Ricorso on the Potomac: The Murderers of Democracy
Wednesday, 09 July 2008
"....the thunderclap, the ricorso, which, in Vico’s famous philosophy of history, presages the end of democracy and the return of leaders claiming to rule by divine sanction."

Today the United States Senate voted by a wide margin to gut the Fourth Amendment and give the president dictatorial powers to violate the privacy of every American citizen, while also granting immunity to wealthy corporations who colluded with the president for years in a patently illegal program of warrantless surveillance. The vote was 69-28, with Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama breaking with the (slim) majority of Senate Democrats who voted against the measure and joining instead with the Republicans, who voted in their usual zombified lockstep with the president's wishes.

As is well known, Obama once vowed, unequivocally, to support a filibuster of any bill that included the immunity provision for the president's corporate co-conspirators; today he voted with the zombified Republicans to choke off any attempt at a filibuster, so the bill could proceed to the final vote of approval.

I have little to say about this shameful action, beyond repeating what I said almost two years ago, when the Senate passed the infamous "Military Commissions Act," which gutted the 900-year-old doctrine of habeas corpus, approved the principle of presidential dictatorship and authorized the use of torture. (This "law" has not been repealed by the Democratic-led Congress, by the way.) That 2006 piece was called "Thunder on the Mountain: The Murderers of Democracy." And although a few omissions are necessary in the reprise below, due to the differing details between the two bills, the sentiments expressed are exactly the same -- as are the sinister ramifications of today's vote.

“Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes.
I'll say this, I don’t give a damn about your dreams.”
-- Bob Dylan, “Thunder on the Mountain”

Who are these people? Who are these useless hanks of bone and fat that call themselves Senators of the United States? Let’s call them what they really are, let’s speak the truth about what they’ve done today....

Who are they?

read more at burlesque 

Double-Cross

The "double-cross system" has been used in war and peace, in order to deceive.

It was made very effective during WWII by J. C. Masterman, the head of the "double-cross system in the English secret service. It help greatly in winning the war.

This system has been used to lead an enemy to believe in false information, it has also been used to prop up moral of people in desperate situations and is often use to manipulate public belief at large. I am using the name double-cross here to describe a well organised conspiracy to lie convincingly on a grand scale.

"Double cross" characters are always difficult if not impossible to detect unless the originator of the secret double cross reveals its deed, during or after the event — as most of the front personnel of a double-cross is either unaware, devious to the hilt or dead — or on the way to be dead.

How does the double-cross system work? It uses devious secret ways to transfer erroneous information about government activity in war or in peace to achieve a particular belief in the enemy's mind or in the general public's perceptions. These days we tend to call some of it spin, but spin is crude and only a part of a double-cross and sometimes spin will be oriented against the undercurrent of the double cross, to make the double-cross more effectively sneaky.

It is used daily to various degree and complexity — including many "double-crosses" tacked together for the same purpose. At its most elaborate, it will lead a populace and US senators to believe in the rightful purpose of a war in Iraq, all spurned from a lying president... At its most simple, one could believe what is called deceit or lying is double cross... it's not.

There is deceit and there is double-cross.

Deceit is often simple and relies mostly on one source of deceitfulness. Any serious analysis can blow a simple lie out of the water. A double cross is ingrained, layered, tough and basically impossible to detect, even on a lie detector machine...

Double-cross is very elaborate and demands a solid conspiratorial compartmental structure of management. Spying organisations always are aware of it and use it. In order for a double cross system operation to succeed it needs a set up of information seemingly coming from different sources with some elasticity in order to instigate doubt, fear and/or belief from different directions, in a carefully choreographed timeline — and it needs to remain fiercely secret.

There are thus many ways to create and manage a double cross event/belief depending on the information to be manipulated/disseminated.

There, in the depth of some organisations — private, commercial and governmental — are event analysts and creator, some very bright minds, clever double-crossers (minders to the front line of fibbers/truthtellers) who can prepare for most eventualities in order to secretly steer the ship of deceit where it should beach. What we — the public — believe to be random or accidental events (or news items), even in chaotic crescendo, are carefully staged managed incidents (press released as well) with enough military precision to succeed, but nor too tightly packed as not to appear as a set-up conspiracy, Setting a double cross demands a deep knowledge of psychology, knowledge of betrayal and of allegiance mixes, in proportion that are specific to the individuals managed and of great understanding of individuals and of individuals in mobs (the masses) at the receiving end... It also demands an elastic adaptation to events not going the way originally planned, thus that all bases are covered.

The characters at the coal face of false information distribution are often innocent fodder — often credible professionals — who become part of an elaborate scheme that they may not suspect. It could start by dipping their toes into something that is innocuous enough through exciting participation in a small worthwhile event or simply by not recognising they are being manipulated or compromised. Once the clever ones discover they have been taken, the double-cross system makes sure there is no turning back... There are no "prisoners". The fodder often dies.

When the double-cross system uses poor sods, they may be given money to lie on record, then they are retired in ways that could not never be fathomed. Which journalists could say they ever met a defector from Iraq who really knew what was going on in the weapons of mass destruction department? None. Dead or vanished, or proven to be lying. Even a Challabi who was paid 350,000 US dollars a month to organise such "valuable" rubbish.

A while after the beginning of the "war", Challabi was "tainted" by the CIA on false charges of fake currency dealing AND for "divulging sensitive information" to Iran (telling their codes had been broken by US intelligence —the Iranians knew that anyway but played along). In fact I believe the CIA was grooming him to become palatable in the eyes of the Shiite Iraqis so he could be elected to the Iraqi parliament and secretly carry on working for the US. The interesting factor here is that Challabi was tainted "TWICE" in order to reinforce his "liberation" from the exposed CIA clutches. To me it was a cheap trick. Sure, one needs more than one destructive aspect for a destructive attempt to be really successful. Striking from two directions at once, or in quick succession, is the way extinction works... Challabi's CIA's past was thus erased...

Sometimes by their own actions or expressed beliefs, some characters are used without manipulation, but they are watched closely so they can be cleverly counter-acted with specific fake surface information that is managed (targeted spin ahead of, during and after "revelations") to steer the "real truth" into a hole. Thus only the deceit —used as a rich counterpoint to the poor truth — is believed. Why so? The process reinforces the value of the false information by being challenged but not so much as to tear it apart. The double-cross system may just bait on a very small hook and voilà: It is easier to catch big fish on a small hook than catch small ones on a big hook...

Thus it is very difficult to know who is participating or has participated in a double cross system for the dissemination of false but CREDIBLE information. The purpose of double cross is to deceive on a grand scale, thus the fake information has to be credible and of mostly significant national or international magnitude.

Valerie Plame was outed as a pay back for her husband having challenged the validity of the Nigerian uranium to Saddam... She was "lucky" she was not erased. So was her husband... The information about the uranium was so poor that even the media took it as a joke, thus protecting Valerie and her husband with the truth of his revelations... Had the couple been vanished, bigger questions would have been asked. Thus the system sailed through the small storm it itself created and continued the deceit by ignoring the "failure" (but was it a failure?). Even a few month after being exposed, the president was still using the fake information as part of a package of pointers to war with Iraq.

I would suggest that recently, four characters were/are part of such system without their knowledge:

David Kelly

Mordechai Vanunu

Bruce E. Ivins

The fourth one is hell bent on disproving global warming.

I do not have any proof of their participation nor of a double-cross system in their cases, and this blog is only highly speculative, but the surface information bubbles on each case fits perfectly the double cross system of deception...

David Kelly
David Kelly knew too much. He had to realise at some point — as a UK government scientist and an expert in biological weapons who had served on the United Nations weapons inspection team — that some major REAL information he knew was conflicting with what the UK government was dishing out.

Some of the information he had supplied was being rehashed to suit the government line, contrary to their content. Thus David Kelly was caught in a conflict of serving his government or becoming a whistle blower, knowing there was some shenanigans going on... I strongly believe he was carefully monitored and managed from the onset, because within the ranks of the government, someone somehow had to know eventually that disembowelling David Kelly's information would be noticed by David Kelly himself. In the double-cross system, very little is left to hazard.

People like David Kelly do not operate in a vacuum — they have friends, colleagues and families — although by the end of his travails, he was isolated, as a perfect end to a successful double-cross. Often the system makes optimised use of the duty/knowledge conflict to expose the characters to sunlight, and the system is constructed so that the characters will drive themselves into the mud more and more, especially if they tell the truth.

In some instances, a double-cross could be called "damage control", but I believe in the David Kelly case the UK government would have been fully aware of David's meetings, movements and spills before the big blow up. It was seemingly using a damage-control situation to expose the importance of the government "dilemma" in having information, some conflicting (David Kelly's — under "management" by the secret service), but the overwhelming majority of which was "pointing to war". We had to feel sorry for Blair caught in trying to "diplomatically" solve the Saddam's conundrum peacefully, when, really, war had been secretly declared long before... Blair was telling porkies, Bush was telling porkies and the little Australian master J.W. Howard was doing his bit to tell porkies "in the national interest"...

"Managers" of such double-cross are well aware that in order to tell the truth, the manipulated characters often have to be deviously communicating, using deceit secretly conflicting with allegiances to the employer. Thus the truth soon gets wiped out by the character himself/herself when pursued by the justice system, or government commissions in which the character admits that he/she lied because he/she did.

And their position is belittled — by exposing he/she had not full access to the "real core" of the information (see Andrew Wilkie) he's referring to (no one ever has the full deck, especially the double-cross system's manager who is also a small cog in the greater system) inferring their knowledge is half-cocked — making sure he's/she's not credible. Sure, David Kelly lied to cover his tracks but this is irrelevant. He is portrayed as a liar and a deceitful person. The double cross system makes sure that in these cases, he/she is abandoned with very weak legal representation, he/she is surrounded by a moat of stench, hounded into the ground, he/she is destroyed or he/she "destroys" himself/herself "proving" that his/her claims were ludicrous...

