Definitely one of the greatest men of American letters of the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut passed away earlier this year at the age of 85. And the US news media all but ignored him....Why? Here are some of the simple truths he spoke about whenever he was given a public forum... As a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, the literary icon who passed away April 11, 2007, NOW proudly shares one of his last broadcast television interviews. On our October 7, 2005 program, NOW Host David Brancaccio interviews Vonnegut about his life and the current state of American democracy. With his classic wit, the legendary author of CAT'S CRADLE and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE delivers some choice words for our parties, our system, and our president.

Celebrating Chanukah 2007 in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, who would think? Yet tonight inside a marble encrusted hall in Baghdad, we lit the eighth light of a hand-made, 6-foot tall menorah. We prayed in Hebrew, joyfully sang a medley of Chanukah songs, ate latkes, and best of all, we were Jews together in the land of our earliest forefathers. The Jewish community at the US Embassy in Baghdad is growing and thriving to such an extent that we now reliably form a minyan. We call ourselves B'nai Baghdad... If you visit this link scroll down to the bottom and read the comment by Zubaida, an Iraqi woman.

The Central Bank of Sudan will deal only in the euro beginning in 2008 and advised local commercial banks to opt for convertible currencies other than the U.S. dollar.

The United States wants to place a radar station in the Czech Republic and intercepter missiles in Poland, saying the components would defend European allies against a possible Iranian strike.

Gorbachev, 76, whose policies of glasnost and perestroika - openness and restructuring - helped end communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites, criticized the high level of military spending by the United States.

"Does America intend to fight the rest of the world, does America need to build a new empire? They will not succeed," Gorbachev said at the close of a meeting of the World Political Forum, a group he founded in 2003 that includes many former high-ranking politicians.

"There still one year that President Bush has on his hands. Let's hope that he will not take the risk... of military action against Iran," Gorbachev said, adding that such an attack "at the very least" could provoke increased terrorist attacks, an energy crisis and "even result in a big war."

Lung cancer included. Yummy.

People who eat a lot of red meat and processed meats have a higher risk of several types of cancer, including lung cancer and colorectal cancer, U.S. researchers reported. Meat can raise lung cancer risk, too. First big study to find link between saturated fats and lung disease. People who eat a lot of red meat and processed meats have a higher risk of several types of cancer, including lung cancer and colorectal cancer, U.S. researchers reported.

The work is the first big study to show a link between meat and lung cancer. It also shows that people who eat a lot of meat have a higher risk of liver and esophageal cancer and that men raise their risk of pancreatic cancer by eating red meat.

"A decrease in the consumption of red and processed meat could reduce the incidence of cancer at multiple sites," Dr. Amanda Cross and colleagues at the U.S. National Cancer Institute wrote in their report, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

The researchers studied 500,000 people aged 50 to 71 who took part in a diet and health study done in conjunction with the AARP, formerly the American Association for Retired Persons. After eight years, 53,396 cases of cancer were diagnosed.

A forecast made by Denmark-based Saxo Bank, chaos will take a grip on the world in 2008. Oil prices will skyrocket to 175 dollars per barrel, the Chinese market will collapse by 40 percent, whereas the U.S. will suffer a 25-percent setback. All this will happen because of the mortgage crisis in the USA which already slows down the U.S. economy.

The Etruscans have long been considered one of the most enigmatic peoples of the ancient world. Still today shrouded in mystery, their civilization first came to be known from their frescoed tombs spread across the lands north and west of Rome with their suggestive phallic symbols. History, as usual brutal and reductive, tells the story of the Etruscan civilization in a few words: they appeared, flourished for nine centuries, their kings ruled Rome for hundreds of years, and then they declined and vanished. Where they came from and where they went still mystifies scholars. The well-preserved frescoes in Etruscan tombs depict magical religious lives of banquets, dancing, music and sex, filled with demons and deities and a morbid preoccupation with the hereafter. Their sacred books dealing with arcane rituals and accumulated knowledge constituted the so-called Etruscan Discipline, a unity of theory and practice about the interpretation of signs. Their deities were Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Minerva, and their terrible God, Charun-Charon.

Hillary Clinton voted to let our military continue to use cluster bombs in areas with concentrated civilian populations, despite the thousands of innocent children who have died or been handicapped due to picking up unexploded cluster bomblets. This vote was cast in September 6, 2006 on an amendment to the Defense Appropriations act by Senator Dianne Feinstein. Senator Clinton made no statements either on the floor or via press release explaining her vote. But perhaps her recent statements explain it: "You know, it’s tempting any time things seem quieter for a minute on the international front to think that we don’t need a president who’s up to speed on foreign affairs and military matters" Does being "up to speed" on foreign affairs and military matters means voting to continue the indiscriminate use of cluster munitions?

In late October, Napolitano gave the keynote address at the conference Reason in DC, where he delivered a spellbinding speech that blended a masterful understanding of American history with a blazing outrage at the excesses of the new security state. "Who is the greatest violator of the Constitution?" asks Napolitano. "George W. Bush has shown less fidelity to the Constitution than any president since Abraham Lincoln."

This week we will be discussing a spy story in Israel's early years that left a nasty mark on the young state, with reverberations for the following 20 years. It was called the "Lavon Affair," after Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, "Esek HaBish" or "The Mishap". It revolved around nearly a dozen highly dedicated young Egyptian Jews who were asked, and agreed to spy for Israel against the country in which they were born. Why they were caught and more or less abandoned by Israel to incarceration and for a while, torture in Egypt's prisons to be finally released only 14 years later is a question that has never been answered. This story, known as "Operation Susannah," is thus one of idealism and self-sacrifice, as well as abandonment and an unwillingness to take responsibility. Due to strict censorship in Israel, few knew more than in the year 1954, Israeli underground cells had been operating in Egypt which were subsequently uncovered by the Egyptian police. The young Jews were arrested and forced to undergo a show trial. Two people, Yosef Carmon and Max (Meir) Binnet, committed suicide in prison due to the brutal interrogation methods of the Egyptian police. Two more, Dr. Moshe Marzouk of Cairo and Shmuel Azar of Alexandria, were sentenced to death and hanged in a Cairo prison. Israel glorified them as martyrs.

In 1954, Israeli agents working in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including a United States diplomatic facility, and left evidence behind implicating Arabs as the culprits. The ruse would have worked, had not one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to capture and identify one of the bombers, which in turn led to the round up of an Israeli spy ring. Some of the spies were from Israel, while others were recruited from the local Jewish population. Israel responded to the scandal with claims in the media that there was no spy ring, that it was all a hoax perpetrated by "anti-Semites". But as the public trial progressed, it was evident that Israel had indeed been behind the bombing. Eventually, Israeli's Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was brought down by the scandal, although it appears that he was himself the victim of a frame-up by the real authors of the bombing project, code named "Operation Susannah." It is therefore a fact that Israel has a prior history of setting off bombs with the intent to blame Arabs for them.

They gather in remote valleys and mountain strongholds, and only a handful of initiates are permitted to know their mystic rites or to read their "Six Books of Wisdom." Their faith is a baffling hybrid of Greek philosophy and Muslim mysticism; they revere Jesus, Moses and Muhammad equally. Though their sect is technically an offshoot of the Isma'ili Muslim sect, it shares ideas with Chinese and Indian religions. Such are the shadowy outlines of the mysterious Druze, a self-enclosed feudal group famous for its autonomy and military prowess. Of Lebanon's dozen or more sects, the Druze are said to be the fourth largest, with a membership of 250,000 (there are roughly 260,000 in Syria, as well as some 40,000 in Israel). Yet the Druze's solidarity and fierce sense of loyalty have given them clout disproportionate to their numbers. Ever since 1975 the leader of the Druze has served as the head of the Lebanese left.

Police on Monday arrested a Druze resident of the Golan Heights suspected of giving a speech in support of Hezbollah and its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah during a visit he made to Syria. Police say the 58-year-old Majdal Shams man is not a known political activist and has never before been suspected of security-related offenses. Druze political activists on the Golan described the arrest as an attempt to frighten residents of the Heights from publicly expressing their political positions.

A new book reveals the 22-year effort by FBI director J Edgar Hoover to get Albert Einstein arrested as a political subversive or even a Soviet spy. Uncovered FBI files are revealed in a book by Fred Jerome who says it was a clash of cultures - Einstein's challenge and change with Hoover's order and obedience. From the time Einstein arrived in the US in 1933 to the time of his death, in 1955, the FBI files reveal that his phone was tapped, his mail was opened and even his trash searched. Einstein became world famous in 1906 for his Special Theory of Relativity that deals with light. His General Theory of Relativity, published in 1919, deals with gravity and has been called mankind's greatest intellectual accomplishment.

Just about everyday, the news is bad! The economy is going to hell, the Iraqi War continues unabated and the energy crisis is shifting into high gear. One direct result: The Middle Class is disappearing. No Middle Class, no democracy! And yet, our people seem to be sleepwalking through it all. Maybe, Carl Jung was right when he said, “The people can’t stand too much reality.” Here's the opening scene: Two lobsters are found sitting in a restaurant tank trading philosophical observations. One pretends to be dead in order to avoid becoming a dinner entrée on that night's pricey menu. The other prods, "If you spend all your time playing dead, what’s the point of being alive?" That line speaks volumes of truth about our mostly mesmerized America and its refusal to face its grim reality, which includes our state of perpetual war hatched by the deranged Bush-Cheney Gang; (1) a national economy going straight to hell on a runaway train called "Free Trade;" (2) and a fossil-fuel energy crisis that unless resolved will send us spiraling into another Dark Age!

I wonder if Tom Brokaw knew what was happening on the nine Indian reservations in his home state of South Dakota in 1968. I seriously doubt it. On December 29, 1968, as they have done for many years, the Lakota people were gathered around the mass grave at Wounded Knee to pray. And on December 29, 1990, they would gather to mourn the 100th anniversary of the massacre of their people. To the non-Indians of South Dakota and the rest of America, December 29, 1990 was another day. But to the Lakota people, December 29 was a day they commemorated every year since 1890. It was a day when nearly 300 of their relatives were shot to death in cold blood by the enlisted men and officers of the 7th Cavalry. Ironically, 21 members of the 7th Cavalry were awarded Medals of Honor for this horrific slaughter of women and children. White people ask why we Lakota still talk about Wounded Knee as if it was not ancient history. If something terrible happened to your grandmother — that’s right, your grandmother — something so heinous that it became a part of American history, would you still consider that to be ancient history? I think not. A grandmother can never be ancient history or you wouldn’t be able to ride over the river and through the woods to her house on holidays. Consider this. On December 29, 1890, my grandmother, Sophie, was a 17-year-old student at the Holy Rosary Indian Mission, a Jesuit boarding school just a few miles from Wounded Knee. She was called out with the rest of the students to feed and water the horses of the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry that had just rode on to the mission grounds chasing down survivors that had escaped the slaughter. My grandmother recalled seeing blood on their uniforms and she overheard them bragging about the mighty victory they had just scored at Wounded Knee. That’s right, my grandmother, who is now deceased, remembered. Now does that make the Massacre at Wounded Knee ancient history to me? You bet that it does not. Many other Lakota still living today had grandmothers and grandfathers that were either killed or survived the massacre. No, it is not ancient history to the Lakota.

(Following is a transcript of the Oct. 22, 1992 conversation with President David Steiner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) recorded without his knowledge by New York businessman Haim (Harry) Katz. Its existence was first revealed to the Washington Times and its release triggered Steiner's resignation. David Steiner: Haim. Harry Katz: Hello, how are you? DS: Where are you located?
HK: I'm located in Queens, New York. DS: Queens.. .Far Rockaway? HK: Belle Harbor. DS: Belle Harbor. I'm trying to get this list together. Would you ever get into the city? HK: Sure, I do. Sure, you come frequently? DS: Well I come in from time to time. I have an office there, at AIPAC in the city. You know, I want you to understand . . . where did you get my name and phone number? HK: Oh, I, um, I called AIPAC. . . DS: Yeah. HK: And ahh. . .I know you're the president of AIPAC...DS: You should understand that, the political information that I gave you, those are personal choices . . .HK: Sure, I understand. [Photo: engrish.com]

The Israeli daily Ha'aretz has revealed that that the paper obtained a copy of a previously unreleased document from the 2000 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks known as the Camp David Summit. According to Ha'aretz, the document shows that there was much more agreement between the two sides than was publicly announced. After 7 years of open conflict, and more than 5,000 Palestinians killed, in addition to nearly 1,000 Israelis, the fact that a document existed in which the two sides secretly agreed on core issues raises the ire of peace activists on both sides, who feel the deaths could have been avoided. The document shows that Israeli authorities were considering an 'initiated separation plan' as early as June 2000, in which Israeli troops would withdraw from their occupation of Palestinian land. It also shows that there was significant agreement between the two sides on some part of the core issues of borders, refugees and Jerusalem.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about a criminal investigation launched by French authorities against Guillaume Dasquié, a reporter for the daily Le Monde, on accusations of publishing state secrets related to the 9/11 hijackings. Officers from the Directorate of Territorial Security, a counterespionage agency, searched Dasquié’s Paris home on Wednesday. They detained him for 48 hours, during which time he was interrogated and pressured to reveal his sources, according to international news reports. Dasquié faces five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros (US$110,000) under Article 413-11 of France’s penal code if convicted. “We are troubled by the criminal probe against Guillaume Dasquié and his detention for two days by French security services who pressured him to reveal his sources,” CPJ’s Executive Director Joel Simon said. “Dasquié should not be prosecuted for serving the public’s right to know.”

On PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal this past Friday, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann criticized right-wing radio host Michael Savage, who had a show on MSNBC in 2003. Olbermann recounted how he nearly walked off the set of his Countdown show once when MSNBC told him to run a commentary by Savage. Describing why he was opposed to including the segment, Olbermann said Savage’s show was “basically just spattering invective on people he didn’t like“: MSNBC hired a guy named Michael Savage. And he came on and did– not only did he do a show once a week that was basically just spattering invective on people he didn’t like and these people change from week to week, but it was terribly produced. I mean, it was an awful show.

Continuing Bill Moyers’ interview last night with host of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann about the relationships between politics and journalism, fielding questions from Moyers’ own staff on how Olbermann perceives his particular style of journalism.

The GOP blocks passage of a bill that would have banned torture outright even as Bush had threatened to veto it. Bush and his criminal conspirators --the GOP leadership in Congress --have thus worked mightily to cover up his crimes, obstruct justice and make legal --ex post facto --the crimes that Bush has already committed. But that's not all. The GOP is moving to quash an investigation of Bush that will involve "obstruction of justice", an investigation that one hopes would end in Bush's impeachment, removal, arrest and trial for war crimes.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US government has asked a Congressional committee to suspend its probe into the destruction by the CIA of videotapes, citing 'significant risks' to its own investigation, the New York Times reported Saturday.

The US Justice Department's request Friday to the House Intelligence Committee came after the panel had summoned two CIA officials to testify next week -- a hearing that now is likely to be postponed, the daily reported.

So what defines a fascist society? Often times, fascism is subconsciously linked to the grainy black and white pictures of marauding Wermacht and SS troops from the 1940s. However, this shows a mental normalness which is incorrect. While Nazism did have fascist overtones, Nazism is not a form of government. Nazism is political ideology implemented through the use of a fascist government system. It is this system that needs to be understood and not the policy employed through it. This is vital since any form of government – yes, including a democracy – can be operated through a fascist structure. It is not exclusive to a dictatorship. As this article will show, you may be surprised by the results of the analysis.

The economic collapse of the 1930s was staggering in its dimensions. Unemployment jumped from less than 3 million in 1929 to 4 million in 1930, 8 million in 1931, and 12 1/2 million in 1932. In that year, a quarter of the nation's families did not have a single employed wage earner. Even those fortunate enough to have jobs suffered drastic pay cuts and reductions in hours. Only one company in ten failed to cut pay, and in 1932, three-quarters of all workers were on part-time schedules, averaging just 60 percent of the normal work week. The economic collapse was terrifying in its scope and impact. By 1933 average family income had tumbled 40 percent, from $2,300 in 1929 to just $1,500 four years later. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, three or four families crowded together in one-room shacks and lived on wild weeds. In Arkansas, families were found inhabiting caves. In Oakland, California, whole families lived in sewer pipes. Vagrancy shot up as many families were evicted from their homes for nonpayment of rent. The Southern Pacific Railroad boasted that it threw 683,000 vagrants off its trains in 1931. Free public flophouses and missions in Los Angeles provided beds for 200,000 of the uprooted. To save money, families neglected medical and dental care. Many families sought to cope by planting gardens, canning food, buying used bread, and using cardboard and cotton for shoe soles. Despite a steep decline in food prices, many families did without milk or meat. In New York City, milk consumption declined a million gallons a day. President Herbert Hoover declared, "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been." But in New York City in 1931, there were 20 known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger. There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief.

