The Next "Catastrophic" Event?!

November 26, 2005

United States Prepares For ‘Catastrophic Event’ As US Justice Department Orders New Crackdown on Journalists and Dissenting American Citizens

By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Russian Subscribers

On a day that Americans strangely refer to as ‘Black Friday’, and which is a day that sees their descent into an orgy of consumption, spending money they do not even possess, Russian Scientists have issued one of their strongest warnings, and repeating earlier ones, that the fracturing of the North American Plate has accelerated in these past weeks, and leading to yet another violent volcanic eruption on the periphery on the Continent, and as we can read as reported by the Reuters News Service in their article titled "Colombia's Galeras volcano erupts" and which says:

"One of Colombia's largest volcanoes has erupted, spewing huge amounts of ash and sulphur fumes. Pasto, the city that lies immediately below the Galeras volcano, is home to nearly half a million people. The evacuation of the area began days ago, but many farmers are still refusing to vacate their homes. The volcano, part of the Andes mountains, last erupted 12 years ago, killing nine people, including scientists who were monitoring it."

Occurring almost simultaneously to this volcanic eruption in Colombia was an antipode (a direct or diametrical opposite) counterpart in the Indian Ocean, and as we can read as reported by the Reuters News Service in their article titled "Comoros volcano spews ash over capital" and which says, "A volcano spewed ash in its second eruption this year in the Indian Ocean Comoros islands, sending hundreds of villagers fleeing in fear the mountain could unleash a river of lava, witnesses said. Mount Karthala, a 2,361-metre (7,746-feet) volcano, sent clouds of ash and sparks flying late on Thursday, leaving the capital Moroni and other villages on the main island of Grande Comore covered in grey."

Further evidence of the continued stresses building upon the North American Plate we can see from these various reports over the past few weeks:

As reported by the Associated Press News Service in their November 17th article titled “Small earthquake strikes Massachusetts" and which says, "A minor earthquake shook a section of Plymouth this afternoon. Officials with the Weston Observatory, which monitors earthquake activity, say the two-point-five registered tremor was centered two miles south of the center of town. According the observatory's Web site, the quake was felt just after 12:30 this afternoon."

As reported by the Post and Courier News Service in their November 20th article titled "Quake surprises Summerville [South Carolina]" and which says, "The boom heard across much of Summerville, and the vibration that followed, was actually a little earthquake, the second this year in the area, according to Pete Jenkins, director of the Earthquake Center at Charleston Southern University. The quake, which struck about 3 p.m. Saturday, raised eyebrows and worried children, but caused no damage. The U.S. Geological Survey took note of the event but did not report its magnitude as of late Saturday."

As reported by the KOMO TV News Service in their November 23rd article titled "4.1 Quake Rattles Bellingham Area" and which says, "A small earthquake shook the area around Deming in Whatcom County Wednesday. There were no initial reports of any injuries or property damage. In the first half hour after the quake, 25 people reported feeling it, describing the shaking as moderate. Some people who called the media reported hearing a loud boom before the quake."

As reported by the Associated Press News Service in their November 23rd article titled "Tiny earthquake shakes St. Louis region" and which says, "No major damage was reported after a minor earthquake shook the St. Louis region. The tiny quake [2.5 magnitude], centered 10 miles southeast of St. Louis, struck around 11 p.m. Tuesday in East St. Louis, Ill., said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver."

As reported by the Thunder Bay Chronicle News Service in their November 25th article titled "Big bang shakes up Dryden area" and which says, "What seismologists are calling a “small” 1.5 magnitude earthquake, also reported that the couple heard a deafening bang, like a sonic boom or explosion."

Not just to the increasing frequency of these earthquakes upon the North American Plate, but also to the ‘Boom’ noises being reported that are accompanying them are most significant according to these reports as these ‘booms’ are the indicators of earthquakes of massive plate fracturing, and not associated with normal earthquake movements.

More concerning are the reports from the United States New Madrid Fault Zone Region where these ‘Booms’ are being heard without an accompanying earthquake, and as we can read as reported by the KTVO TV News Service in their ‘sanitized’ November 25th article titled "Explanation found for mysterious boom" and which says, "The mystery surrounding a loud, explosion-like noise that had much of Northeast Missouri talking Tuesday afternoon is now solved. It was apparently a sonic boom, an explosive sound caused by the shock wave preceding an aircraft traveling at or above the speed of sound."

These reports further state that the only modern day comparison to the earthquake events occurring within the North American Plate today are those of this past years 9.3 magnitude Sumatra earthquake catastrophe, and of which we can read, "This was no small earthquake. It ruptured the planet along 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) of fault. Scientists estimate the Indian plate slipped 33 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) under the Burma microplate. The fault shook for at least eight minutes. A typical large earthquake lasts 30 seconds or so. Earth's very gravity balance was altered, and the North Pole shifted by an inch."

Not being reported to the American people are how rare in fact these earthquake ‘booms’ are, and as we can read as reported by the United States Terra Research Instituted in their report titled “Mystery of 'The Earthquake Boom’: a real earthquake" and which says, “Earthquake Boom is a very loud, deep sounding explosion, which emanates from the earth. If directly above emanation, directional determination may be difficult as sound is not from a distinct direction as it is from a wide area of earth’s surface. It is a higher frequency audio form of the traditional shaking earthquake even though current seismographs cannot ‘see’ or ‘record’ them.

Scalar devices are able to clearly ‘see’ these events along with the rest of the earthquake ‘family’ of earth-generated events such as the ‘silent’ or ‘slow’ earthquake. Another relative to the ‘family’ is the earth ‘lurch’ and a ‘fast version of slow’ earthquake – these yet to be discovered by mainstream science. These loud explosions have been witnessed by many over the years. They also accompany traditional earthquakes as these are part of the mix of seismic activity

City residents of Spokane, Washington in the summer of 2001 experienced a classic series of explosions (earthquake booms) and earthquakes in a flurry of shallow earthquake swarms. Seismologists were unable to record these booming events on seismographs.”

To the American people being warned of the pending catastrophic events soon to overcome them some of their officials have warned them, and as we had previously reported on in our November 2nd report titled "More Earthquakes and Fireballs Besiege Eastern American Coastal Regions as United States Orders Their Citizens to Prepare For Coming Catastrophic Disasters" and wherein we had stated:

“As the pressures building upon the North American Plate are increasing beyond ‘all measurable levels’, according to reports from the Russian Academy of Sciences, concern has mounted in the continually disaster hit nation of the United States to the point that their highest government officials have begun warning their citizens to prepare, even to the point of telling them it is their ‘Civic Duty’, and as we can read as reported by the Associated Press News Service in their article titled "Chertoff: Preparedness Depends on People" and which says:

"Stockpiling supplies and developing family response plans in case disaster strikes not only might save lives — it's also a civic duty, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press. Two months of hurricanes ravaging the Gulf Coast should prove that people need to make preparations so emergency officials can focus on those who are poor, elderly or otherwise can't help themselves, Chertoff said."For those people who say, 'Well, I can take care of myself no matter what, I don't have to prepare,' there is an altruistic element — that to the extent that they are a burden on government services, that takes away from what's available to help those who can't help themselves," Chertoff said. "That is a matter of civic virtue."

In order to control the mass panic and chaos these catastrophic events will soon visit upon their citizens, the United States Government is also reported to be cracking down even further in their attempt to stifle internal dissent, and using both political and Bird Flu pandemic fears to mask their true motivations, and as we can read as reported by the Capitol Hill Blues News Service in their article titled "Feds ramp up spying on journalists, other Americans" and which says:

"Using powers granted under the USA Patriot Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped up surveillance of journalists in an effort to plug leaks from a scandal-weary Bush administration.Wiretaps, intercepts of electronic communications and daily monitoring of reporters’ activities are part of a program authorized by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalesm, Justice Department sources say.

Increased surveillance of journalists is only part of a stepped-up federal efforts to monitor day-to-day activities of Americans. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission set an 18-month deadline for broadband Internet Service Providers to make their systems “wiretap-ready.” “This is like saying, `Everybody has to keep their doors unlocked because the FBI might need to get in,’” says Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department attorney who handled computer crime cases and now senior vice president and chief security counsel of Solutionary Inc., a computer security consulting company in Omaha. “The harm of everybody keeping their doors unlocked all the time is much greater than the benefit.”

In addition, the FBI is turning to outside “contract agencies” to not only supplement agency resources but also to provide less of a trail back to the White House. This includes exchanging information with U.S. “data brokers” which then sell that information to others. One such broker, Locatecell, was recently cited by Canadian authorities for selling cell phone numbers of public officials. Security consultant A.J. Howell says he was contacted by the FBI about aiding their spying on Americans but turned the agency down. “I don’t spy on my fellow Americans,” he says. Among the things he was asked to do was keep tabs on Washington-based reporters.

The government has contracts with private companies like Blackwater, staffed with former military special operations soldiers, to work inside American borders. Blackwater operatives were deployed in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrinia to provide domestic security but also has contracts for "information gathering" activities within the U.S."

