It depends on what's stimulated

Krugman:

...The story has played itself out time and time again over the past 30 years. Global investors, disappointed with the returns they’re getting, search for alternatives. They think they’ve found what they’re looking for in some country or other, and money rushes in.

But eventually it becomes clear that the investment opportunity wasn’t all it seemed to be, and the money rushes out again, with nasty consequences for the former financial favorite. That’s the story of multiple financial crises in Latin America and Asia. And it’s also the story of the U.S. combined housing and credit bubble. These days, we’re playing the role usually assigned to third-world economies...

...The global origins of our current mess were actually laid out by none other than Ben Bernanke, in an influential speech he gave early in 2005, before he was named chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Bernanke asked a good question: “Why is the United States, with the world’s largest economy, borrowing heavily on international capital markets — rather than lending, as would seem more natural?”

His answer was that the main explanation lay not here in America, but abroad. In particular, third world economies, which had been investor favorites for much of the 1990s, were shaken by a series of financial crises beginning in 1997. As a result, they abruptly switched from being destinations for capital to sources of capital, as their governments began accumulating huge precautionary hoards of overseas assets.

The result, said Mr. Bernanke, was a “global saving glut”: lots of money, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

In the end, most of that money went to the United States. Why? Because, said Mr. Bernanke, of the “depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets.”

All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.” E.g., “Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad.”

In other words, the United States was not, in fact, uniquely well-suited to make use of the world’s surplus funds. It was, instead, a place where large sums could be and were invested very badly. Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences...

That's the print version. On his blog version, it's Stimulus? Never mind.



Paul Krugman thinks Dear Leader won't just sit idly by while Rome burns. He'll pour more gasoline on the flame.

The definition of stimulus differs. For the Ba$e, it means increasing the bottom line. For you, it means a chance to make an honest living.

Look how Dear Leader pulled "out" of the 2001 recession: using Greenspan, he encouraged the formation of a financial real estate bubble. The job market never markedly improved, but the corporate bottom line sure did.

Now he thinks about tax breaks for the Big and "rebates" out of your social security fund. But creating real jobs? Don't let's be silly.

Anything that diminishes the Power of the supply-side Force is not something the Ba$e, or its Leader, will allow.

One Trick Pony

They hate the R-word.

WASHINGTON — A recession is probably not on the horizon, despite the drumbeat of grim financial news, but the ailing economy needs quick passage of a stimulus package plus aggressive action by the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, told Congress on Thursday .

“We currently see the economy as continuing to grow, but growing at a relatively slow pace, particularly in the first half of this year,” Mr. Bernanke told the House Budget Committee, acknowledging that conditions are worse this year than in the “reasonably good” second half of 2007...

Passengers will pay no attention to that iceberg while we move around the chairs and the crew mans the lifeboats .

...“The president supports a permanent extension of his tax cuts, and he supports a short-term growth package, but they are separate,” said Tony Fratto, the White House deputy spokesman...

And what would said short-term jump-start stimulus be? Well... tax cuts, with permanent long term tax cuts might do the trick for Dear Leader's Ba$e, considered separately, of course.

...President Bush told congressional leaders privately he favors income tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses, officials said...

We're taking on water! Steer it towards those icebergs, they'll plug the holes. And you passengers won't need the life jackets, they'll just get in your way.

Data Dump Now

From the story of Al Qaeda as an an invention of the CIA, to a summary of the real role of the CIA (hint: the Company works for the Company), to the fraud of the 9-11 coverup, The Existentialist Cowboy is on one helluva roll this week.

The reading gets dense, but you just can not make this shit up. In fact, one suspects you don't have to. The Company has a different version for every audience.

Stay off of small airplanes, Len, and keep up the good work.

Another piece of work you should read about is Max Blumenthal's story about Mike Huckabee. He's the worst sort of Dominionist, and replacing the Constitution with Biblical Law is only the beginning of the End Times with this guy.



Fortunately, the Company is not ready to End the World, because they can't see the profit in it. Yet. In America, anyway. Yet.

If Hucksterbee manages to get close to $tealing this $election, and resists the inevitable Company takeover, one suspects he will wake up to find himself on a small plane. Transiently.

Pressure Drop

Citigroup, the nation’s largest bank, reported a staggering fourth-quarter loss of $9.83 billion on Tuesday and issued a sobering forecast that the housing market and the broader economy still had not bottomed out.

To shore up their financial condition, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, which has also been rocked by the subprime mortgage debacle, both were forced again to go hat in hand for cash infusions from investors in the United States, Asia and the Middle East, for a combined total of nearly $19.1 billion.

Citigroup’s gloomy news will most likely add to the anxiety of consumers and workers already concerned that the mortgage crisis could plunge the economy into a recession. Adding to worries, the government reported that retail sales in December declined for the first time since 2002.

Growing pessimism led to another sharp sell-off in stocks, which fell about 2 percent for the day and are now down about 6 percent since the beginning of 2008, the third worst start for a year since 1926...

Meanwhile, let's go look at what Those Who Would Lead say about the best way to shovel out of the Big Shitpile... not that Democrats in the state of Michigan have any voice in the process. Not that the Rethuglicans are even willing to use the R-word:



Sleepy Fred thinks he's still walking down the sunny side of the street. Hucksterbee wants to know where in the Bible the Recession is ever mentioned. Or the Constitution, either. 9ui11ani wants to use the Department of Homeland Security to make you remember any Economic problems can be solved by cutting taxes just like he did on 9-11. And so on, ad nauseum.

Unit Prime of the Oborg is making noises like the Assimilated do: "...cut $80 billion in taxes"...

Not so strangely enough, Hillary gets this right as Edwards does. When you're caught between a hyperinflationary energy cost increase pressure and the deflationary vacuum of an overpriced real estate-financial market, you keep people working and earning a paycheck. You do things like make sure they can stay healthy and keep working. You let them all go unemployed, and you don't just have a Recession.

You have a Depression. The Christian Dominionists feel that another great Depression is just what's needed to set up their kind of Moral society, to keep their wimmin at home, barefoot and pregnant, their kids God fearin' and in line, and the darkies pickin' in the field. But anybody sane realizes that after the Dominionists have their Apocalypse, the only languages anyone will be speaking will be Hindi and Chinese, and the Warrior Christ will have about the following that the other religons lost in blood, time, and dust have.

All the Right People Hate Him

jedreport, at MyDD on all the people who really don't like John Edwards.

The right people to have hate you are the people who have an interest in making the world a worse place.

They will act against you. They may defeat you. But if you fight them, you know you did the best you could.

You have to thank people like Edwards for at least bringing the issues up in an election year where the main$tream seems to be voting for either America's Top Model or the Oprah platitude-of-the-month favorite.

Oborg Economic Policy and the Same Old Used to Be Assimilated

So put a shiny smile on the same Republiborg policy, and you have the Obama solution to the current economic crisis, according to Krugman:

...Since this is an election year, the debate over how to stimulate the economy is inevitably tied up with politics. And here’s a modest suggestion for political reporters. Instead of trying to divine the candidates’ characters by scrutinizing their tone of voice and facial expressions, why not pay attention to what they say about economic policy?