China marked 70 years since Japan's Nanjing massacre on Thursday, invoking memories of the atrocity to remind Tokyo that the wartime past remains a bitter backdrop to an improving relationship. Sirens wailed, calling citizens to silence, a bell tolled, and tens of thousands of people, including frail survivors, gathered for the reopening of a newly expanded massacre memorial in the former national capital in eastern China. The six-week wave of killing by Japanese soldiers after Nanjing fell was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan's invasion of China. Official Chinese accounts say 300,000 were killed. For China, how Japan remembers the "Rape of Nanking" -- as the city was then called in English -- has become a test of how contrite its neighbor is about its brutal occupation of much of the country from the 1930s up to 1945. Aged survivors came out to remind the world of the event. Chen Fubao, 75, clutched a black-and-white photo of his father, who was killed in the slaughter. "We hope that the Japanese government, especially those in the nationalist factions, will admit the truth in history and learn from the Germans," he told Reuters. "They should not cover up their crimes any more." Beijing and Tokyo have been moving in recent months to ease long-running tensions over history, territory and energy and commemorative propaganda has avoided harsh words about Japan's current leaders.

The Chinese city of Nanjing is marking the 70th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the second world war in Asia. On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops entered what was then the capital of China's nationalist Kuomintang government, beginning a campaign of mass murder and rape that lasted for six weeks. The exact number who died in what became known as the Rape of Nanjing remains in dispute. China says up to 300,000 were killed, many of them women and children.

The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, was an infamous genocidal war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. The duration of the massacre is not clearly defined, although the violence lasted well into the next six weeks, until early February 1938. During the occupation of Nanjing, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and the execution of prisoners of war and civilians. Although the executions began under the pretext of eliminating Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians, a large number of innocent men were intentionally identified as enemy combatants and executed—or simply killed outright—as the massacre gathered momentum. A large number of women and children were also killed, as rape and murder became more widespread.

"When [the Allied Powers] opened the so-called Tokyo war-crimes tribunal [after World War II], they needed evidence that Japan committed greater atrocities [than the Tokyo air raids and use of atomic bombs], so they made up the so-called Nanjing Massacre, which was completely unfounded," declares Mr. Kase, chair of the Committee for the Examination of the Facts about Nanjing. Satoru Mizushima, the director of "The Truth of Nanjing," a soon-to-be-released film supported by such politicians as conservative Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, echoes Kase, who served as a special adviser to two past prime ministers. Nanjing, he says, was a "fabrication, a campaign of Communist China."

Activists and researchers have long tried to understand how the highly sophisticated U.S. military could have failed so completely to stop the attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. Statements made by several U.S. military personnel who were deeply involved in the crisis response that morning suggest an alarming method that may have been used to sabotage normal defenses. Revealed here for the first time, this is one possible reason that the military was in such a state of paralysis until it was too late to make a difference. NORAD AND THE NMCC: A key military installation on 9/11 was the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operations center, located deep under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Major General Eric Findley, NORAD's director of combat operations, was there, and has recalled events around the time of the first attacks. He had just been finishing breakfast when a colleague said to him: "The Federal Aviation Administration's asked for NORAD assistance with a hijacking." As he then came back to the battle cab, someone told him: "Sir, you wanna have a look at this." The monitor was showing television footage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, with a burning hole in it from having just been hit by an airplane. Before Findley knew it, TV showed the second tower being struck. He said: "We've got a coordinated attack."

On Wednesday, attorneys for prisoners at Guantanamo called on the Supreme Court to restore the Constitution and grant the prisoners habeas corpus—the right to challenge their imprisonment before a judge. “All have been confined at Guantanamo for almost six years, yet not one has had meaningful notice of the factual grounds of their detention,” said former Solicitor General Seth Waxman in his oral arguments.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Washington, D.C., where the Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in a case challenging the Bush administration’s jailing of hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners without charge or trial. At issue is an appeals court ruling denying prisoners the writ of habeas corpus—the right to challenge their imprisonment before a judge. Lawyers for the prisoners argue the ruling is unconstitutional and the Bush administration’s military tribunal system, an inadequate alternative.

The session marked the third time since 2004 the Supreme Court took up a challenge to Guantanamo detentions.

In an orgy of savage violence Radovan Karadzic's forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims in the Bosnian war. He called it ethnic cleansing. After being indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague he went into hiding and, despite a massive international manhunt, has evaded capture for the past 12 years. Ed Vulliamy, who covered the Balkan wars in the early 1990s, returned to Bosnia to speak to Karadzic's friends, family and foes to discover why the West has failed so abjectly to bring him to justice. A heavy morning mist lifts to reveal sweeping meadows above the riverside town of Foca in Eastern Bosnia: receding mountain ridges and nestled hamlets surrounded by haystacks. But what the emergent sun does not illuminate is the whereabouts of the man believed hidden in this vast landscape, with its closed doors and its impervious inhabitants: Radovan Karadzic, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs.

Just over a week ago, a major operating manual for the US military’s prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was leaked and posted on the internet. Among other disclosures, it reveals that isolation and sensory deprivation of prisoners was official Army policy. We take a look at how this affects the debate within the American Psychological Association and the participation of its members in interrogations. [includes rush transcript] The document shows that the military had an official policy of denying some prisoners any access to independent monitors of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, something the military has repeatedly denied. Another disclosure is the use of isolation and sensory deprivation techniques as a means of “preparing” detainees. It says incoming prisoners are to be held in near-isolation for the first two weeks to foster dependence on interrogators and “enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process.”

A man I interviewed, who had been in his tea stall in the vicinity and witnessed most of the incident, summed up the local reaction this way:

"The Americans say the people who fought them are al-Qaeda or fedayeen. We are all living in this small city here. Why have we not seen these foreign fighters and strangers in our city before or after this battle? Everyone here knows everyone, and none have seen these strangers. Why do they tell these lies?"

Another man, at the scene had drawn my attention to a parked car scarred with 112 bullets. As I was photographing it, a man with two children at his side approached. They were, he said, the children of his brother who had been killed by the gunfire.

"This little boy and girl, their father was shot by the Americans. Who will take care of this family? Who will watch over these children? Who will feed them now? Who? Why did they kill my brother? What is the reason? Nobody told me. He was a truck driver. What is his crime? Why did they shoot him? They shot him with 150 bullets! Did they kill him just because they wanted to shoot a man? That's it? This is the reason? Why didn't anyone talk to me and tell me why they have killed my brother? Is killing people a normal thing now, happening every day? This is our future? This is the future that the United States promised Iraq?"

Sixty years ago, my grandparents lived in the beautiful village of Beit Daras, a few kilometers north of Gaza. They were farmers and owned hundreds of acres of land.

But in 1948, in the first Arab-Israeli war, many people lost their lives defending our village from the Zionist militias. In the end, with their crops and homes burning, the villagers fled. My family eventually made its way to what became the refugee camp of Khan Younis in Gaza. We were hit hard by poverty, humiliation and disease. We became refugees, queuing for tents, food and assistance, while the state of Israel was established on the ruins of my family's property and on the ruins of hundreds of other Palestinian villages.

Globalisation, climate change, and the mass production of biofuels are pushing up food prices worldwide, which could jeopardise the livelihoods of the world's poorest, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

"Food prices have been steadily decreasing since the Green Revolution, but the days of falling food prices may be over," said Joachim von Braun, lead author of the report and director general of IFPRI.

Titled, "The World Food Situation: New Driving Forces and Required Actions", the 16-page report examined how various global trends are impacting world hunger on both the supply and demand ends of the market.

"Surging demand for feed, food, and fuel have recently led to drastic price increases, which are not likely to fall in the foreseeable future," von Braun said. But "climate change will also have a negative impact on food production."

On 29 October, the Israeli army forced more than 200 Palestinians from their homes in the village of Khirbet Qassa , Hebron District. The small village was established in the 1950s and most of its residents are refugees from the village of Beit Jibrin . The new Tarkumiya checkpoint, which lies very close to the Green Line, is being built near the village.

The villagers lived in tents and caves and gained a livelihood from raising sheep and goats. Since construction began on the Separation Barrier, separating the village from the rest of the West Bank , the army has harassed the residents and denied them access to the grazing fields and other facilities that lie beyond the Barrier. About a year and a half ago, the army warned the residents that it intended to demolish their homes on the grounds that they were built without a permit.

The White House on Monday threatened to veto legislation pending in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require the first big increase in three decades in the country's automobile fuel efficiency. Congressional Democrats have hammered out a complicated deal that could result in a 40 percent boost in fuel efficiency standards by 2020. The White House said it opposed provisions expected to be included in the bill that would require utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and raise taxes on oil and natural gas companies.

Group Files Freedom of Information Request to Obtain National Security Letter Records. As a result of newly released Department of Defense (DoD) documents revealing the potential abuse of the government’s surveillance powers, the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to force the FBI to turn over documents concerning its use of National Security Letters (NSLs) that demand private data about individuals within the United States without court approval. In today’s request, the ACLU seeks records pertaining to the FBI’s issuing of NSLs at the behest of other agencies that are not authorized to access this sensitive information on their own. In addition, the ACLU is requesting all documents indicating how the FBI has interpreted and used its power to silence NSL recipients since the Patriot Act’s gag provision was amended in 2006.

A sequel to the blockbuster thriller “The Da Vinci Code” is set to lift the veil on mysterious Freemason symbols carved into the very fabric of the historic streets and buildings of the US capital. Novelist Dan Brown has set the new adventures of his hero, scholar-adventurer Robert Langdon, right in the heart of Washington, which could reveal some astonishing facts for history buffs. Brown “had a contact with us but then cut it short. We are all sitting around waiting for his book to come out but nobody knows what he’s going to say,” Akram Elias, grand master-elect of Washington’s Grand Lodge, told AFP. According to the pre-publicity, the book — working title “The Solomon Key” — will feature Langdon hero of the mass-selling “The Da Vinci Code” and who was played by Tom Hanks in the hit film version. “For the first time, Langdon will find himself embroiled in a mystery on US soil. This new novel explores the hidden history of our nation’s capital,” Brown wrote in a posting on his official website. Washington has strong historic roots in Freemasonry — an old and widespread fraternity which traditionally practised secret rituals.

The percentage of Americans favoring impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney is approaching the percentage who favored impeachment of President Nixon in 1973-74.

Public opinion has reached this high level even before Congress has started any impeachment investigation of the Bush-Cheney administration. The public is way ahead of Congress, suggesting that it is time for the U.S. House of Representatives to move forward with the impeachment process.

In October 1973, a Gallup Poll results showed only 28 percent favored Nixon's impeachment and removal from office. That was after a summer of well-publicized Senate Watergate Committee hearings.

Just nine months later, the day before Nixon resigned, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed there was enough evidence for an impeachment trial, and 55 percent thought Nixon should be removed from office.

That is how drastically opinion shifted once Congress acted and revealed the full extent of Nixon's abuses of power.

Now, without any impeachment investigation by Congress, we already see the public's desire for impeachment action approaching the level that led to Nixon's departure from office.

Every Saturday, the president of the United States gives a radio address to the nation. It is followed by the Democratic response, usually given by a senator or representative. This past Saturday the Democrats chose retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez to give their response, the same general accused in at least three lawsuits in the U.S. and Europe of authorizing torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in Iraq. This, combined with the Democrats’ endorsement of Attorney General Michael Mukasey despite his unwillingness to label waterboarding as torture, indicates that the Democrats are increasingly aligned with President Bush’s torture policies.

Sanchez headed the Army’s operations in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. In September 2003, Sanchez issued a memo authorizing numerous techniques, including “stress positions” and the use of “military working dogs” to exploit “Arab fear of dogs” during interrogations. He was in charge when the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison occurred.

What he wants us to see is: the lot. Not one side or another, but the whole shooting match A Polish immigrant, cabin boy and gunrunner, Joseph Conrad wrote action-packed adventure stories, which were also modernist classics. Giles Foden celebrates an enduring master on the 150th anniversary of his birth. "I have never learned to trust it. I can't trust it to this day ... A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature." Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 1922. Long before Auden was telling us poetry makes nothing happen, or Adorno was saying there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Conrad was questioning - fundamentally - the political and moral utility of writing. Yet this was a writer who drew the approbation of FR Leavis, the pre-eminent British supporter of the view that literature could play a role in the maintenance of civilisation. In 1941, Leavis described Conrad as being "among the very greatest novelists in the language - or any language".

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born English novelist. He is regarded as one of the greatest English novelists, which is even more notable because he did not learn to speak English well until he was in his 20s (albeit always with a Polish accent). Conrad is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, John Maxwell Coetzee[1] as well as Jerzy Kosiński[citation needed] and inspired such films as Apocalypse Now (drawn from Conrad's Heart of Darkness). Writing during the apogee of the British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences in the British Merchant Navy to create novels and short stories that reflected aspects of a world-wide empire while also plumbing the depths of the human soul.

A new book claims that Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency, ran a highly secretive bombing campaign directed at individuals in Europe helping Pakistani scientist AQ Khan build a nuclear weapon. Deception, authored by investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, said the first victim was Heinz Mebus, a close friend of Khan, who had helped build Pakistan’s fluoride and uranium conversion plants in 1979. "A letter bomb exploded inside Mebus’s home in Erlangen, West Germany. Mebus was out at work, but his dog died in the attack,” the authors wrote. European investigators linked this bombing to another one in Berne, Switzerland, in February 1981, outside the home of Eduard German, managing director of CORA Engineering, which supplied a gasification and solidification unit to Pakistan in 1979. "It (the information in the book) is not in the public domain," Jyoti Sinha, a former intelligence official, told this writer. Was he surprised by these revelations? "Not at all. That would be quite natural," said Sinha, who was the number two man in the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW).

Deep in Richard Nixon's White House files sit letters from a long-forgotten lobbying campaign to make Mark Felt head of the FBI. Instead, Felt became Deep Throat. The National Archives released more than 10,000 pages of documents from the Nixon presidency on Wednesday and among them are the urgings of past and present FBI agents and other interested citizens to appoint Felt, then the No. 2 FBI official, as director. Associates described his "outstanding loyalty." Nixon did not take the advice. Ultimately, Felt's devastating leaks as The Washington Post's secret Watergate source helped undermine Nixon's presidency. The documents, also shedding light on foreign and national security policy from the Nixon years, show increasing urgency in U.S. attempts to pacify the Middle East, alarm over Israel's apparent progress in developing nuclear weapons and a wish to "manipulate relations with Saudis" to help broker peace. U.S. officials are also seen weighing whether to support a Kurdish rebellion in Iraq. To combat the terrorist threat in the Mideast, the U.S. must focus on "political dialogue," said a March 1973 directive now echoed in this week's Mideast summit. Nixon, soon to be consumed by the Watergate investigation, passed over career agents including Felt when he selected loyalist L. Patrick Gray as FBI chief after the J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, just weeks before the Watergate break-in. Gray resigned the next year because of allegations he had destroyed Watergate documents. Felt's supporters weighed in, with letters, telegrams and cards that have been in Nixon's White House files all these years.

No one knows how many people were killed on the road to Basra in February 1991, but there were enough to fill a traffic jam that was five vehicles wide and sixty miles long. The attack will be described later in this post -- as will the reason I bring it up. Contrary to U.S. propaganda, the victims were mostly civilians, many of them Jordanians, Palestinian refugees, and so forth (men, women, and children). All were moving north to comply with a United Nations order, but the USA slaughtered them at midnight in the desert so no one would see. Statistically, the USA is the world’s most violent nation in terms of conquest. Either the USA is killing people, or equipping dictators to kill people. Such extreme violence attracts Zionists like flies to excrement. It makes populations easy to manipulate through false-flag operations. It’s one reason why Zionists took control of the USA. If Americans truly valued human life, they would never have allowed Israel to exist in the first place. France is the same. It helped make Israel a nuclear power, and deliberately caused the Rwanda genocide. England’s colonial period in India was savage, as was Holland’s colonial period in Southeast Asia. Now Zionists own all those violent nations.

No one knows who killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. We do know, however, that the main witness cited in the UN report, Zuhir Mohamed Said Saddik, "has been convicted of embezzlement and fraud among other crimes" (Der Spiegel) which casts grave doubt on the credibility of his testimony. No problem; the Bush administration has used convicted fraudsters to make their case for war before, particularly in the case of Iraq where the specious claims of Ahmed Chalabi appeared consistently on the front page of the New York Times creating the rationale for the invasion. But, Sadik's trustworthiness is even more uncertain than Chalabi's. "Sources in the UN say that Sadik had undeniably lied" and had received money for his testimony. "According to a statement by his brother, Sadik had called him from Paris in late summer and said, "I've become a millionaire!" (Der Spiegel) Indeed; lying can be a profitable choice when it serves the greater objectives of American-Israeli foreign policy. None of this suggests that Syrian intelligence wasn't involved in the assassination. It very well may have been. It simply proves that the report of German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis is inconclusive and may have been the result of American coercion. At the very least, the report fits rather nicely with the Bush administration's stated goals for regime change in Damascus and redrawing the map of the Middle East.

The Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company (Tapline), was founded as a joint venture between the Standard Oil company of New Jersey (now Esso), Standard Oil of California (Chevron), The Texas Company (Texaco), and Socony-Vacuum Oil Company (Mobil), however, it eventually became a fully owned subsidiary of Aramco. The company built and operated the Trans Arabian Pipeline, a 1214 km 30" oil pipeline from Qaisuimah, Saudi Arabia to Sidon, Lebanon. In its heyday, it was an important factor in the global trade of petroleum-- helping with the economic development of Lebanon-- as well as American and Middle Eastern political relations.

Plans to build a pipeline to siphon oil from newly conquered Iraq to Israel are being discussed between Washington, Tel Aviv and potential future government figures in Baghdad. The plan envisages the reconstruction of an old pipeline, inactive since the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948, when the flow from Iraq's northern oilfields to Palestine was re-directed to Syria. Now, its resurrection would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel's energy crisis at a stroke. It would also create an end less and easily accessible source of cheap Iraqi oil for the US guaranteed by reliable allies other than Saudi Arabia - a keystone of US foreign policy for decades and especially since 11 September 2001.

The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem. The Prime Minister's Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a "bonus" the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram. The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.

Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he expects an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel to be reopened in the near future after being closed when Israel became a state in 1948. "It won't be long when you will see Iraqi oil flowing to Haifa," the port city in Northern Israel, Netanyahu told a group of British investors, declining to give a timetable. "It is just a matter of time until the pipleline is reconstituted and Iraqi oil will flow to the Mediterranean." Netanyahu later told Reuters the government is in the early stages of looking into the possibility of reopening the pipeline, which during the British Mandate sent oil from Mosul to Haifa via Jordan. "It's not a pipe-dream," Netanyahu said.

The Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline passes through Syrian territory to reach the refinery at Haifa. Given the state of war that still exists between Syria and Israel, the Assad government seems unlikely to allow such a plan to proceed. Pumping oil from Mosul to Hafia via Jordan may be an option, but it would be too expensive. So a second regime change in the region, this time in Syria, would make the Israelis much happier. Given all this, Washington’s pointing the finger at Damascus makes much more sense now. Reopening the pipeline would also serve US interests in the long run.

The secret flight plans of American military planes have revealed for the first time how European countries helped send prisoners, including British citizens, to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Despite widespread criticism of alleged human rights abuses and torture at the US base in Cuba, a Sunday Times investigation has shown that at least five European countries gave the United States permission to fly nearly 700 terrorist suspects across their territory. Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries across the continent have been secretly involved in America's rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture. [See flight logs and complete list of prisoners at www.ghostplane.net]

To Canadians, Maher Arar is the most well-known example. Germans know about Khaled al-Masri and in Italy, it's Osama Mustfafa Hasan, also known as Abu Omar, who gets the headlines. What all three have in common, aside from being Muslims, is extraordinary rendition. Each has been taken forcibly to another country, allegedly by U.S. intelligence, to be interrogated or tortured about allegations of involvement in international terrorism. Arar and al-Masri have been released and declared innocent. Abu Omar remains in prison in his native Egypt.

U.S.-Russian relations are deteriorating rapidly. Misguided and arrogant U.S. policies since the end of the Cold War have fueled resentment in Russia, and Vladimir Putin's increasing defiance is inflaming the West. But Washington and Moscow need not be adversaries. Both sides must act soon to avert renewed confrontation.

Faced with threats from al Qaeda and Iran and increasing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States does not need new enemies. Yet its relationship with Russia is worsening by the day. The rhetoric on both sides is heating up, security agreements are in jeopardy, and Washington and Moscow increasingly look at each other through the old Cold War prism.

Although Russia's newfound assertiveness and heavy-handed conduct at home and abroad have been the major causes of mutual disillusionment, the United States bears considerable responsibility for the slow disintegration of the relationship as well. Moscow's maladies, mistakes, and misdeeds are not an alibi for U.S. policymakers, who made fundamental errors in managing Russia's transition from an expansionist communist empire to a more traditional great power.

A financial crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to $2,000 an ounce, a trends researcher said.

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Recently, a 'lyrical terrorist' was convicted in the UK over hate records. I was not aware that the UK, like the US, had a law against “Thought Crimes.” Surely this woman is not as guilty of incitement to terrorism as Fox News? FOX ATTACKS: Iran. It's Not Terrorism If The US Does It [In the clip, Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade openly calls for US support for acts of terrorism—such as car bombings—in Tehran. His criminal remarks are a direct offense to victims of terrorism all around the world and render Kilmeade morally equivalent to terrorist groups like al Qaeda which he ostensibly denounces.]

"The first community-currency system was born in Canada in 1983. Since then the concept has spread to more than 2,000 communities across North America, South and Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The mechanics of these systems change to reflect individual circumstances. But the basic concept of an interest-free, community-controlled exchange medium has remained the same."

Using local currency can "stimulate the local economy by giving people incentive to shop in their own neighborhood, rather than drive the distance to large chain stores." This helps protect the environment and takes power away from a centralized government and those who print fiat currencies.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in partnership with Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), presents Oral Histories of the First World War: Veterans 1914-1918. The Web exhibition is based on the CBC's radio broadcast In Flanders Fields, a series of one-on-one interviews with veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which aired from November 11, 1964 to March 7, 1965. The website is organized into seven themes: Second Ypres, Vimy Ridge, War in the Air, The Somme, Trench Warfare, Passchendaele and Perspectives on War. These first-hand accounts, which can be listened to or read via the retyped transcripts, provide the personal insights on the experience of war by one of the greatest generations that Canada has ever produced. About Oral Histories of the First World War: The Web exhibition features a sampling of digitized radio recordings taken from the CBC's reel-to-reel audio tape of the radio broadcast In Flanders Fields. The original broadcasts were the inspiration for the themes for this website.
The transcript excerpts on this website are taken from the CBC's original typed documents for In Flanders Fields. This website was produced by LAC in partnership with VAC www.vac-acc.gc.ca/general/ and the CBC http://archives.cbc.ca/index.asp?IDLan=1. [This link has come to our attention via the beautiful and very interesting site wood s lot]

Iraqi police recently caught two terrorists with a car full of explosives. Would it surprise you to learn they were British Special Forces? The story sounds amazing, almost fantastical. A car driving through the outskirts of a besieged city opens fire on a police checkpoint, killing one. In pursuit, the police surround and detain the drivers and find the vehicle packed with explosives – perhaps part of an insurgent's plan to destroy lives and cripple property. If that isn't enough, when the suspects are thrown in prison their allies drive right up to the walls of the jail, break through them and brave petroleum bombs and burning clothes to rescue their comrades. 150 other prisoners break free in the ensuing melee. Incredible, no? Yet this story took place in the southern Iraqi city of Basra recently. Violence continues to escalate in the breakout's aftermath... just not for the reasons you think. You see, the drivers of the explosive-laden car were not members of an insurgency group – they were British Special Forces. Their rescuers? British soldiers driving British tanks. That's right – two members of the British Armed forces disguised as Arab civilians killed a member of the Iraqi police while evading capture. When the people of Basra rightfully refused to turn the murderers over to the British government, per Coalition "mandate," they sent their own men in and released over 100 prisoners in the process. Winning the hearts and minds, aren't we?

What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

(PARMA, Ohio) - Could an Ohio gas station be built atop an old Indian burial ground? That's what one man says in Parma, Ohio, an incorporated city southwest of Cleveland, where a gas station owner caught something he wasn't at all trying for. A security camera caught a blue ghost on video, and it seems to be in no apparent hurry; the recording lasted half an hour. It is not clear exactly how many people have observed this phenomena, or if its origin is truly from a Native American resting place. It is known that between 1950 and 1980, Parma's population soared from less than 20,000 to more than 110,000. That could perhaps account for quick development and even possibly, the paving of a burial ground. "I actually watched it for 30 minutes and then actually I watched it move and that is when I got freaked out," said the Marathon Gas Station's owner, Ameed Abuzahrieh. http://salem-news.com/articles/november142007/ohio_ghost_111407.php

Ruled over black majority for 15 years. 1965 UDI was attempt to maintain white rule. Ian Smith, the former Rhodesian prime minister who unilaterally declared independence from Britain to preserve white rule has died aged 88 after a long illness. Smith governed the country, now called Zimbabwe, for 15 years from 1964 to 1979, a turbulent period of guerilla war and international isolation. Seen by many as the symbol of colonial-era racism in Africa, Smith was unrepentant to the end, convinced that Zimbabwe would have been better off under minority rule than that of his successor, the current President Robert Mugabe, with whom he shared nothing but a disdain for Britain. Smith had recently suffered a stroke and died at a clinic in Cape Town. The son of a Scottish butcher, Smith was born in Rhodesia, then a British colony, in 1919, and educated in South Africa. He served as a RAF fighter pilot in the second world war, before returning home to become a government minister. During the 1960s, when independence movements were sweeping across Africa, the majority of the 200,000 white Rhodesians supported the idea of self-government. But they rejected the notion that the black majority, numbering about 5 million, should take over power.

Guantánamo detainees were denied Red Cross visits and mail, had criticism of the U.S. government or leaders censored from their letters and were isolated without Korans, according to a once-secret prison camps manual that has surfaced on the Internet. Though military spokesmen on Wednesday confirmed the March 2003 policy manual was authentic, they cited security needs at the remote Navy base in Cuba in declining to confirm specifics. ''Detention operations . . . have evolved significantly since 2003,'' said Army Lt. Col. Ed Bush, making clear that the Red Cross now can see all detainees. At issue was the sudden appearance on the Internet -- first on a website devoted to defense leaks, later on the online magazine Wired -- of the 238-page ''Camp Delta SOP,'' military jargon for Standard Operating Procedures at the prison camps broadly called Delta. A how-to manual, it draws back a curtain on the secretive, isolated base in 2003, more than a year into operation of the Bush administration prison.

A detailed insight into the inner workings of the Guantánamo detention camp, ranging from items allowed in cells to how many witnesses should be present for cavity searches, is provided in a leaked Pentagon manual.

Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) standard operating procedures (SOP) for Camp Delta (Guantanamo Bay prison). This is the primary document for the operation of Guantanamo bay, including the securing and treatment of detainees. The document is extensive and includes, in addition to its text, forms, identity cards and even muslim burial diagrams. It is signed by Major Miller, who Donald Rumsfeld later sent to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize it". It is the subject of an ongoing legal action between the ACLU, who has been trying to obtain the document, and the Department of Defense, who has withheld it in full. gitmo-sop.pdf

a. Phase One Behavior Management Plan (First thirty days or as directed
by JIG [Joint Intelligence Group]). The purpose of the Behavior Management
Plan is to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt
by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates
on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his
interrogator. During the first two weeks at Camp Delta, classify the
detainees as Level 5 and house in a Maximum Security Unit (MSU) Block.
During this time, the following conditions will apply...

I watched a few days ago one of Al Jazeera’s good programs "Without Frontiers" and it was about the city of Fallujah.. considering that it was the third anniversary of the Fallujah battle. I translated the most interesting portions of the program as there hardly is any news coming out of Iraq and especially Fellujah. Most interestingly I found out during that program that al Jazeera was the only TV network that managed to enter Fallujah during the first battle.. and the US’s condition to stop the battle, was that Al Jazeera should leave. This is how the United States "liberated" Iraq. This is how the United States hopes to spreads "freedom" and "democracy" throughout the Middle East. Anchor Ahmad Mansour gives a little background on the destruction inflicted on Fallujah by US forces before starting the discussion: 36000 homes ● 9000 shops ● 65 mosques ● 60 schools ● Historic city library ● All the government offices ● All the infrastructure of the city ● All Power stations ● Entire water treatment station ● Entire sewage system ● Entire communication system.

"A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact." – Mohamad Tareq, a Fallujah resident. Although reported by a handful media outlets at the time, the mainstream media took the official US denials at face value — that there had been no use of the illegal white phosphorus weapons on the inhabitants of Fallujah in December 2004. However the newly released movie (35 mb) from Italy’s RAI News 24 television programme blows the lie out of the water. Will we now see the mainstream media report the horrific crimes committed on the inhabitants of Fallujah?

Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.

"We're asking a lot of soldiers these days," said Roy Wallace, director of plans and resources for Army personnel. "They're humans. They have all sorts of issues back home and other places like that. So, I'm sure it has to do with the stress of being a soldier."

The neocons and their corporate masters intend nothing less than the total subjugation of every man woman and child in what could only be called a fascist military industrial hell state, similar to the one described by George Orwell in his prophetic novel - '1984'. This gang of corporations and politicians, which have stolen America, see the people as mere cattle to be used, lied to, and exploited, cattle to be fed into an endless meat grinder of wars for power and profit. The neocons envision a dark future of "Never ending war".

Everytime there is any 'rapprochement' between the Arabs and Americans, Israel will conduct a false flag. Remember Monica Lewinsky? Her 'scandal' with Clinton was very timely and also derailed a peace agreement that Israel didn't want to sign. Newly released British documents contain a claim by an unnamed contact that the Shin Bet security service collaborated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to hijack the June 1976 flight from Israel that was diverted to Entebbe, Uganda, the BBC reported Friday. Israel's rescue of the dozens of hostages taken in the hijacking of the Air France plane, popularly known as the Entebbe raid, is considered one of the most daring and successful operations in Israeli history. Elite Israel Defense Forces troops stormed the airport where the hostages, many of them Israeli, were held and overpowered the hijackers and Ugandan soldiers. Although the captors used the hijacking to demand the release of Palestinians or Palestinian supporters, a British government file on the incident quotes the unnamed source as telling a British diplomat in Paris that Israel was behind the hijacking. The claim is not known to be backed up by corroborating evidence, and the file does not make it clear whether the British government took the claim seriously.

Effie Eitam and Israel’s Denial of Shin Bet Involvement in Entebbe. You just KNOW it had to come…The panic-stricken denial, the outraged shrieking of ‘how dare you filthy Goyim accuse us Jews of anything untoward, immoral or unseemly’ and–almost as if it were legislatively imposed–the wailing of persecution and anti-Semitism. And so, true to form and as predictable as vultures at the scene of a 3-day-old road-kill, here ‘they’ come, meaning the makeup artists whose job it is to slap more rouge and mascara on the ugly, syphilitic whore known as Israel and try to do something about the smell of death and deception that follows her around like a black cloud everywhere she goes…In this case it deals with the recently-released British intelligence reports indicating that the famous Entebbe hijacking in 1976 (and subsequent rescue of the Jewish hostages from the ‘crazed Palestinian militants’ who were holding them) was the handiwork of–ONCE AGAIN, SURPRISE, SURPRISE, Israeli Intelligence. ‘Just in the knick of time’ as the old saying goes, since at that time the US was just about to begin important talks with the PLO over the Palestinian situation, all of which got flushed right down the toilet with this timely act of terrorism.

The man who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima passed away last week at the age of 92. Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. did not die from war wounds or violently at the hands of other people, years before his time. He died in hospice care, in a bed, from heart problems and strokes. In stark contrast, the more than 100,000 civilians who were killed at Hiroshima 62 years ago were burnt, melted, vaporized, in an apocalyptic act of warfare. Many died painful deaths over a period of days or weeks. Others saw family members consumed by flames. Most were far younger than Tibbets was when he finally died. Thousands were children. Is now the wrong time to discuss this? Tibbets called it a “damn big insult” when a Smithsonian exhibit commemorating Hiroshima’s fiftieth anniversary attempted to capture some of the suffering. If he didn’t think that was the right time for such reflection, then perhaps now is as good as any. Although he was offended to see the victims remembered, he had said that he meant no insult himself when he reenacted the bombing in Texas in 1976, complete with mushroom cloud. He said he slept fine every night. He consistently affirmed he’d do it all over again. [Incredibly], people disagree on whether the nuking was a war crime. [You'd have to be an American to disagree. -Denial- The rest of the world is in no doubt at all.]

