Corporate Watchdogs's topics - tribe.net

Back UP, Obama-fans

2009-12-10T00:44:53Z

The President is Executive of the United States and its laws.

The Presidents are RIOTERS, since the illegal, secret and overt treaties, with UK, to illegally favor by fascist conspiracy and against our royal favors exclusion clause:

FOR, illegally: WINDSOR (since Victoria), SAUD (appointed by Windsor), DAVID (illegal Israeli and non-kosher RICO Zionists, whereby actual Jews are from Ethiopia, Isaiah 20:5, no doubt of fraud, by any other origin, to incite the several world wars), TSARS (US purchased Alaska in bad faith, to thwart the coming revolutionary republic, by invading Russia, with the AEF), and VATICAN, a fascist organ of Rome

AGAINST, illegally: SPAIN, ASIAN ROYALS, AFRICAN ROYALS, ARAB ROYALS, and all other royalty and republics

The USA co-opted British crusades, and by illegal interest taints the President.

The Presidency has been unviable since the 1893 coups against Hawaii, to incite WWI and the following start, to WWII.

The President has been a seditious conspirator, since the passage of the Sedition Act, 18 U.S.C. 2384.

The President WOULD BE and COULD BE a traitor, but the riot and inciters have profiteered by distorting the very nature of WAR, which is not evident, and so, SHARIA.

No sharia terror would issue, but for the President of the USA being so sold out and at such disrespect for law, Barack Obama and John McCain both tried to lose the last election, by letting SAMUEL JOSEPH WURZELBACHER III take up an entire half hour, of Debate III.

Joe owed $1200 to the IRS, which he paid, AFTER the November 3, 2008 election.

Naturally, Mr.Obama's Grandma Maddie Dunham called him home and called him a Kenyan, and then she died, of her cancer, in despair, at his corruption.

The creepy, rioting Americans impose 50 senates on the cost-structure of the entire world. Only Nebraska has no state senate, and so is relatively safe, for a new capitol, when the tsunamis caused by the impending La Palma eruption wash over Maine to Miami and all over the Atlantic area. Note the design of the Washington Monument, which suggests how the NW part of La Palma will fall into the water, like the marble column, which is a mere fraction of the size of the large object, about to splash-down.

See the pool, at the Capitol? The whole place will get wet. Ask Ben Franklin.

Obama lost Prop.8 and Arizona's Governorship, by trying to out-dive better Bush-pilots, which know the leading cause of death in Alaska is bush-piloting, mixed, with alcohol.

Obama opposed the duly appointed Roland Burris, and so incited Catholic cops to riot and mayhem, and to murder several young black men, around New Year 2009.

John Burris had his secretary blow me off, and OPD and BART hung up on me, that first week, of 2009. None report riot to press or to court, which suppress facts and discovery, to obstruct justice, in grave error. California may collapse, over this.

The President will not admit JEWS ARE FROM ETHIOPIA, and so, he intends to incite the expected assassination of any several persons, by plane crashes, ten years after 9/11/2001, which equals 23, if added sideways, which math is dire, by 2011.

Note the trend to ten-year disasters, since the 1882 invasion of Palestine and the Intifada of 1926, see KRYSTALNACHT, 1936, with the CIA appointment of the Shah in 1953, with Saddam in 1958, as incitement for assassination of Zionist President Kennedy in 1963 and his brother Robert, in 1968.

The President of the United States is a nuisance, an inciter to riot, an aggravated violator of 18 U.S.C. 371, conspiracy to interagency fraud, which with profiteering by decree violates all by BILLS OF ATTAINDER, at riot, CPC 404, in California, and by incitement, CPC 404.6(a).

The USA distorts all persons and things, since fixing the War of 1812 to end, after peace was declared in 1814, and the British made up for burning D.C. by sending their troops, deliberately, into Andrew Jackson's guns, without attacking the US artillery.

The current President is of the NIXON regimes, which fixed all media, when Richard Milhous Nixon was Vice President, under Dwight D. Eisenhower. All riot, unrestrained.

The music is all ripped off by government and corporate gangsters into actually illegal warrantless surveillance, and so when DAVID BOWIE overproduced Nixon feeds, he was able to profile attorneys, by suing VANILLA ICE off a jam, which any several fakers eventually used, as dupe media, proving all attorneys were churned, into the riot.

Time-Warner duped warrantless survellance IP, for AC-ZZ and for all kinds of movies, commercials, concerts, and false processes.

By referring to Nixon in YOUNG AMERICANS (1978), Bowie foreshadowed US and UK conspiracy, to defraud Iran of its assets and me, of my music, and to then oppress me and a class, for notice and relief, and to wage war, illegally, against Iran and China, since the BRITS had their TITS twisted by Saladin, in 1187, and dropped their loads beside the roads, went away contented, and plotted, to two invasions, of CHINA and of SHIITES, to control all territory, or British Crusaders and other Vatican clowns would be routed from Jerusalem, repeatedly.

NO ATTORNEY WILL CHALLENGE BUSH, OBAMA, OR THE RIOT, since Jerry Brown slept with Linda Ronstadt, back when the California A/G was Governor and regularly running for President. But the Islamic Republic of Iran, People's Republic of China, or others may sue.

The President is such a nuisance, the debt-holder nations can sue him down, or force his resignation, or cause Congress to discover his several seditions, OR THE DEBT MAY BE CANCELLED, FOR CAUSE. Hear AC-DC? HEY! CDC! No coffee at county jails, DUDES!

Mr.Obama needs to do some time, out here in California, after he gets impeached, or we have a problem, with him flying in, from Houston.

Notice how the Ming Dynasty's WHITE FLEET sailed around the world, in the 1430s, but in the course of this lost at least one sailor with gear, to England, which took any gun-powder AND the triangular arrowheads, for use by Robin of Loxley's longbowmen.

Their reign was short, and so any Chinese moved to France, where the crossbow emerged, as a way for Europe to kill, liberally, in continental wars of the day.

Isabella of Spain wised up, and sent Columbus to Hispaniola and two other locales, where he discovered wrecked Chinese and their descendants. Think you can throw a fast one, past SF Giants' 3B Pablo Sandoval? Kung Fu Panda is a clever hitter, dude.

Think you can sue your way, into the Houston Rockets' lineup? Yao trumps Obama.

Clowning contemner CHARLEY WONG has a kiddie TV show, based in Taiwan, with contraband tunes, he took from the same source, which Van Halen sang about, as in, 'I heard the news, all about your disease (cancer, as in the big C, at CAL, Berkeley, where the song was first played, and then ripped, by Nixon-Windsor surveillance).

The FRUITY PIE show features young faces, which actors have, from actual connection, to other land-bridge Asians, brought to China, now Taipeiese. See the POUNDCAKE graphic, at the beginning of the show? If not, get a clue, why DAN HALEN is a cartoon, late at night.

All the rock is stolen. Obama's whores campaigned on a billion dollar bubble, for two and a half years!

This comic KNOWS, how warrantless electronic surveillance worked, to cause the Democrats and the Emmanuel Brothers to seek crackhead Barack H. Obama, from Greenwich Village, and get him into Harvard, thereby inspiring MTV's JACKASS.

Steve O looks like Ari had a kid with Rahm, but they are bastards, so Steve is all tatted up, but his premise is Ari and Rahm are not really related.

Wee Man's premise is Ari of the CIA had a kid with Hillary, who he is related to, so Wee is short. Johnny Knoxville's premise is Mike Emmanuel of CNN did himself in a test-tube, since that is what Johnny looked like, a Mike. Reconstitute cokehead Bam Margeram's nose, into crackhead Obama's nose, with a magic mirror, since Obama's mole on his identical nose is on the left. Viva La Bam has a mole, on the right.

They all chase Bushwick Billy and Beetlejuice, on the Stern Show, since Obama intends to take his AF1 black box down, to the Atlantic Trench, like the Air France jet, which crashed when he went to France over D-Day 2009 and let a Honduran coups go down.

Calling Sioux and other natives 'Indians' is a conspiracy against commerce and business, and against fundamental rights. A person may SUE, for cause, hereby.

The USA may not attack the last Emperor with Steve McQueen, and then leave the door open, for the CIA to over-fly by B-24 Liberators, from Tibet and Taiwan, to start the Korean War and to incite taking of Tibet.

The US established a Pusan, then a Yalu perimeter, and was blasted back, to Inchon and to Parallel 38, the third and absolutely unresolved invasion, of China, by the USA.

The PRC may not harbor cause of action against the USA, contaminate processes in the USA and in the several states, accumulate debt, and thereby enable riot and incitement by illegal administrations, and so host President Nixon and his followers.

By making a movie, called INCHON, Sun Myung-Moon slyly intimated, he knows the moon has risen, over the illegal US-UK Empire and the United Nations, illegally chartered, to support Israel and to violate the same US Constitution, which was not violated as royal favors exclusion clause or any other clause, when the US stayed out of the League of Nations, since the UK intended to start an Imperial Crusade, and did so, to contaminate all US process of law, so now all persons and US land are at riot.

At riot, the USA allows the PRC, South Korea, and actual enemies England and Japan to riot, fix winnable wars, and then to undermine commerce and peace, and pretend commerce is served, by illegal debt accumulation, which will never be repaid, by conspiracy to profiteer and to obstruct justice.

NO PRESIDENT MAY RIOT AND INCITE, AND CONSPIRE, WITH ANY NATION, WHICH PLAYS AT COWBOYS AND INDIANS, TO KILL US CITIZENS AND ITS OWN, WITH THE RIOT.

The President is a review evader, for high crimes and misdemeanors, and for manslaughter and incitement, to mayhem and riot, unrestrained.

Resign or be sued, MR.OBAMA and your fans, and your Republican 'friends,' actually co-conspirators, for issuance of any order to chill or desist, and to disband.

Tiger seems to have hit the wrong pedals, at an odd anniversary, you know?

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Dreaming the NEW American Dream

2009-04-04T17:03:58Z

California poets Ava Bird & Rex Butters, and....

Santa Cruz artist Russell Brutsche - Karen Kwiatkowski of Virginia

Protests to stop immigration raids ... and more.
____________________

http://www.newamericandream.net

The New American Dream

What's New?

* Karen Kwiatkowski column
* Ava Bird poetry
* Rex Butters poetry
* Gary Mennie poetry

Columns:
Sherwood Ross — why not shut down a few prisons in the United States as well?
Mickey Z — Americans are cowards, too comfortable, will never-ever-not-in-one-million-years revolt-or-even-bother-to-stand-up — no matter what the rich folks do to them.
Lydia Sems — It's The American Dream that is the problem.

and more from Jack Saunders ...

Resistance:
* Planned civil disobedience in Minnesota to stop raids against immigrants
* Protests at Creech AFB against U.S. drone terroristic activity
*100 days of protest against Guantanamo to culminate

All this, Northern Exposure, The Big Lebowski, Paradise by the Dashboard Lights ... a certificate for free toast ... and more.

Join us.

The New American Dream
Dude.
... because ... Sister Mary Anne told us, "There are no wrong questions, if you don't know the answers."

... from the Dream Team

http://www.newamericandream.net

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Do you know of any web sites, that should be on our list?

