Iran

The Polar ice cap may be melting, but the U.S. economy is frozen, starting right here in my small town. Gradually rising levels of dismay at the gas pump and in the supermarket gave way to paralytic shock last week when “lock-in” notices from the local fuel company arrived. This year’s advance price for home heating oil is nearly twice what people paid last year. A collective gasp of disbelief from my tough, resourceful Maine neighbors echoed across the meadows and up the rocky coast. Many claimed they would never sign the contract. “What’s your alternative?” I asked a friend.

“I don’t have one,” he muttered.

In the days that followed, a new quality of dread settled over the place like soot, as people weighed their options. Heat or food? Gas or electricity? Medicine or mortgage payments? What to give up? What to cut back? The conversations were everywhere. In the supermarket, I heard one man tell another: “When I was a kid, you woke up, went into the bathroom, and broke up the ice in the toilet. Now my kids will have to do the same. America is moving backward.”

My neighbors are like deer caught in the headlights: frozen in fear as something sinister, implacable, and wholly unanticipated lurches toward them. A reckoning has begun to unfurl like a dark flower, slowly at first, then gathering urgency and force. This is not a short detour after all, but an untraveled road to an unknown place from which there is no return, no escape…and we are not prepared.

Link barrage: How mass NSA wiretaps work; Manchurian Obama©; International tensions and other boring matters (that will still ruin your wallet)

HongPong — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:34:05 -0600

Who Planned the Anthrax Attacks?- by Justin Raimondo

I gots to filch a few grafs about how the wiretap system works - and how the Big Machine in the Sky is reading our to/from packets quite a lot: Everything about Pat Lang is friggin awesome - this one came from one of his old school buddies in the telecom spy game: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008: FISA and All Those Numbers

But let's say Mr. Terrorist is somewhere in Maryland between Baltimore and Washington DC, and he is using a prepaid cell phone he bought with cash. His NPA (area code) can be 240, 301, 410, 443, 202, or 703 depending on his carrier. Each one of those NPAs can have up to 792 NXX codes assigned to it. And each one of those NXX codes can have up to 10,000 numbers. Now we're really starting to see a problem. The government already knows which blocks are owned by prepaid cellular carriers, but there are still hundreds of thousands of telephone numbers in one small region to sift through. This guy may only pop up for a few hours before trashing his phone – I know I would!

How does the FBI or NSA tap his phone based on the number? Here’s what I suspect has been happening behind the scenes with the FISA battle.

It is physically impossible to monitor all the calls traversing the telephone networks. The tinfoil hat crowd likes to scream about the NSA “monitoring all our calls” but it just isn’t physically possible. When I worked for a long distance carrier we were processing around 1 million calls per day, per junction (a junction is a large central office), and our network had about 7-8 junctions. That was in the late 1990s. Call volume is much higher today. And that was one carrier out of many.

What we can look at, however, are the messages the telephone network uses to connect, maintain, and disconnect your calls. This process is known as call signaling, or call processing. In the old days, intercepting the call signaling of a large portion of the network was difficult since both the call processing and voice connection used the same physical circuit. Now, a signaling technology called Signaling System 7 (SS7) has made that job much easier – the signaling process has been decoupled from the voice circuit. All the SS7 messages are carried on a network separate from the network that connects the two phones together for the conversation. (For the techno-geeks among us, Wiki SS7 )

Although the land line telephone network can operate without SS7, the cellular networks cannot. They all use SS7. Most likely the FBI and NSA are exploiting this portion of the telephone network. But remember, the SS7 network is only carrying call signaling messages. Inside those messages are the telephone numbers of the calling party and the called party, but no names. These messages containing each telephone number in a call can be stored in huge databases and mined for anomalies. The SIGINT folks are probably looking for call patterns – anything that will make the target stick out. If there is an interesting call pattern, then resources can be applied to actually monitor the conversation.

So, is it really wiretapping if the government is only monitoring call patterns and no names are associated with numbers? Is it really wiretapping if no voice conversation is monitored? I don’t know. That’s for the lawyers to decide. I do know that the amount of data collected would be incredibly huge – for every telephone call there will be many SS7 messages generated. Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of calls processed by the prepaid cellular carriers per day, and you start seeing the problem our law enforcement and SIGINT folks are tackling. Sifting through all these millions of call singling messages is a huge undertaking.

Most likely the process is becoming more and more automated with signaling anomalies triggering the automatic monitoring and storage of conversations. Although this would make life much easier for the collection folks, this automation would be where the legal points become shaky since the warrant would have to be applied after the fact. I do not know for sure, but I suspect that total automation is feasible to a degree. It would still require a lot of resources. What if the trigger was in error and you recorded two innocent people, should you still have to get a warrant even if internal procedures ensured the recording was deleted? Sometimes innocent Americans get caught up in SIGINT collections overseas, and there are existing oversight policies to deal with that.

Be sure to check it all out on Lang's site!!