In fact, recent statements by the candidates and their surrogates about the economy are quite revealing.

Take, for example, John McCain’s admission that economics isn’t his thing. “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he says. “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”

His self-deprecating humor is attractive, as always. But shouldn’t we worry about a candidate who’s so out of touch that he regards Mr. Bubble, the man who refused to regulate subprime lending and assured us that there was at most some “froth” in the housing market, as a source of sage advice?

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani wants us to go for broke, literally: his answer to the economy’s short-run problems is a huge permanent tax cut, which he claims would pay for itself. It wouldn’t.

About Mike Huckabee — well, what can you say about a candidate who talks populist while proposing to raise taxes on the middle class and cut them for the rich?

And then there’s the curious case of Mitt Romney. I’m told that he actually does know a fair bit about economics, and he has some big-name Republican economists supporting his campaign. Fears of recession might have offered him a chance to distinguish himself from the G.O.P. field, by offering an economic proposal that actually responded to the gathering economic storm.

...But Mr. Romney, who really needs to take chances at this point, apparently can’t break the habit of telling Republicans only what he thinks they want to hear. He’s still offering nothing but standard-issue G.O.P. pablum about low taxes and a pro-business environment.

On the Democratic side, John Edwards, although never the front-runner, has been driving his party’s policy agenda. He’s done it again on economic stimulus: last month, before the economic consensus turned as negative as it now has, he proposed a stimulus package including aid to unemployed workers, aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, public investment in alternative energy, and other measures.

Last week Hillary Clinton offered a broadly similar but somewhat larger proposal. (It also includes aid to families having trouble paying heating bills, which seems like a clever way to put cash in the hands of people likely to spend it.) The Edwards and Clinton proposals both contain provisions for bigger stimulus if the economy worsens.

And you have to say that Mrs. Clinton seems comfortable with and knowledgeable about economic policy. I’m sure the Hillary-haters will find some reason that’s a bad thing, but there’s something to be said for presidents who know what they’re talking about.

The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

Anyway, on Sunday Mr. Obama came out with a real stimulus plan. As was the case with his health care plan, which fell short of universal coverage, his stimulus proposal is similar to those of the other Democratic candidates, but tilted to the right.

For example, the Obama plan appears to contain none of the alternative energy initiatives that are in both the Edwards and Clinton proposals, and emphasizes across-the-board tax cuts over both aid to the hardest-hit families and help for state and local governments. I know that Mr. Obama’s supporters hate to hear this, but he really is less progressive than his rivals on matters of domestic policy...

Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar.
You're gonna go far, fly high,
You're never gonna die, you're gonna make it if you try;
they're gonna love you.
Well I've always had a deep respect, and I mean that most sincerely...

You owe it to the people. We're so happy we can hardly count.
Everybody else is just green, have you seen the chart?
It's a helluva start, it could be made into a monster
if we all pull together as a team.
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy
we call it Riding the Gravy Train.

The Most Important Issue in 2008

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Anything but the Economy or lack thereof

The Moe Preznit President strikes again.



Apparently Dear Leader wants to make Iraqiranistan the issue of 2008.

He's going over to the Company's proxy state in the middle east, Israel, and insisting the National Intelligent Estimate is all wrong. Olmert, of course, loves him those Company dollars, and whole-heartedly agrees.

If that wasn't enough, he's urging his Wahhibi creditors to take on the Great Shia Menace. No, silly, not Iraq.

...President Bush urged wary Persian Gulf allies on Sunday to rally against Iran “before it is too late,” even as the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the country had agreed to answer outstanding questions about its nuclear programs within four weeks...

Never let it be said Dear Leader does not act like he drinks his own Kool-Aid.

While he's trying to keep everyone's mind on the Terra from Iran and not the Terror on Wall Street, anyway.

The Big Shitpile appears to have allowed Bank of America to absorb Countrywide, but it's not clear in the longrun who's going to absorb whom.



But it's all fundamentally about the price of oil. The Company wants the oil price as high as it can get it, creating superinflationary pressures. Also, the bankers want to wring as much out money out of the credit $ystem of the United States as possible. To do this, Dear Leader has sought almost complete deregulation of banking and lending.

Everything has been to get the Consumers to Consume. The tribal memory has been remarkably long after that little dust-up in the 1930s, and the stagflation of the '70s, and the roller coaster recessions of the '80s and '90s, and the long continuous and ruinous recession of the Bu$h preznitcy [unless, of course, you made over $500,000 a year, in which case you were part of Bu$hie's Ba$e]. Everyone realized that a lot of money in the bank just tended to get Disappeared in value.

To get around the reluctance to save, the banks got people to borrow. And to try to make sure they paid on time, they jacked up interest rates for those that couldn't, and talked Dear Leader into making it hard for them to get bankruptcy protection.

Leading, of course, to the Big Shitpile, since people that can't pay to terms, just tend to walk away.

So along with galloping inflation, which the Feds control by jacking up interest rates, you got the failure to spend, causing a slowdown, which the Feds control by lowering interest rates.

Ben Stein is right. This is what happens when the Three Stooges run things, and Moe is preznit.

Now Dear Leader is promising some kinda action this week, but don't count on it to really accomplish anything, unless you think a finger in the eye and a bonk on the head of the American public is particularly productive.

George Carlin lays it out for you.

On education and your owners.



In case that's not enough, they want your soul.

The Money Party Rulz

You get some interesting questions out here on the high plains of cyberspace. From The Existentialist Cowboy, a link to a Op-Ed News piece:



Why would Diebold prefer Hillary to Obama? As Len Hart's thread points out they're both pandering to corporate donors and their constituents with meaningless platitudes. Rove was trying to posture Hillary as the opposing "contender" back in 2005. Then there's that maverick Republican, Chuck Hagel.

...Hagel sits on the Board of Directors of a holding company called McCarthy Group. They claim to be an investment firm with a diverse portfolio upwards of 1 billion dollars. Anyways, here is the kicker.

McCarthy Group owns ES & S and Diebold. Both highly controversial Evoting machines. I believe he also was one of their CEO's when they were just starting. Even more damning both those companies were created by 2 brothers who are heavy GOP supporters...

" -Senator Charles Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, has a controlling financial stake in the McCarthy Group, which in turn owns ES&S. Nebraska voters cast their votes on ES&S DREs. Further, Michael McCarthy, chairman of the McCarthy Group, served as Hagel's campaign treasurer from 1999 until 2002.

-Leaders of the nation's two largest DRE manufacturers, Diebold and ES&S, are a pair of brothers. Bob Urosevich is president of Diebold's election system division, while Todd Urosevich is a vice-president of ES&S."
Stephen Miller, 9/8/04

I'd agree with the Gnome:

...There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party... Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So doesn't it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum.

This doesn't mean there isn't competition in the Boardroom. Often the fiercest competitors at work are people within the same Company trying to grab the same job. Regardless of what they say to get position, they'll be just as ruthless once they're in the Boss's chair.