Israeli Court Sentences Sheinbein to 24 Years. An Israeli court sentenced convicted murderer Samuel Sheinbein to 24 years in prison yesterday, saying the Maryland teenager had displayed "cruelty, wickedness and malice" in killing Alfredo Enrique Tello Jr. in Montgomery County two years ago. "The actual murder, together with the monstrous acts that were committed to the body, show that the sanctity of life and a person's dignity in both life and death are values to which the defendant attaches no significance," said Uri Goren, president of Tel Aviv District Court, reading in Hebrew from the sentencing document. Sheinbein, slightly pale but impassive, stood flanked by police, his hands clasped behind his back, as the sentence was delivered. "In light of his age, and in light of the severity of his actions, the defendant therefore deserves a severe and deterring punishment," Goren said. Sheinbein will be eligible to apply for furloughs of 24 to 96 hours beginning in 2003 and to apply for parole in 2013, when he is 33. He is also eligible for conjugal visits immediately.

The U.S. Justice Department has asked Israel to facilitate the extradition of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man suspected of raping and sexually abusing dozens of boys. Avrohom Mondrowitz was investigated by the New York Police Department in the 1980s and was indicted for sex crimes against four boys in Brooklyn, N.Y., but fled to Israel before he could be arrested. According to witness reports, 60-year-old Mondrowitz, a married father of seven, would pose as a psychologist specializing in the treatment of children that suffered sexual abuse. U.S. asks Israel to extradite Hassidic Jew wanted for molesting minors.

As Hitler shouted his way up the political ranks in Germany, the Guardian and Observer misjudged the extent of his early influence, writes Sir Ian Kershaw. By the time the Nazi party came to prominence by winning 107 seats (18.3% of the votes) in the Reichstag election of September 14 1930, British newspapers could not ignore Hitler and his movement. But, as Brigitte Granzow showed long ago in her book, A mirror of Nazism, the reportage was replete with distortions and misinterpretation. In an article on September 21 that year, the Observer echoed the widely held belief on the left that Hitler was the creature of big capital. It saw the real dangerman not as Hitler, but as the media tycoon and leader of the German National People's party, Alfred Hugenberg. The "Hugenberg manoeuvres", it stated, had aimed to promote both Communists and Nazis as a vehicle to weaken the organised working classes. "Hugenberg, and not Hitler, will ultimately call the Nazi tune."

A SENIOR counter-terrorism officer with the Australian Federal Police has testified that police were directed to charge "as many suspects as possible" with terrorism offences in order to test the new anti-terrorism laws introduced in 2003. The admission was made by federal agent Kemuel Lam Paktsun, the senior case officer on the Operation Newport investigation that led to the arrest of Sydney medical student Izhar Ul-Haque, whose trial was sensationally dismissed in the NSW Supreme Court yesterday. Agent Lam Paktsun's startling testimony came during a pre-trial hearing on October 24 that has not previously been reported, when he was questioned about the circumstances of Mr Ul-Haque's arrest in April 2004. "At the time we were directed, we were informed, to lay as many charges under the new terrorist legislation against as many suspects as possible because we wanted to use the new legislation," Mr Lam Paktsun testified. "So regardless of the assistance that Mr Ul-Haque could give, he was going to be prosecuted, charged, because we wanted to test the legislation and lay new charges, in our eagerness to use the legislation."

On October 31, Jim Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, offered his incredulity over the so-called Peru Free Trade Agreement, passed the House a few days later: I'm astounded that members of Congress would even consider passing more of these free trade agreements that workers hate.

Mr. Hoffa should understand by now that Congress is no friend of workers. Congress is a whorehouse long ago sold out to corporate interests. It acts as a rubber stamp factory for the globalist agenda. Even so, a sizeable number of Democrats voted against the free trade as in unhindered looting and pillaging bill, understanding well enough the possible wrath of voters, or at least the minority paying attention.

While the deal was easily approved in a 285-132 vote, more Democrats voted against the deal than supported it. Despite backing from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democratic leaders, 116 Democrats voted against the deal while 109 Democrats supported it. Eight Democrats did not cast votes, reports Ian Swanson, writing for the Hill.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the leadership's position and why you chose to do what you did this week.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: I think it’s very difficult to explain their position, because I don’t think their position is defensible. I think when you consider that our whole nation is at risk, our constitutional form of government has been undermined by lies, by illegal war, by massive debt, how can you explain the position of Democratic leaders?

I think that the American people and their response is becoming more and more powerful, and we’re seeing that there being rising discontent among Democrats in Congress about the direction that our leaders have said is not possible. I think that people want to see this administration held accountable. After all, what could be more important than having an opportunity to get to the truth of what happened in Iraq, that the war was based on lies; that over almost 4,000 of our brave young men and women who represent this country have lost their lives because of those lies; that over a million innocent Iraqis, noncombatants, civilians, have lost their lives because of those lies; that we will spend between one and two trillion dollars for this war, even borrowing money from China? And our whole domestic agenda is being capsized by this war. And the administration is preparing still to take us in another war against Iran, similarly lying about a cause for war. So what can be more important? Our country is at risk, and it’s time for our Democratic leaders to take a stand.

MOSCOW, Russia, November 13, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A young man dressed in military gear attacked a Moscow abortion clinic in an attempt to stop his girlfriend from undergoing an abortion, Interfax reported Nov. 8. Identified as ‘Alexander’, the student from the Ulyanovsk region burst into the hospital clinic wearing camouflage gear from his army service and carrying what appeared to be a grenade and a pistol. According to reports, the man took a nurse hostage and ordered her to take him to the operating room, arriving just before the doctors began the abortion. Begging his girlfriend not to have the abortion, he threatened the doctors, ordering them to release the girl. The man was restrained by guards and taken to a local police station. His grenade was discovered to be a plaster cast, while the pistol was an air gun. In his defense the man said he had not intended to do anything wrong, but that he loved Tatiana, the girl, and wanted to marry her and raise a child. He was released without charges. The couple married. Their child will be born next spring.

Washington D.C., America, November 13, 2006 A young man dressed in military gear attacked a Washington abortion clinic in an attempt to stop his girlfriend from undergoing an abortion. Identified as ‘Alexander’, the student from a mid western university burst into the hospital clinic wearing camouflage gear from his army service and carrying what appeared to be a grenade and a pistol. According to reports, the man took a nurse hostage and ordered her to take him to the operating room, arriving just before the doctors began the abortion. Begging his girlfriend not to have the abortion, he threatened the doctors, ordering them to release the girl. Police arrived and ordered the distraught student to lay down his weapon and give up. When Alexander hesitated police snipers shot him in the head seriously wounding him and accidentally wounding a nurse. The student's grenade was discovered to be a plaster cast, while the pistol was an air gun. Police said: "A tragedy was narrowly avoided, had they arrived any later innocent people could have been hurt. The police responded in in the only way they could have under the circumstances." Alexander died of his wounds the following day. Had he lived he would have faced many years in federal prison for acts of domestic terrorism. Tatiana, went back to the doctor and had the abortion. She has since joined the U.S. Army and is now serving in Iraq.

According to a wide range of reports, several nuclear bombs were “lost” for 36 hours after taking off August 29/30, 2007 on a “cross-country journey” across the U.S., from U.S.A.F Base Minot in North Dakota to U.S.A.F. Base Barksdale in Louisiana. [1] Reportedly, in total there were six W80-1 nuclear warheads armed on AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs) that were “lost.” [2] The story was first reported by the Military Times, after military servicemen leaked the story.

TONY BLAIR privately conceded two weeks before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein did not have any usable weapons of mass destruction, Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, reveals today. John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), also "assented" that Saddam had no such weapons, says Cook. His revelations, taken from a diary that he kept as a senior minister during the months leading up to war, are published today in The Sunday Times. They shatter the case for war put forward by the government that Iraq presented "a real and present danger" to Britain. Cook, who resigned shortly before the invasion of Iraq, also reveals there was a near mutiny in the cabinet, triggered by David Blunkett, the home secretary, when it first discussed military action against Iraq. The prime minister ignored the "large number of ministers who spoke up against the war", according to Cook. He also "deliberately crafted a suggestive phrasing" to mislead the public into thinking there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, and he did not want United Nations weapons inspections to be successful, writes the former cabinet minister. Cook suggests that the government misled the House of Commons and asked MPs to vote for war on a "false prospectus".

The U.S. Treasury Department said on Wednesday publicly held U.S. debt breached $9 trillion this week for the first time ever, just five weeks after Congress had raised the statutory borrowing limit.

At the end of September, U.S. President George W. Bush signed a measure to increase the debt limit ceiling to $9.815 trillion from $8.965 trillion, allowing the government to keep issuing debt.

The increase in the debt limit is the fifth since Bush took office in January 2001. The U.S. debt stood at about $5.6 trillion at the start of his presidency.

In approving the debt limit increase, Congressional lawmakers said the $850 billion increase should be large enough to allow the government to continue borrowing into 2009, well beyond next year's presidential and congressional elections.

The Bush administration estimated the U.S. federal budget deficit for fiscal 2007 would total $163 billion. The deficit for the year ended Sept. 30 narrowed by 34.3 percent from the $248 billion gap in fiscal 2006. (Reporting by Nancy Waitz; editing by Gary Crosse)

Declassified Documents and Key Participants Show the Importance of Phony Intelligence in the Origins of the Iraq War. CBS News’ 60 Minutes exposure last night of the Iraqi agent known as CURVEBALL has put a major aspect of the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq back under the spotlight. Rafid Ahmed Alwan’s charges that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons and the mobile plants to produce them formed a critical part of the U.S. justification for the invasion in Spring 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s celebrated and globally televised briefing to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, relied on CURVEBALL as the main source of intelligence on the biological issue. Today the National Security Archive posts the available public record on CURVEBALL’s information derived from declassified sources and former officials’ accounts. While most of the documentary record on the issue remains classified, the materials published here today underscore the precarious nature of the intelligence gathering and analytical process, and point to the existence of doubts about CURVEBALL’s authenticity before his charges were featured in the Bush administration’s public claims about Iraq.

U.S. State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry Publish Record of Dobrynin-Kissinger "Back Channel" Meetings, Based on First-time Access to Classified Soviet-Era Documents. In February 1972, with the Moscow summit approaching, Kissinger met with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, who was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State William Rogers, to talk about what the Secretary knew and did not know about “the state of U.S.-Soviet relations.” Commenting on the meeting in his memorandum of conversation forwarded to Moscow, Dobrynin observed that it was a “unique situation when the Special Assistant to the President secretly informs a foreign ambassador about what the Secretary of State knows and does not know.” This memorandum appears for the first time in an extraordinary State Department collection of U.S. and Soviet documents on the Dobrynin-Kissinger meetings, produced through a U.S.-Russian cooperative effort, with selections posted on-line today by the National Security Archive.

The national Anti-Defamation League fired its New England regional director yesterday, one day after he broke ranks with national ADL leadership and said the human rights organization should acknowledge the Armenian genocide that began in 1915.

The firing of Andrew H. Tarsy, who had served as regional director for about two years and as civil rights counsel for about five years before that, prompted an immediate backlash among prominent local Jewish leaders against the ADL's national leadership and its national director, Abraham H. Foxman.

"My reaction is that this was a vindictive, intolerant, and destructive act, ironically by an organization and leader whose mission -- fundamental mission -- is to promote tolerance," Newton businessman Steve Grossman, a former ADL regional board member, said yesterday.

"I predict that Foxman's actions will precipitate wholesale resignations from the regional board, a meaningful reduction in ADL's regional fund-raising, and will further exacerbate the ADL's relationship with the non-Jewish community coming out of this crisis around the Armenian genocide."

Tarsy, 38, said he had been struggling with the national position for weeks and finally told Foxman in a phone conversation Thursday that he found the ADL's stance "morally indefensible."

Wellstone's political life was dominated by his efforts to improve economic and social conditions for millions of Americans. He began as a community organizer during the 1970's, advocating on behalf of working families and the poor for better health care, affordable housing, better public education, day care and other essential programs and policies. Through these activities, he created a powerful network of activists, union members, farmers and other newly involved citizens. The effectiveness of this network made the difference in his long-shot 1990 campaign for US Senate against Rudy Boschwitz, an entrenched incumbent with far greater financial resources. Over the next twelve years, Senator Wellstone served as a tireless advocate for environmental protections, labor rights, victims of domestic violence, veterans, campaign finance reform and sensible US foreign policy. Wellstone's Senate career began, and tragically ended, in remarkably similar fashion. His first months in office were defined by his opposition to President George H. W. Bush's 1991 "Gulf War" against Iraq, and some twelve years later, his last weeks in office were defined by his vote against another Bush administration, and against another push for war in Iraq. On October 11, 2002, Wellstone was one of only twenty-three senators to cast a vote against the fateful Iraq War Resolution. The week before, on October 3, Wellstone addressed the proposed attack upon and occupation of Iraq in a speech given from the floor of the Senate. "The United States could send tens of thousands of US troops to fight in Iraq," he said, "and in so doing, we could risk countless lives of US soldiers and innocent Iraqis." "The United States could face soaring oil prices," he said, "and could spend billions, both on a war and on a years-long effort to stabilize Iraq after an invasion." "Authorizing the pre-emptive, go-it-alone use of force now," he said, "right in the midst of continuing efforts to enlist the world community to back a tough new disarmament resolution on Iraq, could be a costly mistake for our country." A week and a day later, the IWR passed in the Senate. Five days after that vote, it was signed into law by George W. Bush. Nine days after that signature, five years ago, Paul Wellstone was gone.

The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction. The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes. The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed. At the beginning of October, Israel's military censor began to allow the local media to report on the raid without attributing their report to foreign sources. Nevertheless, details of the strike have remained clouded in mystery.

Gaia theory creator says ‘dark time’ will leave only 500 million, ‘but for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.’

Six billion dead. That’s the latest magic number from the eco-left that’s designed to scare the world into global warming action. Climate extremist James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia theory, used it predicting mankind will almost be wiped out by 2100 from global warming.

Lovelock told Rolling Stone that predictions of the earth’s warming will be “nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Rolling Stone summed it up by saying “The human race is doomed,” in a story posted on its site October 17. Only as few as 500 million will survive “with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes – Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.”

Ironically, the aging scientist didn’t advocate for typical eco-solutions. In fact, he said they won’t work and advocates for nuclear power. “To Lovelock, cutting greenhouse-gas pollution won’t make much difference at this point, and much of what passes for sustainable development is little more than a scam to profit off disaster,” wrote Jeff Goodell. “‘Green,’ he tells me, only half-joking, ‘is the color of mold and corruption.’”

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is.

My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the "Collapse Gap" – to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the Cold War.

Slide [2] The subject of economic collapse is generally a sad one. But I am an optimistic, cheerful sort of person, and I believe that, with a bit of preparation, such events can be taken in stride. As you can probably surmise, I am actually rather keen on observing economic collapses. Perhaps when I am really old, all collapses will start looking the same to me, but I am not at that point yet.

And this next one certainly has me intrigued. From what I've seen and read, it seems that there is a fair chance that the U.S. economy will collapse sometime within the foreseeable future. It also would seem that we won't be particularly well-prepared for it. As things stand, the U.S. economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act. And so I am eager to put my observations of the Soviet collapse to good use.

Bargaining while buying some trinkets in the Maldivian capital, Male, recently, I heard most unexpected words: "You can keep your dollars."

This tiny nation of 1,200 islands has long accepted U.S. currency out of convenience for visitors and financial sobriety. The dollar tended to do better in global markets than the local monetary unit, the rufiyaa. That may be changing and it's a bad omen for the world's reserve currency.

``My dollars aren't as popular here as they've been in the past,'' says Moyez Mahfouz, 51, who has visited the Maldives from Bahrain with his family once or twice a year for a decade. ``More and more on this trip, I'm being asked for rufiyaa.''

These things start out slowly, and in recent months I have had similar experiences from Mexico to Vietnam. In markets, restaurants, taxis and tourist shops that long accepted dollars, many are opting for local currency. The reason: concerns the dollar plunge that analysts have predicted for years is afoot and that the U.S. is uninterested in halting it.

Richard Hayes Phillips claims to hate politics.

He much prefers being alone in the woods, where he has recently been doing trail work as a volunteer for the Lake George Land Conservancy.

Nonetheless, the 56-year-old scientist, folk singer and former professor has spent months over the last three years investigating what he believes was widespread election fraud in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election.

Phillips testified in two lawsuits related to the election and recently finished a book about his findings, "Witness to a Crime: A Citizen's Audit of an American Election," which Kent State University Press hopes to release in the spring.

"The election was rigged for Bush," Phillips claimed recently at a Bolton Landing diner. "The most glaring discrepancies almost always helped Bush and hurt Kerry."

The General Secretary of the Union of Political Prisoners and Detainees in Iraq, Muhammad Adham al-Hamd declared that the US occupation administration in Iraq relies on systematic rape, torture, and sadistic treatment of Iraqi women prisoners in its prison camps in the country. Al-Hamd said that the enormous crimes being committed against women in the prison camps in occupied Iraq have the support and blessings of the US military, for whom the practices serve as a means to bring psychological pressure on men engaged in the Resistance, in an attempt to break their spirit and fighting will.