From the always ominous Cryptogon: Teachers Get Guidance On How to Relay the Lessons of Sept. 11

and worse: Leading British Intelligence Official, Alex Allan, Found with “Blood Everwhere,” Now In a Coma, Nothing to See Here, Move Along

Dana Milbank - The Economy? Words Fail Me. - washingtonpost.com

No evidence needed under terror profiling plan | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press

The Associated Press: ISPs still considering tracking Web use

Ron Paul: I hear members of Congress saying "if we could only nuke Iran"

Crucial analysis: Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out | War on Iraq | AlterNet

Military action 'would destabilise Iraq' - Middle East, World - The Independent

Talabani-Barak handshake angers some Iraqi MPs | Reuters

BBC NEWS | Pakistan's future in the balance

$100 for a Tank of Gas? Especially in an S.U.V., It’s Hard to Say ‘Fill It Up’ - NYTimes.com

Hilarious!

Wampum: Viacom v Google

Fallen Stars: Celebrity Foreclosures - CNBC.com

Fannie, Freddie Shares Plummet on Capital Worries. Move along...

Daily Telegraph PSYOPS at an end? LobeLog.com » Blog Archive » The Bolton-Telegraph Scare

The strange saga of Larry Johnson continues: it's pretty grumpy over @ No Quarter,

The Adulation of a Leader: a Cautionary Tale : NO QUARTER

The anti-Obama audience Webster Tarpley has purchased some blog ads for his mysterious book, Obama - The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate: Webster Griffin Tarpley, . Described as such:

Barack Obama is a deeply troubled personality, the megalomaniac front man for a postmodern coup by the intelligence agencies, using fake polls, mobs of swarming adolescents, super-rich contributors, and orchestrated media hysteria to short-circuit normal politics and seize power.

Obama comes from the orbit of the Ford Foundation, and has never won public office in a contested election. His guru and controller is Zbigniew Brzezinski, the deranged revanchist and Russia-hater who dominated the catastrophic Carter presidency 30 years ago. All indications are that Brzezinski recruited Obama at Columbia University a quarter century ago. Trilateral Commission co-founder Brzezinski wants a global showdown with Russia and China far more dangerous for the United States than the Bush-Cheney Iraq adventure.

Obama's economics are pure Skull & Bones/Chicago school austerity and sacrifice for American working families, all designed to bail out the bankrupt Wall Street elitist financiers who own Obama. Obama's lemming legions and Kool-Aid cult candidacy hearken back to Italy in 1919-1922, and raise the question of postmodern fascism in the United States today.

Obama is a recipe for a world tragedy. No American voter can afford to ignore the lessons contained in this book.

I am a fan of the idea that these NGO "color revolutions" around Europe are some trendy synthetic PSYOPS type shit. And that Obama's advisors would run with the "synthesizers". Anyway.

Sy Hersh: Covert war in Iran escalates: Baluchis used as pawns in risky scheme, Special Ops out of control

HongPong — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:38:00 -0600

I noted all this nonsense a while ago: March 27, 2007: New GeoMap; Kremlin warns of "Operation Bite" American attack on Iran April 6? More rumors etc.

The latest twist is that apparently the Democrats agreed to give Bush as much money as they wanted in order to do the "U.S. Covert - BALUCHIS" attack detailed on this sketch here. At roughly the time of my post, actually!

April 4, 2007: Iran paranoia, covert war escalates; Tensions rise as Persian Gulf fills with carriers, media crews, tribal revolts; US Air Force buzzes infiltrated Iranian Khuzestan

At that time we had the excellent "Approximate Covert Crisis GeoMap: Shitstorm 2007:

April 8, 2007: Jundullah: Baluchi ally of the United States... And Al Qaeda... in covert Iran war.

Since those heady days, I haven't had too much to say about the Baluchi pawn situation. However, the drums of war have continued and my tasty diagrams are as accurate as last year. Both the CIA-sponsored tribal uprisings and the Mujahideen el-Khalq actions are going forth accordingly.

At least, that's what good ol Seymour Hersh has divined from his vast array of establishment sources, who generally seem quite frightened of the alternate chains of command that Dick Cheney has built up from his office.

Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Pay very close attention to this part, kiddos, because herein lies the primary potential source of a cataclysmic Iran war: the "small group" at the White House who are developing an alternate chain of command.

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

There you have it. This is huge. Bigger than the usual British-style strategy of renting local warlords like the Baluchis. Also duly noted:

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

I have zero faith in any element of America's political class to even understand what is happening, let alone get some degree of control over these covert operations, ever escalating and widening out into the aggressive galaxy of contractors and militant baby boomers, all set in motion on their own, partitioned even from the regional American military commanders.

When even the President's direct regional commander, General Fallon, couldn't find out what the fuck Special Forces are actually doing, then by definition we have a serious and insane war conspiracy unfolding.

And for now, that is basically all I can say.

Random links: The latest Systemic Margin Call; Russians blame 85% of Afghanistan opium on American aviation!

HongPong — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:23:03 -0600

Or also, from the last several days...

Political Punch: Liberal bloggers sayin Clinton ads darken Obama. Some others say it is a YouTube artifact effect.

Atmosphere released a free MP3 from the next album.

Hillary, Obama and the Establishment Machine | The Agonist

Hm. Definitely interesting: The Man Between War and Peace, Admiral Fallon.

Cuban Cyber Rebels and their flash drives and blogs! Viva Cuba flashdriva!

Smashing Magazine has nice design and free fonts.

io9 has random sci fi stuff. cool design too.