The lies win hands down, even if there is some doubts. Even in the case of Valerie Plame, her loyalty to her country stopped her from doing what she should be doing, beyond a simple spirited protest... To expose more of herself would lead to spilling the beans on the CIA operations — a crime highly punishable, an impossible crime because release of the information would also be treason. No papers, no media — as silly as they can be — would touch it.

Truth versus porkies
The mathematics are there to prove that only 67 per cent of the "aware" population per cent need to believe the information for the whole system to work... If that critical figure is not reached, it is not a problem per say in populations of docile or ignorant subjects (!!!!), but the dose of fear and lies can be tweaked up if necessary.

Thus we were made to believe "the dossiers were not sexed up" despite having been made from the thickest of black lies...

Even if we believed they had been sexed up, there was enough doubt (national secrecy, you know et al) in the pipeline to still push our fears towards the government's position. So the deception, the lingering doubt aided by the government managed medatic hysteria made sure the truth would not win.

The media and government disinformation channels need to stay above 67 per cent in favour of the lies for the lies to prevail over a long period. At most time, while preparing for war in Iraq, the media was about 85 per cent in favour of the lies.

Piece of cake.

And the government own agencies organised some side show to make sure the media would buy the "hoax". Media orgs are tarts, beetles pushing daily dung uphill, ready to swallow "exclusivity" like a blotting paper — or, not to show my age, a kitchen absorbent paper that swallows thrice the amount of "spill". Eager to have the news first, media organisations prostitute for "secret and exclusive info", and they also love biffo. Without some biffo of sort, media doesn't exist or dies doing weather reports. In my schematic cartoon exposition of the process, I did show the media playing its role. In in one can see ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation as well as the American Broadcasting Company) prominently being fed... Fox was directly "connected" from Rupert visiting Bush, weekly or so...

Thus the surface media liaison office of the governments, in tune with the undercurrent results of double-cross, has to give some "burley", exclusive titbits here and titbits there with probability of a "regrettably unavoidable" war despite all "diplomatic" efforts for the whole thing to spread like butter on hot toast. The media becomes excited at the prospect of being embedded... The disinformation build-up towards war was so sustained that, whatever Saddam did, "he was telling lies when telling the truth". Saddam's 10,000 page accurate dossier on the disposal of Iraqi WMDs in the early 90s was shot into flame by the US, using a bit of surface spruiking that had been pre-massaged by some double-cross into the psyche of the US population ...

From the government propaganda office, such deceit is intensive work that needs to be seriously "managed". In the UK Alistair Campbell was doing the job in which the "national secrets and interests" rationale could be invoked to further muddy the waters, as well as compartmentalise the "knowledge", the "gathering of evidence" and the "massaging of the evidence" in a favourable loop..

Possibly at the beginning, the David Kelly affair may not have been a true double-cross system but I believe it was, and was managed like one, till his unfortunate end.

Blair would have known but had no regrets. He forgot diligently the commandment of his god that forbids any killing in any shape or form, including war,, and Blair became a Catholic soon after. A simpatico conversion with the next character on the list...

Mordechai Vanunu
For a while I thought that Vanunu had been a Mossad agent whose main purpose had been to disseminate in a clever way the concept not denied nor confirmed that Israel had nuclear weapons. At the time, it seems highly profitable for Israel to remind the world about its possession of nukes or not, as an issue of international importance, without threats.

Its need was to rekindle subtle unsure fear in the mind of potential enemies still haggling annoyingly with tired weapons from the 1970s and earlier. But then after analysis of Vanunu's past and record, I am not so sure if he was Mossad... Either way, he played a part, willingly or not, in the uncertainty/certainty dichotomy of the existence of the Israeli nukes.

Mossad would have seen Vanunu as a pigeon to be plucked, or Vanunu was part of the sting by playing a double game from the start. I now believe Mossad spotted their pigeon... But in the long run it's only important to Vanunu himself, not to the information magnitude.

So from then on, I will take it as if Vanunu was an innocent bystander.
In this affair, Mossad had to know that Vanunu — who had been, and still was, a strong voice against Israel's behaviour towards it's neighbours and the Palestinians — was working in one of the most sensitive sector of Israel's dirty secrets. Had Mossad acted as they usually do, Vanunu would have joined the ranks of fruit pickers in a kibbutz somewhere, after having been "dismissed" for something like poor performance or, better still, sexual harassment or simple culling of the workforce.... No...

So despite his very public protests bagging Israel, Vanunu was employed for more than ten years as a lab technician in the secret nuke factory. A very fishy conflict of existence. Thus I believe Vanunu was being monitored closely. Signing documents not to "reveal" secrets would be like an invitation to do the opposite to anyone inclined to revolt, thus Vanunu. The Israelis had to know that...

Let's accept Vanunu was battling his conscience between his beliefs and his duty, when he left his employment after taking some "revealing" pictures (they did not reveal much)... But the truth is he was "fired" from his job. From then on, it would have been a matter for Mossad to know when Vanunu was going to crack, because when one is fired, one is usually not "happy". Vanunu went through Asia, searching for enlightenment (considering conversion to Buddhism) and landed in Australia.

There in Sydney's infamous King's Cross, Vanunu, a Moroccan Jew, converted to Anglicanism... Hum... And I believe in tall fairies... He started to show his pictures of the Israeli nuke installations to some of the parishioners (I knew one of the people who saw them AND told me at that time, before even the whole thing blew up)... In King's Cross, he met with a journalist (Peter Hounam) from the pommy paper "Sunday Times" then quickly eloped to the UK to spill the beans on a grand scale. I believe there was two seats for Mossad agents on that plane. Obviously, the SMH was too small a provincial potato to give an exclusive on the nukes to be denied or not.

But the Sunday Times was taking too long to check and counter-check the veracity of Vanunu's story (this serious cross-checking would not have alerted Mossad or the Israelis "staff" at the embassy, of course... he-he). Here I smell another rat. Vanunu — having waited about a year to let the world know about the Israeli nukes — was becoming so impatient he went to another paper within days, The Daily Mirror, and told his same story once more...

And a few days after that, this good Jewish-Anglican Vanunu became suddenly in love with a woman (an American Mossad agent, Cheryl) and within two days was flying to Rome on a "romantic" holiday — abandoning his quest to let the world know about the peril it faced: the secret Israeli nukes pointing somewhere... Ah women...

Once in Italy, Vanunu was "abducted by Mossad agents, drugged then shipped to Israel where he was put on trial for treason and espionage."

So, only FIVE DAYS after Vanunu had fallen in love, TWO DAYS or so after Vanunu had been abducted back to Israel (no one knew or cared were he was then), the Times published the information Vanunu had revealed... which was not much.

Magic. The cat was in the bag. All the Israeli government had to do was not to deny nor confirm the information, thus the world guessed the information was correct but not proven, because Vanunu's pictures were "inconclusive" and the story came only from one source — a low paid worker without access to anything and who had not been very bright thus had been "fired" (after 10 years???).

Bingo. Enough had been revealed to frighten the pants out the Arabs, without saying anything concrete...

Of course Vanunu's trial was held in secret but "miraculously" he managed to place his hands on the window of the van he was transported in. On his hands were written the "details of his abduction" so journalists could get the info. The god of the Anglican Buddhists was on his side. And that of the journos...

What followed was Vanunu's imprisonment, release 11 years later, re-arrest for talking to the press etc... etc...

Either Vanunu was a pigeon who thought he was a clever duck, either Vanunu was a Mossad agent who played his assigned role very well... Either way, I believe Mossad could have put the lid on his "revelations" at any Anglican/Buddhist temple of its choosing... But Mossad waited till they knew "Vanunu's information" was going to be published to make a move on Vanunu. Not a minute earlier...

That is a double-cross.

Bruce E. Ivins
In regard to Bruce E. Ivins, I will let you fill in the blanks when you tally the information about the other characters above. The US government needed to blame Saddam for anything to go to war. Even on the anniversary of 9/11, president Bush was lying through his teeth by squarely blaming Saddam for 9/11 when everyone knew it was "Bin Laden" (I still have the papers with a picture of Bush in front of the collapsed buildings, claiming "We Will Prove Saddam's Guilt!"... But when doing this he also was referring to the second prong of the blame: the Anthrax affair...

I believe no-one was suppose to die from the set-up which obviously was organised with governmental blessings... But things got a bit out of hand and innocent people died thus the FBI got involved. The FBI does not like other US agencies treading on their patch and did a thorough investigation leading to... Bruce E. Ivins... On this one the ABC (American Broadcasting organisation) played a role which was at the low end of media disinformation... The public should be horrified that this broadcaster still holds a licence, but that's my midget view... But then Fox, etc... If we dismantled our trusted media outlets, We'd be getting our real news from behind the counter at secret meetings...



The fourth character is hell bent on disproving global warming.
He is paid by the oil companies and his information is CREDIBLE. But that's the strength of any double-cross system: credible lies and top-notch disinformation.

Our political systems still "believe" in god, don't they? No atheists could win the US presidency, could they? Creationism is still cooking its glorious rubbish, isn't it?

We're suckers!!... and the double-cross "systemers" know that. Makes their life simpler when dealing with bigger lies...

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ps: from the onset, in mid 2002, from various sources, I knew that the war in Iraq was been planned and the information to blame Saddam was being concocted. One source, an official European website (I believed set up by some secret service) was shut down within days. many links to such information were cancelled. The Internet only represented a tiny section of news dissemination, compared to TV, newspapers, etc. Today Internet is still in the doldrums compared to the idiot box. We knew the war was for OIL... Still is.

Tales of Addiction, Anxiety, Ranting
Scientist, Counselor Recount Recent Turmoil in Anthrax Suspect's Life

By Amy Goldstein, Nelson Hernandez and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 6, 2008; A01

Late last fall, Bruce E. Ivins was drinking a liter of vodka some nights, taking large doses of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs, and typing out rambling e-mails into the early morning hours, according to a fellow scientist who helped him through this period.

