Inconvenient Truth in Cheneyburton Paradise

As much as Big Time Dick wants to git his Iran On, too many people know too much.

November 22, 2007
Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S.
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD — Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior American military officials.

The data come largely from a trove of documents and computers discovered in September, when American forces raided a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. The raid’s target was an insurgent cell believed to be responsible for smuggling the vast majority of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The most significant discovery was a collection of biographical sketches that listed hometowns and other details for more than 700 fighters brought into Iraq since August 2006.

The records also underscore how the insurgency in Iraq remains both overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni. American officials now estimate that the flow of foreign fighters was 80 to 110 per month during the first half of this year and about 60 per month during the summer. The numbers fell sharply in October to no more than 40, partly as a result of the Sinjar raid, the American officials say.

Saudis accounted for the largest number of fighters listed on the records by far — 305, or 41 percent — American intelligence officers found as they combed through documents and computers in the weeks after the raid. The data show that despite increased efforts by Saudi Arabia to clamp down on would-be terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, some Saudi fighters are still getting through.

Libyans accounted for 137 foreign fighters, or 18 percent of the total, the senior American military officials said. They discussed the raid with the stipulation that they not be named because of the delicate nature of the issue.

United States officials have previously offered only rough estimates of the breakdown of foreign fighters inside Iraq. But the trove found in Sinjar is so vast and detailed that American officials believe that the patterns and percentages revealed by it offer for the first time a far more precise account of the personal circumstances of foreign fighters throughout the country.

In contrast to the comparatively small number of foreigners, more than 25,000 inmates are in American detention centers in Iraq. Of those, only about 290, or some 1.2 percent, are foreigners, military officials say.

They contend that all of the detainees either are suspected of insurgent activity or are an “imperative threat” to security. Some American officials also believe that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown insurgent group that claims a loose allegiance to Osama bin Laden, may by itself have as many as 10,000 members in Iraq.

About four out of every five detainees in American detention centers are Sunni Arab, even though Sunni Arabs make up just one-fifth of Iraq’s population. All of the foreign fighters listed on the materials found near Sinjar, excluding two from France, also came from countries that are predominantly Sunni.

Over the years, the Syrian border has been the principal entry point into Iraq for foreign insurgents, officials say. Many had come through Anbar Province, in west-central Iraq. But with the Sunni tribal revolt against extremist militants that began last year in Anbar, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other jihadists concentrated their smuggling efforts on the area north of the Euphrates River along the Syrian border, the officials said.

The officials added that, based on the captured documents and other intelligence, they believe that the Sinjar cell that was raided in September was responsible for the smuggling of foreign fighters along a stretch of the border from Qaim, in Anbar, almost to the border with Turkey, a length of nearly 200 miles. They said that was why they were confident that the cell was responsible for such a large portion of the incoming foreign fighters.

American military and diplomatic officials who discussed the flow of fighters from Saudi Arabia were careful to draw a distinction between the Saudi government and the charities and individuals who they said encouraged young Saudi men to fight in Iraq. After United States officials put pressure on Saudi leaders in the summer, the Saudi government took some steps that have begun to curb the flow of fighters, the officials said.

Yet the senior American military officials said they also believed that Saudi citizens provided the majority of financing for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “They don’t want to see the Shias come to dominate in Iraq,” one American official said.

The Sinjar materials showed that 291 fighters, or about 39 percent, came from North African nations during the period beginning in August 2006. That is far higher than previous military estimates of 10 to 13 percent from North Africa. The largest foreign fighter hometown was Darnah, Libya, which supplied 50 fighters.

For years American officials included Libya on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. But last year the United States removed it from that list and re-established full diplomatic relations, citing what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described as Libya’s “continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation” it has provided in the antiterrorism fight.

Also striking among the Sinjar materials were the smaller numbers from other countries that had been thought to be major suppliers of foreign fighters. As recently as the summer, American officials estimated that 20 percent came from Syria and Lebanon. But there were no Lebanese listed among the Sinjar trove, and only 56 Syrians, or 8 percent of the total.

American officials have accused Iran, the largest Shiite nation in the Middle East, of sending powerful bombs to Iraq and of supporting and financing Shiite militias that attack American troops. They also contend that top Iranian leaders support efforts to arm Shiite fighters.

But whatever aid Iran provides to militias inside Iraq does not seem to extend to supplying actual combatants: Only 11 Iranians are in American detention, United States officials say.

After the raid on the Sinjar cell, the number of suicide bombings in Iraq fell to 16 in October — half the number seen during the summer months and down sharply from a peak of 59 in March. American military officials believe that perhaps 90 percent of such bombings are carried out by foreign fighters. They also believe that about half of the foreign fighters who come to Iraq become suicide bombers.

“We cut the head off, but the tail is still left,” warned one of the senior American military officials, discussing the aftermath of the Sinjar raid. “Regeneration is completely within the realm of possibility.”

The documents indicate that each foreigner brought about $1,000 with him, used mostly to finance operations of the smuggling cell. Saudis brought more money per person than fighters from other nations, the American officials said.

Among the Saudi fighters described in the materials, 45 had come from Riyadh, 38 from Mecca, 20 from Buraidah and the surrounding area, 15 from Jawf and Sakakah, 13 from Jidda, and 12 from Medina.

American officials publicly expressed anger over the summer at Saudi policies that were destabilizing Iraq. Sunni tribal sheiks in Iraq who risked their lives to fight extremist militants also faulted Saudi clerics.

“The bad imams tell the young people to go to Iraq and fight the American Army, because if you kill them or they kill you, you will go to paradise,” Sheik Adnan Khames Jamiel, a leader of the Albu Alwan tribe in Ramadi, said in an interview...

We sympathize, Sheik Jamiel. In America, it is much the same...

When the World is Going Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around

...after all, all that money has to go somewhere.

...Rarely on Wall Street, where money travels in herds, has one firm gotten it so right when nearly everyone else was getting it so wrong. So far, three banking chief executives have been forced to resign after the debacle, and the pay for nearly all the survivors is expected to be cut deeply...

Nearly all, meaning the little people, of course.

...Late last year, as the markets roared along, David A. Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, called a “mortgage risk” meeting in his meticulous 30th-floor office in Lower Manhattan.

At that point, the holdings of Goldman’s mortgage desk were down somewhat, but the notoriously nervous Mr. Viniar was worried about bigger problems. After reviewing the full portfolio with other executives, his message was clear: the bank should reduce its stockpile of mortgages and mortgage-related securities and buy expensive insurance as protection against further losses, a person briefed on the meeting said. ..

Funny how nobody could see that except for Goldman-Sachs, Atrios, and pretty much the entire progressive bubble of cyberspace.

...Even Goldman, which saw the problems coming, continued to package risky mortgages to sell to investors. Some of those investors took losses on those securities, while Goldman’s hedges were profitable.

When the credit markets seized up in late July, Goldman was in the enviable position of having offloaded the toxic products that Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, UBS, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley, among others, had kept buying...

That touches me, somewhere. You could call it the Colonel Amerika way.

...Robert E. Rubin, a former Goldman head, is the new chairman of Citigroup. In Washington, another former chief, Henry M. Paulson Jr., is the Treasury secretary, having been recruited by Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff and yet another former Goldman executive.

The heads of the Canadian and Italian central banks are Goldman alumni. The World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, is another. Jon S. Corzine, once a co-chairman, is the governor of New Jersey. And in academia, Robert S. Kaplan, a former vice chairman, has just been picked as the interim head of Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment.

Since going public in 1999, Goldman has been the No. 1 mergers and acquisitions adviser, globally and in the United States, with two exceptions: in 2005 it came in second in the United States rankings, and in 2000 it lost the top spot globally. In both instances, Morgan Stanley took the lead, according to Dealogic...

...this bottom-line approach has turned off some Goldman veterans and clients. They see the firm’s desire to advise, finance and invest — a so-called triple play — as antithetical to Goldman’s stated No. 1 business principle of putting clients first...

...“While the integration of our investment banking operations with our merchant bank was somewhat controversial at the time, we felt these businesses were mutually reinforcing...”

...In the race for president, Goldman Sachs executives are the top contributors to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and the second highest contributor to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Blankfein has held a fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in his apartment and has come out publicly in her favor.