2008-08-07T06:13:22Z

Hi Gang. I have been busy starting a tribe that is simply a list of must see web sites that powerful people hope we will never see. Sites about corporate corruption, government corruption, Rip offs and sleazy business practices, art with a message, important documentaries on line and access to information you won't find on the 6:00 news.

If you know of any sites, you think should be on the list, please post it here.
http://tribes.tribe.net/importantwebsites

Thanks everybody. I am looking forward to seeing what interesting sites you post.

Leslee

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Wal-Mart Tells Managers How to Vote

2008-08-01T15:54:52Z

MSNBC 8/1/8

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing U.S. store managers to lobby against Democrats in November's presidential election, fearing they will make it easier for workers to unionize, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if store workers unionize, the paper said.

About a dozen employees who attended meetings in seven states said executives argued employees would have to pay hefty union dues and get nothing in return, and might have to go on strike without compensation. They also warned that unionization could force the company to cut jobs as labor costs rise, the Journal reported.

The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who have run the meetings didn't tell those attending how to vote in the November elections, but made it clear that voting for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, would be tantamount to inviting unions in, the Journal said.

Wal-Mart opposes proposed legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize by signing a card rather than holding a vote.

A Wal-Mart spokesman confirmed the meetings to the Journal.

"If anyone representing Wal-Mart gave the impression we were telling associates how to vote, they were wrong and acting without approval," David Tovar, the Wal-Mart spokesman, told the Journal.

Wal-Mart Watch, a union-backed group that often takes issue with labor practices at the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer, argued that the meetings were just the latest example of bad behavior toward employees.

"Today's Wall Street Journal story demonstrates once again that Wal-Mart intimidates its workers," Executive Director David Nassar said in an e-mailed statement.

The Journal, citing figures from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive politics, said that 12 years ago, 98 percent of Wal-Mart's political donations went to Republicans. Now, with Democrats appearing poised to gain more clout in Washington, the Journal said the 48 percent of its $2.2 million in political contributions go to Democrats and 52 percent to Republicans

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Conspiracy History compilation DVDs torrents

2008-03-06T14:43:35Z

**************************************************

Greetings to all my relations.

This is the last step of our project History Watch. If History is
defined and known by the texts, we can now add to this definition the
recorded events of the filmed archives. Animated images are harder to
deny than printed words. Our objective is to spread out freely some of
the little broadcast, even hidden informations about our collective
History.

We put online a collection of 391 documentaries and other selected and
recut videos, to offer to a wide public the best of the infos
available on the net in english and in french. If you are interested,
you have the time, the right equipment and connection, all you have to
do is open the joint document and decompress it if needed (but normaly
your system should do it automaticaly). You'll find therein nine links
that will open the torrents for the nine DVDs we compiled (around 4.6
Gig each, for a total of a little over 41 G, being over 100 hours of
videos).

Otherwise, you can go directly to btjunkie.com and search for these titles.

11 Septembre 2001 - 9-11
Bush family & friends
Capitalist & Communist regimes
Capitalist conspiracy
Mind Kontrol - Secret Programs
New World Order - Secret Societies
Secret services - cover up - covert ops
Secret weapons - UFO
Terrorism Theories propaganda

Torrents are a system of peer to peer data transfer. The more people
download a torrent, the faster it spreads and the longer it stays on
the net. If you don't have a bittorrent software, we suggest that you
download uTorrent on utorrent.com. If you want to participate in
facilitating the diffusion of these infos about our collective
History, download these torrents on as many computers as possible,
whether it is in cybercafes. It takes one or two minutes to open up
the links and the downloading will keep proceeding on its own.

Please spread this out, take part in this action for social education
on a planetary scale. Thanks.

For more info: watch.history@gmail.com History Watch

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Has anyone here had this experience?

2008-02-11T06:16:50Z

Has anyone here had this experience?

Has anyone here felt that maybe they were being attacked and lied about, by a corporation on tribes? I have reason to believe that might be happening to me. If so how did it play out? Any recommendations? These people play really dirty. I do not wish to do the same. But if there was a way to expose them for who they are that would be great.

http://tribes.tribe.net/depressionhelp

See
On defending Depression Help

DepressionTribe.tribe.net/threa...22d294

http://DepressionTribe.tribe.net/thread/0241f054-1310-4a3b-b175-d1808022d294

I believe they are trying to scare people off from reading our tribe which gives lots of evidence about the drug industry.

Thanks

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen

2007-12-17T16:51:42Z

Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 14, 2007

Ohio's Secretary of State announced this morning that a $1.9 million official study shows that "critical security failures" are embedded throughout the voting systems in the state that decided the 2004 election. Those failures, she says, "could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State." They have rendered Ohio's vote counts "vulnerable" to manipulation and theft by "fairly simple techniques."

Indeed, she says, "the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant."

In other words, Ohio's top election official has finally confirmed that the 2004 election could have been easily stolen.

Brunner's stunning findings apply to electronic voting machines used in 58 of Ohio's 88 counties, in addition to scanning devices and central tabulators used on paper ballots in much of the rest of the state.

Brunner is calling for widespread changes to the way Ohio casts and counts its ballots. Her announcement follows moves by California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen to disqualify electronic voting machines in the nation's biggest state.

In tandem, these two reports add a critical state-based dimension to the growing mountain of evidence that the US electoral system is rife with insecurities. Reports from the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers Committee Task Force Report, Princeton University and others have offered differing perspectives that add up to the same conclusion.

Coming in the state that decided the 2004 election for George W. Bush, Brunner's confirmation of the electoral system's vulnerabilities adds huge new weight to the charge that the Buckeye State's vote count was stolen.

In a series of investigative reports dating to well before the 2004 election, the Columbus Free Press and Freepress.org have documented several dozen different means used by the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign to steal the official 2004 vote count.

The final official tally for Bush---less than 119,000 votes out of 5.4 million cast---varied by 6.7% from exit poll results, which showed a Kerry victory. Exit polls in 2004 were designed to have a margin of error of about 1%.

In various polling stations in Democrat-rich inner city precincts in Youngstown and Columbus, voters who pushed touch screens for Kerry saw Bush's name light up. A wide range of discrepancies on both electronic and paper balloting systems leaned almost uniformly toward the Bush camp. Voting procedures regularly broke down in inner city and campus areas known to be heavily Democratic.

In direct violation of standing federal election law, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties have since destroyed all or part of their 2004 election data. The materials were additionally protected by a federal court injunction in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff). To date, no state or federal prosecutions have resulted from this wholesale destruction of presidential election records, including 1.6 million ballots, cast and uncast, needed for definitive auditing procedures. However, two Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) election officials have been convicted of felony manipulation of an official recount. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the state's largest newspaper, recently editorialized that there is "no evidence" the 2004 election was stolen, but omitted mention of the destruction of the electoral records by more than half the counties in the state. The Plain-Dealer and other mainstream media have consistently ignored findings by the Free Press and others indicating widespread manipulation and theft of the kind Brunner has now confirmed was eminently do-able within the Ohio system.

Brunner says "the results underscore the need for a fundamental change in the structure of Ohio's election system to ensure ballot and voting system security while still making voting convenient and accessible to all Ohio voters." Among other things, she advocates replacing touch-screen machines with optical-scan units that include a paper balloting system.

The study was managed by the Battelle Corporation, and conducted by Columbus-based MicroSolved Inc., SysTest Labs of Denver along with a consortium of academic subcontractors. It was reviewed by a dozen county officials, and included scrutiny of voting systems produced by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Hart Intercivic and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold).

Brunner is the Democratic successor to Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, who administered the 2004 election as Secretary of State while also serving as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. The report comes as part of her pledge to guarantee a fair and reliable vote count in the upcoming 2008 presidential election.

Under Blackwell, Ohio spent some $100 million installing electronic voting machines as part of the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the scandals surrounding the 2000 election. Former Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, HAVA's principle author, now resides in a federal prison, in part for illegalities surrounding his dealings with voting machine companies.

Blackwell, who was defeated in a 2006 race for the Ohio governorship, outsourced web hosting responsibilities for the 2004 vote count to a programming firm that also programmed the web site for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign. Blackwell's chosen host site for the state's vote count was in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the servers for the Republican National Committee, and the Bush White House, were also located.

Brunner has now recommended that all Ohio's voting be done on optical scan ballots, with reliance on central tabulation. Voters with disabilities could use AutoMark machines with bar coding devices that allow the marking of ballots with little or no additional assistance.

"It's a testament to our state's boards of elections officials that elections on the new (federally) mandated voting systems have gone as smoothly as they have in light of these findings," Brunner said.

Conversely, it is also a testament to the ease with which the 2004 election was stolen by election officials who had clear conflicts of interest aimed at keeping George W. Bush in the White House.

--
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org) and of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? (The New Press) with Steve Rosenfeld. THE FITRAKIS FILES are available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2920

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

The Aim of the Financiers: A One-World Government with a One-World Currency

2007-12-10T14:03:21Z

The Aim of the Financiers: A One-World Government with a One-World Currency
By Alain Pilote

The following article is one of the appendices of Louis Even's new book, "In This Age of Plenty":

The basic flaw of the present financial system is that the banks create money as a debt, charging interest on the money that they create. The obligation for the debtor countries to repay the banks money that the banks did not create, money that does not exist, brings about unpayable debts. The Financiers know quite well that it is impossible for these countries to repay their debts, that the present financial system is defective at its base, and that it can only bring about crises and revolutions. But this is exactly what they want!

As Clifford Hugh Douglas, the founder of the Social Credit school, said: "The Money Power does not, and never did, want to improve the money system - its consequences in war, sabotage and social friction are exactly what is desired.". Why?

It is because the Financiers believe that they are the only ones capable of governing mankind properly, and in order to be able to impose their will upon every individual and control the whole world, they invented the present debt-money system. They want to bring every nation in the world to such a state of crisis that these countries will think they have no alternative but to accept the miracle solution of the Financiers to save them from disaster: complete centralization, a single world currency, and a one-world government, in which all nations will be abolished, or forced to give up their sovereignty.

The Trilateral Commission
There are three major economic areas in the world: Europe, North America, and the Far East (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.). If, under the pretext of having to join forces to be able to face economic competition with the two other economic regions, the member countries of each of these three regions decide to merge into one single country, forming three Super-States, then the one-world government will be almost achieved.

This is exactly what is taking place now, and being promoted by the Trilateral Commission, founded in July, 1973, by David Rockefeller, the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York. The official aim of the Trilateral Commission is "to harmonize the political, economic, social, and cultural relations between the three major economic regions in the world (hence the name "Trilateral"). This aim is almost achieved in Europe with the Single European Act that was implemented in 1993, requiring all the member countries of the European Community to abolish their trade barriers, and to hand over their monetary and fiscal policies to the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. By 1999, all these countries are supposed to share only one currency, the "Euro".

As regards the North American area, the merger of its member countries is well under way with the passage of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), first between Canada and the U.S.A., ant which later also included Mexico. (By the next ten years, it is supposed to include all of the Americas) There is a strong pressure to force these countries to harmonize their fiscal policies, and as it happened in Europe, economic union will inevitably lead to political union.