It was around the time that FBI agents showed Ivins's 24-year-old daughter pictures of the victims who had died in the 2001 anthrax attacks and told her, "Your father did this," the scientist said. The agents also offered her twin brother the $2.5 million reward for solving the anthrax case -- and the sports car of his choice.

Ivins "was e-mailing me late at night with gobbledygook, ranting and raving" about what he called the "persecution" of his family, said the scientist, a recovering alcohol and drug user who had been sober for more than a decade. The scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that he had been contacted by a co-worker of Ivins's at the sprawling Army biodefense laboratory in Fort Detrick and that the co-worker said the veteran anthrax researcher "has really gone down the tubes."
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Gus: This erratic behaviour is not that of a guilty man — a man who did a bad deed. It is that of a good person who may have performed part of a complex act under "instructions", but the links have been broken as they always do in a double-cross. Thus Bruce E. Ivins was left alone to carry the baby — possibly having secretly supplied the stock of Anthrax for the "terrorist" act organised on behalf of the "possible" double-cross instigator... The FBI has to know, Ivins did not act alone... Ivins may have been under the illusion of doing something secret but ligit — but he knew he had been tricked... Nothing he could say or do would save him. He would have know he was alone... alone... alone... People with high moral values have a greater sense of guilt even for the smallest of resulting bad deed. Most likely Mr Ivins became agitated and depressed in the same way as David Kelly. In Ivins case, 5 people died because he "might" have supplied the Anthrax.

In David Kelly's case, David knew that no matter what he did, he would be "responsible" for not being able to do anything about the incoming deaths of his Iraqi sources on the non existence of biological weapons in Iraq — sources who had become his "friends"... This would have been seen as compromising his work to the point of treason. He was trapped. He was pushed...

My view...

United States authorities are "confident" that a Government scientist who killed himself last month was the only person responsible for deadly anthrax attacks in the US in 2001.

"Painstaking investigation led us to the conclusion that Dr Bruce E Ivins was responsible for the death, sickness and fear brought to our country by the 2001 anthrax mailing and that it appears, based on the evidence, that he was acting alone," FBI chief investigator Joseph Persichini said .

"The FBI sought out the best experts in the scientific community and over time highly sensitive and specific tests were developed that were capable of detecting the unique qualities of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks," he said.

Dr Ivins, 62, a bio-weapons expert who worked in a Government lab dealing with anthrax, was found dead on July 29 of apparent suicide.

On Wednesday (local time) authorities released a trove of formerly sealed documents revealing details of their probe into the deadliest bio-terror attack in US history.

The documents from the investigation, codenamed Amerithrax, included dozens of search warrants, police reports and anonymous letters linked to the mailing of anthrax-laced letters which killed five people shortly after the September 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on the US.

"Based upon the totality of the evidence we had gathered against him, we are confident that Dr Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks," US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor told a press conference.

---------------------------------

Gus: read blogs above... What is missing here is proper "motive"... What was going on in the head of Dr Ivins then? How could he think of the deed and execute it on his own? What was the purpose? Participate in the hysteria of 9/11 on his own? Would the doctor have listened to the speeches of George W Bush, especially the one of 2002 (In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions.) and become deranged?

No... 

Why did the ABC network was quick to link this attack to Saddam Hussein referring to government sources telling them the Anthrax had bentonite in it, a hallmark of Saddam's labs of Anthrax (the US had supplied Saddam with the strain in the 1980s, so they knew the strain). In fact there was no bentonite — Iraq is the only other state known to have tried making such a weapon, and it dried anthrax cultures along with bentonite, a clay used as a fluidising agent — in it and the analysis pointed to Dr Ivins lab...  Why did Ivins kill himself so soon after being "found out"? Not because he was guilty.

On the blog above, I deliberately muddled the time line... The Anthrax affair "happened" before the speech made by GWB in 2002 but the Anthrax attack was used well and truly by GWB to blame Saddam...

Ivins would have known then that "his" deed was being manipulated "away from the culprits of 9/11" towards Iraq. He would have had to know at that time, he had become "responsible" for one of the major motives towards a war with Iraq, when "his" sent notes were mostly "Muslim" generic... Who planted the idea in Ivins' mind? Who "helped" (managed his state of mind) him? We'll never know. Successful double-cross.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday outlined a patternBruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist who killed himself last week, presenting a sweeping but circumstantial case that he was solely responsible for mailing the deadly anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001. of bizarre and deceptive conduct by

After nearly seven years of a troubled investigation, officials of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department declared that the case had been solved. Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Some survivors of the attacks and members of Congress said they were persuaded by the evidence against Dr. Ivins, laid out in hundreds of pages of applications for search warrants unsealed for the first time. But some independent scientists, friends and colleagues of Dr. Ivins remained skeptical, noting that officials admitted that more than 100 people had access to the supply of anthrax that matched the powder in the letters.

Lawyers for Dr. Ivins reasserted their late client’s innocence and criticized the government for presenting what they called “heaps of innuendo” that failed to link him directly to the crime and would never have to be tested in court. “It was an explanation of why Bruce Ivins was a suspect,” said Paul F. Kemp, who represented the scientist for more than a year before his death on July 29 at age 62. “But there’s a total absence of proof that he committed this crime.”

The conflicting views of Dr. Ivins emerged in a day of emotional crosscurrents. At a morning memorial service at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., weeping Army scientists praised Dr. Ivins as a beloved colleague “known for his patience and enthusiasm for science,” as a written program put it. At the same time, at F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and bureau officials were explaining to survivors of the anthrax attacks and relatives of the five people who died why they believe Dr. Ivins was a mass murderer.

Later, at an afternoon news conference, Mr. Taylor, the United States attorney, called Dr. Ivins “a troubled individual” who had carried out “the worst act of bioterrorism in U.S. history.”

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see blogs above... 

Anthrax victim's widow speaks out

Maureen Stevens says knowing the identity of her husbands alleged killer has helped her

US anthrax victim Robert Stevens' widow has called it "shocking" that army scientist Bruce Ivins was allowed near anthrax when he was "certifiable".

Maureen Stevens thanked the FBI for their investigation into Mr Ivins, who killed himself last week after being told he was to be charged.

But she said the US government was ultimately responsible for her husband's death in 2001.

Mr Stevens was one of five people killed by anthrax-laced letters.

"He was not just a little bit weird - he was certifiable, and he had been for years," said Mrs Stevens of Ivins.

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Gus: The word "certifiable" is too ambiguous to be used in this context. It is as if the FBI were playing both side of the board at the same time. Either he was "insane" or "qualified"...

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From the free dictionary:

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take your pick...

Most people will reach verdicts guided by their general views on America's federal institutions - if you are inclined to trust government agencies, then you will accept their view on Ivins' sole responsibility for these terrible crimes.

If you are not, you will probably be sceptical.

Mr Ivins' attorney said the casebook showed why he was a suspect, but did not prove he had done it.

The evidence, as an American newspaper cautiously put it, is "compelling, but not airtight".

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Gus: typical ifs and buts result of a double-cross being peeled... Nothing not much fits, lots of unfocused fluidity in the details, yet plenty of circumstantial stuff... Too many loose ends such as screening of personnel, although the psychopaths are hard to detect...

One must not forget that the result of these anthrax letters was that Bush did blame Saddam directly and convincingly at least to the majority of people. Bush's popularity shot through the roof up to 70 per cent approval in the US.

More than 9/11, more than the trucks with cover flapping in the desert breeze presented by Colin Powell at the UN, the Anthrax letters appear to have been used to convince the Europeans of the "necessity" of the war in Iraq, since the Europeans "knew" that 9/11 was the work of Bin Laden, hiding in Afghanistan... despite Bush claiming he would prove Saddam's guilt...(for 9/11)

We cannot disassociate the "result" from the "actions" (if they were his) of Dr Ivins. We live in the age of deceit... 

August 9, 2008
Scientist Officially Exonerated in Anthrax Attacks
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Six years after labeling Steven J. Hatfill a “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks, the Justice Department formally exonerated him on Friday and told his lawyer it had concluded that Dr. Hatfill “was not involved in the anthrax mailings.”

The department agreed in June to pay $4.6 million to settle Dr. Hatfill’s lawsuit against the government, but until Friday it had conspicuously avoided declaring that he had nothing to do with the attacks.

Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said in the letter to Dr. Hatfill’s lawyer that “we have concluded, based on laboratory access records, witness accounts and other information, that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the particular anthrax used in the attacks, and that he was not involved in the anthrax mailings.”

The lawyer, Thomas G. Connolly, declined to comment Friday, except to say that “the letter speaks for itself.”

The formal exoneration underscored the wrong path that the investigation had taken before the F.B.I. began looking two years ago at a colleague of Dr. Hatfill, another military scientist named Bruce E. Ivins.

The Justice Department said this week that it was now convinced that Dr. Ivins — who died 11 days ago after taking an overdose of painkillers — was the anthrax killer and that he had acted alone in a crime that killed five people and shook the country.

--------------------

 Gus: ..."that he had acted alone"? Buckshit!

From The New York Times

The scientists say they are confident the F.B.I. has identified the source of the anthrax, a flask in the custody of Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. considers to have been the perpetrator of the attacks. But almost a hundred other people were known to have had access to cultures from the flask, and the scientists say they have no opinion as to whether Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide last month, was the culprit. Some former colleagues and other experts have questioned whether the government was right in suspecting Dr. Ivins, a researcher at the Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md. But the technical feat of matching the attack anthrax to its source is itself a gripping tale of scientific detection.

From The American Conservative

...

