said they were saddened by the news of Robertson's resignation and want to hear more about the president's program.
"I guess that's a decision he's made and I respect him," said Judge George P. Kazen, another FISA judge. "But it's just too quick for me to say I've got it all figured out."

Bush said Monday that the White House briefed Congress more than a dozen times. But those briefings were conducted with only a handful of lawmakers who were sworn to secrecy and prevented from discussing the matter with anyone or from seeking outside legal opinions.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) revealed Monday that he had written to Vice President Cheney the day he was first briefed on the program in July 2003, raising serious concerns about the surveillance effort. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she also expressed concerns in a letter to Cheney, which she did not make public.

The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), issued a public rebuke of Rockefeller for making his letter public.
In response to a question about the letter, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggested that Rockefeller should have done more if he was seriously concerned. "If I thought someone was breaking the law, I don't care if it was classified or unclassified, I would stand up and say 'the law's being broken here.' "

But Rockefeller said the secrecy surrounding the briefings left him with no other choice. "I made my concerns known to the vice president and to others who were briefed," Rockefeller said. "The White House never addressed my concerns."

Staff writers Jonathan Weisman and Charles Babington and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Enron's Ken Lay 1997 Letter to George W. Bush Re: Energy Policy in Uzbekistan

2005-12-31T16:07:00.000-06:00

Craig Murray: As Britain’s outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region.

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/contact.html

December 30, 2005
More old news

From the chatter on the web, it's clear that there are still a few diehard Bush/Blair supporters out there who believe this is about democracy and security.
I hate to disillusion such people, but everyone should be aware of this document:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/bushlay12.html

(This was released with other Enron court documents. To anyone covering the Enron story, it meant very little. Now, however....)

...and here's the full text:

Kenneth L. Lay
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Enron Corp.

P.O. Box 1188
Houston, TX 77251-1188
713-853-6773
Fax 713-853-5313
April 3, 1997
Via Fax: 512/463-1849

The Honorable George W. Bush
Governor of the State of Texas
PO Box 12428
Austin, Texas

Dear George,

You will be meeting with Ambassador Sadyq Safaev, Uzbekistan's Ambassador to the United States, on April 8th. Ambassador Safaev has been Foreign Minister and the senior advisor to President Karimov before assuming his nation's most significant foreign responsibility.

Enron has established an office in Tashkent and we are negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas of Uzbekistan and Gazprom of Russia to develop Uzbekistan's natural gas and transport it to markets in Europe, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. This project can bring significant economic opportunities to Texas, as well as Uzbekistan. The political benefits to the United States and to Uzbekistan are important to that entire region.
Ambassador Safaev is one of the most effective of the Washington Corps of Ambassadors, a man who has the attention of his president, and a person who works daily to bring our countries together. For all these reasons, I am delighted that the two of you are meeting.

I know you and Ambassador Safaev will have a productive meeting which will result in a friendship between Texas and Uzbekistan.
Sincerely,

Ken
Natural gas. Electricity. Endless possibilities.

Diplomat Says Britain Used Data Gotten by Torture

2005-12-31T16:04:00.000-06:00

By ALAN COWELL
Published: December 31, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/international/europe/31britain.html

LONDON, Dec. 30 - Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has published documents on the Internet that he says prove that the British knowingly received information obtained through torture.
Mr. Murray, who was forced to quit the Foreign Office last year after publicly condemning the Uzbek authorities, criticized the British and American governments in reports from Uzbekistan that he posted on the site, www.craigmurray.org.uk.

On the site is a diplomatic cable Mr. Murray says he wrote, dated July 2004. It states that Britain received "intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the U.S."

"We should stop," the document goes on to say. "It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the U.S. and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror."

Mr. Murray also said in one document that at a meeting in London on March 8, 2003, "I was told specifically that it was perfectly legal for us to obtain and to use intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers."

He said that at the meeting, a British government legal adviser, Michael Wood, "gave his legal opinion that it was not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture."

"He said the only legal limitation on its use was that it could not be used in legal proceedings, under Article 15 of the U.N. Convention on Torture," Mr. Murray said.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Murray said he believed that the legal opinion meant that the information could not be used as evidence in court but could be used for intelligence purposes.

The disclosures, which repeat some earlier claims by Mr. Murray, play into a fierce debate in the United States and Europe over the transfer of terror suspects to countries that practice torture. Earlier this week, Britain and Greece denied allegations in Greece that their intelligence agents had interrogated 28 Pakistani suspects using torture after the July 7 bombings in London.

In a landmark ruling earlier this month, Britain's Law Lords, sitting as the country's highest court, said evidence obtained by torture, no matter by whom, was inadmissible in British courts.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office, who spoke in return for anonymity under department rules, declined to comment directly on Mr. Murray's claims. "There is nothing new here," he said.

He also declined to comment on British news reports that the Foreign Office had blocked publication of a nonfiction book by Mr. Murray, "Murder in Samarkand," until he edited out sensitive material.

In the telephone interview, Mr. Murray, who was ambassador from 2002 to 2004, said that the material on the Web site was authentic and that he was the source. He said it included the documents that the Foreign Office had wanted him to excise from his book.

The Foreign Office spokesman said Britain condemned the use of torture and did not practice it. But the spokesman said British intelligence agents routinely assessed the likely source of information they received and "took into account" the reliability of information that might have been extracted under torture from suspects in detention.

Mr. Murray assailed the human rights record of Uzbekistan at a time when, he said, the United States was playing down reports of human rights abuses there.

In a confidential letter he sent to the Foreign Office on Sept. 16, 2002, a summary said: "U.S. plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism."

Mr. Murray said American policy toward President Islam A. Karimov was dictated by the availability of strategic air bases. The State Department gave Uzbekistan a favorable human rights assessment to free up hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, Mr. Murray said.

A second letter, dated March 18, 2003, said in its summary: "As seen from Tashkent, U.S. policy is not much focused on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan the U.S. pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship."

According to Mr. Murray, the letter said: "Last year the U.S. gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one-party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom."

Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity

2005-11-27T22:41:00.000-06:00

Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity
Fears of Post-9/11 Terrorism Spur Proposals for New Powers

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/...

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 27, 2005; Page A06

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.

The proposals, and other Pentagon steps aimed at improving its ability to analyze counterterrorism intelligence collected inside the United States, have drawn complaints from civil liberties advocates and a few members of Congress, who say the Defense Department's push into domestic collection is proceeding with little scrutiny by the Congress or the public.

"We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.

Wyden has since persuaded lawmakers to change the legislation, attached to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill, to address some of his concerns, but he still believes hearings should be held. Among the changes was the elimination of a provision to let Defense Intelligence Agency officers hide the fact that they work for the government when they approach people who are possible sources of intelligence in the United States.

Modifications also were made in the provision allowing the FBI to share information with the Pentagon and CIA, requiring the approval of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, for that to occur, and requiring the Pentagon to make reports to Congress on the subject. Wyden said the legislation "now strikes a much fairer balance by protecting critical rights for our country's citizens and advancing intelligence operations to meet our security needs."

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the data-sharing amendment would still give the Pentagon much greater access to the FBI's massive collection of data, including information on citizens not connected to terrorism or espionage.

The measure, she said, "removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." She said the Pentagon's "intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate."

Lt. Col. Chris Conway, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said that the most senior Defense Department intelligence officials are aware of the sensitivities related to their expanded domestic activities. At the same time, he said, the Pentagon has to have the intelligence necessary to protect its facilities and personnel at home and abroad.

"In the age of terrorism," Conway said, "the U.S. military and its facilities are targets, and we have to be prepared within our authorities to defend them before something happens."