Another member of Goldman’s influential diaspora is Philip D. Murphy, a retired executive who is the chief fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee.

All of which has made Goldman a favorite of conspiracy theorists, columnists and bloggers who see the firm as a Wall Street version of the Trilateral Commission.

One particular obsession is President Bush’s working group on the markets, an informal committee led by Mr. Paulson that includes Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve; Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Walter Lukken, the acting chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The group meets about once a quarter — privately, with no minutes taken — to ensure that government agencies are briefed on market conditions and issues. The group is currently examining the extent to which the packaging and distribution of mortgage loans contributed to the crisis. It also recently completed a study recommending that hedge funds not be subject to further regulation; the group’s fund committee was led by Eric Mindich, a former Goldman trader who now runs a successful hedge fund.

There is no evidence that the conduct of the group is anything but above board. But to some, the group’s existence adds more color to the view that Goldman is indeed everywhere — much as J. P. Morgan was in the early years of the 20th century.

...When asked at a conference how he hoped to take advantage of his competitors’ weakened position, he said Goldman was focused on making fewer mistakes. But he wryly observed that the firm would surely take it on the chin at some point, too.

“Everybody,” he said, “gets their turn.”

Indeed.



Of course, some turns spin better than others.

Where The Winners Lose

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Shareholders in the securities industry are having their worst year since 2002, losing $74 billion of their equity. That won't prevent Wall Street from paying record bonuses, totaling almost $38 billion.

That money, split among about 186,000 workers at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos., equates to an average of $201,500 per person, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The five biggest U.S. securities firms paid $36 billion to employees last year.

The bigger bonus pool derives from a record $9 billion of fees for arranging acquisitions and $5 billion for underwriting initial public offerings and sales of junk bonds, the most lucrative securities, Bloomberg data show. Bankers' record fees help explain why 2007 will prove to be the industry's second- most profitable after the subprime mortgage market collapse led to losses at Merrill and Bear Stearns. The last time bonuses declined was 2002 when the Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 23 percent, and Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. went bankrupt.

Goldman's record earnings and gains at Morgan Stanley and Lehman mean all the New York-based firms will be forced to pay more in a year when all but Goldman lost more than 20 percent of their market value...

Securities firms typically use slightly less than 50 percent of their revenue to pay salaries, benefits and bonuses, a percentage that firms adjust throughout the year. This year's bonus estimate was based on the five-year average ratio at each of the five firms. Year-end bonuses usually account for about 60 percent of compensation.

In the first nine months of 2007, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill, Lehman and Bear Stearns told their shareholders that they set aside $52.4 billion for compensation, up 9 percent from a year earlier. For the whole year, the figure rises to $62.5 billion, according to analysts' estimates that combined revenue at the five largest securities firms will climb 1.7 percent to $135 billion.

That brings bonuses to almost $38 billion. The total increases when bonuses for employees at hedge funds, leveraged buyout firms and banks such as New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG are included.

The industry's bonuses are larger than the gross domestic products of Sri Lanka, Lebanon or Bulgaria. The average $201,500 bonus is more than four times the $48,201 median household income in the U.S. last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics...

Let Them Drink Bud

T. Rex asks what happens when the water's gone?

...We keep hearing about how the Georgia reservoirs have about eighty days of water left. The question nobody seems to be interested in answering (or even contemplating) is exactly what will happen to Atlanta and the surrounding area when those reservoirs actually run out, and everyone in North Georgia turns on their taps and nothing comes out...

...If the state and federal government are too muddle-headed to come up with a workable plan, that can only mean one thing; that when the excrement hits the rotational ventilation device, a whole bunch of people who are already rich will get even richer as gallons of fresh water skyrocket in price and things start to get nasty. Ask Naomi Klein. She’ll tell you what’s up. Republicans live for this shiz...

Fo' shizzle. Chaos is tha plizzay!

Make that some Republicans, the ones who own the show, T. Rex.

For them, chaos is the Word of the Lord.

This could be the key to breaking the blue state governments: if the South and the West go all Sahara, there is always the largest source of fresh water in North America, and the only climate where it still rains regularly.

You can bet the blue state governments will do their best to stop the feds from draining the Great Lakes.

You can bet the red feds will enjoy every opportunity to override blue states rights.

They'll consider it payback to the old Union for the Confederacy, as they squander the water in the desert of the real.

Not What Faux Said

Or MSGOP either...

Bernhard:

IAEA: Iran Has No Nuke Program

Heathlander at Eurotrib, Professor Farideh Farhi at Juan Cole's blog and Jim Herring at Col. Pat Lang's place explain the content of the recent IAEA report (pdf at http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/files/IranIAEAreportNov15.pdf) (for some reason Blogspot will not allow that link- interesting, no?) on Iran's nuclear energy program.

They conclude that the characterizing of that report in the 'western' mainstream media was severely distorting and did not reflect the central findings of the IAEA report.

These are:

* IAEA inspections and information requests are continuing and Iran is cooperating and answering to such as it is obliged to do.
* The inspections and investigations, done intrusively over years, have not unearthed any piece of evidence that the legitimate nuclear program Iran persues has any military aspect.
* Iran is within its full contractual international legal obligations in persuing civil Uranium enrichment. It does do so and the process is under full IAEA control.

Still the above authors and the IAEA miss to highlight one aspect I find important.

The Supreme Leader of Iran, the eminent legal and religious authority of the country, in 2005 released a binding ruling (Fatwa) that pursuing any nuclear weapon program would be against the law and religious doctrine of Iran. The president of Iran has recently again confirmed this position.

These are serious declarations by state leaders which can not be simply withdrawn within the system they are operating in. There would have to be revolutionary events to make these statements obsolete. Such events are unlikely.

Again, this is not what CNN- or, doubtless, the Cheneyburton Corporation would have you believe.

Nice to see the disinformation machine still wants to git its War On.

Damn the torpedoes and the $200 a barrel oil too, baby. What's good for Exxon is good for 'Merika, too.

Black Budget Items

Noah Shachtman picks up on another one:

More than $20 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone unidentified "foreign companies whose identities — at least so far — are impossible to determine," according to a new study from the Center for Public Integrity.



That's even more than the $16 billion earned by former Halliburton subsidiary KBR. Private security firm DynCorp came behind KBR, raking in $1.8 billion between 2004 and 2006. By comparison, Blackwater USA -- whose guards were just subpoenaed by a federal grand jury, BTW -- nabbed a mere $485 million...

Bandar Bu$h strikes again, one supposes.

It must be nice to hold the lien on L'il Boots, or profitable anyway...

Why L'il Boots Loves His Waterboard

Larisa Alexandrovna and Alan Dershowitz are having it out over the use of torture, that staple of the culture of cruelty.

As in staple in your head.

Another thing about torture: aside from its immorality and its ineffectiveness at producing reliable information, there is one thing it is very good at doing.

Torture is very good at forcing people to say what you want them to say.

If your aim is to fix your intelligence around a predetermined policy, torture is your oyster.

That's why the Cheneyburton Corporation and L'il Boots love it so much.

You Can Not Make This Stoopid Up

So apparently the dynamic and Very Serious NeoLiberal duo of Fred Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon are suggesting in The New York Pravda

...we'd better get ready to deploy "a sizable combat force" to Pakistan for a mission that "would involve supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership."

The comments thread to Yglesias's post says it all.

Never Look an Elder God in the Face

War being one of the oldest gods terrorizing the human race.



Only in the Australian news, from a French news agency:

The US military is experiencing a "suicide epidemic" with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS.

At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 - an average of 17 a day - the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.

While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per 100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.

That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans aged 20 to 24 - almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.

"Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,'' CBS quoted veterans' rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.

CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.

"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,'' Mike Bowman said.

"They don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.''

Bad Idea

More idiocy from venture capitalists. Even the morons at Pfizer walked away from this dog. You do not inhale insulin.

Aside from its ridiculously short half life, insulin has profound effects on respiratory tissue, which is only specialized for the exchange of O₂ and CO₂.

Many of these effect lead to hyperplasia of respiratory and smooth muscle cells in the lung.

Can you say "a lead-in to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease"?

I thought you could.