Moreover, his former colleagues have repeatedly told the media that, as far as they are aware, Ivins didn’t know how to weaponize anthrax. He was a vaccine specialist, not a weaponizer. The assumption is that Ivins kept his weaponizing skills secret from his coworkers. But how did he learn those skills? Perhaps colleagues at Ft. Detrick provided the help in casual conversation. Yet there’s not the slightest indication that during his years at Ft. Detrick Ivins even once asked fellow scientists about weaponizing techniques.

Nor is it clear why Ivins—a registered Democrat—would single out Sens. Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle to receive lethal letters. Interestingly, both had been critical impediments to passage of the Patriot Act. The first wave of anthrax mail, sent Sept. 18, 2001, targeted major media; the second round, posted Oct. 9, went to Congress. On Oct. 25, amid widespread panic, the act passed. Yet it is improbable that a mad scientist would specialize in such targeted political activity—or that he personally benefited from the repercussions. Many others did, however.

“In the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event,” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes. “It was really the anthrax letters that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years … that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism..."

Read more at The American Conservative

Cabinet Office ordered to release secret memos on Iraq dossier

By James Macintyre, Political Correspondent
Thursday, 4 September 2008

The prospect of a return to the debate over the dossier which led to a furious row between the BBC and the Government, the death of Dr David Kelly and the subsequent Hutton Inquiry will horrify ministers...

Secret emails and memos showing how the Iraq war dossier was "sexed-up" must be released by the Cabinet Office, The Independent has learnt.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, has told civil servants to release undisclosed material which could provide "evidence that the dossier was deliberately manipulated in order to present an exaggerated case for military action".

After repeated freedom of information requests, Mr Thomas says in a 20-page ruling given to The Independent that there is a clear public interest in seeing comments about drafts of the dossier between 11 and 16 September 2002, in the days before Alastair Campbell suggested changes. Mr Thomas adds that there is no national security justification for keeping these comments from politicians secret.

read more at The Independent

-------------

Gus: will the truth come out? Who knows... The system often prepares fallback positions and on this issue I would suggest three hurdles may have come down but ten more are in the way...

see double cross above...

Seeking Details, Lawmakers Cite Anthrax Doubts

By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: September 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not think the bureau has proved its case.

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that “important and lingering questions remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case.”

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr. Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.

“My conclusion at this point is that it’s very much an open matter,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate committee, said of the strength of the case against Dr. Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army’s biodefense laboratory who worked on anthrax vaccines. “There are some very serious questions that have yet to be answered and need to be made public.”

read more at the NYT

Lawsuit to Ask That Cheney's Papers Be Made Public

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 8, 2008; Page A04

Months before the Bush administration ends, historians and open-government advocates are concerned that Vice President Cheney, who has long bristled at requirements to disclose his records, will destroy or withhold key documents that illustrate his role in forming U.S. policy for the past 7 1/2 years.

In a preemptive move, several of them have agreed to join the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in asking a federal judge to declare that Cheney's records are covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and cannot be destroyed, taken or withheld without proper review.

The group expects to file the lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It will name Cheney, the executive offices of the president and vice president, and the National Archives and chief archivist Allen Weinstein as defendants.

The goal, proponents say, is to protect a treasure trove of information about national security, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, domestic wiretapping, energy policy, and other major issues that could be hidden from the public if Cheney adheres to his view that he is not part of the executive branch. Extending the argument, scholars say, Cheney could assert that he is not required to make his papers public after leaving office. Access to the documents is crucial because he is widely considered to be the most influential vice president in U.S. history, they note.

-------------

see toon at top...

Cheney Shielded Bush From Crisis

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 15, 2008; A01

This is the second of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press.

Vice President Cheney convened a meeting in the Situation Room at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10, 2004, with just one day left before the warrantless domestic surveillance program was set to expire. Around him were National Security Agency Director Michael V. Hayden, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and the Gang of Eight -- the four ranking members of the House and the Senate, and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the intelligence committees.

Even now, three months into a legal rebellion at the Justice Department, President Bush was nowhere in the picture. He was stumping in the battleground state of Ohio, talking up the economy.

With a nod from Cheney, Hayden walked through the program's vital mission. Gonzales said top lawyers at the NSA and Justice had green-lighted the program from the beginning. Now Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was in the hospital, and James B. Comey, Ashcroft's deputy, refused to certify that the surveillance was legal.

That was misleading at best. Cheney and Gonzales knew that Comey spoke for Ashcroft as well. They also knew, but chose not to mention, that Jack L. Goldsmith, chief of the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice, had been warning of major legal problems for months.

More than three years later, Gonzales would testify that there was "consensus in the room" from the lawmakers, "who said, 'Despite the recommendation of the deputy attorney general, go forward with these very important intelligence activities.' " By this account -- disputed by participants from both parties -- four Democrats and four Republicans counseled Cheney to press on with a program that Justice called illegal.

In fact, Cheney asked the lawmakers a question that came close to answering itself. Could the House and Senate amend surveillance laws without raising suspicions that a new program had been launched? The obvious reply became a new rationale for keeping Congress out.

The Bush administration had no interest in changing the law, according to U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, chief of the federal government's special surveillance court when the warrantless eavesdropping began.

"We could have gone to Congress, hat in hand, the judicial branch and the executive together, and gotten any statutory change we wanted in those days, I felt like," he said in an interview. "But they wanted to demonstrate that the president's power was supreme."

----------------------

see toon at top. read more at the Washington Post...

From Al Jazeera

Is US democracy under threat?

Author and feminist Naomi Wolf argues Americans should become "democratic commandos"

Is US democracy under threat from within? Third-wave feminist and author of the best selling Beauty Myth not only believes the US is dangerously looking down the path of fascism but in her latest book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries she argues that Americans should become "democratic commandos".

Among her many suggestions: Amend the US Constitution to permit national referendums on issues such as whether or not to keep troops in Iraq.

But can that form of democracy really work? And is that type of individual activism realistic in a complex multi-cultural society?

On Tuesday's Riz Khan [Al Jazeera] we ask controversial author, activist and feminist Naomi Wolf about the future of America and whether or not its everyday citizens can make a difference.

You can join the conversation. Click here and send us your feedback or email riz@aljazeera.net to let us know your views.

This episode of Riz Khan [aired] on Tuesday, September 16, 2008.

Watch Al Jazeera English programmes on YouTube

---------
Feedback     Number of comments : 10
---
KM
United States     16/09/2008
       
Yes US democracy is under threat!!
       
Convoluted elections with electoral system doesn't reflect the choice and opinions of majority Americans. It's time that national referendums take place to reflect true American opinion rather than just of some bozos who are out to make the world unsafe
-----
James Wilson
United States     17/09/2008
       
ACTIVISM
       
I have no doubt in my mind that if Thomas Jefferson were alive today he would have already organized a militia and stormed the White House. Then hung a few U.S. Repersentivaes on the White House lawn for Treason.
-----
Ike Solem
United States     17/09/2008
       
Naomi Wolf on Riz Khan
       
In California, we have that referendum process - but it has been very troublesome. It was initially intended to give the public a vote over the California state legislature, but now we have very complex referendums presented to the public, complete with very dishonest marketing campaigns, leading to equivalent level of corruption. The real problem, as I see it, is that our media does not honestly report the news - which is why I watch Al Jazeera instead of FOX and CNN.

-----

read more at Al Jazeera... see toon at top

The administration of US President George W Bush authorised the CIA to waterboard al-Qaeda suspects according to two secret memos issued in 2003 and 2004, The Washington Post reports. 

The memos were issued at the request of intelligence officials who were "troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing", the newspaper said, citing four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. 

"The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations," the Post said. 

The White House, which has not previously acknowledged it was aware of the specific techniques being used by interrogators, has said the United States does not currently use waterboarding, but that it would not rule out the use of such techniques in the future. 

Bush Govt Gave Nod To Torture: Report

In late October 2001, lab technician Terry Abshire placed a tray of anthrax cells under a microscope and spotted something so peculiar she had to look twice. It was two weeks after the country's worst bioterrorism attack, and Abshire, like others at the Army's Fort Detrick biodefense lab, was caught up in a frenzied search for clues that could help lead to the culprit. Down the hall, Bruce E. Ivins, the respected vaccine specialist, was looking, too.

Abshire focused her lens on a moldlike clump. Anthrax bacteria were growing here, but some of the cells were odd: strange shapes, strange textures, strange colors. These were mutants, or "morphs," genetic deviants scattered among the ordinary anthrax cells like chocolate chips in a cookie batter.

Unknowingly, Abshire had discovered a key to solving the anthrax case. But it would take nearly six years to develop the technology to allow FBI investigators to use it.

------------------

This thorough article leaves us asking plenty more questions... As expressed in double crossed, Ivins would not have acted alone if Ivins was the culprit. The FBI establishes with 99 per cent certainty that the strain came from Ivins' personal stach of the virus... No doubt here.

But the article in its conclusion tells us that :

Would the FBI's evidence have stood the challenge of a court trial? Paul Kemp, a lawyer who represented Ivins, dismissed the government's case as an "orchestrated dance of carefully worded statements, heaps of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence."

Bureau officials said they feel cheated at being deprived of the opportunity to prove otherwise. The resentment spilled over in the early hours of July 27, when investigators first learned of Ivins's drug overdose, said Montooth, who recalled getting 253 text messages from fellow agents within minutes after the news broke. For the next week, the members of his team barely slept, Montooth said, because they knew Ivins's suicide meant they "would never get to do what we wanted to do, which was to go to court."

--------

The lawyer is right.

And this is the way double-cross operates... No-one can ever get a fix on the truth.

What would have been Ivins' motive? What would have pushed him to act if he acted? What would have been his intent? Why was the "Anthrax scare" in the US readily fast used to blame Saddam? And why someone passed on false information about the strain to the Media in order to butter the case against Saddam... What literature Ivins had read? Who had pressed his buttons if he was responsible?  Why would Ivins kill himself? How did he do it? Pill overdose? "sure"...