Muhammad Adham al-Hamd made the comments in a statement regarding reports that confirmed the presence of large numbers of women in the American-run prison camps – women who are detained solely to be raped and abused in order to bring pressure upon their husbands, brothers, sons or fathers. IRAQ: Child prisoners abused and tortured, say activists

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has condemned US president's war rhetoric on Iran, saying he belongs in a psychiatric hospital.

"The US President (George W. Bush) made an atomic bomb threat," Chevez said on Thursday, referring to Bush's war rhetoric against Iran.

"In other words, he's threatening a third world war but now with atomic weapons. It's like he should be taken to the psychiatric hospital. I think he's on the edge of the psychiatric hospital," he added.

Last week Bush claimed Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, adding this may lead to World War III. His remarks drew fierce domestic and international criticism.

Who runs America? Is it the people, our politicians, or the media? We know that "the people" is not the answer, because the people are opposed to the Iraq War, the police state, globalism, a North American Union, the continuing invasion of illegal immigrants, abortion, homosexuality, ad infinitum. But the media could care less what the people want. They label the average American as bigoted, racist and stupid. The politicians follow the lead of the media. Any politician who does not is blacklisted, smeared, and defamed by the media. All who go along with the socialist/fascist agenda of the media become "media darlings" and are promoted to stardom on TV and in newsmagazines and newspapers. So, if the media is king, then who is it that runs the media?

The barely reported highlight of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran for the Caspian Sea summit last week was a key face-to-face meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A high-level diplomatic source in Tehran tells Asia Times Online that essentially Putin and the Supreme Leader have agreed on a plan to nullify the George W Bush administration's relentless drive towards launching a preemptive attack, perhaps a tactical nuclear strike, against Iran. An American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia.

In itself, the Putin-Khamenei meeting was extraordinary, because the Supreme Leader rarely receives foreign statesmen for closed talks, even one as crucial as Putin. The Russian president, according to the diplomatic source, told the Supreme Leader he may hold the ultimate solution regarding the endlessly controversial Iranian nuclear dossier. According to IRNA, the Supreme Leader, after stressing that the Iranian civilian nuclear program will continue unabated, said. "We will ponder your words and proposal."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday said he plans to buy 5,000 Dragunov sniper rifles from Russia to protect the oil-rich nation from a possible U.S. invasion.

The self-styled socialist revolutionary and open critic of Washington has bolstered the OPEC nation's weaponry by buying planes, helicopters and assault rifles from Russia to prepare for a guerrilla-style resistance to a foreign invader.

"I'm going to buy 5,000 Dragunov rifles from Russia ... with telescopic sight, the best in the world, with infrared night-view," Chavez said during his weekly Sunday broadcast held on a beach along Venezuela's eastern coast.

Think of this as part two of Recherche du trillions perdu, my Online Journal article on Dov Zakheim, former Bush appointee as Pentagon Comptroller from May 4, 2001 to March 10, 2004. At that time he was unable to explain the disappearance of $1 trillion dollars. Actually, nearly three years earlier, Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10, 2001 that an audit discovered $2.3 trillion was also missing from the Pentagon books. That story, as I mentioned, was buried under 9-11’s rubble. The two sums disappeared on Zakheim’s watch. Yet on May 6, 2004, Zakheim took a lucrative position at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most prestigious strategy consulting firms in the world. One of its clients then was Blessed Relief, a charity said to be a front for Osama bin Laden. Booz, Allen & Hamilton then also worked closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the research arm of the Department of Defense. So the dark card was shifted to another part of the deck.

What is the most outrageous piece of news that isn’t being discussed? I would venture to say it is the strange tale of Dov Zakheim and the missing trillions. I hear all kinds of numbers. I hear 2.3 trillion from Rumsfield and I hear about one trillion that Zakheim can’t explain. Still, you’ll need to check the dates of Zakheim’s days in the saddle as Pentagon Comptroller and then you can wonder to your hearts content. There’s no doubt the money is gone and there’s no doubt about who should know where it went but…what do I know? I know one trillion dollars is a lot of money. Isn’t one trillion dollars a million million? Zounds!!! Has the cost of the entire Iraqi incursion come to a trillion dollars yet? It certainly isn’t anywhere near 2.3 trillion. Why isn’t this under discussion? Is it just too big a thing, too enormous to comprehend, that our minds go blank when we think about it? Hmmm…

Weapons inspector David Kelly was the decent man apparently hounded to suicide after exposing Tony Blair's lies on Iraq. But the crusading MP Norman Baker felt sure there was something more to his death - and gave up his front-bench role to investigate the case. In the Mail he revealed extraordinary evidence that he believes proves Kelly did not take his own life and was instead murdered by Iraqi dissidents. Here, he reveals how the murder may have been carried out... While investigating the death of Dr David Kelly I have made many strange discoveries, not least some disturbing parallels with the case of a young American journalist named Danny Casolaro. Mr Casolaro made himself deeply unpopular with elements in the murky world of U.S. defence by probing too deeply into their activities. One morning in August 1991, he was found dead in a hotel room near Harpers Ferry in Virginia. He was in the bath, naked, with his wrist slashed. There were no signs of bruising or other marks on the body and the police concluded that he had committed suicide. But this was totally false according to Dr Christopher Green, who was the CIA's chief forensic pathologist for decades. Dr Green participated in Casolaro's autopsy and last year he told veteran White House reporter Sterling Seagrave that the young journalist had been killed before being stripped, put in a full bath, and his left wrist cut in precisely the same manner as Dr Kelly's. And as with Dr Kelly, there was remarkably little blood, bar a small amount smeared on the edge of the tub, suggesting that the wrist wound had been inflicted after the heart had stopped pumping. This compelling demonstration of how effectively a murder can be disguised as suicide drove me on in my search for the truth about Dr Kelly, who was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood on July 18, 2003, having apparently taken his own life.

Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death. For Tony Blair it was a glorious day. He was in the United States being feted by the U.S. Congress and President Bush. Their adulation was such that he was being offered the rare honour of a Congressional Gold Medal. Naturally enough, Bush and his administration were hugely grateful for Blair's decision to join the United States in its invasion of Iraq. That invasion was supposed to lead to the discovery and disposal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and make the world a safer place. But as Blair was lapping up the grateful plaudits from the U.S. Congress on July 17, 2003, the man who had done more than almost any other individual on earth to contain the threat from WMD lay dead in the woods at Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire.

Aribert Heim, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals still thought to be at liberty, was hunted down and killed by a Jewish death squad in 1982, a new book claims. Danny Baz, a retired colonel in the Israeli air force, claims in a book published in France this week that the Austrian death camp doctor was tracked down in the United States by a Jewish search-and-destroy squad called "The Owl" and shot dead. The group's members, which included Mr Baz, are said to have been veterans of the Israeli and American militaries. Heim is known as the Butcher of Mauthausen after carrying out medical experiments on concentration camp inmates in the Austrian death camp. He removed human organs without anaesthetic to see how long victims lived. But after the Second World War he served only two years in jail before resuming work as a gynecologist in Baden-Baden. Alerted of his imminent arrest, Heim disappeared in 1962 and has never been seen since - though there have been alleged sightings over the years in Egypt, Uruguay, Chile and more recently in Spain. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has placed him second on its list of targets under "Operation Last Chance" - a final effort to track Nazi criminals before old age takes them - and in July Austria offered £35,000 for information leading to his capture.

Un fascinant document à paraître le 16 octobre raconte la traque d'un des derniers grands criminels nazis. En avant-première, rencontre avec Danny Baz, qui fut un des acteurs de l'opération. «Je mange, bois, respire Aribert Heim.» L'homme qui a écrit cette phrase est de passage à Paris. Il arrive de Kinshasa. L'Afrique noire semble le fasciner. Là-dessus, on n'en saura pas plus. Petites lunettes cerclées de fer blanc, cheveux courts poivre et sel, le regard un peu torve, conséquence d'une blessure à l'oeil droit, signe extérieur du baroudeur, il doit avoir une petite cinquantaine. Cet homme s'appelle Danny Baz. Ça ne vous dit rien. C'est normal. Lorsque vous lirez son livre *, vous ne l'oublierez plus. Ne cherchez pas à voir son visage : il n'y aura pas de photos de lui dans la presse. L'homme ne veut pas apparaître. Pas envie d'être la victime d'un néonazi surexcité qui le reconnaîtrait. On ne sait jamais.

About a month ago, I received a five-minute long thermal imaging video from a well-placed source, who chooses to remain anonymous. I made copies for a few key people and solicited their interpretation of what we were looking at. What we concluded, in fact, is that this extraordinary video has the potential to break the TWA Flight 800 case wide open. The video had been shot from a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion that had been flying almost directly above TWA Flight 800 when it exploded off the coast of Long Island on the night of July 17, 1996. For the record, the P-3 is a long-range, antisubmarine warfare patrol aircraft with advanced submarine detection and avionics equipment.

Modern economists are obsessed with the idea of "growth" - credit growth, money growth, economic growth - the list goes on. But the questions we must ask are: Is this growth sustainable? Is the whole concept of economic growth based on credit valid? Has it ever worked in the past? What I intend to do is to illustrate an historical cycle which occurred in the major financial centres which were based on, or extensively relied on, "paper" money. In other words, they relies on credit. I will concentrate on certain European economies and focus on the pattern running from Genoa to Amsterdam to London to New York. To illustrate two different types of economy which fall outside this pattern, I will refer to Venice of the fifteenth century and the Ottoman Empire prior to 1800 to illustrate prosperity without the extensive use of credit. This talk will concentrate on "currency", for as Lord Keynes pointed out: "There is no subtler or surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency." So the nature of currency is crucial. Now, before leaping off into history, I will first touch on money and its function, and explain some of the transactions to which we will refer in the course of this essay.

Extrapolating freely from the documented history of blowback, Johnson speculates that we have already entered the "last days" of the Republic. America's post-World War II "imperialism," he predicts, will soon put an end to self-government in the United States: "I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent." The destruction of the American Republic may even illustrate a profound historical regularity, he implies: "Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny." He even thinks that the American military is now "ripe" for "a Julius Caesar"--that is, for "a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path."

Johnson's conviction that imperialism tends to transform democracies into autocracies is based largely on his study of ancient Rome. He argues that the basic dynamics of Rome's imperial adventures and annexation of conquered territory ushered in the collapse of the Roman Republic. As sporadic and regional military campaigns were replaced by continuous and distant ones, Rome's citizen army had to be replaced by a standing army. Loyal not to political classes in Rome but to their commanders in the field, the professionalized Roman legions made it possible for Caesar to initiate the dismantling of the Republic brought to a conclusion by his grand-nephew Augustus.

"Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end," Johnson writes, adding that "Bush has unleashed a political crisis comparable to the one Julius Caesar posed for the Roman constitution," threatening to subvert the traditional constitutional order and put dictatorship in its place.

Through startling interviews with perpetrators, witnesses and victims, GHOSTS OF ABU GHRAIB examines and contextualizes the abuses that occurred in the fall of 2003 at the notorious Iraqi prison abuses documented in photographs that are etched in our national consciousness. The film probes the psychology of how typical American men and women came to commit these atrocious acts and, on a parallel track, explores the policy decisions that eroded our compliance with the Geneva Conventions and contributed to making the abuse a reality. Ultimately, the film asks what these events say about America, our government, our military and our human nature.

[The] following is the transcript of the conversation between George W. Bush and José Marìa Aznar in Crawford, Texas, on February 22, 2003. It is an English translation of the text published in El Paìs on September 26, 2007. President Bush: Saddam Hussein won't change and he'll continue playing games. The time has come to get rid of him. That's it. As for me, I'll try from now on to use a rhetoric that's as subtle as can be while we're seeking approval of the resolution. If anyone vetoes [Russia, China, and France together with the US and the UK have veto power in the Security Council, being permanent members], we'll go. Saddam Hussein isn't disarming. We have to catch him right now. Until now we've shown an incredible amount of patience. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we'll be militarily ready. I think we'll get the second resolution. In the Security Council we have the three Africans [Cameroon, Angola, and Guinea], the Chileans, the Mexicans. I'll talk to all of them, also Putin, naturally. We'll be in Baghdad by the end of March. There's a 15 percent chance that at that point Saddam Hussein will be dead or will have fled. But those possibilities don't exist until we've shown our resolve.

Simultaneously, Russia and America Conduct Major War Games. There has been a virtual media blackout on the conduct of major military exercises by both Russia and the US. Reminiscent of the Cold War, Russia and America are conducting major war games simultaneously. The Russian Air Force will be conducting major military exercises over a large part of its territory from the 16th to the 30th of October. These Russian exercises coincide chronologically with the conduct of major US sponsored war games under Vigilant Shield 08, which are slated to take place from the 15th to the 20th of October. VS-08 was preceded by major naval exercises under Pacific Shield 07 hosted by Japan, involving the participation of Australia, France, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK, and the US. President Vladimir Putin announced in August that Russia would be resuming long-range bomber flights over the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union. (Associated Press, October 1, 2007). Moscow's resolve was in response to US-NATO threats directed against Russia including the militarization of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The US exercise code named Vigilant Shield 2008 (VS-08) is casually presented as an "anti-terrorist drill". While under the joint auspices of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, US Northern Command in liaison with NORAD is in charge of the operation. VS-08 includes a massive deployment of the US Air Force and Canada's Air Force. It resembles a war-time scenario with the deployment of bombers and fighter jets over the entire North American continent extending into the Arctic.

NATO and Russia have reached a historic agreement to combat common security threats in the post-September 11 era. The deal, establishing a joint council of the 19 NATO nations and Russia, was announced by NATO foreign ministers after meeting with their Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov. NATO Secretary-General George Robertson announced the deal. He said: "It is impossible to overstate the importance of this recognition, that NATO and Russia must stand side by side in defence of common values and interests in the face of the challenges of the new century." With the pact arising from Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for the West since the September 11 terror attacks, Russia took another significant step toward its former enemies, after agreeing Monday with Washington to shrink their nuclear arsenals. Capping an ambitious reform agenda to prepare for a summit in Prague in November, the ministers reviewed the alliance's plans to invite new members from eastern Europe, agreed to modernize NATO's military capabilities to respond to evolving threats and establish new relations with Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reached a breakthrough agreement on May 14, 1997, calling for a new era of cooperation between the former archenemies. The historic accord, which was formally ratified by Russia and NATO's 16 member nations at a May 27 ceremony in Paris, France, appeared to clear the way for NATO's expansion into Central and Eastern Europe. In July 1997 NATO is expected to invite the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to become NATO members. The agreement followed months of diplomacy intended to soften Russian opposition to NATO enlargement. Russia has repeatedly protested that NATO's expansion into the territory of states that were once allied with the Warsaw Pact—a defunct military alliance of East European Communist nations and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—was provocative and threatened Russian security.

Sanctions enforced by the UN on Iraq since the Gulf War have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, including over half a million children - many of whom weren't even born when the Gulf War began. On 2 August 1990 the Iraqi army invaded its southern neighbour, Kuwait. Four days later the United Nations responded by imposing a complete trade embargo on Iraq. In the ten years since Iraq has continued to be the subject of sanctions that affect almost every aspect of life for the average woman, man and child. With imports of food and medicine severely restricted, malnutrition and disease is now endemic in what was once one of the healthiest countries in the world. A 1999 Unicef report calculated that more than half a million children had died as a direct result of sanctions. On average 200 hundred Iraqi children are dying every day. In September 1998, Denis Halliday head of the UN humanitarian programme in Iraq resigned claiming he could no longer administer 'an immoral and illegal' policy. His successor, Hans von Sponeck also later resigned, along with the head of the World Food Programme. Meanwhile US and UK politicians insist that the sanctions regime is necessary to contain the threat of Saddam Hussein. When asked on US television whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of sanctions was justified Madelaine Albright replied "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it." On 6 March 2000 the film 'Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq' was broadcast on British television. It was written and presented by John Pilger and produced and directed by Alan Lowery. JohnPilger.com

You are aware that we have come form Serbia, from Kosovo and Metohija, the Serbian Jerusalem, the cradle of Serbian spirituality, Serbian culture and Serbian statehood. There - where our roots lie, where the spiritual identity of the people was created, where numerous sacred sites are located (1300 churches and monasteries), built and erected over the course of almost a millennium – today, mostly as a result of the operations undertaken by NATO, we find ourselves in grave danger of the last traces of our existence being obliterated. How did this come to be? Is this possible at the beginning of the 21st century? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is possible. It is possible thanks precisely to the operations of NATO under the conductor’s baton of Washington and Brussels. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the clasp that binds Europe and North America, was established in 1949 with a mission to guarantee the freedom and security of all its member states by political and military means. A noble purpose, indeed: worthy of all praise. Unfortunately, that purpose has been abandoned, namely, since the end of the Cold War in the 90s (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union), NATO, in order to justify its existence, is in search of a new purpose and establishing different priorities.