On this day that these American call Black Friday, the evidence of their heeding the warnings for their preparing for these events, even those warnings from their own government officials, and who have told them it is their Civic Duty to be prepared, continues to show their non compliance. But, how soon they will be faced, not with just a Black Friday, but a Black World, they do not recognize. For as some Russian Scientists speculate, their time for preparation should no longer be measured in months, or years, but perhaps only in weeks….or days.

© November 26, 2005, EU and US all rights reserved.

[Ed. Note: The United States government actively seeks to find, and silence, any and all opinions about the United States except those coming from authorized government and/or affiliated sources, of which we are not one. No interviews are granted and very little personal information is given about our contributors to protect their safety.]

Return To Main Page

Return To Alternative News

Return To Weather Of Note

oh,jeeezz................................

November 23, 2005: “With a well-bribed Congress having passed a “revision” of the Federal Bankruptcy Act preventing debtors from going bankrupt from credit card debts, the grateful credit card agencies have now jacked up their minimum percentage rates and we can now expect to see them go much higher. Like the greedy gas industry, they won’t up the rates from 5% to 25% all at once. Like heating oil, gasoline and other controlled and vital substances, the interest rates will creep slowly but surely upwards. Naturally, with the diminution of driving due to the advent of winter and the lower use of gas, the prices of gasoline will quickly stabilize and even drop a few cents. Not so heating oil which will begin the planned creep-up, accompanied by screams of Congressmen who will be flooded with anguished complaints just before the mid-terms and an similar chorus of whining woe from the oil barons who will assure us that it’s all the fault of the evil Moslims but they just have to keep up with prices.

The oil industry, like other gougers, should be subject to a strict, governmental control agency, which will never happen with the greedy thieves now running Congress. Although many in ghettos will freeze to death this winter or die of pneumonia, the current administration is not overly concerned with the fate of poor blacks.

Note, while we are on economic stories, that all the loud bombast from the incompetent Brown of FEMA and the equally incompetent President, about “rebuilding” the Gulf Coast has quietly vanished into the night, just like the billions of taxpayers dollars stuffed into the pockets of Bush friends.

To those sorry creatures who voted for Bush, hoping for a New Christian Nation, much pity should be extended. The rest of us can stop paying bribe money to the government in the form of taxes.”

Syria: 400 Mossad Agents in Lebanon

Syria says 400 Mossad agents in Lebanon
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Friday, November 25, 2005
DAMASCUS: Syria's official Al-Thawra newspaper claimed Thursday that more than 400 agents from Israel's spy agency Mossad are in Lebanon in the latest volley in an increasingly vitriolic war of words with Lebanon's new leaders.

"You have to recognize the danger of having more than 400 men from Israel's Mossad in Lebanon who are working with the other (Lebanese) agents who once supported the Zionist enemy and its militias," wrote editor Fayez Sayegh.

"These agents are encircling Lebanon like a belt that will explode when Israel and its strategic ally the United States decide," he said, charging there was also an increasing number of agents from the CIA and European states in the country.





"All these agents came to Lebanon... to sow dissent, revive hatred, reinforce pressure on Lebanon and Syria and above all spy on national forces, the Lebanese resistance and Palestinians," said the paper.

Syria's state run Tishrin newspaper and the Baath newspaper had tried to stir up strife in Lebanon earlier this month, when they ran editorials calling on its allies to hold demonstrations in Lebanon against Premier Fouad Siniora's government and the economic situation in Lebanon.

The call was widely dubbed by the local media as a flagrant intervention in Lebanon's domestic affairs in defiance of unrelenting global pressure on the regime of President Bashar Al Assad to take its hands off Lebanon. No demonstrations took place and no political group in Lebanon announced any plans to demonstrate.

Syrian troops left Lebanon in April, ending a 29-year presence, amid the political turmoil that followed the assassination in February of former premier Rafik Hariri.


Comment: What is already beyond doubt is that it was not the Syrian government that was responsible for Hariri's murder but agents of the Israeli and/or American governments. Hariri was expected to be the next Lebanese PM and had close ties to the French government who maintained a historic stake in Lebanon. In such a position, Hariri would have been unlikely to "play ball" with the Israelis and their plan to use Lebanon as a staging ground for an expansion of the war in the Middle East to serve Sharon's agenda of creating a greater Israel.

The UN investigation which sealed the Hariri case and blamed Syria was carried out by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis. Mehlis was the prosecutor of the 1982 bombing of the La Belle Discotheque in West Berlin, which was blamed by Ronald Reagan on Libya and which allowed Reagan to bomb Libya. Suspicious? Of course it is, and, in any case, it has been adequately shown that Israeli and US intelligence agencies blew up the La Belle. It comes as no surprise then that Mehlis' case against Syria in the Hariri assassination rested on the testimony of a single unnamed source who was revealed by German magazine Der Spiegel as Zuheir al-Siddiq, a criminal convicted of fraud and embezzlement, who had clearly lied in his testimony, contradicting himself several times.

Curious? Does it remind anyone of events prior to the Iraq war and claims made by "Iraqi exiles", "curveball" and other assorted drunks and criminals?

At the present time, with Lebanon now effectively neutered and a pro-Israel management team installed, it appears that Syria, a country about half the size of Iraq and with a population of 18 million, is next to be maneuvered (read blackmailed by Israel) to either come "on side", which will require the resignation of Assad and the installation of a pro-Israel leader, or face the consequences. The consequences will no doubt include the threat of some level of military campaign or an economic one. Having said that, a lot will depend on the decision of Assad and how successful the Mossad and the CIA are in carrying out further targetted assassinations and dirty tricks.

Stay tuned, and don't believe what you assimilate from the newspapers or have beamed into your brain by the TV.

Flight 93 and 175 Just Taken Off FAA "Active"List?

Two 9/11 Airliners, Flight 93 and 175, Just Recently Taken Off FAA 'Active' List. Are Both Jetliners Still Flying in United's 'Friendly Skies'?
FAA records for four years listed both 9/11 United jetliners as still on the 'active' list. Now planes only 'deregistered' in September after snoopy researchers questioned FAA officials a month earlier.
25 Nov 2005

By Greg Szymanski



Two of the 9/11 airliners were never ‘deregistered’ and remained on the ‘active’ flight list until Sept. 28. 2005, the classification officially changing only a month after two inquisitive flight researchers made repeated calls to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), inquiring about the strange irregularity.



The two planes in question were Flight 93 and Flight 175, both owned and operated by United Airlines and, according to the official story, both destroyed on 9/11, one in Shanksville, Penn., and the other crashing into the South Tower of the WTC.



Usually a normal procedure after an airliner is destroyed, why it took United more than four years to ‘deregister’ the airplanes and fill out the official FAA paperwork remains a mystery and never has been fully explained by the FAA, United or the government.



In fact, in stark contrast, a check of FAA records shows the two other American Airline flights, Flight 11 and 77, both were ‘deregistered’ and classified as ‘destroyed’ only months after 9/11 on Jan. 14, 2002.



Why the late filing by United?



“My brother and I both wrote the FAA in August about this situation and asked why the planes were not deregistered. The FAA said that an owner does not need to deregister an aircraft,” said one of the researchers named Roger, who preferred only to use his first name. “Ironically, a couple of months after I wrote the FAA, the planes were deregistered. What's up with that?



“Although the planes are deregistered, they are not listed as cause destroyed but rather as cause cancelled. The American airplanes are clearly listed as cause destroyed but not so the United planes.



“There is a guy who was saying on a web posting that he knew one of the United planes was still in service in Chicago. I know nothing of how he would know this or who he was but I think he was the same guy who brought this stuff to our attention and he's clearly right about the planes still being registered.



“Two planes destroyed and two planes still flying? Are you familiar with the Cleveland airport mystery? So did Flight 93 land at Cleveland with 200 passengers on board?”



A recent check of FAA records proves the flight researcher’s statements correct as Flight 93 identified as N591UA and Flight 175 as N612UA, both were taken off the active FAA list in September with a reason given as ‘cancelled’ not ‘destroyed.’



The FAA again was contacted this week, giving the same answers given to the two researchers back in August regarding the late deregistration. And in regards to listing both United flights as ‘cancelled not destroyed,’ FAA officials also gave no further explanation.



Besides the FAA deregistration issue, solid evidence has also come forward that two of the 9/11 flights, Flight 11 and 77, never even existed at all, according to Bureau of Traffic Safety (BTS) records.



According to BTS statistics, both 11 and 77 officially never took-off on 9/11. The meticulous data kept on every airliner taking-off at every airport in the country also showed no elapsed run-way time, wheels-off time and taxi-out time, not to mention several other categories left blank on 9/11 concerning the two flights.



Although Flights 11 and 77 have the above data meticulously logged on 9/10, it was suspiciously absent on 9/11, even when every other plane that took of that day had been recorded and logged by the BTS.



Why the discrepancy? No one has ever given an official explanation for the BTS missing flight data, even though it is well known that airports are extremely concerned about recording accurate BTS data for each and every flight in and out of its airport for liability purposes.



