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12/14/2002
Drones to Watch Over You :.Swarms of sensors, cameras and microphones everywhere: An increasing number of federal agencies are pursuing plans to use pilotless surveillance aircraft to help patrol the Mexican and Canadian borders, protect the nation�s major oil and gas pipelines and aid in other homeland security missions.
Incoming Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said in an interview Tuesday that he will ask President Bush to explore the possible deployment of such aircraft, known as unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, by civilian agencies responsible for homeland security.
The drones would be similar to those used in high-profile missions by the CIA and U.S. military to target suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. But unlike many of the UAVs deployed overseas, such as the one that fired a missile at a carload of suspected terrorists in Yemen last month, the drones flown for homeland security operations would not be armed with weapons, only cameras or sensors, several federal officials said.
posted by Kevin at 6:48 AM
12/13/2002
Victory: Kissinger Scurries Away Like a Cockroach :.The light of the truth is a terrible thing, if you're a despicable and evil creature. (Would you say I was being a bit hard on cockroaches, Dr. Kissinger, by comparing them to you?) Who is Bush going to appoint to head the independent commission now, Oliver North? HAHA. Oh, maybe I shouldn't joke around like that: Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stepped down Friday as chairman of a panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, citing controversy over potential conflicts of interest with his private-sector clients."It is clear that, although specific potential conflicts can be resolved in this manner, the controversy would quickly move to the consulting firm I have built and own," Kissinger wrote in a letter to President Bush, who appointed him. "I have, therefore, concluded that I cannot accept the responsibility you proposed."
posted by Kevin at 4:49 PM
Senators Want Kissinger's Client List :.The appointment of someone of Kissinger's almost unbelievably corrupt, compromised and evil nature indicates that the current U.S. regime is desperate to cover up the events of 9/11. Bush and the gang are willing to bet big with open and egregious fraud in order to keep the lid on this thing. Kissinger's stench, however, is more than even the lapdogs in the U.S. Senate can tolerate. What does that tell you? The White House has told lawmakers that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, President Bush's choice to head a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, is not required by law to disclose his business clients.
Senate Democrats want the list to determine whether Kissinger's clients pose conflicts of interests.
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said federal law guiding presidential appointments does not require such disclosures when the appointee is not paid. Kissinger is drawing no salary.
Senate Democrats claim all 10 members of the commission are required to submit financial disclosures, which would include naming clients. That opinion was supported by a report issued last week by Congress' research arm, the Congressional Research Service.
The White House position wouldn't prohibit Kissinger from turning over the client list on his own. The former secretary of state was not immediately available for comment.
The confrontation came to a head as former Sen. George Mitchell resigned from the commission.
posted by Kevin at 3:39 AM
Total Information Awareness: Expect the Next Attack Soon :.The ultimate goal for the THEM is to make you beg to be imprisoned. Get ready: In the Pentagon in Washington, a team is working on plans to collect as much information about every single aspect of everyone in America as they can.
This includes everything from doctor's records to bank deposits, e-mail to travel tickets, phone conversations to magazine subscriptions.
The reason, according to the Under Secretary of Defense Pete Aldridge, is to catch people intending to carry out terrorist crimes.
"The bottom line is that this is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act."
Backers of the project, known as Total Information Awareness, admit that it sounds Orwellian.
A reluctant supporter of the Pentagon's plans is Frank Gaffney, a former assistant defense secretary.
He says that it would only take one more terrorist attack and public support is assured.
"At that point there will not only be a willingness to submit to those sorts of infringement but a demand that they be infringed upon in the hope of trying to protect us.
"If there were no war on terror, this is not something that we would want to do."Well, that last sentence is interesting, considering everything we know about government involvement with terrorists.
posted by Kevin at 3:35 AM
U.S. to Attack Iraq No Matter What :.There's growing indication now that a massive US attack against Iraq is practically set for January, no matter what is contained in Iraq's weapons declaration and no matter what United Nations inspectors find out on the ground. An ambassador to the UN who insisted on remaining anonymous assured Asia Times Online that "at any moment we could be facing an official statement from the White House saying Iraq is in material breach of Resolution 1441. We are all helpless against it at the UN."Note: I happen to think this article is accurate, but sharp readers will notice that it was written by the same guy who floated this thing, which was retracted by AsiaTimes.
posted by Kevin at 3:29 AM
Iraq Bought Anti-Nerve Gas Drug with U.S. Approval :.The U.S. made a big deal about stopping a large shipment of atropine headed to Iraq from Turkey a few weeks ago. Well, check this out: With Washington's approval, Iraq has bought more than 3.5 million vials of atropine since 1996 even though the drug can be used to protect against nerve gas attacks, U.N. officials said on Thursday.