Under new rules proposed by the Transport Security Administration (TSA) (pdf), all airline passengers would need advance permission before flying into, through, or over the United States regardless of citizenship or the airline's national origin.

Currently, the Advanced Passenger Information System, operated by the Customs and Border Patrol, requires airlines to forward a list of passenger information no later than 15 minutes before flights from the US take off (international flights bound for the US have until 15 minutes after take-off). Planes are diverted if a passenger on board is on the no-fly list.

The new rules mean this information must be submitted 72 hours before departure. The TSA held a public hearing in Washington DC on 20 September, which heard comments from both privacy advocates and airline industry representatives from Qantas, the Regional Airline Association, IATA, and the American Society of Travel Agents. The privacy advocates came from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Identity Project. All were negative.

The proposals should be withdrawn entirely, argued Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad and the leading expert on travel data privacy. "Obscured by the euphemistic language of 'screening' is the fact that travellers would be required to get permission before they can travel."

La Revolución Cubana, durante casi media centuria, ha tenido que enfrentar crecientes obstáculos que se interponen al mejor desenvolvimiento del país, a causa del más inhumano bloqueo impuesto por el imperialismo de Estados Unidos de América (EE.UU.). En rigor, se trata de un sistema de agresiones socio-económicas, ideo-políticas y militares —incluyendo medidas de carácter internacional—, todo lo cual ha devenido escenario sin parangón en la Historia escrita. Un breve recuento conduce a observar cómo la pasada década, tras el derrumbe del Socialismo que lideró la ex Unión Soviética, se apostó a que el proceso revolucionario cubano sería la próxima víctima. Fueron los tiempos en que Bush I —el padre del actual inquilino de la Casa Blanca— estaba seguro de que tendría el placer de ser el primer presidente en visitar la Cuba post-Castro. El momento era oportuno para arreciar el engendro imperial. En ese contexto, en plena campaña electoral, ante una maniobra de su contrincante Clinton en torno a un proyecto anticubano, en 1992 papá Bush aprobó la Ley Torricelli, precisamente en la “república bananera” de Miami, derivándose una triple lectura: primera, había que aprovechar la influencia de la terrorista mafia gusano-yanqui radicada en La Florida con vistas a las elecciones presidenciales; segunda, se incrementaría la ascendencia de dicha mafia sobre el futuro mandatario de EE.UU.; y tercera, en consecuencia, serían mayores las agresiones imperiales contra Cuba.

For 15 consecutive years, the general assembly of the United Nations has voted in favor of lifting the economic sanctions that seriously harm the Cuban people, especially the most vulnerable sectors. The international community is unanimous on this issue, with the majority continually increasing. In 2006, 183 countries condemned the cruel and illegal state of siege that Washington imposes on Cuba. In vain. As if deaf, the U.S. government persists in applying an inhumane, anachronistic and ineffectual policy that has been in place since July 1960. [1] The sanctions have cost the Cuban economy more than $89,000 million since then. In 2006 Cuba lost nearly $4,000 million as a direct consequence of this brutal policy. Not only can the Caribbean island not export any product to the U.S., nor import anything, but it does not even have the authorization to establish commercial dealings with U.S. companies located in other countries, which is in flagrant violation of international law. Cuba cannot obtain credits of any kind from international financial institutions and are prohibited from using the U.S. dollar in its transactions with the rest of the world. [2]

Last month, Maine became the first state to pass legislation declining participation in the national ID system mandated by the Real ID Act of 2005. State-level legislation either repudiating Real ID, asking Congress to repeal its worst privacy-violating provisions, or asking for a delay while states study the issue, exists in various stages (sometimes passed by one House but not the other), or is being considered, in other states: as of this writing, the list consists of Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, Washington State, and Wyoming. In other words, a state-led rebellion against Real ID is brewing. Let’s review the relevant history.

La Higuera, el pueblo donde murió el líder revolucionario, es el centro del proyecto. Luego del hallazgo en 1997 de los restos del guerrillero, enterrado secretamente en una fosa cerca de Vallegrande (700 kilómetros al sureste de La Paz), las autoridades bolivianas crearon la 'Ruta del Che', un circuito que sigue los viajes que Guevara hizo por la selva. "La idea es difundir el pensamiento del 'Che' a través de un turismo ordenado y respetuoso de los pobladores", dice Edil Peña Rojas, presidente de los guías de la Ruta del Che y miembro de la Fundación del Che, que mantiene en Vallegrande su patrimonio revolucionario. El circuito, que parte de Santa Cruz, segunda ciudad boliviana, atraviesa varias decenas de kilómetros de selva. Unos 2.000 turistas de todos los continentes llegan a esta región montañosa, especialmente en octubre, para asistir a las conmemoraciones que se organizan por la muerte del guerrillero argentino.

Forty years ago, Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia by the Bolivian army helped by the CIA. Today situation is Bolivia and rest of Latin America is changing fast. It is becoming clear every day that the leftist trend is becoming dominant in the area. Today Bolivia, under the leadership of President Evo Morales has become the leading center of leftism and opposition to the hegemonic American policies. Venezuela, under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez has also emerged as a similar center. Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez paid homage to Che Guevara. Hugo Chavez called him “ infinite revolutionary”. Evo Morales also described him as a great and dedicated revolutionary. Raul Castro, brother of Fidel Castro also participated in the event to remember Che Guevara in the Cuban town of Santa Clara, where he once fought as revolutionary. Che Guevara was a medical doctor and was born in Argentina. He fought along with Fidel Castro, in the Cuban revolutionary war. He is still remembered as a great revolutionary in Cuba. Every Friday, the school children dressed in red and white recite that they want to become like Che Guevara. To them he is a great personality who represents honesty, courage and internationalism. (Ben © Heine)

The 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara elicited considerable media attention, mostly about his iconic image captured on T-shirts throughout the world. There were the standard snarky asides that many young people wearing those T-shirts have scant notion of who Che was, but the journalists reporting the story seemed equally ignorant. Little was reported about Che's life and what led him to shun the comforts of a physician's lifestyle in Argentina to fight as a revolutionary in the rugged terrains of Cuba, the Congo and finally in Bolivia - or why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the world's poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent. One exception was the BBC, which bothered to send a reporter to Florida to interview Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA agent who was part of a team of CIA operatives and Bolivian soldiers who captured Che. "Mr. Rodriguez ordered the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully, to remain consistent with the Bolivian government's story that Che had been killed in action in a clash with the Bolivian army," said the BBC report. Che's hands were then cut off and put in formaldehyde to preserve his fingerprints. (Ben © Heine)

The world of Phillip II sits at the heart of the Golden Century of Spain. Its empire spanned the globe. It was the envy of Europe. Its coffers bulged with silver and gold from the New World. Spanish armies brought repression to the Low Countries and threatened destruction and ruin to England in the Elizabethan age. The great historian Fernand Braudel portrayed it as a period of dramatic rise; the 1. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (3 vols., 1949). Reformation was checked; a new “Mediterranean World” was crafted.11. But was it truly the siglo de oro–was it not instead the era of conflicts and repression? This period produced one great work of literature that ranks ahead of all others. It is the tale of Don Quixote de la Mancha, authored in two parts by Miguel Cervantes. In our literary canon, the novel has come to dominate the other forms in modern times. And with respect to the novel we can say, “in the beginning was Cervantes.” The genre springs from his work. And even today, after four hundred years, how many novels can begin to compete with this one? It is a work of amazing flexibility; it piles layer upon layer of meaning. It can be studied in universities and performed in Broadway musicals. Cervantes’s genius was to be simultaneously great, complex, subtle, and yet packed with immediate popular appeal. Cervantes fills a great panorama and he perfects the art of the tragicomedy. What seems at first blush a farce, a comic send-up, turns into a work filled with pain, loss, horror and introspection. What seems at first shallow soon emerges, especially in the second part, as a work of great philosophical depth; of wit and profound and timeless wisdom. I have read Don Quixote three times in my life; the last time just now.

In one of the longest-held secrets of the Cold War, the U.S. Army explored the potential for using radioactive poisons to assassinate "important individuals" such as military or civilian leaders, according to newly declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press. Approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948, the effort was a well-hidden part of the military's pursuit of a "new concept of warfare" using radioactive materials from atomic bombmaking to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations. Military historians who have researched the broader radiological warfare program said in interviews that they had never before seen evidence that it included pursuit of an assassination weapon. Targeting public figures in such attacks is not unheard of; just last year an unknown assailant used a tiny amount of radioactive polonium-210 to kill Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London.

"Big Brother" is how Orwell depicted the totalitarian state in which human individuality, freedom, choice, and lives are subordinated to the needs of the "state". Every means is, therefore, justified to maintain the omnipresent state in power. Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. --1984, Chapter I, Part I, George Orwell

The mainstream media are continuing to use figures provided by the website Iraq Body Count (IBC) to sell the public a number for total post-invasion deaths of Iraqis that is perhaps 5-10% of the true death toll.

As we recently reported, only a handful of media outlets covered a new ORB poll revealing that 1.2 million Iraqis had been murdered since the 2003 invasion. BBC Online provided a rare example:

“A UK-based polling agency, Opinion Research Business (ORB), said it had extrapolated the figure by asking a random sample of 1,461 Iraqi adults how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

“The results lend weight to a 2006 survey of Iraqi households published by the Lancet, which suggested that about 655,000 Iraqi deaths were 'a consequence of the war'.

“However, these estimates are both far higher than the running total of reported civilian deaths maintained by the campaign group Iraq Body Count which puts the figure at between 71,000 and 78,000.” (BBC Online, ’US contractors in Iraq shootout,’ September 17, 2007; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6998458.stm)

Every country must surrender their sovereignty in order to establish the One World Order. This is facilitated by the globalists and their American minions, abetted by the obedience-trained U.S. Congress. Economic destabilization, with or without military blitzkriegs (a.k.a. major acts of terrorism) is an effective method for taking over a vulnerable country. The play-for-pay political puppets are installed or replaced according to their compliance to the globalist handlers. The elite affluent men behind the curtain remain the same: big banks and multi-national businesses. The privatization of so many government functions has stripped Congress, with their compromised consent, of congressional approval and oversight which is mandated by congressional law.

The privatization of warfare, rendition flights, torture, and economic destabilization has produced numerous enemies and vehement animosity. Most Americans, who get their daily dose of government-friendly 1984 Orwellian-style propaganda, have no idea why foreigners hate us.

Countries with huge populations of indigenous, brown-skinned “enemies” seem particularly vulnerable to resource pilfering, together with the atrocities and massacres that accompany such activities. After all, they are “uncivilized” and standing in the way of our “national interests,” without appreciation or vision for what their resources could produce in our insatiable, more sophisticated society. Incredulous Americans, comfy at home, don’t like hearing about the bloody, gory details. However, there are astute foreign leaders, though U.S. media-demonized, who won’t readily acquiesce to economic assailants or conform to globalist demands. In addition to the Middle East, the resource-rich countries of South America have been especially targeted.

"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot."

The Night of the Long Knives is seen by many as the turning point where Hitler made it clear that he was above the law and the supreme leader of the German people.

Durkin Uncovered Information That She Said Troubled Her Just Before She Was Killed in Afghanistan. There is a new mystery in Afghanistan and at its heart is the death of a U.S. soldier and the family she left behind. Top lawmakers have gotten involved and are seeking answers from the Pentagon about Ciara Durkin and the details surrounding her death. She was killed by a gunshot wound, inside the tightly secured Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Massachusetts Army National Guard Spc. Ciara Durkin, 29, on home leave in early September, gave her siblings what now seems ominous advice. She told them that if anything were to happen to her while she was serving to investigate. Friday, Ciara was found dead near a church in the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. She had been shot in the head. So far, the Army only has said that her death was not combat related. "We need answers.

A soldier killed in Afghanistan last week told her family they should press for answers if anything happened to her, reports CBS station WBZ-TV in Boston. Spc. Ciara Durkin, 30, of Quincy, Mass., was shot in the head last week outside a chapel near her office at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The Department of Defense reported Durkin was not killed in action. Durkin's sister, Fiona Canavan, told the Patriot Ledger on Wednesday that when her sister was home three weeks ago, she told her about something she had come across that raised some concern with her. "She was in the finance unit and she said, 'I discovered some things I don't like and I made some enemies because of it.' Then she said, in her lighthearted way, 'If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated,''' Canavan told the paper.

A probe was launched this week into the death of an Irish-born U.S. woman soldier in Afghanistan. Ciara Durkin, who was born in Connemara, County Galway and moved with her family to the Boston area at age 10, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head at her base camp. Her death occurred on Thursday of last week. Durkin was a member of the Massachusetts National Guard and was assigned to the army's Task Force Diamond. She had been serving in Afghanistan since February. "We're completely in the dark," Pierce Durkin, the dead soldier's 28-year-old brother, told the Globe.

The New York Sun publishes something true and useful – there’s a first time for everything – about the NSA’s semi-secret seminars given to ‘journalists’ between 2002 and 2004 on how to avoid telling the truth, as if ‘journalists’ needed any help in that regard. Oddly enough, none of the attendees can remember attending. The NSA must have slipped them one of those new selective amnesia drugs! This reminds me of the story, from the Angry Arab News Service, of how, during the illegal American attack on the people of Iraq, Lebanese military, together with American officials (the CIA?), camped out in the offices of the Daily Star in Beirut, and made sure nobody dared print the truth about American violence. Is it any wonder that people now go to the internet for their news? The internet is full of nonsense, but at least some of what you can read there is true.

Last week, Josh Gerstein explained how the information control freaks at the National Security Agency conducted secret "seminars" for reporters—basically, little classes on how and when the government would like them to keep their mouths shut about top-secret and not-so-secret information. What's funny is that no one seems to remember the sessions, which went down at NSA headquarters between 2002 and 2004. Maureen Baginski, who was listed as a presenter at the seminars, said she had no recollection of being present. Why would she? She was only the FBI's "intelligence czar" back in 2004, before she left to work for SPARTA, an employee-owned defense contractor of utmost secret-government-like creepiness. Likewise? Not a single reporter has yet come forward to claim attendance.

Frustrated by press leaks about its most sensitive electronic surveillance work, the secretive National Security Agency convened an unprecedented series of off-the-record "seminars" in recent years to teach reporters about the damage caused by such leaks and to discourage reporting that could interfere with the agency's mission to spy on America's enemies.

Background: On Tuesday, August 14th 2007, the Yezidis, one of the minorities in norhern Iraq, were the target of a bloody and ruthless massacre. This massacre took place in the city of Sinjar, in the Nineveh province. Early Tuesday morning, several trucks - fully loaded with several tons of the much sophisticated and explosive substance of Trinitroluene - TNT - exploded. The explosive is very hard to retain and is used by very well equipped armies or terrorist regimes that cooperate with super powers. The explosion was aimed at the civilians and is by far the most brutal and ruthless attack against civilians since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The massacre took 520 lives and several hundreds were wounded. This act of terrorism made thousands of families homeless, as they got their homes blown away. Nineveh-the future of the province: According to the constitution of Iraq, law number 118, paragraph IV (II), the Assyrian province of Nineveh is considered "a province which is not part of a current region." This means that in the Assyrian province of Nineveh, the jurisdiction of the occupational power is the one that should be followed. The province of Nineveh is today the core area of the Assyrian triangle; the area between Nineveh, Turabdin and the province of Urmi. The Kurdish parties in northeastern Iraq want to change this demography. The do everything in their power to occupy and, against the Iraqi constitution, conquer the Assyrian province of Nineveh - a province rich of oil.

On 17 September 1982, journalist Robert Fisk registered the unfiltered rawness of witnessing the murdered victims of Sabra and Shatila up close: "Massacres are difficult to forget when you've seen the corpses." On the final morning of the mass execution, stumbling upon the bodies of unarmed civilians, the French poet, playwright and novelist Jean Genet wrote: "A photograph has two dimensions, so does a television screen; neither can be walked through." By the time Genet and other foreign journalists had arrived, the Lebanese right-wing Christian Phalange party had hastily buried most of the remains of their butchered victims, in an effort to prevent reporters from witnessing and broadcasting the carnage. In those early hours and days, the stark and blunt terror that the Phalange and their Israeli overseers visited upon the inhabitants of the camp, mostly Palestinian, had not yet been unmasked or imprinted into historical record. Despite the attempted cover-up of mass grave sites and the indiscriminate, execution-style slayings of more than 2,000 men, women and children -- at least three axed out of their mothers' wombs -- the massacre caused the outcry the Israelis and their Phalange proxies wished to avoid.

