Angus Reid Global Monitor : Polls & Research
January 31, 2007
(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Many adults in the United States question their president’s motivation in specific policies, according to a poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates released by Newsweek. 67 per cent of respondents think George W. Bush is influenced more by his personal beliefs than by facts in Iraq and other major areas.
Bush—a Republican—earned a second four-year term in the November 2004 presidential election. During his tenure, the U.S. launched the war on terrorism in Afghanistan—as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—and the coalition effort to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
The war in Iraq was launched in March 2003. At least 3,081 American soldiers have died during the military operation, and more than 23,100 troops have been wounded in action. 64 per cent of respondents think the U.S. Congress has not been assertive enough in challenging the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war.
On Jan. 10, Bush introduced his new course of action for the coalition effort, which includes an increase in U.S. troop levels. Yesterday, Republican Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter said Bush cannot ignore the upper house’s opposition to his latest proposal, declaring, "I would respectfully suggest to the president that he is not the sole decider. The decider is a joint and shared responsibility."
Polling Data
Do you think U.S. president George W. Bush’s decisions about policy in Iraq and other major areas are influenced more by the facts or more by his personal beliefs, regardless of the facts?
Influenced more by the facts
22%
Influenced more by personal beliefs
67%
Don’t know
11%
Since the Iraq war began, do you think Congress has been assertive enough in challenging the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, or has not been assertive enough?
Assertive enough
27%
Not assertive enough
64%
Don’t know / Refused
9%
Source: Princeton Survey Research Associates / Newsweek
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,003 American adults, conducted on Jan. 24 and Jan. 25, 2007. Margin of error is 4 per cent.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
FBI turns to broad new wiretap method
ZDNet | January 30, 2007
The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.
Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.
Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000 . It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit , and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible.
Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm , a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)
That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.
The technique came to light at the Search & Seizure in the Digital Age symposium held at Stanford University's law school on Friday. Ohm, who is now a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Richard Downing, a CCIPS assistant deputy chief, discussed it during the symposium.
In a telephone conversation afterward, Ohm said that full-pipe recording has become federal agents' default method for Internet surveillance. "You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment," he said. "If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses, you don't throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact."
"You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you're trying to monitor," he added.
On Monday, a Justice Department representative would not immediately answer questions about this kind of surveillance technique.
"What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets."
When the FBI announced two years ago it had abandoned Carnivore, news reports said that the bureau would increasingly rely on Internet providers to conduct the surveillance and reimburse them for costs. While Carnivore was the subject of congressional scrutiny and outside audits, the FBI's current Internet eavesdropping techniques have received little attention.
Carnivore apparently did not perform full-pipe recording. A technical report (PDF: " Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System ") from December 2000 prepared for the Justice Department said that Carnivore "accumulates no data other than that which passes its filters" and that it saves packets "for later analysis only after they are positively linked by the filter settings to a target."
Gloria Steinem: How the CIA Used Feminism to Destabilize Society
By Henry Makow Ph.D.
March 18, 2002
"In the 1960's, the elite media invented second-wave feminism as part of the elite agenda to dismantle civilization and create a New World Order."
Since writing these words last week, I have discovered that before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA spying on Marxist students in Europe and disrupting their meetings. She became a media darling due to her CIA connections. MS Magazine, which she edited for many years was indirectly funded by the CIA.
Steinem has tried to suppress this information, unearthed in the 1970's by a radical feminist group called "Red Stockings." In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas prevented Random House from publishing it in "Feminist Revolution." Nevertheless the story appeared in the "Village Voice" on May 21, 1979.
Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era," she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, "and that made me a Marxist." (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: "Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job."
Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan's alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a "Chester Bowles Student Fellowship" to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.
In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA's Cord Meyers to direct an "informal group of activists" called the "Independent Research Service." This was part of Meyer's "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which created magazines like "Encounter" and "Partisan Review" to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.
One of Steinem's CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960's, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women's lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine's first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the cream of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.
Steinem's personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980's, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.
Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University's secret pagan "Skull and Bones" society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.
The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom." Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950's and 1960's, and I believe continues to do so today. In "The Cultural Cold War," Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.
The CIA's "Project Mockingbird" involved the direct infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets. "By the early 1950's," writes Deborah Davis, in her book "Katherine the Great," the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all." In 1982 the CIA admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field. Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who ran the operation until his "suicide" in 1963, boasted that "you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month."
I was born in 1949. Idealists in my parent's generation were disillusioned when the Communist dream of universal brotherhood turned out to be a shill for a brutal despotism. My own generation may discover that our best instincts have also been manipulated and exploited. There is evidence that the 60's drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and anti-war movement, like feminism, were CIA directed. For example, the CIA has admitted setting up the (National Student Association as a front in 1947 http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html). In the early 1950's the NSA opposed the attempts of the House Un American Activities Committee to root out Communist spies. According to Phil Agee Jr., NSA officers participated in the activities of SNCC, the militant civil rights group, and Students for a Democratic Society, a radical peace group.
According to Mark Riebling, the CIA also may have used Timothy Leary. Certainly the agency distributed LSD to Leary and other opinion makers in the 1960s. Leary made a generation of Americans turn away from active participation in society and seek fulfillment "within." In another example of the CIA's use of drugs to interfere in domestic politics, Gary Webb describes how in the 1980's, the CIA flooded Black ghettos with cocaine.
I won't attempt to analyze the CIA's motivation except to suggest what they have in common: They demoralized, alienated and divided Americans. The elite operates by fostering division and conflict in the world. Thus, we don't realize who the real enemy is. For the same reason, the CIA and elite foundations also fund the diversity and multicultural movements.
Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.
Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture ("husband") and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium.
Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere "stereotypes." This is a vicious calumny on all heterosexuals, 95% of the population. Talk about hate! Yet it is taught to children in elementary schools! It is echoed in the media. Lesbians like Rosie O'Donnell are advanced as role models.
All of this is calculated to create personal confusion and sow chaos among heterosexuals. As a result, millions of American males are emasculated and divorced from their relationship to family (the world and the future.) The American woman has been hoodwinked into investing herself in a mundane career instead of the timeless love of her husband and children. Many women have become temperamentally unfit to be wives and mothers. People, who are isolated and alone, stunted and love-starved, are easy to fool and manipulate. Without the healthy influence of two loving parents, so are their children.
Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order. Its advocates are sanctimonious charlatans who have grown rich and powerful from it. They include a whole class of liars and moral cripples who work for the elite in various capacities: government, education and the media. These imposters ought to be exposed and ridiculed.
Women's oppression is a lie. Sex roles were never as rigid as feminists would have us believe. My mother had a successful business in the 1950's importing watchstraps from Switzerland. When my father's income increased, she was content to quit and concentrate on the children. Women were free to pursue careers if they wanted to. The difference was that their role as wife and mother was understood, and socially validated, as it should be.
Until Gloria Steinem and the CIA came along.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry Makow is the author of A Long Way to go for a Date. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. He welcomes your feedback and ideas at henry@savethemales.ca.
March 18, 2002
"In the 1960's, the elite media invented second-wave feminism as part of the elite agenda to dismantle civilization and create a New World Order."
Since writing these words last week, I have discovered that before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA spying on Marxist students in Europe and disrupting their meetings. She became a media darling due to her CIA connections. MS Magazine, which she edited for many years was indirectly funded by the CIA.
Steinem has tried to suppress this information, unearthed in the 1970's by a radical feminist group called "Red Stockings." In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas prevented Random House from publishing it in "Feminist Revolution." Nevertheless the story appeared in the "Village Voice" on May 21, 1979.
Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era," she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, "and that made me a Marxist." (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: "Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job."
Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan's alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a "Chester Bowles Student Fellowship" to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.
In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA's Cord Meyers to direct an "informal group of activists" called the "Independent Research Service." This was part of Meyer's "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which created magazines like "Encounter" and "Partisan Review" to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.
One of Steinem's CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960's, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women's lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine's first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the cream of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.
Steinem's personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980's, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.
Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University's secret pagan "Skull and Bones" society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.
The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom." Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950's and 1960's, and I believe continues to do so today. In "The Cultural Cold War," Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.
The CIA's "Project Mockingbird" involved the direct infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets. "By the early 1950's," writes Deborah Davis, in her book "Katherine the Great," the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all." In 1982 the CIA admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field. Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who ran the operation until his "suicide" in 1963, boasted that "you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month."
I was born in 1949. Idealists in my parent's generation were disillusioned when the Communist dream of universal brotherhood turned out to be a shill for a brutal despotism. My own generation may discover that our best instincts have also been manipulated and exploited. There is evidence that the 60's drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and anti-war movement, like feminism, were CIA directed. For example, the CIA has admitted setting up the (National Student Association as a front in 1947 http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html). In the early 1950's the NSA opposed the attempts of the House Un American Activities Committee to root out Communist spies. According to Phil Agee Jr., NSA officers participated in the activities of SNCC, the militant civil rights group, and Students for a Democratic Society, a radical peace group.
According to Mark Riebling, the CIA also may have used Timothy Leary. Certainly the agency distributed LSD to Leary and other opinion makers in the 1960s. Leary made a generation of Americans turn away from active participation in society and seek fulfillment "within." In another example of the CIA's use of drugs to interfere in domestic politics, Gary Webb describes how in the 1980's, the CIA flooded Black ghettos with cocaine.
I won't attempt to analyze the CIA's motivation except to suggest what they have in common: They demoralized, alienated and divided Americans. The elite operates by fostering division and conflict in the world. Thus, we don't realize who the real enemy is. For the same reason, the CIA and elite foundations also fund the diversity and multicultural movements.
Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.
Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture ("husband") and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium.
Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere "stereotypes." This is a vicious calumny on all heterosexuals, 95% of the population. Talk about hate! Yet it is taught to children in elementary schools! It is echoed in the media. Lesbians like Rosie O'Donnell are advanced as role models.
All of this is calculated to create personal confusion and sow chaos among heterosexuals. As a result, millions of American males are emasculated and divorced from their relationship to family (the world and the future.) The American woman has been hoodwinked into investing herself in a mundane career instead of the timeless love of her husband and children. Many women have become temperamentally unfit to be wives and mothers. People, who are isolated and alone, stunted and love-starved, are easy to fool and manipulate. Without the healthy influence of two loving parents, so are their children.
Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order. Its advocates are sanctimonious charlatans who have grown rich and powerful from it. They include a whole class of liars and moral cripples who work for the elite in various capacities: government, education and the media. These imposters ought to be exposed and ridiculed.
Women's oppression is a lie. Sex roles were never as rigid as feminists would have us believe. My mother had a successful business in the 1950's importing watchstraps from Switzerland. When my father's income increased, she was content to quit and concentrate on the children. Women were free to pursue careers if they wanted to. The difference was that their role as wife and mother was understood, and socially validated, as it should be.
Until Gloria Steinem and the CIA came along.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry Makow is the author of A Long Way to go for a Date. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. He welcomes your feedback and ideas at henry@savethemales.ca.
Rockefeller Admitted Elite Goal Of Microchipped Population
Rockefeller Admitted Elite Goal Of Microchipped Population
Hollywood director Russo goes in-depth for first time on the astounding admissions of Nick Rockefeller, including his prediction of 9/11 and the war on terror hoax, the Rockefeller's creation of women's lib, and the elite's ultimate plan for world population reduction and a microchipped society
Prison Planet | January 29, 2007
Paul Joseph Watson
Hollywood director and documentary film maker Aaron Russo has gone in-depth on the astounding admissions of Nick Rockefeller, who personally told him that the elite's ultimate goal was to create a microchipped population and that the war on terror was a hoax, Rockefeller having predicted an "event" that would trigger the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan eleven months before 9/11.
Rockefeller also told Russo that his family's foundation had created and bankrolled the women's liberation movement in order to destroy the family and that population reduction was a fundamental aim of the global elite.
Russo is perhaps best known for directing Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy but was more recently in the spotlight for his exposé of the criminal run for profit federal reserve system, the documentary America From Freedom to Fascism .
Currently undergoing more treatment in his fight against cancer, Russo made time for a sit down interview with radio host and fellow documentary film maker Alex Jones in which he dropped bombshell after bombshell on what Rockefeller had told him about the direction the world was being steered towards by the global elite.
