Disclaimer: This site is *not* affiliated with AIPAC, Ahmed Chalabi, K Street, ClearChannel, or Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ. In case you were curious. Full disclosure: I have some shares of Apple and therefore I have an Apple bias. Yum. Also got a tiny bit of gold!
Kind of amazed that the Iraq 'combat mission' officially ended, as this seven-year epic dominated my college experience & well basically shaped a whole era. But did FOXnews even honorably observe the conclusion of the troops operations? How could they, when they can instead set fires and blather about Alaska oil pipelines?
I has a sad over this NYC mosque concerntrolling fauxtroversy. After all an urban area laden with knicknacks, fast food, gambling and strip clubz cannot be besotted by a JCC/YMCA like cultural center. Cultural arsonists & jacobins like Palin and Gingrich are quite depressing, but even worse it seems like the White House can't really work the daily news cycle.
CIA CASH CONDUIT - In-Q-Tel: CIA Venture Capital fund already funded Google Earth, formerly known as Keyhole. In-Q-Tel's tax return brags of developing, providing this software to the intelligence community. This is why Google Earth Server/Enterprise edition is now the 'keystone' of fusion center geospatial intelligence systems. Cryptome has their hilarious tax returns! cia-in-q-tel-06.zip // cia-in-q-tel-07.zip // cia-in-q-tel-08.zip
Check this lol fro the 2008 return page 38. This is your Google Earth to 'fuse data from maps, images, text and other sources" etc
In-Q-Tel, a private nonprofit venture funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, today announced a strategic investment in Keyhole Corp., a pioneer of interactive 3D earth visualization. The investment, made in February 2003, was In-Q-Tel's first engagement with a company on behalf of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
Sparkin up Prop19:Rolling Stone has some nibbles. Expect turnout! Good ol California Uber Alles himself, Jerry Brown, declared "We've got to compete with China... And if everybody's stoned, how the hell are we going to make it?"Drug War Victims - Drug WarRant
"....we will suggest below that if the hard core arises for certain identifiable reasons, it can be broken up or at least muted by government action." .... "We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."
This is one hell of a chestnut. It seems obvious, in retrospect, the best way to conceal the truth of establishment shady business and institutionalized crime is to mix in a ton of bullshit in order to turn all the skeptics and inquirers against each other. Only now it's Obama's dang 'information czar' pitching the strategy!
Interestingly, the more I broaden my sources, the more I appreciate the broad spectrum of people that have cancelled their subscriptions to Establishment Bollox and the Lies of the Mighty Wurlitzer. It's amazing how so many features of Establishment Reality are so widely loathed from within so many different worldviews.
This important fact is what people like Cass Sunstein don't understand. Like faux Establishment 'Centrists', they believe that ontological truth, or even the 'optimal' policy outcome, is like @ the 50% mark between where the dialectical left & right goalposts are placed.
It's like Howard Fineman - accurately dubbed the Weathervane because you only have to look which way he's pointing to determine what reassuring centrist reality is today's hot item. Howard Fineman is the precise opposite of a 'conspiracy theorist' in Sunstein's world.
The Establishment's Hegelian social control techniques are obvious: just set the left and right goalposts, stir and repeat. Problem-reaction-solution. If one can influence both the left and right goalposts in the great false dichotomy, it makes the product of "centrists" far more acceptable. Everything floating around outside this parlor game is the prima materia of 'conspiracy' that the State should attack professionally, Sunstein says!
Anyhow Cass Sunstein was appointed by President Obama as some kind of info czar. Interestingly he wrote a paper about how to manipulate conspiracy theorists by attempting to throw their groups off the Hegelian deep end, thus opening an opportunity for defamatory information warfare. Fascinating stuff, and it's got Alex Jones incensed!!
This whole thing reminds me of how the JFK conspiracy scene is managed as "A Story/B Story" wherein there are two alternate, mutually irreconcilable narratives. Dribs and drabs of facts supporting A and B (roughly, CIA/Mafia and Lone Gunman, usually) can be offered and safely paddle around on the History Channel.
Let us share a few choice links about how the CIA type control system AKA the Intelligence Power controls the World of Conspiracy. This is good stuff -- this is exactly how Mama Cass wants the world of conspiracies organized.
For The Win: Fintan Dunne called the Sunstein approach years ago!
The CIA Fakes is a catchphrase term to describe a group which includes:
-- Covert Operatives of the CIA, NSA and DIA; of the U.S. Corporate/Military Industrial Complex; of the intelligence services of U.K. Spain, France Holland, Germany, and Russia.