Had Ivins been such a devious psychotic megalomaniac that he would have relished the day he would be caught and be able to tell why... Because what happened needed planning and related purpose. So far not a single shread of evidence of this has come up to pin on Ivins. Only that the strain of Anthrax came from his personal stach of the stuff, but hundred people could have had access to it.

His contact should he have had any with a "handler" would have been done via secret untraceable ways.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw has vetoed the publication of minutes of key Cabinet meetings held in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003.

He said he would use a clause in the Freedom of Information Act to block the release of details of meetings in which the war's legality was discussed.

Releasing the papers would do "serious damage" to Cabinet government, he said, and outweighed public interest needs.

The Information Tribunal ruled last month that they should be published.

'Necessary'

They had rejected a government appeal against the Information Commissioner's ruling that the papers be published because decisions taken in the run-up to 2003 invasion of Iraq were "momentous" and controversial.

---------------

See toon at top and peruse the double cross system below it....

                 "outweighed public interest needs." ????

Tell this to the million Iraqi who died, the 4251 US soldiers who died, the 4.5 million Iraqi displaced, etc...

UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw has been the victim of Nigerian fraudsters who sent out hundreds of e-mails in his name asking for money.

The e-mails claimed he had lost his wallet on charity work in Africa and needed 3,500 US dollars to get home.

Messages headed the Right Hon Jack Straw MP were sent to council bosses, government chiefs and others.

The fraudsters are thought to have hacked into computers at Mr Straw's Blackburn constituency office.

Mr Straw has confirmed the e-mails had been sent to a "significant number of people" in his address book but he said there were no security issues as it was his Blackburn e-mail address rather than his ministerial account that was targeted.

He told his local newspaper the Lancashire Telegraph: "I started getting phone calls from various constituents asking if I was really in Nigeria needing 3,000 dollars.

-----------------

Meant to say, one my trusted antennas got this message that starts with :

From Miss Susan Nkosi
Abidjan Cote D'ivoire.
West Africa.
 
ATT, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTMENT PROPOSAL
DEAR ONE,
 
Compliments of the season. I am Susan Nkosi 22years. I am a citizen of
Sierra Leone. I am writing to solicit your noble assistance for the transfer
and investment of USD$8.5 million dollars (Eight million five hundred
thousand us dollars) in your country.

--------------

and it ends with:

Thank you as you want to help an orphan, God bless you
Best Regard,
Susan Nkosi.

I have tears in my eyes...

Pigeons are coming home to roost in the prestigious halls of the United Kingdom's Parliament building. Whether they make it across the Atlantic to the US Capitol is a matter that should be of interest to all Americans.

"What we were being asked to do was to politicize intelligence, and we subsequently found out ... that policy was being fixed around intelligence," Gun said in her testimony last week.

Israeli police have arrested nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu for violating a ban on him speaking to foreigners.

Mr Vanunu was jailed as a traitor in 1986 and served an 18-year sentence after discussing his work as a technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor with a British newspaper.

The interview led experts to conclude the facility had produced fissile material for as many as 200 atomic warheads.

After his release from jail in 2004, Israeli defence authorities barred Mr Vanunu from travelling abroad, alleging he has more details on the Dimona atomic reactor to divulge.

The restrictions, upheld by Israel's Supreme Court, have been condemned by international human rights groups.

Mr Vanunu denies he poses a security risk but says he will pursue anti-nuclear activities and wants to live abroad.

In 2007, Mr Vanunu was sentenced to six months in jail for violating the ban on contact with foreigners.

Israel neither confirms nor denies having the Middle East's only atomic weapons under a policy of "strategic ambiguity" billed as warding off enemies while avoiding arms races.

Mr Vanunu, a Jewish convert to Christianity, argues that by refusing international inspections at Dimona, Israel inflames regional tensions and risks a "second Holocaust".

He has also said the Jewish state has no right to exist and there has been little public sympathy for him in Israel.

------------------

read my speculations in double crossed...

No offense Gus but,

By any measure of human justice and responsibility, the unilaterally declared state of "Israel" to exist in the occupied lands of a foreign country is as unacceptable to modern civilization as anything one can possibly conceive. 

After many months of trying to find a justification, even for the relatively small amount of information we have received over 60 years, I cannot come to terms with this massive injustice receiving  any consideration of civilized behavior. 

Even without its murders and unprincipled concentration camp methods, the least that can be said about these so-called "Israelis" is that they are indeed a replica of the Nazis, both in motive and execution and yet - they have the indecency to claim that their WW II "treatment" by the Hitler regime in Europe, entitles them to take over the centuries old state in the Middle East called Palestine by all of us.  And then?

Even though it has been changed, I believe that the motto of the Mossad being "By way of deception thou shalt make war" is spot on to the Zionist dictum and to the way the Jews view their business methods.

When we come to the whistleblower Vanunu we should take a good look at the way the Jewish people consider these methods.

Firstly, I believe that the Hebrew Semite belief that they are the chosen people, and dedicated to that thought over many centuries, they are unlikely to execute a person who their god has chosen as His?  As such I am inclined to believe what he said - and so it seems.

Secondly - what weight (to any true free citizen of the world) does the expression "upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court" really carry?  In essence it is no more valid in civilized society than me organizing a group to declare ourselves the "State of Tuross Heads" and we will uphold it with our own court!  Struth.  To me as a simple man, the answer is simple; nothing can be accepted as legal when based on an original illegal act - unless you are beyond mortal man?

Thirdly, the mention of the Apartheid/Nazi law viz: "In 2007 Mr. Vanunu was "sentenced" to six months in jail for violating the ban on contact with foreigners". (Did that include the Palestinian citizens in occupied territory?) You would have to be a chosen one [or a super human] to be restricted to contact with only other chosen ones?]

The debate about what the Zionists believe they can do or not is an issue over which mere humanity has no control.  It is a situation about which I believe the entire world will eventually regret and the precedent may even come back to bite the Zionists in their collective bums.

I believe that, under the present circumstances, the very concept of an "Israel" being acceptable to modern civilized society is too archaic to even be considered as justified.  It conjures up a society which demands a fairy land of perfect people who, no matter from where they have committed a crime, may come to their Mount Zion and will be protected.

I believe that is sick and sad and probably a reason for the supposed hatred.

The world is getting smaller and the Zionist principles are so dangerous that I feel that our servicemen and women, who gave their lives for freedom, must be turning over in their graves.

God Bless Australia.  NE OUBLIE.

Again using the KISS principle, I believe that there has been and there always will be, traitors and patriots depending on one of two issues.  Firstly money and secondly the human belief in guilt that leads to passing away with regrets.

I believe that your discussion on the Vanunu person outing on the Zionists' lies about their nuclear weapons [which the US used to justify the invasion of Iraq] could have been any one of the options you depict. However, this one proved to be correct.

The black ops that the US/Zionists and Britain have fine tuned, will always be only as good as the personality of the people involved and their everyday lives.

The secret of not being ousted is surely not living a lie?  The simple act of shaking hands was intended to be an indication of not being able to use your sword. If a nation is to deal with the rest of the world on the basis of deception [like the Zionists] then they must expect to receive what they do unto others.

I think Gus that you have correctly argued the methods of nations against nations, originally intended to protect the "innocent" and to prevent pre-emptive war.  However, it is now used to control those who are truly innocent.

Every force develops an equal and opposite force.  As originally a TAS (Torpedo anti Submarine) operator, I was fascinated by the ingenuity of mainly the British and Germans during the Atlantic Submarine war (of which I was not a part). 

Every time the Brits invented some defense, the Germans overcame it.  Every time the Germans developed a new system, the Brits overcame it.  What a pity that such an organization [on both sides] of brilliant people to cope with a particular problem was used for the kill or be killed purposes.

I don't have any hang-up with what you have written in this item other than to say you have exposed the obvious and the basis of thousands of stories.

America, Britain and the Zionists in particular, are not to be trusted in what they say or do not say.  Like the media of any nation, the information the people receive is what is sanitized by the "powers that be". 

Ergo, if a society sets itself above any law but their own, and it is clear cut, it is obligatory for the rest of civilization to stop it early - or repent at leisure.

God Bless Australia.  NE OUBLIE.

Blowback On the Border: The Purpose of the Terror War System
Written by Chris Floyd      
Monday, 04 January 2010 00:37
(UPDATED BELOW)

Let me say -- or rather, reiterate -- up front that it is my personal view that the form of vigorous activism known as non-violence is the only way, or the best way, that we can hope to even begin to address the inherent and intractable conflicts of human existence in a genuinely effective profound, sustainable and humane manner. That is the ideal I strive toward.

Of course, I also recognize that being what I am -- a white man of Christian heritage living safely and comfortably under the penumbra of empire -- it is easy for me to espouse this ideal. No drone fired in the distant black sky is going to kill my children tonight as they sleep warmly in their beds. No raiding party of assassins is going to tear down the door of my parents' house tonight and shoot them at the dinner table. No one with a grudge against me -- or simply in need of quick cash -- is going to sell me into the captivity of a worldwide gulag. I'm not going to be caught in the crossfire of marauding mercenaries on my way to work. I'm not going to wake tomorrow in a refugee camp, my home and livelihood abandoned in the wake of a ravaging "counterterrorism" operation. No foreign soldier is going to shoot me, or abuse me, or humiliate me, or simply refuse to let me pass down the street of my own city. I'm not going to be stopped, "profiled," or regarded with suspicion or hatred simply because of my skin color or the cultural or religious etymology of my name.

If I lived under the bootheel of such forces, I don't how I would react, how firmly I could hold to my ideal. I don't know if I would have the strength of mind and will, or the fortitude and wisdom it would take to resist our primal pull to violence -- especially if I grew up in a culture that exalted certain forms of violence as cardinal virtues. (Of course, as an American, I did grow up in such a culture -- and so has almost every other human being in history. To take the non-violent way is to appear -- and yes, often feel -- unnatural, deracinated, alien.)