Among the steps already taken by the Pentagon that enhanced its domestic capabilities was the establishment after 9/11 of Northern Command, or Northcom, in Colorado Springs, to provide military forces to help in reacting to terrorist threats in the continental United States. Today, Northcom's intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas fuse reports from CIFA, the FBI and other U.S. agencies, and are staffed by 290 intelligence analysts. That is more than the roughly 200 analysts working for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and far more than those at the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, each of the military services has begun its own post-9/11 collection of domestic intelligence, primarily aimed at gathering data on potential terrorist threats to bases and other military facilities at home and abroad. For example, Eagle Eyes is a program set up by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which "enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror," according to the program's Web site.

The Marine Corps has expanded its domestic intelligence operations and developed internal policies in 2004 to govern oversight of the "collection, retention and dissemination of information concerning U.S. persons," according to a Marine Corps order approved on April 30, 2004.

The order recognizes that in the post-9/11 era, the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity will be "increasingly required to perform domestic missions," and as a result, "there will be increased instances whereby Marine intelligence activities may come across information regarding U.S. persons." Among domestic targets listed are people in the United States who it "is reasonably believed threaten the physical security of Defense Department employees, installations, operations or official visitors."

Perhaps the prime illustration of the Pentagon's intelligence growth is CIFA, which remains one of its least publicized intelligence agencies. Neither the size of its staff, said to be more than 1,000, nor its budget is public, said Conway, the Pentagon spokesman. The CIFA brochure says the agency's mission is to "transform" the way counterintelligence is done "fully utilizing 21st century tools and resources."

One CIFA activity, threat assessments, involves using "leading edge information technologies and data harvesting," according to a February 2004 Pentagon budget document. This involves "exploiting commercial data" with the help of outside contractors including White Oak Technologies Inc. of Silver Spring, and MZM Inc., a Washington-based research organization, according to the Pentagon document.

For CIFA, counterintelligence involves not just collecting data but also "conducting activities to protect DoD and the nation against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, assassinations, and terrorist activities," its brochure states.

CIFA's abilities would increase considerably under the proposal being reviewed by the White House, which was made by a presidential commission on intelligence chaired by retired appellate court judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). The commission urged that CIFA be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States.

The Silberman-Robb panel found that because the separate military services concentrated on investigations within their areas, "no entity views non-service-specific and department-wide investigations as its primary responsibility." A 2003 Defense Department directive kept CIFA from engaging in law enforcement activities such as "the investigation, apprehension, or detention of individuals suspected or convicted of criminal offenses against the laws of the United States."

The commission's proposal would change that, giving CIFA "new counterespionage and law enforcement authorities," covering treason, espionage, foreign or terrorist sabotage, and even economic espionage. That step, the panel said, could be taken by presidential order and Pentagon directive without congressional approval.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the CIFA expansion "is being studied at the DoD [Defense Department] level," adding that intelligence director Negroponte would have a say in the matter. A Pentagon spokesman said, "The [CIFA] matter is before the Hill committees."

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a recent interview that CIFA has performed well in the past and today has no domestic intelligence collection activities. He was not aware of moves to enhance its authority.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has not had formal hearings on CIFA or other domestic intelligence programs, but its staff has been briefed on some of the steps the Pentagon has already taken. "If a member asks the chairman" -- Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) -- for hearings, "I am sure he would respond," said Bill Duhnke, the panel's staff director.

Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials

2005-11-27T22:39:00.000-06:00

Editorial

Published: November 15, 2005

www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/opinion/15tue1.html?th&emc=th

To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.

Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.

It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.

Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.

Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.

The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.

Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

Who They Are - The double standard that underlies our torture policies

2005-11-27T22:37:00.000-06:00

jurisprudence
The law, lawyers, and the court.

Who They Are
The double standard that underlies our torture policies.
By David Cole

Posted Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 12:32 PM ET

www.slate.com/id/2130028?nav=wp

"It's not about who they are. It's about who we are."

So said Sen. John McCain, in defending his amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would bar U.S. officials from inflicting "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" on detainees in the war on terror. But while Sen. McCain is surely right that how we treat those in our custody ultimately reflects back on us, this debate is also very much about who "they" are. That's because the Bush administration's justification for employing "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" against certain individuals expressly turns on the fact that these individuals are foreign nationals held abroad. The coercive-interrogation policy is predicated on a double standard: According to the administration, we can do it to "them" because "they" are different from "us."

On this theory, what would indisputably be illegal if done on U.S. soil, or if done to a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world, becomes lawful when inflicted on foreign nationals held abroad. It is this theory that drove the administration to warehouse hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under our control but technically beyond our borders. It is this theory that drove the administration to open a network of CIA-controlled secret prisons—dubbed "black sites"—in undisclosed locations around the world. Application of the theory has already resulted in multiple homicides in the course of interrogations, one of which is recounted in gruesome detail by Jane Mayer in the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker.

And just when Congress appeared to be on the verge of doing something about it, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the principal co-sponsors of the McCain Amendment, convinced the Senate to undercut the amendment by making it unenforceable—at least for the hundreds of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Thursday night, the Senate approved Graham's proposal, which would selectively suspend the writ of habeas corpus for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo, denying them any access to a court for violations of constitutional or international law—even if they are being subjected to precisely the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that the McCain Amendment prohibits. Graham's amendment is predicated on the same double standard as the Bush administration's interpretation of the Torture Convention—namely, that it is somehow permissible to do to foreign nationals what would be patently unacceptable if done to citizens.

This double standard is deeply flawed. Legal protections for fundamental rights of those we have locked up should not vary depending on the passport they hold. And this flaw raises a serious question not only about administration policy in the war on terror, but also about American constitutional doctrine.

The administration's justification for treating foreign nationals held abroad in the war on terror differently from those held here first surfaced with respect to the prisoners held at Guantanamo. When lawyers challenged the legality of those detentions, the administration responded that the Constitution does not extend to foreign nationals outside our borders, and that therefore the Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights. That issue is now being litigated in the courts—although not for long, if Graham's amendment becomes law.

Then, during Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' confirmation hearings, the administration disclosed that, in its view, not only does the Constitution not apply to foreigners held abroad, but a key part of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment doesn't either. That treaty, signed by virtually every country in the world, and signed and ratified by the United States in 1994, absolutely prohibits such conduct, without exception, even in a state of war.

After 9/11, however, the Bush administration took the view that the prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" simply does not apply to foreign detainees held outside the United States. It pointed to the fact that when Congress ratified the treaty, it stated its understanding that "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" comprised conduct that would violate the United States Constitution—whose Fifth Amendment prohibits any coercion that "shocks the conscience" in interrogations. Claiming that the U.S. Constitution does not extend to foreigners overseas, the administration reasoned that the treaty prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" is similarly limited.

This legal sleight of hand allows the president to insist repeatedly that he does not condone torture and acts only in accordance with the law, while simultaneously dispatching the vice president to Congress to preserve the loophole that allows the infliction of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment on foreign suspects abroad. That loophole is the legal underpinning of the CIA's reported practice of "disappearing" foreign suspects into secret "black sites" and then using interrogation tactics against them that would unquestionably be forbidden if employed at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters. The CIA's approved tactics have reportedly included water-boarding—in which the suspect is made to think he is drowning to convince him to talk—mock burials, and threats to send individuals to countries with a known track record for even more brutal forms of torture.

The administration's treaty interpretation makes no sense. The Torture Convention is predicated on the principle that the conduct it prohibits is fundamentally incompatible with human dignity—and all human beings have equal dignity, regardless of their nationality, and regardless of where they are held. There is no evidence that Congress sought to limit the Torture Convention prohibition to conduct within our borders. Abraham Sofaer, who submitted the treaty to Congress on behalf of the first Bush administration, has written to Congress stating that the current administration's position is inconsistent with the original understanding of the convention and improperly turns an effort by Congress to give substantive definition to the terms "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" into a geographical loophole that frees U.S. officials to commit actions just short of torture when acting abroad.

Sen. Graham's proposal to cut off judicial review for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo exploits a similar double standard. By its terms, it applies only to foreign nationals—denying them habeas review that is preserved for citizens. There is no basis for selectively denying judicial review to foreign nationals—if anything, they need such protection even more than citizens, since, unlike citizens, they are unlikely to find any protection through the political process.