The Well-Fed Unity Pony is Ridden to the War on Terra

Barney Frank:

...the only way I can think of to avoid “refighting the same fights we had in the 1990’s”, to quote Senator Obama, is to let our opponents win these fights without a struggle.

The Unity pony is fed by every main$tream corporate sponsor, who want you to take out a New and Improved Low-Interest rate mortgage on your soul.

Rates have never been this low!

The Unity pony has a very very long line of people eagerly waiting to ride who in their down time watch Oprah and Dr. Phil or nod sagely to the wisdom of editorial page of the Wall Street Pravda.

The Unity pony is bigger than the Empire State Building, and the swish of its tail has extinguished the light of the Statue of Liberty, whose head has gone sailing off ballistic into the hills of the Homeland.

The Unity pony’s shiny fur is covered underneath by human-shaped blood sucking arachnids who lurk in the hallways of power and subways and intertubes.

They fund suicide bombings of abortion clinics and rape professional women trying to feed fatherless children in Iraq.

They gas Marine checkpoints to keep from getting stuck in traffic.

They’re sure of Democratic voter fraud- why else would Democrats vote for Democrats?

The Unity pony knows the Homeland’s at stake, and the battlefield is the twilight zone of your mind.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one believes it, does anyone know?

She did.

via Avedon via Pruning Shears, Sibel Edmonds has told her story to the London Times, state secrets being no longer so secret anymore one supposes.

Reproduced here for the record:

...Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions...

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations...

That, and the cash flow.

...One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.

Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

“He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said.

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder...

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.

Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing.

She was able to discuss the case with The Sunday Times because, by the end of January 2002, the justice department had shut down the programme.

The senior official in the State Department no longer works there. Last week he denied all of Edmonds’s allegations: “If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that’s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this.”

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

How Pakistan got the bomb, then sold it to the highest bidders

1965 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, says: “If India builds the bomb we will eat grass . . . but we will get one of our own”

1974 Nuclear programme becomes increased priority as India tests a nuclear device

1976 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist, steals secrets from Dutch uranium plant. Made head of his nation’s nuclear programme by Bhutto, now prime minister

1976 onwards Clandestine network established to obtain materials and technology for uranium enrichment from the West

1985 Pakistan produces weapons-grade uranium for the first time

1989-91 Khan’s network sells Iran nuclear weapons information and technology

1991-97 Khan sells weapons technology to North Korea and Libya

1998 India tests nuclear bomb and Pakistan follows with a series of nuclear tests. Khan says: “I never had any doubts I was building a bomb. We had to do it”

2001 CIA chief George Tenet gathers officials for crisis summit on the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to other countries

2001 Weeks before 9/11, Khan’s aides meet Osama Bin Laden to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device

2001 After 9/11 proliferation crisis becomes secondary as Pakistan is seen as important ally in war on terror

2003 Libya abandons nuclear weapons programme and admits acquiring components through Pakistani nuclear scientists

2004 Khan placed under house arrest and confesses to supplying Iran, Libya and North Korea with weapons technology. He is pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf

2006 North Korea tests a nuclear bomb

2007 Renewed fears that bomb may fall into hands of Islamic extremists as killing of Benazir Bhutto throws country into turmoil...

What is this May they speak of?

Iranian Speedboats Threatening Our Battleships!

Except... maybe they weren't...

Just two days after the U.S. Navy released the eerie video of Iranian speedboats swarming around American warships, which featured a chilling threat in English, the Navy is saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship.

The near-clash occurred over the weekend in the Strait of Hormuz. On the U.S.-released recording, a voice can be heard saying to the Americans, "I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes."

The Navy never said specifically where the voices came from, but many were left with the impression they had come from the speedboats because of the way the Navy footage was edited.

Today, the spokesperson for the U.S. admiral in charge of the Fifth Fleet clarified to ABC News that the threat may have come from the Iranian boats, or it may have come from somewhere else...

Could be... The New York Pravda:

TEHRAN — Iran’s Revolutionary Guard accused the United States on Wednesday of fabricating a video showing Iranian speedboats confronting United States Navy warships in the Persian Gulf over the weekend, according to a report carried by the semiofficial Fars news agency and state-run television.

“Images released by the U.S. Department of Defense about the Navy vessels were made from file pictures, and the audio was fabricated,” an unnamed Revolutionary Guard official said, according to Fars, which has close links to the Revolutionary Guard. It was the first time Iran had commented on the video that the Pentagon released Tuesday.

The audio includes a statement that says, “I am coming to you,” and adds, “You will explode after a few minutes.” The voice was recorded from the internationally recognized channel for ship-to-ship communications, Navy officials have said.

The Pentagon immediately dismissed the assertion that the video, which shows Iranian speedboats maneuvering around and among the Navy warships, had been fabricated. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Iran’s “allegation is absurd, factually incorrect and reflects the lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident.”

Naval and Pentagon officials have said that the video and audio were recorded separately, then combined...

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy...

Maybe they were just some Blackwater boys joyriding who wanted to get the ships out of their way. It wouldn't be the first time.

The Guardian voices its doubts, too:

...On Tuesday, the US administration released video footage that it said showed the Iranian speedboats harassing the American vessels. A voice in English with a strong accent was heard to say: "I am coming at you - you will explode in a couple of minutes."

Yesterday the Iranians put out their own four-minute video that showed an Iranian patrol officer in a small boat communicating with one of the US ships. "Coalition warship number 73, this is an Iranian navy patrol boat," the Iranian said. An American naval officer replied: "This is coalition warship number 73 operating in international waters."

The voice of the Iranian sailor in Tehran's footage was different to the deeper and more menacing voice, threatening to blow up the warships in the US version. Nor was there any sign of aggressive behaviour by the Iranian patrol boats...

Yes, but them Eyerainians support them other guys in Palestine, and thus contribute to its instability. You know, the ones we don't fund directly, anyway. No, Virginia, I am not talking about Israel...



Oh, and an update: the Pentagon does not dispute the Iranian version of events. But you won't hear that tonight on FOX.

You might also check out the Dark Wraith's compilation of the situation:

...How did this encounter, which now appears to have been nothing out of the ordinary, turn into an "incident" that would prompt a dire warning from the President of the United States? As it turns out, behind the "anonymous Pentagon sources" the mainstream media were ominously citing when the story first broke was a gentleman named Bryan Whitman, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Office of Strategic Influence. For readers unfamiliar with Mr. Whitman, he was none other than the architect of the propaganda push originally put forth about the "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch, a story that turned out to be so at odds with what actually happened that Ms. Lynch, herself, repudiated the Pentagon version in testimony before Congress.

That's right: The latest, hot-off-the-presses story of a nearly deadly naval battle between the United States and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the Strait of Hormuz came straight out of the office of a disgraced Pentagon propagandist, a man already caught at least once before using a military incident and associated video to pump lies to an ever-receptive, ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media and its Right-wing warhawks in the Blogosphere. True to form, the American media instantly swallowed the story, complete as it was with ominous implications for an ugly new war, and repeated it as gospel truth to the ever-receptive, ever-gullible U.S. audience.