The United States has made an issue in recent weeks of its current inability to block Iraqi attempts to import the drug, saying it wants to quickly add atropine to a new U.N. Security Council restricted list.
posted by Kevin at 3:19 AM
White Cloud Surveillance System :.For those of you thinking about sailing away to the promise land, uh: U.S. intelligence officials said White Cloud is a "constellation" of three satellites that can intercept any electronic emission from a ship, "triangulate" its exact location, and then beam the coordinates back to a U.S. Navy control room at the National Maritime Intelligence Center in Suitland, Md.
The network, officially known as the Ocean Surveillance Information System, was designed during the Cold War to keep track of Soviet military and cargo vessels, said James Bamford, author of several books on U.S. intelligence.
posted by Kevin at 3:14 AM
Activists Use Wi-Fi to Build Communications Network :.For the past four weeks, the group of self-described geeks has been working on a plan to provide tree-sitters in the Headwaters Forest region of Northern California with access to an 802.11b wireless network.
posted by Kevin at 3:07 AM
Crucial World Trade Center Records Destroyed :.Thousands of key Word Trade Center building records, considered crucial to helping explain why the towers collapsed, were likely destroyed in the catastrophe, officials acknowledged yesterday.
Construction logs, maintenance records and early drawings - originals and copies alike - were among the documents that probers had hoped to use to help solve the collapse "puzzle" and are now presumed lost, the National Institute of Standards and Technology said.
Furthermore, many of the site's designers, contractors and insurers say they lack backup files of their plans, leaving probers in even more of a quandary.
posted by Kevin at 2:57 AM
12/12/2002
Al Qaeda Version 2.0 :.This is the type of nonsense that created bin Laden in the first place: President George Bush has formally approved $92m (�60m) to train a pan-Iraqi militia to help fight a war against Saddam Hussein. Over the past few weeks the Pentagon has been scouring countries looking for bases. A Nato airbase in southern Hungary emerged yesterday as the favourite site.Research Credit: BW
posted by Kevin at 10:10 AM
Remote-Control for Bacteria :.This is the most frightening thing I have read in a long time. I only took Biology 101 in college, but you don't need much more knowledge than that to imagine some of the possible uses of this: Remote-controlled bacteria could be just around the corner. Researchers have found a way to switch cell processes on and off with radio waves.
The goal is "microbial machines", Joseph Jacobson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge told this week's Materials Research Society meeting in Boston.
Cells, he explained, could be equipped with a toolbox of 'software' - such as the ability to glow periodically. Remote-controlled enzymes could cut and paste these modules as if downloading a particular program into the cells.Related: Bill Joy's, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us: Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.
posted by Kevin at 2:46 AM
12/11/2002
Back UpObviously, the site is up again. With traffic to the site falling, things getting worse by the day and lack of contributions, I thought: Why bother with this? But after reading the messages from some of you, one thing became clear: My metric for measuring success was flawed. I realized that, while the site was not attracting large numbers of people, it was attracting small numbers of people who might actually make a difference. Some of you are actively trying to wake people up, and you are using the information presented here to form part of your knowledge base. That was amazing to me. That was what convinced me to keep going. Dozens of people expressed interest in a newsletter, but after further consideration, I thought that this is not the time to be locking the information up in the form of private and privileged communications. I thought about dharma and karma (call it whatever you want) and decided that I have an obligation to do what I can, if I am at all able, regardless of what comes of it. Amazingly, just as I decided to drop the standard notions by which success of the site could be measured, two readers made financial contributions. (One contribution paid for the hosting of this site for a year. The other one was enough to buy gas for a week. Thanks guys!) I was stunned, amazed, touched and encouraged by this. This medium of exchange, of interaction, allows all of us to route around the barriers to understanding of our world. It allows us to support those voices which we find interesting and enlightening. And it allows individuals to contribute to causes in several different ways. Wow. That is humbling and incredible. The wave of the future does not lie in hierarchical organizations, but rather in decentralized networks of peers. What we, as individuals, lack in terms of military power, we more than make up in adaptability, intelligence and personal conviction. By empowering ourselves and each other, by routing around the corporate, governmental and ideological barriers to understanding, we have a chance to create a planetary information network that is resistant to attack from all forms of tyranny. And if we can do that, without firing a shot, is there anything we can't do? I am honored to stand as a node in this network of peers. Let's do everything we can to turn the current political and economic crises into opportunities.