More importantly critics contend this is another clear indication Flight 11 and 77 were only ‘phantom flights,” adding even further doubt to the credibility of the official government story concerning 9/11.



Besides the FAA and BTS irregularities, the official flight lists from all four flights have been a serious bone of contention for 9/11 critics, who call attention to the glaring errors and conflicting passenger numbers on many of the flight lists released, many coming from unverified sources.



On Flight 11, for example, American Airlines released two different lists containing 77 and 75 names the day after 9/11, but the Washington Post published 89 names the same day while the Boston Daily published 89 names with conflicting names, however. Remember, complicating matters worse, Fox News all along was still claiming that only 81 names were confirmed a week later.



Through out the years, not only have the numbers conflicted but so have the names on the lists. Gerald Holmgren, a 9/11 researcher who has spent much time and effort researching the flight irregularities found one of the most glaring errors never explained by the airlines or the government.



Holmgren, whose compilation of 9/11 flight data can be found at http://indymedia.all2all.org/news/2004/05/84711.php, uncovered that four of the alleged passengers on American Airlines Flight 11 with the last names of Ward, Weems, Roux and Jalbert also mysteriously and unexplainable were also listed as passengers on Flight 175 that struck the South Tower.



Holmgren in his 2004 article had this to say:



“What a mess! This crime - the murder of approximately 3000 people, and the excuse for two wars and alarming attacks on civil liberties - and presumably more to come - is supposed to have been properly investigated and documented? Why should we be expected to believe who the hijackers were, when the spin doctors can't even do a credible fabrication job of a list of innocent victims?



“It's previously been demanded by many skeptics that we need to see a verifiable official passenger list which actually contains the names of the alleged hijackers. We can now take the implications of that further and point to the absence of any passenger list documentation for AA11 which stands up to scrutiny as a credible document. We have nothing which could support the existence of any of the alleged passengers on the alleged flight.”



Greg on the Radio.

Listen to my Radio Broadcast live every Monday night at 8pm Pacific time on LewisNews Radio. Look for program scheduling each week at http://webs.lewisnews.com/radio/index.htm. Greg is also a weekly regular on "The Power Hour with Joyce and Dave," a three-hour syndicated daily radio broadcast on the Genesis Network, broadcasting on many AM/FM stations nationwide. Greg appears every Monday at 7a.m to 8a.m. Pacific time.

First Light

Global Eye

First Light

By Chris Floyd
Published: November 25, 2005

Last week, America's troubled sleep was shattered by a trumpet blast of truth sounding deep in Washington's corridors of power, where the rule of the Lie has held sway for so long. This intrusion of reality into the bloodstained fantasyland of the Bush Regime comes late in the day for the moribund Republic -- perhaps too late -- but it has struck a mighty blow against the Lie's adherents, driving them into spasms of hysterical panic, like rats exposed suddenly to the light.

The unlikely instigator of this historic upheaval was U.S. Representative John Murtha, the 73-year-old conservative Democrat and war hawk, one of many "opposition" leaders who once strongly backed President George W. Bush's murderous folly in Iraq. Murtha, a Vietnam vet, has been a stalwart of the military-industrial complex for decades, supporting U.S. wars around the world and showering legislative largess on the weapons industry -- which has obligingly kicked back lobbying contracts to his kin and friends, The Los Angeles Times reports.

But a penchant for typical backroom grease is not necessarily incompatible with political courage. And Murtha showed plenty of the latter when he rocked Washington with a truly revolutionary act in these degraded times: stating the obvious. Calling Bush's war "a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion," Murtha said U.S. forces should "redeploy" out of Iraq immediately; otherwise, Iraqis will never feel free, the insurgency will grow, terrorism will spread and the United States will sink further into debt and dishonor, putting the nation's very survival at stake.

This riot of understatement has been self-evident to most sentient beings for a long time; that it is now sinking into the occluded consciousness of Potomac power players is a turning point of genuine significance. Although Murtha was immediately assaulted in one of the most raucous displays of bile ever seen in Congress -- with Bushist attack dogs labeling the war-wounded Pentagon patron a coward, traitor and terrorist-appeaser -- his about-face has brought the so-called "extremist" antiwar position of swift withdrawal squarely into the political mainstream, and it won't go away now. And why should it? After all, it just happens to be the position of a majority of the American people, as poll after poll reveals.

None of this means the Bush nightmare is over, of course; not by the longest shot. This gang will grow ever more vicious as their support crumbles; in fact, it's a good bet that the worst is yet to come. The Bushists know that they have prison sentences hanging over their heads if they ever lose their grip on power. They will either do "whatever it takes" to keep holding the whip hand -- in which case we are in for political and social strife the likes of which America has not seen since the Civil War -- or, at the very least, they will make things bad enough that the nation's power elite will negotiate a settlement, as in Richard Nixon's day: We won't prosecute you if you'll just go away. In any case, it won't be pleasant.

To Our Readers
Has something you've read here startled you? Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas to improve our coverage?
Then please write to us.
All we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number in case we need to get in touch.
We look forward to hearing from you.

Email the Opinion Page Editor

So no false hopes of a new day dawning. Let's not forget what happened after the "new dawn" after Nixon's departure: Six years later, Ronald Reagan was in office with an even worse crew -- a lunatic fringe of aggressive militarists, hard-right ideologues and religious extremists allied with rapacious corporate elitists, all bent on destroying the idea of a common good beyond the bottom line. This poison has gone deep into the American bloodstream, and its virulence has been increased a thousandfold by the current regime. Bush's exit won't cure the body politic of this wasting disease.

Nor will it halt the voracious system of dominance and empire that has driven U.S. foreign policy -- under Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives -- for the past 60 years, covering the earth with more than 700 military bases while waging ceaseless war, directly and by proxy. Indeed, war profiteering has become essential to the wealth and power of the elite, and is now deeply embedded in the U.S. economy as a whole. Bush accelerated this all-devouring engine into overdrive; but he didn't create it, and his departure won't derail it.

Thus, even if the Bush Regime collapses entirely, we will still face an uphill battle against "Bushism" and all the long-term currents it represents. We must also guard against something even worse rising in its place. For the Bush years have shown how fragile American democracy is, how relatively little it takes for a predatory faction to seize the state and manipulate the public, cow the opposition, intimidate the press and use violence in pursuit of loot and power. The template is there now, and it's entirely conceivable, perhaps inevitable, that some new would-be dictator -- more competent, more subtle, more adroit than the ludicrous klutz from Crawford -- will use it to create a more efficient and durable instrument of domination.

Still, the immediate task at hand -- ending the bloody war crime in Iraq and restoring some vestige of legality and reality to American politics -- is a tall enough order. So we should take heart from events like Murtha's declaration and Bush's freefall in the polls. There has been a shift in the political landscape, which provides cautious but credible grounds for hope of some measure of change. Not a false triumphalism, for there is never any final "triumph" in human affairs; there is only the continual, never-ending task of trying to rise above our worst instincts. But for the first time in years, the sun of possibility has broken through the stinking murk of the Bush Imperium.



Annotations


War in Iraq
Representative John Murtha, Nov. 17, 2005

House Rejects Iraq Pullout After GOP Forces a Vote
Washington Post, Nov. 19, 2005

Uproar in House as Parties Clash on Iraq Pullout
New York Times, Nov. 18, 2005

Straw Man Resolution in Congress: Joking around with the Lives of the Troops
Informed Comment, Nov. 16, 2005

An Unlikely Lonesome Dove
Washington Post, Nov. 18, 2005

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
National Journal, Nov. 22, 2005

The betrayed mothers of America
The Independent, Nov. 19, 2005

The Gates of Hell
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 22, 2005

Vegetarians Between Meals
Common Dreams, Nov. 18, 2005

Dishonest and reprehensible' words from Dick Cheney
Knight-Ridder, Nov. 23, 2005

The spoils of war
The Independent, Nov. 22, 2005

Lobbyist's Brother Guided House Bill
Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2005

Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
URL of this page: http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/157811/

Voice of the White House

TBR News November 21, 2005



Notice!

Our new security system prevents email messages coming through the AOL server from being delivered to our address. This is because of the probability of unwelcome and problematical attachments to messages from this source. Correspondents wishing to contact TBR News are suggested to use another server. Ed.



And all the sons of Congressmen! And the two adorable 100 Proof Bush daughters! (Ginna and Tonic)

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people, On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
- H.L. Mencken

“That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage - - - -torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians - - - - which does not change its moral color when it is committed by our side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
-George Orwell

"Under the Bush administration, openness and accountability have been replaced by secrecy and evasion of responsibility. They abuse their power, conceal their actions from the American people, and refuse to hold officials accountable."
-Senator Edward M. Kennedy

“George W. Bush is deeply interested in Deep Space Exploration. His next project will be to circle Uranus and search for Klingons…..”
-Dallas Herald

“Once a Republican, always a coprophile…:”
-Mother Theresa

“A government official is a man who has risen from obscurity to something worse.”
-Pat Robertson

"The voters decide nothing. Those that count the votes decide everything."
-J.V. Stalin

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

America’s Enemies!