Just in Time for 2008

via Phillip Carter:

FEC Reduced to Offering Advice
Without a Quorum, Rulings on Campaigns Are Nonbinding

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 9, 2008; Page A13

Down to two members and unable to muster a quorum, the Federal Election Commission has decided to offer advice instead of binding decisions on questions from political campaigns.



This week, organizations with pending requests for decisions from the six-member FEC on campaign matters received phone calls from agency staffers letting them know not to expect formal rulings anytime soon.

The groups were told that the FEC's two remaining members will hold a public hearing Jan. 24 to share their informal views on the requests. The board lacks the four votes needed for the commission to take official action on a number of matters, including enforcement cases.



"For those things that require four votes, we'll take them up to the point where that requirement for a vote is triggered, and then put them on hold," said FEC Chairman David M. Mason, one of the two remaining members. "Work, I'm afraid, will continue to back up."

Bob Biersack, an FEC spokesman, said: "The staff will go ahead and draft an answer and the two members will discuss those drafts. Hopefully, in a way, that gives some kind of guidance without saying, 'This is the position of the commission.' "



The advice offered collectively by Mason, a Republican appointee, and Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic appointee, will not be binding. "It won't give them explicit legal protection," Mason said. "But if we both say no, or both say yes, that should provide some guidance."

When operating with a full complement, commissioners routinely undertake enforcement cases and audits of political committees, among other matters. They need four votes to launch such reviews, four votes to find probable cause, four votes to reach a settlement, and four votes to file suit in court.

Contested cases from late last year -- those that resulted in disagreement among FEC board members -- are in limbo, Mason said. And more of them are stacking up every day.



The four vacancies are the result of a standoff between President Bush and Congress over one of Bush's nominees, Hans A. von Spakovsky. His critics contend that during his tenure in the Justice Department's civil rights division, von Spakovsky advocated a controversial Texas redistricting plan and fought to institute a requirement in Georgia that voters show photo identification before being permitted to cast ballots...

So Dear Leader gives us the choice of FEC officials that are guaranteed to throw the $elections to the Rethuglicans or none at all.

The $election has been unofficially shrunken to the size where Mr. Norquist can drown it in a bathtub. Whoever wins, there are no rules, because there is no oversight at the Federal level. Just advice.

The entire $electoral process is now kabuki.

Fairytales

Well, the Big Dog is right:

... “It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time — not once, ‘Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war. And you took that speech you’re now running on off your Web site in 2004. And there’s no difference in your voting record and Hillary’s ever since.’

“Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairytale I’ve ever seen.

"What did you think about the Obama thing calling Hillary the senator from Punjab? Did you like that? Or what about the Obama handout that was covered up, the press never reported on, implying that I was a crook. Scouring me—scathing criticism over my financial reports. Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn’t take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon.”
…
"But the idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months is a little tough to take just because of the sanitizing coverage that’s in the media doesn’t mean the facts aren’t out there.”

The Big Dog is barking for his own, but basically he's right. After Obama voted against the War he got a little Senatorial attitude adjustment, and ever since, he's been just the same as Hillary in his voting record. I don't think we need either one of 'em.

We need a real Democrat running for President, not a Rethuglican Lite.

Gnome on the Bi Party $ystem

MJS channels Gnome Chomsky.

And you have to filter it out, because Gnome likes to speak in his own language, but there is more good stuff:

"Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place."

...

"...There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party... The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum."

...

"There are no conservatives in the United States... The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, ...believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich."

...

"I mean, what's the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you're trained to be a ruler - they both can run because they're financed by the same corporate institutions..."

"...the most politically bizarre, consciously dumb film of our era"

So what do you call it when people who know much better mislead an audience by only telling part of the truth?

Tom Englehardt and Chalmers Johnson talk a little history and explode more than a little disinformation about the ability of the DINOcrat-run Company to run bipartisan secret wars with the Rethuglicans.

But is it any co-incidence Charlie Wilson's War emerges right now, when once again, a new crop of Those Who Would Rule are telling us that history is over, and if we all hold hands and believe, everything's gonna be alright?

Johnson:

..."The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every 'secret' armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the rape of Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the 'secret war' in Laos, aid to the Greek Colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of President Allende in Chile, and Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the Agency's activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States and devastating to the people being 'liberated.' The CIA continues to get away with this bungling primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its Constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.

"According to the author of Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan mujahideen ("freedom fighters"). The Agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and 'unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower [in this case, the USSR].'

"The author of this glowing account, [the late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for the CBS television news show '60 Minutes' and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S.'s clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was 'the largest and most successful CIA operation in history,' 'the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time,' and that 'there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire.' Crile's sole measure of success is killed Soviet soldiers (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period 1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.

"However, he never once mentions that the 'tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists' the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996 killed nineteen American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon..."

"For the CIA legally to carry out a covert action, the president must sign off on -- that is, authorize -- a document called a 'finding.' Crile repeatedly says that President Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the mujahideen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director [today Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his heroic mujahideen were manipulated by Washington like so much cannon fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The mujahideen did the job but as subsequent events have made clear, they may not be all that grateful to the United States."

...The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi's summing-up for Cinematical: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia."

But it's better than that. The money's increased since Charlie's day, when it was $10 million a year through Pakistan. Now, it's $10 billion a year directly to Pakistan. And that's not even including what's in the black budget.

But back to my original question. what do you call it when people who know much better mislead an audience by only telling part of the truth?

Propaganda, of course.

Kumabaya's teh Thing

And you thought the economy, or the War, or secret torture prisons, or global warming, or the corporate subversion of the United States Constitution was the most important issue on the minds of voters today.



Not so, according to The New York Pravda

...Edmund Case, a 38-year-old marketing executive, walked away from a rally for Mr. Obama here on Saturday impressed by his call to bridge the partisan divide. He said that he would not choose his candidate until Tuesday...

“Anyone who recognizes the value of bringing both parties to the table — that means real compromise — then that’s good,” Mr. Case said. “Obama has that. McCain seems to have that, too.”

Mr. Obama, whose mentor was Joe Lieberman. Lieberman, who fields tough questions for John McCain and supports his bid for the Presidency. Lieberman, bff of the Clintons. Not to mention sidestepping the Democratic process to get elected Senator again, and giving Gore the worst possible advice in 2000 as VP candiate. Lieberman, a double, triple, or multiplex agent for somebody or several somebodies if there ever was one.

The New York Pravda today also runs a lengthy opinion piece on just how passe all those partisan opinions are:

We Agreed to Agree, and Forgot to Notice

...if you listen closely, you might hear something — a faint but persistent tapping at the window that economists, criminologists and biologists say is the sound of change arriving anyway. From capital punishment to global warming to homosexuality to abortion, many of the social issues that divide us are shifting and evolving — perhaps even in some instances into a new consensus, or at least, and no less profoundly, toward a reframing of the old debates...