Dust Up

...In the early evening scene, a satellite seems to streak through the branches, while bright, round, fuzzy Comet Holmes appears to lie just beyond them, near the stars of the constellation Perseus. Mirfak, alpha star of Perseus, is the brightest star above the comet and to the right. Next Monday (November 19), Holmes will be close enough to Mirfak to view the star through the remarkable comet's expanding coma. Recent measurements place the dusty coma's diameter at about 1.4 million kilometers, even larger than the Sun.

Just Askin'

Whatcha gonna do if it doesn't rain?

Oh yes, Lou Dobbs sez the issue is illegal immigrants, so get all pissed about the Messicans.

No, no, no, the issue is Social Securty. No, no, no, the issue is the Wahr on Drugs. No, no, no, the issue is the Terra'ists.

And the TV weatherman sez don't pay attention to that global warming scaremongering.

But that water bit... it's a problem everywhere.

It's just some places are little further along than others...



And all those other issues, they reflect like facets off of the change, and the harder people sweat to keep things the way they've always been, the faster the world changes into something it's never been.

As long as the changes that need to be made are unthinkable, we'll be running to into change without the least bit of thought.

Condi's Girl and the Clinton Collection Agency

It's the Opposition vs. Big Time Dick's boy.

It's kabuki with nukies, courtesy of different factions of the Company.

As Greg Palast points out, the Cheneyburton Company didn't just pull Musharraf out of their hat, as much as they've cozied right up to him.

Trojan Horse Candidate

Just go read what Orcinus has to say today, and watch the vids.

...What does this all mean? Does it mean Ron Paul is fronting for fascists? Does it mean he's a racist? Or is it something more complex, but equally disturbing?

Every presidential candidate attracts cranks, racists, kooks, conspiracy theorists, radicals of various stripes, and assorted fringe actors to their campaigns -- some more than others. Generally speaking, it's not worth paying a lot of attention to, because their numbers typically are quite small, and most of those involved are idiosyncratic -- that is, they only coincidentally reflect on the candidate themselves, if at all. They're irrelevant.

But people who track the activities of the far right -- the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Patriots/militiamen, "Freemen"/"constitutionalists", and anti-abortion, anti-tax, and anti-gay radicals -- do pay attention to how they vote: where their money and support goes, and why. It's important to track this because it's about watching who they empower, and who's empowering them, and to what extent this is occurring.

In the 1980s and early '90s, they tended to divide their votes among a menu of various fringe candidates (David Duke, Bo Gritz), mostly under the banner of the Populist Party, and "mainstream" third-party candidates like Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan. A lot of them, however, abandoned third parties altogether after the 2000 election, when Buchanan betrayed them by choosing a black woman as his running mate -- and many of them simply began voting Republican...

...the far right has always been fond of tapping into threads of national discontent -- it's how they've survived all these years, really -- which is why they have made a living the past generation whipping up anti-government sentiment, exploiting the farm crisis, gun control, abortion, education, and a whole menu of other issues along the way. More recently, immigration has been their chief entree to the mainstream, and now they have jumped on the anti-Iraq war bandwagon.

Ron Paul's presidential candidacy has been the focal point for this, and it has been striking, not to mention disturbing, to observe the unanimity with which the far right has been coalescing behind Paul's candidacy. And the support (unlike that for either Buchanan or Perot) has not been merely avid, it's perfervid.

Virtually every far-right entity -- neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militias, constitutionalists, Minutemen, nativists, you name it -- that I've been monitoring for the past decade or more is lining up behind Paul. I've checked with other human-rights observers, and they're seeing the same thing. Ron Paul, rather quietly and under the radar, has managed to unite nearly the entire radical right behind him.

And it's not likely, even, that this is so much by design as by nature. It's a natural outgrowth of who Ron Paul is. Yet the scope of this coalescence of the far right is unprecedented. Certainly no other presidential candidate in my memory -- except perhaps the early George Wallace -- has energized and drawn the ardent support from the far right the way Ron Paui has...

So when I encounter progressives that tell me all walleyed that Ron Paul has the potential to really change things, I agree.

Work camps for all you immigrants and terra'ists, because the security industrial complex can be just nationalistic as hell, oligarchs running everything, and total destruction of the ability to project non-corporate American power anywhere in the world.

Oh yeah, and Blackwater/ DynCorp running the Pentagon and breaking the back of that commie New World Order United Nations.

Like Kool-Aid in the Desert of the Real

Greenwald seems to be taking offense at Left Blogistan, and particlarly Orcinus, for impugning the reputation of that most maverick Ron Paul. Seems like Salon Glenn thinks Paul's record shows what a great guy he is, a liberal progressive dream of a candidate.

I'll believe that Glenn, when and if there's ever a Fitzmas present for Dick Cheney.

Orcinus has pointed to 161 pieces of Paul-sponsored legistlation, and linked to each, that belie Ron Paul and his Amazing Technicolor Campaign.

Ron Paul, closet Dominionist, serves some pretty bad-ass Kool-Aid that Glenn Greenwald should know better than to drink.

Business As Usual

So when does the D.o'D. get involved in narcotics?

A Defense Department contract involving antidrug training missions may test the durability of the political controversy over Blackwater Worldwide's security work in Iraq.

The Moyock, N.C., company, which was involved in a September shooting in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead, is one of five military contractors competing for as much as $15 billion over five years to help fight a narcotics trade that the government says finances terrorist groups.

Also competing for contracts from the Pentagon's Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office are military-industry giants Raytheon Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp., as well as Arinc Inc., a smaller aerospace and technology contractor.



The contracts are expected to be awarded as the need arises, so the Pentagon's level of concern about employing Blackwater will likely be measured over time and by whether the company wins leading roles or is shut out.

Companies competing for the work might be called on to develop detection or surveillance technology; train U.S. and foreign forces; or provide logistics, communications and information-technology systems, among other areas...

Instead of giving all of the business to a single firm, the Pentagon plans to award the antidrug work on a task-by-task basis, requiring Blackwater and its rivals to compete constantly.

In August, the Defense Department gave each of the five companies a $25,000 contract to look at intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in Saharan Africa. Four more contracts have since been awarded, but the government has classified the details.

For bigger companies such as Lockheed and Northrop, the value of the antidrug contracts are miniscule when compared with building fighter jets and naval ships. Yet, work such as this is increasingly important as they seek to expand into new markets that could grow over time.

For Blackwater, which started in 1997 as a small company that trained law-enforcement officers and others at its compound in North Carolina, such contracts are crucial to growth. Since 2001, Blackwater's roster of military veterans and former law enforcement officers has swelled to more than 40,000, and it has built a fleet of airplanes and helicopters larger than those of some of the countries where it does business. Blackwater hopes to sell its own surveillance airship and a custom-built armored vehicle for dangerous missions.

Under the Defense Department contract, Blackwater might end up as a subcontractor to a rival. Lockheed lists Blackwater as one of 37 companies it might use to supply nonsecurity services such as training personnel. Blackwater received $44 million in contracts from Lockheed between 2005 and 2007 for work as a subcontractor on antidrug training and border-related work in Afghanistan, according to the Defense Department.

Richard Douglas, deputy assistant defense secretary for counternarcotics, counterproliferation and global threats, said Blackwater's training of Afghan antidrug forces has made them more effective. "We've been very happy with the results of our association with them in Afghanistan," he said.

Well, nothing succeeds like success.

Speaking of success, Scott Horton at Harper's got an update on Cheneyburton's drive to git his Iran On, and the political realities that aren't rallying the NeoCons behind him beyond the usual suspects. Let's hope Scott's right.

Unintentional Tell

Kindasleezy Rice on Pakistan:

...“we’ve been in close contact, as you might imagine, through our embassy, through our ambassador there, with all parties in Pakistan,” she was signaling that the United States was hedging its bets in Pakistan by reaching out to civilian institutions and nongovernmental organizations, administration officials said. “This is not a personal matter about President Musharraf,” Ms. Rice said. “This is about the Pakistani people. And the United States has been dedicated to helping the Pakistani people come to a more democratic path.”

Right, democracy. She keeps using that word. Somehow I do not think that word means what she says it means.