Nonetheless, despite all these caveats and complexities, the ideal abides. I decry, denounce and mourn for the use of violence. Each act of violence -- however understandable it might be in context -- is a vast, ruinous defeat for our common humanity.

...

 see toon at top and read more of Mr Floyd...

Gus, if Chris Floyd is not a practicing poet then he/she should be.  The above post is brilliant for many reasons and is almost a prayer to all humanity.

I would like to read one from this person about the hypocrisy of the false practice of "democracy" by politicians in this ever-increasingly bastardized world of ours.  If "they" don't succeed in destroying it by unrestrained pollution, then "they" will use WMD to achieve it - and with depleted uranium to spare.  "They" have to dump it somewhere, why not Kosovo - Afghanistan - Iraq and Iran?

The obligations - required by the US and Britain (once Great Britain) to be "independent" especially as a nation as large in size and as small in population as Australia - IMHO, are increasing faster than planet warming.  During the Howard "new order" so much legislation was passed which was totally condemned by all Australian legal organizations and personalities, and only the media moguls (intentionally) stood to gain from it.  I refer in particular to Howard's removal of the Keating "Cross media ownership" - so that ALL of our information, from whatever source, could be controlled by a minority of "powers that be".

A previous forum from which I was "expelled" actually ridiculed me for suggesting that the media elected governments - in ALL forms of politics - whether it is inaptly called democracy, or communism, or a dictatorship or even Apartheid like the Israel Occupation Forces.

Concerning the latter.  Although I am a Labor voter, I object to the Rudd Labor government welcoming any representative of the illegal state of "Israel".  Recognizing personally does not make it legal.  While I agree that he has done a lot of good for the badly battered "Howard's" Australia.

Nevertheless, as a citizen of this supposed democracy, I refuse to accept that any government elected by my countrymen and women can, without a mandate, officially give an Australian welcome to a representative of a state that legally doesn't exist and cannot exist as long as the occupied and oppressed Palestinians continue to stand up for their rights.

Where now are the “free world” resounding calls in the Nazi occupied European countries of WW II viz:  “we will take our country back”?  Clap clap then - clap trap now.

To accept the IOF as a legal identity could be tantamount to applying that principle to all such criminal organizations like the various mafias of the world, who are also worth billions and who also "line the pockets of politicians".  I do not believe that Rudd or his ministers are in any way receiving benefits but, I do accept that some of our best known Journalists ARE.  Having Murdoch in their pocket is not enough?

Kevin Rudd aspires to be a leader in this world but, while he caters to the powers that be, (and while that may be necessary at present) the overwhelming number of world citizens finding avenues to be "truthfully informed" will not accept him, even as they have refused to do so with the accused British war criminal, Tony Blair.

Gone are the days when the citizens of the Commonwealth nations could rely on the once Great Britain for fairness and the Westminster system of Justice.  Fortunately, the false impression that the US would protect Australia as its policy forced it to do in WW 2 is also going into the "too hard" basket.

The US has lied consistently to its paranoiac citizens that wars of choice in countries too weak to defend themselves (or their natural resources) is keeping the "terrorists" from their door.  And the recently patently futile "media seeking" action of a young African clearly demonstrates THAT to be a stupid claim. 

The biggest terrorist danger to the American people is their own administration and the now proven fact that "anyone" - yes literally "anyone" - can become President of the US.

God Bless Australia.  NE OUBLIE.

Yes Ernest...

 I've been following Chris Floyd since he was a commentator on the Bushit wars at the Moscow Times... He has written a few books and his website is http://www.chris-floyd.com

Wothwhile checking it regularly, if not daily.

Today his article is:

Mondo Hondo: Obama Goes Traditional in Latin America

For  almost 200 years, since the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has continally asserted – and often physically exerted – its self-awarded right of dominion over all the lands south of its border. Military "partnerships," exploitative sweetheart deals for U.S. corporate and financial elites, and general servility toward Washington's political and economic agenda have been the chief characteristics of this "special relationship."

Whenever these elements are to Washington's liking, the Latin American country in question is considered a "good neighbor" – however heinous it might be to its own people. But if any one of these elements is not pleasing in the eyes of the Beltway lords, then the offending nation becomes a pariah, a dangerous hotbed of radicalism, terrorism and that most dread condition of all: instability.

Two recent articles reaffirm the unfortunate vitality of this dreary truth.

I.
First, Joseph Shansky brings us this report from Honduras, where the newly elected "legitimate" government of coupsters blessed by Barack Obama are honoring the ancient traditions of American-backed Latin American "democracy":

Now that the world heard from mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times of a “clean and fair” election [in Honduras] on Nov. 29 (orchestrated by the US-supported junta currently in power), the violence has increased even faster than feared.

Dick Cheney is a sadist.

On Sunday, in an exclusive interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News' "This Week," Cheney proclaimed his love of torture, derided the Obama administration for outlawing the practice, and admitted that the Bush administration ordered Justice Department attorneys to fix the law around his policies.

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding," Cheney told Karl, as if he were issuing a challenge to officials in the current administration, including President Barack Obama, who said flatly last year that waterboarding is torture, to take action against him. "I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques..."

The former vice president's declaration closely follows admissions he made in December 2008, about a month before the Bush administration exited the White House, when he said he personally authorized the torture of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.

“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times about the waterboarding, a drowning technique where a person is strapped to a board, his face covered with a cloth and then water is poured over it. It is a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition.

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Le Marquis de Sadism was but a choir boy compared to le marquis de Cheney the psycho. See toon at top.....

From the Independent

...

Torture isn't a matter of niceties. You can argue the circumstances in which you might feel it useful or even necessary. You can try and épater le bien-pensant by writing "A Modest Proposal for Preventing Poor People in Britain from Being Endangered by Torturing Their Children and Their Mothers", only without Jonathan Swift's wit or intention to satirise.

You can sincerely believe it right to cripple the grannies and dismember the family pets in what you conceive of the greater community good. What you cannot do, as the Government is trying to, is get around the fact that Britain, along with most of the developed world, has decided to ban the practice.

And for good reason. After centuries of abuse, torture has been found to be neither productive nor containable. It rarely provides accurate intelligence. It produces fantasy and misleading information born out of the desperation of the victim. For all the discussion of the "ticking time bomb" and the films of Dirty Harry and Spooks, there is no reported case where an explosion has been prevented because of the use of torture.

What its proponents never like to answer is the question of just who would decide who should be tortured. The answer, of course, is the "state". And once you add that to the equation you are on a straight line to General Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and all those other characters whom successive British governments were wont to support in their heyday.

Attempting to define or confine the circumstances under which the suspect can be interrogated or the manner of the humiliation and pain that can be dealt out simply makes the unacceptable into the obscene.

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FBI formally closes protracted anthrax case

By DEVLIN BARRETT and PETE YOST
The Associated Press
Friday, February 19, 2010; 4:20 PM

WASHINGTON -- After seven frustrating years probing the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings, the FBI closed the case Friday, concluding a mentally unhinged government researcher acted alone in the attacks that killed five people and unnerved Americans nationwide.

Many details of the case have been known, but newly released FBI documents paint a fuller portrait of Dr. Bruce Ivins as a troubled scientist whose career was teetering toward failure at the time the letters were sent. As the U.S. responded to the mailings, his work was given new importance by the government and he was even honored for his efforts on anthrax.

The documents also describe what investigators say was Ivins' bizarre, decades-long obsession with a sorority. The letters were mailed from a mailbox near the sorority's office in Princeton, N.J.

The anthrax letters were sent to lawmakers and news organizations as the nation reeled in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Postal facilities, Capitol buildings and private offices were shut down for inspection and cleaning by workers in hazardous materials "space suits" from Florida to Washington to New York and beyond.

The FBI and Justice Department announced the decision closing the case while disclosing reams of evidence collected in the case. Officials also released a nearly 100-page summary of their findings.

The document said Ivins made comments to a former colleague that showed "immediately prior to the anthrax letter attacks, his life's work was in jeopardy."

Ivins killed himself in 2008 as prosecutors prepared to indict him for the attacks. He had denied involvement, and his family and some friends have continued to insist he was innocent.

Authorities say Ivins' death capped a years-long cat-and-mouse game with investigators, in which he repeatedly offered to help the FBI catch the killer, cast suspicion on his colleagues and tried numerous forms of subterfuge.

Authorities tried to build a case against biowarfare expert Steven Hatfill, but ultimately turned away from that and had to pay him a multimillion-dollar settlement.

After the attacks, the FBI relied heavily on Ivins' help, according to the documents, and the scientist offered agents his notebooks, his office, and his e-mail.

He passed a polygraph in connection with the investigation in 2002, but investigators learned years later that he had been prescribed psychotropic medications at the time. Examiners who reassessed the results concluded that Ivins exhibited classic signs of the use of countermeasures to pass a polygraph.

----------------------

In the comment above, "Double-Crossed", I explored the possibility of a few characters being the unsuspected front fodder of double-cross... I suspected Ivins was one of them. To this day — although I have no clue or no "secret" information — I believe that Ivins was a pawn in a well-constructed double cross that even the FBI might could not penetrate. That is the secret success of double cross. One was always at pain to find a motive for "Ivins' deed" and "his decade long obsession with a sorority". It takes a great leap of faith to build out of one's mind, an act that will 100 per cent benefit the hype of the day (blaming Iraq for 9/11), while placing oneself at enormous risk of being found out. Sure, "Ivins helped the authorities" to source the Anthrax, but one would need to be super devious not to trip soon over innocuous detail, including some possible sexual deviation. The FBI explanation of his fooling the lie detector is suspect. To me that was a successful double-cross that used a weird character till his death. Of course some characters like Ivins, should they be involved in a double-cross, would be handled carefully and given all the promises of full protection until their "eradication". Nothing new.