After his popular video Mad As Hell was released and he began his campaign to become Governor of Nevada, Russo was noticed by Rockefeller and introduced to him by a female attorney. Seeing Russo's passion and ability to affect change, Rockefeller set about on a subtle mission to recruit Russo into the elite.
During one conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo if he was interested in joining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) but Russo rejected the invitation, saying he had no interest in "enslaving the people" to which Rockefeller coldly questioned why he cared about the "serfs."
"I used to say to him what's the point of all this," states Russo, "you have all the money in the world you need, you have all the power you need, what's the point, what's the end goal?" to which Rockefeller replied (paraphrasing), "The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world."
Rockefeller even assured Russo that if he joined the elite his chip would be specially marked so as to avoid undue inspection by the authorities.
Russo states that Rockefeller told him, "Eleven months before 9/11 happened there was going to be an event and out of that event we were going to invade Afghanistan to run pipelines through the Caspian sea, we were going to invade Iraq to take over the oil fields and establish a base in the Middle East, and we'd go after Chavez in Venezuela."
Rockefeller also told Russo that he would see soldiers looking in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Osama bin Laden and that there would be an "Endless war on terror where there's no real enemy and the whole thing is a giant hoax," so that "the government could take over the American people," according to Russo, who said that Rockefeller was cynically laughing and joking as he made the astounding prediction.
In a later conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo what he thought women's liberation was about. Russo's response that he thought it was about the right to work and receive equal pay as men, just as they had won the right to vote, caused Rockefeller to laughingly retort, "You're an idiot! Let me tell you what that was about, we the Rockefellers funded that, we funded women's lib, we're the ones who got all of the newspapers and television - the Rockefeller Foundation."
Rockefeller told Russo of two primary reasons why the elite bankrolled women's lib: One before women's lib the bankers couldn't tax half the population and two because it allowed them to get children in school at an earlier age, enabling them to be indoctrinated into accepting the state as the primary family, breaking up the traditional family model.
This revelation dovetails previous admissions on behalf of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem (pictured) that the CIA bankrolled Ms. Magazine as part of the same agenda of breaking up traditional family models.
Rockefeller was often keen to stress his idea that "the people have to be ruled" by an elite and that one of the tools of such power was population reduction, that there were "too many people in the world," and world population numbers should be reduced by at least half.
One issue which has spiraled out of control of the elite according to Rockefeller's conversations with Russo, is the Israel-Palestine conflict, with serious thinking at one stage revolving around the bizarre notion of giving Israeli citizens one million dollars each and relocating them all in the state of Arizona.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
America ‘poised to strike at Iran’s nuclear sites’ from bases in Bulgaria and Romania
Report suggest that ‘US defensive ring’ may be new front in war on terror.
- Gabriel Ronay
Sunday Herald
President Bush is preparing to attack Iran's nuclear facilities before the end of April and the US Air Force's new bases in Bulgaria and Romania would be used as back-up in the onslaught, according to an official report from Sofia.
"American forces could be using their two USAF bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania's Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April," the Bulgarian news agency Novinite said.
The American build-up along the Black Sea, coupled with the recent positioning of two US aircraft carrier battle groups off the Straits of Hormuz, appears to indicate president Bush has run out of patience with Tehran's nuclear misrepresentation and non-compliance with the UN Security Council's resolution. President Ahmeninejad of Iran has further ratcheted up tension in the region by putting on show his newly purchased state of the art Russian TOR-Ml anti-missile defence system.
Whether the Bulgarian news report is a tactical feint or a strategic event is hard to gauge at this stage. But, in conjunction with the beefing up of America's Italian bases and the acquisition of anti-missile defence bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, the Balkan developments seem to indicatea new phase in Bush's global war on terror.
Sofia's news of advancedwar preparations along the Black Sea is backed up by some chilling details. One is the setting up of new refuelling places for US Stealth bombers, which would spearhead an attack on Iran. "The USAF's positioning of vital refuelling facilities for its B-2 bombers in unusual places, including Bulgaria, falls within the perspective of such an attack." Novinite named colonel Sam Gardiner, "a US secret service officer stationed in Bulgaria", as the source of this revelation.
Curiously,the report noted that although Tony Blair, Bush's main ally in the global war on terror, would be leaving office, the president had opted to press on with his attack on Iran in April.
Before the end of March, 3000 US military personnel are scheduled to arrive "on a rotating basis" at America's Bulgarian bases. Under the US-Bulgarian military co-operation accord, signed in April,2006, an airbase at Bezmer, a second airfield at Graf Ignitievo and a shooting range at Novo Selo were leased to America. Significantly, last year's bases negotiations had at one point run into difficulties due to Sofia's demand "for advance warning if Washington intends to use Bulgarian soil for attacks against other nations, particularly Iran".
Romania, the other Black Sea host to the US military, is enjoying a dollar bonanza as its Mihail Kogalniceanu base at Constanta is being transformed into an American "place d'arme". It is also vital to the Iran scenario.
Last week, the Bucharest daily Evenimentual Zilei revealed the USAF is to site several flights of F-l5, F-l6 and Al0 aircraft at the Kogalniceanu base. Admiral Gheorghe Marin, Romania's chief of staff, confirmed "up to 2000 american military personnel will be temporarily stationed in Romania".
In Central Europe, the Czech Republic and Poland have also found themselves in the Pentagon's strategic focus. Last week, Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, and the country's national security council agreed to the siting of a US anti-missile radar defence system at Nepolisy. Poland has also agreed to having a US anti-missile missile base and interceptor aircraft stationed in the country.
Russia, however, does not see the chain of new US bases on its doorstep as a "defensive ring". Russia's defence chief has branded the planned US anti-missile missile sites on Czech and Polish soil as "an open threat to Russia".
Sergey Ivanov, Russia's defence minister, spoke more circumspectly while emphasising Moscow's concern. He said: "Russia is not worried. Its strategic nuclear forces can assure in any circumstance its safety. Since neither Tehran, nor Pyongyang possess intercontinental missiles capable of threatening the USA, from whom is this new missile shield supposed to protect the West? All it actually amounts to is that Prague and Warsaw want to demonstrate their loyalty to Washington."
Bush's Iran attack plan has brought into sharp focus the possible costs to Central and Eastern Europe of being "pillars of Pax Americana".
Monday, January 29, 2007
Kucinich: Bush's actions 'could lead to impeachment'
Mike Sheehan
The Raw Story
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) says the White House is "up to its old tricks" as it preparess for a U.S. attack on Iran, according to a press release.
The 2008 Democratic presidential candidate warns that Bush's actions could result in impeachment.
Kucinich accuses the Bush administration "of mounting a media blitz to prepare the U.S. public for an eventual attack on Iran," according to the release, which cites a report that the President authorized the military to kill Iranians operating inside Iraq.
"The White House is up to its old tricks again," says Kucinich, accusing the administration of "providing information by anonymous sources and portraying Iran as an aggressor in Iraq." He continues, "The President is mischaracterizing U.S. action vis а vis Iran. In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in offensive and provocative acts against Iran.
"The President's strategy, by portraying our involvement as only being on the defensive, is laying out the groundwork for him to attack Iran and bypass authorization by Congress."
The six-term Congressmember, a long-time advocate for peace, blasts "the White House spin machine" for "providing justification for a new war ... against Iran." He adds, "The Washington Post is quoting strategically placed Administration sources who are providing justification for an attack... This new twist on Iran, a country this Administration refuses to have free and open diplomatic talks with, is stating the Administration's case for war."
Kucinich closes by warning, "The degree to which this President continues to take steps to go to war against Iran without consulting with the full Congress is the degree to which he is increasingly putting himself in jeopardy of an impeachment proceeding."
The Raw Story
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) says the White House is "up to its old tricks" as it preparess for a U.S. attack on Iran, according to a press release.
The 2008 Democratic presidential candidate warns that Bush's actions could result in impeachment.
Kucinich accuses the Bush administration "of mounting a media blitz to prepare the U.S. public for an eventual attack on Iran," according to the release, which cites a report that the President authorized the military to kill Iranians operating inside Iraq.
"The White House is up to its old tricks again," says Kucinich, accusing the administration of "providing information by anonymous sources and portraying Iran as an aggressor in Iraq." He continues, "The President is mischaracterizing U.S. action vis а vis Iran. In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in offensive and provocative acts against Iran.
"The President's strategy, by portraying our involvement as only being on the defensive, is laying out the groundwork for him to attack Iran and bypass authorization by Congress."
The six-term Congressmember, a long-time advocate for peace, blasts "the White House spin machine" for "providing justification for a new war ... against Iran." He adds, "The Washington Post is quoting strategically placed Administration sources who are providing justification for an attack... This new twist on Iran, a country this Administration refuses to have free and open diplomatic talks with, is stating the Administration's case for war."
Kucinich closes by warning, "The degree to which this President continues to take steps to go to war against Iran without consulting with the full Congress is the degree to which he is increasingly putting himself in jeopardy of an impeachment proceeding."
Media wants Waco-style Massacre
New Hampshire Patriot Not What Mainstream Wants You to Believe
-Mark Anderson
America Free Press
The circumstances surrounding the Browns, a New Hampshire couple convicted of federal income tax evasion, could turn on a dime.
Recently AFP interviewed Ed Brown, a Plainfield home owner who grew up in the Roxbury slums of Boston. He and Mrs. Brown, who is a dentist, are self-made people who worked hard for their lot in life, only to see it swept away by a government that takes in gargantuan sums of money via taxes on the domestic populace to pay enormous interest on the national debt (which cannot be repaid), much of which is due to America's endless military conflicts.
When AFP contacted Brown recently, he was living everyday life as best he can at the house he built on their 110 acres. His wife, who he said is in a state of arrest wearing an electronic ankle bracelet—is staying with a son in a neighboring state.
“The dental business died a week ago Tuesday,” Brown told AFP. “My wife’s a prisoner—like she’s a flight risk!”
The two are supposed to be sentenced April 24, having each been convicted Jan. 18 in federal court in Concord for not paying income taxes since 1996. The government claims the Browns owe some $625,000.
“Everybody should say, ‘show me the law and I’ll pay the tax,’ ” Brown told AFP. That is what he told federal authorities who can’t seem to produce a copy of a law requiring payment of the federal income tax.
Filmmaker Aaron Russo’s America: From Freedom to Fascism documentary interviews a number of former IRS agents and other authoritative people who say that the powers that be, when asked to provide a copy of the law, such as an enabling statute, that requires U.S. workers to pay federal income tax on their wages, come up empty-handed.
Russo concluded that if the federal income tax applies to anyone or anything, it applies to corporate capital gains, not the incomes of individuals, and that the IRS doesn’t even define income.
The proverbial “tax man” came down on the Browns just as they had considered selling their home and acreage so they could live in a warmer climate. Notably, their property is across the road from 500 acres owned by Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer.
But making the best of the winter weather, individuals and families with children have been over to Brown’s place lately for sledding and skating—before and since the tax trouble began. Life still seems more or less normal, though Brown suspects that federal agents may eventually storm the house and arrest him, perhaps after the publicity on his and his wife’s plight calms down.
As of Jan. 25, he said the publicity was still significant, with TV news crews continuing to pay attention. He also told AFP that while he has always paid the 54 other kinds of taxes levied on Americans—with property taxes hitting $14,000 a year on their home and $18,000 a year on their office building for the former dental business—he won’t budge on the federal income tax.
For one thing, as already noted, no one can produce a copy of the law that requires payment of an unapportioned tax on the labor of Americans. Moreover, there are due-process issues whereby U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe apparently disallowed the Browns from bringing forth any evidence or witnesses they needed for defending themselves in court. Also, the issue of federal jurisdiction, or the lack thereof, comes into play, Brown pointed out.
Addressing some conventional media reports that characterized his home as a virtual fortress, or “compound” with a “lookout tower,” Brown replied, “It’s a deck, for crying out loud—an octagon-shaped compass deck.”
Just below the elevated deck on the large, well-built house—which has solar-power capability and was off the grid from 1990 to 2003—is a reading room.