These efforts to exploit the vulnerabilities of foreign nationals raise even more fundamental questions about the proper scope of our constitutional obligations. If a particular tactic—say, water-boarding—is unconstitutional because it shocks the conscience when used against a citizen within the United States, why should the result be any different when U.S. officials employ the same tactic against a foreign national overseas?

Distinctions based on nationality and location have historical roots, but those roots are of doubtful validity today. For example, the Supreme Court's failure to treat freed slaves as "citizens" was the basis for its infamous 1857 ruling against Dred Scott. But Congress rejected the rationale of the Dred Scott case in the constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War, guaranteeing equal protection and due process to all "persons."

When the Constitution was initially adopted, there were also strong distinctions between domestic and international law and jurisdiction—so much so that there was a question whether even U.S. citizens would be protected by the Constitution overseas. Indeed, in 1891, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field wrote that "the Constitution can have no operation in another country."

But while such territorial distinctions might have made some sense in the 18th century, they make little sense today and have for the most part been abandoned. We routinely extend our laws abroad, prosecuting individuals for conduct overseas if it has any effect on U.S. citizens or property. Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has held that the Bill of Rights is not limited by our borders and protects U.S. citizens from their own government wherever in the world they may be. Shouldn't the same principle apply to foreign nationals—at least in cases where U.S. officials have exercised coercive authority over them? The rights not to be locked up arbitrarily or to be protected from treatment that shocks the conscience are human rights, not privileges of citizenship. We should honor these rights wherever we are acting and on whomever we are acting.

Hermann Cohen, a 19th-century Jewish philosopher, once wrote, in an exegesis on the Bible, "The alien was to be protected not because he was a member of one's family, clan, or religious community, but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity." We are in danger of losing that idea.

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

2005-11-27T22:36:00.000-06:00

Editorial

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

Published: October 31, 2005

www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/opinion/31mon1.html?th&emc=th

In the national anguish after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress rushed to enact a formidable antiterrorism law - the Patriot Act - that significantly crimped civil liberties by expanding law enforcement's power to use wiretaps, search warrants and other surveillance techniques, often under the cloak of secrecy. There was virtually no public debate before these major changes to the nation's legal system were put into effect.

Now, with some of the act's most sweeping powers set to expire at the end of the year, the two houses of Congress face crucial negotiations, which will also take place out of public view, on their differences over how to extend and amend the law. That's controversy enough. But the increasingly out-of-control House of Representatives has made the threat to our system of justice even greater by inserting a raft of provisions to enlarge the scope of the federal death penalty.

In a breathtaking afterthought at the close of debate, the House voted to triple the number of terrorism-related crimes carrying the death penalty. The House also voted to allow judges to reduce the size of juries that decide on executions, and even to permit prosecutors to try repeatedly for a death sentence when a hung jury fails to vote for death.

The radical amendment was slapped through by the Republican leadership without serious debate. The Justice Department has endorsed the House measure, and Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Judiciary Committee chairman, who is ever on the side of more government power over the individual, is promising to fight hard for the death penalty provisions.

There are now 20 terrorism-related crimes eligible for capital punishment, and the House measure would add 41 more. These would make it easier for prosecutors to win a death sentence in cases where a defendant had no intent to kill - for example, if a defendant gave financial support to an umbrella organization without realizing that some of its adherents might eventually commit violence.

Any move to weaken the American jury system in the name of fighting terrorism is particularly egregious. But the House voted to allow a federal trial to have fewer than 12 jurors if the judge finds "good cause" to do so, even if the defense objects. Under current law, a life sentence is automatically ordered when juries become hung on deciding the capital punishment question. But the House would have a prosecutor try again - a license for jury-shopping for death - even though federal juries already exclude opponents of capital punishment.

The House's simplistic vote for another "crackdown" gesture can only further sully the notion of patriotism in a renewed Patriot Act.

"The Look of Love" -"TORTURE MAN" - Dick Cheney, Why is this man still in office?

2005-11-26T21:27:00.000-06:00

*+*+* "The Look of Love" *+*+*
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

The Bush Administration and all that it’s reach commands is far and away are the most insipid group of governing individuals America has ever known about.

Why is the need to torture people so important that Cheny Lobbied for the past year about this?

Just who are the people in these secret camps all around the world?... where Dick Cheney wants to Torture them, kill them... without any adherence to the Geneva Convention laws prohibiting inhumane treatment of prisoners of war? It could be YOU in that camp the way Bush has obliterated American's civil rights. All under the guise of "PROTECTING AMERICA" from Terrorism.

The American people need to know what Bush is doing with the CIA and these secret prisons around the world.

And even more importantly we need to know the truth about 911.
There can be no real progress for America in the world until the truth about the Bush administrations role in 911 is understood. They have created false motives at every turn.
Distorted terrorist threats to induce fear, revoke free speech and civil liberty to ram through the Patriot Act, lies to start the Iraq war for oil and leave America with the highest debt in US history while they profit from it, excuses for outright negligence concerning the Katrina disaster...

Why are George W. Bush & Dick Cheney still in office? It’s outrageous and simply unbelievable. America is bankrolling a white house full of criminal conspirators. And the worst has yet to come.

Everything that has happened since 911 is proof that the Bush administration has used the powers of presidency in an ambiguously destructive manner. Deliberately. With supreme negligence and contempt for America and humanity in general.

Below is a list of links and articles concerning Dick Cheney’s mission to endorse TORTURE, above and beyond world law :

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*+*+* Frontline's "The Torture Question" documented that the Bush admin. has sanctioned torture and committed war crimes.

++++++++++++++ ___________________________________

*+*+* HERE IS MORE PROOF OF SANCTIONED TORTURE BY RUMSFELD:

"Prisoners Allege Use of Lions"
_++++++++++++++++++_

The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 - Army officials said Tuesday that they were looking into claims by two former Iraqi detainees that they had been put into cages holding lions to terrify them during interrogations in 2003.

Thahe Mohammed Sabar said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union that soldiers had pushed him and Sherzad Khalid, a friend, into the cage, then pulled them out when a lion moved toward him. Mr. Khalid said soldiers had forced him into the cages after repeatedly asking where to find Saddam Hussein and unconventional weapons.

Asked about the allegations during a news conference on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said, "It seems quite far-fetched," adding, "Obviously, everything that everyone alleges is looked into."

The two are among eight plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First against Mr. Rumsfeld, alleging they were subjected to sexual abuse, mock executions and other torture.
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_________________++++++++++_______________________

***Read this little Torture Excerpt from a NY Times Op-Ed Below: ++++++++++

On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called "the sleeping bag technique."

"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide information."

___________________+++++++++++_________________________________________+++++++++++______________________

Cheney Fights for Detainee Policy
As Pressure Mounts to Limit Handling Of Terror Suspects, He Holds Hard Line

By Dana Priest and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, November 7, 2005; Page A01

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/06/...

Over the past year, Vice President Cheney has waged an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects, according to defense, state, intelligence and congressional officials.

Last winter, when Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, began pushing to have the full committee briefed on the CIA's interrogation practices, Cheney called him to the White House to urge that he drop the matter, said three U.S. officials.

In recent months, Cheney has been the force against adding safeguards to the Defense Department's rules on treatment of military prisoners, putting him at odds with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England. On a trip to Canada last month, Rice interrupted a packed itinerary to hold a secure video-teleconference with Cheney on detainee policy to make sure no decisions were made without her input.

Just last week, Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The exemption would cover the CIA's covert "black sites" in several Eastern European democracies and other countries where key al Qaeda captives are being kept.

Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt declined to comment on the vice president's interventions or to elaborate on his positions. "The vice president's views are certainly reflected in the administration's policy," he said.

Increasingly, however, Cheney's positions are being opposed by other administration officials, including Cabinet members, political appointees and Republican lawmakers who once stood firmly behind the administration on all matters concerning terrorism.