-- Political Agents working within the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Democratic Black Caucus, Green Party, and Patriot Movement.
-- Politicians in the U.S., U.K. Spain, France, Germany and Russia --who pose as 9/11 skeptics.
-- Media, including Mainstream, Alternative Media and Internet broadcasting media who either front for, cooperate with, or are directly employed by intelligence services mentioned above.
The primary objectives of the CIA FAKES are:
-- To leverage the Fakes into position as the leadership/spokespersons
for the 9/11 skeptics movement. --To splinter and divide that movement. --To promote lame, tame and/or booby-trapped questions about 9/11.
-- To be sufficiently over-the-top as to prevent the 9/11 issue getting
any traction in the media or left-wing.
-- To ensure that the movement would not have a politically-active
leadership capable of turning it into an effective political lobby campaign.
The questions about 9/11 were bound to be asked, the important
aspect for the perpetrators was and is ...by whom?
One big corner of that overall 9/11 picture is formed by four disparate-seeming individuals: a veteran whistleblower, an attractive novice whistleblower, a campaigning journalist and a reputed lingerie model; jigsaw peices called Ellsberg, Edmonds, Hopsicker and Keller. Ellsberg supports Edmonds, confirmed by Hopsicker --backed by eyewitness accounts from Keller. But they're all telling different flavors of the same story.
To specify which story that is, let's take a look at the popular tales of 9/11. The notorious main division is between LIHOP and MIHOP. But it's much more detailed than that. Explanations come in a full range of flavors --starting with the official story:
A. Official story:
CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush and/or Clinton were complacent.
B. OfficialLame Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush/Cheney maybe let it happen; Israelis Knew.
C. OfficialLIHOP Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI were compromised; Bush/Cheney did let it happen; Israelis Helped.
D. OfficialLIHOP Wild Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI compromised; Bush/Cheney/Neocons let it happen; Israelis Did It.
E. OfficialLIHOP Tinfoil Conspiracy:
Israelis/Neocons/Bush/Cheney Did It; CIA/FBI looked the other way.
F. OfficialMIHOP 'Serious' Conspiracy:
Israelis/Neocons/CIA/FBI/Bush/Cheney/Military-Industrial-Complex Did It.
G. OfficialLoony Conspiracies:
Rothschilds and/or Rockefellers and/or CFR and/or Bildebergers did it.
Globalists who want to run everything in a World Government did it.
Jews and Jewish bankers -who already run everything- did it.
Satanists, Opus Dei or Reptilians did it.
It's a terrific variety of theories.
It plays out something like this:
The mainstream media push version A; hint at B; sneer at G.
The controlled right/intellectual media pushes version B.
The controlled left/intellectual media pushes version C.
The 'moderate' Fake internet sites push versions C and D.
The 'softcore' Fake internet sites push versions D and E.
The 'independent' Fake internet sites push version F.
The 'loony' Fake interent sites push variations of version G.
But every single one, from A to G are OFFICIAL versions, sanctioned and promoted by the 9/11 intelligence coverup operation and their CIA Fakes network. They have a flavor for every market.
The creation of this multiplicity of explanations is a core element of the coverup. Left to their own devices, people on the Internet might have figured out the truth themselves. But with this circus in action, there is always plenty of distraction and lots of division in opinion.
The intelligence coverup is not trying to stop 9/11 conspiracy theories on the internet. It's creating them. Then playing off supporters of the different theories against each other. That's a classic Cointelpro-style tactic.
Our main though far from exclusive focus – our running example – involves
conspiracy theories relating to terrorism, especially theories that arise from and post-date
the 9/11 attacks. These theories exist within the United States and, even more virulently,
in foreign countries, especially Muslim countries. The existence of both domestic and
foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the
government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be. Terrorism-related
theories are thus a crucial testing ground for the significance, causes, and policy
implications of widespread conspiracy theorizing. As we shall see, an understanding of
conspiracy theories has broad implications for the spread of information and beliefs;
many erroneous judgments are a product of the same forces that produce conspiracy
theories, and if we are able to see how to counteract such theories, we will have some
clues about how to correct widespread errors more generally.
Part I explores some definitional issues and lays out some of the mechanisms that
produce conspiracy theories and theorists. We begin by discussing different
understandings of the nature of conspiracy theories and different accounts of the kinds of
errors made by those who hold them. Our primary claim is that conspiracy theories
typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a “crippled
epistemology,” in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational
sources. Those who hold conspiracy theories do so because of what they read and hear. In
that sense, acceptance of such theories is not irrational from the standpoint of those who
adhere to them. There is a close connection, we suggest, between our claim on this count
and the empirical association between terrorist behavior and an absence of civil rights
and civil liberties.10 When civil rights and civil liberties are absent, people lack multiple
information sources, and they are more likely to accept conspiracy theories.