In front of these two gigantic economic powers, the countries of the Far East will have no choice but to join forces together and merge, to be able to compete with North America and Europe in the field of international trade.

One-world currency -- the "Mark of the Beast"??

To consolidate their power, the Financiers also want to eliminate every existing national currency, and to install a one-world currency. In the 1970s, Dr. Hanrick Eldeman, Chief Analyst of the Common Market Confederacy in Brussels, unveiled a plan to "straighten out world chaos": a three-story computer located in the administrative building of the headquarters of the Common Market, in Brussels, Belgium. People who work there call it "the Beast". The plan implies a system of digital enumeration of each human being on earth. Thus the computer would give each inhabitant of the world a number to be used for each purchase or sale. This number would be invisibly tattooed by laser (or implanted with a microchip) either on the forehead or on the back of the hand. This would establish a walking credit card system.

And the number could be seen only through infrared scanners, installed in special verification countries or in business places. Dr. Eldeman pointed out that by using three entries of six digits each, every inhabitant of the world would be given a distinct credit card number.

This reminds us strangely of what Saint John the Apostle wrote in the Book of Revelation (13:16-18): "And he (the Beast) shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freemen and slaves, to receive a mark on their right hands, or on their foreheads, and that none might buy or sell, unless he carried this mark, which was the beast's name, or the number that stands for his name. Here is wisdom; he that has understanding, let him count the number of the beast. For it is the number of a man: and the number of him is six hundred and sixty-six".

That man will be the Pope of Rome who will be incarnate by Satan as he incarnate the Serpent, a man-like creature, in the garden of Eden, and Judas Iscariot in the days of Christ's flesh. The main title and claim of the Pope is "Vicarivs Filii Dei" which means "In place of the Son of God", or "Substitute for the Holy Ghost". The letters of this title with numeric values in the old Roman system add up to 666. Thus:
V = 005
I = 001
C = 100
A = 000
R = 000
I = 001
V = 005
S = 000

F = 000
I = 001
L = 500
I = 001
I = 001

D = 050
E = 000
I = 001
Total = 666

Debit cards
A few decades ago, before the invention of computers and microchips, such a system would have seemed far-fetched, a product of science fiction. But now everyone knows about the existence of debit cards with which you can buy anything in stores, without the need to carry any cash on you, the amount of your purchase being debited automatically from your bank account. The avowed goal of the banks is to eliminate all cash, and to force people to use debit cards as the only means of payment.

There is always the risk of losing one's debit card, or of having somebody else illegally use it. So here comes the ultimate solution: to link people personally to their card, so there is no way they can lose it or have it stolen! And there you have it: a micro-computer chip can be implanted under your skin, or a three six-digital unit can be tattooed on your skin...just as described in Saint John's Book of Revelation.

Actually, the mark in the right hand signifies obeying the will, and the mark in the forehead implies receiving the doctrine of the "Beast". The Beast will be the Pope of Rome who will be incarnate by Satan when he is cast down to earth at the close of the Gentile dispensation.

Everything will be in place for a government that wants to control everybody's move, since they will know everything about you: all that you buy, where and when you buy it, who you phone, how much money you have, will all be inscribed on this card. And if, for whatever reason, you are classified as an "undesirable person" or as an "enemy of the State" by the government, they will only have to erase your number from the central computer, and you will no longer be able to buy or sell (and thus be condemned to disappear before long).

The Illuminati
This quest for a world government has been going on for a long time. For example, on Feb. 17, 1953, Financier Paul Warburg said before the U.S. Senate: "We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent." This quest for world domination can be traced back to the creation of the "Illuminati", a secret society, in 1776. Their leader, Adam Weishaupt, wrote out the master plan to bring about the subjection of the whole human race to an oligarchy of Financiers. The word "Illuminati" is derived from Lucifer and means "holders of the light".

As surprising as it may seems, the insignia of the Order of the Illuminati appears on the reverse side of U.S. one-dollar bills. The first time it appeared was in 1933, by order of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the beginning of the New Deal (the name given to Roosevelt's political reforms of that time).

One can read at the base of the 13-story pyramid, the year 1776 (MDCCLXVI in Roman numerals). Most of the people think that it represents the date of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, but it actually memorializes the foundation of the Order of the Illuminati, which was on May 1, 1776. (Note the Zionist-Communist May Day connection).

The pyramid represents the conspiracy for the destruction of the Catholic Church (and all existing religions"), and the establishment of a one-world government, or a United Nations dictatorship. The eye radiating in all directions, is the "all-spying" eye that symbolizes the terroristic, Gestapo-like, espionage agency that Weishaupt set up to guard the "secret of the Order and to terrorize the populace into the acceptance of its rule". The Latin words "ANNUIT COEPTIS" translate to "Announcing the creation or beginning". Below them, "NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM" translates to a "New secular order" and the year is written in Roman numerals at the base of the Pyramid.

Manly Palmer Hall explained the symbolism otherwise. He said, Annuit Coeptis means "He (NOT the Christian God) has smiled upon our endeavours". The capstone or triangle signifies science, NOT spirituality, and that the scroll underneath, bearing the inscription "Novus Ordo Seclorum" indicates the nature of the enterprise: a "New order of the ages", an order of science and knowledge as opposed to Christian (morality) superstition and fear.

This insignia was adopted by the U.S. Congress as the reverse of the seal of the United States on September 15, 1789. (The obverse side of the seal bears the eagle, which is used as the official seal and coat of arms of the U.S.A., and which is also shown on the reverse side of the U.S. $1.00 bills).

The appearance of this insignia of the Illuminati on U.S., one-dollar bills in 1933 meant that the followers of Weishaupt regarded their efforts as beginning to "be crowned with success," and that they totally controlled the U.S. Government.

The pyramid is a symbol of the Knights Templar of Freemasonry and a Zionist symbol and the Hexgram is used by Royal Arch Masons which is part of York Rite Masonry also a Zionist symbol. The two seals of the "Great Seal" combines symbolism of all Masonic Orders. The Eagle is a symbol of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

Proof the Great Seal is Masonic
First outline the pyramid with a triangle. Now take the pyramid and draw a line under the base of the capstone and extend it left to right extended to the A in ANNUIT and the S in COEPTIS. Now draw lines from the end of this line down to the last O in ORDO so you will finsih the Hexagram also called the Jewish Star of David.

Draw circles around all five letters to which the Hexagram points. These letters make the word MASON. The 32 feathers on the left wing of the eagle signify the 32 degress of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. The right wing has 33 feathers for the extra 33rd honary degree and inner head of the Scottish Rite. George Washington himself on the front of the One Dollar Bill was a 33rd degree Scottish Rite Mason. The 9 tail feathers indicate the 9 additional degrees of the York Rite of Freemasonry. There are13 olives and 13 leaves on the olive branches, 13 arrows in the other eagle's claw, 13 stripes on the shield, 13 stars above the eagle in the form of a Hexagram, 13 letters in "E PLURIBUS UNUM", 13 letters in "ANNUIT COEPTIS", 13 rows of bricks in the pyramid. The 33rd degree Grand Lodge of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is located exactly 13 blocks north of the White House above an upside down pentagram oulined by the road layout which rests on the White House. See this link: http://www.cuttingedge.org/n1040.html

The use of the Hexagram and the Pentagram and even the 7 pointed star stems from Jewish Cabalism or mysticism which was adopted from paganism. The placement of the symbols on the American money etc. is no different then to displaying a cross on the back of a one dollar bill. But you will never see these religious symbols removed because the ACLU only attacks what it sees as Christian. Separation of Church and State is a farce. The law requiring the "Separation of CHURCH and State" might as well say "Separation of Christondom and State" because only religions calling themseves "Christian" use buildings called "Church".

Albert Pike was the founder of the KKK and one time leader of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Southern Jurisdiction. He himself protested the suggestion that Masonry was Christian and said that "if Masonry was Christian why were most of the people who had possession of it during the early days of the USA Hebrew"?

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Garage/4803/IWJindxf.html
http://www.hourofthetime.com/majestyt.htm
http://www.cuttingedge.org/fmcorner.html

A Luciferian conspiracy
To say that the Illuminati is a "Luciferian" conspiracy" is not only a stylistic device, but it is literally true, since the leaders of the Illuminati are actually worshipers of Satan, and their final objective is to have the whole world bow down to him. Through his hellhounds, it is Satan himself who continues his revolt against God by endeavoring to foil God's plan on earth, and to snatch from God as many souls as possible.

Just like Satan, the Financiers think that they are smarter than God, and that they are the only ones who can lead mankind properly. The members of the Illuminati are people of every race and creed, but who all lust for money and power.

Recognizing the powers involved
In the conclusion of his book "Pawns in the Game", which denounces the plot of the Illuminati for world domination, William Guy Carr explains what must be done to stop this plot.

First, we must as individuals recognize the spiritual powers involved, and realize that we are not only facing terrestrial powers, but also spiritual ones; that it is basically a fight between God and Satan. We must choose who we will serve, who we will fight for: God or Satan.

Second, we must take practical steps to counteract the plan of the Financiers which, in Mr. Carr's own words, can be done only through a monetary reform: "The electors must insist that the issue of money, and the control thereof, be placed back in the hands of the Government where it rightfully belongs."

The necessity for Social Credit
The prayers and sacrifices to obtain the assistance of Heaven are certainly necessary to thwart the plan of the Financiers. But a technique, a temporal means, is also necessary to thwart the plan of the Financiers. This means is the Social Credit reform, conceived by the Scottish engineer, Clifford Hugh Douglas, the only reform that the Financiers really fear, and that would put an end to their power to control all the nations. ("Social Credit" means social money - money created without debt by society, issued with new production, and withdrawn from circulation as production is consumed - instead of having a banking credit, as it is the case today - money created as a debt by private banks.)

Douglas first thought that once his discovery and its implications would be brought to the attention of the governments and of those in charge of the economy, they would hasten to implement it. But Douglas soon made another discovery: the Financiers, who ruled the economy, were absolutely not interested in changing the financial system, and its flaws and consequences (wars, waste, poverty, social friction etc.,) were absolutely what they desired, and even fostered deliberately, in order to impose their solution of a one-world government. So the Financiers did everything they could to stop and silence the Social Credit idea: a conspiracy of silence in the news media, or deliberate falsification of Douglas's doctrine, in order to render it vulnerable; calumnies and ridicule against the apostles of "Michael". Douglas wrote in his book "Warning Democracy":

"So rapid was the progress made by the Social Credit ideas between 1919 and 1923 both in this country (Great Britain) and abroad, and so constantly did ideas derived from them appear in the pages of the press, that the interests threatened by them became considerably alarmed, and took what were, on the whole, effective steps to curtail their publicity. In this country the Institute of Bankers allocated five million pounds (then the equivalent of 24 million dollars) to combat the 'subversive' ideas of ourselves and other misguided people who wished to thinker with the financial system. The large Press Associations were expressly instructed that my own name should not be mentioned in the public press, and no metropolitan newspaper in this country or the United States was allowed to give publicity, either to correspondence or to contributions bearing upon the subject. In spite of this Canadian Parliamentary Inquiry at which I was a witness (in 1923) managed to expose on the one hand the ignorance of even leading bankers of the fundamental problems with which they had to deal, and on the other hand the lengths to which the financial power was prepared to go to retain control of the situation."