“We’re very mainstream, middle-class people,” said Brown, who noted that media reports suggesting he’s “holed up” in his house are off base.
Some areas of the house have been boarded up to keep out blowing snow, so he is not “barricading” himself in the house, he explained.
The Union Leader seems also to have played the “antigovernment” card, even though many American patriots make a careful distinction by saying they are anti-corruption of government, not anti-government.
Notably, the Associated Press article in The Union Leader couldn’t resist the highly charged word “compound,” which conceivably could create a bunker mentality in the minds of readers and may quell public outrage if federal agents ever decide to forcibly enter Brown’s home to arrest him. As the article claimed:
“A jury decided that the Browns plotted to hide their income and avoid taxes on Elaine Brown’s income of $1.9 million between 1996 and 2003. Over 10 years, they also used $215,890 of postal money orders broken into increments just below the reporting threshold to pay for their hilltop compound and for Elaine Brown’s dental offices.”
U.S. marshals said on a couple occasions they had no plans to forcibly enter Brown’s property and arrest him, though national media sources quoted marshals as saying that they “have to decide how to seize the Browns’ assets, possibly including their home.”
Citing a new twist in this case, a recent issue of The Boston Globe noted that federal agents “seized more than 30 weapons from the Brown house in May.”
Brown commented by telling AFP, “They stole $15,000 worth of my guns and turned them over to a gun shop.”
Brown was still at home on Jan. 25, preferring only to comment off the record about the situation.
-Mark Anderson
America Free Press
The circumstances surrounding the Browns, a New Hampshire couple convicted of federal income tax evasion, could turn on a dime.
Recently AFP interviewed Ed Brown, a Plainfield home owner who grew up in the Roxbury slums of Boston. He and Mrs. Brown, who is a dentist, are self-made people who worked hard for their lot in life, only to see it swept away by a government that takes in gargantuan sums of money via taxes on the domestic populace to pay enormous interest on the national debt (which cannot be repaid), much of which is due to America's endless military conflicts.
When AFP contacted Brown recently, he was living everyday life as best he can at the house he built on their 110 acres. His wife, who he said is in a state of arrest wearing an electronic ankle bracelet—is staying with a son in a neighboring state.
“The dental business died a week ago Tuesday,” Brown told AFP. “My wife’s a prisoner—like she’s a flight risk!”
The two are supposed to be sentenced April 24, having each been convicted Jan. 18 in federal court in Concord for not paying income taxes since 1996. The government claims the Browns owe some $625,000.
“Everybody should say, ‘show me the law and I’ll pay the tax,’ ” Brown told AFP. That is what he told federal authorities who can’t seem to produce a copy of a law requiring payment of the federal income tax.
Filmmaker Aaron Russo’s America: From Freedom to Fascism documentary interviews a number of former IRS agents and other authoritative people who say that the powers that be, when asked to provide a copy of the law, such as an enabling statute, that requires U.S. workers to pay federal income tax on their wages, come up empty-handed.
Russo concluded that if the federal income tax applies to anyone or anything, it applies to corporate capital gains, not the incomes of individuals, and that the IRS doesn’t even define income.
The proverbial “tax man” came down on the Browns just as they had considered selling their home and acreage so they could live in a warmer climate. Notably, their property is across the road from 500 acres owned by Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer.
But making the best of the winter weather, individuals and families with children have been over to Brown’s place lately for sledding and skating—before and since the tax trouble began. Life still seems more or less normal, though Brown suspects that federal agents may eventually storm the house and arrest him, perhaps after the publicity on his and his wife’s plight calms down.
As of Jan. 25, he said the publicity was still significant, with TV news crews continuing to pay attention. He also told AFP that while he has always paid the 54 other kinds of taxes levied on Americans—with property taxes hitting $14,000 a year on their home and $18,000 a year on their office building for the former dental business—he won’t budge on the federal income tax.
For one thing, as already noted, no one can produce a copy of the law that requires payment of an unapportioned tax on the labor of Americans. Moreover, there are due-process issues whereby U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe apparently disallowed the Browns from bringing forth any evidence or witnesses they needed for defending themselves in court. Also, the issue of federal jurisdiction, or the lack thereof, comes into play, Brown pointed out.
Addressing some conventional media reports that characterized his home as a virtual fortress, or “compound” with a “lookout tower,” Brown replied, “It’s a deck, for crying out loud—an octagon-shaped compass deck.”
Just below the elevated deck on the large, well-built house—which has solar-power capability and was off the grid from 1990 to 2003—is a reading room.
“We’re very mainstream, middle-class people,” said Brown, who noted that media reports suggesting he’s “holed up” in his house are off base.
Some areas of the house have been boarded up to keep out blowing snow, so he is not “barricading” himself in the house, he explained.
The Union Leader seems also to have played the “antigovernment” card, even though many American patriots make a careful distinction by saying they are anti-corruption of government, not anti-government.
Notably, the Associated Press article in The Union Leader couldn’t resist the highly charged word “compound,” which conceivably could create a bunker mentality in the minds of readers and may quell public outrage if federal agents ever decide to forcibly enter Brown’s home to arrest him. As the article claimed:
“A jury decided that the Browns plotted to hide their income and avoid taxes on Elaine Brown’s income of $1.9 million between 1996 and 2003. Over 10 years, they also used $215,890 of postal money orders broken into increments just below the reporting threshold to pay for their hilltop compound and for Elaine Brown’s dental offices.”
U.S. marshals said on a couple occasions they had no plans to forcibly enter Brown’s property and arrest him, though national media sources quoted marshals as saying that they “have to decide how to seize the Browns’ assets, possibly including their home.”
Citing a new twist in this case, a recent issue of The Boston Globe noted that federal agents “seized more than 30 weapons from the Brown house in May.”
Brown commented by telling AFP, “They stole $15,000 worth of my guns and turned them over to a gun shop.”
Brown was still at home on Jan. 25, preferring only to comment off the record about the situation.
Diebold disclosed e-voting key on website
The Register | January 28, 2007
John Leyden
Electronic voting machine firm Diebold is once again the subject of an embarrassing security gaffe after hackers created keys capable of opening voting machines from pictures posted on its website.
Two of three keys crafted by Ross Kinard of SploitCast were capable of opening a voting machine obtained by Princeton University for testing purposes. It's tempting to think, given the apparent ease of the attack, that the locks are simple enough to be opened by anyone with a basic knack for lockpicking.
Diebold has removed the offending images, replacing them with pictures of digital card keys but that's akin to closing the gate after the horse has bolted. Access to the key would allow tamperers to slip in a memory card containing a virus or, even worse, tally-altering software. In theory, security tape ought to be posted over the compartment to detect such tampering, but that relies on election officials checking for problems.
To make matters worse, the filing cabinet-style key is the same across all Diebold voting machines of the same model.
John Leyden
Electronic voting machine firm Diebold is once again the subject of an embarrassing security gaffe after hackers created keys capable of opening voting machines from pictures posted on its website.
Two of three keys crafted by Ross Kinard of SploitCast were capable of opening a voting machine obtained by Princeton University for testing purposes. It's tempting to think, given the apparent ease of the attack, that the locks are simple enough to be opened by anyone with a basic knack for lockpicking.
Diebold has removed the offending images, replacing them with pictures of digital card keys but that's akin to closing the gate after the horse has bolted. Access to the key would allow tamperers to slip in a memory card containing a virus or, even worse, tally-altering software. In theory, security tape ought to be posted over the compartment to detect such tampering, but that relies on election officials checking for problems.
To make matters worse, the filing cabinet-style key is the same across all Diebold voting machines of the same model.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Tens of thousands demand U.S. get out of Iraq
Deborah Charles
Reuters
Jan 28, 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chanting "bring our troops home," tens of thousands of anti-war protesters rallied in front of the U.S. Capitol on Saturday to pressure the government to get out of Iraq.
Veterans and military families joined some lawmakers, peace groups and actors including Vietnam war protester Jane Fonda to urge Congress and President George W. Bush to stop funding the war and pull troops from Iraq.
"When I served in the war, I thought I was serving honorably. Instead, I was sent to war ... for causes that have proved fraudulent," said Iraq war veteran Garett Reppenhagen.
"We need to put pressure on our elected government and force them to ... bring the troops home," the former sniper said to cheers from a sign-waving crowd.
Tens of thousands of people attended the rally on the National Mall, according to a park police officer.
For more than two hours, speakers atop a stage that also held a flag-draped coffin criticized Bush and the U.S. presence in Iraq before protesters marched around the Capitol.
In the crowd, a group of families of soldiers killed in Iraq held pictures of their loved ones, including one photo of a soldier in full dress uniform lying in a coffin.
More than 3,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The protest was one of several held around the United States. In California, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where several dozen people carried flag-draped, mock coffins.
Protesters also planned coordinated efforts in Washington and across the country over the next week to lobby lawmakers to take action against the war.
Bush's approval ratings have dropped to some of the weakest of his presidency and polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of his plan to send another 21,500 troops to Iraq.
But Bush said he has no intention of backing off his plan.
Asked about the protests, White House national security adviser spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Bush "understands that Americans want to see a conclusion to the war in Iraq and the new strategy is designed to do just that."
The demonstrations come amid growing efforts by lawmakers to protest Bush's plans in Iraq. The Senate Foreign Relations committee passed a resolution on Wednesday opposing the plan to send more troops.
Protesters are trying to send Bush and Congress a message that Americans do not support the war.
"I'm convinced this is Bush's war. He has his own agenda there," said Anne Chay, holding a sign with a picture of her 19-year-old son, John, who is serving in Iraq. "We're serving no purpose there."
Fonda, who was criticized for her opposition to the Vietnam War, drew huge cheers when she addressed the crowd. She noted that she had not spoken at an anti-war rally in 34 years.
"Silence is no longer an option," she said. "I'm so sad we have to do this -- that we did not learn from the lessons of the Vietnam War."
Democratic Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said the November 7 election -- which gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress -- showed Americans want change.
"It takes the ... outrage of the American people to force Washington to do the right thing," he said. "We've got to hold more of these ... until our government gets the message -- Out if Iraq immediately. This year. We've got to go."
(Additional reporting by Timothy Ryan in Washington and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles)
Sudan media go off air to protest Guantanamo detention
KHARTOUM (AFP) - Sudan's two main television stations went off the air for three minutes in solidarity with Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman detained since 2002 at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay.
Sami al-Haj of the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera was arrested by the Pakistani army on the Afghan border in December 2001 and has been held without charge at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba since 2002.
At exactly 10:00 pm (1900 GMT), the time of the main news bulletin, more than 2,000 staff of Sudan's state satellite television and semi-official Blue Nile TV as well as Omdurman Radio stopped work as they stopped broadcasting.
After the break in transmission, an announcer read out a statement.
"We are taking this move to protest the detention and draw the world opinion attention to the fact that Haj is being kept in custody for nearly six years ... We demand that Haj be immediately released or taken to court.
"We urge the Sudanese government to be courageous enough to address the US government for his release," the announcer said.
Also appearing on the screen, a woman who identified herself as Haj's aunt, said her nephew had been on hunger strike for the past two weeks. "We don't know what has happened to him," she said.
Iraq: 250 insurgents killed near Najaf
ROBERT H. REID
Associated Press
U.S.-backed Iraqi troops on Sunday attacked insurgents allegedly plotting to kill pilgrims at a major Shiite Muslim religious festival, and Iraqi officials estimated some 250 militants died in the daylong battle near Najaf. A U.S. helicopter crashed during the fight, killing two American soldiers.
Mortar shells, meanwhile, hit the courtyard of a girls' school in a mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baghdad, killing five pupils and wounding 20. U.N. officials deplored the attack, calling the apparent targeting of children "an unforgivable crime."
Two car bombs exploded within a half hour in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing 11 people and wounding 34, police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qader said. Three ethnic groups — Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen — are in a bitter struggle for control of that oil-rich area.
In addition to confirming the two Americans killed in the helicopter crash near Najaf, the U.S. command announced three combat deaths from Saturday — one Marine in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar province and two Army soldiers in the Baghdad area.
