1.23.2009

Indira Singh interview, 7/20/2005

This is not recent, but I post it because this woman really illustrates the kind of courage and tenacity that it takes to be a whistleblower in this country today. She is obviously a person of great integrity and intelligence, with presence of mind and tremendous personal courage in the face of death threats from very powerful people. This is how a patriot behaves. I don't know what has become of her, but all Americans should be very grateful that people like Indira Singh will put their lives on the line -- without the comfort of belonging to some powerful organization or being armed to the teeth to protect themselves, while those with those very advantages often shrink into hidey holes -- but merely armed with the nerve to seek the truth no matter where it leads. - Ed.

July 20th 2005
Inteview with Indira Singh
"Ground Zero 911, Blueprint For Terror, Part Two"

Indira Singh worked on Wall Street from 1975 Until June 28th, 2002 when she was summarily terminated due to her investigation into computer software company, Ptech. In Part One, She described her work as an emergency medical technician at ground zero, and began to describe her professional work for JPMorgan Chase and her first client meeting with software engineer, Ptech.

Bonnie Falkner: So, Indira, how did your meeting with Ptech, how did that go?

Indira Singh: Well, they came a little late, immediately there were some issues with regard to how the day would proceed, for instance they showed up without the agreed upon software in hand. The most important thing about it is that their chief scientist Dr. Hussein Ibraham came. He’s an Egyptian-American and he had a very good reputation in the field, very bright, someone you would like working with, very knowledgeable. But, they had showed up without the software.

Read more here.


Mystery Prison Buses in the Desert

On a recent visit to Tucson, Arizona, where I was invited to give a presentation on monetary reform, I was disturbed by a story of strange goings on in the desert. A little over a year ago, it seems, a new industrial facility sprang up on the edge of town. It was in a remote industrial zone and appeared to be a bus depot. The new enterprise was surrounded by an imposing security fence and bore no outward signs identifying its services. However, it soon became apparent that the compound was in the business of outfitting a fleet of prison buses. Thirty or so secondhand city buses were being reconfigured with prison bars in the windows and a coat of fresh paint bearing the “Wackenhut G4S” logo on the side.

The new Wackenhut operation is shrouded in mystery. It has been running its fleet of empty prison buses night and day, apparently logging miles on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract. Multiple buses can be seen driving all over town and even on remote desert back roads. Oddly, except for the driver and one escort guard seated in front, these buses are always empty.

Read more @ Global Research

More info on Wackenhut @ SourceWatch

The Wackenhut Corporation provides security services to commercial and government organizations. It is a subsidiary of U.K. based G4S, which is one of the largest security corporations in the world. [1]

"It is known throughout the industry that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut." -retired FBI agent, William Hinshaw in a September 1992 SPY Magazine article by John Connolly.

Information re: Russel Tice whistleblower allegations of NSA ILLEGAL SPYING ON AMERICANS

from Cryptogon Archives, May 2008:

I’m going to provide a one paragraph summary, just to make sure that the implications of this are clear to everyone:

The U.S. Government has, almost certainly, established a database and tracking system for something like eight million Americans who have been designated as threats to national security. The system is called MAIN CORE and it is being run under the auspices of highly classified Continuity of Government (COG) operations. MAIN CORE uses a variety of intelligence sources as inputs, including your email, web activity, telephone and private financial information. In the event of a major national security crisis, it is alleged that Americans listed in the MAIN CORE database, “Could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

Read more @ Cryptogon

And from Emptywheel: Russel Tice confirms everything we've surmised about Bush's illegal wiretap program

Teddy linked to the stunning Russell Tice appearance on Keith O tonight. I wanted to add a few points.

First, Tice's description of the program confirms everything we have surmised about the program. The program:

  • Established the means to collect all American communications
  • Analyzed meta-data to select a smaller subset of communications to tap further
  • Conducted human analysis of those messages

That is, the Bush administration used meta-data (things like length of phone call that have nothing to do with terrorism) to pick which communications to actually open and read, and then they opened and read them.