This is classic behavior from the same folks that have given us the Iraq debacle. Support a strongman, and his opposition. Likely we advised Musharraf to go all martial law, and at the same time told Bhutto to go back and chat with her supporters.

Kind of like Poppy's people telling Saddam it was okay for him to gas his Kurds, then to take what he wanted from Kuwait, and then breaking him for it.

It's a move right out of the Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton NeoCon playbook.

"A vote for Paul is basically a vote for dissolution of the Republic."

What Dr. Sardonicus says.

What, you think that's an extremist sort of statement? Orcinus has compiled a list of the legistlation Ron Paul has introduced and supported. Can you say "Stormfront Candidate"?

I thought you could, and would.

Water for the Desert

Larisa Alexandrovna notes that Israel, like the United States, has entered the desert of the real.

Welcome to the desert of the real in which a Jewish man can cite Nazis in defense of torture tactics. I was raised on the Holocaust. I went to a highly religious school where many of my teachers and guest lecturers were Holocaust survivors.

My family talked about the Holocaust at every opportunity, remembering those who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, including members of my family. I lived under the Soviet regime, which also tortured and murdered. I have never met or spoken with any Jew who has ever defended torture, no matter who the "scapegoat" is.

Apparently, there are some Jews who are more than willing to become the very monsters they abhor. This mentality I do not understand and never will...

Even if in some instances Nazi tactics worked, why would anyone endorse them for any reason, especially a Jewish man? Dershowitz, and others like him - Joe Lieberman, et al - do not speak for Jews, nor do they speak for Israel. In fact, the far right regime that has co-opted Israel and the US both is not representative of Judaism or Christianity for that matter. Whatever or whomever it is they represent, it is not the Israeli people or the American people. It is as though a multi-national organized crime syndicate has taken over both countries and is using the cover of religion as a shield against criticism...

Correct. Chaos is the plan.

The people of Israel are held hostage to the same kind of zealots and fanatics that have taken over the American government.

Both governments appeal to the same sort of cowardice to justify the march to fascism.

Note: I am not suggesting Israel has taken over America. The tail does not wag the dog.

I'm Afraid of Americans

Johnnys in america,
low-techs at the Wheel
No-one needs anyone, they don't even just pretend
Johnnys in america...

Johnny wants a brain,
johnny wants to suck on a coke
Johnny wants a woman,
Johnny wants to think of a joke
Johnnys in america...

Johnnys in america,
Johnny looks up at
The stars
Johnny combs his hair,
and Johnny
Wants pussy and cars
Johnnys in america...

God is an american
I'm afraid of americans
I'm afraid of the world
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't...
Johnnys in america

Learn to Love and Trust Big Brother

WASHINGTON - A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information...

Because government and businesses would never abuse your confidence.

...The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.

Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people's privacy without court permission.

The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

Ponzi Scheme Sanction with Extreme Prejudice

hell's handmaiden points to an excellent financial analysis by Market Ticker:

...The Bulls on The Street subscribe to this thing called "magical thinking", in that they believe that people can commit fraud and get away with it by shoving off the cost on someone else, attaching a very short "warranty period" which will expire before the bomb goes off.

The Law says that it doesn't work that way.

Fraud voids all contracts and what's worse, the Statute of Limitations doesn't start to run until the fraud is "outed"!

It took six months for the media to figure this out?

Or is the truth that the media simply doesn't want to talk about reality? "The Street" doesn't want to talk about it either, never mind that they have plenty of $1,000 per hour lawyers who do understand it.

Why not?

Because once this is clearly out in the public eye and in their mind, this entire house of cards comes crashing down as all these bad loans are put back as far up the line as there remains money!

This will sink originating banks and mortgage companies. It will sink securitizers (which are the big Wall Street "boyz") and raises all sorts of interesting SarBox issues.

It will also wipe out every broker and real estate agent who participated in these schemes.

The second order effect is even worse - it will precipitate a full-on consumer confidence collapse; a collapse that no longer can be avoided...

And just before Christmas, at that. Somewhere, the Grinch smiles.

...the fraud has become embedded in all elements of the housing bubble:

* "Grade inflation" in the claimed credit quality of securitized mortgages.
* Appraisal fraud - if the recent suit proves up, this was systematic, and if you ask Real Estate agents (and can find an honest one) they will tell you that appraisers were frequently given the "sale price" - a clear violation of their intended neutrality and, in some states, a violation of the law. The number of appraisers who found themselves "blacklisted" for failing to hit desired target prices is the stuff of legends as well.
* Mortgage fraud - an example related to me on the phone over the weekend was of a hairdresser at CostCutters who claimed $8,000 a month in income. How does this get through underwriting - say much less past the broker who is given that information? It doesn't, unless its being done completely by computer and no human looks at it - or they just don't care.

In short, the entire "Real Estate boom" that "powered our economy" over the last five years is one giant ball of fraud.

A ball of fraud that turns out to have a nuclear core, and it is now starting to "rapidly disassemble."

If you're a "Bull" in the market today you have to be willfully ignoring this.

Is that smart?

How well does magical thinking work in general?

...The "recovery" from the 2003 lows has not been driven by "solid earnings", "a solid economy" and "a solid consumer."

It has been driven by organized fraud in the housing market, from appraisals to "subprime" mortgages to pumping "interest only" and "negative amortization" loans (which brokers knew where unaffordable once they reset or recast) to outright false claims of phantom income by borrowers.

All of this produced phantom economic activity which fueled the export business - China's making things we consume but our consumption is unsustainable!

By best estimates, 6.5 trillion dollars worth has been withdrawn from their "household ATM" by US consumers in the last four years and spent.

To put perspective on this the US GDP last year was about $13 trillion dollars.

Let's presume that 20% house price appreciation over the last four years is "about right" given 3-4% real wage growth. So the rest - 80% - is the product, direct and indirect, of fraud.

That makes roughly $5 trillion over four years of phantom money that wasn't real wealth created by real economic activity.

That's 9.6%, roughly, of our GDP on an annualized basis!

But for this fraud we would have been in a deep and long recession for the last FOUR YEARS.

Now this has to be unwound. To the tune of five trillion dollars.

People talk about how the "subprime problem" is "contained" and then they put a number on it - $100 billion, $50 billion, even $200 billion.

That too is a Chimera.

The real issue is the $5 trillion in so-called "wealth" that was spent but unearned, and as a consequence was been replaced by DEBT on consumer balance sheets.

That debt now requires service and will for years if not decades to come, unless it is written-down en-masse!

Obviously, to try to unwind this "all at once" would crash our economy instantly.

50% losses in the stock market? Try 75% and an almost-certain deflationary depression.

Of course that's unrealistic.

We're not going to take the medicine in "one gulp" any more than we got the benefit from the fraud in "one gulp".

But it is beyond question that we will take the pain and cost of unwinding this mess.

It cannot be avoided.

To the extent that "The Media" refuses to address this they are complicit. To the extent that "analysts" keep spouting "buy buy buy" they are complicit in robbing your wealth. To the extent that investment banks and others on "The Street" continue to hold so-called "Level 3" assets which they claim whatever mark they can get a computer to spit out, they too are complicit.

The entire premise of this "expansion" over the last four years has been fraudulent.

There was no actual expansion. No real wealth created. No real economic activity advance.

Instead, the truth is that our "price/earnings" ratios in the market have been propped up by consumer spending that was wholly built upon a fraudulent foundation. It has been a Chimera; the idea that you can create something from nothing.

I'm tired of it. You should be tired of it. You should not tolerate this from the media, from the regulators and from the politicians.

Politicians will pander to their donors and try to pander to you, yet those donors are why we are here.

But for the "cooking" of financial instruments there was no market for these securities as there was no profit to be made!

But look, over there! Isn't that Brittney? Or Jennifer Anniston?

Market Tickler links to a site for a petition to Congress to expose this and do something, anything, about the fraud.

The problem I have is that I'm not real sure anything can be done about it, nor do I understand the situation well enough to suggest intelligent solutions. Other than to buy gold and guns, and sit on top of the gold with your guns.

Until the Feds send the Blackwater goons to confiscate it, your house, and your internal organs too.

Financial Incentive

How to profit from a 'police state'

If 25% of workers really are involved in supporting the police state, how can the rest of us change things without being sent to the slammer by the people who have the guns and want to use them?