There are four entities who represent the most dangerous enemies to American liberties since George III.

They are:

1. The Neocons or Likudists who owe their personal allegiance to another country and now completely control our foreign policy. They lied and deceived us into the Iraq war and are demanding that more and more American soldiers die to preserve their own country and ideals.

2. The Christian Evangelical right who is trying to force the United States into becoming a theocracy under their rule. They know in their hearts that they alone can restructure a secular humanist America into their idea of Heaven on Earth.

3. An element of American society that call themselves Patriots and are obsessively militaristic and great admirers of the corporate or fascistic state. Many of these have been very minor members of the American military and as a counterbalance to their reserve or rear area tours of duty, are rabidly in favor of draconian military action, the bloodier the better. Usually these drumbeaters are too old, or too fat, to fight and have no sons of draft age.

4. George W. Bush, who is the worst president in the history of the United States and directly responsible for the huge death tolls in Iraq, is determined to rule the United States until God puts a stop to him and is even more determined to force the American people into becoming obedient, Christian and self-sacrificing lemmings who worship at his shrine and march in step.

Recommended reading

We gather information, on a daily basis, from many websites. There are a number of publications that are well worth viewing for their intelligent reporting of national and international news. All of those sources, listed below, are daily newspapers with the exception of the Asia Times. The latter is a very well written site with in-depth articles that are worth reading.

The New York Times: www.nytimes.com
The Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com
The Christian Science Monitor: www.csmonitor.com
The Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: www.seattlepi.nwsource.com
Asia Times www.atimes.com

Note: Very little of the information in this edition of TBR news has come from the mainline American media. It is just not there. Most of it has come from foreign sources and the Internet. Most of our sources can be seen on the main page.

The Voice of the White House

November 21, 2005: “Murtha’s challenge to the Bush Administration to cut our extensive losses in the non-winnable Iraqi war has set fire to a huge pile of deadwood that represents growing hostility to, and utter disbelief in, the current Administration.

From a totally pragmatic point of view, the U.S. has lost the war in Iraq, just like we lost the war in Somalia and Vietnam. Politicians, and some generals, are reluctant to admit their errors, however, so we will see a circling of the wagons, led by the odious and obviously sadistic Vice President, to fight to the end the concept of giving up our senseless imperial dreams.

Bush and his crime partners have ruined the U.S. foreign trade balance, loaded up the American people and their children with an enormous debt, tried, thankfully in vain, to establish a theocracy in the United States, displayed a terrible contempt to the poor and most especially the black poor, gleefully stolen billions of taxpayer’s dollars and given it to their friends, fouled the atmosphere, ruined for decades the reputation of this country as the fountainhead of freedoms and personal liberty, slaughtered God alone knows how many perfectly innocent Arabs in Iraq and ruined many thousands of American military personnel and wounded, many crippled for life, totaling tens of thousands more.

Bush and Cheney and the entire Republican party are nothing but moral bankrupts whose collective masks have slipped to reveal the rapacious, immoral and vicious toads hiding behind them. Think now that we have three more years of meltdown in Washington and think, too, that the Bush people are liable to try to start a new war to stir up patriotism and raise their ruined reputations.

Syria is the logical choice and many here say that the thoroughly evil Mossad is more than likely to set off a bomb somewhere to kill Americans, (as insiders in the intelligence community claim they just did in Amman), blame it on the Muslims and rub their hands with glee while more American lives and money are spent in shoring up their own amoral state.”

More 9/11 Miracles and Wonders

More Miraculous 9/11 Evidence: Four Credits Cards Found in Perfect Condition From Inside the Wallet of Flight 11 Passenger
Joseph Iskandar said his son, Waleed, always carried his cards in his wallet and were 'miraculously' returned one year later, but he never questioned where and how the credit cards were found amidst the devastation of the towering inferno.
23 Nov 2005

By Greg Szymanski



More miraculous 9/11 evidence has turned up, as Joseph Iskandar, the father of Flight 11 passenger, Waleed, said not one but incredibly four of his son’s credit cards were found in perfect condition by the Ground Zero Recovery Team.



Originally Iskandar reported receiving only one credit card, a perfectly intact Wells Fargo ATM card, but now three more cards mysteriously surfaced, either in a ‘miraculous’ stroke of luck, considering the devastation in the towering inferno, or possibly another clear sign of more planted evidence placed by the FBI at all disaster locations on 9/11.



Iskandar never doubted the credibility of the evidence, also becoming another in the long line of flight passenger family members who have never questioned the government’s 9/11 story.



This comes in stark contrast to the other group of Ground Zero family members, a group made up of literally hundreds, if not thousands, who openly say 9/11 was an inside job or who publicly call for a new investigation. In contrast, the flight families either remain incredibly silent or, like Iskandar, have echoed the government story like a bunch of parrots in a cage.



Regarding the new evidence, Iskandar, 73, a Lebanese native who immigrated to the U.S. in 1980, told the Arctic Beacon Monday in an extended telephone conversation from his Northridge, California, home, the three other cards returned to him included Frequent Flyer credit cards from United, American and Delta airlines.



“When I returned to Ground Zero for the first anniversary of 9/11, I was told by some men that they had found four of Waleed’s credit cards, all in good condition. They never told me how they found it or where but just sent me the cards,” said Iskandar, adding he never questioned the identity of the men or the credibility of the cards, the items being mailed to his home several weeks later.



“Waleed used to keep his credit cards in his wallet and although it was a bit unusual considering the devastating crash, I just considered it to be a miracle from God. I then took the cards and they are included in a memorial at his burial site.”



Another person closely following the chain of strange 9/11 evidence, who wants to remain anonymous, had this to say about the Iskandar credit cards:



“I guess his ATM card must have slid out of his wallet, flown out of his pocket, then out of his seat and around the seat belt, then through the exploding jet fuel and debris, out of the building, then to be found picture perfect!”



Although Iskandar believes the cards were God-sent, others think the FBI had a dirty hand in planting tainted evidence, since besides the incredible find of not one - but four - of Waleed’s cards coming from inside his wallet, many other pieces of miraculous evidence has also surfaced.



The Arctic Beacon recently reported Capt. Jim Ingledue of the Virginia Beach Fire Department and 9/11 first responder finding the completely unblemished California ID card, driver’s license and wedding ring of one of the Flight 77 passengers amidst the devastation and rubble at the Pentagon.



Passenger Suzanne Calley’s husband, Frank, of San Martin, California, verified the return of his wife’s items, but like Iskandar didn’t question or even seek verification of the credibility of the evidence.



Although Calley had no questions, Capt. Ingledue, a firm believe of the official government 9/11 story, called it “highly strange and remarkable’ to find this type of evidence in the Pentagon meltdown.



“I remember thinking it was highly unusual and strange to find a perfectly intact ID card amidst all that devastation,” said Capt. Ingledue, a Pentagon first responder who arrived two days after 9/11 and spent a total of seven days in search and rescue.



In a telephone conversation two weeks ago from Virginia Beach, Capt. Ingledue added the find was “so strange” he kept it in his pocket for an hour instead of immediately turning the evidence over to FBI agents like he was instructed.



“When we arrived at the Pentagon, we were advised to turn over any personal effects or possible evidence immediately over to the FBI,” said Capt. Ingledue, who admitted the find was unusual, but doesn’t subscribe to any wild-eyed 9/11 conspiracy theories. “I kept this bit of evidence with me a little longer, I don’t know why, but I guess I thought it was strange to find an ID in perfect shape when everything else around me was devastated.”



Besides the possibility that Calley and Iskandar’s ID cards and credit cards were planted by the FBI, a similar question has been ignored by the state sponsored press and authorities the day after 9/11 when miraculously the unscathed passport of Satam Al Suqami, one of the alleged 19 Arab terrorists, turned up several blocks from Ground Zero.



Although ABC News and the Associated Press played up the importance of the Suqami passport, linking 9/11 to the Arab hijackers, serious questions were never raised in the press or by the 9/11 Commission as to the credibility and authenticity of the find.



Critics now contend with the Calley and Iskandar cards, all turning up in perfect condition like the passport, it only adds to the necessity of launching a full scale investigation into the possibility that all three items were planted by the FBI in an attempt to hoodwink the American people into believing the official 9/11 story, a story that has so many holes that it makes a perfectly good piece of Swiss cheese look like a solid object.



And to add even more fuel to the fire, numerous other accounts of suspicious evidence has also conveniently surfaced, linking the alleged hijackers to 9/11, including two of Mohamed Atta's bags also found right after 9/11.



Not only did authorities find the luggage but they conveniently contained a handheld electronic flight computer, a simulator procedures manual for Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft, two videotapes relating to “air tours” of the Boeing 757 and 747 aircraft, a slide-rule flight calculator, a copy of the Koran, Atta's passport, his will, his international driver's license, a religious cassette tape, airline uniforms, a letter of recommendation, “education related documentation” and a note to other hijackers on how to mentally prepare for the hijacking.