Personnel changes in President Bush's second term have added to the isolation of Cheney, who previously had been able to prevail in part because other key parties to the debate -- including Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet Miers -- continued to sit on the fence.

But in a reflection of how many within the administration now favor changing the rules, Elliot Abrams, traditionally one of the most hawkish voices in internal debates, is among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy in his role as the deputy national security adviser for democracy, according to officials familiar with his role.

At the same time Rice has emerged as an advocate for changing the rules to "get out of the detainee mess," said one senior U.S. official familiar with discussions. Her top advisers, along with their Pentagon counterparts, are working on a package of proposals designed to address all controversial detainee issues at once, instead of dealing with them on a piecemeal basis.

Cheney's camp is a "shrinking island," said one State Department official who, like other administration officials quoted in this article, asked not to be identified because public dissent is strongly discouraged by the White House.

A fundamental question lies at the heart of these disagreements: Four years into the fight, what is the most effective way to wage the campaign against terrorism?

Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended.

On the other side of the debate are those who believe that unconventional measures -- harsh interrogation tactics, prisoner abuse and the "ghosting" and covert detention of CIA-held prisoners -- have so damaged world support for the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign that they have hurt the U.S. cause. Also, they argue, these measures have tainted core American values such as human rights and the rule of law.

"The debate in the world has become about whether the U.S. complies with its legal obligations. We need to regain the moral high ground," said one senior administration official familiar with internal deliberations on the issue, adding that Rice believes current policy is "hurting the president's agenda and her agenda."

McCain's amendment would limit the military's interrogation and detention tactics to those described in the Army Field Manual, and it would prohibit all U.S. government employees from using cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Cheney pushed hard to have the entire amendment defeated. He twice held meetings with key lawmakers to lobby against the measure, once traveling to Capitol Hill in July, to button-hole Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.), McCain and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

When that tack did not work -- 90 senators supported the measure -- Cheney handed McCain language that would exempt the CIA. Despite Cheney's concerns, Graham said he has not heard any concerns from the CIA suggesting it needs an exemption from the McCain amendment. The CIA declined to comment.

"It shows that we have a philosophical difference here," said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The vice president believes in certain circumstances the government can't be bound by the language McCain is pushing. I believe that out of bounds of that language, we do harm to the U.S. image. It doesn't mean he's bad or I'm good; it just means we see it differently."

Cheney and the White House also oppose the language of a separate Defense Department directive, first reported by the New York Times, limiting detainee interrogations. The ongoing internal debate has stalled publication of the directive.

"This is the first issue we've gone to the trenches on," said a senior State Department official.

On the issue of the CIA's interrogation and detention practices, this spring Cheney requested the CIA brief him on the matter. "Cheney's strategy seems to be to stop the broader movement to get an independent commission on interrogation practices and the McCain amendment," said one intelligence official.

Beside personal pressure from the vice president, Cheney's staff is also engaged in resisting a policy change. Tactics included "trying to have meetings canceled ... to at least slow things down or gum up the works" or trying to conduct meetings on the subject without other key Cabinet members, one administration official said. The official said some internal memos and e-mail from the National Security Council staff to the national security adviser were automatically forwarded to the vice president's office -- in some cases without the knowledge of the authors.

For that reason, Rice "wanted to be in all meetings," said a senior State Department official.

Cheney's chief aide in this bureaucratic war of wills is David S. Addington, who was his chief counsel until last week when he replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the vice president's chief of staff.

Addington exerted influence on many of the most significant policy decisions after Sept. 11, 2001. He helped write the position on torture taken by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a stance rescinded after it became public, and he helped pick Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the location beyond the reach of U.S. law for holding suspected terrorists.

When Addington learned that the draft Pentagon directive included language from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and cruel treatment, including "humiliating and degrading treatment," he summoned the Pentagon official in charge of the detainee issue to brief him.

During a tense meeting at his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Addington was strident, said officials with knowledge of the encounter, and chastised Deputy Assistant Secretary Matthew C. Waxman for including what he regarded as vague and unhelpful language from Article 3 in the directive.

On Tuesday, Cheney, who often attends the GOP senators' weekly luncheons without addressing the lawmakers, made "an impassioned plea" to reject McCain's amendment, said a senatorial aide who was briefed on the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its closed nature. After Senate aides were ordered out of the Mansfield Room, just steps from the Senate chamber, Cheney said that aggressive interrogations of detainees such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed had yielded useful information, and that the option to treat prisoners harshly must not be taken from interrogators.

McCain then rebutted Cheney's comments, the aide said, telling his colleagues that the image of the United States using torture "is killing us around the world." At least one other senator, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), supported Cheney, as he has in public, the aide said.

Staff writers Charles Babington and Josh White contributed to this report.
__________________________________________________________

Cheney Plan Exempts CIA From Bill Barring Abuse of Detainees

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 25, 2005; Page A01

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/24/...

The Bush administration has proposed exempting employees of the Central Intelligence Agency from a legislative measure endorsed earlier this month by 90 members of the Senate that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoners in U.S. custody.

The proposal, which two sources said Vice President Cheney handed last Thursday to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the company of CIA Director Porter J. Goss, states that the measure barring inhumane treatment shall not apply to counterterrorism operations conducted abroad or to operations conducted by "an element of the United States government" other than the Defense Department.

Although most detainees in U.S. custody in the war on terrorism are held by the U.S. military, the CIA is said by former intelligence officials and others to be holding several dozen detainees of particular intelligence interest at locations overseas -- including senior al Qaeda figures Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaida.

Cheney's proposal is drafted in such a way that the exemption from the rule barring ill treatment could require a presidential finding that "such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack." But the precise applicability of this section is not clear, and none of those involved in last week's discussions would discuss it openly yesterday.

McCain, the principal sponsor of the legislation, rejected the proposed exemption at the meeting with Cheney, according to a government source who spoke without authorization and on the condition of anonymity. McCain spokeswoman Eileen McMenamin declined to comment. But the exemption has been assailed by human rights experts critical of the administration's handling of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This is the first time they've said explicitly that the intelligence community should be allowed to treat prisoners inhumanely," said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "In the past, they've only said that the law does not forbid inhumane treatment." Now, he said, the administration is saying more concretely that it cannot be forbidden.

The provision in question -- which the Senate on Oct. 5 voted 90 to 9 to attach to its version of the pending defense appropriations bill over the administration's opposition -- essentially proscribes harsh treatment of any detainees in U.S. custody or control anywhere in the world. It was specifically drafted to close what its backers say is a loophole in the administration's policy of generally barring torture, namely its legal contention that these constraints do not apply to treatment of foreigners on foreign soil.

The House version of the appropriations bill contains no similar provision on detainee treatment, and lawmakers are to meet later this week to begin reconciling the conflict.

Cheney's meeting with McCain last week was his third attempt to persuade the lawmaker, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, to accept a less broad legislative bar against inhumane treatment. Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride declined to comment, saying, "the vice president does not discuss private conversations that he has with members [of Congress] . . . or information that may be exchanged with members."

She added that the intent of such meetings is usually "to build consensus on legislative issues, still in the policymaking process." CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a former Cheney aide, said the agency does not comment on the director's meetings.

Other sources said the vice president is also still fighting a second provision of the Senate-passed legislation, which requires that detainees in Defense Department custody anywhere in the world may be subjected only to interrogation techniques approved and listed in the Army's Field Manual.

The manual is undergoing revision, and McCain has contended that this process will give the military sufficient flexibility to respond to terrorist countermeasures. But Cheney's office has argued in talking points being circulated on Capitol Hill that the manual "will be inapplicable in certain instances" because of such countermeasures.

The CIA has been implicated in a number of alleged abuses in Iraq and has been linked to at least a few cases in which detainees have died during interrogations at separate military bases throughout the country. So far, no CIA operatives have been charged in connection with the abuse, although a single CIA contract employee is on trial for involvement in the death of an Afghanistan detainee, and sources have indicated that a grand jury may be looking at other allegations involving the CIA.