One must not forget to mention here that the best way that the Financiers found to stop the advancement of the Social Credit idea was the creation of political parties falsely bearing the name "Social Credit", to make people think that voting for a new party is sufficient to change the system, whereas what is needed is the education of the people (by having them subscribe to the "Michael Journal"), to force the elected representatives to serve the population, instead of serving the Financiers. Fortunately, all the so-called "Social Credit parties" are dead and buried now, but they did a lot of damage and spread confusion in the minds of the people while they existed.

"The psychological moment"
Douglas predicted that the present debt-money system of the Bankers would become unworkable and fall by itself, because of all of the unpayable debts that it creates. All the countries in the world are struggling with skyrocketing debts and heading for disaster, even though everybody knows these debts can never be paid off. Other factors announce the inevitable fall of the present system: automation, for example, which makes full employment impossible.

Douglas said that "a psychological moment" will come, a critical moment when the population, given the gravity of the situation, and despite all the power of the Financiers, will have suffered their debt-money system long enough, and will be disposed to study and accept Social Credit. Douglas wrote the following in 1924, in his book "Social Credit":

"The position will be tremendous in its importance. A comparatively short period will probably serve to decide whether we are to master the mighty economic and social machine that we have created, or whether it is to master us; and during that period a small impetus from a body of men who know what to do and how to do it, may make the difference between yet one more retreat into the Dark Ages, or the emergence into the full light of a day of such splendor as we can at present only envisage dimly. It is this necessity for the recognition of the psychological moment, and the fitting to that moment of appropriate action, which should be present in the minds of that small minority which is seized of the gravity of the present times."

Louis Even, at the end of an article written in 1970 and entitled "Social Credit, yes - Party, No", repeated this idea of Douglas:

"The Social Crediters of the Michael Journal maintain, along with Douglas, that as regards Social Credit, the most effective work to do is to enlighten the population on the monopoly of financial credit, attributing to it the bad fruits of which it is the cause in the lives of people, of families, of institutions; and, in front of these bad fruits, to expose the doctrine of genuine Social Credit, which is so brilliant and in keeping with common sense. They also endeavor to develop within themselves, and to also radiate, a Social Credit spirit, which is clearly in keeping with the spirit of the Gospel: a spirit of service and not of domination, not of an insatiable pursuit of money or material goods, which is of the same nature - with a less powerful means - as the spirit of the barons of High Finance.

"Whether the collapse of the present financial system, under the weight of its own enormities, or events that have been foretold many times by privileged souls - events one certainly cannot doubt of when one sees the present decadence of moral standards, apostasy, the paganization of affluent nations that used to be Christian - occur soon, in either case, the living or the survivors of those events won't be without a light to establish a social economic system worthy of its name."

The point to remember in all of this is that the present financial system, which creates money as a debt, is the main means of the Financiers to establish a one-world government. Debt finance is the bridge that leads us from a free society to complete dictatorship. And the only thing the Financiers fear, the only thing that can stop them in their plan of world conquest, is the reform of the present financial system, the establishment of an honest debt-free money system, along the lines of the Social Credit philosophy. Then one realizes all the importance of the Social Credit solution, and the importance of spreading it an making it known. This is why Soviet foreign Minister Molotow had said to Dr. Hawlett Johnson, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the 30s: "We know all about Social Credit. It is the one theory in the world we fear."
Alain Pilote.

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 2 replies

Did RAND Corporation Pen the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act?

2007-11-24T14:16:11Z

Did RAND Corporation Pen the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act?
Published on Friday, November 23, 2007.

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By Kurt Nimmo

According to Jessica Lee of Indypendent and Kamau Karl Franklin of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act was penned with plenty of help from the RAND Corporation.

“Rep. Jane Harman, Democrat from California, has had a lengthy relationship with the Rand Corporation,” Lee tells Democracy Now, although she was unable to determine if RAND wrote the bill. On the 12th anniversary of the OKC bombing, Rep. Harman, as chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, introduced the bill in the House of Representatives.
“The ‘Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007' seeks to address the roots causes of radicalization, and would establish a grant program to provide funds to States to foster badly needed vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to state and federal agencies,” explains Harman’s website. “It also creates a Center of Excellence for the Prevention of Radicalization and Home Grown Terrorism to examine the social, criminal, political, psychological and economic roots of domestic terrorism and to propose solutions, and promotes international collaboration on strategies to combat radicalization."

Franklin mentions Brian Michael Jenkins, an “expert” on “terrorism, counterinsurgency, and homeland security,” according to RAND. Jenkins is “someone who helped the United States in counterinsurgency measures in Vietnam,” states Franklin. “In addition to that, he wrote a book, and in his own book” Jenkins declared that “in their international campaign, the jihadists will seek common ground with leftists, anti-American and anti-globalist forces, who will in turn see radical Islam comrades against a mutual foe.”

In short, according to Kamau Karl Franklin, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act is more about domestic political activism than Islamic terrorism, although it appears Jenkins—and neocons such as the former Marxist David Horowitz—are attempting establish a link between the two, an absurdity at best, as the best way to discredit both the antiwar and patriot movements.

According to a Center for Constitutional Rights factsheet, RAND is a key player in the “domestic terrorism” prevention effort detailed in this draconian bill. A RAND study “Trends in Terrorism,” Chapter 4 on “homegrown terrorism,” advocates “special attention to environmentalist, Anti-globalization activist and anarchists as potentially new terrorist in the making.”

Not surprisingly, RAND is intimately connected to the global elite and the military-industrial-intelligence complex: “The interlocks between the trustees at Rand, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations were so numerous that the Reece Committee listed them in its report (two each for Carnegie and Rockefeller, and three for Ford). Ford gave one million dollars to Rand in 1952 alone, at a time when the chairman of Rand was simultaneously the president of Ford Foundation,” notes SourceWatch (Rene Wormser, Foundations: Their Power and Influence, p65-66). “Two-thirds of Rand’s research involves national security issues. This is divided into Project Air Force, the Arroyo Center (serving the needs of the Army), and the National Defense Research Institute (providing research and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the defense agencies).”

As Lee Rogers notes, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, in its effort to flush out “terrorists,” including those opposed to the sort of globalism supported by Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations, will perform an end-run around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The bill “states in the first subsection that in general the efforts to defeat thought crime shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights and civil liberties of the United States citizens and lawful permanent residents. How does this protect constitutional rights if they use vague language such as in general that prefaces the statement? This means that the Department of Homeland Security does not have to abide by the Constitution in their attempts to prevent so called homegrown terrorism.”

This bill is completely insane. It literally allows the government to define any and all crimes including thought crime as violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Obviously, this legislation is unconstitutional on a number of levels and it is clear that all 404 representatives who voted in favor of this bill are traitors and should be removed from office immediately. The treason spans both political parties and it shows us all that there is no difference between them. The bill will go on to the Senate and will likely be passed and signed into the law by George W. Bush. Considering that draconian legislation like the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act have already been passed, there seems little question that this one will get passed as well. This is more proof that our country has been completely sold out by a group of traitors at all levels of government.

“With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman’s ‘Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act’ passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain,” write Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson for the Baltimore Sun. “Not since the ‘Patriot Act’ of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.”

Harman’s “proposed commission is a menace through its power to hold hearings, take testimony and administer oaths, an authority granted to even individual members of the commission—little Joe McCarthys—who will tour the country to hold their own private hearings. An aura of authority will automatically accompany this congressionally authorized mandate to expose native terrorism.”

Ms. Harman’s proposal includes an absurd attack on the Internet, criticizing it for providing Americans with “access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda,” and legalizes an insidious infiltration of targeted organizations. The misnamed “Center of Excellence,” which would function after the commission is disbanded in 18 months, gives the semblance of intellectual research to what is otherwise the suppression of dissent.

While its purpose is to prevent terrorism, the bill doesn’t criminalize any specific conduct or contain penalties. But the commission’s findings will be cited by those who see a terrorist under every bed and who will demand enactment of criminal penalties that further restrict free speech and other civil liberties. Action contrary to the commission’s findings will be interpreted as a sign of treason at worst or a lack of patriotism at the least.

While Ms. Harman denies that her proposal creates “thought police,” it defines “homegrown terrorism” as “planned” or “threatened” use of force to coerce the government or the people in the promotion of “political or social objectives.” That means that no force need actually have occurred as long as the government charges that the individual or group thought about doing it.

As Shaffer and Robinson note, examples of “resulting crackdowns on such protests include the conviction and execution of anarchists tied to Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket Riot.” Additionally, we might add that the FBI’s COINTELPRO—targeting civil rights, antiwar, and national liberation movements—may serve as a template for “insidious infiltration of targeted organizations.” Although the official history would have us believe COINTELRPO was shut down in the 1970s, events since that time reveal the government is still in the business of illegally going after Americans who exercise their constitutional right to petition the government. For more on these recent events, see Brian Glick’s COINTELPRO Revisited: Spying and Disruption.

Thus it makes perfect sense that the corporate media—compromised by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird beginning in the 1950s—would employ the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly to characterize the antiwar, truth and patriot movements—and even supporters of Ron Paul—as potentially violent advocates of “domestic terrorism.” No doubt, in the weeks and months ahead, we should expect more such propaganda as Harman’s “proposed commissions,” little more than federally mandated inquisitions, get up to speed.
Finally, as noted above, it is only a matter of time before the so-called Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 becomes law. The bill has been referred to the Senate where it awaits scrutiny from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and is almost certain to pass.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2007/231107RAND.htm

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Website: Corporate Connections

2007-08-21T00:39:02Z

http://www.TheyRule.net

The site allows you to build maps of various interconnections between corporations, think tanks, government, etc. I haven't played with it much yet, but it looks pretty neat.

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 2 replies

presidential directive at whitehouse.gov gives Bush imperial powers

2007-05-22T17:57:54Z

presidential directive at whitehouse.gov gives Bush imperial powers

Just heard about this presidential directive from their own website. This means any event that is considered a disruption of the nation or its normal routine (from the mega-quake in Cascadia to the even a computer virus) then Mr Bush can declare this emergency with 90s imperial rule. They can even take over Native American Reservations or anything else deemed important for military stragedy. Add to this this week's ruling on environmentalism as possibly ecoterrorism.

One news report with the actualy whitehouse.gov announcement:

Bush Anoints Himself as the Insurer of Constitutional Government in Emergency
By Matthew Rothschild
May 18, 2007

With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.

In a new National Security Presidential Directive, Bush lays out his plans for dealing with a “catastrophic emergency.”Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.”

He laid this all out in a document entitled “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51” and “Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20.”

http://progressive.org/mag_wx051807

The White House released it on May 9.

Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.

The subject of the document is entitled “National Continuity Policy.”

It defines a “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”

This could mean another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California, I imagine, since it says it would include “localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies.”

The document emphasizes the need to ensure “the continued function of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government,” it states.

But it says flat out: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”

The document waves at the need to work closely with the other two branches, saying there will be “a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government.” But this effort will be “coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial
branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers.”

Among the efforts coordinated by the President would ensuring the capability of the three branches of government to “provide for orderly succession” and “appropriate transition of leadership.”