On Oct. 4, 1992 a Tel Aviv-bound El Al cargo aircraft crashed into an apartment complex in Bijlmermeer, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Amsterdam a few minutes after takeoff from the nearby Shipol airport. The crash of the Boeing 747-200 killed 39 people on the ground and all four crew members. After the crash El Al representatives handed over to the Dutch authorities a revised cargo manifest which, sources now admit, included a variety of materials previously not disclosed. For some unexplained reason, the Dutch officials agreed to keep Israel’s secrets. For years following the crash, however, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods displayed a uniquely high number of unusual ailments. But when they took to the media their inquiries as to whether the plane’s cargo could have contained health hazards, both the residents and the media were brushed off. Even though Dutch authorities knew what was on that plane, they preferred to lie to their own citizens rather than confront Israel. Finally, on Oct. 1 of this year, the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported it had obtained documents confirming that when the El Al flight crashed six years ago it had on board 190 liters of dimethyl methyl phosphonate (DMMP), a chemical used to produce Sarin, the nerve gas used to deadly effect by members of a religious cult on the Tokyo subway system.

Local residents had suspected very early on that LY1862 was not a routine flight. Eyewitnesses reported seeing men in hazmat suits removing unidentified debris from the site immediately after the crash. And in the months that followed hundreds of local people and rescue workers complained of a range of chronic health problems, including depression, fatigue and listlessness, breathing difficulties and stomach pains. Tests commissioned by a Dutch citizens' group revealed traces of uranium at the crash site and abnormally high levels of uranium in the bodies of survivors.

In June 1993, the Dutch newspaper Trouw reported that on the morning of Monday, October 5, some twenty persons in white suits were seen at the site of the crash. These persons quickly became the subject of speculation. Witnesses claimed that the white-suited persons did not speak in Dutch and removed evidence from the crash site under white sheets.

"The number of occasions when parliament received unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information is, in the Commission's opinion, too high," the committee wrote. "The government paid too little attention to public worries, even those that were based on misconceptions." Labour Prime Minister Wim Kok was also criticized. The commission found he failed in his coordinating role.

The Bijlmermeer Disaster Yesterday marked the anniversary of the 1992 crash of El Al Flight 1862 into the Amersterdam neighborhood of Bijlmermeer, "whose sordid aftermath opened up a whole can of worms relating to secret weapons trafficking and unaccountable government." Six years after the crash, an investigation revealed that the flight had been carrying three of the four chemicals needed for Sarin.

One of the Bijlmer crash issues was the presence of depleted uranium (DU) in the plane's counterweights. A total of 282 kilograms was constructed in the plane's tail wings. Laka made this public in October 1993[1] after which a discussion started on the potential burning of DU and the risks for citizens and rescue workers.

On a clear, blue February morning 2006, Michael E. Kreca, a longtime writer for Right-libertarian sites EtherZone.com and LewRockwell.com--and who had been previously financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London--was shot dead at point-blank range by San Diego police officers, on a very public street near his San Diego area apartment.

San Diego police were "cleared" of culpability by a District Attorney. Mr. Kreca was said to have pulled a gun from his waistband after officers asked if he were carrying a weapon. There were no witnesses, other than the officers themselves.

Scant reportage was given to the event. (Two representative articles here: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20060213-9999-1m13kreca.html; http://www.the-boondocks.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=19242, the original having "disappeared".)

The day after the shooting, a team of police officers arrived at the late Kreca's residence and carried out and carted away boxes of "evidence," including his computers. We wonder what San Diego P.D. was looking for; what it found, and how anything in his house was relevant to a supposed "justifiable homicide/self defense" situation on a public thoroughfare, where the alleged "almost assailant" has already been offed by the very police to whom he purportedly posed an "imminent threat"?

The Hidden Facts (video, 16 minutes, 32MB)

Forty percent of Americans have never lived when there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Anyone got a problem with that?

With Hillary Rodham Clinton hoping to tack another four or eight "Clinton" years on to the Bush-Clinton-Bush presidential pattern that already has held sway for two decades, talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate.

The dominance of the two families in U.S. presidential politics is unprecedented.
Already, for 116 million Americans, there has never been a time when there wasn't a Bush or Clinton in the White House, either as president or vice president.

Does a nation of 303 million people really have only two families qualified to run the show?

A new Gallup poll reveals that, as the organization puts it, Americans now "express less trust in the federal government than at any point in the past decade, and trust in many federal government institutions is now lower than it was during the Watergate era, generally recognized as the low point in American history for trust in government."

Among the findings: Barely half trust the government to handle international problems, the lowest number ever. And less than half express faith in the government handling domestic issues, the lowest findings since 1976.

Fifty years after federal troops escorted Terrence Roberts and eight fellow black students into an all-white high school, he says the struggles over race and segregation still are unresolved. "This country has demonstrated over time that it is not prepared to operate as an integrated society," said Roberts, who is a faculty member at Antioch University's psychology program. He and the other students known as the Little Rock Nine will help the city observe Central High School's 50th anniversary this week with a series of events culminating with a ceremony featuring former President Bill Clinton. For three weeks in September 1957, Little Rock was the focus of a showdown over integration as Gov. Orval Faubus blocked nine black students from enrolling at a high school with about 2,000 white students. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had declared segregated classrooms unconstitutional in 1954 -- and the Little Rock School Board had voted to integrate -- Faubus said he feared violence if the races mixed in a public school. The showdown soon became a test for then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sent members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division in to control the angry crowds. It was the first time in 80 years that federal troops had been sent to a former state of the Confederacy. Yet, half a century later, there are signs of progress and strife in Arkansas' largest school district, which is now 70 percent black.

Fifty years ago this week, President Dwight Eisenhower risked igniting the second U.S. civil war by sending 1,000 American soldiers into a Southern city. The troops, with bayonets at the end of their rifles, provided protection for nine black students trying to get into Little Rock's Central High School. Until the soldiers arrived, the black teenagers had been kept out by mobs and the Arkansas National Guard, in defiance of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling ending school segregation. The black children involved became the leading edge of a social experiment. Their lives offer answers to the question of what happens to black children who attend integrated schools, a question underscored by the recent Supreme Court ruling that voluntary school integration plans in Louisville and Seattle are unconstitutional.

Remarks of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at the "We Stand With Israel Now and Forever" Rally at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. As Delivered. When I met with people on the streets, outside Sbarro's pizzeria, at Hadassah Hospital, and in a variety of settings throughout Jerusalem, I conveyed the same support and solidarity that we are demonstrating here today. Similarly, when I met with the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, the Foreign Minister, and with other military and government officials, I made clear that we in the United States count on our government-- the American government—to stand with Israel now and forever, just as the people of America stand with the people of Israel. Today I am here not only as a United States Senator, not only as someone who has been to Israel seven times, who has supported the government and people of Israel for over twenty-plus years, but as an American citizen with one singular message – the United States and Israel face a common threat. Make no mistake about it, the attack on the United States here in New York and at the Pentagon on September 11th comes from the same well of hatred and evil that stalks Israel. It is not possible for us to imagine confronting and winning the war against terrorism here and abroad, without our helping Israel win it at home.

Today in Israel, Hillary Clinton endorsed the Apartheid Wall that Israel is building in the West Bank. "This is not against the Palestinian people," Clinton, a New York Democrat, said during a tour of a section of the barrier being built around Jerusalem. "This is against the terrorists. The Palestinian people have to help to prevent terrorism. They have to change the attitudes about terrorism." So, either every Palestinians is a terrorist, or by some miraculous feat, the wall only exists when terrorists get near it? Funny how during her three-day trip, Clinton couldn't find any time to visit the West Bank - except for the part that Israel is stealing - yet she managed to hop over it and go to Jordan after the atttacks there.

Oh, those crazy college journalists.

Who is sillier, they or we older Americans, so prone to outrage for dumb reasons? I'm referring to the four-word editorial that appeared four days ago in the Rocky Mountain Collegian, captivating CNN, raining down disdain on its editor, and losing the paper $30,000 in advertising so far. The editorial, in type about 20 times bigger than this, read: "Taser this...(F-word) Bush." A student-and-faculty board that oversees student publications meets tonight to decide whether to fire the $290-a-week editor for his sins. I, meanwhile, would like to examine the editorial in detail. Crude and clever! First, it was published by editor-in-chief J. David McSwane, a 19-year-old junior at Colorado State. Not long ago he was too young to drive. Second, it had the support of his editorial board, composed of similarly green human beings. Third, it was intended as a commentary on the Tasering of a combative student speaker at a John Kerry forum in Florida. Check it out on YouTube and imagine how it might look if you, too, were a student. Fourth, it uses an obscenity that most Americans hear or speak almost every day. This is perhaps not true if you live in rural Michigan. But in the lexicons of urbanites and college kids, that obscenity is no more offensive than "fish."

The college newspaper editor under fire for an editorial that included a profane reference to President Bush plans to defend the newspaper's actions at a hearing Tuesday night. J. David McSwane, editor-in- chief of the Rocky Mountain Collegian at Colorado State University, could be suspended or fired if CSU's Board of Student Communications determines the editorial violated student media policies.

One of the best things that could have happened to the students up at Colorado State University (CSU) was the printing of the editorial stating, "Taser this... F--- Bush", in the school's newspaper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian.

College Republicans at Colorado State University want the editor of the student newspaper to resign after he used a vulgarity in an editorial before the word "Bush."

Colorado State University has announced that its method for manufacturing low-cost, high-efficiency solar panels is nearing mass production. In a new 200 megawatt (MW) solar manufacturing facility, AVA Solar Inc. will start production by the end of next year on the patented technology developed at Colorado State by mechanical engineering Professor W.S. Sampath. Sampath has developed a continuous, automated manufacturing process for solar panels using glass coating with a cadmium telluride thin film instead of standard crystalline silicon. Based on the average household usage, 200 megawatts will power 40,000 U.S. homes. Produced at less than $1 per watt, the panels will dramatically reduce the cost of generating solar electricity and could power homes and businesses around the globe with clean energy for roughly the same cost as traditionally generated electricity. Sun-powered homes defy a cool housing market Builders say buyers are seeking them out, and solar industry officials say growth is going through the roof.

It should come as no surprise Rudy Giuliani is a stark raving neocon. One glance at Giuliani’s foreign policy team—stacked with the usual suspects from the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Heritage Foundation—and it should be obvious what sort of decider-commander guy Giuliani would be, not that he has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere near the White House. No, the White House is reserved for the Bilderberg Queen, Hillary, and the “field,” as it is called, is little more than a dog and pony show for distracted Americans, who think they live in a democracy. “Rudy Giuliani talked tough on Iran yesterday, proposing to expand NATO to include Israel and warning that if Iran’s leaders go ahead with their goal to be a nuclear power ‘we will prevent it, or we will set them back five or 10 years,’” Newsday reported earlier this week. (Cartoon by Boston Globe)

One of the world's leading experts on credit derivatives, Das is the author of a 4,200-page reference work on the subject, among a half-dozen other tomes. As a developer and marketer of the exotic instruments himself over the past 30 years. He seemed like the ideal industry insider to help us get to the bottom of the recent debt crunch -- and I expected him to defend and explain the practice.

I started by asking the Calcutta-born Australian whetherthe credit crisis was in what Americans would call the "third inning." This was pretty amusing, it seemed, judging from the laughter. So I tried again. "Second inning?" More laughter. "First?"

Still too optimistic. Das, who knows as much about global money flows as anyone in the world, stopped chuckling long enough to suggest that we're actually still in the middle of the national anthem before a game destined to go into extra innings. And it won't end well for the global economy. Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright / Private Debt Much Higher Than During the Great Depression

Yet just five days earlier, Daniel Pipes–who, as I first reported here, has signed on as a foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani’s campaign–essentially argued for war crimes against Palestinians, and there was no cry of protest from the media or anywhere else.

“Believing that if you don’t win a war, you lose it, I have long encouraged the Israeli government to take more assertive measures in response to attacks,” Pipes wrote on his blog on September 6.

In a Jerusalem Post piece six years ago, “Preventing war: Israel’s options,” I called for shutting off utilities to the Palestinian Authority as well as a host of other measures, such as permitting no transportation in the PA of people or goods beyond basic necessities, implementing the death penalty against murderers, and razing villages from which attacks are launched. Then and now, such responses have two benefits: First, they send a strong deterrent signal “Hit us and we will hit you back much harder” thereby reducing the number of attacks in the short term. Second, they impress Palestinians with the Israeli will to survive, and so bring closer their eventual acceptance of the Jewish state.

The Geneva Conventions label collective punishments as a war crime. “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed,” according to Article 33. “Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

Six days ago, at least 28 civilians died in a shooting incident involving the US security company Blackwater. But what actually happened? Kim Sengupta reports from the scene of the massacre. The eruption of gunfire was sudden and ferocious, round after round mowing down terrified men women and children, slamming into cars as they collided and overturned with drivers frantically trying to escape. Some vehicles were set alight by exploding petrol tanks. A mother and her infant child died in one of them, trapped in the flames.

The shooting on Sunday, by the guards of the American private security company Blackwater, has sparked one of the most bitter and public disputes between the Iraqi government and its American patrons, and brings into sharp focus the often violent conduct of the Western private armies operating in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, immune from scrutiny or prosecution.

Blackwater's security men are accused of going on an unprovoked killing spree. Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer, was shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets, as he attempted to get away from their convoy. Yesterday, sitting swathed in bandages at Baghdad's Yarmukh Hospital, he recalled scenes of horror. "I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot," said Mr Salman. "But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid."

On July 13th 2004 at about 5:25 p.m. Robert James Fischer("Bobby" Fischer) entered the Japanese immigration dept. on his way to Japan Airlines flight JL 745 departing from Tokyo/Narita airport at 6:20 p.m. for Manila Philippines. Bobby gave the immigration lady his passport and she quickly stamped his exit visa. However he'd forgotten to fill out the immigration departure form. She told him to fill it out at a nearby writing stand. He took it over there and filled it out. But when Bobby returned a couple of minutes later an immigration man had replaced her. Bobby gave him back his passport and the filled out immigration form. However when the immigration man put his passport under a special light a beep went off or was set off and Bobby was detained. Bobby was asked to take a nearby seat while they found out what was the problem. Bobby took the seat and as he was waiting he heard someone on the phone fiercely barking instructions to an immigration official.

Seeking ways to evade deportation to the United States, Fischer wrote a letter to the government of Iceland in early January 2005 and requested an Icelandic citizenship. (Fischer also attempted, unsuccessfully, to receive Serbian citizenship.[citation needed] He also unsuccessfully requested German citizenship on the grounds that his late father, Hans Gerhardt Fischer, had been a lifelong German citizen.) Sympathetic to Fischer's plight, but reluctant to grant him the full benefits of citizenship, Icelandic authorities granted him an alien's passport. When this proved insufficient for the Japanese authorities, the Althing agreed unanimously to grant Fischer full citizenship in late March for humanitarian reasons, as they felt he was being unjustly treated by the U.S. and Japanese governments.[36] Meanwhile, the U.S. government filed charges of tax evasion against Fischer in an effort to prevent him from traveling to Iceland.

The story, first broken by the Military Times web site based on tips from military officers, was relegated to the bottom of page 16 in Thursday’s New York Times and to page 10 of the Washington Post. Featured prominently in both newspapers and generally in media coverage were reassurances from a spokesman for the Air Force that it represented “an isolated mistake” and that “at no time was there a threat to public safety.” This incident, however, has immense and ominous significance. Describing it as an “isolated mistake” begs the obvious questions of how a nuclear-armed B-52 was allowed to become airborne—ostensibly without the approval of senior officials—and who ordered this extraordinary flight, and why.

By SCOTT VEST, former Air Force Captain at Minot AFB. There has been a great deal of speculation in recent days about the Air Force incident on August 30 in which six cruise missiles were transported from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana with nuclear warheads still attached. There are those who believe that the shipment, revealed to the Military Times by two unnamed Air Force officers, represents part of some nefarious plot by the Bush Administration to stage weapons for a nuclear attack on Iran.

According to conventional wisdom in Spain and in the U.S., in Spain’s transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy, it was King Juan Carlos, with the assistance of the U.S. government (first the Ford administration, then the Carter administration), who brought democracy to Spain. In this interpretation of events taking place from 1975, when the dictator died, to 1978, when the first democratically elected government was installed, the U.S. government actively supported the development of democracy in Spain. The reality, however, was very different. As documented in a recent book by Nicolas Sartorins and Alberto Sabio, El Final de la Dictadura (The End of the Dictatorship), the U.S. government was not very keen on having full democracy in Spain. The primary, if not exclusive, concern of the U.S. government in Spain was to preserve its military and economic interests. Democracy in Spain was the least of its concerns. As a matter of fact, the U.S. government would have preferred to keep both Franco and the dictatorial regime alive and in good health, rather than open up a democratic process with an uncertain outcome. As the U.S. ambassador in Spain, Mr. Stabler, wrote in February 1975 to Secretary of State (under President Ford) Henry Kissinger, “It will be much easier to reach an agreement with the Spanish Government to renew the military bases in that country if Franco stays in power. But he is not going to last much longer and the transition to a post-Franco era has already begun”(Archives of the Gerald Ford Foundation. National Security Advisor, Box 12, Spain).