A report by the CIA inspector general's office on the agency's role in the handling of detainees is classified. It has been shown to the Justice Department and briefed only to a few lawmakers. Several military investigations have already blamed the CIA for leading a program in Iraq that essentially made detainees disappear within the military's detention system with no record of their captivity -- a practice that human rights groups have said violated international laws of war.

In a particularly infamous case, a detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq named Manadel Jamadi was photographed after his death, packed in ice, by military police soldiers at the facility. He allegedly died in a shower room during interrogation by CIA officers after being brought there by Navy Seal team members. A high-level CIA operative allegedly helped conceal Jamadi's death after Army officers found his body.

But the extent of the CIA's direct involvement in torture is unclear, partly because the agency has been reluctant to help the Defense Department's many investigations into abuse and has refused to provide Army officers with documents deemed relevant to the probes.

Staff writer Dana Priest contributed to this report.

__________________________________________________________

Op-Ed Contributors

Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS

www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/opinion/14blochemarks.html?th&...

Published: November 14, 2005

Washington — How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked.

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.

When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance).

SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.

SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against these techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to study the effects of various tactics and identify the coping styles most likely to withstand them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals applied this knowledge to detainees, working with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners' vulnerabilities. "We know if you've been despondent; we know if you've been homesick," General Hill said. "That is given to interrogators and that helps the interrogators" make their plans.

Within the SERE program, abuse is carefully controlled, with the goal of teaching trainees to cope. But under combat conditions, brutal tactics can't be dispassionately "dosed." Fear, fury and loyalty to fellow soldiers facing mortal danger make limits almost impossible to sustain.

By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse. On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called "the sleeping bag technique."

"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide information."

Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

M. Gregg Bloche is a law professor at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jonathan H. Marks, a barrister in London, is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.

Louisiana Sunset

2005-11-01T17:47:00.000-06:00

LSU Lakes Dusk 3
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Louisiana Sunset

2005-11-01T17:44:00.000-06:00

LSU Lakes Sunset
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

“Online Freedom of Speech Act” is Rebublican Back Door for Unregulated Reporting of Political Ad's & Payoffs

2005-11-01T03:28:00.000-06:00

The “Online Freedom of Speech Act” is OUTRAGEOUS!!
Especially since the Bush administration has been found to be “Buying News” ILLEGALLY!

SEE HERE: www.flickr.com/photos/antifluff/52562586/

This is how Bush became president for two terms. Control & manipulation ("Libby" leak as well to be sure) of "Jesus" via advertising channels presided over by Carl Rove. You can see the "911 Steel Beam Cross" for yourself if you click the link above...Baton Rouge, Louisiana July, 2005 "I'm with W how 'bout you" ... huge electronic Billboard Ad's along interstate I-10.

Synopsis:

"the Internet would become a free-fire zone without any limits on spending or reporting requirements. The bill uses freedom of speech as a fig leaf, pasted on in the guise of defending political bloggers from government censorship. In fact, bloggers face no such threat under the existing campaign law."

Editorial

The Digital Money Mill

Published: November 1, 2005

www.nytimes.com/2005/11/01/opinion/01tues3.html?th&em...

Now looms a wolfish assault in sheep's clothing: the Online Freedom of Speech Act, which House Republican leaders are suddenly planning to put to a vote on Wednesday so politicians can abuse the Internet as an unregulated outlet for multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. The bill, put on a fast track in the hope that nobody notices outside the political-industrial complex, would exempt the Internet from the hard-won three-year-old reform law that stopped federal officials from tapping corporations, unions and fat cats for unregulated donations in the quid pro quo marketplace.

The reform law's ban on such "soft money" abuses would continue for political ads on radio and television and in print. But the Internet would become a free-fire zone without any limits on spending or reporting requirements. The bill uses freedom of speech as a fig leaf, pasted on in the guise of defending political bloggers from government censorship. In fact, bloggers face no such threat under the existing campaign law.

The Internet's power as a fund-raising tool has only begun to emerge. The House's greedy move to exempt the Web from the law of the land should be denied by any lawmaker mindful of polls showing that government corruption is a dominant public concern. Make no mistake: this is a bill to protect political bagmen, not bloggers.

Bush White House Abuse of - "War Powers in the Age of Terror"

2005-11-01T02:08:00.000-06:00

SYNOPSIS:

"In the interests of national security today, we should curb presidential war-making powers. A hitherto compliant Congress must reclaim the institutional authority conferred upon it by the Constitution. When it comes to wars, the first responsibility of the legislative branch is not to support the commander in chief. It is to exercise independent judgment, an obligation that transcends party. Members of Congress who lack the wit or the moral courage to fulfill this obligation ought to be held accountable by voters."

Op-Ed Contributor

War Powers in the Age of Terror

By ANDREW J. BACEVICH

Published: October 31, 2005

www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/opinion/31bacevich.html?th&amp...

Boston

WHEN senators this month asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about possible military action against Syria or Iran, she recited the administration's standard response: all options remain "on the table." Pressed on whether any such action might require congressional authorization, Ms. Rice demurred. "I don't want to try and circumscribe presidential war powers," she said, adding that "the president retains those powers in the war on terrorism and in the war in Iraq."

Although Ms. Rice's evasion exhausted the committee's attention span, the war powers issue cries out for attention. In a post-9/11 world, what limits - if any - exist on the president's authority to use force?

The Constitution addresses the matter with apparent clarity. Article I, Section 8 assigns to Congress the authority "to declare war." After 1945, however, the perceived imperatives of waging the cold war all but nullified this provision. When it came to using force, presidents exercised wide discretion, ordering American troops into action and notifying Congress after the fact. The legislative branch no longer "declared" war; at most, it issued blank checks that the White House cashed at its convenience. Occasional efforts to constrain presidential freedom of action, like the Vietnam-inspired War Powers Resolution of 1973, accomplished little.

After 9/11, the Bush administration wasted little time in expanding executive prerogatives even further. Acting in his capacity as commander in chief, President Bush committed the nation to open-ended war on a global scale. Concluding that eradicating terrorism meant going permanently on the offensive, he promulgated a doctrine of preventive war. Finding that Saddam Hussein posed a clear and present danger, he moved to put this Bush Doctrine into effect in Iraq.

On Capitol Hill, the response to this sweeping assertion of presidential authority fell somewhere between somnolent and supine. With the administration gearing up to invade Iraq, the Congress roused itself just long enough to instruct the president in October 2002 to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." As Lyndon Johnson did with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, Mr. Bush interpreted this as a mandate to wage war however he saw fit, an interpretation that Secretary Rice has now reaffirmed.

Yet the brief history of America's global war on terrorism demonstrates the folly of allowing the executive branch a free hand in determining the scope and conduct of that conflict. Deference to Mr. Bush's fixation with Saddam Hussein has cost the United States dearly. To expand that misadventure will only drive those costs higher. Furthermore, an attack on either Syria or Iran, launched merely on the president's say-so, would produce a profound reaction, in all likelihood surpassing that induced by Richard Nixon's 1970 incursion into Cambodia.

In the interests of national security, earlier generations endowed whoever happened to occupy the Oval Office with the authority to unleash Armageddon. The perceived urgency of the Soviet threat took precedence over constitutional scruples. Deterring yesterday's enemy meant being able to wage war in an instant, with one man issuing the orders.

But defeating today's jihadists, who are unlikely to be impressed by the prospect of incineration, requires a different strategy. Victory will come when we have deprived violent radical Islam of its claim to legitimacy. Incorporating military power into that effort will require prudence - we have seen the consequences that rashness can produce. Hardly less important, sustaining military commitments once undertaken will demand a national consensus, which existed after 9/11 but which the present administration has since squandered.