Many of the great debates, in short, have become a bit passé, precisely as anticipated by President John F. Kennedy. “Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint — Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative or moderate,” Mr. Kennedy said in a 1962 news conference. But, he said, most problems had become “technical problems, administrative problems; they are very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”

No, there have been no passionate debates in the country since 1962. We just thought there were, that's all. Viral memes and all that.

...Professor Bunzl at Rutgers, who works on climate change and energy issues, said that the quieting of controversy could speak louder than the clamor of the fight itself.

“There is much more change going on than we realize,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “And one way it expresses itself is how all of a sudden we realize that what was an issue no longer matters.”

Indeed, in his Iowa speech, Mr. Obama seemed to suggest that even having a conversation about healing and coming together was outdated, and that it’s what you do next, with a consensus and a community made real through action, that matters.

“We are one nation, we are one people,” he said. “And our time for change has come.”

Just be quiet and go with the program and it will all work out, because it's all good. Now, where have I heard that before?

Bipartisanship on anything that matters isn't just date rape, no matter what Grover Norquist says.

It's a perversion of the form of a Republic to an invading Imperial meme that's designed to take over the system for the new and improved squeeky clean version of the Company.



What this country needs isn't singing around the campfire.

What this country needs is a good flamethrower.

Covert. No, really!

Would they lie to you?

WASHINGTON — President Bush’s senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The debate is a response to intelligence reports that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts there to destabilize the Pakistani government, several senior administration officials said.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a number of President Bush’s top national security advisers met Friday at the White House to discuss the proposal, which is part of a broad reassessment of American strategy after the assassination 10 days ago of the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto...

Covert, which is why they told everybody about it. So everyone could rest easy know their super seekrit spy armies were swinging into action. Discreetly, of course.

...Many of the specific options under discussion are unclear and highly classified. Officials said that the options would probably involve the C.I.A. working with the military’s Special Operations forces...

...The Bush administration has not formally presented any new proposals to Mr. Musharraf, who gave up his military role last month, or to his successor as the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who the White House thinks will be more sympathetic to the American position than Mr. Musharraf. Early in his career, General Kayani was an aide to Ms. Bhutto while she was prime minister and later led the Pakistani intelligence service.

But at the White House and the Pentagon, officials see an opportunity in the changing power structure for the Americans to advocate for the expanded authority in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country. “After years of focusing on Afghanistan, we think the extremists now see a chance for the big prize — creating chaos in Pakistan itself,” one senior official said.

The new options for expanded covert operations include loosening restrictions on the C.I.A. to strike selected targets in Pakistan, in some cases using intelligence provided by Pakistani sources, officials said. Most counterterrorism operations in Pakistan have been conducted by the C.I.A.; in Afghanistan, where military operations are under way, including some with NATO forces, the military can take the lead.

The legal status would not change if the administration decided to act more aggressively. However, if the C.I.A. were given broader authority, it could call for help from the military or deputize some forces of the Special Operations Command to act under the authority of the agency.

The United States now has about 50 soldiers in Pakistan. Any expanded operations using C.I.A. operatives or Special Operations forces, like the Navy Seals, would be small and tailored to specific missions, military officials said.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who was on vacation last week and did not attend the White House meeting, said in late December that “Al Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks on the Pakistani government and Pakistani people.”

So it is said, sahib.

I like that "50 soldiers in Pakistan" bit. Anybody want to buy a good bridge in Brooklyn, or some beachfront property in Louisiana?

The Al Qaeda Bomb

lukery pulls some threads together.

...For some reason, the criminals involved in the nuclear black market are still (mostly) walking free - in Pakistan, the US and elsewhere - while those who threatened to expose them - Richard Barlow, Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame, and the latest addition, Atif Amin - have been harassed, threatened and gagged.

According to Joe Trento:
The CIA even started using some of the Khan network’s front companies for its own purposes...

When AQ Khan first acquired the centrifuge blueprints in Holland in 1976, the CIA asked the Dutch government not to arrest him. They've been watching him, and the rest of the network, ever since. They watched him build the 'Islamic Bomb' in Pakistan, and they watched the proliferation - to Iran, to North Korea, to Libya, and to maybe a dozen other countries and terrorist groups like al Qaida.

At various times in the last 30 years, (elements of) the US and British governments:
a) actively assisted in the proliferation
b) tipped off the perpetrators to various stings
c) stopped investigations into the network
d) destroyed people who threatened the network: Richard Barlow, Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame, and the latest addition, Atif Amin.

In fact, the CIA apparently knew more about the Pakistan program than even Benazir Bhutto when she was Prime Minister.

According to Seymour Hersh's fantastic 1993 article in the New Yorker:

"The question of what Ms. Bhutto knew, or didn’t know, about the bomb would be resolved when she paid a scheduled state visit to Washington in June (1990); at that time she was provided with a detailed briefing by William H. Webster, the C.I.A. director. To dramatize the extent of American knowledge, Webster arranged for Ms. Bhutto to be shown a mockup of a Pakistani nuclear bomb.

...

Mark A. Siegel, a former Carter Administration official and close Bhutto associate, who served as Pakistan’s American lobbyist in 1989 and 1990, described her feelings of disbelief upon being briefed by Webster. "The briefing was more detailed" than any information that she, as Prime Minister, had been provided, Siegel said. "It also showed that the military was doing it behind her back." "

You might read the rest of the article, but be warned, a lot of the links have already been inactivated.

The Smiling Face on Your TV

The Cult of Personality meets the Praetorian Guard.

Again.

Palermo:

...In 1968, when Kennedy was gaining momentum and piling up primary victories it looked as though he would win the presidential nomination. But before he could be safely ensconced inside "the bubble" of 24-hour federal protection he was assassinated. And his progressive challenge to the war in Vietnam and to poverty at home was stopped in its tracks.

In 2008, Obama is gaining momentum, and hopefully people inside his organization are cognizant of the fact that he constitutes a very real threat to the likes of Blackwater, Dyncorps, Halliburton, and the hundreds of other private companies currently profiteering from the Iraq occupation.

Blackwater, that reactionary private mercenary outfit headed by the right-wing Christian nationalist Erik Prince stands to lose big time with an Obama presidency. Under George W. Bush Blackwater went from a marginal company with about $27 million in government contracts to a behemoth currently receiving over $1 billion in federal largesse.

It was revealed after the massacre of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad by Blackwater mercenaries that the U.S. State Department cannot function in Iraq without the services of the well-connected private company. Blackwater has a lot riding financially on keeping the Iraq occupation going and a lot to lose if it is ended. (Please read Jeremy Scahill's book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.)

Under an Obama Administration Blackwater would no doubt be cut down to size along with Bush's other crony capitalist entities. The Blackwater Boys no doubt have close friends and ideological soul mates deep inside the federal security services.

In 1968, immediately following the killing of Robert Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order providing Secret Service protection to all viable presidential candidates. His decision came as a result of the RFK assassination. But it was too late to prevent a tiny piece of lead from disfranchising millions of American voters.