When in doubt, check out the Gary Webb video @ Archive.org, late in his life reflecting on the whole Los Angeles CIA crack cocaine thingy.

Global Guerillas is pretty buzzwordy, but it's pretty good. For your daily dose of super-modern open source insurgent warfare, extortion through DDoS - both Russian and Botnet variants, the imminent insect techno-eschaton, and how one super-empowered individual guerilla Henry Okah has brought Nigeria into total chaos and propelled oil over $100 a barrel. This Robb guy is definitely paying attention. National security bureaucracies are doomed?! Not if they can hoard up their own very biggest bestest haystack!

Meanwhile the economic crash continues apace. Much hand-wringing at one of my favorite spots, the Agonist . Wheat is over $12/bushel.

Buffett: it's a recession, stupid.

Banks face systemic margin call, $325 billion hit: JP Morgan!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are facing a "systemic margin call" that may deplete banks of $325 billion of capital due to deteriorating subprime U.S. mortgages, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N:Quote, Profile, Research), said in a report late on Friday.

JPMorgan, which sent a default notice to Thornburg Mortgage Inc. (TMA.N: Quote,Profile, Research) after the lender missed a $28 million margin call, said more default notices and margin calls were likely. The Carlyle Group's mortgage fund also failed to meet $37 million in margin calls this week.

"A systemic credit crunch is underway, driven primarily by bank writedowns for subprime mortgages," according to the report co-authored by analyst Christopher Flanagan. "We would characterize this situation as a systemic margin call."

The credit crisis that began about a year ago will likely intensify after Friday's weak February U.S. employment report "that most definitely signals recession," JPMorgan said.

Bush Family Piggy Bank Receives Default Notice! | The Agonist

The best news I have heard is the insane bastards in Florida who have taken advantage of the crashed system. They are sitting in their homes, paying nothing at all, waiting for the totally conked court system to struggle with the lost paperwork at every level of the mortgage. An awesome thing to behold!! The Big Picture | Foreclosure-proof Homeowners:

What is shocking, that in each and every case, I have been told by brokers and banks that the owners, have ceased paying their mortgages in some cases for nearly 2 years and have continued to occupy these homes. Now, these are homes in excess of $2,000,000 in the very best neighborhoods in South Florida. Brokers have added that these buyers further complicated things by putting huge home equity lines on top of their mortgages and now have no possibility of selling their homes for amounts needed to cover their accumulated debt.

America is amazing. Ok.

Bloomberg.com Citigroup needs Arab cash, fast!!!! Rlly fast!!!

Russians pissed off about American/Pakistani opium smuggling support in Afghanistan: (via cryptogon)

Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan by Vladimir Radyuhin

Global Research, February 24, 2008: Global Research Editor's Note

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.

Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on Afghanistan was launched following the Taliban government's 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a collapse in opium production in excess of 90 percent.

The following report, which accuses the United States of using military transport planes to ship narcotics out of Afghanistan confirms what is already known and documented regarding the Golden Crescent Drug Trade and its insiduous relationship to US intelligence.

February 23, 2008

Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan.....

....“Unfortunately, they [NATO] are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” Putin angrily remarked three years ago. He accused the coalition forces of “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.” As time went by, Russian suspicions regarding the U.S. role in the rise of a narco state in Afghanistan grew deeper, especially after reports from Iraq said that the cultivation of opium poppies was spreading rapidly there too.

“The Americans are working hard to keep narco business flourishing in both countries,” says Mikhail Khazin, president of the consultancy firm Niakon. “They consistently destroy the local infrastructure, pushing the local population to look for illegal means of subsistence. And the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] provides protection to drug trafficking.”

U.S. freelance writer Dave Gibson recalled in an article published in American Chronicle in December what a U.S. foreign intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told NewsMax.com in March 2002 of the CIA’s record of involvement with the international drug trade. The official said: “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences – the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favourite business.”

AFP

(A USAF cargo plane takes off from the U.S. airbase in Incirlik in Turkey in March 2003. A Russian news channel reported that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.)

Now Russia has joined the fray accusing the U.S. military of involvement in the heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to Europe. The Vesti channel’s report from Afghanistan said that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey.

The Ganci Air Force base at the Manas international airport in Kyrgyzstan was set up in late 2001 as a staging post for military operations inside Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz government threatened to close the base after neighbouring Uzbekistan shut down a similar U.S. airbase on its territory in 2005, but relented after Washington agreed to make a one-off payment of $150 million in the form of an assistance package and to pay $15 million a year for the use of the base.

One of the best-informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, Arkady Dubnov, recently quoted anonymous Afghan sources as saying that “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation.”

A well-informed source in Afghanistan’s security services told the Russian journalist that the American military acquired drugs through local Afghan officials who dealt with field commanders in charge of drug production.

Writing in the Vremya Novostei daily, Dubnov claimed that the pro-Western administration of President Hamid Karzai, including his two brothers, Kajum Karzai and Akhmed Vali Karzai, are head-to-heels involved in the narcotics trade.

The article quoted a leading U.S. expert on Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin, as telling an anti-narcotics conference in Kabul last October that “drug dealers had infiltrated Afghani state structures to the extent where they could easily paralyse the work of the government if decision to arrest one of them was ever made.”