Not Simple Denial, Simple Manipulation

Bob Herbert, on the curious reluctance to admit it is a Category 5 hurricane:

...With all due respect to the chairman, he would see the recession that so many others are feeling if he would only open his eyes. While Mr. Bernanke and others are waiting for the official diagnosis (a decline in the gross domestic product for two successive quarters), the disease is spreading and has been spreading for some time.

The evidence is all around us. Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland told Mr. Bernanke that many members of Congress are holding forums in their districts “to help people who are coming to our doors, literally with tears in their eyes, and trying to figure out how they’re going to manage a foreclosure that’s right around the corner.”

The housing meltdown is getting the attention, but there’s so much more. Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards.

The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking.

The big story out of Mr. Bernanke’s appearance before the Joint Economic Committee was his prediction that the economy was likely to worsen. Only the people still trapped in denial could have believed otherwise.

This is what Representative Maurice Hinchey of upstate New York told the chairman:

“This economy is not doing well. And the example of the mortgage closures on 2 million people — and maybe a lot more than that as time goes on — is really not the cause of the economic problem we’re facing, but it’s just a factor of it. It’s a factor of the weakness of this economy.”

In an interview after the hearing, Representative Hinchey discussed the disconnect between official government reports and the reality facing working families. He noted that the unemployment rate does not include workers who have become so discouraged that they’ve given up looking for a job.

And the most popular measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, does not include the cost of energy or food, “the two most significant aspects of the increased cost of living for the American people.”

The elite honchos in Washington and their courtiers in the news media are all but completely out of touch with the daily struggle of working families. Thirty-seven million Americans live in poverty and close to 60 million others are just a notch above the official poverty line.

An illness, an auto accident, the loss of a job — almost anything can knock them off their rickety economic perch.

We hear over and over that consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the gross domestic product, but we seldom hear about the frightening number of Americans who are trying desperately to maintain a working-class or middle-class style of life while descending into a sinkhole of debt.

“We have an economy that is based on increased debt,” said Mr. Hinchey. “The national debt is now slightly above $9 trillion, and ordinary working people are finding that they have to borrow more and more to maintain their standard of living."

“The average now is that people are spending close to 10 percent more than they earn every month. Obviously, that can’t be sustained.”

The chickens of our denial are coming home to roost with a vengeance. Meanwhile, the elites are scouring the landscape for signs of a recession.

The problem lies in the elite lies. They have a distinct financial incentive to keep things the way they are. Their discomfiture is more with the rubes who are beginning to realize they've been scammed by a system that exists principally for plunder.

No Wonder It's a Mickey Mouse Operation

More from Shachtman:

"Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, former and current Disney officials have been advising and sometimes joining the intelligence community to help with everything from spy technology to intelligence analysis," CQ observes. And now, you can join in the fun, too. Mickey is hiring threat analysts, cyber defenders, and security managers, too.

Disney had been aiding the cloak-and-dagger set long before “synergy” became an entertainment industry buzzword: Walt Disney himself worked closely with the FBI, according to the agency’s files.

But the new relationship the Walt Disney Co. has with the intelligence world is a special one, observers say — thanks in part to the striking convergence between the conglomerate’s innovations in high-tech wizardry and the spook community’s adoption of the same kind of gadgetry.

“You’d be astonished at the overlap,” says Eric Haseltine, a former Disney hand who specialized in virtual reality before taking on executive posts in the National Security Agency’s research and development division and the Directorate of National Intelligence’s science and technology arm...

Somehow, I don't think I would.

Stovepipe V.2

It looks like Cheney's at it again, pressuring the CIA to change its reports on Iran's weapons programs.

It looks like ChuShu and DiFi managed a stovepipe of their own for a new AG for Dear Leader, and she's going to bat for the Telcoms, too.

Like they think no one is looking.

Building the Better Warfighter

Noah Shachtman:

We now know that there are robotic cars smart enough to drive themselves around a city. The next step: give those vehicles automatic weapons, of course.



Enter the Black Knight -- a very early prototype of an "Unmanned Combat Vehicle," developed by arms-maker BAE Systems for the U.S. Army. From the outside, the Knight doesn't look all that different from the armored vehicles used by the American military in combat zones around the world. But soldiers can also get out of the nine-and-a-half-ton Knight, and control the vehicle from afar -- including a custom, one-off 30mm gun and coaxial machine gun.

Or the troops can stay just chill out, and let the thing drive itself. The Knight uses "advanced robotic technology for autonomous mobility," according to BAE. "This capability allows the Black Knight to plan routes, maneuver on the planned route, and avoid obstacles - all without operator intervention..."

Last month, a set of South African remotely-operated 35 mm guns spun out of control, and killed nine soldiers. The Black Knight basically operates under the same principles -- taking that South African weapon, and making it mobile. And radio-operated.

What could go possibly wrong?

Now we're told, this was simple mechanical failure, not hunter-seeker behavior. But apparently this was.

Stormfront Ron, Dominionist Candidate

Via Southern Beale on a thread of Lambert's. Say it's not so: Stormfront?

Yip yip .

Let me reiterate:

Anybody who thinks you can have an America without federal taxes is an utter fool or a lying bastard.

I know what I know Ron Paul is, and it isn’t an utter fool.

Anyone who honestly believes his multimillion dollar haul this week came from blue collar types, however, probably is being fooled.

Ron Paul is a Dominionist of the Confederate school, bought and paid for.

Evidence? Circumstantial, and weak, but abundant.

Although these days he's not making a lot of noise, apparently he is recruiting among Christian fundamentalists. Even as I look that site has been scrubbed; the cached version is here, and as you can see, somewhat different.

I decided to look at some of the links on that page the caching process seemed to have broken. Luckily, the site's name was given, though its link didn't work. I found this "statement of faith:"

...I have never been one who is comfortable talking about my faith in the political arena. In fact, the pandering that typically occurs in the election season I find to be distasteful. But for those who have asked, I freely confess that Jesus Christ is my personal Savior, and that I seek His guidance in all that I do. I know, as you do, that our freedoms come not from man, but from God. My record of public service reflects my reverence for the Natural Rights with which we have been endowed by a loving Creator.

I have worked tirelessly to defend and restore those rights for all Americans, born and unborn alike. The right of an innocent, unborn child to life is at the heart of the American ideal of liberty. My professional and legislative record demonstrates my strong commitment to this pro-life principle.

In 40 years of medical practice, I never once considered performing an abortion, nor did I ever find abortion necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. In Congress, I have authored legislation that seeks to define life as beginning at conception, H.R. 1094. I am also the prime sponsor of H.R. 300, which would negate the effect of Roe v Wade by removing the ability of federal courts to interfere with state legislation to protect life. This is a practical, direct approach to ending federal court tyranny which threatens our constitutional republic and has caused the deaths of 45 million of the unborn. I have also authored H.R. 1095, which prevents federal funds to be used for so-called "population control." Many talk about being pro-life. I have taken and will continue to advocate direct action to restore protection for the unborn...

Admittedly, Christianity does not a Dominionist make, but Dominionists do tend to advertise themselves as anti-abortion Christian fundamentalists. It does seem that he's being quiet about this. In fact, his "faith" is something you have to look for unless you're one of the "chosen".

But there are some interesting connections between Gary North and Ron Paul, as well as Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, which has invited Paul to speak in the past. It also appears he's on their advisory board.

Is he a stealth Dominionist? I'd say so. Blackwell's trained everyone from Grover Norquist to Karl Rove, and would be unlikely to let anyone who's not advise him about anything.

the farmer has some interesting links, too, and points towards Orcinus' shake down:

...Paul has so far managed to pull off something of a neat trick: Appearing thoughtful and principled, even though his beliefs and principles are largely derived from the extremist far right -- a fact that he's wisely muted in the campaign. You don't hear Ron Paul talking about the New World Order a lot in the press, largely because no one is asking him about it -- but in reality, he hasn't changed his beliefs appreciably since the days he was touring the militia K-ration banquet circuit.

There's lots more there you should read and think about.

These aren't the 'droids you're looking for either.