And of course, everyone's communications--everyone's--were included in the totality of communications that might be tapped.

Including--especially--journalists. We knew that both Christiane Amanpour and Lawrence Wright's communications were tapped. Well, apparently so were every other journalists'.

Read more @ Emptywheel

OOPSIE! Article Removed

Yesterday the Grand Forks Herald reported that Minot AFB was one of six finalists to be head of the finalists for Global Strike Command, whatever that is, but it doesn't sound good. Barksdale was also on the list, I believe. These COINCIDENTALLY being the places of the "missing nukes" problem. Also, the AF being the branch of the military most infested with religious extremists who heart Israel and hate Muslims. So all in all, not the best news.

Well, apparently, you shouldn't know these things, because today it's gone. Whoosh! Right down the hopper. But I'm sure it's nothing to worry about!!! HA HA HA!!! - Ed.

Empty hole here.

Gaza war widens lead of Israel's conservative Likud Party

"And you wise men don't know how it fee-e-eee-i-ee-ee-ee-eeels, to be thick, as a brick." - Jethro Tull

Polls show Benjamin Netanyahu likely to be next prime minister as Israelis vote on Feb. 10.


Read more @ Christian Science Monitor

Bush tentacles? You mean like an Octopus??

This is perilously close to talking about the actual intelligence war allegedly going on in real time, and led on the dark side by B41, said to be the "head of the Octopus," all of which is of course pooh-poohed as crazy conspiracy shit by people who eat nothing but candy for news. Whereas Alternet being, in my opinion, a site that people accustomed to corporate news would think of as quite meaty; but to me it is still more like a powdered donut. So this piece was a pleasant surprise. Also noted that B41 was caught sneering maliciously at Obama during inauguration ceremonies, which is good news. The Secret Service have their work cut out for them. - Ed.

by Russ Baker

As George W. Bush leaves office and Barack Obama takes over, we are in danger of missing the opportunity for change our new president has promised -- unless we come to grips with what the great historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called our "hidden history," not just of the past eight years but of the past half-century and more.

Read more @ Alternet

Caroline Kennedy ends senate bid

Caroline Kennedy last night withdrew from consideration to replace Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton - just two months after she rocked the New York political landscape by throwing her hat in the ring, The Post has learned.

Read more @ NY Post

Alternative Explanation: Death Threats. Which of course is just a silly conspiracy theory, because nobody in the Kennedy family has ever been assassinated.....oh wait.....

Alarm spread over use of lethal new weapons

By Erin Cunningham

January 22, 2009 -- GAZA CITY, Jan 22 (
IPS) - Eighteen-year-old Mona Al-Ashkar says she did not immediately know the first explosion at the United Nations (UN) school in Beit Lahiya had blown her left leg off. There was smoke, then chaos, then the pain and disbelief set in once she realised it was gone - completely severed by the weapon that hit her.

Mona is one of the many patients among the 5,500 injured that have international and Palestinian doctors baffled by the type of weaponry used in the Israeli operation. High-profile human rights organisations like Amnesty International are accusing Israel of war crimes.

Mona's doctors at Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital found no shrapnel in her leg, and it looked as though it had been "sliced right off with a knife."

Read more @ Information Clearing House

The Imminent Undoing of Israel

Lots of history packed tightly. - Ed.

by Susan Safi and Iman Safi

History invariably repeats itself. But in the techno age even history is running at top speed. Socio-economic and cultural changes that generally took centuries to develop and take shape in the past are materializing within decades if not years.

Read more @ Turkish Weekly


Defiant to the end. Gaza's tunnels back in business as IOF leaves

Excerpt:

Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, was heading to Brussels yesterday after getting the green light from legal advisers to the Israeli government who had been concerned she would face war crimes allegations. She was hoping to clinch a deal committing the European Union to contribute forces, ships and technology to anti-smuggling operations. But EU officials said their efforts would focus on providing humanitarian relief and maintaining the ceasefire. Ehud Barak, moved swiftly from war-making to electioneering yesterday, saying the fighting had given voters – who go to the polls to choose a new parliament on 10 February – a glimpse of the type of leadership they need. “We have similar tests awaiting us: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah. It isn’t over yet. These subjects have not been cleared from the table,” he said.