posted by Kevin at 12:33 AM
Israel: Do-It-Yourself Al Qaeda Cell :.We know that states routinely use terrorism as a tool to drive domestic and foreign policy. NO terrorist organization exists in a vacuum, wholly outside of influence from the governments they allegedly threaten.* In many cases, government operatives may be found in the command and control echelons of terrorist organizations. Surely, if Karl von Clausewitz was alive today, he would revise his most famous passage to read, "Terrorism is merely the continuation of policy by other means." We know the U.K. was involved with many of the most notorious IRA bombings and shootings in recent decades, including the Omagh outrage. We know the CIA played a key role in the genesis of Al Qaeda. We must note that this type of thing continues to be standard operating procedure for fascist regimes everywhere: Palestinian security forces have arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, a senior official said yesterday.
The arrests come two days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon charged al-Qaeda militants were operating in Gaza and in Lebanon.
"The Palestinian Authority arrested a group of collaborators who confessed they were working for Israel, posing as al-Qaeda operatives in the Palestinian territories," said the official, on condition of anonymity.
He said the alleged collaborators sought to "discredit the Palestinian people, justify every Israeli crime and provide reasons to carry out a new (military) aggression in the Gaza Strip."* Listen (mp3) to FBI informant, Emad Salem, who secretly recorded a conversation with his handler. He says, words to the effect: We have started building the bomb...It was built with supervision of the FBI and the DA. Start listening at 3 minutes 40 seconds. Salem was inside the terror cell that would go on to bomb the World Trade Center, and his handler was telling him to fill out pink forms and blue forms and to get a job and to only hang out with the terrorists on weekends. Oh, by the way, the FBI did nothing to stop the World Trade Center bombing. They nickel and dimed Salem on a $500 per week request. After the World Trade Center bombing, the FBI had to pay him over $1 million for his information. For more info on the British government's connections to the IRA, start here, here and here. Then see: The Committee: Political Assassination in Northern Ireland by Sean McPhilemy (banned in the U.K., rare and hard to find elsewhere) to learn about how the British played the other side of the fence at the same time. Recent revelations on CIA support of Italian terrorist operations: Gen Maletti, comannder of the counter-intelligence section of the military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, said his men had discovered that a rightwing terrorist cell in the Venice region had been supplied with military explosives from Germany.
Those explosives may have been obtained with the help of members of the US intelligence community, an indication that the Americans had gone beyond the infiltration and monitoring of extremist groups to instigating acts of violence, he said.
"The CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism," Gen Maletti told the Milan court. "I believe this is what happened in other countries as well."Research Credit: BW
posted by Kevin at 12:32 AM
Iraqi Weapons Declaration :.They're saying this thing needs to be kept secret because it amounts to a cookbook for weapons of mass destruction. HA! Several U.N. member states want it kept secret because it is no doubt littered with references to U.S., British, French and German companies that have been supplying Iraq with weapons technology for decades. Hint: Several countries knowingly and unknowingly served as trans-shipment points for weapons and equipment that could not be legally exported directly to Iraq. The intelligence services set up cut out operations that handled these transactions in order to subvert domestic export laws. No merchants of death want to be outed in public. Woops, the dealers, in this case, happen to run the world: The huge document appeared to contain the names of foreign arms suppliers in a long declaration on Iraq's past weapons programs -- something that could prove embarrassing for the countries involved, including members of the Security Council.
In the index, Iraq listed procurements for its nuclear programs as well as imported chemical precursors and foreign technical assistance for its chemicals weapons programs.
"There are lots of pages devoted to procurement information," said Gary Milholling, director of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, commenting on the dossier's information on suppliers.
"If they have listed all their suppliers, that is quite important and should be made public. If you expose this network, it means it is harder for them to continue."