Move along, move along :

...Admiral William Fallon, commander of the US Central Command, was on a visit to Pakistan, and he actually happened to be in the general headquarters of the Pakistan armed forces in Rawalpindi when Musharraf was giving the final touches to his proclamation on emergency rule...

And this isn't worth noting either, of course, there's nothing to see here:

...Top brass of one country always somehow happen to be on hand when major upheavals occur in the other. Who doesn't remember the remarkable coincidence of Pakistan's chief of Military Intelligence, Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, holding meetings with top American officials -- including the future head of the CIA, Porter Goss -- on September 11, 2001? Ahmad of course, was later hustled quietly out of his post after being accused of directing a payment of $100,000 to accused 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta.

Of course Bu$hCo is shocked and says our administration would never block the march towards Democracy in Pakistan. Of course.

And I'm fluent in the binary language of moisture 'vaporators, too.

Ron Paul Salad

What the farmer said:

In a mixing bowl:

1. Combine one cup of Pat Buchanan and one cup of Grover Norguist, whip to a high peak.

2. Mix equal parts church and state and whisk until thoroughly blended.

3. Pour mixture into the chilled bleached skull of a trade unionist; garnish with red white and blue sprinkles and a shiny gold coin.

Serve with White Nationalist Crackers (supply-sider up), and a thick slice of Strict Constructionist Cheese.

Makes an excellent accompaniment to any hot homemade Chicago Boys Dirty War Chili. (very popular in Latin America back in the 70’s).

But Stormfronters just love the gas it gives you.

Blue Dog DINOcrats and Other UFOs.

Of course, they don't really exist. The Blue Dog Democrats, supporting the War on Terra. Because if they're supporting it, they aren't really Democrats, any more than UFOs are really unidentified.

Truthout has a piece today on how they've overrun- and faciliatated the buyout- of the Democratic party by "wealthy conservatives". No, I am not talking about Grays, either.

Like UFO, the term "Wealthy Democratic Conservative" is just a lot of misinformation. The new owners of the DINOcrats aren't simply conservative. They're Company.

It's like the $4.5 million Ron Paul came up with overnight that has the progressive blogsphere all abuzz. They sound like they really think that money came from "blue collar" supporters. It's more likely a big chunk of that change came from corporate benefactors, buying a piece of the long shot, an anti abortion zealot who might mollify the zealots as VP while Ghouliani cross dresses for success.

It's just bizness expenses, and when you're making a billion dollars a day on the War on Terra, a million bucks of insurance is nothing. Especially when you'll own said politicos for the rest of their bombastic lives. It's an investment that's bound to pay off better than the market these days.

Ghouliani's Enforcer

Law and Order in New York responded to Clinton economic policy, not Ghouliani strong arm tactics.

Just sayin'.

One knows with the knowledge one has, not with the knowledge one knows one wants

Jeff Wells on the capacity of language and the limitations of discussion:

..."Almost overnight," just 50,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans began acting differently, by demonstrating abstract thought in the creation of art and religion. People were talking, not just communicating by gesture and intonation, and things had names. Categories were being defined and ideas were shaping words, filling our ancestors' heads and animating their lives. And now, 2,000 generations later, are our vocabularies rich enough to paint in abstract the real world? Or have we lost or abandoned concepts along the way, as Oldspeak, that could help us see that which may be all about us, but for which we have no meaningful words, and so can't see?

When Tim Russert attempted to dispatch the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich with a question regarding his close encounter, Kucinich replied "It was an Unidenfied Flying Object, okay? It's unidentified - I saw something." Except "UFO" is not a contentless placeholder. UFO is identified with little green men, ET and Mars Attacks. There is no meaningful way to speak about the subject in the English language without reference to its debased and comic acronym, and if language shapes our view of reality, then it may take an effort of will or a boundary experience of our own to see that there is more to the phenomenon than a punchline.

Having the wrong word may be even more a hindrance to our perception of reality than not having a word at all. And that misperception, about UFOs and much else, is almost certainly managed to some measure to keep our vision blurry.

Budd Hopkins shared a story in 2003 about the late UFOlogist Allen Hynek, who got to know Donald Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford. On one visit to Washington, Hynek met Rumsfeld in his office and said, "I have been in this for years looking at the UFO phenomena. I feel like at this point in my life I am in a position of 'need to know' what you know or what some agency might know that I don’t know. I have a 'need to know' I feel." Hopkins said that Hynek told him "Rumsfeld stood up and pointed a finger at him and said, "You have no 'need to know' and then sat down again. That was the end of it."

There are a lot of things we can't know with certainty about that story, not least of which is whether it actually even happened. But we can know that for some things we don't know their true names, and until we do we won't know them, or even see them.

Thought Criminals

Via WGG, the Thought Crime Prevention Bill for all of you extremists:

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed HR 1955 titled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. This bill is one of the most blatant attacks against the Constitution yet and actually defines thought crimes as homegrown terrorism. If passed into law, it will also establish a commission and a Center of Excellence to study and defeat so called thought criminals. Unlike previous anti-terror legislation, this bill specifically targets the civilian population of the United States and uses vague language to define homegrown terrorism. Amazingly, 404 of our elected representatives from both the Democrat and Republican parties voted in favor of this bill. There is little doubt that this bill is specifically targeting the growing patriot community that is demanding the restoration of the Constitution.

First let’s take a look at the definitions of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism as defined in Section 899A of the bill.

The definition of violent radicalization uses vague language to define this term of promoting any belief system that the government considers to be an extremist agenda. Since the bill doesn’t specifically define what an extremist belief system is, it is entirely up to the interpretation of the government. Considering how much the government has done to destroy the Constitution they could even define Ron Paul supporters as promoting an extremist belief system. Literally, the government according to this definition can define whatever they want as an extremist belief system. Essentially they have defined violent radicalization as thought crime...

Section 899B of the bill goes over the findings of Congress as it pertains to homegrown terrorism. Particularly alarming is that the bill mentions the Internet as a main source for terrorist propaganda. The bill even mentions streams in obvious reference to many of the patriot and pro-constitution Internet radio networks that have been formed. It also mentions that homegrown terrorists span all ages and races indicating that the Congress is stating that everyone is a potential terrorist. Even worse is that Congress states in their findings that they should look at draconian police states like Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom as models to defeat homegrown terrorists. Literally, these findings of Congress fall right in line with the growing patriot community.

The biggest joke of all is that this section also says that any measure to prevent violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism should not violate the constitutional rights of citizens. However, the definition of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism as they are defined in section 899A are themselves unconstitutional. The Constitution does not allow the government to arrest people for thought crimes, so any promises not to violate the constitutional rights of citizens are already broken by their own definitions...

We love Big Brother here. Just sayin,' what, me thinkin'?

Sonderkommandos

Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson:

Let’s hear it for Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, 21st century sonderkommandos, because they are helping install an Attorney General who parses words and facts while refusing to delcare that water boarding is torture. For the poorly educated, sonderkommandos were Jewish prisoners in the Nazi death camps who helped entice unsuspecting Jewish men, women, and children into the gas chambers and helped dispose of the bodies. And yes, I mean the comparison.

I am sure my characterization of Feinstein and Schumer in this regard will be condemned but so be it. It is what it is. As a teenager reading William Shrier’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I was fascinated and horrified to learn that some Jewish prisoners willingly took part in helping the Nazis exterminate other Jews. I grant you, Feinstein and Schumer are not executing anyone, but they are putting their blessing on a man so clueless that he does not know that a practice that mimics drowning is torture.

I had always assumed that Jews who survived the Holocaust or the relatives of those who were murdered under the Nazi plan would understand the importance of standing against tyrants and torturers. And for the most part that has been true. But now we are confronted with the spectacle of two prominent Jewish American legislators who are enabling a President who has authorized torture. They have no shame...

Well, nobody is being executed, at least not yet. But by signing off on a potential Attorney General who is unwilling to condemn without reservation a practice that is inhuman and illegal, we can begin to understand how seemingly decent people will let themselves participate, whether by omission or commission, in facilitating the violation of international conventions. The road to gas chambers starts when good people find excuses to justify torture and murder. Feinstein and Schumer are enablers.

Let's just hope the good voices get a hearing before it's too late.