Read more @ ThereAreNoSunglasses

Israel, scared of Iran, chastized by Hezbollah, that leaves the Palestinians

Scathing in its perception of Israel. - Ed.

The London Review of Books has one of its multi-commentator sections on Gaza. The one that stood out to me was from the Israeli playwright, Yitzhak Laor:
We’ve been here before. It’s a ritual. Every two or three years, our military mounts another bloody expedition. The enemy is always smaller, weaker; our military is always larger, technologically more sophisticated, prepared for full-scale war against a full-scale army. But Iran is too scary, and even the relatively small Hizbullah gave us a hard time. That leaves the Palestinians.
Read more @ Atheo News

Someone take away Thomas Friedman's Computer Before He Types Another Sentence

Have some chocolate for breakfast. This is funny. - Ed.

by Matt Taibbi

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America's ability to fall for absolutely anything -- just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts -- along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-'stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400-square-foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Read more @ Alternet


Israelis are living high on US expense account

This is interesting. A thoughtful, reality-based editorial analysis gets printed in The Age, and the next thing you know, the paper delivers a grovelling apology for the "hurt" and "distress" it caused to the Jewish population. Never happen again....anti-semitic...dealt with internally...blah blah blah. Nice. - Ed.

There’s a memorable scene in the Stephen Spielberg film ‘Munich’. After the 1972 Munich Olympic Games killings of Israeli athletes, prime minister Golda Meir tells confidants she wants to show the plotters that killing Jews "is expensive". She then organises for the assassination of each of the plotters.

Today, it is Israel itself that has become expensive. Most directly, it is very expensive to the US, which subsidises and arms it.

Read more @ The Truth Seeker

Israel fails again to provoke Hezbollah and war between the US and Iran

It is becoming apparent that the frenzied Israeli attack on the people of the Gaza Strip was designed specifically to inflame Hezbollah and provoke them into a war with Israel; a war that would quickly escalate to involve Iran and the US for the purpose of ultimately bringing about regime change in Iran. Furthermore, this was all supposed to happen before Bush left office when it was hoped that war with Iran would be unavoidable by the time Obama took office.

Read more @ Damian Lataan's site

Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis

The scale of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government's long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, "When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?"

Read more @ The Guardian UK

What kind of 'soldiers' shoot children with white flags

Israel accused of executing parents in front of children in Gaza

And of course, they also execute the children in front of the parents. - Ed.

One nine-year-old boy said his father had been shot dead in front of him despite surrendering to Israeli soldiers with his hands in the air.

Another youngster described witnessing the deaths of his mother, three brothers and uncle after the house they were in was shelled.

He said his mother and one of his siblings had been killed instantly, while the others bled to death over a period of days.

Read more @ Telegraph.co.uk


1.22.2009

Romans 13 and Christ's "Clergy Response Teams"

by Brother Gregory Williams
January 21, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

Pastors across the country have been called on by the Department of Homeland Security to join “Clergy Response Teams” in order to placate and control the people of America in the event of local or national emergencies. Jeff Ferrell, a reporter for KSLA in Shreveport, claimed that “For the clergy team, one of the biggest tools that they will have in helping calm the public down or to obey the law is the bible itself, specifically Romans 13.” This idea was affirmed in the report by Dr. Durell Turberville who was quoted as saying, "because the government is established by the Lord, you know. And, that's what we believe in the Christian faith. That's what's stated in the scripture."

Read more @ News With Views


Tice: NSA spied on e v e r y b o d y, targeted journalists

Also wondering if Sy Hersh got his phone calls from all the people who said they would call him on January 21st to blow whistles, and let's hope he's typing away right now. - Ed.

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

Read more @ Raw Story