From Chris Floyd

Teach Your Children Well: There Is No Law but Might and Murder

This is the lesson that the United States government -- the government of the historic progressive, Barack Obama -- taught the children of America today:

Yes, as the Washington Post reports, the United States government announced today that there will be no penalties whatsoever for the lawyers who were ordered by their superiors, George Bush and Dick Cheney, to write memos "justifying" the tortures that Bush and Cheney wanted to unleash upon captives held indefinitely without charges, without evidence, without trial, without rights.

Dick Cheney has openly confessed to instructing his pathetic little minions, his nasty little modern-day Vyshinksys, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to write the scraps of paper of twisted legalese meant to pre-emptively exonerate the top officials of the United States government for the unambiguously criminal actions they were to inflict upon their uncharged, untried prisoners -- some of whom had actually been purchased, like slaves, from traffickers in human bodies -- around the world. Cheney boasts openly of supporting and facilitating torture techniques -- such as waterboarding -- which have historically been prosecuted as high crimes by American authorities, and are, in fact, capital crimes under the laws of the United States today.

But on Friday, February 19, 2010, the administration of President Barack Obama declared that not only will it not prosecute the avowed and boastful perpetrators and accomplices of the capital crime of torture, it will not impose even the mildest of administrative or professional reprimands upon them. For the foulest of tortures, reaching even to murder, the government of the United States will do nothing: no investigation, no prosecution, no penalty.

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney has been taken to hospital in Washington after experiencing chest pains, his office has said.

They said Mr Cheney, 69, was "resting comfortably" at George Washington University Hospital and his doctors were evaluating the situation.

Mr Cheney, who left office in January last year, has a history of heart problems.

He has had four heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery.

Hospital doctors told NBC News that the former vice-president was stable and may receive additional treatment on Tuesday.

The television network said that Mr Cheney had had an angiogram test so that doctors could look into his coronary arteries, and that the results showed he might need more treatment.

--------------

 see toon at top...

From the Washington Post

During the long years that the Justice Department was investigating Jay S. Bybee and John C. Yoo, it was tempting to view the torture memos as if they were momentary aberrations in the life of the modern presidency. But in clearing the Bush administration lawyers who authored the memos of all charges of unprofessional conduct, the department invites future John Yoos to rubber-stamp future presidential abuses at moments of (real or imagined) crisis.

The torture memos are an entirely predictable product of an institutional set-up that puts the meaning of national security law at the mercy of a politicized Office of Legal Counsel and a super-politicized legal staff in the White House. There is a compelling need to reform that structure.

Forty years ago, the Office of Legal Counsel was dominated by career lawyers. But by the time George W. Bush was elected, the office had only a handful of seasoned professionals, and all the leading positions were held by political appointees who, like Bybee and Yoo, were predisposed to support their president.

Given this political transformation, the exoneration of Bybee and Yoo creates a dangerous precedent. Consider the department's discussion of the torture memo's claim that the president, as commander in chief, can defy Congress's statutory prohibition on torture and order the military or CIA to engage in any and all forms of abuse. The department concedes that Bybee and Yoo presented an "incomplete and one-sided" argument in support of this remarkable legal conclusion and that the next head of the OLC, Jack Goldsmith, found that this claim had "no foundation in prior OLC opinions, or in judicial decisions, or in any other source of law."

Nevertheless, the department found that Bybee and Yoo acted professionally in writing their defense of unchecked presidential power. In reaching this conclusion, it relied principally on two facts: first, that other political appointees in the Bush OLC also believed that presidential torture raised "complicated questions," and, second, that the White House was demanding a quick decision. Future Yoos will take notice and perhaps line up a few office mates to agree with extremist legal positions before issuing their memos during the next crisis.

---------------------------

"acted professionally in writing their defense of unchecked presidential power."?????? My goodness!!!! Stalin would not have been so bold.

...

For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, “the mark” (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq—not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel.

To provoke that invasion required the displacement of an inconvenient truth (Iraq played no role in 911) with what lawmakers and the public could be deceived to believe. The emotionally wrenching nature of that incident was essential in order to induce Americans to abandon rational analysis and to facilitate their reliance on false intelligence.

Americans were (predictably) provoked by that mass murder. The foreseeable reaction—shock, grief and outrage—made it easier for them to believe that an infamous Iraqi Evil Doer was to blame. The displacement of facts with beliefs lies at heart of how Israel, the world’s leading authority in game theory, induces other nations to wage their wars.

False but Plausible

To displace facts with credible fiction requires a period of “preparing the minds” so that the mark will believe a pre-staged storyline. Thus the essential role of a complicit media to promote: (a) a plausible present danger (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), (b) a plausible villain (a former ally rebranded as an Evil Doer), and (c) a plausible post-Cold War threat to national security (The Clash of Civilizations and “Islamo-fascism”).

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read more of Jeff Gates, see toon at top

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Gus: sure, but we knew all this before 2000, before 9/11, before the war in Iraq... I'm not a gamer (my arthritic thumbs, you know...), but even a dummy like me could see through the way info was being frothed up to suit a political outcome. Not new. We're old enough here on this site to have seen blue-murder several times over, from WWII to Afghanistan, including Vietnam and other crap. We've seen it all before... As an aside, speaking for myself, I played fubol in the days when the ball was a semi-deflated leather and pig-bladder half-filled with water, I believe to toughen our skills and skulls, when the temperature was 14 degree C below zero... One of the icy blasted headers still resonates in my cabouschka as if it was yesterday. I don't know why I did not suffer from permanent brain damage... but thinking about it, this and playing with pure-lead toy sodiers and asbestos heat-insulating gloves did not help my intellectual development. Though, sometimes I wonder what I'm doing here...

...But, then we had the sexed-up non-sexed up dossiers from Blair and the lies went on and on... We knew and knew, but could not do anything as the media at large kept pumping mud in the populace's mind as if it was honey...

Gamers actually have learned more from devious politicians hubris rather than the reverse. The mathematical genius, Israeli mathematician and game theory specialist Robert J. Aumann, did not discover anything. He "stole" (well say adapted or mathematicalized) the complex knowledge of what the rulers of this world have long counted upon: the guilable mass-controlled public. Press this button and tada...  Enslaved in the time of the egyptians, conned with religious hubris by the popes in the west and polarized by the prophets in the east — a public of men, women and children who, with a ray of sunshine in their pigeon lofts, tried to liberate themselves from the shackles of less caring rulers ("let them eat cakes") were to be captured again in the smart military snare of little emperors. Please note this is only a quick summise... The French revolutionary committe summary of historical record goes on for about 2000 pages in the small print size used by lawyers contracts addendum clauses. The egyptians slaves (or some liberated workers) were more succint — only left a few chalky bones in clay jars (I'm not sure of this one) for the record.

So, nothing new in the "gaming" environment. Virtuality may have replaced some of reality but sooner or later, the reality takes over and the reactive habits acquired from the virtual world are used like a Pavlov's dog "buiscuit". Rink dar bell, Her Komandant Klink!... Bad guys good guys, moral decision, adversity, shoot first before being shot, monsters, blood, more blood and more blood... KABOOM! All okay as long as it's not my blood or yours. All learnt to suit a reactive outcome — even piloting drones 6000 miles away, from the sofa of the new nine-to-five soldier's home.

Now, a zillion years later, the public has been getting smarter, so it is captured individually (but with a "calming" collective effect) by growing debt. Greed on credit. Yes the latest invention in the management of people so they "work for you" is to make them "work for themselves", in a system from which there is no escape from the comforts of debt but personal ruins... Think clearly about it... On top of this, rulers allow us the illusionary concept of democratic choice in which the ruler's class is always at the top of the pyramid — because it can... Even genuine politicians cannot control the problem because the true ruling class controls the game of money...

Peace.

from the American Conservative

A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe, kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects.

But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group, which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars. Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.

“There’s something truly bizarre about this,” said Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor and a revered figure among many members of the society. “Liz Cheney is a former student of mine — I don’t know what moves her on this thing,” he said.

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Gus: "Er... Daddy?"

from the New York Times

...

Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.

In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

The ghost of Dr David Kelly, the British government scientist who died in mysterious circumstances shortly after Britain and America went to war in Iraq seven years ago, continues to haunt the corridors of power in Whitehall, and no doubt the postmodern Disneyland fortress HQ of MI6 just across the Thames.

The Mail on Sunday claimed yesterday that Dr Kelly, a former inspector of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons with the UN, was "exterminated" by British government agents "for his reckless behaviour".

Dr Kelly's death in 2003 came after the Blair government's ubiquitous cheerleader and town-crier Alastair Campbell, in a burst of self-righteous indignation, charged that he had spoken out of turn to journalists, Andrew Gilligan of the BBC in particular. As a result, Kelly was hounded publicly and mauled in a House of Commons committee hearing.

Days later he was dead, apparently after taking drugs and slashing his wrist with a pruning knife on Harrowdon Hill near his home at Southmoor in Oxfordshire. The special inquiry into the affair led by Lord Hutton found that he had died by his own hand, and that Gilligan's BBC Radio report had distorted what he had actually said.

Rumours and doubts about the Hutton verdict have persisted, with doctors, military officers and former Ministry of Defence officials questioning the findings.

Now, in a report as strange and contorted as the affair of Kelly's death itself, the Mail on Sunday has interviewed a former KGB agent, Boris Korpichkov, who came to Britain in 1998 and then teamed up with a former MI5 man, Peter Everett, in a company called Global Intelligence Services.

In a series of conversations, Everett allegedly told Korpichkov that Kelly had been "exterminated" by a "rival firm" - meaning a rival British agency to MI6.

Despite all the inverted commas round the word "exterminated", the charge is little short of sensational. Yet the Mail on Sunday buried the story on its inside pages. Why?