In the interests of national security today, we should curb presidential war-making powers. A hitherto compliant Congress must reclaim the institutional authority conferred upon it by the Constitution. When it comes to wars, the first responsibility of the legislative branch is not to support the commander in chief. It is to exercise independent judgment, an obligation that transcends party. Members of Congress who lack the wit or the moral courage to fulfill this obligation ought to be held accountable by voters.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University,is the author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War."

Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal'

2005-11-01T01:58:00.000-06:00

This is the first thing I've read, from someone who would know, (Powell's former aide Lawrence Wilkerson) that acknowledges the real danger we are in with the Bush Administration running America.

"Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal'
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

www.nytimes.com/2005/10/21/politics/21wilkerson.html?th&a...

Published: October 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

The comments came in a speech Wednesday by Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Mr. Powell at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005. Speaking to the New America Foundation, an independent public-policy institute in Washington, Mr. Wilkerson suggested that secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either." He was far more admiring of the president's father, whom he called "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Mr. Wilkerson has long been considered a close confidant of Mr. Powell, but their relationship has apparently grown strained at times - including over the question of unconventional weapons in Iraq - and the former colonel said Mr. Powell did not approve of his latest public criticisms.

Nazi Banker Thyssen & Prescott Bush Connection

2005-10-19T13:34:00.000-05:00

Thyssen & Prescott Bush Connection
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Keeping It In The Family: The Bushes and the Nazis

Listen to the first Journalist in History to go the US National Archives and the Library of Congress to go over the Documents to Prove that Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush were Nazi traitors to the country who should have been tried for Treason.

QUICKTIME MOVIE: WATCH THIS!!!!!
70.84.33.210/%7Einfomedi/video/previews/150305martialprev...

Thyssen, Hitlers Angel has $3Million in US BANKS -Prescott Bush's Banking Relationship with Nazi Germany

2005-10-19T13:31:00.000-05:00

Hitlers Angel has $3Million in US BANKS
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

SPYCHIPS - A Book about RFID Technology & How Government & Corporations Plan to Use it to Spy on YOU!

2005-10-18T01:46:00.000-05:00

SPYCHIPS
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Unless you believe it's inevitable that you have a chip in ya... you might want to read this book.

RFID everywhere. It's coming, it's here and before long if we don't draft laws to limit the extent RFID can be used tracking people... then you can kiss freedom goodbye forever.

This ain't no joke.

Right now Wal Mart has over twice as much data stored as the internet.

Imagine this figure in Ten years including the goverment and all corporations.

Big Brother is Here.

________________________________________________
RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification. RFID uses tiny computer
chips, some smaller than a grain of sand, to track items from a
distance. Big business and big government want RFID chips to replace the
bar code. The chips can be embedded in ATM cards, sewn into the seams
of pants, or woven into shirt labels without their owners' knowledge.
The information on these chips can be read secretly, without your
permission, right through your purse, backpack or wallet.

Why Fight RFID?

Big business wants to use RFID to chip, number and track every item on
the planet -- every can of Coke, every car tire, every book, every
garment. They want to know where everything is at all times. By
association, they will be able to know very private details about the
people who buy, wear and interact with those products.

It's Already Started

Wal-Mart is already putting spychips on products. They've been caught
putting RFID tags in Lipfinity lipstick boxes, and just last week we
found an RFID tag on Hewlett-Packard printer/scanner packages in TEXAS!
You can see what we found by visiting our site at
www.spychips.com/protest/walmart/walmart-protest-details.....
_________________________________________________

Here's a News Letter from the SPYCHIPS author:

From: newsletter@nocards.org
Subject: Anti-RFID rally at Wal-Mart this Saturday in Dallas
Date: October 13, 2005 9:17:28 PM CDT
To: newsletter@nocards.org

Dear CASPIAN Members and supporters:

I'm flying into Dallas today for a showdown in the Lone Star State.

It's time to take a stand against spychipping companies and their RFID
tagging activities, and Wal-Mart is at the top of our list. They've
begun brazenly selling RFID-tagged items right under the noses of Texas
shoppers, and it needs to stop.

We're organizing this weekend to send Wal-Mart a clear message:

"Don't mess with Texas! No Spychips in the Store!"

My Spychips co-author, Liz McIntyre, and I will be on hand to help local
CASPIAN members alert the public and the media to Wal-Mart's use of RFID
in stores. We will lead a rally outside of a Dallas Wal-Mart Super
Center Saturday to raise awareness of RFID and demand that the company
immediately stop selling spychipped products.

For more details, see:
www.spychips.com/protest/walmart/walmart-protest-details....

Wal-Mart is the 800-pound gorilla of the retail industry, and other
retailers follow its lead. (We've just learned that Best Buy is
considering item-level RFID tagging for 2006. We're betting they'll
rethink those plans once they get hit with a consumer backlash of their
own!) By taking a stand now, we can prevent the spread of these tags.

I have organized five protests since I founded CASPIAN in 1999, and
every one has been a completely positive experience. People bring their
families, their golden retrievers, and their shared love of freedom, and
they leave with the satisfaction that only comes from taking a stand for
what's right. That's a lot in this increasingly apathetic world. And it
feels great.

We now have over 10,000 CASPIAN members around the world and plan to
work with local communities to organize similar events elsewhere. We
know you will prove us right when we say that Americans and people
everywhere else across the globe will fight back against big corporate
plans to number and track us all.

Let's show them that it won't be as easy as they think.

In freedom and with high hopes,

Katherine Albrecht
CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)
www.spychips.com // www.nocards.org
Co-author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to
Track Your Every Move with RFID"

=====================================================================
CASPIAN: Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering
Opposing supermarket "loyalty" cards and other retail surveillance
schemes since 1999

www.spychips.com/
www.nocards.org/

You're welcome to duplicate and distribute this message to others who
may find it of interest.

Let the Indictments Begin

2005-10-14T23:12:00.000-05:00

Let the Indictments Begin
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Delay was in Baton Rouge only weeks ago on the local news after Katrina, just smiling acting like he's your best buddy. Seeing all these politicians in Baton Rouge makes me ill. A bunch of white collar criminals. How many generations are going to have to pay for the setbacks done to america by the Bush Administration?

And I think all the time. These men, these people have children and grandchildren. Do they think about them at all? Judging by what I see I don't think they think much about anybody.

Raegan had over 100 Indictments in his administration. A record.

I think the Bush Administration could topple that easily if the truth be known. But alas, they cover up & conspire to obstruct Justice so well that they all may be untouchable.

Isn't that what the Bush Supreme Court Nominations are all about? Is it over for America? Is there even a shade of democracy left?

Is this another false begining, indictments & investigations going nowhere?

BUYING OF NEWS BY BUSH'S AIDES IS RULED ILLEGAL - NY Times

2005-10-14T22:35:00.000-05:00

BUYING OF NEWS BY BUSH'S AIDES IS RULED ILLEGAL
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

BUYING OF NEWS BY BUSH'S AIDES IS RULED ILLEGAL
October 1, 2005, Saturday
By ROBERT PEAR (NYT); National Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 1, 1021 words

DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 1021 WORDS -Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party. In a blistering...

select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D10F638540C72...

Bunnatine Greenhouse at Army Core Engineers v.s. Halliburton No Bid Iraq Contracts

2005-10-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

Bunnatine Greenhouse at Army Core Engineers v.s. Halliburton No Bid Iraq Contracts
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Provided:

An in depth article in Vanity Fair @ Halliburton in Iraq. Also some other related Links.

Commentary:

Given the lack of support for Katrina in New Orleans it's an astounding perspective... What Halliburton will do to make a buck while the People in America suffer needlessly and are in great danger from the negligence of George Bush tending to his cronies and Oil profits.

Halliburton is in Iraq making Billions while people die. And the Vice President of the United States was their CEO. That is a huge conflict of interest. There is without question foul play and Bunnatine Greenhouse has put her job on the line. She's been fighting to expose this to the public since 2004.