Sure, they can say the Russians are grumbling like usual. But from Moscow's perspective, the U.S. is just trying to keep on top of all the Players in the Game. And they run the Wire all over the whole territory, so they know exactly who is doing what where, and can watch the opium caravans go cruising by. The fact that this doesn't track in American conventional wisdom is a monument to the intentional ignorance of Baby Boomers, regardless of how accurate the Russians are here.

The planes, the drugs, the detainees, it all seems to be part of a nexus of secret military/DHS contractor airlines. These guys are soooo 1980s. The ponzi scheme depends on information asymmetry, which can always be disrupted......

The Filipino Monkey has pivotal role in geopolitical confrontations: Persian Gulf radio hacker nearly freeks out US Navy in Hormuz incident

HongPong — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:24:41 -0700

The pooping lawyer of Chicago: I have no idea what this blog is trying to say, but I approve!

McGovern calls for Bush impeachment. Huzzah i guess.

Lookie here: this news comes from Potomac Flacks, written by, for, about Beltway PR people. Not bad!

Potomac Flacks: Davis Named Communications Coordinator for 2008 Republican National Convention

James Davis has been hired as the Communications Coordinator for the 2008 Republican National Convention. Prior to joining the convention staff, Davis worked in strategic communications in the Public Affairs Office of the Secretary of Defense where he was involved in efforts related to the Global War on Terrorism and other critical issues. While in chilly Minnesota, Davis will be working under Matt Burns who is running the show as Director of Communications and Spokesman for the Committee on Arrangements for the 2008 Republican National Convention. (PF Tipster)

And also:

Minnesota Monitor:: Defense Department blog coordinator hired for RNC

by: Andy Birkey / Fri Jan 11, 2008
The 2008 Republican National Convention has hired James Davis as communications coordinator, a move that bodes well for bloggers, particularly those on the right.

Before the current move to the RNC, Davis' job was strategic communications in the Public Affairs Office of the Secretary of Defense where, according to Ken Silverstein of Harper's Magazine, he helped pass Iraq war and War on Terrorism talking points from the Department of Defense to hand-picked bloggers.

During almost daily conference calls, bloggers and online journalists, including prominent Minnesota bloggers Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker of Power Line and Ed Morrissey Captain's Quarters, are connected with military personnel during the Blogger's Roundtable.

"The list of bloggers who regularly participate in the conference calls is overwhelmingly conservative and friendly to the goals of the Bush Administration," wrote Silverstein. "The government is picking certain people as 'surrogates' to the exclusion of many others and feeding them news."

According to the Department of Defense, the program, once called the "Surrogates Operation," has as its mission providing "source material for stories in the blogosphere concerning the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Global War on Terrorism by bloggers and online journalists."

"A few moderates are invited to take part, but the list of participants skews far, far to the right. The Pentagon essentially feeds participants the talking points, bullet points, and stories it wants told," wrote Silverstein.

While it's not surprising that the RNC hired someone with such a close history of working with pro-Iraq war bloggers, it will certainly ensure access between convention officials and bloggers such as Powerline and Captain's Quarters.

I don't know if this is a spoof or what: Lawyer's Cache of Poop! [the site banner had a great rich dude with a monocle, but it won't load now...]

DFLers Bonoff, Madia raise sizable sums in MN CD3. Hm. Skrilla Billa...

Check out this article about the British banking system, the economic collapse and all. Cityphilia by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books. I really really double recommend this one.

The Raw Story | Report reveals Vietnam War hoaxes, faked attacks meanwhile there is fishy stuff in the notorious Strait of Hormuz. The big deal now is how the establishment trumped up some Iranian boats zipping around the carriers and some old school middle eastern radio pirate lunatic known as the "Filipino Monkey": You just can't make this shit up.

Yes this is fairly awesome. It just shows that 2008 is the kind of year where slackers with high-powered radios can flip out the chokepoints of all the damn oil in the Persian Gulf. Not bad for a jester?

I am posting the whole article because it appears the great Filipino Monkey audio was immediately seized upon by the PSYOPS guys! The military public relations people spliced the audio and video together and got it out to American TV. Everyone looks a bit dumb now...

‘Filipino Monkey’ behind threats? - Navy News - Navy Times

By Andrew Scutro and David Brown - Staff writers, Posted : Sunday Jan 13, 2008 15:38:29 EST

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”

Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it’s unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water.

“We don’t know for sure where they came from,” said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. “It could have been a shore station.”

While the threat — “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes” — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there’s no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it’s difficult to figure out who’s talking.

SEE THE PENTAGON’S VERSION OF THE VIDEO

A LINK TO THE IRANIAN VERSION (CLICK THE CAMERA ICON)

“Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.

So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.

Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.

Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Furthermore, Hoffman said radio signals have a way of traveling long distances in that area. “Under certain weather conditions I could hear Bahrain from the Strait of Hormuz.”

Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, could not say if the voice belonged to the heckler.

“It’s an international circuit and we’ve said all along there were other ships and shore stations in the area,” he said.

When asked if U.S. officials considered whether the threats came from someone besides the Iranians when releasing the video and audio, Roughead said: “The reason there is audio superimposed over the video is it gives you a better idea of what is happening.”

Similarly, Davis said the audio was part of the “totality” of the situation and helped show the “aggressive behavior.”