Again the state sponsored media jumped on the story, running in the Associated Press, Boston Globe and other papers in the weeks following 9/11, further perpetuating the government’s 9/11 myth without even asking the question of whether the evidence was credible or possibly planted by the FBI.



Regarding the Iskandar case, what’s even more unusual than the credit cards, is Waleed, a 34-year-old Harvard graduate, was never even listed as an original Flight 11 passenger either on the American Airlines flight manifest or the several different conflicting passenger list versions made public by major media outlets.



In fact, his name first appeared on a passenger list one year later in an unverified list given by a media outlet on the first year anniversary, but continued not to be listed on other distributed lists by other large media outlets.



In response to his son being left off the Flight 11 list, Iskandar said:



“I contacted American the day after the tragedy and told them not to list my son as my wife, Samia, and I were grieving terribly and we didn’t want to be bothered by the press. Later after we realized how big this whole incident became, we had him put back on the list.”



Iskandar said he also kept his son’s flight itinerary as a keepsake, adding his son was on his way from Boston to Los Angeles to tell his parents about his recent engagement to his new fiancé, who was also with Waleed in Boston but decided to leave on a later flight that never arrived in Los Angeles due to the airplane lockdown after 9/11.



The official flight lists and there many discrepancies have been a serious bone of contention for 9/11 critics, who call attention to the glaring errors and conflicting numbers on many of the flight lists released, many coming from unverified sources.



On Flight 11, for example, American Airlines released two different lists containing 77 and 75 names the day after 9/11, but the Washington Post published 89 names the same day while the Boston Daily published 89 names with conflicting names, however. Remember, complicating matters worse, Fox News all along was still claiming that only 81 names were confirmed a week later.



Through out the years, not only have the numbers conflicted but so have the names on the lists. Gerald Holmgren, a 9/11 researcher who has spent much time and effort researching the flight irregularities found one of the most glaring errors never explained by the airlines or the government.



Holmgren, whose compilation of 9/11 flight data can be found at http://indymedia.all2all.org/news/2004/05/84711.php, uncovered that four of the alleged passengers on American Airlines Flight 11 with the last names of Ward, Weems, Roux and Jalbert also mysteriously and unexplainable were also listed as passengers on Flight 175 that struck the South Tower.



Holmgren in his 2004 article had this to say:



“What a mess ! This crime - the murder of approximately 3000 people, and the excuse for two wars and alarming attacks on civil liberties - and presumably more to come - is supposed to have been properly investigated and documented ? Why should we be expected to believe who the hijackers were, when the spin doctors can't even do a credible fabrication job of a list of innocent victims?



“It's previously been demanded by many skeptics that we need to see a verifiable official passenger list which actually contains the names of the alleged hijackers. We can now take the implications of that further and point to the absence of any passenger list documentation for AA11 which stands up to scrutiny as a credible document. We have nothing which could support the existence of any of the alleged passengers on the alleged flight.



“The fact is - that in nearly three years - the media has tried to give the impression that they have published valid passenger lists, when all that has been provided is the contradictory rubbish exposed in this investigation. We are left with no choice but to conclude that these AA11 lists are fabrications.



“Personal stories of those allegedly involved have been built on the basis of these fabricated lists. As qualified earlier, some or all of them may be real people who are really missing, and may have friends or families who genuinely believe that they got on to a flight called AA11. We don't know at this stage. But the passenger lists as complete entities are lies.”



Whether Iskandar knows the real fate of his son or whether his son is a fiction, is unknown due the speculative nature and unreliability of the flight lists. Taking Iskandar at his word, his son exists and was killed on Flight 11, but it is also well-known the CIA/FBI creates aliases and fictitious identities to fill many needed slots in the witness protection as well as other clandestine programs.



“The FBI/CIA are busy now creating fictitious identities that they will need 30 years from now, complete with totally made up backgrounds right down to pictures in high school year books,” said Phil Jayhan, a long time 9/11 researcher. “Maybe the boys at the Pentagon borrowed some for 9/11 because the flight lists just aren’t credible or real.”



Researchers also point to speculative nature of the flight lists when information surfaced regarding to the real possibility that Flight 11 and 77 never even existed in the first place on 9/11.



According to Bureau of Traffic Safety (BTS) statistics both flights officially never took- off on 9/11, as well as showing no elapsed run-way time, wheels-off time and taxi-out time. However, Flights 11 and 77 existed on 9/10, having all the recorded data properly logged as do each and every commercial flight that leaves each airport in America.



Why the discrepancy? No one has ever given an official explanation for the BTS missing flight data, even though it is well known that airports are extremely meticulous about recording accurate BTS data for each and every flight in and out of its airport for liability purposes.



But, more importantly, if this is a clear indication Flight 11 and 77 were only ‘phantom flights” and never existed, why then wouldn’t some of the family members publicly voice their concerns?



One more suspicious thing about the Iskandar interview is that he became another in the long list of those who lost loved ones on the airplanes who either remained silent or bought into the official 9/11 story lock, stock and barrel.



“I have no reason to doubt the government. Everyone has been good tome including former California Gov. Gray Davis,” said Iskandar. “I come from Lebanon and I think these people are crazy, like bin Laden, and I call them the bad seeds or bad Muslims. I am satisfied with the government investigation and have no doubt who caused this terrible disaster.”



Iskandar joins several other members of the airplane 9/11 community, including Calley and Linda Gay, who recently said they are in total agreement with the official government story, adding they are unquestionably satisfied with the government investigation.



In fact, save Ellen Mariani, who lost her husband on Flight 175, the rest of the jetliner family community has never publicly questioned the government’s official 9/11 story and has pretty much stayed quiet in the background, out of the public eye.



What makes this surprising, if not downright suspicious, is that it is in stark contrast to the majority of family members who lost loved ones at Ground Zero, a group that has hundreds of outspoken critics of the government’s official story, a group unafraid to publicly blame the Bush administration for being the real culprits behind 9/11.



For example, there are literally hundreds of survivors and family members from Ground Zero who protest the government regularly, saying Bush and the neo-cons are hiding the truth about 9/11 to protect their own skin.



But in stark contrast only Mariani has gone public with her disgust of the government from the airline group, a fact that shouldn’t be ignored when trying to unweave the complex web of deceit woven by the neo-con culprits behind 9/11

9/11: The Death Toll Continues......

Ground Zero Worker and 9/11 Hero Dying of Cancer From Toxins at WTC; White House And New York Officials Deny Liability and Have Thrown Victims into the Streets Like Pieces of Garbage
Pat Arcese, now dying of cancer, says government lied about the safety of workers at Ground Zero. He is now suing New York but officials have denied liability, leaving him $2 million in debt from mounting medical bills.
20 Nov 2005

By Greg Szymanski



Pat Arcese wakes up every morning, knowing the clock is ticking, knowing he’s fighting a losing battle against cancer, a deathly cancer caused by working at Ground Zero after 9/11.



It’s a story that would break anyone’s heart, a story about a 9/11 hero left to die by heartless, inhuman government officials who tossed Arcese aside like throwing away a piece of garbage in the street.



Forget about all the political wheeling and dealing for a moment. Forget about Valerie Plame, Dick Cheney’s leak problems, Baby Bush’s drinking problems and all the other White House idiotic nonsense.



And think about one thing. Think about how these scoundrels, these less than human political pieces of garbage treated Arcese, a longtime New Yorker and Ground Zero hero.



Think about how former Mayor Giuliani, Bush, EPA officials and all the others down the lying chain of command told Arcese and others it was safe to work at Ground Zero, knowing full-well it wasn’t, knowing all along they were sending these rescue and clean-up workers into nothing but a disgusting and lethal pit of pollution.



Now four years later, two other workers are thought to have died from the exposure of lethal contaminants at Ground Zero and, according to Arcese, he may be the third in what may prove to be only the beginning of a long line of graves caused by the likes of these ‘garbage bag’ politicians, these pitiful specimens of human beings who sent thousands of workers unprotected into nothing but a cesspool of deadly toxic waste.



“I am 6’3”, used to be 225 pounds and solid as a rock. I was the toughest guy on the block and if you knocked me down, I’d just get up and keep coming at you,” said Arcese in a telephone conversation this week from his mother’s home near Tampa, Florida, where he stays due to his weakened condition.



Arcese, who was once robust and solid as a rock, has now been reduced, turned literally into a walking skeleton, as his over 200 pound muscular frame has been dwindled down by cancer to a mere 125 pounds.



“Remember Raging Bull or the Marciano fights? That was me and if you don’t believe me, you can ask anyone who knew Pat Arcese in New York what I was really like. You could knock me down but I would always get up,” recalls Arcese about his days on the streets in New York.



“Right now I can’t sleep at nights so sometimes I go walking late at night. I’m not the kind of person who turns the other cheek and that’s probably why I worked at Ground Zero longer than most, working 12 hours a day and staying long enough to decorate one of the first Christmas trees there in remembrance of the 3,000 people who were murdered there and, I mean, murdered!