Let's hope that the Blackwater elements can be thoroughly flushed out of the federal security services. Let's also hope that the Secret Service does a better job protecting Obama in the coming election year than Pakistan's ISI did in protecting Benazir Bhutto who didn't live to see election day.

What must be done with Blackwater is what President John F. Kennedy said he wanted to do with the CIA following the Bay of Pigs disaster: Tear it up into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and JFK are rolling in their graves at the privatizing of the armed forces that George W. Bush has rammed through. With privatization comes a lack of control on the part of the government over its own military and security services. Bush gave Blackwater and companies like it a free ride on the government's dime and they no doubt want the gravy train to continue. Obama promises to apply the brakes. He therefore has some well-armed and lethally trained enemies that stand to lose their livelihoods if he follows through on his promise to end the Iraq occupation...

Quoth the Dark Wraith:



"Social unraveling"? It looks pretty tattered already.

Not to sound all tinfoil, but if a criminal cabal (cough)Cheneyburton(/cough) wanted to, you know, postphone an election so it couldn't be prosecuted, the ideal way to do it would be to do what their boy Musharaff just did. To somebody.

If they played their cards right, they could declare martial law, cause an even greater amount of civil unrest, and install a certain VP until things "settled down". Which of course, endless war on terror being endless, it might never do.

If they played their cards right.

Not that I would suggest conspiracy theories here or anything.

Although given the lack of appeal of the current Republican front runner among the monied, and the distaste in the Village for him, perhaps there might be a more tactical advantage for the Company for a hit on the right.

There are other philosophical differences between the Kennedy brothers and what we're facing today. Evidence suggests when John Kennedy first assumed office, he was a big fan of Ian Fleming, and pushed the envelope of covert activity. Too late, he realized that letting a government agency pursue a secret agenda meant keeping secrets from him, too.

Sowing the wind, he reaped a whirlwind.

The Phone Company

And you thought Ma Bell was in charge. Meet NeuStar, a spinoff of Lockheed-Martin- and the United States government.

Every phone call, fax and personal computer connection in North America depends on the services of a little-known company called NeuStar, based in Sterling, Va. The company manages a directory of 500 million telephone numbers in the United States and Canada, says Jeffrey E. Ganek, its chairman and chief executive. The company, a spinoff from Lockheed Martin, had an estimated $430 million in sales in 2007.

Here are excerpts from a conversation:

Q. With the explosion of cellphones, personal digital devices, faxes and PC connections, how does anyone keep track of who is using which number?

A. That explosion is what led the industry and the federal government to create an entity like NeuStar. NeuStar physically directs the routing from every telephone call in North America. You cannot make a telephone call in North America without NeuStar.

You see, in the 1950s, when every call was a voice call and it went from one black dial phone to another, telecommunications was pretty easy. Now there are more than half a billion working telephone numbers in North America. There are more than four billion network endpoints around the world. An endpoint can be a desk voice phone, a mobile handset or a computer or something in between.

Q. Why don’t AT&T or Verizon Communications keep track of all the numbers?

A. Because almost all telephone calls start on one network and terminate on another. Back in the days of the Bell system, it was one engineer who was in charge of the entire network, from black dial telephone to black dial telephone. Now when you call a telephone number, your phone company doesn’t know whether that phone call is destined to a customer of its own or a customer of an entirely independent network. NeuStar tells each telephone company where to send each call.

Q. And it all has to happen in a fraction of a second?

A. It does. Every telephone company in North America has a physical interface into the NeuStar directory system.

Q. Is that how you keep track of the numbers, by having a directory?

A. Exactly. NeuStar is the North American numbering plan administrator. If a telephone company needs the telephone number for one of its end users, they’ve got to come to NeuStar...

Q. What’s the concept of pooling in a nutshell?

A. It used to be when a telephone company needed a number, the smallest block of numbers we could give them was 10,000 numbers, or the equivalent of an entire local exchange. If you were a telephone company and had a single customer in a town, you’d come to me and I’d have to give you an area code, say 422, and all 10,000 numbers that come with that. But we used an advanced technology in the routing database and, for the first time, were able to allocate blocks of 1,000 telephone numbers.

Q. So it was your company that was involved in deciding that some people in Manhattan could not have 212 numbers but instead had to have 646 area codes?

A. I knew that NeuStar was playing an important role in the industry when I saw there was a “Seinfeld” episode on exactly that problem. The fact is, there are only so many telephone numbers associated with any one area code. So with the explosive growth in the number of telephones and network endpoints, there’s been a huge demand, and area codes have been altered.

What’s a fascinating twist on this, it used to be that when you dialed a 212 area code number, you knew you were dialing a telephone number on the island of Manhattan. Now with the coming of voice over the Internet, VoIP, you can dial a 212 telephone number and have the number ring a phone in Buenos Aires or Moscow. The significance of telephone numbers has changed. The system is becoming much more complex and increasingly requires the routing capability of the central directory that NeuStar manages on behalf of all networks...

Q. Why did you spin off from Lockheed Martin in 1999? Why wouldn’t they want to keep you?

A. When NeuStar got started, this business had never existed before. For the first time, rivals from different telephone companies had to sit at a table and say, “For the common good, we need an independent company to provide a trusted routing directory we all will depend upon. Each of us will put information about all our customers and where their telephone calls should be routed into this database.” AT&T, Verizon, TMobile and Comcast don’t trust each other — they are competitors. But they trust NeuStar to hold this very valuable data.

So we needed to manage the trust of those competing carriers, and part of that trust was a contractual pledge that we would be neutral, hence the name. Separately, Lockheed Martin was acquiring Comsat, a carrier. As a result, they had to divest either Comsat or NeuStar. Even the appearance of NeuStar managing telephone numbers in favor of a network owned by the corporate parent would have violated that trust.

A neutral party that makes money off of everybody, and follows everything, and oh, by the way, created by the Federal Government and a major contractor of the D.o'D.

How neutral can ya get?

Two Taste Treats in One

Osama alive has market value
He scares the sheeple so
Osama dead becomes bad bread
Made from stale and moldy dough

Be he alive or be he dead
His fate: to be a tool
Keep them in line, not serpentine
A screeching, howling ghoul

If there is no story here
Then stories don’t exist
Was his death commonly known
Is there something we have missed?

Heads will roll, but not that far
Their shapes not perfectly round
Want to go bowling in Pakistan
And watch the pins fall down?

++++

-MJS

Osama bin Laden's Dead

There was just the Bhutto verbal slip, that many thought was simply a misattribution, that may have precipitated the violence.

It's all we have to go on, but there are at least a couple of more kinks in the story, reported by no less than The New York Times and FOX itself in 2002.

People have been starting to notice some funny things. If he's dead, and the Administration really did know about his death in 2002, that would be an awfully embarrasing fact to come out in an election year. Then there's the tinfoil question of whether or not the Pak secret police really killed him- and assumed control of Al Qaeda operations.

That being the other statement of Bhutto's that you can't write off as a simple misattribution.