Part II discusses government responses and legal issues, in light of the discussion
in Part I. We address several dilemmas of governmental response to conspiracy theories,
such as the question whether it is better to rebut such theories, at the risk of legitimating
them, or to ignore them, at the risk of leaving them unrebutted. Conspiracy theories turn
out to be especially hard to undermine or dislodge; they have a self-sealing quality,
rendering them particularly immune to challenge. We suggest several policy responses
that can dampen the supply of conspiracy theorizing, in part by introducing diverse
viewpoints and new factual assumptions into the hard-core groups that produce such
theories. Our principal claim here involves the potential value ofcognitive infiltration of
extremist groups, designed to introduce informational diversity into such groups and to
expose indefensible conspiracy theories as such.
Tell me this, Sunstein: how does all that drug money get through the Federal Reserve System? Everyone has been so eager to confront that 'conspiracy theory,' haven't they?
Blah blah blah... let's get to the good stuff: [Below the fold - favorite chunks of much of the crazy essay]
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Actually I'm impressed. The list of articles of impeachment are well-chosen, and all very well-documented. Huzzah! Right now we're following it on C-SPAN, getting read aloud!
Even includes the PSYOPS of the war propaganda campaign - and the 9/11 coverup. Not bad at all!
Article I
Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.
Article II
Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.
Article III
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.
Article IV
Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.
Article V
Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.
Article VI
Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.
Article VII
Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.
Article VIII
Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.
Article IX
Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor
Article X
Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes
Article XI
Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq
Article XII
Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation’s Natural Resources
Article XIIII
Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries
Article XIV
Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency
Article XV
Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq
Article XVI
Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors
Article XVII
Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives
Article XVIII
Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy
Article XIX
Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to “Black Sites” Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture
Article XX
Imprisoning Children
Article XXI
Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government
Article XXII
Creating Secret Laws
Article XXIII
Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act
Article XXIV
Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment
Article XXV
Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens
Article XXVI
Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements
Article XXVII
Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply
Article XXVIII
Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice
Article XXIX
Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Article XXX
Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare
Article XXXI
Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency
Article XXXII
Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change
Article XXXIII
Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.
Article XXXIV
Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001
Article XXXV
Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders
******
Duly noted. It was important to get this on the record, even if the mainstream Dems don't care. It's all very well cited and certainly worthy of any politician to stand on.
In any case, you could campaign against all of these articles, in talking-point form. They're quite well-worded, and I have to hand it to the clever wordsmiths that put this beast together.
Unfortunately, in our system of government the actual impeachment system is a mess - and there's really very little way for the legislative branch to chip away at patently awful leaders.
On the other hand, the DFL-controlled Minnesota Senate blocked Lt. Gov. Molnau's confirmation as Transportation Commissioner. So you've got a bit more chutzpah around these parts.
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)
Before the current move to the RNC, Davis' job was strategic communications in the Public Affairs Office of the Secretary of Defense where, according toKen 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.
"Thelist of bloggerswho 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...]
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...
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.
“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....
Cracked.com has five kick-ass action movies that are pure Propaganda. Both Shooter and Kurtlar Vadisi Irak (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq) are on there, and indeed, both are pretty damn sweet political propaganda. Kurtlar Vadisi: "Let's face it, this is a fucking jihad of awesome." I had one of the first reviews of Kurtlar Vadisi out there, made from a crappy screener that didn't even have English. It was that awesome.
Shooter Trailer: The best Oswald-vs-the-conspiracy movie conceivable.
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!!!
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.......
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.
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."
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."
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:
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!)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
Having a low-key afternoon after the Wednesday street market closed in Treguier. Outside my aunt & uncle's spot the vendors have been peddling their wares all morning.
We just watched the traditional afternoon game of Bocci-like bowling in a gravel parking lot in front of the river. Small kids, older folks, the young tough-looking dudes, everyone plays nicely together. They basically throw a tiny rubber ball out about 25 feet, then try to throw three metal balls apiece at it. Whoever lands the closest wins. I was surprised no one got pegged in the head. I took a few video clips; when I get back I'll share more digital bits than you can handle...
England started flooding severely the day we left; fortunately enough for us, the Stansted Airport actually had few problems. I bumped into a number of interesting news stories today.