Apocalypse Overhead

Rapture rescue will airlift you to safety. If you can afford it

The booming business of privatised disaster services in the US goes against the principle that every life is of equal value

Naomi Klein
Saturday November 3, 2007
The Guardian

I used to worry that the US was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax - the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses - but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatised disaster services, we're getting the Rapture right here on earth.

Just look at what is happening in southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn't the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group - but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest zip codes in the country. Members of the company's Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the fires, the "mobile units", racing around in firetrucks, even extinguished fires for their clients.

One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. "Just picture it. You are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Here's a couple of guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire, and they're there specifically to protect your home."

And your home alone. "There were a few instances," one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, "where we were spraying and the neighbour's house went up like a candle." With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of rapid response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection. Now, increasingly intense natural disasters will be met with the new model: Rapture response...

It was a 10 year old kid that set those fires, right? Not the enforcers of a protection racket.

Of course, there's now a whole new player on the block. The world's biggest private army will guarantee you and yours' safety.

For a price.

Saturation Point

According to Real Climate's survey of the literature, the ocean's capacity for absorbing CO₂ is saturating. If that's true, the greenhouse effect is on the verge of serious acceleration.

The ocean has a tendency to take up more carbon as the CO₂ concentration in the air rises, because of Henry's Law, which states that in equilibrium, more in the air means more dissolved in the water. Stratification of the waters in the ocean, due to warming at the surface for example, tends to oppose CO2 invasion, by slowing the rate of replenishing surface waters by deep waters which haven't taken up fossil fuel CO₂ yet.

The Southern Ocean is an important avenue of carbon invasion into the ocean, because the deep ocean outcrops here. Le Quere et al. [2007] diagnosed the uptake of CO₂ into the Southern Ocean using atmospheric CO₂ concentration data from a dozen or so sites in the Southern hemisphere. They find that the Southern Ocean has begun to release carbon since about 1990, in contrast to the model predictions that Southern Ocean carbon uptake should be increasing because of the Henry's Law thing. We have to keep in mind that it is a tricky business to invert the atmospheric CO₂ concentration to get sources and sinks. The history of this type of study tells us to wait for independent replication before taking this result to the bank.

Le Quere et al propose that the sluggish Southern Ocean CO2 uptake could be due to a windier Southern Ocean. Here the literature gets complicated. The deep ocean contains high concentrations of CO₂, the product of organic carbon degradation (think exhaling fish). The effect of the winds is to open a ventilation channel between the atmosphere and the deep ocean. Stratification, especially some decades from now, would tend to shut down this ventilation channel. The ventilation channel could let the deep ocean carbon out, or it could let atmospheric carbon in, especially in a few decades as the CO₂ concentration gets ever higher (Henry's Law again). I guess it's fair to say that models are not decisive in their assessment about which of these two factors should be dominating at present. The atmospheric inversion method, once it passes the test of independent replication, would trump model predictions of what ought to be happening, in my book.

A decrease in ocean uptake is more clearly documented in the North Atlantic by Schuster and Watson [2007]. They show surface ocean CO₂ measurements from ships of opportunity from the period 1994-1995, and from 2002-2005. Their surface ocean chemistry data is expressed in terms of partial pressure of CO₂ that would be in equilibrium with the water. If the pCO₂ of the air is higher than the calculated pCO₂ of the water for example, then CO₂ will be dissolving into the water.

The pCO₂ of the air rose by about 15 microatmospheres in that decade. The strongest Henry's Law scenario would be for the ocean pCO₂ to remain constant through that time, so that the air/sea difference would increase by the 15 microatmospheres of the atmospheric rise. Instead what happened is that the pCO₂ of the water rose twice as fast as the atmosphere did, by about 30 microatmospheres. The air-sea difference in pCO₂ collapsed to zero in the high latitudes, meaning no CO₂ uptake at all in a place where the CO₂ uptake might be expected to be strongest.

One factor that might be changing the pressure of CO₂ coming from the sea surface might be the warming surface waters, because CO₂ becomes less soluble as the temperature rises. But that ain't it, as it turns out. The surface ocean is warming in their data, except for the two most tropical regions, but the amount of warming can only explain a small fraction of the CO₂ pressure change. The culprit is not in hand exactly, but is described as some change in ocean circulation, caused maybe by stratification or by the North Atlantic Oscillation, bringing a different crop of water to the surface. At any event, the decrease in ocean uptake in the North Atlantic is convincing. It's real, all right.

Canadell et al [2007] claim to see the recent sluggishness of natural CO₂ uptake in the rate of atmospheric CO₂ rise relative to the total rate of CO2 release (from fossil fuels plus land use changes). They construct records of the atmospheric fraction of the total carbon release, and find that it has increased from 0.4 back in about 1960, to 0.45 today. Carbon cycle models (13 of them, from the SRES A2 scenario) also predict that the atmospheric fraction should increase, but not yet. For the time period from 1960 to 2000, the models predict that we would find the opposite of what is observed: a slight decrease in the atmospheric fraction, driven by increasing carbon uptake into the natural world. Positive feedbacks in the real-world carbon cycle seem to be kicking in faster than anticipated, Canadell et al conclude...

References
Canadell, J.G., C.L. Quere, M.R. Raupach, C.B. Field, E.T. Buitehuis, P. Ciais, T.J. Conway, N.P. Gillett, R.A. Houghton, and G. Marland, Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO₂ growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, doi 10.1073, 2007.

Ciais, P., M. Reichstein, N. Viovy, A. Granier, J. Ogee, V. Allard, M. Aubinet, N. Buchmann, C. Bernhofer, A. Carrara, F. Chevallier, N. De Noblet, A.D. Friend, P. Friedlingstein, T. Grunwald, B. Heinesch, P. Keronen, A. Knohl, G. Krinner, D. Loustau, G. Manca, G. Matteucci, F. Miglietta, J.M. Ourcival, D. Papale, K. Pilegaard, S. Rambal, G. Seufert, J.F. Soussana, M.J. Sanz, E.D. Schulze, T. Vesala, and R. Valentini, Europe-wide reduction in primary productivity caused by the heat and drought in 2003, Nature, 437 (7058), 529-533, 2005.

Le Quere, C., C. Rodenbeck, E.T. Buitenhuis, T.J. Conway, R. Langenfelds, A. Gomez, C. Labuschagne, M. Ramonet, T. Nakazawa, N. Metzl, N. Gillett, and M. Heimann, Saturation of the Southern Ocean CO₂ sink due to recent climate change, Science, 316 (5832), 1735-1738, 2007.

Schuster, U., and A.J. Watson, A variable and decreasing sink for atmospheric CO₂ in the North Atlantic, J. Geophysical Res., in press, 2007.

If we'd only listened to our betters...

(CNN) -- Saudi Arabia could have helped the United States prevent al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on New York and Washington if American officials had consulted Saudi authorities in a "credible" way, the kingdom's former ambassador said in a documentary aired Thursday...

Yeah, instead of listening to you, right?

Bandar is the most reprehensible piece of slime I know of.

Prince Bandar is the one that is closest to the Bush family, earning the name "Bandar Bush" by the press back in the salad days of the Bush administration before 9/11. In fact, he was at the ranch with Bush in August 2002 a year after Bush got the warning from the CIA he brushed off. In fact, there was a bit of noise that Bandar himself had contributed big bucks to the Islamic charity Al Qaeda was using as a cover for financing.

Al Qaeda itself is a branch of the Royal House of Saud, itself trying to gain control of what the Saudis call a government.

Incidently, Bandar has made quite literally billions off of the war on terror by facilitating arms deals and private contracting with the British and American governments.

The Saudi Royals in my book are a big piece of what's wrong with the world today.

They're what the Bush family aspires to be in life.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Job Statistics

From The New York Pravda, buried in the depths of the Business section, Floyd Norris:

Today’s employment report is mediocre at best. But to understand that, you have to look past the headline numbers.

Those numbers say that the government’s survey of employers showed a gain of 130,000 private sector jobs, on a seasonally adjusted basis, in October. That seems to be better than in recent months.

I don’t believe it. Most of those jobs — 103,000 of them, before seasonal adjustment — were added by the statisticians, not reported by employers. (It should be noted that, before seasonal adjustment, there were 201,000 jobs added, so this is just more than half.)