“Even though I have been ill, I still ain’t gonna change. I still helped someone recently one night who was being mugged, saved his life and then testified against the perpetrators and put them away where they belong.



“And here in Florida one night, when I was out walking late because I couldn’t sleep due to the pain, I helped someone out like I did in New York, someone who was being robbed in a van. I’m just that way. I’m not gonna turn my back on anyone who needs help.



“You know, there were a lot of people who saw what happened at Ground Zero, came all gung-ho to help and then, just as quick, just left because it was so bad. I don’t hold it against them because it was a really a bad scene, I mean the worst possible scene. It was sort of like coming and going to hell and back every day. That’s about the best way to describe it.”



After working at Ground Zero day and night for more than three months, Arcese started feeling ill about eight months later, the symptoms starting with respiratory problems, paleness and skin rashes, but rapidly growing much worse.



“I kept waking up every day wondering what the hell was wrong with me,” recalls Arcese who twice during his illness collapsed on the New York streets, his heart stopping and having to be brought back to life by paramedics. “I deteriorated so fast and nobody knew what was going on. But it felt like my insides were being ripped out and I knew it had to be from toxins, asbestos and other contaminants I was exposed to at the World Trade Center.



“My god, I was never sick a day in my life and now I am down to 125 pounds and can’t hardly stand up straight without a cane! I kept telling the doctors, ‘you tell me what it is, smart guy, if it ain’t what I was exposed to at Ground Zero?’”



When working at Ground Zero, Arcese recalls three important facts that made it clear to him that the city of New York, the White House and the EPA were all lying to him and the other workers who were all told – told point blank – the air was safe to breadth and conditions safe to work every day they reported to Ground Zero.



The three facts, in Arcese’s own words, that proved to him the government lied were:



“One, they had these little test tube bottles all around the WTC and they would use these as proof to the workers it was safe. Every day One of the EPA workers would tell us they checked the tubes and it was safe. I knew they were lying.



“One day I went around and filled at least 30 of the tubes with asbestos that I found lying around the site. When EPA announced next morning and said it was safe, I caught them lying red-handed and called the official a liar right to his face.



“Another thing. The government spent millions of dollars on wash down machines for workers, but they never even used them once. Why? Well, they never even gave us protective gear or any protective clothing. They just didn’t care about people, but they sure did care about getting the billions of gold out from the basement and they sure cared about hauling the steel away as quick as they could.



“The second reason I know they lied is because I found out after the trucks that hauled the steel out left the WTC, they went into a wash down contamination center. What does that tell yah”



“And, the last thing, which is the icing on the cake, is the EPA put up this protective fence or what they called the ‘safe zone.’ And, think about it, there were hundreds of FBI and CIA there every day but they always stayed in the ‘safe zone’ and on the other side of the fence. Why?



“And the politicians, like Bush Giuliani and the rest, they’d only show up for a quick photo session and get the hell out of there as fast as they could in their limousines. Ask yourself: why didn’t they stay and lend a hand if it was so safe? And tell me why did they dump the dust right into the river? Hell, they tried to contaminate the whole city!”



In answer to Arcese’s question, the politicians never stayed longer than a few minutes at Ground Zero because everybody in high places knew all along the WTC and the surrounding area was a powder keg of lethal contaminants.



In fact, it was well-known by the city of New York that the WTC was an asbestos bombshell. For years, the Port Authority treated the building like an aging dinosaur, attempting on several occasions to get permits to demolish the building for liability reasons, but being turned down due the known asbestos problem.



Further, it was well-known the only reason the building was still standing until 9/11 was because it was too costly to disassemble the twin towers floor by floor since the Port Authority was prohibited legally from demolishing the buildings.



Although the city of New York and the federal government has refused to accept liability in Arcese’s case leaving him $2 million in debt for his medical bills, he is still pursuing a lawsuit filed in New York.



He recently overcame a motion to dismiss by city lawyers, claiming no responsibility Arcese’s deadly cancer diagnosis even though he has independent medical examinations saying his condition is directly related to the battery of carcinogens and toxins he was exposed to at Ground Zero.



“I recently got back from the doctor and was told there was no cure and nothing could be done,” said Arcese, adding that he also has knowledge that several of his New York friends, including a good buddy named Patty O’ Neil, all coming down with the same symptoms. “I just talked to Patty and he said his skin was turning gray and he was having breathing problems. I told him, Patty, you got to get to a doctor quick because that is exactly what happened to me.”



Besides Arcese, several other Ground Zero workers have sued the federal government in 2004 for lying about air quality at the WTC.



The suit accuses EPA officials of making misleading public statements about the level of dangerous contaminants released into the air after the twin towers were destroyed in a terror strike.



The plaintiffs say they were sent to work without proper protective gear, exposing them to PCBs, asbestos, benzene and other known carcinogens.



Among those making claims are city correction officers, a National Guard medic and a city paramedic sent to help with the cleanup. Also in the case, a federal marshal charges he lost two months of work because of shortness of breath and other ailments triggered by his work at the site.



Attorneys are asking to classify the case as a class action to include thousands of workers sent to Ground Zero after the attacks. Among those named as defendants are former EPA director Christie Whitman and officials from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, accusing them of authorizing news releases in the day after the attacks that were "false and misleading."



To indicate how false and misleading the EPA reports really were after 9/11, the following was sent out on September 18, 2001, by Whitman:

“EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced today that results from the Agency's air and drinking water monitoring near the World Trade Center and Pentagon disaster sites indicate that these vital resources are safe.

“Whitman also announced that EPA has been given up to $83 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support EPA's involvement in cleanup activities and ongoing monitoring of environmental conditions in both the New York City and Washington metropolitan areas following last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of air quality and drinking water conditions in both New York and near the Pentagon show that the public in these areas is not being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances," Whitman said. "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breadth and their water is safe to drink,” she added.

However, according to Arcese and many others now suffering illnesses from being exposed to the air at Ground Zero, was anything but safe, as children in nearby schools are now complaining of respiratory problems, more than half the site workers have serious breathing problems, half of the firefighters can no longer work and at least 14 rescue dogs have died.



Regarding the enormity of the health problems, one man who has pushed the issue about the EPA lies has been American philanthropist, Jimmy Walter, who has publicly called for justice for these “unsung 9/11 heroes,” many who like Arcese are sick and dying.



“If you worked or had loved ones in Manhattan after 9/11, who have resulting injuries or health issues, we encourage you to consider filing criminal charges against Mayor Giuliani, Christi Whitman, James Connaughton and other members of the White house, EPA and the NY Health Department,” said Walter in a written plea on his web site at www.reopen911.org. “We are dedicated to bringing justice to the real terrorists who attacked us and answering the glaring, painful questions surrounding 9/11.”





Arcese, who recently appeared on Greg Szymanski’s radio show the Investigative Journal on the Republic Broadcast Network at www.rbnlive.com, announced he is trying to raise money to go back to a New York Hospital to receive special treatment after two recent operations have been unsuccessful in stopping the cancer spread.



“I spend my time taking care of a young horse I adopted after I found him starving in a nearby field during one of my walks in the neighborhood,” said Arcese, adding he plans to one day return to New York and ride his newfound friend, who he named Twin Towers, in one of the New York City parades.



“Twin Towers has become a real friend and the day he tried to get in the car with me. Everybody in the neighborhood is telling how good he looks and the other day I took him with me to the store and he just waited outside in the parking lot until I came out. The police came by and at first told me you can’t have a horse out here, but after they found out it was me, they just all huddled around and starting taking pictures of me and Twin Towers walking on sidewalk in the middle of a six lane highway.



“But about the cancer, this has been a tough thing to beat, but my friends back in New York said if anyone can beat the cancer, it’s Pat Arcese and I’m not going to let them down.”



Editor’s Note: If anyone is interested in helping Pat get up the funds to get treatment he needs back in New York since he is living on a small fixed income, please contact the Arctic Beacon at arcticbeacon@earthlink.net and we will put you in touch with Pat Arcese, a true 9/11 hero.

So,Where Did "Al Qaeda" Really Come From?

So, Where Did
'Al Qaeda' Really
Come From?
Suprise,suprise,suprise!
By Wayne Madsen
11-19-5


More on Al Qaeda -- the database.

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.

"I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .

"Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.

"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.'

"In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.

"It was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic Conference's database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.

"[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base."

"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.

"In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.

"These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.

"Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.

"Because of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the 'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.

Meet "Al Qaeda"

"Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.

" . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.

" Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."

In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda." We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

http://waynemadsenreport.com/

Zionist War on Freedom of Speech

The Jewish war
on freedom of speech

Corporate West causes terror
in order to profit from it
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net




We have been betrayed by leaders known to us and by those unknown to
us. The elected and unelected. Is there a crime worse than betrayal by
leaders? .... Holocaust revisionism is at the cutting edge of
contemporary thought.
— J. B. Campbell, The New American Man: A Call to Arms




One by one, those who oppose the manipulated Jewish version of history
are being forcibly removed from society, and silenced because their
views conflict with the program of mind-controlled slavery that has
been meticulously crafted by the people who control the world by
controlling the money.