Another former cruiser skipper said he thought the Monkey might be behind the audio threats when he first heard them earlier this week.

“It wouldn’t have surprised me at all,” he said. “There’s all kinds of chatter on Channel 16. Anybody with a receiver and transmitter can hear something’s going on. It was entirely plausible and consistent with the radio environment to interject themselves and make a threatening comment and think they’re being funny.”

This former skipper also noted how quiet and clean the radio “threat” was, especially when radio calls from small boats in the chop are noisy and cluttered.

“It’s a tough environment, you’re bouncing around, moving fast, lots of wind, noise. It’s not a serene environment,” he said. “That sounded like somebody on the beach or a large ship going by.”

He said he and others believe that the Filipino Monkey is comprised of several people, and whoever gets on Channel 16 to heckle instantly gets the monicker.

“It was just a gut feeling, something the merchants did. Guys would get bored, one guy hears it, comes back a year later and does it for himself,” he said. “I never thought it was one, rather it was part of the woodwork.”

The former skipper noted that he warned his crew about hecklers when preparing to transit Hormuz. “I tell them they’ll hear things on there that will be insulting,” he said. “You tell your people that you’ll hear things that are strange, insulting, aggravating, but you need to maintain a professional posture.”

A civilian mariner with experience in that region said the Filipino Monkey phenomenon is worldwide, and has been going on for years.

“They come on and say ‘Filipino Monkey’ in a strange voice. They might say it two or three times. You’re standing watch on bridge and you’re monitoring Channel 16 and all of a sudden it comes over the radio. It can happen anytime. It’s been a joke out there for years.”

While it happens all over the world, it’s more likely to occur around the Strait of Hormuz because there is so much shipping traffic, he said.

Speaking of those dem spooks making da spooky press releases: Double Agent Gadahn Threatens Bush In Neo-Con Stunt claiming that some random Jewish kid from California who's now the Al Qaeda spokesman du jour is really a fake. Either way he makes a pretty boring YouTube mastermind of doom etc. Lacks the chutzpah we expect from TV-based evildoers nowadays:

Fear Adam Gadahn!!!! Unless the TV never shows you, because you are not entertainingly scary enough!!

Another one of those attempted Ron Paul racism smear thingys: Vicious Ron Paul Hit Piece Scrapes The Barrel Of Yellow Journalism. On the other hand it confirms that Ron Paul is the kind of guy who showed up to random neo-confederate events in the old days. But what did you expect? The man was part of the great White fringe since forever... At least he's telling 'em to get against the Empire, i say... On the other hand NAACP: NAACP President: Ron Paul Is Not A Racist - "Linder says Paul being smeared because he is a threat to the establishment." Hmm....

What else is new?

HongPong — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:13:44 -0600

People are asking me if the war in Iran is going to start on the 15th of October. Well, I answer, in the 4th generation warfare sense, it already has started..... Seymour Hersh's latest missive must be read. Now it's 'counterterrorism' with the Republican Guard. Joe Lieberman practically tried to start the war last week. Fuckin A. The new war messaging. The whole bit... Goddamn... Goddamn...

Daily dimension of Minnesota conspiratoria: Jesse Ventura questions 9/11 and compares it to the JFK assassination:

Fourth dimension of power: your partisan bickering, removed: This Modern World. Obvious statements: Boondocks is teh awesome. Doonesbury too.

OpenCircuit, a new Twin Cities tech collective concept. Related: MinneDemo: DemoCamp Minnesota.

Yong Ho from the Macalester days has a sweet trilingual website.

AIR is a new Adobe app platform (Like Java). You can do your GoogleAnalytics through it. Didn't seem to have much advantage over the web way though.

OpenDNS is a nifty new DNS management service. Get rid of those "looking up website....." delays by getting better DNS! Bonus for businesses and fundies: it can filter porn too!

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. This is a great long summary, the major sectors of the book distilled so you can better understand the IMF/Pinochet/supercapitalist doom mode, seen everywhere from Katrina to Iraq. And how are people are building "shock absorbers" into their local societies in order to thrive once more. A powerful argument against the dying 'Washington consensus' of exploitative trade and debt slavery economics. Much more useful as an analytic frame than most things these days.

Alternatives to the conventional 'crazy talk': Icarus, community alternatives for mental illness.

Cool stuff: Free Speech TV and Keynote: Jeremy Scahill on his new "Blackwater" book, and something called Conspiracy Theory Rock.

Wall Street Journal fantasyland, convinced $100 barrels of oil wouldn't kill the economy. Dangerous groupthink from on high, and Mr. Murdoch's property working nicely: How Economy Could Survive $100 Oil.

Good for secrets and such: cryptogon.com.

Retired CIA analysts spell out the mideast gig: The Teflon Alliance with Israel. (Counterpunch rules)

A selection of interesting stuff from the Agonist, one of my favorite sites:

The Hope In Weakness (Morality II) | The Agonist

The Land of Cotton: Uzbekist@n, Not Dixie and East Germany on the Amu Darya: Ubzekist@n.

Blackwater Woes: More Elite than Our Military? and Blackwater, The Privatization of War And Public Enemy Number One.

Old Folks In the US Unhealthier Than Europeans. A LOT Unhealthier.