__________________________________________________________

Vanity Fair Article Synopsis: w/Links

In the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, when order had been restored to the Balkans, KBR had won its first LOGCAP contract: it would supply everything that occupying U.S. forces needed, from tents and mess halls to swimming pools and generators. The federal government would be trimmed, private industry would profit, soldiers would be snappily serviced. The original architect of this plan was Dick Cheney, then assistant secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush. LOGCAP was a huge boon to KBR and its parent, Halliburton. Just four years later, Cheney was Halliburton's C.E.O.

In November 2004 the Pentagon would launch an investigation into allegations that two Halliburton employees in Kuwait had accepted bribes from third-party contractors, and the company would announce it had terminated its relationship with the subcontractors in question. A company spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, would say, "We are doing everything we can to make sure this particular scenario doesn't happen again." But deYoung says that that might be hard, given that a tone was set from the top. KBR chairman Jack Stanley was forced to leave the company in June 2004 for what Halliburton vaguely termed violations of business conduct. He is said to have received "improper personal benefits" involving a Swiss bank account which French investigators say contained $5 million in bribes for KBR contracts in Nigeria. Both the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have launched formal investigations.

"My first day at Camp Cedar, I noticed flatbed trucks were bringing brand-new S.U.V.'s, like Toyota Land Cruisers, Hummers, 4Runners—some of the most expensive S.U.V.'s that money can buy. I saw hundreds of them going to Iraq." The S.U.V.'s weren't hauling anything, Warren says. They were just for KBR personnel to ride in from base to base. They had power windows and CD players. "You don't have CD players in a car in wartime," Warren says wonderingly. On such delicate vehicles, desert conditions were brutal. "Within 90 days," he says, "they were completely trashed."

"A majority of the goods we transported were transported the wrong way," Warren explains. "You can't haul paper towels and napkins on a flatbed when it's raining and there's no tarp. We lost millions of dollars of goods that scattered on the roads. Pants, boots, shirts, water.… And we couldn't stop to pick that stuff up. We told KBR time and again, You can't haul this stuff on a flatbed—you need it in a container. But they never did change. And what happens is, when you start losing things that way, you attract Iraqis. We had people following convoys so they could pick up stuff that fell off the truck."

That July, at the congressional hearing where both Wilson and Warren testified, a KBR supervisor said the truckers were fired for running Iraqi-driven cars off the road with their trucks. "I did do this," Warren says. "But Halliburton management had told us to do it!" Wilson agrees. "We were told when we went to Kuwait that we were to do whatever we could to protect the integrity of the convoy. Even if it meant running people off the road." A KBR project manager for transportation later testified that the army, which made all decisions about KBR convoy security, "does not direct KBR drivers to run civilian vehicles off the road."

www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050307roco...

From 2004 when she first came out.
Behind the Halliburton investigation - Hardball with Chris Matthews - MSNBC.com
msnbc.msn.com/id/6358641/

ABC News: Army Faces Probe on No-Bid Deals With KBR
abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=194885

The Huffington Post | The Blog (June 27, 2005)
www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/charlie-cray/whist...

THE BRAD BLOG: "Whistleblowers Charge Pentagon Aided Halliburton" (June 30, 2005)
www.bradblog.com/archives/00001508.htm

Pentagon Evading Oversight - NY Times Sept. 29, 2005

2005-10-13T23:32:00.000-05:00

Pentagon Is Evading Oversight - NY Times Sept. 29, 2005
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Republicans See Signs That Pentagon Is Evading Oversight

By DOUGLAS JEHL

www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/politics/29intel.html?ex=11287...

Published: September 29, 2005

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - Republican members of Congress say there are signs that the Defense Department may be carrying out new intelligence activities through programs intended to escape oversight from Congress and the new director of national intelligence.

The warnings are an unusually public signal of some Republican lawmakers' concern about overreaching by the Pentagon, where top officials have been jockeying with the new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, for primacy in intelligence operations. The lawmakers said they believed that some intelligence activities, involving possible propaganda efforts and highly technological initiatives, might be masked as so-called special access programs, the details of which are highly classified.

"We see indications that the D.O.D. is trying to create parallel functions to what is going on in intelligence, but is calling it something else," Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.

Mr. Hoekstra said he believed that the purpose might be to obscure the extent of Pentagon intelligence activities and to keep them outside Mr. Negroponte's designated orbit.

Even under the new structure headed by Mr. Negroponte, the Pentagon's activities are widely understood to make up about 80 percent of an annual intelligence budget whose details remain classified but that is widely understood to total about $80 billion a year. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon is understood to have carried out a major expansion of its intelligence programs, including human spying efforts by Special Operations Forces and an arm of the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose missions have expanded into areas traditionally the purview of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have been pressing Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, for more information about the Pentagon's human spying. But the concerns now being voiced by Mr. Hoekstra and others appear to extend more broadly.

In the interview, Mr. Hoekstra declined to be specific, citing concerns about classification and the general sensitivity of the issue. But as an indication of the committee's sentiments, another Republican lawmaker cited an unclassified report issued by the committee in June, which said the panel believed that "it does not have full visibility over some defense intelligence programs" that do not clearly fall under particular budget categories.

The report said the committee believed that "individual services may have intelligence or intelligence-related programs such as science and technology projects or information operations programs related to defense intelligence that are embedded in other service budget line items, precluding sufficient visibility for program oversight."

"Information operations" is a military term used to describe activities including electronic warfare, psychological operations and counterpropaganda initiatives.

A version of the intelligence authorization bill that was passed by the House this summer calls on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in consultation with Mr. Negroponte, to provide Congress with "a comprehensive inventory of Department of Defense intelligence and intelligence-related programs and projects." Those who would receive such a report would include the House Intelligence Committee, its Senate counterpart and the armed services committees in both chambers of Congress.

As part of the intelligence overhaul that Congress ordered last year, Mr. Negroponte, as director of national intelligence, is supposed to oversee 15 intelligence agencies whose activities fall under a budget category known as the National Intelligence Program. Mr. Negroponte has less authority over programs that fall under another category, the Military Intelligence Program, which are intended to provide tactical and strategic support to military commanders.

But the concern expressed by Mr. Hoekstra and others is focused on a third category of programs involving intelligence activity but not labeled as such, and included within the budgets of the individual military services.

"Greater transparency into these programs and projects will enhance Congressional oversight and permit identification of potentially duplicative programs in other services," the committee said in its recent report, issued in June to accompany the intelligence authorization act for the fiscal year 2006.

In the interview, Mr. Hoekstra said the committee had been told that the Pentagon was creating parallel structures "so they don't have to deal with the D.N.I.," the abbreviation for the new intelligence chief.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher Conway, declined to comment on the issue, referring questions to Mr. Negroponte's office. A spokesman for Mr. Negroponte, Carl Kropf, described coordination between Mr. Negroponte's office and the Pentagon as "excellent" on budget issues.

"Successfully integrating D.O.D.-unique intelligence programs and missions into the National Intelligence Program requires full transparency," Mr. Kropf said. "Such transparency exists today."

Correction:

An article yesterday about concerns by Republican members of Congress that the Defense Department may be trying to avoid congressional oversight by using special intelligence programs misstated the amount of money the government is estimated to spend each year on all intelligence activities. The figure, which is classified, is believed to be about $40 billion, not $80 billion.

The Big Lie - "We Respect your Privacy" - SpyChips read the Book

2005-10-13T23:29:00.000-05:00

The Big Lie - SpyChips
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

www.spychips.com/

Well they don't store information for nothing... Wal Mart has more data stored than the internet. A LOT more.

SPYCHIPS read the book.

There IS by all means a conspiracy to acquire and control information.

RFID is about control of information.
Billions invested in this area.
Including by the Defense Department.

Brown Brothers Harriman Banking Corp. - Keeping It In The Family: The Bushes and the Nazis

2005-10-13T23:26:00.000-05:00

Brown Brothers Harriman Banking Corp.
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Listen to the first Journalist in History to go the US National Archives and the Library of Congress to go over the Documents to Prove that Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush were Nazi traitors to the country who should have been tried for Treason.