The document designates a National Continuity Coordinator, who would be the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

Currently holding that post is Frances Fragos Townsend.

She is required to develop a National Continuity Implementation Plan and submit it within 90 days.

As part of that plan, she is not only to devise procedures for the Executive Branch but also give guidance to “state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure.”

The secretary of Homeland Security is also directed to develop planning guidance for “private sector critical infrastructure owners and operators,” as well as state, local, territorial, and tribal governments.

The document gives the Vice President a role in implementing the provisions of the contingency plans.

“This directive shall be implanted in a manner that is consistent with, and facilitates effective implementation of, provisions of the Constitution concerning succession to the Presidency or the exercise of its powers, and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 USC 19), with the consultation of the Vice President and, as appropriate, others involved.”

The document also contains “classified Continuity Annexes.”

from http://progressive.org/mag_wx051807

___ actual presidential directive from whitehouse.gov:

National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive

White House News

NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/NSPD 51

HOMELAND SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/HSPD-20

Subject: National Continuity Policy

Purpose

(1) This directive establishes a comprehensive national policy on the continuity of Federal Government structures and operations and a single National Continuity Coordinator responsible for coordinating the development and implementation of Federal continuity policies. This policy establishes "National Essential Functions," prescribes continuity requirements for all executive departments and agencies, and provides guidance for State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector organizations in order to ensure a comprehensive and integrated national continuity program that will enhance the credibility of our national security posture and enable a more rapid and effective response to and recovery from a national emergency.

Definitions

(2) In this directive:

(a) "Category" refers to the categories of executive departments and agencies listed in Annex A to this directive;

(b) "Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions;

(c) "Continuity of Government," or "COG," means a coordinated effort within the Federal Government's executive branch to ensure that National Essential Functions continue to be performed during a Catastrophic Emergency;

(d) "Continuity of Operations," or "COOP," means an effort within individual executive departments and agencies to ensure that Primary Mission-Essential Functions continue to be performed during a wide range of emergencies, including localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies;

(e) "Enduring Constitutional Government," or "ECG," means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers among the branches, to preserve the constitutional framework under which the Nation is governed and the capability of all three branches of government to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency;

(f) "Executive Departments and Agencies" means the executive departments enumerated in 5 U.S.C. 101, independent establishments as defined by 5 U.S.C. 104(1), Government corporations as defined by 5 U.S.C. 103(1), and the United States Postal Service;

(g) "Government Functions" means the collective functions of the heads of executive departments and agencies as defined by statute, regulation, presidential direction, or other legal authority, and the functions of the legislative and judicial branches;

(h) "National Essential Functions," or "NEFs," means that subset of Government Functions that are necessary to lead and sustain the Nation during a catastrophic emergency and that, therefore, must be supported through COOP and COG capabilities; and

(i) "Primary Mission Essential Functions," or "PMEFs," means those Government Functions that must be performed in order to support or implement the performance of NEFs before, during, and in the aftermath of an emergency.

Policy

(3) It is the policy of the United States to maintain a comprehensive and effective continuity capability composed of Continuity of Operations and Continuity of Government programs in order to ensure the preservation of our form of government under the Constitution and the continuing performance of National Essential Functions under all conditions.

Implementation Actions

(4) Continuity requirements shall be incorporated into daily operations of all executive departments and agencies. As a result of the asymmetric threat environment, adequate warning of potential emergencies that could pose a significant risk to the homeland might not be available, and therefore all continuity planning shall be based on the assumption that no such warning will be received. Emphasis will be placed upon geographic dispersion of leadership, staff, and infrastructure in order to increase survivability and maintain uninterrupted Government Functions. Risk management principles shall be applied to ensure that appropriate operational readiness decisions are based on the probability of an attack or other incident and its consequences.

(5) The following NEFs are the foundation for all continuity programs and capabilities and represent the overarching responsibilities of the Federal Government to lead and sustain the Nation during a crisis, and therefore sustaining the following NEFs shall be the primary focus of

the Federal Government leadership during and in the aftermath of an emergency that adversely affects the performance of Government Functions:

(a) Ensuring the continued functioning of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government;

(b) Providing leadership visible to the Nation and the world and maintaining the trust and confidence of the American people;

(c) Defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and preventing or interdicting attacks against the United States or its people, property, or interests;

(d) Maintaining and fostering effective relationships with foreign nations;

(e) Protecting against threats to the homeland and bringing to justice perpetrators of crimes or attacks against the United States or its people, property, or interests;

(f) Providing rapid and effective response to and recovery from the domestic consequences of an attack or other incident;

(g) Protecting and stabilizing the Nation's economy and ensuring public confidence in its financial systems; and

(h) Providing for critical Federal Government services that address the national health, safety, and welfare needs of the United States.

(6) The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National

Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination.

(7) For continuity purposes, each executive department and agency is assigned to a category in accordance with the nature and characteristics of its national security roles and

responsibilities in support of the Federal Government's ability to sustain the NEFs. The Secretary of Homeland Security shall serve as the President's lead agent for coordinating overall

continuity operations and activities of executive departments and agencies, and in such role shall perform the responsibilities set forth for the Secretary in sections 10 and 16 of this directive.

(8) The National Continuity Coordinator, in consultation with the heads of appropriate executive departments and agencies, will lead the development of a National Continuity Implementation Plan (Plan), which shall include prioritized goals and objectives, a concept of operations, performance metrics by which to measure continuity readiness, procedures for continuity and incident management activities, and clear direction to executive department and agency continuity coordinators, as well as guidance to promote interoperability of Federal Government continuity programs and procedures with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate. The Plan shall be submitted to the President for approval not later than 90 days after the date of this directive.

(9) Recognizing that each branch of the Federal Government is responsible for its own continuity programs, an official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President shall ensure that the executive branch's COOP and COG policies in support of ECG efforts are appropriately coordinated with those of

the legislative and judicial branches in order to ensure interoperability and allocate national assets efficiently to maintain a functioning Federal Government.

(10) Federal Government COOP, COG, and ECG plans and operations shall be appropriately integrated with the emergency plans and capabilities of State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to promote interoperability and to prevent redundancies and conflicting lines of authority. The Secretary of Homeland Security shall coordinate the integration of Federal continuity plans and operations with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency.

(11) Continuity requirements for the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and executive departments and agencies shall include the following:

(a) The continuation of the performance of PMEFs during any emergency must be for a period up to 30 days or until normal operations can be resumed, and the capability to be fully operational at alternate sites as soon as possible after the occurrence of an emergency, but not later than 12 hours after COOP activation;

(b) Succession orders and pre-planned devolution of authorities that ensure the emergency delegation of authority must be planned and documented in advance in accordance with applicable law;

(c) Vital resources, facilities, and records must be safeguarded, and official access to them must be provided;

(d) Provision must be made for the acquisition of the resources necessary for continuity operations on an emergency basis;

(e) Provision must be made for the availability and redundancy of critical communications capabilities at alternate sites in order to support connectivity between

and among key government leadership, internal elements, other executive departments and agencies, critical partners, and the public;

(f) Provision must be made for reconstitution capabilities that allow for recovery from a catastrophic emergency and resumption of normal operations; and

(g) Provision must be made for the identification, training, and preparedness of personnel capable of relocating to alternate facilities to support the continuation of the performance of PMEFs.

(12) In order to provide a coordinated response to escalating threat levels or actual emergencies, the Continuity of Government Readiness Conditions (COGCON) system establishes executive branch continuity program readiness levels, focusing

on possible threats to the National Capital Region. The President will determine and issue the COGCON Level. Executive departments and agencies shall comply with the requirements and

assigned responsibilities under the COGCON program. During COOP activation, executive departments and agencies shall report their readiness status to the Secretary of Homeland Security or the Secretary's designee.

(13) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall:

(a) Conduct an annual assessment of executive department and agency continuity funding requests and performance data that are submitted by executive departments and agencies as part of the annual budget request process, in order to monitor progress in the implementation of the Plan and the execution of continuity budgets;

(b) In coordination with the National Continuity Coordinator, issue annual continuity planning guidance for the development of continuity budget requests; and

(c) Ensure that heads of executive departments and agencies prioritize budget resources for continuity capabilities, consistent with this directive.

(14) The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall:

(a) Define and issue minimum requirements for continuity communications for executive departments and agencies, in consultation with the APHS/CT, the APNSA, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Chief of Staff to the President;

(b) Establish requirements for, and monitor the development, implementation, and maintenance of, a comprehensive communications architecture to integrate continuity components, in consultation with the APHS/CT, the APNSA, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Chief of Staff to the President; and

(c) Review quarterly and annual assessments of continuity communications capabilities, as prepared pursuant to section 16(d) of this directive or otherwise, and report the results and recommended remedial actions to the National Continuity Coordinator.

(15) An official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President shall:

(a) Advise the President, the Chief of Staff to the President, the APHS/CT, and the APNSA on COGCON operational execution options; and

(b) Consult with the Secretary of Homeland Security in order to ensure synchronization and integration of continuity activities among the four categories of executive departments and agencies.

(16) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall:

(a) Coordinate the implementation, execution, and assessment of continuity operations and activities;

(b) Develop and promulgate Federal Continuity Directives in order to establish continuity planning requirements for executive departments and agencies;

(c) Conduct biennial assessments of individual department and agency continuity capabilities as prescribed by the Plan and report the results to the President through the APHS/CT;

(d) Conduct quarterly and annual assessments of continuity communications capabilities in consultation with an official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President;

(e) Develop, lead, and conduct a Federal continuity training and exercise program, which shall be incorporated into the National Exercise Program developed pursuant to Homeland Security Presidential Directive-8 of December 17, 2003 ("National Preparedness"), in consultation with an

official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President;

(f) Develop and promulgate continuity planning guidance to State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector critical infrastructure owners and operators;

(g) Make available continuity planning and exercise funding, in the form of grants as provided by law, to State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector critical infrastructure owners and operators; and

(h) As Executive Agent of the National Communications System, develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive continuity communications architecture.

(17) The Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall produce a biennial assessment of the foreign and domestic threats to the Nation's continuity of government.

(18) The Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall provide secure, integrated, Continuity of Government communications to the President, the Vice President, and, at a minimum, Category I executive departments and agencies.

(19) Heads of executive departments and agencies shall execute their respective department or agency COOP plans in response to a localized emergency and shall:

(a) Appoint a senior accountable official, at the Assistant Secretary level, as the Continuity Coordinator for the department or agency;

(b) Identify and submit to the National Continuity Coordinator the list of PMEFs for the department or agency and develop continuity plans in support of the NEFs and the continuation of essential functions under all conditions;

(c) Plan, program, and budget for continuity capabilities consistent with this directive;

(d) Plan, conduct, and support annual tests and training, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, in order to evaluate program readiness and ensure adequacy and viability of continuity plans and communications systems; and

(e) Support other continuity requirements, as assigned by category, in accordance with the nature and characteristics of its national security roles and responsibilities

General Provisions

(20) This directive shall be implemented in a manner that is consistent with, and facilitates effective implementation of, provisions of the Constitution concerning succession to the Presidency or the exercise of its powers, and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 U.S.C. 19), with consultation of the Vice President and, as appropriate, others involved. Heads of executive departments and agencies shall ensure that appropriate

support is available to the Vice President and others involved as necessary to be prepared at all times to implement those provisions.