Three leading historical revisionists — first, Ernst Zündel; then,
Germar Rudolf; now, David Irving — are all under the gun in European
courts, charged with crimes they are not even allowed to defend
themselves against.

But the worldwide Jewish assault on freedom of speech reaches much,
much farther than that. A kangaroo court packed with Israeli settlers
as witnesses is now roasting of Palestinian benefactor Sami Al-Arian in
Tampa. Anyone who realizes Sami's innocence (prosecution of him would
not have been possible before the passage of the Patriot Act) and
supports him suddenly receives a home visit from the FBI and IRS aimed
at intimidating them into silence. The tactic works. Sami’s support has
dwindled.

And at least two deposed leaders of nations — Slobodan Milosevic of
Serbia and Saddam Hussein of Iraq — have through their words from
unjust imprisonment risen to the status of heroes in the fight against
the Jewish war machine that slaughters innocents in many countries
around the world, and trumpets its right to pretend to an exalted,
immune status that they insist nonJews are simply not eligible for.
Everything the Western press has said about both vilified characters
has been deliberately twisted negatively. Media manipulation of the
facts of history is the second-best weapon in the arsenal of the Jewish
war machine. The first, of course, would be money.

Orwell's "newspeak" thus arrives in nonfiction history couched in the
language of the Jewish spy agency named the Anti-Defamation League.
Anyone who questions the unprovable story of gas chambers in World War
Two immediately gets slammed into jail, especially if you live in
Germany or Canada, two satellite toadies to the Jewish-controlled
U.S./UK/Israeli axis of evil now plundering the planet for profit.

Jewish observers of these statements immediately lapse into their
disingenuous fusillade of aspersions beneath the banner of their
cynical credo — anti-semitism — most, without realizing that many
millions of people now know of centuries-long plans by the world's
elitist organizations — notably churches — to subvert and control the
minds of the human citizens of this planet. The Jews are not without a
very curious history of collapses of societies in which they have risen
to prominence: Rome, Venice, Spain, Britain, Russia, Germany, and now,
the United States.

Today, new laws in most Western nations (arbitrary geographic divisions
of the monolithic social force known as the Corporate West) prohibit
even discussing such matters. The macabre legal phraseology the
thought-controllers use is "defaming the memory of the dead."

The great laugh in this, as one of my fellow alarmists once mentioned,
is that the creators of this law may feign concern about the
reputations of deceased martyrs, but they sure don't care much about
the living, judging by other behavior by the same group.

But this is no laughing matter. Because the real issue is freedom of
speech for every person, and even more than that, it's about freedom of
thought.

Fact: In most countries of the Corporate West, you may not even
consider that much-maligned assertion trumpeted with certainty by men
with such intellectual integrity as Rudolf and Zundel, both of whom are
dismissed as white supremacists and sequestered from the realm of human
communication so the the rest of the world won't get the information
Jews are so desperately trying to conceal — namely, about their perfidy
during World War II and their control of the financial forces that
allow them to unduly influence all of the major governments in the
world.

The dean of the Holocaust Revisionist movement, Robert Faurisson of
France, has been expressing it best for almost 30 years. “Show me or
draw me a Nazi gas chamber!"

And in all that time, despite the ubiquitous and obscene hysteria of
Jewish sewer tales, this evidence proving the existence of the
Auschwitz gas chambers has yet to be brought forth for comprehensive
public scrutiny. There can be only one answer to this mystery.

Yet with calculated choruses of ritualized mourning, the new Jewish
Holocaust religion creeps around the world, spread by the efforts of a
powerful yet clandestine network of Jewish supremacists, stifling
thought and promoting Jewish profligacy and poverty and misery for
everybody else wherever it spreads.

This is the result, despite the best efforts of the worldwide Jewish
spin machine — which includes public schools and medical profession —
of trying to convince us there was a deliberate policy of extermination
of a certain ethnic group during World War II, and most importantly,
that this is a tragedy that we should worship.

No one quibbles that Jews died, although the actual number ranges all
the way down to 875,000, a number once reported by the Associated
Press. But it is the argument about the gassings, and other side issues
that put the Jews in a bad light, that sends all these people to jail.

To that end, hundreds if not thousands of Holocaust museums have sprung
up across the United States, all funded by taxpayer dollars. Gee,
imagine that? Whatever happened to separation of church and state?
(Yes, I know; Bush got a hold of it.)

As trenchant Jewish critic Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the
Jewish community has made a mockery of decency by shoving this
Holocaust worship down the throats of everyone else. Lenni Brenner and
other relatively objective Jewish observers have chronicled the sorry
role of international Jewish organizations complicit with Hitler in the
manipulation of Europe's Jewish population for purposes of finagling a
Jewish state in Palestine.

Yet most Jewish critics of Jewish behavior continue to deny the basic
fiction of the German gassings even as they bemoan the pathology of the
Jewish proclivity to suggest that Jewish dead are somehow more valuable
than nonJewish dead.

And anyone who tries to stand up to this thought-control tyranny, if
they are in the truculent satellite countries of the Corporate West
axis of evil, is immediately silenced and thrown into jail for saying
things that are simply not allowed by our Jewish keepers.

Perhaps an even worse effect is that hundreds of otherwise progressive
news sources are effectively constrained from even reporting honestly
on this very crucial issue to human development because of these insane
hate speech laws regarding the Holocaust that are spreading around the
world.

Ironically, the real hate speech comes from the very people who passed
these laws.

The assertion that six million Jews were murdered in gas chambers by
Germans does not stand in the light of critical and objective scrutiny,
and never has. It is only the Zionist spin machine, which controls far
more of your thought than you know, insisting on the fiction, repeating
the propaganda, that has allowed this mistaken idea to take hold in the
public mind. Call it the Lee Harvey Oswald principle.

It is merely a twisted legend of remembered misery fostered by a
self-referential hysteria based upon an ancient edict that declares one
random group of people in the desert are, in perpetuity, so vastly
superior to every other group of humans on the planet that they may
commit any crime against any nonJew without penalty. And this is
precisely the madness that today has our world in a death grip.

Ernst Zundel's trial, a phony Jewish circus if there ever was one, has
been postponed til after the holidays. The German judge fired Ernst's
defense attorney and appointed a more suitable one provided by the
state. Has there been a darker picture of justice in the Corporate West
than this? Sure, every day.

Justice in the Corporate West these days is marked by American-hired
mercenaries in black hoods using cattle prods on the orifices of people
they know are innocent. That is the hallmark behavior of the real axis
of evil: Britain, Israel, and the United States.

The rest of the world may not let this situation go on much longer,
particularly since the Jewish infiltration of the U.S. government, as
well as the U.S. entertainment, medical, and financial systems has as
its objective the collapse of the entire world society and the
consequently lucrative fire sale profits that will be available during
the process of repairing a collapsed world structure. It's a place
where we're headed where freedom is simply not on the menu.

Of the two free speech activists now imprisoned in Germany (Irving was
Nov. 16 in Austria), Germar Rudolf may be the more significant arrest.
His body of work is so academically scrupulous and his conclusions so
definitive and persuasive that the Jews who run the Zionist murder
machine simply had to get him off the street.

As Michael Hoffman reported:

Of all the scientists who have scrutinized the Auschwitz gas chamber
yarn, Rudolf was the most meticulous and dispassionate. His deportation
to face a prison sentence in the German-Israeli banana republic is a
tragedy. To claim that he incited racial hatred because he cast doubt
on the dogma of homicidal gas chambers is like arresting a scientist
who
questions the Catholic dogma of the Virgin Birth because it might
"incite hatred" of Italians. This is just too stupid.

And even creepier, now, when you pay attention to the corporate spun
news, you see new stories almost every day: people being swept up for
not thinking the right thoughts, people being jailed for decades for
simply having thoughts and taking actions that show they have a sense
of humanity and honesty, and are unwilling to accept the facile lies by
a social establishment that is drenched in Jewish money, and skewing
all the facts of existence for profit.

You think my statements are over the top? Consider this — the central
core of the Holocaust debate: the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

This bold assertion, which has skewed all political dealings in the
world since it was alleged to have happened in 1945, is only the last
surviving bit of hyperbole from a much larger and much more ridiculous
retinue of preposterous claims put forth by Jewish media over time to
popularize Holocaust fever. These range from using the skin of dead
Jews to make lampshades and soap. The term Holocaust itself stems from
a phrase used by a famous writer that has now been proven false.

Jewish hysteric Elie Wiesel won the Nobel prize for literature for his
accounts of the Holocaust, and his critics have proven his statements a
work of fiction. Here is Faurisson’s assessment:

Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the
alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night,
he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have
witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all
historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other
"eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to
their deaths each day in Buchenwald.

When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice
of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or
remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two
decided to leave with their German captors.

It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine
sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians
return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the
testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous
scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.