Authorities said Iraqi soldiers supported by U.S. aircraft fought all day with a large group of insurgents in the Zaraq area, about 12 miles northeast of the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
Col. Ali Nomas, spokesman for Iraqi security forces in Najaf, said more than 250 corpses had been found. Iraqi army Maj. Gen. Othman al-Ghanemi also spoke of 250 dead but said an exact number would not be released until Monday. He said 10 gunmen had been captured, including one Sudanese.
Provincial Gov. Assad Sultan Abu Kilel said the assault was launched because the insurgents planned to attack Shiite pilgrims and clerics during ceremonies marking Ashoura, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar commemorating the 7th century death of Imam Hussein. The celebration culminates Tuesday in huge public processions in Karbala and other Shiite cities.
Officials were unclear about the religious affiliation of the militants. Although Sunni Arabs have been the main force behind insurgent groups, there are a number of Shiite militant and splinter groups that have clashed from time to time with the government.
Iraqi soldiers attacked at dawn and militants hiding in orchards fought back with automatic weapons, sniper rifles and rockets, the governor said. He said the insurgents were members of a previously unknown group called the Army of Heaven.
"They are well-equipped and they even have anti-aircraft missiles," the governor said. "They are backed by some locals" loyal to ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Abu Kilel said two Iraqi policemen were killed and 15 wounded, but there was no word on other Iraqi government casualties.
A U.S. statement said the American helicopter went down while "conducting operations to assist Iraqi Security Forces" in the attack. It said two crew members died and their bodies were recovered. The statement did not give any information on why the aircraft crashed.
It was the second U.S. military helicopter to do down in eight days. Twelve U.S. soldiers died Jan. 20 when a Black Hawk crashed northeast of Baghdad. The Army says it is investigating the cause, but a Pentagon official has said debris indicated it was downed by a missile.
The mortar attack in Baghdad occurred about 11 a.m. at the Kholoud Secondary School in the Adil neighborhood, police and school officials said. The principal, Fawzyaa Hatrosh Sawadi, said students were mingling in the courtyard during a break in exams when at least two shells exploded.
The blasts shattered windows in classrooms, spraying students with shards of glass. Associated Press Television News footage showed pools of blood on the stone steps and walkways. A fin from a mortar shell lay on the ground.
Hours after the attack, grieving parents wept as the bodies of their children were placed in wooden coffins. Police said four of the girls were killed instantly and a fifth died later.
In a joint statement, UNICEF and UNESCO called the attack "yet another tragic reminder of the risks facing Iraq's schoolchildren."
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but a Sunni organization, the General Conference of the People of Iraq, blamed Shiite Muslim militias with ties to government security forces. The group said in a statement that the mortar shells bore markings indicating they were manufactured in Iran, which U.S. officials accuse of supporting Shiite militias.
Three bombings, meanwhile, struck Shiite districts in Baghdad, killing at least seven people and wounding 61, police said.
The worst incident was a car bomb that killed at least four and wounded 39 at an outdoor market in Sadr City, a sprawling slum that is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a militia blamed for much of Iraq's sectarian bloodshed.
The mortar attack and bombings appeared to be part of the sectarian reprisal killings that have pushed Iraq into civil warfare over the past year, violence that President Bush hopes to quell by sending up to 21,500 more American soldiers to Baghdad and surrounding areas.
U.S. officials have long accused al-Qaida in Iraq, a Sunni Muslim group, of fanning sectarian hatreds by staging vicious attacks on Shiite civilians. Revenge killings have surged since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the largely Sunni city of Samarra last Feb. 22.
The two car bombs in Kirkuk exploded within 30 minutes of each other in different parts of the city, 180 miles north of Baghdad. The first blast was at a car dealership, killing six people and wounding 19, said Qader, the police general said. The second went off at a popular restaurant, killing five and injuring 15, he said.
In Baghdad, police said they found 39 bullet-riddled bodies throughout the city Sunday, apparent victims of sectarian death squads. Ten more bodies were recovered floating down the Tigris River 25 miles south of the capital.
Drive-by shooters killed a high-ranking Shiite official at the Industry and Mines Ministry along with his 27-year-old daughter and two other people, police said.
A car bomb exploded near a mosque in the Sunni city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four, police said.
The U.S. command announced the arrest of 21 suspected terrorists, including an al-Qaida courier, in a series of raids in Baghdad and Sunni areas north and west of the capital. Three are believed to have close ties to the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq, the military said.
Friday, January 26, 2007
PREMEDITATED MERGER
How leaders are stealthily transforming USA into North American Union
Posted: January 2, 2007
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
It seems unthinkable. But then, so did 9/11 before it happened.
Can it really be possible that Americans are witnessing a governmental program designed to merge – slowly but surely – the United States, Mexico and Canada?
That question is generating a major amount of below-the-media-radar buzz. In recent months, e-mails and telephone calls have poured into radio talk shows and congressional offices asking: Is there a plan to create a "North American Union"? Will a new currency, the "amero," replace the dollar? Is it true that Mexicans will now get Social Security?
Yet Congress (except for a few representatives like Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul) as well as the establishment press (with notable exceptions like CNN's Lou Dobbs) turn a blind eye – despite major evidence mounting daily.
Just recently, for example, confirmation surfaced that the U.S. government is indeed planning on providing full Social Security benefits to Mexicans – which critics predict will bankrupt the already-shaky system. And a report by the powerful Council on Foreign Relations, regarded by many as something of a "shadow government," has called for a massive transfer of wealth from the U.S. to Mexico and the establishment of a "security perimeter" around North America – rather than securing America's borders with Mexico and Canada.
So, while many dismiss plans to integrate the three North American countries as wild Internet "conspiracy theories," the January edition of WND's acclaimed Whistleblower magazine – titled "PREMEDITATED MERGER" – boldly lays out the disturbing evidence for all to see.
"The idea that our own government could be engaged in compromising U.S. sovereignty in such a radical way is hard for people to contemplate," said WND Managing Editor David Kupelian. "After all, Americans are already reeling from a stunning immigration problem – stunning not only because of the effect 12-20 million illegals have on America's economy, values and crime rate, but also because of the government's refusal to do anything about it. And now they're hearing that perhaps their government has a secret globalist agenda that actually encourages an invasion from the south."
Veteran newsman Lou Dobbs described the merger controversy this way in a recent CNN broadcast: "For any American to think that it is acceptable for the president of the United States and … our government, to proceed without the approval of Congress or a dialogue and a debate and a public voice from the people of this country is absolutely unconscionable. … What they're doing is creating a brave new world, an Orwellian world, in which the will of the people is absolutely irrelevant."
So take a deep breath, and then fasten your seat belt for this guided tour of what the U.S., Mexican and Canadian governments, as well as behind-the-scenes power brokers, have planned for America. Your Whistleblower "tour guides" will be Joseph Farah, Jerome Corsi Ph.D., Lou Dobbs, Rep. Tom Tancredo, Rep. Ron Paul, Patrick Buchanan, Joe Kovacs and David Kupelian.
Highlights of "PREMEDITATED MERGER" include:
"Merger with Mexico" by Joseph Farah
"U.S.-Mexico merger opposition intensifies" by Joseph Farah, who surveys congressmen, newscasters and others aghast at secret efforts to scrap the dollar, end U.S. sovereignty and combine nations.
"A North American United Nations?" by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
"Lou Dobbs: 'What they're doing is creating a brave new world'"
"The North American Union: How close are we?" by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., who lays out the troubling evidence for a multi-government plan to merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico
"Mexico ambassador: We need North American Union in 8 years"
"Documents reveal 'shadow government,'" on how a Freedom of Information request resulted in 1,000 pages of confirming documentation
"The NAFTA superhighway: Coming soon" by Patrick Buchanan, on why Mexico seeks 'complete integration' with the U.S.
"Texas congressman: Superhighway all about North American Union," on U.S. Rep. Ron Paul's concern over a common currency, borderless travel and even bigger bureaucracy
"Why China dominates NAFTA" by Jerome R. Corsi
"How to survive the NAFTA dollar crisis," by Jerome R. Corsi, including economic advice in the age of the "amero"
"The CFR's vision for a new North America," revealing excerpts from the Council on Foreign Relations' radical 59-page blueprint for "North American community"
"Mexican drug cartels take over U.S. cities" by Joseph Farah, in which U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo reveals how Mexican gangs buy businesses, politicians, power and police departments
"It's the drugs, stupid" by Joseph Farah, on the profound impact Mexico's multi-billion-dollar drug trade exerts on America's immigration crisis
"'Bush doesn't think America should be an actual place,'" by Joe Kovacs, whose interview with Rep. Tom Tancredo reveals that the president believes the U.S. should be merely an 'idea' without borders
"North American students trained for 'merger,'" on why 10 universities are participating in a "model parliament" in Mexico to simulate the "integration" of the three nations
"North American Union major '08 issue?" – a look at a new coalition that is mobilizing grass roots support and targeting Washington lawmakers
"Are globalists evil?" by David Kupelian, on why so many apparently "good people" are so attracted to global government
"As bad as this North American Union plan is," said WND founder and Editor Joseph Farah, "it does succeed in making much more understandable exactly why our government isn't stopping illegal immigration. It doesn't really want to."
Feds pressed to hand over border agent docs
Congressman files FOIA request on info that could favor Compean, Ramos
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Homeland Security to force the handover to Congress of investigative documents the agency claims will support their accusation of criminal behavior by imprisoned former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.
In a telephone interview with WND, Poe explained the extraordinary procedure was necessary after DHS refused to furnish the reports to Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, arguing McCaul's chairmanship of the Investigations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security had passed to the Democrats.
The decision by Poe to file a FOIA request with DHS reflects increasing congressional concern the agency is conducting a cover-up of the Ramos-Compean investigation. Congressmen say the agency has continued to stonewall repeated requests to obtain promised investigative documents relevant to congressional oversight responsibilities.
WND reported yesterday McCaul held a meeting Sept. 26 with deputies of the DHS Inspector General's office in which the deputies made accusations of criminal misconduct against the Border Patrol agents. In attendance at the meeting were Poe and fellow Texas congressmen John Culberson and Kenny Marchant.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the DHS inspector general told the Texas congressmen the relevant investigative reports would be released the first day after the Oct. 23, 2006, sentencing of the agents. So far, however, DHS has refused to release the promised reports, despite repeated requests from McCaul.
"I was at that meeting," Poe told WND. "We had the office of the DHS inspector general and the Department of Justice (DOJ) there. They made allegations that these two Border Patrol agents had made incriminating statements that DHS and DOJ had in their possession. We were told we would be given these statements to contradict what the agents had been telling us."
Poe explained that Ramos and Compean had told the congressman the fleeing drug smuggling suspect they were chasing was armed and that they suspected he was a drug dealer because of his behavior, including driving a van across a border road the agents knew was used by drug smugglers, and running away to avoid arrest.
"We supported Congressman McCaul's attempts to get these reports," Poe explained to WND. "But when after January 1, 2007, DHS told Congressman McCaul that they could no longer hand over the information to him because he was no longer subcommittee chairman, I decided to file the FOIA request to get the documents."
Poe said he has been frustrated by DHS stonewalling.
"Why didn't the DHS inspector general come to the September 26, 2006, meeting prepared to give us the information?" he asked. "Even a Xerox machine in the Justice Department should be able to work once in four months to make a copy of those statements."
Poe said he found the lack of candor "disturbing."
And he wondered since so many resources were available from the federal government to the prosecution, why not share that information with Congress. "So, we're not through yet," he said.
Poe expressed concern that he is not sure the jury in the Ramos and Compean case got all the information the government had concerning the relevant facts of the case.
"When the government does backroom deals with criminals, like this habitual drug offender from Mexico, the public, and especially the defendants, have an absolute right to know what the deal was and how it came about," he said. "Maybe the jury heard it, and maybe the jury didn't hear it, but we will find out."
Many of the factual aspects of the case are now being disputed by investigators, including the ballistics investigation into the weapons fired and the round subsequently extracted from the left buttocks and right groin of the drug smuggler by a U.S. Army doctor.