In the past such information has been submitted but not disclosed by U.N. weapons inspection units. Companies around the world that co-operated with the United Nations did so on condition they would not be publicly identified.
It is not known whether the United States or other council members might try to suppress this part of the Iraqi report, but after distribution to all of the Security Council's 15 member states, there is a good chance it will leak to the media.
posted by Kevin at 12:22 AM
The Microwave Phaser :.Is this the same death ray emanating from Poindexter's IAO eyeball? Official propaganda on the device is that it makes one's skin only lightbulb hot, enough to force a person to run but not enough to cook him. Of course, there is no proof this can be achieved, because the results of tests on people are classified. It's safe, insist the inventors, the air force's Directed Energy Directorate in Albuquerque.
But anyone with first-hand experience broiling hot dogs and other non-robust meats in their tabletop microwave might be chary of such an assertion. Struck by the heat ray, "Sssss," went the eyeball.
What is the microwaver's target? It must be unarmed civilians, because as described, the VMAD wouldn't seem to offer much against terrorists or regular soldiers ready to fire back with conventional weapons. What is certain is that the Pentagon's microwave projects lack oversight and common sense. In one manic, grandiose claim, the Defense Department calls VMAD "the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb."
posted by Kevin at 12:19 AM
U.S. and Canada Enter Bilateral Military Agreement :.Well, several of us were thinking about Canada... Maybe we should re-think that option: TORONTO - Canada and the United States have signed a new military cooperation agreement that allows troops of each country to enter the other in an emergency, Canadian officials announced Monday.
Faced with threats such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the North American neighbors expanded their military cooperation beyond their partnership in NATO and Canada's role in NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
Under the agreement, either country can request military help from the other. Any U.S. troops operating in Canada would be under the command of a Canadian officer, while any Canadian troops operating south of the border would be under U.S. command.
posted by Kevin at 12:17 AM
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:. Reading
 Fatal
Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture by Andrew Kimbrell
Readers will come to see
that industrial food production is indeed a "fatal harvest"
- fatal to consumers, as pesticide residues and new disease vectors
such as E. coli and "mad cow disease" find their way
into our food supply; fatal to our landscapes, as chemical runoff
from factory farms poison our rivers and groundwater; fatal to
genetic diversity, as farmers rely increasingly on high-yield
monocultures and genetically engineered crops; and fatal to our
farm communities, which are wiped out by huge corporate
farms.
 Friendly
Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Myron Gross
This is a relatively
short but extremely cogent and well-argued treatise on the rise
of a form of fascistic thought and social politics in late 20th
century America. Author Bertram Gross' thesis is quite straightforward;
the power elite that comprises the corporate, governmental and
military superstructure of the country is increasingly inclined
to employ every element in their formidable arsenal of 'friendly
persuasion' to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans
through what Gross refers to as friendly fascism.
 The
Good Life
by Scott and Helen Nearing Helen
and Scott Nearing are the great-grandparents of the back-to-the-land
movement, having abandoned the city in 1932 for a rural life based
on self-reliance, good health, and a minimum of cash...Fascinating,
timely, and wholly useful, a mix of the Nearings' challenging
philosophy and expert counsel on practical skills.
 Silent
Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth by David Bollierd
In Silent Theft, David Bollier
argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering
privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are
engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we
collectively own—publicly funded medical breakthroughs,
software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative
works, and even the DNA of plants, animals and humans. Too often,
however, our government turns a blind eye—or sometimes helps
give away our assets. Amazingly,
the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed
because we have lost our ability to see the commons.
 The
Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-To-Basics
Guide by John Seymour The
Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the only book that
teaches all the skills needed to live independently in harmony
with the land harnessing natural forms of energy, raising crops
and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and
wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving, and much more.
 When
Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten
When Corporations
Rule the World explains how economic globalization has concentrated
the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets
and detached them from accountability to the human interest. It
documents the devastating human and environmental consequences
of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct
values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their
own narrow ends.
 The
New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques
for the Home and Market Gardener
This expansion
of a now-classic guide originally published in 1989 is intended
for the serious gardener or small-scale market farmer. It describes
practical and sustainable ways of growing superb organic vegetables,
with detailed coverage of scale and capital, marketing, livestock,
the winter garden, soil fertility, weeds, and many other
topics.
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