(21) This directive:

(a) Shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and the authorities of agencies, or heads of agencies, vested by law, and subject to the availability of appropriations;

(b) Shall not be construed to impair or otherwise affect (i) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budget, administrative, and legislative proposals, or (ii) the authority of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of Defense, including the chain of command for military forces from the President, to the Secretary of Defense, to the commander of military forces, or military command and control procedures; and

(c) Is not intended to, and does not, create any rights or benefits, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its

agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

(22) Revocation. Presidential Decision Directive 67 of October 21, 1998 ("Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations"), including all Annexes thereto, is hereby revoked.

(23) Annex A and the classified Continuity Annexes, attached hereto, are hereby incorporated into and made a part of this directive.

(24) Security. This directive and the information contained herein shall be protected from unauthorized disclosure, provided that, except for Annex A, the Annexes attached to this directive are classified and shall be accorded appropriate handling, consistent with applicable Executive Orders.

GEORGE W. BUSH

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html

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Leading Democrats say "No to Impeachment of Bush.. it is off the table"

2006-11-12T00:27:47Z

Leading Democrats say "No to Impeachment of Bush.. it is off the table"

Conyers Toes Party Line: No Impeachment
Something Is Extremely 'Rotten In The State Of Denmark'

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, November 10, 2006

The latest Democrat "saviour" to flip flop 180 degrees in light of
their victory is Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. Presumed to become
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in January, Conyers today
said that impeachment of President Bush "is off the table."

"In this campaign, there was an orchestrated right-wing effort to
distort my position on impeachment, " Conyers said in a statement
released by his Judiciary Committee spokesman. "The incoming speaker
(Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.) has said that impeachment is off the
table. I am in total agreement with her on this issue: Impeachment
is off the table."

Conyers seems to have forgotten that last December he laid out the
grounds for impeachment in a 350 page long report called "The
Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception,
Manipulation, Torture, Retribution and Cover-ups in the Iraq War"
and later updated to add "illegal domestic surveillance. "

For a while Conyers was the darling of left leaning bloggers and
readers everywhere:

At this site, we are especially proud of the new Conyers
Report, "The Constitution in Crisis." By purchasing this book, you
have the opportunity to own a part of history and help the
Congressman hold the Bush Administration accountable. Your
assistance in helping Congressman Conyers become the next Chairman
of the House Judiciary Committee will bring us one step closer to
getting the American people the answers from this Administration
that they deserve.
- www.afterdowningstr eet.org

Conyers is so admirable. One of the very few in Congress who still
has integrity and principles. It is too bad that he does not get
more MSM coverage but why would they do that? He might upset the
Republican and Corporate plans for total control and could expose
their nefarious doings.
He is risking much by not following the official DNC program too, in
addition to challenging the Bushies.
- Huffington Post

In december 2005, upon release of the report, Conyers stated:

The Report concludes that a number of these actions amount to prima
facie evidence (evidence sufficiently strong to presume the
allegations are true) that federal criminal laws have been violated.
Legal violations span from false statements to Congress to
whistleblower laws... The Report also concludes that these charges
clearly rise to the level of impeachable conduct... In response to
the Report, I have already taken a number of actions. First, I have
introduced a resolution (H. Res. 635) creating a Select Committee
with subpoena authority to investigate the misconduct of the Bush
Administration with regard to the Iraq war and report on possible
impeachable offenses.

So Conyers was already underway with setting up investigations into
impeachable offences, but now he says that impeachment is off the
table? Clearly he has been given orders to toe the party line or
face the consequences.

Despite the fact that 86% want to see the President impeached,
leading Democrats have already ruled this out. The same leading
Democrats that voted for the war in Afghanistan, for the Patriot
Act, for Homeland Security and against a bill that simply condemned
torture of prisoners in Iraq.

After Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, Conyers is the latest Democrat
to show us their true colours once in power.

Conyers and the other Democrats highlight precisely why we need to
regroup, consolidate and redouble our efforts in light of the
theatrical shift of power in Washington to the left. Because as soon
as this happened, overnight, the truth movement lost a great deal of
support from those that believe the job is now done.

Taking note of many reader comments over the past few days I have
noticed a startling uprise in the amount of negative and dismissive
feedback from some readers. Evidently those who expected us to be
out dancing in the streets at the news of a Democrat landslide in
Washington have been bitterly disappointed.

We have never once suggested that the solution to a corrupt and
fascist Neocon leadership is a passive and capitulating Democrat
sideshow leadership, so why is it any surprise that we are
continuing on the same course as before?

Comments such as the following emphasize my point:

"You can only have it one way. What the hell is up with you people.
The whole time the Bush regime was in power you begged for change.
Now you have it, but your still complaining. "

Yes we are seeking change, but not a simple change of personnel as
we have witnessed this week. As we reported yesterday "There's no
doubt about it, to see frothing Neo-Cons who have been strutting
around like John Wayne for the past five years finally eat humble
pie is a breath of fresh air, but let's not be so deluded as to
think that the Neo-Con agenda, which took decades to craft, was
simply brushed aside by the victory of a party that has supported
Bush every step of the way on major issues."

Seeing Bush on TV admitting he'd took a hell of a beating was great,
for about five minutes, then he started laughing and joking about it
and talking about pushing forward to work closely with a new crowd.

Is rolling over and going back to sleep going to get Bush impeached?
Should we shut down the websites now and go save the whales or
something else we'd all love to be doing if we didn't have to
relentlessly keep fighting to stop our leaders killing our freedoms?

Within hours the Democratic elite have shown us that they don't give
a damn about holding the Bush administration up to scrutiny. With no
effective opposition in the form of a political party it is up to
the people to continue to demand justice and to continue to attempt
to reign in those who have heinously abused their power.

Thomas Jefferson described Congress as "a body to which the people
send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question
everything and yield nothing."

In light of this how can any representative say something like
impeachment is 'off the table?'

found at
http://www.infowars .net/articles/ november2006/ 101106Rotten. htm

Nancy Pelosi on YouTube and Howard Dean

Nancy Pelosi on the YouTube saying "NO TO IMPEACHMENT... ITS OFF THE TABLE"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=R-4vw2qw3Wc
or
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mAGCgY4PDNA

Howard Dean Says No Impeachment Of Bush
Lapdog Democrats to waste two years on minimum wage and mass illegal amnesty, no to Iraq inquiry, no to police state rollback, no to bringing troops home

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, November 9, 2006

Howard Dean last night said there would be no impeachment proceedings against President Bush under a Democrat controlled Congress, echoing the pledge of Nancy Pelosi to protect the administration that lied a nation into a war and dismantled the very fabric of America.

Here's the exchange from Dean's appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night.

STEWART: "How long in your mind do you feel it's gonna be before power corrupts you absolutely?"

DEAN: "Well, you know...."

STEWART: "The last guys did it in three and a half days, what are you guys aiming for?"

DEAN: "Longer than that."

DEAN: "I know half the audience wants us to impeach the President and all that kind of stuff but we're not gonna do that - we're not gonna do that."

Dean is toeing the party line first crystallized by Nancy Pelosi when she told the 60 Minutes program, "Impeachment is off the table....it's a pledge....it is a waste of time."

When will jubilant mindless liberals realize that their darling Democrats have been installed as ringers to halt the momentum of the anti-war and 9/11 truth movements while committing to shielding the Bush administration for the very crimes and misdemeanors that supposedly cost them the House and Senate in the first place?

Democrats have already clearly stated how they intend to "get to work" over the next two years - by helping Bush push through a mass amnesty for illegal aliens - something his own republican House even prevented him doing - and also wasting time on the non-issue of the minimum wage.

Will raising the minimum wage and legalizing all illegal aliens help rollback the devastation the Bush administration has wrought on the U.S. Constitution?

Will raising the minimum wage and legalizing all illegal aliens bring the troops home?

Will raising the minimum wage and legalizing all illegal aliens re-instate the nine amendments to the Constitution that were abolished under the Military Commissions Act?

Will raising the minimum wage and legalizing all illegal aliens do anything to can the unconstitutional domestic eavesdropping program?

Will raising the minimum wage and legalizing all illegal aliens do anything to claw back the out of control deficit?

We were told the Republicans were abandoned because of corruption and Iraq and yet the Democrat shills have completely avoided specifics about how they intend to address these issues and on the question of impeachment have vowed to protect Bush. Empty rhetoric about a "policy change" in Iraq is nothing more than hot air betrayed by a legacy of Democrat support for keeping the troops in the quagmire - exemplified no better than Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, who both support imperial jaunts in the name of the "war on terror."

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has already stated that Blair's government will not co-operate with any move to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and she needn't worry because the Democrats are not going to even try it.

The Associated Press reports that Pelosi and Bush have already proclaimed reconciliation and are now "making nice" and devising how they can work in tandem. Tuesday's vote and its superficial euphoric aftermath was not about a populist reaction to six years of abuse and deceit - it was a sad indictment of the fact that a majority of Americans, particularly the establishment left, still buy the hoax that the Republicrats and the Democons are anything more than two different CEO's bidding for control of Slavery Incorporated.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2006/091106deansaysno.htm

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Six Questions on the American “Gulag” for Historian Kate Brown

2006-09-26T12:38:07Z

Six Questions on the American “Gulag” for Historian Kate Brown
Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006. Kate Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her book, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize. As a historian of Soviet history, she has sifted through an array of declassified NKVD and KGB documents about the abuse of prisoners in the Gulag. Her article, “Out of Solitary Confinement: The History of the Gulag,” will be published in Kritika vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 2007). Brown recently answered a series of questions about the American penal and detention system, especially as it has developed post-9/11. By Ken Silverstein.
Sources1. In 2005, Amnesty International charged that the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo makes the prison “the Gulag of our times.” After public outcry and a media attack, Amnesty retracted the charge. Is the metaphor appropriate?

Soviet arrests were designed to inspire terror. Some people were taken off the street. Others were surprised in their beds in late night roundups. In Soviet prisons, detainees were stripped, searched, and led into special rooms where they were told to face the wall and assume stress positions. Most people were rounded up with no real evidence and without prior investigation. Interrogators withheld food, water, medical assistance, communication with relatives, and sleep until detainees agreed to talk. The most resistant detainees were beaten while handcuffed or tied.

Granted such liberty in dealing with prisoners, some Soviet officers started to enjoy themselves. They made up games, forcing prisoners to dance, smearing glue on their heads, stripping them naked, pouring frigid water over them. Sometimes guards had too much fun and a prisoner died. Then prison-appointed doctors, who often participated in the interrogations, wrote up fictive autopsy reports. Declassified FBI and U.S. Army detailing abuses detainees in U.S. detention centers uncannily echo Soviet NKVD reports. They recount late-night roundups of civilians and describe prisoners held in chambers of extreme heat or cold, chained naked to the floor without food and water for days on end, defecating on themselves, beaten (some to death), forced to dance, to lick their shoes and body parts, to crawl around, and to bark like dogs. American doctors and psychiatrists helped devise methods of inflicting pain and fear to elicit confessions, and they signed false reports when detainees died in custody.