"For all we know," Poe commented, "the drug smuggler seemed to be pointing back at the Border Patrol agents with what could have been something in his hand based on the ballistics reports I am seeing. U.S. Attorney (Johnny) Sutton says the guy was shot in the buttocks. Well, now we find out that that isn't exactly accurate. The guy was shot from 'cheek-to-cheek,' or maybe from the side of his left buttocks to his right groin. There's a big difference in those two statements. You don't have to be a ballistics expert to understand that the body was turned if the bullet went from one cheek to the other cheek, or from the left cheek to the right groin."
Poe repeated that his office was determined to get to the bottom of these investigative questions. "In the big scheme of things, let's assume that the Border Patrol agents violated policy. Assume they didn't file a report even though the law says that they were only required to file an oral report to the supervisor," he asked. "There was no requirement in this instance that they file a written report. Okay, let's discipline the Border Patrol agents, you bet. Let's give them three-day's suspension like the rules call for."
Poe questioned the judgment of U.S. Attorney Sutton, asking "why does the federal government here have a choice to prosecute a guy bringing in a million dollars worth of drugs or prosecute Border Patrol agents who were doing their job, yet the government chose to prosecute the Border Patrol? "Why is the federal government spending so many federal taxpayer resources prosecuting federal Border Patrol agents trying to stop drug smugglers, especially when it means making deals with drug offenders?" he continued. "That's the bigger question in my mind.
Poe agreed the prosecution would put a chilling effect on other Border Patrol agents.
"That's a war zone on the Texas-Mexico border," he said. "It's an undeclared war that's taking place. You have aggressive Border Patrol agents like Ramos and Compean, who are protecting the country, and yet they are vilified and prosecuted by our own government. The next time you have a similar situation with a different Border Patrol agent, the Border Patrol agent will hesitate before they put their life or their career in danger."
Poe called the Ramos and Compean case "the best news drug dealers have ever heard."
Drug smugglers now know, he explained, "that Border Patrol agents may be reluctant to chase them. So all they have to do is run. If another drug smuggler sees a Border Patrol agent, all they have to do is what this drug dealer did – namely, run. Drive, run, just get away. Drug dealers are going to know that federal Border Patrol agents are going to be more reluctant to pursue them because the federal government, for some reason, takes the wrong side of the border war."
In an exclusive Jan.19 interview, Sutton told WND Ramos and Compean's crimes involved "shooting 15 times at an unarmed, fleeing man."
For Sutton, the agents compounded the offense by engaging in a cover-up: "And instead of doing what every other agent does, namely to explain why they decided to use deadly force, these two agents instead decided to lie about it, cover it up, destroy the evidence, pick up all the shell casings and throw them away where we couldn't find them, destroy the crime scene and then file a false report."
The drug smuggler, Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, was given immunity by federal prosecutor Sutton, and was the star witness at the trial of the agents.
Aldrete-Davila has retained a U.S. attorney and now is in the process of preparing to sue the U.S. Border Patrol for $5 million, claiming his civil rights were violated by the agents' criminal behavior of shooting at him as he abandoned a van containing 743 pounds of marijuana and fled from the scene.
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Homeland Security to force the handover to Congress of investigative documents the agency claims will support their accusation of criminal behavior by imprisoned former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.
In a telephone interview with WND, Poe explained the extraordinary procedure was necessary after DHS refused to furnish the reports to Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, arguing McCaul's chairmanship of the Investigations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security had passed to the Democrats.
The decision by Poe to file a FOIA request with DHS reflects increasing congressional concern the agency is conducting a cover-up of the Ramos-Compean investigation. Congressmen say the agency has continued to stonewall repeated requests to obtain promised investigative documents relevant to congressional oversight responsibilities.
WND reported yesterday McCaul held a meeting Sept. 26 with deputies of the DHS Inspector General's office in which the deputies made accusations of criminal misconduct against the Border Patrol agents. In attendance at the meeting were Poe and fellow Texas congressmen John Culberson and Kenny Marchant.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the DHS inspector general told the Texas congressmen the relevant investigative reports would be released the first day after the Oct. 23, 2006, sentencing of the agents. So far, however, DHS has refused to release the promised reports, despite repeated requests from McCaul.
"I was at that meeting," Poe told WND. "We had the office of the DHS inspector general and the Department of Justice (DOJ) there. They made allegations that these two Border Patrol agents had made incriminating statements that DHS and DOJ had in their possession. We were told we would be given these statements to contradict what the agents had been telling us."
Poe explained that Ramos and Compean had told the congressman the fleeing drug smuggling suspect they were chasing was armed and that they suspected he was a drug dealer because of his behavior, including driving a van across a border road the agents knew was used by drug smugglers, and running away to avoid arrest.
"We supported Congressman McCaul's attempts to get these reports," Poe explained to WND. "But when after January 1, 2007, DHS told Congressman McCaul that they could no longer hand over the information to him because he was no longer subcommittee chairman, I decided to file the FOIA request to get the documents."
Poe said he has been frustrated by DHS stonewalling.
"Why didn't the DHS inspector general come to the September 26, 2006, meeting prepared to give us the information?" he asked. "Even a Xerox machine in the Justice Department should be able to work once in four months to make a copy of those statements."
Poe said he found the lack of candor "disturbing."
And he wondered since so many resources were available from the federal government to the prosecution, why not share that information with Congress. "So, we're not through yet," he said.
Poe expressed concern that he is not sure the jury in the Ramos and Compean case got all the information the government had concerning the relevant facts of the case.
"When the government does backroom deals with criminals, like this habitual drug offender from Mexico, the public, and especially the defendants, have an absolute right to know what the deal was and how it came about," he said. "Maybe the jury heard it, and maybe the jury didn't hear it, but we will find out."
Many of the factual aspects of the case are now being disputed by investigators, including the ballistics investigation into the weapons fired and the round subsequently extracted from the left buttocks and right groin of the drug smuggler by a U.S. Army doctor.
"For all we know," Poe commented, "the drug smuggler seemed to be pointing back at the Border Patrol agents with what could have been something in his hand based on the ballistics reports I am seeing. U.S. Attorney (Johnny) Sutton says the guy was shot in the buttocks. Well, now we find out that that isn't exactly accurate. The guy was shot from 'cheek-to-cheek,' or maybe from the side of his left buttocks to his right groin. There's a big difference in those two statements. You don't have to be a ballistics expert to understand that the body was turned if the bullet went from one cheek to the other cheek, or from the left cheek to the right groin."
Poe repeated that his office was determined to get to the bottom of these investigative questions. "In the big scheme of things, let's assume that the Border Patrol agents violated policy. Assume they didn't file a report even though the law says that they were only required to file an oral report to the supervisor," he asked. "There was no requirement in this instance that they file a written report. Okay, let's discipline the Border Patrol agents, you bet. Let's give them three-day's suspension like the rules call for."
Poe questioned the judgment of U.S. Attorney Sutton, asking "why does the federal government here have a choice to prosecute a guy bringing in a million dollars worth of drugs or prosecute Border Patrol agents who were doing their job, yet the government chose to prosecute the Border Patrol? "Why is the federal government spending so many federal taxpayer resources prosecuting federal Border Patrol agents trying to stop drug smugglers, especially when it means making deals with drug offenders?" he continued. "That's the bigger question in my mind.
Poe agreed the prosecution would put a chilling effect on other Border Patrol agents.
"That's a war zone on the Texas-Mexico border," he said. "It's an undeclared war that's taking place. You have aggressive Border Patrol agents like Ramos and Compean, who are protecting the country, and yet they are vilified and prosecuted by our own government. The next time you have a similar situation with a different Border Patrol agent, the Border Patrol agent will hesitate before they put their life or their career in danger."
Poe called the Ramos and Compean case "the best news drug dealers have ever heard."
Drug smugglers now know, he explained, "that Border Patrol agents may be reluctant to chase them. So all they have to do is run. If another drug smuggler sees a Border Patrol agent, all they have to do is what this drug dealer did – namely, run. Drive, run, just get away. Drug dealers are going to know that federal Border Patrol agents are going to be more reluctant to pursue them because the federal government, for some reason, takes the wrong side of the border war."
In an exclusive Jan.19 interview, Sutton told WND Ramos and Compean's crimes involved "shooting 15 times at an unarmed, fleeing man."
For Sutton, the agents compounded the offense by engaging in a cover-up: "And instead of doing what every other agent does, namely to explain why they decided to use deadly force, these two agents instead decided to lie about it, cover it up, destroy the evidence, pick up all the shell casings and throw them away where we couldn't find them, destroy the crime scene and then file a false report."
The drug smuggler, Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, was given immunity by federal prosecutor Sutton, and was the star witness at the trial of the agents.
Aldrete-Davila has retained a U.S. attorney and now is in the process of preparing to sue the U.S. Border Patrol for $5 million, claiming his civil rights were violated by the agents' criminal behavior of shooting at him as he abandoned a van containing 743 pounds of marijuana and fled from the scene.
Plan for superhighway ripped as 'urban legend'
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Jeffrey N. Shane, undersecretary for DOT
Congressmen and a policy official of the Department of Transportation engaged in a spirited exchange over whether NAFTA Super Highways were a threat to U.S. sovereignty or an imaginary "Internet conspiracy," such as the "black helicopter myths," advanced by fringe lunatics.
At a meeting Wednesday of the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Jeffrey N. Shane, undersecretary of transportation for policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation, testified.
During the questioning by committee members, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, asked Shane about the existence of plans for a "NAFTA superhighway."
Shane responded he was "not familiar with any plan at all, related to NAFTA or cross-border traffic."
After further questioning by Poe, Shane stated reports of NAFTA superhighways or corridors were "an urban legend."
At this, the chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., questioned aloud whether Shane was just "gaming semantics" when responding to Poe's question.
"Mr. Shane was either blissfully ignorant or he may have been less than candid with the committee," Poe told WND in a telephone interview.
Asked about the Department of Transportation's work with Dallas-based trade group NASCO, the North American SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., and the Texas Department of Transportation plans to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, Poe told WND "the NAFTA superhighway plans exist to move goods from Mexico through the United States to Canada. It appears to be another one of the open-border philosophies that chips away at American sovereignty, all in the name of so-called trade."
Poe said there are security obstacles to the project that must be addressed.
"I don't understand why the federal government isn't getting public input on this," he said. "We get comments like Mr. Shane's instead of our own government asking the people of the United States what they think about all of this. This big business coming through Mexico may not be good business for the United States."
Poe continued to insist "the public ought to make this decision, especially the states that are affected, such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and all the way through up to Canada. The public needs to make input on this. So, I don't understand, unless there's some other motive, why the public isn't being told about these plans and why the public is not invited to make input."
Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., introduced House Concurrent Resolution 40 earlier this week to express the sense of Congress that the United States should not build a NAFTA superhighway system and should not enter into an agreement with Mexico and Canada to form a North American Union.
Asked to comment on Shane's response to Poe, Goode dismissed Shane's claim that NAFTA superhighways were just another "urban legend."
"Let's take Mr. Shane at his word. Let Mr. Shane come over here from the Department of Transportation and endorse House Concurrent Resolution 40," he said. "If, in his mind he's not doing anything to promote a NAFTA superhighway and he's not doing anything to promote the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, then he won't mind joining his voice with ours to be in opposition to any such 'urban legend,' as he so calls it."
Goode added this comment in a playful retort to Shane's attempt to dismiss the discussion: "My prediction is Mr. Shane will run for the timber."
In a serious tone, Goode objected to Shane's attempt to play what he agreed was a game of semantics.
"When President Bush had the meeting in Waco, Texas, the three leaders called the new arrangement the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,' SPP for short," Goode said. "But, as is suggested by Congressman DeFazio at the hearing, the intent of people like Mr. Shane is to use different words and different names as a way to deflect attention from what they are really doing."
Asked about White House Press Secretary Snow's denial that there was any White House plan to create a North American Union, Goode's reply also was direct.
"I guess Mr. Snow is saying that a Security and Prosperity Partnership and a North American Union are not one and the same," he said. "That's just the use of his words, but is he denying that President Bush, President Fox and Prime Minister Martin had the meeting and came up with the Security and Prosperity Partnership in 2005? I doubt it."