What Michael Moore Says:

Here:

...Two months ago, Rolling Stone magazine asked me to do a cover story where I would ask the hard questions that no one was asking in one-on-one interviews with Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards. "The Top Democrats Face Off with Michael Moore." The deal was that all three candidates had to agree to let me interview them or there was no story. Obama and Edwards agreed. Mrs. Clinton said no, and the cover story was thus killed.

Why would the love of my life, Hillary Clinton, not sit down to talk with me? What was she afraid of?

Those of you who are longtime readers of mine may remember that 11 years ago I wrote a chapter (in my first book) entitled, "My Forbidden Love for Hillary." I was fed up with the treatment she was getting, most of it boringly sexist, and I thought somebody should stand up for her. I later met her and she thanked me for referring to her as "one hot s***kicking feminist babe." I supported and contributed to her run for the U.S. Senate. I think she is a decent and smart person who loves this country, cares deeply about kids, and has put up with more crap than anyone I know of (other than me) from the Crazy Right. Her inauguration would be a thrilling sight, ending 218 years of white male rule in a country where 51% of its citizens are female and 64% are either female or people of color.

And yet, I am sad to say, nothing has disappointed me more than the disastrous, premeditated vote by Senator Hillary Clinton to send us to war in Iraq. I'm not only talking about her first vote that gave Mr. Bush his "authorization" to invade -- I'm talking about every single OTHER vote she then cast for the next four years, backing and funding Bush's illegal war, and doing so with verve. She never met a request from the White House for war authorization that she didn't like. Unlike the Kerrys and the Bidens who initially voted for authorization but later came to realize the folly of their decision, Mrs. Clinton continued to cast numerous votes for the war until last March -- four long years of pro-war votes, even after 70% of the American public had turned against the war. She has steadfastly refused to say that she was wrong about any of this, and she will not apologize for her culpability in America's worst-ever foreign policy disaster. All she can bring herself to say is that she was "misled" by "faulty intelligence."

Let's assume that's true. Do you want a President who is so easily misled? I wasn't "misled," and millions of others who took to the streets in February of 2003 weren't "misled" either. It was simply amazing that we knew the war was wrong when none of us had been briefed by the CIA, none of us were national security experts, and none of us had gone on a weapons inspection tour of Iraq. And yet... we knew we were being lied to! Let me ask those of you reading this letter: Were YOU "misled" -- or did you figure it out sometime between October of 2002 and March of 2007 that George W. Bush was up to something rotten? Twenty-three other senators were smart enough to figure it out and vote against the war from the get-go. Why wasn't Senator Clinton?

...I have not even touched on her other numerous -- and horrendous -- votes in the Senate, especially those that have made the middle class suffer even more (she voted for Bush's first bankruptcy bill, and she is now the leading recipient of payoff money -- I mean campaign contributions -- from the health care industry). I know a lot of you want to see her elected, and there is a very good chance that will happen. There will be plenty of time to vote for her in the general election if all the pollsters are correct. But in the primaries and caucuses, isn't this the time to vote for the person who most reflects the values and politics you hold dear? Can you, in good conscience, vote for someone who so energetically voted over and over and over again for the war in Iraq? Please give this serious consideration.

Now, on to the two candidates who did agree to do the interview with me...

Barack Obama is a good and inspiring man. What a breath of fresh air! There's no doubting his sincerity or his commitment to trying to straighten things out in this country. But who is he? I mean, other than a guy who gives a great speech? How much do any of us really know about him? I know he was against the war. How do I know that? He gave a speech before the war started. But since he joined the senate, he has voted for the funds for the war, while at the same time saying we should get out. He says he's for the little guy, but then he votes for a corporate-backed bill to make it harder for the little guy to file a class action suit when his kid swallows lead paint from a Chinese-made toy. In fact, Obama doesn't think Wall Street is a bad place. He wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan -- the same companies who have created the mess in the first place. He's such a feel-good kinda guy, I get the sense that, if elected, the Republicans will eat him for breakfast. He won't even have time to make a good speech about it.

But this may be a bit harsh. Senator Obama has a big heart, and that heart is in the right place. Is he electable? Will more than 50% of America vote for him? We'd like to believe they would. We'd like to believe America has changed, wouldn't we? Obama lets us feel better about ourselves -- and as we look out the window at the guy snowplowing his driveway across the street, we want to believe he's changed, too. But are we dreaming?

And then there's John Edwards.

It's hard to get past the hair, isn't it? But once you do -- and recently I have chosen to try -- you find a man who is out to take on the wealthy and powerful who have made life so miserable for so many. A candidate who says things like this: "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy." Whoa. We haven't heard anyone talk like that in a while, at least not anyone who is near the top of the polls. I suspect this is why Edwards is doing so well in Iowa, even though he has nowhere near the stash of cash the other two have. He won't take the big checks from the corporate PACs, and he is alone among the top three candidates in agreeing to limit his spending and be publicly funded. He has said, point-blank, that he's going after the drug companies and the oil companies and anyone else who is messing with the American worker. The media clearly find him to be a threat, probably because he will go after their monopolistic power, too. This is Roosevelt/Truman kind of talk. That's why it's resonating with people in Iowa, even though he doesn't get the attention Obama and Hillary get -- and that lack of coverage may cost him the first place spot tomorrow night. After all, he is one of those white guys who's been running things for far too long.

And he voted for the war. But unlike Senator Clinton, he has stated quite forcefully that he was wrong. And he has remorse. Should he be forgiven? Did he learn his lesson? Like Hillary and Obama, he refused to promise in a September debate that there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of his first term in 2013. But this week in Iowa, he changed his mind. He went further than Clinton and Obama and said he'd have all the troops home in less than a year.

Edwards is the only one of the three front-runners who has a universal health care plan that will lead to the single-payer kind all other civilized countries have. His plan doesn't go as fast as I would like, but he is the only one who has correctly pointed out that the health insurance companies are the enemy and should not have a seat at the table.

I am not endorsing anyone at this point. This is simply how I feel in the first week of the process to replace George W. Bush. For months I've been wanting to ask the question, "Where are you, Al Gore?" You can only polish that Oscar for so long. And the Nobel was decided by Scandinavians! I don't blame you for not wanting to enter the viper pit again after you already won. But getting us to change out our incandescent light bulbs for some irritating fluorescent ones isn't going to save the world. All it's going to do is make us more agitated and jumpy and feeling like once we get home we haven't really left the office.

On second thought, would you even be willing to utter the words, "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy?" 'Cause the candidate who understands that, and who sees it as the root of all evil -- including the root of global warming -- is the President who may lead us to a place of sanity, justice and peace.

Just Looking for an Honest Monster

You gotta have some respect for a monster that succeeds whether or not it wins.

It's kind of like a monster that drops but rises.

It's kind of like a war that's never been declared, for weapons that aren't there, against people that are dead but don't count as dead.

Me, I'm just looking for an honest monster, you know, the kind there's no questions about, the kind that you know where they stand. Or whatever.



¡El Gato Negro! does a good takedown on a puff piece The New York Pravda ran last week by Roger Cohen.