...Of those 103,000 jobs, 14,000 were in the construction industry, and 25,000 were in finance. Does anyone believe that all those new companies are being created in those industries now?

...At times of inflection, these adjustments can be wildly off, as I argued a month ago. I think we hit such a point this spring. A couple of years from now, after all the adjustments are made, this year’s job performance will look far less impressive.

Over the last 12 months, the government’s current numbers indicate that the private sector added an average of 115,000 jobs a month. But 80 percent of those jobs came from the statistical adjustments.

It is also worth noting that the government’s other survey, of households, has not found those jobs. Over the last 12 months, it has found about 50,000 new jobs a month. In October, it found employment declined by 250,000 jobs...

Minority Report: It's Not Torture When We Do It

And to save democracy, they must destroy it.

Lambert points to Blumenthal, with most of the good stuff behind the Salon corporate adwall, reproduced here:

...Mukasey is not a free agent. He had been strictly briefed and in his testimony was following orders. He has avoided calling waterboarding torture because that is consistent with the administration's position and past practice. Mukasey's refusal to disavow waterboarding reveals his acceptance of his assignment to a secondary role as attorney general, an inferior agent, not a constitutional officer, to certain political appointees in the White House.

Those who are responsible for waterboarding have defined and dictated Mukasey's evasions. His acquiescence demonstrates that no one in his position could take a contrary view to that of David Addington, Vice President Cheney's former counsel and now chief of staff, who directed and coauthored the infamous memos by former deputy assistant director of the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo justifying torture, and charged the current acting director of OLC, Stephen Bradbury, to issue new memos rationalizing it.

Addington is the reigning legal authority within the administration, presiding over the attorney general no matter who would fill the job. Addington rules by decree and tantrum, intolerant of any alternative opinion, which he suppresses with intimidation and threat. Gonzales, as White House counsel and then attorney general, was the marionette of Karl Rove and Addington. Rove is gone, but Addington remains.

...Mukasey's testimony telegraphs that the White House will continue to call the shots. He has already ceded the essence of his power even before assuming it. His vaunted integrity and independence have been crushed, short work for Addington.

Addington's dominion over the law -- controlling the writing of the president's executive orders and the memos from OLC, the office of the White House counsel and the carefully placed network of general counsels throughout the federal government's departments and agencies -- is a well-established and central aspect of Cheney's power. Addington has been indispensable to the vice president since he served as his counsel on the joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, when Cheney was the ranking minority member. In that capacity, Addington wrote, under Cheney's signature, the notorious minority report that was an early clarion call for the imperial presidency.



Addington and Cheney's report decried Congress for its "hysteria" over the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved the selling of missiles to Iran to finance arms for the Nicaraguan Contras against explicit congressional legislation. The Constitution, they argued, "leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States." They added: "Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down."

The Cheney minority report was the doctrinal basis for the Bush presidency: the unitary executive, the commander in chief ruling in wartime by fiat and, ultimately, torture being defined as whatever the president, not the Geneva Conventions, said it was. Addington's authorship of the Cheney Iran-Contra report was largely overlooked until fairly recently, but his deeper connection to that scandal and its resonance have received little attention.

... In the 1980s, Addington, then in his 20s, served as deputy counsel to CIA director William Casey, the moving force behind the Iran-Contra affair and the most powerful figure in the Reagan administration after the president. Along with other hotshots in the counsel's office, Addington was part of what became known within the agency as the "Lawless Group," named after Richard Lawless, a CIA operative who was a close assistant to Casey, according to a former senior CIA official. After Casey's death, Rep. Dick Cheney co-opted the "Lawless Group," putting its members in key positions when he was secretary of defense during the first Bush administration and vice president in the second. (Lawless, for example, after working as Jeb Bush's business partner, served as deputy undersecretary of defense, retiring this past April.)

"A lot of the decisions on Iran-Contra were signed off by the counsel's office," a longtime senior CIA official told me. "It was not a renegade operation. It had lawyers, just like now. Everything they were doing was run by the general counsel's office and Addington was deputy. You may draw your own conclusions, as the Russians say." In fact, the role of the counsel's office surfaced in the trial of Alan Fiers, the CIA agent in charge of the Central American Task Force, who pleaded guilty to misleading Congress. But that role was never investigated or ever really reported.

"These guys don't like the mainstream CIA. In fact, they hate it," the CIA official explained. "They don't like information unless it fits what they want to hear. They hate the CIA because the CIA tells them what they don't want to hear. They want assessments that prove ideological points. They are looking for simplistic answers to complicated issues. They inhabit a make-believe world of moving up into perceived areas of expertise. It's the same guys; they all resurface when Republicans are back in power. It's the same group. It's a system. The similarities are amazing in all these wars we've been dragged into."

Casey is the half-forgotten forefather of the radical Bush presidency. A clandestine agent of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the intelligence group predating the CIA, Casey became a wealthy and politically influential lawyer. He was among the original godfathers of the conservative movement, serving on the board of the right-wing Regnery publishing house, operating as financier of William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review and founding conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute.

An avid supporter of Richard Nixon's, Casey was appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and president of the Import-Export Bank. Casey regarded the Watergate scandal as a mere political attack, "political shenanigans," as he described it to Nixon in a private letter in May 1973. In 1980, Casey was director of Reagan's campaign. After the election he wanted to be named secretary of state, but settled for CIA director.

...Casey conducted his own foreign policy, relying on secret methods and men of action. His rival, Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz, remarked, "The CIA's intelligence was in many cases simply Bill Casey's ideology." "Casey had made of himself a clandestine secretary of State," wrote his biographer Joseph Persico in "The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey: From the OSS to the CIA." "His involvements in Afghanistan, China, the Philippines, Iran, and Central America had not been simply those of a spy chief but those of a covert foreign minister."

Casey chose Lt. Col. Oliver North to run the covert Contra operation and suggested to him plans for illegal supply in violation of the Boland Amendment and how to use a middleman for selling arms to Iran. The final report of the joint congressional committee on the Iran-Contra scandal concluded: "We believe that the late Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, encouraged North, gave him direction and promoted the concept of an extra-legal covert organization." "The person who managed this whole affair was Casey," said Abraham Sofaer, then the State Department's counsel.

Before congressional committees, Casey falsely testified that the CIA was unaware of the shipment of missiles to Iran. His perjury was exactly the same as that of then National Security Advisor John Poindexter, on the same question, and it is likely he would have been indicted, faced trial and been convicted, like Poindexter. Casey's then deputy, Robert Gates, now secretary of defense, said, "Casey was guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in." Adm. Bobby Inman, who preceded Gates as deputy, had resigned because, he said, "I caught him lying to me in a number of cases." Inman's immediate successor as deputy, John McMahon, quit after opposing the Iranian arms deal. After a week of mumbling appearances before Congress, Casey collapsed from a cancerous brain tumor and died.

Casey's closest aides -- including the Lawless Group -- scattered. Cheney promptly hired Addington. As his counsel, Addington attacked the investigation, defended the administration and covered up his own involvement in the Casey operation. One former prominent Democratic Senate staff member who had directed the probe told me that the Democrats were unaware of Addington's link to Casey. If they had been they would have raised it as a dangerous conflict of interest and demanded that he be removed. "Addington never should have been permitted to work on the committee," he said. "But no one paid attention to his background. It wasn't important."

Cheney's defense of Casey's actions as written by Addington in the minority report became the core of the Bush doctrine: The president as commander in chief can do whatever he wants regardless of Congress. There must be no checks and balances, no accountability. There must be no disclosure to other branches of government, whether legislative or judicial. Oral findings, or, if necessary, secret memos, make the illegal legal merely by saying they are legal in the name of presidential authority. The operational need to know determines who knows.

Now Mukasey, who was supposed to restore credibility to the Justice Department, has been transformed overnight into a cog in the machine, another servant to his masters, Addington's apologist. His brief tragedy is just one small outcome of a long history. The almost instantaneous tainting of his reputation should have been understood from the start as inevitable.

In their minds, they are the State. This criterion alone is enough reason why we should institutionalize them all as criminally insane. Especially Addington, who is still young enough, self-righteous enough, and mad enough to bring about global thermonuclear war.