Morality | The Agonist

Air War: Target Iran! | The Agonist

That's all for now kiddos. Go read Hersh if you didn't already.

The compass points the wrong way

HongPong — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:50:52 -0600

Ah shit: Sarkozy calls for UN-led 'new world order':

The United Nations should avail itself as an instrument for a "new world order of the 21st century," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday in his first address to the General Assembly. Sarkozy, who won the presidency this year on a strong reform platform to modernize France, urged the world body to embark on programmes ranging from equal wealth distribution to fighting corruption in his speech full of references to France's past revolutionary ideals.

Jacobin Commie! Yikes!! The Neo Con New World Order etc. w00000!!11!!!

An ugly scenario: World War III: What World War III May Look Like - by Philip Giraldi - a former Intelligence officer:

The United States uses a neutron-type bomb against the main Iranian nuclear research center at Natanz, which it had already bombed conventionally and destroyed. It vows to bomb again if Iran continues to resist. Iran is defiant and fires another wave of Silkworms at U.S. ships, sinking one. Suicide bombers hit U.S. targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia and China place their nuclear forces on high alert. Pakistani militants take over parliament, aided by radical elements in the army and the intelligence service. India launches a preemptive strike against the main Pakistani nuclear centers at Wah and Multan, where the country's arsenal is believed to be concentrated. Pakistan has hidden some of its nukes elsewhere, however, and is able to strike back by bombing New Delhi. World War III has begun.

Someone said recently that this stuff with total NSA surveillance and paramilitary Blackwater insanity looks like Baron Hausmann's reorganization of Paris: the creation of new forms and institutions that aren't really helpful against Islamic terrorists, but quite useful against violent domestic insurrections. Haussmann built those big Parisian avenues so that revolt organizers couldn't blockade parts of the city. Saddam took a page from this when rebuilding Baghdad...

Seems too true. And all the damn compasses keep pointing that way. The fascist shift, the real deal.......

Classic colonial powers in Iraq:

Here is the legal framework on that. More from Prof. Juan Cole:

A big feature of the literature on decolonization is the delight leaders such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Ruhollah Khomeini took in abrogating laws bestowing 'extra-territoriality' on colonial personnel and even just civilians from the metropole, while in the subject country. Now extra-territoriality is back with a vengeance; and, of course, no colonial enterprise can be run without it. One can't have persons of the superior race hauled before a native judge; bad show, old boy, to let the wily oriental gentlemen get the upper hand that way.

The argument about whether Cheney/Bush went into Iraq over petroleum is not interesting. Of course they did, one way or another. The question is what exactly they thought they were doing about Iraq's petroleum. I would argue that they threw public resources (perhaps as much as two trillion dollars worth when all is said and done) to secure profits for private companies.

Fake terror threat manipulates Congress to further spy powers: The insanity continues as Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) claims that "bogus" intelligence claims were bandied about by the White House in order to get the extension of spy powers. Here you have a legislative example of the classic fear "staged war on terror" dynamic. It's all right here.

When did the dissing of generals start? Right wing noxious fumers like Jonah Goldberg have been ripping on generals since quite a while ago: VAPAHS!!!

Hence, in any case, conventional wisdom will always be happy if Republicans More Happy With the "Democratic" Congress than Democrats.

Dan Rather: the video producer, Mary Mapes, who got nailed by some kind of repackaged info bomb, thinks Dan Rather's big lawsuit is courageous. Mary Mapes: Courage for Dan Rather.

The Drugging of our children: Someone made a video, mainly about ADHD and pumping the kids' heads full of psychotropic social control agents. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's by someone named Gary Null (Google Video), who seems to have some other weird offbeat medical videos on Google Video.

AT&T going to tap the Internet & scan to catch your bad movies: Slashdot carried the story that:

Save the Internet writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the MPAA is trying to convince major ISPs to do content filtering. Now, merely wanting it is one thing, but the more important point is that 'AT&T has agreed to start filtering content at some mysterious point in the future.' We're left to wonder about the legal implications of that, but given that AT&T already has the ability to wiretap everything for the NSA, it was only a matter of time before they found a way to profit from it, too."

The chic TASER police state: Andrew Meyer was that kid at the Kerry rally tagged for no particular reason (though of course it's not safe to suggest elections are rigged in Florida, let alone mention secret societies!) Creepy embrace of tasers by the establishment media. Bill O'Reilly was really creepy about the whole thing. Emil Steiner in the WaPo says creepy stuff too. Protest for Tasered Student Continues. More creeps - a connection between ominous neocons and violence-loving O'Reilly: A marriage made in Hell. Media Matters - Beck said he "enjoy[s] watching" Taser videos; O'Reilly rolled out "Don't Taze me, bro!" bumper stickers. Stunning future ahead for Taser.

We have our own police state issues around here. PrisonPlanet has a new web page devoted to classic police brutality incidents. The new Pain Ray Gun "Silent Guardian" which basically is a microwave weapon that hurts a lot. Let me share a bit of probably-classified wisdom about microwave weapons: they are perfectly defeated by aluminum foil. Tinfoil hats at the ready!!! (Apparently, ISBN numbers are intellectual property nowadays too - no sneeking into your university bookstore to steal those serials and order 'em online! Yikes) Police Culture In the US. America’s Police Brutality Pandemic by Paul Craig Roberts. Veterans Disarmament Act To Bar Vets From Owning Guns if anyone says they have PTSD. Underground militia here we come, before the blue helmets sez ya crazy!