QUICKTIME MOVIE:
70.84.33.210/%7Einfomedi/video/previews/150305martialprev...

Pentagon Bars Military Officers And Analysts From Testifying "ABLE DANGER"

2005-10-13T23:20:00.000-05:00

Pentagon Bars Military Officers And Analysts From Testifying "ABLE DANGER"
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Pentagon Bars Military Officers And Analysts From Testifying

September 21, 2005, Wednesday
By PHILIP SHENON (NYT); National Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 15, Column 5, 477 words
select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70F1EF93D540C72...

WHAT ARE THEY HIDING SO MUCH FROM US FOR?

They are covering up the governments involvement and foreknowledge of 911. And when we do find out what's going on America will see we are not prepared for the natural disasters from Nature, and most certainly not safe from terror if your own government keeps you in harms way and then capitalizes upon it. Make up your own story. Any way you look at it. The Bush Administration is the worst thing that has ever happened to America. Tragic and surrounded by controversy, exploitation, pointless death and Sin.

Here's Jeb Bush's Philosophy on the relevancy of Truth:

"The truth is useless. You have to understand this right now. You can't deposit the truth in a bank. You can't buy groceries with the truth. You can't pay rent with the truth. The truth is a useless commodity that will hang around your neck like an albatross all the way to the homeless shelter. And if you think that the million or so people in this country that are really interested in the truth about their government can support people who would tell them the truth, you got another thing coming. Because the million or so people in this country that are truly interested in the truth don't have any money." Spoken by Jeb Bush in conversation with Retired Naval Intelligence Officer, Al Martin and Cited in Bushwhacked, by Uri Dowbenko, September, 2002

**** Here is another important FBI witness who they won't let testify either: Sibel Edmunds, Gag ordered by John Ashcroft.

Synopsis:

'State Secrets Privilege' Not So Rare
August 16, 2005
by William Fisher

(Edmonds, a former Middle Eastern language specialist hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 and filed a lawsuit later that year challenging the retaliatory dismissal. An unclassified public report by the Department of Justice inspector general contains much of the information the department now seeks to block.)
As whistleblower Sibel Edmonds asks the U.S. Supreme
Court to review her dismissed case against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the mainstream media continues to refer to the government's defense – the so-called state secrets privilege – as "rarely used."

In fact, it has been used over 60 times since its creation in the 1950s.

The state secrets privilege is a series of U.S. legal precedents allowing the federal government to dismiss legal cases that it claims would threaten foreign policy, military intelligence, or national security.

A relic of the Cold War with the then-Soviet Union, it has been invoked several times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Judges have denied the privilege on only five occasions.

It was used against Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, who was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and possible espionage within the Bureau. Lower courts dismissed the case when former Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the state secrets privilege.

The state secrets privilege was used again in 2002 in the case of Notra Trulock, who launched a defamation suit against Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American computer scientist who had been charged with stealing nuclear secrets for China from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The privilege was first invoked against Sibel Edmonds to prevent her from testifying that the federal government knew that al-Qaeda intended to use airliners to attack the United States in 2001. The case was a $100 trillion action filed in 2002 by 600 victims' families against officials of the Saudi government and prominent Saudi citizens.

Edmonds, a former Middle Eastern language specialist hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 and filed a lawsuit later that year challenging the retaliatory dismissal. An unclassified public report by the Department of Justice inspector general contains much of the information the department now seeks to block.

The report concluded that Edmonds' whistleblower allegations were "the most significant factor" in the FBI's decision to terminate her.

Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the American Federation of Scientists, told IPS, "Once rarely invoked, the state secrets privilege is now increasingly used by the government as a 'get out of jail free' card to block unwanted litigation."

"The idea that courts cannot handle national security cases involving classified information is simply false," he said. "Classified information often figures in criminal espionage cases, and even occasionally in Freedom of Information Act cases. There are procedures for in camera review, protective orders, nondisclosure agreements, and so on."

He added, "In the same way, sensitive classified information could be protected in the current cases where the state secrets privilege has been invoked – without shutting down the entire proceeding. As a society we should be seeking to expand the rule of law, not to carve out more areas where the government is immune to judicial review."

**LETS ASK GEORGE FROM THE RANCH THIS QUESTION: WHY GEORGE DID YOU LET A NUCLEAR SCIENTIST WHO COMMITTED TREASON GO FREE BY INVOKING THE STATE SECTRETS PRIVALEDGE?

President George W. Bush said national security would be compromised if Trulock were allowed to seek damages from Lee. Though it resulted in the case being dismissed, another suit was launched directly attacking then-FBI Director Louis Freeh for interfering and falsely invoking the state secrets privilege.

Reluctant to go to trial, the government worked out a plea bargain with Lee, who had been imprisoned for 278 days in solitary confinement. Lee pled guilty to improper handling of classified data and was cleared of all charges relating to espionage. Lee was arrested in December 1999 and freed in August 2000.

Barbara Olshansky, the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Arar, said that government lawyers "are saying this case can't be tried, and the classified information on which they're basing this argument can't even be shared with the opposing lawyers. It's the height of arrogance – they think they can do anything they want in the name of the global war on terrorism."

www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=6958

SE: Look, I think that that [the AIPAC investigation] ultimately involves more than just Israelis – I am talking about countries, not a single country here. Because despite however it may appear, this is not just a simple matter of state espionage. If Fitzgerald and his team keep pulling, really pulling, they are going to reel in much more than just a few guys spying for Israel.

CD: A monster, 600-pound catfish, huh? So the Turkish and Israeli investigations had some overlap?

SE: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it.

But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.

CD: But you can start from anywhere –

SE: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.

    Bush Wielding Secrecy Privilege to End Suits
    By Andrew Zajac
    The Chicago Tribune

    Thursday 03 March 2005

    The secrets privilege is an especially powerful weapon because federal judges, reluctant to challenge the executive branch on national security, almost never refuse the government's claim to confidentiality.

www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/9393

Guilty & Running Scared - Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal

2005-10-03T17:25:00.000-05:00

Guilty & Running Scared
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

Today on October 3, 2005 I found out from Lamar Advertising of Baton Rouge, that a "Private" donation (an individual) from rural Louisiana funded this series of Bush Advertisements which ran along Interstate I-10 @ College Drive in Baton Rouge, La during the month of July 2005. This is the major hub where traffic in Baton Rouge is backed up for hours ever day.

Given that the Bush administration has now been found to be "Buying News" illegally, is this form of advertising acceptable? The Bush administration could design an ad and get anyone to pay for it and we would never know the difference. Just like Payola in the music industry. What if they put up abortion ad's? The other ad that goes with this one was with a Cross erected from 911 steel beams with a flag and some firemen.

Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: October 1, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01educ.html

"Katrina" the Spider

2005-09-29T02:03:00.000-05:00

"Katrina" the Spider
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

These spiders are common to Louisiana and I've been told they can eat a small bird. They're really cool and beautiful. This is little one. They can get much bigger.

Bush "Your'e an Asshole" -Mini Movie

2005-09-25T01:43:00.000-05:00

This is a great little movie that eloquently states what a bunch of "Assholes" we have running America.

Time to go to jail guys. Sorry, can't get rich, party and kill folks forever ya know. Playtimes over soon. You know you can't do this stuff forever. George Bush people matter despite that you've demonstrated otherwise. Even the poor black people you let go to hell in New Orleans while you wage profit wars for your buddies and run America in the ground.

Treason, fraud, extortion, perjury and war crimes committed by these people in this movie.

www.filmstripinternational.com/index.php?asshole

Old Louisiana Oak Tree Destroyed by Katrina (Baton Rouge)

2005-09-24T01:55:00.000-05:00

Old Oak Tree Broken
Originally uploaded by Antifluff Superstar.

This is a beautiful Tree one block from where I live. Sorry to see it go. Took pic's of her twice this one got the sunset light. They cut it up now it's just the trunk left.