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First of all, from the quite interesting site TheSpyWhoBilledMe.com, which focuses on the creepy and probably damaging outsourcing of intelligence, we learn that many really important products of intelligence analysis in Washington DC are generated by private contractors, who have become thoroughly integrated with the CIA, DIA and other intelligence agencies. The whole thing sucks in 'Corporate Content and the President's Daily Brief:'
Employees of corporations are handling sensitive government responsibilities in the Intelligence Community, including analytical products that are incorporated into our nation’s most important and sensitive document, the President’s Daily Brief. Thanks to outsourcing, for-profit companies have the American president’s ear on a daily basis and their words carry the weight of the combined intelligence agencies of the United States. The possibilities for manipulating politics on a global scale are unprecedented and chilling.
The President’s Daily Brief is a summary and analysis of national security issues that requires the President’s immediate attention and that the National Intelligence Director presents to the President each morning.
Across the board, US government intelligence agencies are now highly dependent upon the staff of companies for critical national security functions. Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the Intelligence Community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence which produces the final document of the President’s Daily Briefing, based upon analytical products created by the Intelligence Community. It would be hard to find an analytical product that does not have contractor involvement in some way, shape, or form. And it’s not just the products. Raw intelligence gathered by contractors also goes into the pipeline.
These analytical products from multiple agencies are sifted through, probably in part by contractors, and presented to the President every day as the US Government’s most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It’s true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence gathering is corporate. Corporations have so penetrated the Intelligence Community that it’s impossible to distinguish their work from the government’s. Although the President’s Daily Brief has the seal of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it is misleading. For full disclosure, the PDB really should look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.
Theoretically, if a corporation wanted to manipulate the national security agenda, it could introduce something into the system and no one would realize what’s happening, particularly since these companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system. For argument’s sake, let’s say a company is frustrated with a government that’s hampering its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning intelligence on that government’s suspected collaboration with terrorists would quickly get the White House’s attention and could be used to shape national policy. To get us into the Iraq war, manipulation of intelligence regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction had to be very artfully done to short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial outsourcing in the Intelligence Community, that safeguard has been eroded.
Iran-Contra Revisited: Laura Rozen points out that a Sy Hersh angle is coming all too true. Back in March, Sy reported that
Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal "lessons learned" discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: "One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office"--a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.
Which all reeks of uncanny accuracy, as well as echoing the quite true fact that everything got piped thru GW Bush's VP office back in the 1980s.
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.
Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."
But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.
Finally Rosen concludes the only possible conclusion:
Perhaps that is the take-away that Abrams' Iran Contra lessons learned exercise derived: with a closed circle feedback loop in which Congress's authority is consistently subjugated to the executive, the White House can get away with anything, and is indeed not subject to the rule of law. Under the Bush administration's definition, there are no checks on the executive branch, the very foundation of our democracy.
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Here's a useful one from Ian @ The Agonist: The War on Terror is the War on Drugs... on Crack. Because your legal system's erosion started with asset forfeiture and all that other insane shit first. Note Don's comment at the bottom about how he quit believing politicians after he saw the CIA pilot landing lotsa coke and weed. Don, an Agonist regular, (sig: 'i did inhale') spent some time in jail because he couldn't quite get out of his bit part in Iran-contra... he flicks off traffic security cameras in Texas nowadays.
Maryam: the well-justified rants of an Iraqi aid worker: There are a lot of people on the Internet pissed off and ranting for lame reasons. Maryam ain't one of em; she works cleaning up the mess in Iraq, trying to patch up wounded children and so forth. On various comments on a FireDogLake thread, she lets loose an ugly, but quite understandable, series of angry thoughts which crystallize the reality we can't handle facing in America, instead cowering behind abstractions:
Stop telling lies to yourself American. We know that your racist brutal murdering war criminal troops came from your society and reflect its values. we know that because we see how they behave and have to bury their victims. If you are stupid enough to think we feel anything but hatred and contrempt for your soldiers and the country that sent them to make war on my people then you are a fool.
As to Saddam bad though he was your country is far worse.
.......As I am an Iraki and as my job is to treat children maimed and deformed by the weapons your country uses and then prevented me from getting the medicines used to treat those cancers you will forgive me if I tell you that you too are telling lies to yourself. What we konw is that when it comes murdering Iraki civilians that there is no difference between the cynical and corrupt party called the Democrats and the cynical and corrupt party called the Republicans. Both are infected with the belief that America has the right to behave as it wishes especially when the people being killed are not white.
.......The Red Crescent to answer your question Siun is the only body working everywhere in Irak and outside it. It is probably the best way for those who want to undo some of the evil that America does to Irakis to help with humanitarian relief.
There are few people with more justifiable rants. Good luck to Maryam out there, somewhere on the fringe of oblivion.