Great moments in Homeland Security: Because if you're not a terrorist, no problem (via here):

Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about "politically charged" opinion pieces he had published in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, "they had them printed out on the table in front of me."

Better yet: Alex Jones guys discover the horrible! Denver Sheriff's Office Helps Private Companies Take Blood And Saliva At Checkpoints. Nice! Ex-FEMA Leader Says Feds May Overreact. Michael Brown expects crazy feds. Shit!

Blackwater looks like the TASER International Comintern: At least those shady bastards are on the map right now. They're gonna get pegged by their own Zapruder film, hopefully. Here's an overview video from Jeremy Scahill, who was really good recently on MSNBC Countdown:

Bad economic news & views: "Greenspan Working To Destroy US Economy", at least suddenly talking down with great shock the excesses of Wall Street. Greenspan's Oil Claim in Context - by Dilip Hiro and Tom Engelhardt. Really helpful.

Financial Times reported:

Fresh economic shocks on the scale of the current credit squeeze will occur if US house prices continue to fall, one of the country’s leading housing experts warned on Wednesday. Robert Shiller, a Yale university economist, told a US congressional panel that he feared “the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression”.

Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright. The Saudis Call Bernanke's Bluff. Foreign reserve currencies quietly getting ditched. Krugman asked if this is the Wile E. Coyote moment (where he looks down and falls through the air). (On a side note, the NY Times has made its editorial stuff free again - and the old article archives going back many years. They want to sell more ads now. Sweet!)

Why the dollar is taking another beating now. First World Government junk bonds on the way. Suddenly, the British pound looks vulnerable. West ‘complicit’ in Third World corruption. How the Bush economy worked.

Looks like a good book: Naomi Klein's The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

On a more funny note: Chinese buy into conspiracy theory. yes the hokey tale of the Rothschilds has become a hit Chinese book, read by all apparatchiks, nomenclatura and bureaucrats of note!

If it's all coming down, the operative question might be: If Humans Are a Virus, Then What Is the End Game? Worth considering I suppose.

Discrediting the North American Union: Reason Magazine calls NAU agenda "a Xenophobic Fantasy". I wish. I found these weird MnDOT documents, there is a real something big out there. Of that much I am certain, and it has Minnesota manifestations.

How about those loose nukes: Simple Error My Ass, says Larry Johnson, a former CIA guy.

Mideast tensions: Israeli rightwing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu claimed some credit around the suspicious Israeli airstrikes on Syria. It's worth noting that this was certainly a kind of hegemonic shifting, a frame bump in the discourse of international politics. War strikes become the norm, and Netanyahu is positioning himself to bask in the glory. Syria’s Illusory Nukes: More Propaganda.

This stupid prancing shit with Ahmadinejad: Grow Up. Hell yeah. Newt Gingrich: Bush Should Blow Up Iran's Natural Gas Insfrastructure. A good point:

Gingrich said: "I can't imagine why they put up with this. I mean, either General Petraeus is wrong and the military spokesman's wrong or the current policies we have are stunningly ineffective. ... We should finance the students. We should finance a Radio Free Iran. We should covertly sabotage the only gasoline refinery in the country. We should be prepared, once the gasoline refinery's down, to stop all of the gasoline tankers and communicate to the Iranian government, that, if they want to move equipment into Iran - into Iraq - they're gonna have to walk."

What was legal beagle Greta's response to this bloodthirsty, illegal and immoral suggestion?

She said, "That actually seems rather simple and easy to do." The sheer insanity of this is mind-boggling.

Gingrich's open call for sabotage of Iran's gas industry lends more credence to my theory that Iran's natural gas infrastructure, including recent construction on a pipeline to India, is the real target of the Bush administration, not the nuclear plants.

That's why they've over-hyped the nuclear issue. Seek the money to find the hidden agenda. The target is gas, not the atom.

Better yet! Think Progress: Durbin: Lieberman-Kyl Amendment Is ‘Dangerous,’ ‘Puts Us On Record’ In Support Of Iran War. Fuck he's right!!! It's another batshit insane blank check thing. Iran promises missiles will fly if US attacks. UK Times throws out major neocon propaganda, but still: Secret US air force team to perfect plan for Iran strike.

Senate Neocons Provoke Iran. Dress Rehearsal for War. For more,Informed Comment always good. Michael Scheuer, formerly known as CIA's "Anonymous," has one on Why Does Norman Podhoretz Hate America? about the "Islamofascist" bullshit. Quite good.

Iran's Ahmadinejad, public enemy No. 1? shorter: "Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war" by Juan Cole.

The Russian oil company LUKoil gets West Qurna oilfield development. Good thing American soldiers liberated the contracts to such field by fiat of the gun. What it may cost to stay in Iraq (to secure Russian oil contracts, which may or may not become petrodollars).

Michael Ledeen vs Michael Ledeen: Sell arms to Iran vs. Iran is a warring enemy of America!! Neocons have all this evil innuendo about crushing the liberals, but they themselves are the treasonous bastards since they were selling weapons to Iran during the Iran-Contra Rockstar Geopolitical Party of All Time.