Doubt has been cast once more on the official version of events surrounding the death in 2003 of Dr David Kelly, the scientist who apparently committed suicide a week after he was unmasked as a government whistleblower. It was Kelly who told the Radio 4 journalist Andrew Gilligan that Tony Blair's government had "sexed up" the evidence that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

Now, in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, a retired police detective, Graham Coe, who guarded Dr Kelly's body alone for 25 minutes in woodland on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire in July 2003, has said there was "not much blood, if any" at the scene. He has also admitted there was a 'third man' with him and his partner that day – a claim that had previously been dismissed.

The Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly found that the government scientist had committed suicide by severing the ulnar artery in his wrist with a pruning knife. His body was found a day after he told his wife he was going for a walk.

DC Coe gave evidence to the Hutton inquiry, but many feel he was not questioned in sufficient detail. For example, Dr Kelly's body was found by two volunteer searchers, who said that when they met DC Coe and his partner, DC Shields, there was a third man with them.

At the inquiry, DC Coe said only he and DC Shields were present, a discrepancy that has led to speculation that if there was indeed a third man present, he was an MI5 or MI6 agent. DC Coe has now admitted to the Mail on Sunday there was a third man with them. But he claims he was a trainee police constable who is no longer with the force. He would not reveal the man’s name.

The panel found that Dr. Ivins carried out the attacks to get “revenge” against an array of perceived enemies, including Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick J. Leahy and several news media organizations, as well as “to elevate his own significance.”

The panel completed its work in August, filing its report under a court seal, which was lifted for the public release. The Justice Department redacted the public text, removing some names and passages to protect the privacy of health professionals, law enforcement investigators and, in some details, Dr. Ivins himself, panel members said.

The panel of six psychiatrists, one toxicologist and two officials of the American Red Cross, where Dr. Ivins was a regular volunteer, did not set out to determine who was responsible for the attacks, and they did not examine records concerning other people who were suspected at various points in the seven-year investigation.

In addition to Dr. Ivins’s mental health records, the group examined thousands of pages of F.B.I. files, including the scientist’s e-mail messages and transcripts of interviews with many of his colleagues, friends and relatives.

The anthrax letters, mailed to news organizations and the two senators in the weeks after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killed five people and sickened at least 17 others. Contamination shut down much of the postal system, drove members of Congress and Supreme Court justices from their offices and touched off a national panic about the danger posed by invisibly tiny anthrax spores.

The investigation, which the F.B.I. said was the biggest and most scientifically complex in its history, focused for months on another former Fort Detrick scientist, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. Dr. Hatfill later sued the Justice Department and F.B.I. for leaking confidential information about him, and received a settlement worth $4.6 million. One month later came Dr. Ivins’s suicide, by an overdose of Tylenol, and the disclosure by F.B.I. investigators that they had come to believe that he alone had carried out the attacks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/us/24anthrax.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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Gus: I may be wrong here and I have no proof but I still believe that this case was a perfect double cross: no trace... see articles on this activty in this line of blogs, including "double-crossed", though I can see that the psychiatrists may suggest Ivins could have used the hysteria about Saddam to cover his revenge. I don't think so.

Clearly, we have been lied to for an entire decade in regard to the truth of 9/11. Just as clearly, the "9/11 truth movement" has revealed itself to be as much a part of the cover-up as it is of anything else. At the same time, knowing what really did happen on 9/11 is the only way-is the essential first step-toward any significant taking of positions or any significant political action.

9/11 was an enormity-an event greater in its importance and in the vastness of its result than was the sinking of the Maine, than were the manipulations that brought about Pearl Harbor, or than were the falsifications that led to the Tonkin Bay Resolution. 9/11 was the faked "attack" that "justified" the "Global War on Terror," that "justified" the demonization of Islam, that "justified" war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, and that "justified" the reduction of the United States from a free republic into a police state, albeit, perhaps, not yet an entirely realized one.

I wrote that "Where Did the Towers Go? is a work, assuming that its content and message are properly and fairly heeded, that offers a starting point from which those who genuinely want to do it can begin, first, to rein in and then, perhaps, even end the wanton criminality and destructiveness of a set of American policies that took as their justification and starting point the horrific events of September 11, 2001."

In our world, science and politics may be inextricable from one another. Dr. Judy Wood has shown us, scientifically, the full extent and the obscene measure of the enormous lie that was 9/11. It is now up to all of us to study the lesson she has offered us, since without having learned that lesson, it will not be possible to know how to take the next steps toward the freeing of humanity from the half-visible tyranny that now marches it toward its destruction.

Where Did The Towers Go

Apart from many Vietnamese who die in the millions during the Vietnam war, and those who are still affected by the defoliating agent orange and napalm bombs, one more fallout possibly...

Actress Jane Fonda has accused QVC of cancelling her appearance on the TV shopping channel because of her Vietnam war activism.

In a statement on her website, Fonda said QVC told her they had received "a lot of calls" from viewers criticising her opposition to the Vietnam war.

The 73-year-old was due to appear on Saturday to promote her new book on ageing, titled Prime Time.

But a spokesman for QVC specified no reason for the decision.

"QVC is live 24 hours a day and welcomes more than 22,000 guests a year. It's not unusual to have a schedule change with our shows and guests with little or no notice," a spokesman told Reuters.

"I can't speak to Ms Fonda's comments, other than to confirm that a change in scheduling resulted in her not appearing today."

The spokesman said it was not unusual for schedules to change with little or no notice.

Fonda is not currently re-scheduled to appear.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14177673

A decade after wisps of anthrax sent through the mail killed 5 people, sickened 17 others and terrorized the nation, biologists and chemists still disagree on whether federal investigators got the right man and whether the F.B.I.’s long inquiry brushed aside important clues.

Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated. The scientists make their case in a coming issue of the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense.

F.B.I. documents reviewed by The New York Times show that bureau scientists focused on tin early in their eight-year investigation, calling it an “element of interest” and a potentially critical clue to the criminal case. They later dropped their lengthy inquiry, never mentioned tin publicly and never offered any detailed account of how they thought the powder had been made.

The new paper raises the prospect — for the first time in a serious scientific forum — that the Army biodefense expert identified by the F.B.I. as the perpetrator, Bruce E. Ivins, had help in obtaining his germ weapons or conceivably was innocent of the crime.

Both the chairwoman of a National Academy of Science panel that spent a year and a half reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work and the director of a new review by the Government Accountability Office said the paper raised important questions that should be addressed.

Alice P. Gast, president of Lehigh University and the head of the academy panel, said that the paper “points out connections that deserve further consideration.”

Dr. Gast, a chemical engineer, said the “chemical signatures” in the mailed anthrax and their potential value to the criminal investigation had not been fully explored. “It just wasn’t pursued as vigorously as the microbiology,” she said, alluding to the analysis of micro-organisms. She also noted that the academy panel suggested a full review of classified government research on anthrax, which her panel never saw.

In interviews, the three authors said their analysis suggested that the F.B.I. might have pursued the wrong suspect and that the case should be reopened. Their position may embolden calls for a national commission to investigate the first major bioterrorist attack in American history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/science/10anthrax.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

see all comments above...

WASHINGTON — The federal government has agreed to pay $2.5 million to the widow and children of the first person killed in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, settling a lawsuit claiming that the Army did not adequately secure its supply of the deadly pathogen.

The settlement with the family of Robert Stevens, a tabloid photo editor in Florida, follows an eight-year legal battle that exposed slack rules and sloppy recordkeeping at the Army’s biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. As part of the agreement, Justice Department lawyers are seeking to have many documents that were uncovered in the litigation kept under court seal or destroyed.

Mr. Stevens’s widow, Maureen, filed suit against the government in 2003, as evidence accumulated that the anthrax powder in the lethal letters had come from an Army laboratory. The F.B.I. finally concluded in 2008 that the letters were sent by Bruce E. Ivins, a microbiologist who worked on anthrax vaccines at the Army lab in Maryland, though some of his colleagues and friends have maintained that he was innocent.

Dr. Ivins killed himself in 2008 as prosecutors prepared to indict him in the attacks, in which letters were sent to media organizations and two senators in September and October of 2001, killing five people and sickening at least 17 others. The letters prompted fear nationwide, forced members of Congress and the Supreme Court from contaminated buildings and set off a long and troubled investigation by the F.B.I.

Mr. Stevens, 62, died on Oct. 5, 2001, days after inhaling anthrax powder at work. His death in the anxious aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks at first led officials to believe that Al Qaeda had carried out a germ assault as well, but the F.B.I. soon began to focus on the possibility that an American biodefense insider had mailed domestic supplies of the bacteria.

No letter was recovered from the offices of American Media, the publisher of The National Enquirer, The Globe, Star and other supermarket tabloids, where Mr. Stevens worked part time. But investigators concluded that a poisoned letter had been mailed to one of the tabloids, as well as to network television anchors, The New York Post and two Democratic senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick J. Leahy.

The Stevens settlement marks the second multimillion-dollar payment by the government in the anthrax case. In 2008, the Justice Department agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit by another former Fort Detrick scientist, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, whom investigators pursued for years before clearing him.

Richard D. Schuler, a lawyer for Maureen Stevens, 68, and Mr. Stevens’s three grown children, Nicholas Stevens, Heidi Hogan and Casey Tozzi, said documents and testimony showed minimal vetting of government scientists who worked with anthrax and other pathogens, weak laboratory security and haphazard inventory controls before 2001.

“What we found was a horror show, basically,” Mr. Schuler said. “There was a serious potential danger to society from a biological attack as a result of either an insider or outsider getting access to these lethal organisms.”

Mr. Schuler said testimony and documents from the government showed marked improvements in security since the anthrax letters. But he said he still believed that “a determined insider” could use government supplies to mount a germ attack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/us/anthrax-victims-family-to-receive-2-5-million-in-settlement.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

read this line of blogs from top to bottom...