Also present in the audience at the subcommittee meeting was Rod Nofzinger, director of Government Affairs for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. Nofzinger told WND Shane's denial struck him as less than genuine. In an e-mail to WND, Nofzinger commented:
"Considering what we know about the Bush administration's efforts to open the border to Mexican trucks and that DOT officials have met with groups such as NASCO, I was truly surprised to hear Mr. Shane say flat out that he had no knowledge of plans or meetings related to NAFTA or cross-border surface trade corridors."
Substantiating Nofzinger's argument is a speech Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta gave April 30, 2004, at a NASCO forum in Fort Worth, Texas. Mineta told the NASCO meeting:
"NAFTA has opened the doors to expanding and flourishing trade across our borders. Since its implementation, total U.S. trade with Mexico has increased almost 200 percent – with 70 percent of the U.S./Mexico trade passing through Texas.
"There are, however, some things that we still need to do in the United States to fulfill our obligations under the NAFTA treaty. One of them is to finally open the market between Mexico and the United States for trucking and busing."
Mineta continued:
"And to our friends from Mexico who are here today, I say, 'Welcome, and get ready.' Opening the border is of mutual benefit."
Specifically referring to Interstate Highways 35, 29 and 94 – the core highways supported by NASCO as a prime "North American Super Corridor" – Mineta commented:
"You also recognized that the success of the NAFTA relationship depends on mobility – on the movement of people, of products, and of capital across borders.
"The people in this room have vision. Thinking ahead, thinking long-term, you began to make aggressive plans to develop the NASCO trade corridor – this vital artery in our national transportation through which so much of our NAFTA traffic flows.
"It flows across our nation's busiest southern border crossing in Laredo; over North America's busiest commercial crossing, the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit; and through Duluth, and Pembina, North Dakota, and all the places in between."
In a statement provided WND by e-mail, DeFazio cut past Shane's attempt to dismiss the subject by ridicule, writing:
In the hearing, Undersecretary of Transportation for Policy Jeff Shane, in response to a question from Representative Ted Poe, said the NAFTA superhighway was an urban legend. Whatever the case, it is a fact that highway capacity is growing to and from the border to facilitate trade, and there is no doubt that the volume of imports from Mexico has soared since NAFTA, straining security at the U.S. border. Plans of Asian trading powers to divert cargo from U.S. ports like Los Angeles to ports in Mexico will only put added pressure on border inspectors. The U.S. needs to invest in better border security, including enhanced screening of cargo crossing our land borders.
Shane declined to comment for this article.
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Jeffrey N. Shane, undersecretary for DOT
Congressmen and a policy official of the Department of Transportation engaged in a spirited exchange over whether NAFTA Super Highways were a threat to U.S. sovereignty or an imaginary "Internet conspiracy," such as the "black helicopter myths," advanced by fringe lunatics.
At a meeting Wednesday of the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Jeffrey N. Shane, undersecretary of transportation for policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation, testified.
During the questioning by committee members, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, asked Shane about the existence of plans for a "NAFTA superhighway."
Shane responded he was "not familiar with any plan at all, related to NAFTA or cross-border traffic."
After further questioning by Poe, Shane stated reports of NAFTA superhighways or corridors were "an urban legend."
At this, the chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., questioned aloud whether Shane was just "gaming semantics" when responding to Poe's question.
"Mr. Shane was either blissfully ignorant or he may have been less than candid with the committee," Poe told WND in a telephone interview.
Asked about the Department of Transportation's work with Dallas-based trade group NASCO, the North American SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., and the Texas Department of Transportation plans to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, Poe told WND "the NAFTA superhighway plans exist to move goods from Mexico through the United States to Canada. It appears to be another one of the open-border philosophies that chips away at American sovereignty, all in the name of so-called trade."
Poe said there are security obstacles to the project that must be addressed.
"I don't understand why the federal government isn't getting public input on this," he said. "We get comments like Mr. Shane's instead of our own government asking the people of the United States what they think about all of this. This big business coming through Mexico may not be good business for the United States."
Poe continued to insist "the public ought to make this decision, especially the states that are affected, such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and all the way through up to Canada. The public needs to make input on this. So, I don't understand, unless there's some other motive, why the public isn't being told about these plans and why the public is not invited to make input."
Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., introduced House Concurrent Resolution 40 earlier this week to express the sense of Congress that the United States should not build a NAFTA superhighway system and should not enter into an agreement with Mexico and Canada to form a North American Union.
Asked to comment on Shane's response to Poe, Goode dismissed Shane's claim that NAFTA superhighways were just another "urban legend."
"Let's take Mr. Shane at his word. Let Mr. Shane come over here from the Department of Transportation and endorse House Concurrent Resolution 40," he said. "If, in his mind he's not doing anything to promote a NAFTA superhighway and he's not doing anything to promote the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, then he won't mind joining his voice with ours to be in opposition to any such 'urban legend,' as he so calls it."
Goode added this comment in a playful retort to Shane's attempt to dismiss the discussion: "My prediction is Mr. Shane will run for the timber."
In a serious tone, Goode objected to Shane's attempt to play what he agreed was a game of semantics.
"When President Bush had the meeting in Waco, Texas, the three leaders called the new arrangement the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,' SPP for short," Goode said. "But, as is suggested by Congressman DeFazio at the hearing, the intent of people like Mr. Shane is to use different words and different names as a way to deflect attention from what they are really doing."
Asked about White House Press Secretary Snow's denial that there was any White House plan to create a North American Union, Goode's reply also was direct.
"I guess Mr. Snow is saying that a Security and Prosperity Partnership and a North American Union are not one and the same," he said. "That's just the use of his words, but is he denying that President Bush, President Fox and Prime Minister Martin had the meeting and came up with the Security and Prosperity Partnership in 2005? I doubt it."
Also present in the audience at the subcommittee meeting was Rod Nofzinger, director of Government Affairs for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. Nofzinger told WND Shane's denial struck him as less than genuine. In an e-mail to WND, Nofzinger commented:
"Considering what we know about the Bush administration's efforts to open the border to Mexican trucks and that DOT officials have met with groups such as NASCO, I was truly surprised to hear Mr. Shane say flat out that he had no knowledge of plans or meetings related to NAFTA or cross-border surface trade corridors."
Substantiating Nofzinger's argument is a speech Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta gave April 30, 2004, at a NASCO forum in Fort Worth, Texas. Mineta told the NASCO meeting:
"NAFTA has opened the doors to expanding and flourishing trade across our borders. Since its implementation, total U.S. trade with Mexico has increased almost 200 percent – with 70 percent of the U.S./Mexico trade passing through Texas.
"There are, however, some things that we still need to do in the United States to fulfill our obligations under the NAFTA treaty. One of them is to finally open the market between Mexico and the United States for trucking and busing."
Mineta continued:
"And to our friends from Mexico who are here today, I say, 'Welcome, and get ready.' Opening the border is of mutual benefit."
Specifically referring to Interstate Highways 35, 29 and 94 – the core highways supported by NASCO as a prime "North American Super Corridor" – Mineta commented:
"You also recognized that the success of the NAFTA relationship depends on mobility – on the movement of people, of products, and of capital across borders.
"The people in this room have vision. Thinking ahead, thinking long-term, you began to make aggressive plans to develop the NASCO trade corridor – this vital artery in our national transportation through which so much of our NAFTA traffic flows.
"It flows across our nation's busiest southern border crossing in Laredo; over North America's busiest commercial crossing, the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit; and through Duluth, and Pembina, North Dakota, and all the places in between."
In a statement provided WND by e-mail, DeFazio cut past Shane's attempt to dismiss the subject by ridicule, writing:
In the hearing, Undersecretary of Transportation for Policy Jeff Shane, in response to a question from Representative Ted Poe, said the NAFTA superhighway was an urban legend. Whatever the case, it is a fact that highway capacity is growing to and from the border to facilitate trade, and there is no doubt that the volume of imports from Mexico has soared since NAFTA, straining security at the U.S. border. Plans of Asian trading powers to divert cargo from U.S. ports like Los Angeles to ports in Mexico will only put added pressure on border inspectors. The U.S. needs to invest in better border security, including enhanced screening of cargo crossing our land borders.
Shane declined to comment for this article.
US suspects face torture overseas
Dan Isaacs
BBC News
It is no secret that the US military operates detention centres around the world for the interrogation of terror suspects.
The treatment of prisoners in these places - including Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq - has come in for intense scrutiny and evidence of human rights violations has been widely reported.
But less well-documented is the process by which terror suspects are sent by the United States for interrogation by security officials in other countries.
This is known as "rendition" and is becoming increasingly controversial because many of these countries - including Syria and Egypt - are accused of using torture on prisoners, not least by the US State Department.
'Tortured in Syria'
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who in 2002 was detained in transit at New York's JFK airport, and accused of being an al-Qaeda member.
After 12 days in US custody, he was bundled in chains aboard a plane to Jordan and then taken by road to the Syrian capital, Damascus. There, Mr Arar claims, he was tortured by Syrian security police.
"The interrogator said, 'Do you know what this is?' I said, 'Yes, it's a cable,'" Mr Arar told the BBC.
"He told me: 'Open your right hand.' I opened my right hand and he hit me like crazy. And the pain was so painful and of course I started crying, and then they asked me questions."
Steven Watt from the American Civil Liberties Union has been closely involved in the case.
"The US State Department specifically states that the state security police in Syria torture and abuse detainees in their custody and that's exactly what happened to Maher," he said.
"In the first two weeks in particular he was beaten severely using electric cables, on all parts of his body, and he was detained in what he described as a grave. It was six feet [1.8m] long, three feet wide and six feet high and that was his home for some 10 months."
'Dozens of cases'
The Syrian authorities have confirmed that they did interrogate Mr Arar in relation to terrorist activities, but deny that any torture took place.
The case is far from unique. Human rights lawyers have documented similar stories from prisoners transferred to a range of countries which the US State Department recognises as routinely carrying out torture in detention - including Syria and Egypt.
Mr Watt says it is difficult to find out how many cases of rendition there have been by the US authorities.
"Well, it's highly sensitive, but just in recent months there have been reports of some 100 to 150 individuals who have been rendered in such fashion - that's since 9/11.
"Recently in an interview on US television [Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak said 50 to 60 individuals alone had been rendered by the US to Egypt, so I think 100 to 150 is a fairly conservative estimate."
The US does not deny that terror suspects have been transferred in this way, but strongly rejects accusations that they are being tortured.
"In a post-9/11 world the United States must make sure we protect our people and our friends from attack," said President George W Bush when challenged on the issue at a press conference in March.
"That was the charge we had been given. And one way to do so is to arrest people and send them back to their country of origin, with the promise that they won't be tortured.
"That's the promise we receive. This country does not believe in torture. We do believe in protecting ourselves. We don't believe in torture."
''Window-dressing'
The US authorities say they receive "diplomatic assurances" that those they transfer will not be tortured.
Stephen Grey, a journalist who has closely followed US rendition policy, is not convinced that this amounts to anything more than window-dressing for a highly controversial policy.
"Although the Bush administration is now saying they wouldn't be tortured - people who've actually been involved in this programme know full well what kind of countries they're dealing with," he told the BBC.
Mr Grey says Michael Scheuer, the former head of a CIA unit set up to track al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, "has said that he told his bosses in the administration and the CIA that people they were sending to countries like Egypt would be tortured".
The US State Department declined a request for an interview, but did provide a statement.
"It is the long-standing policy of the United States not to transfer a person to a country if it determines that it is more likely than not that the person will be tortured," the statement says.
"Prior to any transfer, the department seeks assurances in every case in which continued detention by the government concerned is foreseen, of humane treatment and treatment in accordance with international obligations."
'Times of war'
Danielle Pletka is a vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in tune with the politics of the Bush administration.
"I'm not a big fan of torture. Unfortunately, there are times in war when it is necessary to do things in a way that is absolutely and completely abhorrent to most good, decent people," she told the BBC.
"I don't want to say that the United States has engaged routinely in such practices, because I don't think that it is routine by any standard.
"But that said, if it is absolutely imperative to find something out at that moment, then it is imperative to find something out at that moment, and Club Med is not the place to do it."