Old news: Greg Palast on Alex Jones in 2002 - old stuff but it mainly checked out. Venezuela, Florida elections, Saudis and Pakistanis in 9/11.

Last bits: The unmasking power of the freedom of speech and dialogue - on the Columbia academic situation. It's really ugly scene with Peter King on mosques, really bad: Extremism in religion is not against the law.

Interesting from dailykos: Hadrian's Forum: Catiline and Rome's "Housing Bubble"; Roman Progressives, Part 1.

A town uses social networking for the Edwards campaign. Sounds like Matt Bai wrote an interesting book on the blogger roots blasting against the Democratic Party establishment.

Some crazy freakin' conservatives have a song about how much God hates America right now. This kind of masochism is how they are starting debates now. WHY SHOULD GOD BLESS AMERICA?!? These people WANT to KNOW!

Ok. ok...

I've got a very bad feeling about this: Your everyday jumble of notes and impending Iran doom!!

HongPong — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 03:20:51 -0600

Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media.

--Ray McGovern, old-school CIA veteran

With reports of loose nukes and impending economic disruptions on the credit market, I've had a weird bad vibe for the last couple days. Having to take funny paths around the crashed I-35W bridge lately just underscores a sense of discontinuity.

Right now I am listening to CSPAN2, where Michael Ledeen drones on about the Mullahs in Iran and how Ledeen is gonna stage the covert war in Iran. James Woolsey and Clifford May all agree at the American Enterprise Institute, it's time for the fuckin Apocalypse! And oddly, Woolsey is a fan of South Park..... Ledeen says "they don't expect to survive" because Iranians put their money outside the country. Bizarre.

Yeah so I was around the insane Internet fringe recently, which is where I discovered the Morgellons!. Mwahaha... Anyway Rense.com, the Jeff Rense website, is a fine place to get up to your neck in everything outside the conventional political spectrum, from UFOs to government-sponsored AIDS to Holocaust deniers. It helps that Rense has crazy-guy hair on his old GIF.

Since our theme with the Morgellons has been medical paranoia, why not include: Bush greases skids for UN Pandemic power grab, via the Alex Jones infowars black helicopter world. The idea is that the World Health Organization and the UN will come take your guns after they release the engineered Morgellons. Supposedly at the recent Canadian Security and Prosperity Partnership they signed rules that "Establishes U.N. law along with regulations by the World Trade Organization and World Health Organization as supreme over U.S. law during a pandemic and sets the stage for militarizing the management of continental health emergencies." w0w!

Early reports said that there were mysterious gigantic put options purchased to expire by September 21st. Official type guys say it looks to be nonsense. It's possible that really the put options are just the downside half of a large deal, designed to offer a hedged bet for both big falls and a big rise. Ron Paul says the stock market is gonna collapse.

A variety of insane war crimes perpetrated in Iraq. Pretty hard to dispute anymore. Anyone who disagrees should think about depleted uranium for a while.

The Air Force outlines how they support insurgencies. Here's the doc (PDF).

Here's the sorta-banned book Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA by Ralph McGee. How did the CIA spin the media in the old days? Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation

There are new regional power blocs forming. Here is one: Putin denies Shanghai regional group is military bloc. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Russia, China, and 4 ex-Soviet states.

Google censors another 9/11 documentary by knocking down the view counts.

Is the federal government using Neo-Nazi provocateurs? How many big rollers in these kinds of organizations are really informants, etc.

Gonzales is gone but all the insane spying remains and Democrats probably aren't going to do anything.

Dems are not going to stop "World War IV" it seems like. Buchanan says mass murdering Iranians will be popular in America. The CIA fabricated Hezbollah threats, shady business in the National Intelligence Estimate. When the Iran war apparently starts, the War Criminal is in the Living Room, indeed.

The Power of Narrative! Some older material, but I thought clear and relevant. Our Date with Armageddon: a pretty good overview of the factors adding into the Iran war. Trapped in the Wrong Paradigm: Three Handy Rules. The Paradigm that Will Not Die. Undying Myths, and Sullivan's Lies on the Path of Penance. The Intelligence won't matter because they'll spoof it. An excellent point. Walking into the Iran Trap, I: A Decision of Policy -- and the Intelligence Won't Matter. The Irrelevance of Intelligence Again, and Collective Illusions. Yeah. And Still One More Time: Stop Helping the Warmongers. How the Foreign Policy Consensus Protects Itself.

Other stuff: Dirge for the 'Surge'- by Justin Raimondo

Antiwar.com Blog · Bogus War Party Propaganda, Juan Cole on History of Western Incursions in the Mideast. Crackpot Realists and Permanent War - by Ann Berg

80% of the intelligence you need is already out there. You don't need some fancy cloak-and-daggers to find out!! This is why everyone and their mom is hooked on the Internet. If you read nothing else, read this!! Ex-CIA dude Ray McGovern:

The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible - and held accountable - for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms, to spies, to - not least - open media.

Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained - as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained - by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.

More following up that idea here: You, Too, Can and Should Be an "Intelligence Analyst". Don't buy the 'appeal to authority' argument.

Ok now I realized a lot of the crazy paranoia stuff is stashed somewhere else so I will have to get it later.