Well I am off for now, probably not going to post anything for a few days as we enjoy Paris and the tail-end of this excellent two-week vacation. When I return, it'll be to a country still sliding quite rapidly downhill... Where it goes, nobody knows. At least i'll be a little more relaxed, enough to deal with things better in the future than I have lately.
Bloomberg - Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are masking burgeoning losses in the market for subprime mortgage bonds by failing to cut the credit ratings on about $200 billion of securities backed by home loans.
The highest default rates on home loans in a decade have reduced prices of some bonds backed by mortgages to people with poor or limited credit by more than 50 cents on the dollar and forced New York-based Bear Stearns Cos. to offer $3.2 billion to bail out a money-losing hedge fund. Almost 65 percent of the bonds in indexes that track subprime mortgage debt don't meet the ratings criteria in place when they were sold, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
That may just be the beginning. Downgrades by S&P, Moody's and Fitch would force hundreds of investors to sell holdings, roiling the $800 billion market for securities backed by subprime mortgages and $1 trillion of collateralized debt obligations, the fastest growing part of the financial markets.
``You'll see massive losses from banks, insurance companies and pension managers,'' said Joshua Rosner, a managing director at investment research firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York and co-author of a study last month that said S&P, Moody's and Fitch understate the risks of subprime mortgage bonds. ``The longer they wait, the worse it's going to be.''
So the big indexes are pretending these bad debts are better, because if they get downgraded all the index funds and everyone else will dump this shit, and its heavily leveraged value will accelerate the system's imminent (and immanent) ruptures. Another fine example of how the market can't self-regulate by downgrading batches of shitty securities. See also: London fund latest subprime victim.
I also went on a wild-goose chase, as the State Department has been unable to get my dad his passport for a good 13-14 weeks. They sent it to a street address in Minneapolis, which I visited (and attempted to find the other three SW / NE / NW quadrant equivalents as well). No luck all around. I am going here in a week.
Catching up with Scott: The Grand Dean of academic conspiracy research is Peter Dale Scott, who has doggedly checked out the 'deep politics' of America, the secret stuff from JFK to Watergate and now 9/11 and Iraq-related matters. He comes from the same cadre as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and the other classic leftie critics. He's saying here that he is not really part of the left anymore, and how the ongoing political battles among nasty factions like the oil lobby are sort of invisible to the Chomsky-style 'structuralists' who apply outdated concepts of the Ruling Class vs. the Oppressed &etc. Here's an 8-minute clip about 9/11, 'left gatekeepers' and Scott's general approach to 9/11 after researching JFK and Iran-Contra for decades.
Scott is one of those guys who insists on looking at individual personalities and all that kind of thing, not just the dull economic structures that old lefties dwell on. Here's another 9 minute clip about Cheney and 9/11, how Cheney sort of seized control of the 'shadow government' on that day. He's connecting 9/11 actions with Oliver North's old weird schemes in the 1980s - FEMA, the National Programs Office, going into the Patriot Act, etc.
Global schemes to divide ethnicities: One interesting neoconservative angle is how you can combine "freedom for small ethnic groups" and "ethnic groups are pawns we play against each other." The dissolution of Yugoslavia & the application of Albanians & the KLA as an (al-Qaeda-linked) anti-Russian proxy force is a pretty good example. Some similar stuff happens around Africa near Rwanda and the Congo. Clearly Elliot "the original pardoned henchman" Abrams' efforts to get the Palestinians fighting amongst each other have gone forth, if somewhat backfired. Many around the mideast suspect that dividing up Iraq was the plan all along. Now the think-tank geniuses are floating plans to partition Iraq, and not surprisingly the Conspiracy Front sees a conspiracy. I accept most of the articles they cite as examples of this policy in Iraq though.
Recent Brit terror plotters "known to police and MI5" aka domestic intelligence services. A typical but generally suppressed angle to many, many stories about "terrorists" in the West.
iPhone cracked by DVDJon: some work accomplished on unlocking standard iPhone features. Google for more info on that, his blog is called 'so sue me'. Appropriate for the guy that originally came up with key parts of the DVD encryption crack, a great defeater of the DMCA worthy of top accolades.
Lifeblogging = people in your head: This Pittsburgh Mac user named Justine elected to basically wear a webcam all day & put her life online via video at tastyblogsnack.com and ijustine.com. Somehow thru this process she gets to fly around and visited Minneapolis for the iPhone release. I am not sure if it is a promotional gig or what. The whole thing is strange but very modern eh? Everyone stumbles into the panopticon - i.e. Little Brother.
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