But many, including the journalist Mr Grey, believe that aside from the human rights issues such intelligence gathering tactics simply do not produce the desired results.
"There are people inside the system, intelligence officers from America and the UK, who are unhappy with what's going on," he said.
"And they're not unhappy because they're soft on terrorism. They're unhappy because they think the whole thing is counter-productive.
"The kind of intelligence they get from torturers beating information out of people is often useless and it just feeds the whole intelligence system with all kinds of useless information that they spend years tracking down and get nowhere."
There is no doubt the sharing of intelligence between countries plays an essential part in defeating global terrorism.
But despite increasing public disquiet about both the morality and effectiveness of interrogation methods being used on terror suspects, neither President Bush nor the US State Department give the impression that the policy of rendition is currently under review.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4088746.stm
Published: 2005/06/14 11:37:25 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Canada compensates deported man
Canada has apologised to a man deported by US authorities to Syria, where he was imprisoned and allegedly tortured.
Maher Arar was detained in the US while returning to Canada from Tunisia. He has dual Syrian-Canadian citizenship.
A Canadian government inquiry cleared him of any involvement in terrorism. Syria denies that he was tortured.
PM Stephen Harper said Mr Arar would receive US$8.9m compensation, and urged the US to drop him from its list of terror suspects
Maher Arar was detained in the US while returning to Canada from Tunisia. He has dual Syrian-Canadian citizenship.
A Canadian government inquiry cleared him of any involvement in terrorism. Syria denies that he was tortured.
PM Stephen Harper said Mr Arar would receive US$8.9m compensation, and urged the US to drop him from its list of terror suspects
US military reveals heat-ray gun
How hot is the heat-ray gun?
By Patrick Jackson
BBC News
The US military revealed a heat-ray gun, the Active Denial System (ADS), to reporters this week.
The technology brings a new, more disorientating dimension to crowd control.
Rioters know where they are with a water cannon: they can see where the cooling is coming from.
Likewise, tear gas smokes before it stings and baton rounds are meant to bounce before they hit the crowd.
A millimetre-wave beam is different: a hot blast which, at a maximum range the Pentagon says is 10 times greater than that of other "non-lethal weapons", effectively comes out of nowhere, silently and invisibly.
Longer, lighter, simpler
"Imagine you're a marine guarding your post and you see some suspicious-looking people coming towards you at a distance," said Susan LeVine, principal deputy of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons (JNLW) Directorate which tested the system.
RIOT CONTROL MILESTONES
1958: British Army use CS tear gas in Cyprus
1960s: Lorry-mounted water cannon used in US
1960s: UK uses baton rounds - wood, rubber, finally plastic
1980s: Pepper spray - a bear repellent - adopted by US police forces
"You will be able to engage them at a point well beyond small-arms range so that you can give them a clear signal to stop," she told the BBC News website.
Bill Sweetman, technology and aerospace editor for Jane's Information Group, believes the primary purpose of the heat-ray gun will be to disperse a crowd which could be concealing gunmen.
The beam, he says, has advantages over existing non-lethal weapons other than range:
it is more economical, as you can keep generating power pulses in different directions while there is petrol in the generator
it is less indiscriminate than tear gas and less cumbersome than water cannon
it is more accurate as it travels at the speed of light and is not subject to the effect of wind
'Not to be trusted'
The heat beam may be an advance on the water jet but it is causing alarm for other reasons.
People hit the pain waves and don't know which way to run
Dr Steve Wright
Leeds Metropolitan University
"What happens when people are in the first rows of a dense crowd and cannot flee?" asks Dr Steve Wright, associate director of Leeds Metropolitan University's Praxis Centre, which studies conflict resolution technology.
"How do subjects exposed from a distance know where to flee from the beam?
"People hit the pain waves and don't know which way to run."
Such a weapon also has the potential to cause panic and deadly stampedes, Dr Wright says.
He is also concerned that America is developing weapons of "tuneable lethality" whereby "you can tune in the amount of pain the weapon provides, from heating to death".
Put to the test
Alan Fischer, media relations manager of Raytheon, which built the ADS as well as making its own commercial version Silent Guardian, is concerned that some people have been likening the technology to a microwave oven.
It is a bit of a uni-tasker and my feeling is that uni-taskers of one kind or another seldom cause military revolutions
Bill Sweetman
Jane's Information Group
Some of the confusion may arise from the fact that Raytheon built the first microwave oven back in 1947.
The millimetre wave may, like microwaves and radars, operate in the radio frequency spectrum but it is "only designed to go a very shallow distance into the skin", Mr Fischer told the BBC News website.
"This has nothing to do with microwaves or microwave cooking or anything like that," he says.
Dr Wright asks if Pentagon tests on healthy service volunteers adequately reflect the potential effect on pregnant women, children and babies.
Ms LeVine, one of the 600-odd people exposed to the beam in tests, says that health tests have been rigorous:
"We've looked at the risk of injuries, at the risk of skin cancer, birth defects, impact on fertility and everything has proved to be negative."
Chinks in the armour?
But how vulnerable might it be in the field to what the Pentagon calls "counter-measures"?
Dr Wright suggests that something as simple as household foil and "a fine metal mesh in front of the eyes" could counteract it.
Attempts to get around the beam would only prove its value, Ms LeVine argues.
"The point of ADS is to assess intent so if somebody is coming at you and they have knocked up something that clearly shows they are going to try and get by this beam, the system has already done its job," she says.
Bill Sweetman questions whether the Humvee-mounted version of the ADS - a "pretty obvious target" - would be vulnerable to a rocket-propelled grenade.
As far as Ms LeVine is concerned, "a lot of vehicles would be vulnerable to an RPG".
But the Jane's editor is not convinced the heat-ray gun will prove a decisive weapon.
"It is a bit of a uni-tasker and my feeling is that uni-taskers of one kind or another seldom cause military revolutions," he says.
It may serve its military purpose well enough, Mr Sweetman adds, but law enforcement is a different story.
"I don't think you would use this unless you thought there was a risk of the other side escalating it into lethal force," he says.
"I don't think you would use this against a bunch of Millwall football fans on the rampage."
HOW HEAT-RAY GUN WORKS
1 360-degree operation for maximum effect
Antenna, linked to transmitter unit, can be mounted on vehicle
Automatic target tracking
2 Antenna sealed against dust and can withstand bullet fire
3 Invisible beam of millimetre-wave energy can travel over 500m
4 Heat energy up to 54C (130F) penetrates less than 0.5mm of skin
Manufacturers say this avoids injury, although long-term effects are not known
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6300985.stm
Published: 2007/01/26 14:49:22 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Ron Paul For President 2008
By Steven Yates
January 17, 2007
NewsWithViews.com
All too often our columns trade in bad news! I'm sure I've given past readers a few sleepless nights. It is my pleasure this go around to deliver some good news! Some very good news!
According to an Associated Press report released late last week, Dr. Ron Paul (R-Tx) is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2008. He has filed papers in Texas allowing him to form an exploratory committee that can raise money.
The one-time medical doctor and nine-term Congressman from southeast Texas last ran for president in 1988 on the Libertarian ticket, and received over 400,000 votes. This time around, he will be running as a Republican, which means going head-to-head against much better known (and better supported) figures such as John McCain.
This is an opportunity for what might be a pursuit worth thinking about—retaking the Republican Party, now that the warmongering neocons have run it pretty much into the ground.
Here's a thought: both major parties may be controlled from the top—but several of my associates have offered compelling arguments that a power struggle has commenced within the super-elite itself. Arrayed on one side are the longstanding international bankers who want to operate through entities like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. On the other are the neocons and their monied backers, who have a vision of Pax Americana, a global empire run from Washington (and Israel). Lest there be any misunderstanding: both camps are globalist through and through. Both have promoted (are promoting) Fabian socialism and communitarianism. Both would dissolve our national borders in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. But they differ over specifics. One of the areas where the two camps are butting heads is over what to do about the mess the Bush Administration has made in Iraq.
A few months ago, Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, published an article declaring the Iraq War unwinnable and calling for an exit strategy. The neocon-controlled Bush Administration wants to "stay the course," however, with Bush just having called for another 21,500 troops to be sent there. The neocons are salivating at the mouth to attack Iran!
If I were in the first group, I'd be wondering about the sanity of these people I had made the mistake of promoting into power! (It's happened before. I sometimes wonder if the banksters and other corporate interests who propelled both Hitler and Stalin into power had counted on the pure evil and bloodlust that manifested itself in those regimes.)
This is an opportunity for the freedom movement in this country! Dr. Paul is one of the few Constitutionalists in Congress. He casts his votes exclusively on what he believes the Constitution empowers the federal government to do, and votes consistently against bills he believes exceed the authority given Congress by the Constitution. This, of course, places him at odds with most of the rest of Congress, including the powers-that-be in the Republican Party. After all, the Republicans no less than the Democrats departed from the Constitution long ago. Both endorse the welfare nanny state, just in different degrees.
Nor will Ron Paul do the bidding of the corporatist globalists. There is also nothing in the Constitution that empowers the federal government to "partner" with big business, or to supply it with corporate welfare. Paul has cosponsored a resolution (H.C.R. 487) to put a stop to the slow, gradualist merger of the U.S. with Canada and Mexico in the name of "free trade" which isn't unless you are part of the corporate elite.
We can't say this about more visible figures such as John McCain, beloved of the mainstream power structure. I doubt we can say it about anyone else who might seek the Republican nomination except possibly for Tom Tancredo who seems also to have been sending out feelers (and who cosponsored H.C.R. 487).
Dr. Paul appointed Kent Snyder, a former staffer on his Libertarian campaign, to chair the exploratory committee. Snyder told AP, "There's no question that it's an uphill battle, and that Dr. Paul is an underdog. But we think it's well worth doing and we'll let the voters decide."
So here is what we have to do—we refers to everyone who wants to live in a free society. Should Dr. Paul officially announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2008, we need to get behind him and start working for him—whether through financial contributions for those able to make them, knocking on doors where feasible, making presentations, or producing written materials like this article. If Ron Paul is in the race, we should begin bombarding mainstream newspapers with guest columns and letters to the editor. If the columns and letters are refused publication, start circulating them online, through the many websites, forums, blogs and other Internet resources available to us. Where possible, start putting up banners and signs along Interstate highways, exits, and major intersections where traffic often slows. That way thousands of ordinary commuters, fed up with government bureaucrats, ridiculous regulations and having over 40 percent of their incomes taken away in taxes (including the hidden tax of inflation) will see: RON PAUL, Republican and Constitutionalist, PRESIDENT IN 2008!!!
The solution to any mainstream media blackout on a Ron Paul campaign: take direct action to thwart it.
Now this calls on the Freedom Movement to do something many of its members find very hard. It calls on us to set aside our differences and work together for a common goal—establishing the credibility, plausibility and practicality of a Paul Presidency that could reverse the present direction of this country.
The inability of different groups and organizations to cooperate has hurt the Freedom Movement terribly! Christians, for example, often refuse to work with non-Christians, and vice versa. They are often uncomfortable working with those Libertarians whose worldview they see as "too secular." Libertarians are just as uncomfortable working with them. Christians don't always get along with each other—nor do Libertarians who have fallen into an in-house squabble over who is the "purest" Libertarian. Both have their differences with, e.g., the Constitution Party. There are many other groups each will not work with; some, in fairness, seem to prefer to remain isolated. There are single-issue groups focused on, e.g., the income tax.
Should Dr. Paul take the plunge and declare himself a candidate, every one of these needs to set aside their factional differences and quabbles and come together under one umbrella. I would go as far as to say that if Ron Paul runs, third parties should refrain from running a candidate of their own (have someone on standby, perhaps, in case Dr. Paul by some chance elects to withdraw altogether). Other groups also need to get with this program: the John Birch Society, Sons of Confederate Veterans, the League of the South, and so on.