Israel critic Norman Finkelstein made national headlines after his tenure was denied by DePaul University . Finkelstein, an author of five books, had received outstanding reviews from his students and peers. His dismissal sparked student protests and sit-ins, and led top academics to rally to his defence. Many questioned whether campuses had fallen victim to powerful pressure groups. In this interview with George McLeod, Norman Finkelstein discusses the Israel lobby, his writings and what makes the Israel issue unusually sensitive in the US. McLeod: What is unique about the Israel/Palestine issue that makes it so controversial and sensitive? Finkelstein: There is nothing unusual about the Israel/Palestine issue, apart from the fact that there is a lobby here that prevents any kind of rational debate and discussion about what goes on there. The conflict itself is not particularly unusual. And its main features are fairly well-known, especially outside the US. There is no other field where a gang of hoodlums use their money and their brass knuckles to prevent tenure appointments, and that’s very odd. There are other politicised fields like Cuba studies or China studies – but these kinds of jihads and witch hunts – they just don’t go on in other fields. [Cartoon © Ben Heine]

The Israel Lobby has claimed another victim. DePaul university has capitulated to Lobby pressure and Norman Finkelstein has been denied tenure. This no doubt is going to have a chilling effect on American academia. [Fore more on the subject, check out Savant’s post on the Zionist Jihad against Norman] Since Alan Dershowitz spearheaded the campaign against Finkelstein, we should make a point to remind everyone how this charlatan was humiliated by Finkelstein on live TV and exposed as an ignorant plagiarist. The following debates are a must see. This is why the Zionists in general, and Dershowitz in particular, are so intimidated by Finkelstein. (Check out this article by Chomsky for previous efforts at silencing Finkelstein)

Let’s start at Ground Zero itself. New York Daily News staff writer Greg B. Smith reports “seven contractors cited for everything from mob ties to tax fraud to fatal accidents are getting a slice of the $16 billion reconstruction at Ground Zero . . . “The problem firms are found every day working the bulldozers, cranes, jackhammers and pile drivers rebuilding the site of the World Trade Center . . . All of the companies work for the Port Authority, the Dormitory Authority or the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. on taxpayer-funded contracts worth millions of dollars.”The list begins, as Smith points out, with John Galt Co., which turns out to be a shell company at the heart of the new investigations into the August 18 fire at the Deutsche Bank tower in which two firemen died. John Galt, the company’s name, ironically taken from the hero in Ayn Rand’s tome to laissez faire capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, is certainly no hero, but tied to Safeway Environmental, a company with not only a terrible safety record but one barred from city work. It seems one of its directors is a reputed mob associate. This News’ story runs like a Sopranos episode. In fact, the News came up with six more companies, all with crooked storylines. You got a problem with that?

FRANKFURT: Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States' proclivity to consume far more than it produces - and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar's value would result.

But for longer than most economists would have been willing to predict a decade ago, the world has been a willing partner in American excess - until a new and home-grown financial crisis this summer rattled confidence in the country, the world's largest economy.

On Thursday, the dollar briefly fell to another low against the euro of $1.3927, as a slow decline that has been under way for months picked up steam this past week.

"This is all pointing to a greatly increased risk of a fast unwinding of the U.S. current account deficit and a serious decline of the dollar," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and an expert on exchange rates. "We could finally see the big kahuna hit."

Sheik Jamal al-Sudani leads a group of volunteers with one of the most solemn tasks in Iraq: Collecting and burying the hundreds of unclaimed dead every month and giving them a proper burial.

"I only think about one thing: That one day, I will face the same fate as these people have faced, and will there be someone to take care of me and bury me, too?" the sheik told CNN.

The discovery of slain bodies in bustling, war-torn Baghdad is a daily fact of life, as ever-present as the lively markets, the solemn mosques, the blinding sunrise and the soft sunset.

Many of the bodies of the slain men, women, and children -- found on the streets, in the sewers and in the ruins of bombings -- have never been claimed because some are so mangled and charred, they're unidentifiable.

Around the beginning of July 1933, the first overt move was made in one of the most fantastic plots in American history. A representative of a group of conspirators opened negotiations with a noted military man to head a 500,000-man army, seize the Government of the United States, put an end to American democracy and supplant it with a dictatorship. The McCormack-Dickstein House Committee, investigating un-American activities, turned its attention to the plot, but that probe ended abruptly. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories. It would be regrettable if historians neglected this episode and future generations never learned of it. When the plot actually began, or whose inspiration it was, is not known, for the Committee avoided probing into these aspects. News of the plot, reported to have backing of "three million dollars on the line and three hundred million...should it be necessary," reached the nation in a time which saw greater changes in political systems than any previous period.

All German newspapers on Wednesday carried banner headlines on the arrest of three terror suspects said to be plotting to explode massive bombs that would have killed a large number of people. Typical were headlines and blurbs such as “Dreadful murder attempt” threatening an “enormous number of deaths” (Spiegel Online); “a hitherto unknown dimension of terror in Germany” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung); a plot prevented “at the last minute” by the security forces (Lausitzer Rundschau). At the same time, the reports noted that the three terror suspects had been under round-the-clock observation by 300 police officers for a period of at least six months.

Once again, we are expected to believe a handful of patsies—excuse me, “terrorists”—were capable of taking out a U.S. military base, this time the Ramstein air base in Germany, but thanks to the diligent work of Germany’s “special police officers,” these America-hating miscreants were apprehended before they attacked. In addition to Ramstein, reports the New York Times, these would-be terrorists plotted “massive attacks” against the Frankfurt international airport and “several sites frequented by Americans, including discos [and] bars…. German and American officials said that such indicators made them suspect (sic) connections to Al Qaeda.”

Editor's Note: "Many Americans are in denial about what is happening to the United States. They don't want to believe that a totalitarian structure could be put in place in their own country. They don't want to view the various pieces of George W. Bush's "anti-terror" system in that broad a context. They hope that someone or something -- the Supreme Court maybe -- will strike down the excesses of the Republican-controlled Congress and the Executive Branch. Though there are still obstacles that stand in Bush's way -- the Nov. 7 elections, for instance -- America's march down a road to a new-age totalitarianism has advanced farther than many understand, as freelance reporter Carla Binion argues in this disturbing guest essay:" On October 17, George W. Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This new law gives Bush power similar to that possessed by Stalin or Hitler, and grants agencies within the Executive Branch powers similar to those of the KGB or Gestapo. Bush justifies this act by claiming he needs it to fight the "war on terror," but a number of critics, including former counterterrorism officials, have said the administration has greatly exaggerated the threat and used illogical methods to combat terrorism.

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury. How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq. You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

That's essentially Bernard William's definition of a lie on p. 96 of "Truth and Truthfulness." It probably fits with how most of us think about a lie. But what about statements that use true facts to deceive?

August 31, Juan Cole was shrill about administration and media statements that GI deaths in Iraq were down for the year. His point was that temperatures get to 120 degrees, so summer means low combat. He produced a table contrasting 2006 with 2007 by month: deaths are higher in 2007 than 2006. He asked for a visual display and many responded. I'm posting mine here.

But this is just part of a pattern of communicating, where true facts are presented within a limited context, so that the resulting asymmetry of information creates a false impression. Most of us don't know that Iraq temperatures reach 120 degrees in July so that physical activity like combat is down. On the other hand, if an official announced that lowland US snow fall in July was the lowest it's been all year -- duh. The difference is that here in the US we all know about July snow fall, so there's no asymmetry.

The Bush administration used the September 11 terrorist attack as an opportunity to implement a "shadow government," based on old plans prepared during the Cold War. More than 150 officials were initially evacuated by helicopter to different locations in mountainous regions of the eastern United States.

In late October the temporary arrangement was made permanent, officially establishing the new regime. Since then Bush has added hand picked people from top levels of the civil service who will carry out his commands unquestioningly. Legal documents have been drafted to give these officials the full powers of government in the event of a catastrophe.

The sinister and illegal "shadow government" consists entirely of executive branch officials. No members of the legislative and judicial branches of government are included in the secret plan. In television interviews Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, confirmed that neither he nor any other congressional leader had been consulted about the plan. When asked whether this constituted a secret government, he replied, "I don't know. I don't know what their role is, what their current authority is, because we haven't been informed."

This is a flagrant violation of the concept of "Separation of Powers" as embodied in the Constitution. In the event that this "shadow government" seizes power, it will function as a dictatorship exercising military and police powers, without any legislative oversight or judicial control.

Those who hoped that — with the victory of the antiwar party in 2006, the departure of Rumsfeld and the neocons from the Pentagon, the rise of Condi and the eclipse of Cheney — America was headed out of Iraq got a rude awakening. They are about to get another.

Today, the United States has 30,000 more troops in Iraq than on the day America repudiated the Bush war policy and voted the GOP out of power. And President Bush, self-confidence surging, is now employing against Iran a bellicosity redolent of the days just prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

What gives Bush his new cockiness? The total collapse of the antiwar coalition on Capitol Hill and the breaking of the Congress.

Last spring, Bush vetoed the congressional deadlines for troop withdrawals, then rubbed Congress' nose in its defeat by demanding and getting $100 billion to support the surge and continue the war.

Before the August recess, Democrats broke again and voted to give Bush the warrantless wiretap authority many among them had said was an unconstitutional and impeachable usurpation of power. They are a broken and frightened lot.

Comes now evidence congressional Democrats have not only lost the pro-victory vote, but forfeited the peace vote, as well.

According to a Zogby poll the last week in August, just two weeks before Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker report, Americans, by 45 percent to 20 percent, give this Democratic Congress lower grades on handling the war than the Republican Congress it replaced.

"[K]ey personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neoconservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively. Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); and Michael Makovsky; an expert on neocon icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud Jerusalem Post. Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have in common a close identification with the views of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel."

As the neocons prepare to sell us another lemon—this time a shock and awe mass murder campaign against Iran—it is demonstrative to reflect upon the convoluted lies the neocons passed off as supposedly damning “intelligence” prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. For instance, those with a sharp memory—or sharper than the average American amnesiac—may recall the neocons claiming Saddam Hussein possessed UAV drones, infernal machines he planned to use against American grade schoolers and other such innocents.

When members of Congress – or pundits and journalists, for that matter – are taken on tightly controlled visits to a war zone like Iraq, they undergo what the late Michigan Gov. George Romney famously referred to as “brainwashing.”

'This man has advanced communist views ... He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours ... ' The extent to which Special Branch police monitored George Orwell as a suspected communist has been revealed in papers disclosed for the first time today at the National Archives in Kew. The documents, which include details of surveillance between the 1920s and 60s, indicate not only the wide range of groups and individuals being watched by police but also officers' spectacular ability to misjudge what they saw. The obtuseness of some exasperated their superiors. A Home Office official named W Ogilvie - whose pencil was probably responsible for a question mark against Ewing's statement - responded a few days later: "I spoke to Inspector Gill of Special Branch asking whether his sergeant could elaborate on the question of Blair's [Orwell's] 'advanced communist views'. Mr Gill rang me up this morning to say that Sergeant Ewing described Blair as being 'an unorthodox communist' apparently holding many of the views but by no means subscribing fully to the party's policy.

George Orwell, the author who coined the phrase "Big Brother is watching you", was himself the subject of intense surveillance by the secret services, documents released on Tuesday disclose. The creator of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisages a day when every person's movements are scrutinised by a totalitarian state, was closely monitored amid concerns that he was a prominent member of the communist movement.

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected. It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert. DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.

In order to prosecute the 9/11 perpetrators under the 9/11 Independent Prosecutors Act, Independent Scientist/DU Radiation Expert Leuren Moret and International Lawyer Alfred Webre will call for the establishment of an International Citizen's 9/11 War Crimes Tribunal, in a public announcement to be made at the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference on Sunday June 24, 2007. According to Moret and Webre, 9/11 was a False Flag Operation by an international War Crimes Racketeering Organization, to provide a pretext to engage in Genocidal & Ecocidal Depleted Uranium (DU) bombing of Central Asia (Afghanistan and Iraq) in order to secure vast oil and uranium reserves; to roll out a Terror-based National Security state-system world-wide; and to implement the final stages of a world Depopulation policy. The International Citizen's 9/11 War Crimes Tribunal would be convened under the jurisdiction of the Kuala Lumpur International War Crimes Tribunal, established in February 2007 as a permanent citizen's Tribunal by The Perdana Global Peace Organization, chaired by Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia, who is the first prominent world leader to take up the DU radiation issue.

Local reporter and author Diana Washington Valdez has dedicated much of her time to an investigation into Juarez’ dark secret: the killings of hundreds and hundreds of women in just over a decades time. Read about the dangers she faced and how her work is inspiring Hollywood.

It took Valdez five years to investigate and write the first version of “The Killing Fields,” which was initially published in Spanish in 2005. She spent another two years working on developing updated material for the English version, published in 2006.

Though she has received praise for her work, Valdez says she also received several threats. “I can’t go back to Ciudad Juarez,” she says. “I knew it would happen in time,” she adds, “but I consider myself very fortunate because other people have been killed down there who have been involved in investigating this or advocating or had some kind of role.”

In addition to the threats on her life, Valdez says certain individuals, some within the Mexican government, have sought to discredit her book. At first, the authorities denied a public response, she says, but last year, as the government was about to release its official report on the slayings, a federal official in charge of the investigation told La Reforma, a major Mexican newspaper, that he was going to refute, point by point, everything that was in Valdez’ book. “I didn’t think his job was to refute my book,” she says. “It was to investigate murders.”

A US Marine was ordered to execute a room full of Iraqi women and children during an alleged massacre in Haditha that left 24 people dead, a military court heard Thursday. "When I opened the door there was just women and kids, two adults were lying down on the bed and there were three children on the bed ... two more were behind the bed," Mendoza said. After leaving the room Mendoza told Tatum what he had found. "I told him there were women and kids inside there. He said 'Well, shoot them,'" Mendoza told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain again who John Walker Lindh was.

JESSELYN RADACK: John Walker Lindh was an American citizen who was caught fighting alongside the Taliban, along with Yaser Hamdi, another US citizen, who was recently released to Saudi Arabia. And we prosecuted him. He was one of the first people tagged with the dubious “enemy combatant” label by the Bush administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, tell us what happened, and your role, and then Michael Chertoff’s.

JESSELYN RADACK: Basically, the Justice Department disregarded the advice of the Ethics unit not to interrogate him without a lawyer, went ahead, interrogated him and, by the pictures we’ve seen worldwide, tortured him, and then went ahead to prosecute him.

Basically, Judge Ellis, who was overseeing the prosecution, ordered that all Justice Department correspondence related to the Lindh interrogation be turned over to the court. That order was concealed from me. I found out about it inadvertently from the prosecutor. And when I went to comply with the order, my emails with the advice not to interrogate him without counsel and the fact that the FBI had committed an ethics violation in doing so were missing from the file. I resurrected those emails from my computer archives and tried to get them to the prosecutor, and when that failed, I turned them over to the media.

As punishment -- again, this was all under Michael Chertoff, who at that time was the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division -- under Chertoff, I was placed under criminal investigation. For what, I was never told. I was forced out of the Justice Department, fired from my next job at the government’s behest, referred to the state bars in which I’m licensed as an attorney, based on a secret report to which I did not have access, and put on the no-fly list. And all of that occurred on Michael Chertoff's watch. So, to the extent that President Bush seeks to rehabilitate the beleaguered Justice Department, I think Chertoff is a very odd choice for that.

A Swiss businessman on Monday claimed that a key piece of evidence in the Lockerbie trial was faked, following a French press report that one of his employees had lied to Scottish investigators. Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss-based Mebo group, told reporters that one of his employees had supplied Scottish investigators with a stolen timing device, which was then presented in the trial as having been found amidst the plane's wreckage. Mebo makes electronic equipment for the security forces. In fact, Mebo employee Ulrich Lumpert has now admitted that the device he handed over to Scottish investigators was one he himself had stolen from the company, rather than part of a batch delivered to Libya in the 1980s.

A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated. The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.

You have to take this story with a big grain of salt-and not because the Lockerbie, Scotland Pan Am 103 shootdown wasn't yet another CIA/Mossad/MI6 etc. inside job, it was, but the question is why. In this story, we are led to believe that a retired Scottish Police chief -with a conscience-has decided to finally fess up and admit that the CIA planted the fragment of a circuit board that was supposedly tied to the transistor radio bomb "proof" floated at the time of the crash. The bottom line of the 'revelation