There's nothing like a NeoCon second stringer.

Cohen does a no-no the Mustache of Understanding and certainly William the Bloody would never do: he admits the 9/11 wrecking crew was originally CIA-funded. If not taking some scratch from the Company when they did the dirty deed.

This is something they Do Not talk about these days. The memory that the CIA started up Osama against the Rooskies years ago is left for conspiracy theorists and Tom Hanks to make feel good movies about, and not casually bandied about in public. The monsters in charge don't like the Faithful to see even their vaguest outlines.

The Distraction

Bob Herbert writes an interesting summary of 1968 that may, alas, have homology with 2008.

...One of the astonishing things about 1968 was how quickly each shocking, consciousness-altering event succeeded the last, leaving no time for people to reorient themselves. The mind-boggling occurrences seemed to come out of nowhere, like the Viet Cong who set off a depth charge beneath the Johnson presidency with the Tet offensive at the end of January.

When Walter Cronkite learned of the coordinated wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam by the Cong and North Vietnamese regulars he is reported to have said: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war.”

The nation shuddered. The U.S. had never lost a war, but now men padding around in black pajamas and flip-flops fashioned from discarded tires gave every appearance of battling the mightiest military on earth to a stalemate.

The New Hampshire primary was March 12. Eugene McCarthy, a quiet, cerebral and sometimes flaky senator from Minnesota who was calling for a negotiated settlement of the war, electrified the country and exposed the president’s political vulnerability by finishing second with 42 percent of the vote.

Within days, Bobby Kennedy, who had only recently said he could see no circumstances in which he would challenge Johnson, was challenging him. McCarthy was furious. Johnson was traumatized.

By the end of the month, Johnson had abandoned the race.

Euphoria reigned — among young people, and those opposed to the war, and those who believed that ordinary people of good will could change the world. For many, it was the peak moment of the 1960s.

It lasted just four days.

On April 3, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. Violence erupted in dozens of cities, and especially in Washington, where a number of people were killed and the fires were the worst the city had experienced since the British took the torch to it in 1814.

John J. Lindsay of Newsweek magazine said that when Bobby Kennedy was told that King had died, he put his hands to his face and murmured: “Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?”

Kennedy himself was murdered two months later. I remember people not knowing what to say. The madness had been unleashed, and there seemed no way to rein it in.

There was much more to come, more war, the orgy of police violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the razor-thin election of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew over Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie in November.

But an awful lot of people tuned out after Kennedy was killed. That seemed to be when, for so many, the hope finally died. The nation has never really recovered from the bullet that killed R.F.K.

Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Kennedy, quotes Richard Harwood of The Washington Post:

“We discovered in 1968 this deep, almost mystical bond that existed between Robert Kennedy and the Other America. It was a disquieting experience for reporters. ... We were forced to recognize in Watts and Gary and Chimney Rock that the real stake in the American political process involves not the fate of speechwriters and fund-raisers, but the lives of millions of people seeking hope out of despair.”

Hope and despair, hung on a cult of personality, are the carrot and the stick used to make people dance to the song of those who would rule it all.

Happy New Year! Hot enough for you?

The heat in Iraq just doesn't go away.

SOUTHERN DEMILITARIZED ZONE, Iraq -- On the "Highway of Death," 11 miles north of the Kuwait border, a collection of tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military vehicles are rusting in the desert.

They also are radiating nuclear energy.

In 1991, the United States and its Persian Gulf War allies blasted the vehicles with armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium -- the first time such weapons had been used in warfare -- as the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait. The devastating results gave the highway its name.

Today, nearly 12 years after the use of the super-tough weapons was credited with bringing the war to a swift conclusion, the battlefield remains a radioactive toxic wasteland -- and depleted uranium munitions remain a mystery.

Although the Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, Iraqi doctors believe that it is responsible for a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in the region. Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations, agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans.

Depleted uranium is a problem in other former war zones as well. Yesterday, U.N. experts said they found radioactive hot spots in Bosnia resulting from the use of depleted uranium during NATO air strikes in 1995...

That was in November 2002. The Quiet in Iraq about this has only increased: with the addition of the Information War on Terror, you'd expect to hear nothing more about it.

And you don't.

...Depleted uranium, known as DU, is a highly dense metal that is the byproduct of the process during which fissionable uranium used to manufacture nuclear bombs and reactor fuel is separated from natural uranium. DU remains radioactive for about 4.5 billion years.

...DU shell holes in the vehicles along the Highway of Death are 1,000 times more radioactive than background radiation, according to Geiger counter readings done for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Dr. Khajak Vartaanian, a nuclear medicine expert from the Iraq Department of Radiation Protection in Basra, and Col. Amal Kassim of the Iraqi navy.

The desert around the vehicles was 100 times more radioactive than background radiation; Basra, a city of 1 million people, some 125 miles away, registered only slightly above background radiation level.

One can't help but wonder where Dr. Khajak Vartaanian and Col. Amal Kassim are today.

One can't help but wonder what the background radiation of Basra is today.

The easily fissible form of uranium, ²³⁵U, is removed from uranium to leave a dense, hard metal (at room temperature) that ignites and burns furiously in an explosion. So depleted uranium is the casing of choice for kinetic weapons, and has been used extensively in Iraq. It is only weakly radioactive and impossible to detect using a Geiger counter, which relies upon radioactive particles to ionize a gas in the detector, generating a current signal. The positvely charged alpha particle emitted by uranium isoope decay is very weak, and hardly penetrates the wall of the Geiger counter.

So what are the doctor and the Colonel detecting?

All uranium isotopes emit neutrons as they decay, which are uncharged and penetrating, until they hit another atomic nucleus.

Isotopes half-life.... half-life.... particle
²³²U.... 68.9 y....... α & SF
²³³U.... 159,200 y.... SF & α
²³⁴U.... 245,500 y.... SF & α
²³⁵U.... 7.038×10⁸ y.... SF & α
²³⁶U.... 2.342×10⁷ y.... SF & α
²³⁸U.... 4.468×10⁹ y.... SF & α

Where SF stands for spontaneous fission.

Let's repeat that. All uranium isotopes emit neutrons as they decay, it's only the ²³⁵U that can be coaxed into an artificial chain reaction.

So what happens as the uranium oxide dust remaining after a uranium munition is burned decays? It makes the atoms around it radioactive as a released uncharged neutron hits the adjacent atomic nuclei. This induces secondary ionization and chemical reactions in the tissue the uranium oxide slowly decays.

I say "in the tissue" because uranium oxide, like silicon oxide, stays in your lungs if it lands there. Or in your kidneys if it gets into your bloodstream through your gut. For the rest of your life, making your tissue radioactive. It's notoriously hard to detect because uranium doesn't produce a lot of primary ionizing radiation, and the radioactive secondary elements it produces are easily excreted. After they've done their damage.

Hence this post of mine from 3 years ago, and this one too. But this problem looks like its going to be around for a few billion years, so it's probably a good idea to keep writing about it. You certainly aren't going to hear a word about it from your government.