Another observer of the Holocaust debacle writes:

Of course the Holocaust happened, in a general sense. The question is
how much of it happened. Only an idiot would say "the Holocaust didn't
happen." The other side tries to pretend that revisionism is "Holocaust
denial." When you say "the Holocaust didn't happen," you are just
playing right into their hands, and discrediting revisionism.
http://www.geniebusters.org/915/04g_gas.html

The above link lists six reasons why the gas chamber story is a lie,
which I will synopsize.

1. The room Jews claim was the Auschwitz gas chamber clearly isn’t that
and wasn’t that (open the link and study the documentary photos).

2. Germans are meticulous record keepers. Many documents were seized
after World War II. None ever contained any written plans to
exterminate Jews.

3. There are no live photographs of people being gassed at Auschwitz.

4. Jewish witness testimony doesn’t prove there were gas chambers.

5. Standard (Jewish) reference books cannot be trusted.

6. Hitler stated his intentions openly, and the Nazis committed
atrocities openly.

There is no valid evidence for the existence of gas chambers at
Auschwitz, only a concerted effort by Jewish media to convince people
there were.

Contemplate the reasons why this is happening, and see how they pertain
to your own health.

These thoughts need to be articulated.

Humans are decent people, not robotoids who need to be molded by social
forces into banal, braindead docility.

The infinite flower that is the human individual should be nurtured and
cherished, not controlled, abused and murdered for reasons that are
lies.

Ladies and gentlemen: Some few of you already know this, but most of
you don’t. Especially note the number of apparently progressive
publications who will not run this story because it mentions Jews. Do
you now realize you yourself are a prisoner in the Jewish war on
freedom of speech?

As you sit there on your couch reading, in your comfortable home,
watching a Hollywood movie, eating corporate food, believing in a
groovy, synthetic god, sucking down an aspartame-laden Diet Coke, do
you have any idea of what the poet William Blake once called
“mind-forg’d manacles?”

Be careful what you think. You could be jailed for it at any time,
especially if what you think is about Jews. This is the new American
way. I wonder where it came from.




John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida whose
popular Internet essays have been collected into two anthologies,
“America’s Autopsy Report” and “The Perfect Enemy.”
http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Body Politics

Body Politics

By Chris Floyd

11/18/05 "Moscow Times" -- -- Four years ago, President George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence, simply by declaring them an "enemy combatant," on his say-so alone. This week, the assemblage of bootlickers and bagmen that befoul the U.S. Senate voted to codify the core of this global autocracy under the pretense of curtailing it.

With great self-fluffing fanfare, the Senate passed two measures ostensibly designed to stem the flood of torture and tyranny issuing from the White House. But the twinned amendments to a military spending bill have the curious effect of canceling each other out: The anti-torture measure leaves Bush's tyranny intact, while the anti-tyranny measure will allow torture to continue unabated. This switcheroo, we are told by one of the scam's sponsors, "will re-establish moral high ground for the United States," The Washington Post reports.

But what can we actually see from this lofty moral promontory? We see that all foreign captives in Bush's worldwide gulag have now been stripped of the ancient human right of habeas corpus. They will not be allowed to challenge "any aspect of their detention" in court -- until they have already been tried and convicted by a "military tribunal" constituted under rules concocted arbitrarily by Bush and his minions. Only then, after years of incarceration without rights or legal protection, will they be given access to a single federal appeals court that can review their conviction -- subject to the usual "national security" restrictions on challenging evidence gathered by secret means from secret sources in secret places. Remarkably, the Supreme Court is expressly prohibited from any jurisdiction whatsoever over any aspect of gulag captivity, The Washington Post reports. And of course, Bush can simply skip the tribunal and keep anyone he pleases chained in legal limbo until they rot. Neither of the ballyhooed amendments affects this raw despotism.

Meanwhile, U.S. citizens can also be arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. But for now, any Homelanders caught in Bush's net can at least appear briefly in court prior to their conviction, where they will enjoy a "judicial process" that Stalin or Saddam would have loved: Bush officials present the judge with a piece of paper declaring that the prisoner is one bad hombre, but all the evidence against him is classified and nobody can see it -- especially the prisoner, The Washington Post reports. And that's it. The captive is then plunged back into the gulag, to be disposed of according to Bush's whim. Again, this medieval mechanism of tyranny was left untouched by the Senate's actions.

The Senate originally voted to cast Bush's captives into outer darkness forever, without a single legal recourse. But then a few prissy hens and bleeding hearts made the usual squawk about rights and law and all that pinko jazz. So the compromise of allowing a post-conviction appeal -- for people who have been arbitrarily seized and held in isolation for years without charges, who have often been tortured, humiliated and driven to madness or attempted suicide before facing a kangaroo court -- was hastily cobbled together and presented to the world as a triumph of the human spirit and the American way.

Ah, but what about the anti-torture amendment, sponsored by the Republican "maverick," Senator John McCain, and hailed by editorialists across the land as a great leap forward in the evolution of political morality? The effusions that have greeted this measure are puzzling. It does nothing more than restate what is already the law of the land. American forces were already forbidden from subjecting any captive "to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" as prohibited by the Constitution and the UN Convention Against Torture. This regurgitation of existing law is the extent of the McCain amendment, along with an adjuration to interrogators to follow written guidelines for rough stuff set down by the Pentagon.

But the partisans of atrocity in the Bush White House knew these laws when they set up the gulag's torture regimen in 2001. They simply redefined "torture" to accommodate any brutal technique they cared to implement, then declared that the commander in chief is beyond the reach of law in wartime -- and that any underlings who commit crimes at his order are likewise absolved of legal liability. This sinister sophistry is still very much in operation and remains unchallenged by the toothless amendment of the "maverick."

The dual amendments are a cynical PR ploy: Torture will be condemned in public but quietly continued in the former KGB camps and other secret hellholes that Bush has strung across the world like a barbed-wire necklace. The Pentagon's own lawyers certainly understand the true nature of the game. As one told The Guardian: "If detainees can't talk to lawyers or file cases, how will anyone ever find out if they have been abused?" No one ever will, of course; that's the point. With habeas corpus denied up front, the worst cases of torture and false imprisonment can now be buried forever in "indefinite detention"; the tribunals, with their access to appeals, will be reserved for open-and-shut showpieces.

These draconian measures reach far beyond a handful of hard-core terrorists. According to the Pentagon's own figures, more than 21,000 innocent people have been caged without due process in Iraq alone, The Guardian reports. Hundreds more have been unjustly imprisoned around the world. A regime that thrives on fear requires a steady stream of "enemy combatants" to justify its unlimited "war powers." The belly of this beast will never be full.

Annotations

Senators Agree on Detainee Rights
Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2005

Senate Rebukes Bush on Iraq Policy
Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2005

McCain Amendment to 2006 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill
United States Senate, Nov. 11, 2005

Detainees Deserve Court Trials
Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2005

Democrats Provided Edge on Detainee Vote
New York Times, Nov. 12, 2005

Rumsfeld can authorize exceptions to new "humane" interrogation directive
Agence France Presse, Nov. 9, 2005

Guantanamo Inmates to Lose All Rights
The Observer, Nov. 13. 2005

Who They Are: The Double Standard that Underlies our Torture Policies
Slate.com, Nov. 11, 2005

Jose Padilla and The Death of Liberty
Information Clearinghouse, Sept. 10, 2005

White House declines to totally rule out torture
Agence France Press, Nov. 13, 2005

We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
New York Times, Nov. 13, 2005

Habeas Corpus
Wikepedia

Court Rules Military Panels to Try Detainees
Washington Post, July 16, 2005

Domination by Detention
Deep Blade Journaly, July 16, 2005

Ruling Lets U.S. Restart Trials at Guantanamo
Miami Herald, July 16, 2005

Alberto Gonzales' Tortured Arguments for Reigning Above the Law
LA Weekly, Jan. 14-20, 2005

Torture Treaty Doesn't Bar `Cruel, Inhuman' Tactics, Gonzales Says
Knight-Ridder, Jan. 26, 2005

Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill Terrorists
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2002

Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003

Coward's War in Yemen
Spiked, Nov. 11, 2002

Drones of Death
The Guardian, Nov. 6, 2002

Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005

The Secret World of US Jails
The Observer, June 13, 2004

The Torture Memos: A Legal Narrative
CounterPunch, Feb. 2, 2005

CIA Takes on Major Military Role: 'We're Killing People!
Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2002

Our Designated Killers
Village Voice, Feb. 14, 2003

A U.S. License to Kill
Village Voice, Feb. 21, 2003

CIA Weighs 'Targeted Killing' Missions
Washington Post, Oct. 27, 2001

US Again Uses Enemy Combatant Label to Deny Basic Rights
Human Rights Watch, June 23, 2003

[Bush Order] Lets CIA Freely Send Suspects to Foreign Jails
New York Times, March 6, 2005

Review: Torture and Truth and The Torture Papers
The New Statesman, March 7, 2005

The Torture Papers: Full Faith and Credit of the U.S. Government
San Diego Union-Tribune, Feb. 27, 2005

Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times