I am hoping that should he choose to run, Dr. Paul can count on the support of think tanks such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, and the Institute for Humane Studies, among many others less known nationally but capable of doing great work at the state and local levels. Free market economists such as Walter Williams will doubtless get behind Dr. Paul, as will their equivalents among philosophers such as the ever-prolific Tibor R. Machan and myself. There are differences in all of these. We don't all work from the same first premises or have absolutely identical visions of the kind of society we want. People who are thinking as individuals probably never will. But we should all be united in the belief that individual freedoms, moral responsibility, private property rights, genuinely free markets (not corporatism), and the rule of law are necessary conditions for prosperity in this life.
We do not have a choice in this! Cooperation among all of us "underdogs" is only way a Ron Paul candidacy has even the slightest hope of making a dent against a firmly entrenched Establishment. We can worry about our differences on our own time!
Last weekend, Aaron Russo, filmmaker extraordinaire and creator of America: Freedom to Fascism, pledged to work on Dr. Paul's behalf despite some rather serious health problems. Dr. Paul, of course, appears prominently in A:FTF pointing out that "the Federal Reserve is no more federal than Federal Express" and expressing worry about our expanding Brave New Police State. [To order Aaron Russo's new documovie America: Freedom to Fascism click on the banner below.
In a letter sent out to those of us on the A:FTF team and widely circulated on the Internet, Russo wrote, "Congressman Paul will be the only uncompromising defender of the Constitution in the race… I am 1,000% behind him!
Russo continued, "Ron Paul has stepped up to the plate because he knows what we all know: the noose is tightening, and there isn't much time if we hope to restore to Constitutional Government. I called Ron yesterday to tell him I am on board to do anything it takes to support his campaign.
He stated what I have reiterated here: "Now is the time for the entire Freedom Movement, all Third Parties, all good Americans everywhere, from all political stripes and persuasions, to unite to overtake the weakened Republican Party. Stand firmly behind Ron Paul, and work to restore our Constitutional Republic…."
"There isn't a better man for the job. He has an impeccable voting record. He is ‘right on,' on Freedom and Sovereignty issues. In a time of universal deceit, Congressman Paul dares to commit the revolutionary act of telling the truth." This last, of course, is a reference to the George Orwell quote that opens A:FTF.
Sound advice! In the last analysis, we have just two questions to consider: (1) Do we really wish to reverse our present course and live in a free society? (2) What are we willing to do to make it happen? We may have here an opportunity to support one of the few men in Washington who still has the vision of our Founding Fathers. There are going to be naysayers who will claim Dr. Paul's views are "outdated," or tell us "it can't be done." (One article has already described a Ron Paul candidacy as "quixotic.") When the naysayers have specific arguments, let us answer them. When they do no more than scoff, point this out and then ignore them.
I recall a rather active member of the South Carolina Libertarian Party based in Columbia, a very energetic man named Dick Winchell whom many of us greatly admired for his willingness to go into the Capitol building and get in the faces of the South Carolina General Assembly. Unfortunately, he was often very much alone. Finally, fed up with the mere moaning and groaning so many Libertarians do about how terrible the government is, he stood up at a meeting and said, "When you guys are ready to do something, call me!"
With Ron Paul, we have an opportunity to do something. Let's not squander it—especially, let's not squander it by fighting amongst ourselves. There are, of course, separate battles to be fought—against Real ID, for example, or against electronic voting, and against the stealth merger of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. A Ron Paul anywhere near the White House put a stop to all the unconstitutional police state tactics and all the globalist nonsense. But he has to get there first. To paraphrase Kent Snyder, this has to happen at the grassroots level or it will not happen at all. And it is probably our last chance!
January 17, 2007
NewsWithViews.com
All too often our columns trade in bad news! I'm sure I've given past readers a few sleepless nights. It is my pleasure this go around to deliver some good news! Some very good news!
According to an Associated Press report released late last week, Dr. Ron Paul (R-Tx) is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2008. He has filed papers in Texas allowing him to form an exploratory committee that can raise money.
The one-time medical doctor and nine-term Congressman from southeast Texas last ran for president in 1988 on the Libertarian ticket, and received over 400,000 votes. This time around, he will be running as a Republican, which means going head-to-head against much better known (and better supported) figures such as John McCain.
This is an opportunity for what might be a pursuit worth thinking about—retaking the Republican Party, now that the warmongering neocons have run it pretty much into the ground.
Here's a thought: both major parties may be controlled from the top—but several of my associates have offered compelling arguments that a power struggle has commenced within the super-elite itself. Arrayed on one side are the longstanding international bankers who want to operate through entities like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. On the other are the neocons and their monied backers, who have a vision of Pax Americana, a global empire run from Washington (and Israel). Lest there be any misunderstanding: both camps are globalist through and through. Both have promoted (are promoting) Fabian socialism and communitarianism. Both would dissolve our national borders in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. But they differ over specifics. One of the areas where the two camps are butting heads is over what to do about the mess the Bush Administration has made in Iraq.
A few months ago, Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, published an article declaring the Iraq War unwinnable and calling for an exit strategy. The neocon-controlled Bush Administration wants to "stay the course," however, with Bush just having called for another 21,500 troops to be sent there. The neocons are salivating at the mouth to attack Iran!
If I were in the first group, I'd be wondering about the sanity of these people I had made the mistake of promoting into power! (It's happened before. I sometimes wonder if the banksters and other corporate interests who propelled both Hitler and Stalin into power had counted on the pure evil and bloodlust that manifested itself in those regimes.)
This is an opportunity for the freedom movement in this country! Dr. Paul is one of the few Constitutionalists in Congress. He casts his votes exclusively on what he believes the Constitution empowers the federal government to do, and votes consistently against bills he believes exceed the authority given Congress by the Constitution. This, of course, places him at odds with most of the rest of Congress, including the powers-that-be in the Republican Party. After all, the Republicans no less than the Democrats departed from the Constitution long ago. Both endorse the welfare nanny state, just in different degrees.
Nor will Ron Paul do the bidding of the corporatist globalists. There is also nothing in the Constitution that empowers the federal government to "partner" with big business, or to supply it with corporate welfare. Paul has cosponsored a resolution (H.C.R. 487) to put a stop to the slow, gradualist merger of the U.S. with Canada and Mexico in the name of "free trade" which isn't unless you are part of the corporate elite.
We can't say this about more visible figures such as John McCain, beloved of the mainstream power structure. I doubt we can say it about anyone else who might seek the Republican nomination except possibly for Tom Tancredo who seems also to have been sending out feelers (and who cosponsored H.C.R. 487).
Dr. Paul appointed Kent Snyder, a former staffer on his Libertarian campaign, to chair the exploratory committee. Snyder told AP, "There's no question that it's an uphill battle, and that Dr. Paul is an underdog. But we think it's well worth doing and we'll let the voters decide."
So here is what we have to do—we refers to everyone who wants to live in a free society. Should Dr. Paul officially announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2008, we need to get behind him and start working for him—whether through financial contributions for those able to make them, knocking on doors where feasible, making presentations, or producing written materials like this article. If Ron Paul is in the race, we should begin bombarding mainstream newspapers with guest columns and letters to the editor. If the columns and letters are refused publication, start circulating them online, through the many websites, forums, blogs and other Internet resources available to us. Where possible, start putting up banners and signs along Interstate highways, exits, and major intersections where traffic often slows. That way thousands of ordinary commuters, fed up with government bureaucrats, ridiculous regulations and having over 40 percent of their incomes taken away in taxes (including the hidden tax of inflation) will see: RON PAUL, Republican and Constitutionalist, PRESIDENT IN 2008!!!
The solution to any mainstream media blackout on a Ron Paul campaign: take direct action to thwart it.
Now this calls on the Freedom Movement to do something many of its members find very hard. It calls on us to set aside our differences and work together for a common goal—establishing the credibility, plausibility and practicality of a Paul Presidency that could reverse the present direction of this country.
The inability of different groups and organizations to cooperate has hurt the Freedom Movement terribly! Christians, for example, often refuse to work with non-Christians, and vice versa. They are often uncomfortable working with those Libertarians whose worldview they see as "too secular." Libertarians are just as uncomfortable working with them. Christians don't always get along with each other—nor do Libertarians who have fallen into an in-house squabble over who is the "purest" Libertarian. Both have their differences with, e.g., the Constitution Party. There are many other groups each will not work with; some, in fairness, seem to prefer to remain isolated. There are single-issue groups focused on, e.g., the income tax.
Should Dr. Paul take the plunge and declare himself a candidate, every one of these needs to set aside their factional differences and quabbles and come together under one umbrella. I would go as far as to say that if Ron Paul runs, third parties should refrain from running a candidate of their own (have someone on standby, perhaps, in case Dr. Paul by some chance elects to withdraw altogether). Other groups also need to get with this program: the John Birch Society, Sons of Confederate Veterans, the League of the South, and so on.
I am hoping that should he choose to run, Dr. Paul can count on the support of think tanks such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, and the Institute for Humane Studies, among many others less known nationally but capable of doing great work at the state and local levels. Free market economists such as Walter Williams will doubtless get behind Dr. Paul, as will their equivalents among philosophers such as the ever-prolific Tibor R. Machan and myself. There are differences in all of these. We don't all work from the same first premises or have absolutely identical visions of the kind of society we want. People who are thinking as individuals probably never will. But we should all be united in the belief that individual freedoms, moral responsibility, private property rights, genuinely free markets (not corporatism), and the rule of law are necessary conditions for prosperity in this life.
We do not have a choice in this! Cooperation among all of us "underdogs" is only way a Ron Paul candidacy has even the slightest hope of making a dent against a firmly entrenched Establishment. We can worry about our differences on our own time!
Last weekend, Aaron Russo, filmmaker extraordinaire and creator of America: Freedom to Fascism, pledged to work on Dr. Paul's behalf despite some rather serious health problems. Dr. Paul, of course, appears prominently in A:FTF pointing out that "the Federal Reserve is no more federal than Federal Express" and expressing worry about our expanding Brave New Police State. [To order Aaron Russo's new documovie America: Freedom to Fascism click on the banner below.
In a letter sent out to those of us on the A:FTF team and widely circulated on the Internet, Russo wrote, "Congressman Paul will be the only uncompromising defender of the Constitution in the race… I am 1,000% behind him!
Russo continued, "Ron Paul has stepped up to the plate because he knows what we all know: the noose is tightening, and there isn't much time if we hope to restore to Constitutional Government. I called Ron yesterday to tell him I am on board to do anything it takes to support his campaign.
He stated what I have reiterated here: "Now is the time for the entire Freedom Movement, all Third Parties, all good Americans everywhere, from all political stripes and persuasions, to unite to overtake the weakened Republican Party. Stand firmly behind Ron Paul, and work to restore our Constitutional Republic…."
"There isn't a better man for the job. He has an impeccable voting record. He is ‘right on,' on Freedom and Sovereignty issues. In a time of universal deceit, Congressman Paul dares to commit the revolutionary act of telling the truth." This last, of course, is a reference to the George Orwell quote that opens A:FTF.
Sound advice! In the last analysis, we have just two questions to consider: (1) Do we really wish to reverse our present course and live in a free society? (2) What are we willing to do to make it happen? We may have here an opportunity to support one of the few men in Washington who still has the vision of our Founding Fathers. There are going to be naysayers who will claim Dr. Paul's views are "outdated," or tell us "it can't be done." (One article has already described a Ron Paul candidacy as "quixotic.") When the naysayers have specific arguments, let us answer them. When they do no more than scoff, point this out and then ignore them.
I recall a rather active member of the South Carolina Libertarian Party based in Columbia, a very energetic man named Dick Winchell whom many of us greatly admired for his willingness to go into the Capitol building and get in the faces of the South Carolina General Assembly. Unfortunately, he was often very much alone. Finally, fed up with the mere moaning and groaning so many Libertarians do about how terrible the government is, he stood up at a meeting and said, "When you guys are ready to do something, call me!"
With Ron Paul, we have an opportunity to do something. Let's not squander it—especially, let's not squander it by fighting amongst ourselves. There are, of course, separate battles to be fought—against Real ID, for example, or against electronic voting, and against the stealth merger of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. A Ron Paul anywhere near the White House put a stop to all the unconstitutional police state tactics and all the globalist nonsense. But he has to get there first. To paraphrase Kent Snyder, this has to happen at the grassroots level or it will not happen at all. And it is probably our last chance!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