2. Didn't the Soviets lock up far greater numbers of people than are now being detained by the United States?

Indeed, American editorialists grounded their rejection of the Gulag metaphor in numbers. Soviet officials routed millions through the Gulag over several decades (3.7 million according to archival records). In the American case, we are talking about a mere 500 prisoners in Guantanamo, and roughly 30,000 in U.S. detention centers in Iraq. Human Rights Watch estimates that 50,000 people are currently held in domestic prisons without charges. It is undoubtedly true that the torture of tens of thousands is better than the torture of millions. But this defense becomes rather weak, not only if one believes in universal civil liberties and human rights, but also if one considers history. The methods of detention and interrogation used by investigators in Iraq and Cuba derive from CIA manuals issued in 1963 that assumed that the detainee would not be a Muslim extremist but a Soviet agent. The methods practiced and propagated during the Cold War have migrated to the “war on terror” so seamlessly that American soldiers photographed their human-rights violations and shared the photos with no idea they were incriminating themselves.

3. How does the American system compare with the Soviet in respect for due process and legal norms, and in terms of punishment and the treatment of prisoners?

Both Soviet and American laws banned torture of prisoners, guaranteed habeas corpus, and limited the range of punishments a prisoner could receive. In both countries, abuses occurred nonetheless—not in isolated instances, but in the “migration” of practices across great distances, which suggests systemic violations of the laws.

We know, in fact, about Soviet and American abuses in astonishing detail because government investigators went to prisons with notebook and camera and emerged appalled at what they saw. The purpose of those investigations, one would imagine, would be to expose illegal detention and torture in order to stop it. But despite the nearly annual Soviet investigations into abuses, the Gulag continued unhindered for nearly three decades. Despite FBI and Army investigations in Iraq and Cuba, the White House persists in justifying the use of secret CIA prisons in undisclosed foreign locations to sequester terrorist suspects without charge. Rather than exposing abuses in order to end them, official Soviet and American investigations served the purpose of placing the blame for institutionalized abuse on individuals—U.S. Army privates, Soviet prison guards, and NKVD security officers. Finding individuals to blame absolved the governments which had set up the conditions for torture. Scapegoating individuals also enabled Soviet and American ideologues to reiterate yet again their societies’ commitment to justice and civil rights, despite all evidence to the contrary.

4. The Bush Administration is targeting non-citizens it accuses of being terrorists. Didn't the Soviets mostly imprison and abuse their own citizens? So isn't it true that, in the American case, the “gulag” is a response to a real or perceived national security threat, while the Soviets were simply seeking to crush dissent?

During the Cold War the idea arose that the Gulag was primarily an instrument of terror to crush dissent. But declassified Soviet documents do not bear this out. By far, most of the people who landed in the Gulag were there for garden-variety offenses: theft of property, assault, hooliganism, and white-collar crime. They were not influential intellectuals who posed a threat to the regime, but poor, uneducated, and culturally marginalized peasants who broke draconian laws in order to make a living. The search for terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan has also targeted the weak and vulnerable. United States Army officials admit that 90 percent of the civilians detained in Iraq were later released without charges. The dragnet in Afghanistan also seems to have netted civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The detention of people who turn out to be innocent bystanders gives a new definition to the phrase “non-combatants.”

5. Have American government officials been more willing to take responsibility for abuses than their Soviet counterparts?

Long after the abuses were made public, Vice President Dick Cheney denied any mistreatment of detainees at Guantánamo. He said that the detainees “have been well treated, treated humanely and decently,” adding, “Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment, but if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who had been inside and released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.” With his bald-faced denial of torture, Cheney illustrated how Guantánamo shares aspects of the Gulag. His performance mimicked that of the famed Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who several months after smiling broadly for a photo in front of the notorious Solovetsky Labor Camp, lied with sanctimony when refuting reports of Soviet camp abuses. In an article published in Pravda on March 5, 1931, Gorky wrote that “convict labor” was “a petty, foul slander” aimed at economically isolating and weakening the USSR. “The Soviet regime,” Gorky said, “does not employ convict labor even in prisons.”

When a state goes to the trouble of sanctioning the torture of civilians for purposes of political control, government officials do not willingly own up to these practices. And those who expose abuse are discredited as slanderers, and accused of “peddling lies” and ultimately of abetting the enemy.

6. Does the tolerance for abuses committed during the “war on terrorism” have any implications for the health of democracy at home?

The President’s broad new powers in the signing statements that enable him to override Congress have corroded the American system of checks and balances. American law enforcement agencies can now wiretap American civilians and detain citizens and permanent residents without charges, and consequently without evidence. Last week the House passed legislation to build a 700-mile Israeli-style fence on the U.S.–Mexico border and to deploy there many of the surveillance technologies tested in Iraq. Perhaps the domestic installation of wartime technologies and military surveillance in civilian settings has become acceptable to us because we have become accustomed, as Soviet citizens did during the endless Stalinist purges, to open-ended wars—wars with no opening salvo and no concluding treaty. Whether or not one agrees that American detention centers and secret prisons are the “Gulag of our time,” the comparison deserves serious consideration. It might help us shine a torch into the dark corners of repression, where the totalitarian qualities of our own society lurk, before the scale of violence ascends to Gulag dimensions.

found at http://harpers.org/sb-six-questions-kate-brown-1158926209.html

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Booklists

2006-09-03T18:40:44Z

I was wondering, if anyone had a few nonbiased books they might suggest for reading. That deals with the rise of corporations in america, after the civil war

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 3 replies

Power to the People

2006-06-08T10:34:17Z

Is it really possible to have a peoples party at this point in time? A party who's candidate was chosen, and supported by the American people?
Yes... it really is possible. And high time if you ask me.
When I was in school they told me I could be anything I wanted. Even the president of the United States. But they never taught me how. Oh sure, we had a class president and all that, (and I seem to remember something about a cartoon bill that kept getting vetoed or something), but somehow I just don't think it's the same thing. But I have asked dozens of people (smart ones too) if they new how to go about being president if they chose to. None of them had the slightest clue. Not that I would ever want to be the president. I can't even ballance my own check book, (or remember if that cartoon bill ever got passed or not) let alone trying to balance the budget for a nation. However, I have met quite a few people along my journeys that I thought had all the attributes I would like to see in a president. Strong, responsible, honorable people, always seeming to naturally look out for the needs of others, less fortunate, and weaker than themselves, while at the same time accomplishing great feats of productivity, (including balancing their check books). Ive met them in all walks of life. All shapes, sizes, sexes, and colors. Proud Americans, all of them. According to our constitution they have the right to run for president. The only question is... how? Well check it out...
A Letter to Michael Moore
Hey Mike,
I hope all is going good with the new project. I can't express to you how much I appreciate your work. You both inspire me and give me hope that someday we the People will find our voice again and take our country back. On that note, I have a great Idea I’d like to share with you. This is an idea I’ve spent serious time thinking about. I’d like to humbly ask for your help. The idea needs shepherding from someone of your caliber. So here it is…

“The People’s Party”
A reality television game show
by Alan Abbott
Contestants will compete for a chance to run for President of the United States for the People’s Party.
Possible contestants, chosen from the general public, are asked (via television & radio) to send in a video tape or DVD, 3 minutes or less explaining why they or the person they are nominating should be considered as a presidential candidate.
The show will be run Documentary/American Idol/ style. The cameras follow each contestant on their quest. Throughout the campaign contestants and their entourage travel together, eat together, stay at the same hotels, and share the same campaign headquarters in the convention rooms at the hotels where they stay.
The American public will have the opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice by telephone and the contestants with the lowest number of votes steps down each week.
The winner of the show wins the candidacy for the Peoples Party, and actually runs for president of the United States of America.

That is the basic idea. I see it as an entertaining way to empower the people to establish their own party, educate the public about what it takes to run for president. Most importantly, it will give the people a chance to take their country back.

I have been developing the show for over a year and have a lot more material. I didn’t want to bombard you with it all right now. I have made several trips to and from L.A. (from Maui) trying to contact you through “more appropriate means” than e-mail, but to no avail. So here we are.

This is actually the second e-mail I have sent you, but I fear the first may have gotten lost in the crowd, as I know you try to respond to all your e-mails. So just to give you a heads up, I am going to ask a few friends to give me a hand in getting your attention. After all, election time is around the corner, and I’d like you to be given the first opportunity to give the country back to the people. Hope you don’t mind. Please feel free to e-mail me or call me at; 808-264-0984. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Alan

We The People
Really can make this happen. More impossible dreams have come true. But we have to work together. Together... the American people can do anything.
I am asking all of you to please copy this entire post and send it to michael@michaelmoore.com then send it to everyone you know.
Michael Moore is my first choice, but I know he is not everybody's cup of tea. Do you have someone in mind you like better for the task of producing, directing, and/or hosting The Peoples Party? Copy and send this entire post to them, and tell them so. But please keep in mind that the show, and everything written here is copywritten so please don't try to pass it off as your own, you'll just get yourself in a lot of trouble. Do however feel free to share with as many people as you want. In fact please do
I sent this letter to Michael Moore on May 19th, 2006 but Mikes a busy guy. He is currently shooting another feature documentary, and I'm sure the shooting schedule is very labor intensive. Not ot mention the amount of e-mails the guy must get every day. Then when he does finaly get a chance to read them, I'm sure he has a priority list of some kind. Either way, he has not returned this e-mail yet.
But Michael is not the only person that is important to reach. If we are going to make a difference we have to work together, and spread the word to everyone.
Thank you all very much.
Sincerely, Alan
Power To The People

michael@michaelmoore.com
thealanabbott@icqmail.com
profile.myspace.com/index.cfm

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

we live in an overpackaged world

2006-05-10T18:55:19Z

please come join me at http://tribes.tribe.net/stopoverpackagedworld

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

RENDON. The American Propaganda Firm (Long)

2006-05-07T07:15:41Z

The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."

It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"

John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information -- overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized "to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. "TK" refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.

Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.

Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks -- a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."

It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. "I was the youngest state coordinator," he recalls. "I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics -- which was a stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. "They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of Oz thing." It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.

After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started consulting," he recalls. "We started consulting." They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.

To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon's wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and "senior communications strategist." Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company's business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon's first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. "Panama," he says, "brought us into the national-security environment."

In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon's job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands, who would then pay Rendon.

A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls -- but Noriega simply named himself "Maximum Leader" and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force -- and Rendon's job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.

At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega's Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and called "Doberman thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara's vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.

Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.

"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon recalls. "My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you'll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.' Then I remember this major saying, 'Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit and said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"

Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we took some rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon's client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.

Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.

"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II," Rendon says. "This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some observations, here's some recommendations, live long and prosper.'"

Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.

To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.

Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.

When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."

Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in "timely, truthful and accurate information." His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it "more important to be first than to be right." In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public's perception of the war -- whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality," he says. "Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war."

By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group was firmly established as Washington's leading salesman for regime change. But Rendon's new assignment went beyond simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare "lethal finding" -- meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too classified to discuss. "That's where we're wandering into places I'm not going to talk about," he says. "If you take an oath, it should mean something."

Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. "The INC was clueless," he once observed. "They needed a lot of help and didn't know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in." Acting as the group's senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. "The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama -- so they were known," recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA's station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency's successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington's neoconservatives.

Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that mattered was his politics. "From day one," Rendon says, "Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam." Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more bluntly. "Chalabi's primary focus," he said later, "was to drag us into a war."

The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a "management fee" of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. "The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days," notes Bruner. "Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department."

Rendon's influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world's perception of reality -- and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior -- and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. "The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration's outlook concerning strategic influence," notes one Army report. "Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group."

Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI's mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations -- planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins. "It's sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect to future anticipated plans," Vice President Dick Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military's top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. "When I get their briefings, it's scary," a senior official said at the time.

In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had hired Rendon "to help the new office," a charge Rendon denies. "We had nothing to do with that," he says. "We were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3" -- the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the office's operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon's bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Greg Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the IOTF," Rendon says.

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an "Information War Room" to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's "proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called 'Livewire,' which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations."

The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships."

The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." One senior officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation."

According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them "in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community." Among the places Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments "built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."

Rendon was also charged with engaging in "military deception" online -- an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked." Rendon would also create a Web site "with regular news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4) additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-mail push operation." These techniques are commonly used to plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.

Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration's message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.

Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of a war. "It was not just bad intelligence -- it was an orchestrated effort," says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. "It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions."

In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. "In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again," he says. "It was 'What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?' We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what's on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what's going to be on the news. They'll take that in a heartbeat."

The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100 million.

The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 -- the start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ, Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the media to be killed in the war -- a war he had covertly helped to start.

Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his "James Bond lifestyle." Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. "He worked for the Rendon Group in London," says his mother, Kathleen. "They just send people all over the world -- where there are wars."

Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. "I saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate," recalls Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. "A soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That's when I knew Paul was dead."

As the Mass ended and Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Moran's role in the company, saying only that "Paul worked for us on a number of projects." But on the long flight back to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in an e-mail: "The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt -- sadness and anger at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago."

The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. "I think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group," Sethna later said.

Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.

Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of Saddam's villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon "intelligence officials" were telling her that "some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri." His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, "ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said."

Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam's stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.

In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.

As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" -- defined as "presenting false information, images or statements." The seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.

As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. "For us, it's a question of patriotism," he says. "It's not a question of politics, and that's an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the "security-intelligence complex" in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.

Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. "He said the embedded idea was great," says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. "It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to "take control of the story," shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's events.

"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war."

James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone.

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Please help

2006-04-08T02:26:46Z

please go to this website to send a fax to the related US
congress and senate members to Request a Congressional Hearing on the
Sujiatun case. it's a very easy to Fill out form, With just a click, the fax will be sent.
thank you,
joshua

here is the link:
http://publicpetition.unvcc.com/UN/index.php

there is more information about Sujiatun on the website:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/211,111,,1.html

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

You've all probably seen these, but in case you haven't...

2006-03-26T20:52:51Z

I work on political documentaries for a living, and I have a website that sells DVDs. Here are four great DVDs that focus on out-of-control corporate shenanigans, in case you haven't already seen them:

MCLIBEL - about the longest running trial in Brit history: McD's vs two activists who told the truth about how damaging the company is to the environment, public health, and labor.

SWEET MISERY - Mostly about the health hazards of aspartame (NutriSweet, Equal), but has good info on the corrupt FDA approval process. And guess who was CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals during approval?? (our good friend Rummy).

THE FUTURE OF FOOD - about GMO's and the bastards at Monsanto.

WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE (I'm sure you know all about this)

They're all available at my website, if you're interested: WWW.DOCWORKERS.COM . Please visit!

-Adam

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 5 replies

New Witness Confirms Existence of Chinese Concentration Camp, Says Organs Removed from Live Prisoners

2006-03-18T04:47:29Z

Please help to end this horrible persectuion. knowledge is our greatest weapon, so please share this information. together in peace we can make a difference.

Falun Dafa is a peaceful meditation practice that teaches putting others before yourself, kindness, always telling the truth and being tolerant of others. We are literally being killed for being good people. The national media has done very little to help us because of trade issues with China. It is up to us to let the world know. Please help us.

By Ji Da
The Epoch Times Mar 17, 2006
www.theepochtimes.com

The witness, a former employee at the Liaoning Thrombosis Treatment Center of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, and says the bodies of Falun Gong practitioners are cremated immediately after the organs are removed. (The Epoch Times)
[High-resolution image ] A former employee of Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine told The Epoch Times during a recent interview that the Sujiatun Concentration Camp in China was actually a part of a hospital. The concentration camp has engaged in taking organs from Falun Gong practitioners when they were still alive and selling the organs. Since 2001, the concentration camp has secretly detained approximately 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners, none of whom have been able to leave the camp alive. The hospital removed many kidneys, livers, and corneas from the practitioners. After the organ removal, the practitioners were thrown into an incinerator, which was converted from a boiler. Their ashes were dumped together with burned charcoal.

Organs from Three Quarters of the 6,000 People Were Removed
Those whose organs were removed were in various states of health. Because many of the victims were illegally detained, there was neither an arrest warrant nor identification as to who these people actually were. Often after their organs were removed, nobody claimed the bodies. Sometimes their bodies were picked up by crooks who pretended to be their family members.

About three-quarters of the 6,000 people died after their hearts, kidneys, corneas, or skin was removed; their bodies were then burned. This witness, whose family member participated in the removal of Falun Gong practitioners' organs, said that approximately 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners remain in the hospital. She was afraid that the authorities would kill all of them to destroy evidence.

The Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine is located at 49 Xuesong Road, Sujiatun, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China. It was the first hospital in China to specialize in the heart, the brain, and surrounding blood vessels. The hospital is composed of several organizations, including the Liaoning Traditional Chinese Medicine College Teaching Hospital and the Shenyang Thrombosis Treatment Center.

Concentration Camp Details
The hospital site is 21,087 square meters, with 17,564 square meters of building area. It employs 460 people in 24 departments and 20 specialized offices. Information from the Chinese government shows that the hospital was established in December 1988, and was formerly named the Shenyang Research Institute of Thrombosis and Liaoning Province Thrombosis Treatment Center of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine. In June 1998, it was renamed China Traditional Medicine Thrombosis Treatment Center.

The Chinese Business Morning View said in a story on July 4, 2004, that a farm worker died of abnormal causes in Sujiatun, Shenyang and was later cremated. The death certificate was provided by the Chinese Medicine Thrombosis Treatment Center in Sujiatun. The news caused a stir in China.

Epoch Times: Did the hospital's medical staff inside the concentration camp know about this?

Answer: This hospital has a small number of officials and some doctors involved secretively in the operation of organ harvesting. Some other staff in the hospital knew about this, but this is absolutely a taboo [to talk about]. They all are afraid of being killed or courting trouble, so they all avoid the issue. Only those highly trusted doctors could be chosen to be the surgeons for organ harvesting operations.

ET: Were Falun Gong practitioners alive when their organs were harvested? Did their families know about this?

Answer: Falun Gong practitioners who were imprisoned there came mostly from Dabei Prison, Masanjia Labor Camp, and other prisons in Shenyang, or they were Falun Gong practitioners arrested in parks or residential homes. Because they refused to denounce Falun Gong, they were arrested without formal warrants, and their families did not know their situation. Many did not even have their names [recorded]. In addition, since the Chinese authority exercises a policy of "not being responsible" for killing Falun Gong practitioners, the death of Falun Gong practitioners is not a very big issue for prisons. The Chinese Communist Party persecutes Falun Gong, [but] these medical personnel were told Falun Gong practitioners were facing death because they killed people, or they were sentenced to death because of crimes, or they had become insane from practicing Falun Gong.

Those Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were harvested came from several types.

Organs harvested from live bodies are worth far more than organs taken from dead bodies. Many Falun Gong practitioners were still alive when their organs were taken. After their organs were cut out, some of these people were thrown directly into the crematorium to be burnt, thus leaving no evidence. For some others, after their organs were stolen, the doctor sewed up the wound and asked the family or family representative to give a signature for cremation. Family members did not know at all that the dead had their organs taken out.

Furthermore, there were some healthy Falun Gong practitioners in prisons in other areas who were injected—without their knowledge—with psychoactive drugs that made their minds confused. They then were transferred to Sujiantun concentration camp to suffer further torture, till in the end their organs were harvested and their bodies were cremated in secret.

Among the Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were harvested, some were weak and some were healthy. Since most of them were illegally arrested, there were no arrest warrants or identification cards. After their organs were taken out while they were still alive, no one came to claim their bodies; or [sometimes] people using fake identities claimed their bodies.

None of these people have come out [of the concentration camp] alive; three-quarters of these 6,000 people have died, having their hearts, kidneys, retinas, and skins harvested and their bodies disposed of. I think now about 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners are still in this hospital, and I am afraid now that the authority will destroy all evidence and kill them.

Question: How did you know these things? Were you yourself a doctor involved in organ harvesting?

Answer: I worked at the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, Shenyang. This is exactly where this concentration camp is located. One of my family members was involved in the operation to harvest Falun Gong practitioners' organs. This has brought great pain to our family.

Question: Please tell us what you knew about.

Answer: From 2001, our hospital started to detain Falun Gong practitioners. At the beginning, these people were detained in the single-storey houses in the back yard of the hospital. Later, the hospital authorities demolished the single-storey houses, and it was unknown where in the hospital the Falun Gong practitioners were transferred. Many staff of the hospital discussed in private that these Falun Gong practitioners had been secretly transferred to the underground chambers of the hospital. According to some people working inside the hospital, the hospital has a huge system of secret underground chambers.

At the time when we went to work there, the person in charge of logistics and purchasing in the hospital said that the quantity of disposable sterile gloves used for operations and daily supplies that the hospital authorities asked to be purchased had increased dramatically. The logistics people estimated based on the scale of purchases at that time that there were at least 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners detained in this hospital.

These Falun Gong practitioners were not detained in the 4-story building under the in-patient department and administration at the front of the hospital, in order to keep the hospital staff from seeing them at all. We only occasionally saw Falun Gong practitioners being sent on a mobile intensive care bed to the first floor for physical examinations. These people were very weak. For the majority of the Falun Gong practitioners, nobody knew where they were being secretly kept. While they still did not know where these people were kept, some staff inquired to the hospital authorities about why so much food and so many sterile gloves and daily supplies were purchased. The hospital authorities said, "You only need to do your job well. There is no need for you to ask any other questions."

Starting in 2001, a family member of mine participated in organ-harvesting operations. My family member tried to keep me from knowing about this at the beginning. The hospital authorities selected doctors they trust in different aspects to perform the secretive operations. After a period of time, I found that my family member was in a lot pain, often had nightmares, and appeared panic-stricken. After repeated inquiries, this family member told me the truth. The leader of the hospital had asked my family member to participate in the organ harvesting operations on Falun Gong practitioners as early as 2001. It was 2003 when my family member confessed. A few years after, my family member felt so much pain from participating in this incident that it was impossible to continue with the evildoing. My family member decided to go abroad to get away from this matter.

My family member also told me: "you don't understand my suffering; those Falun Gong practitioners were alive. It might be easier for me if they were dead, but they were alive."

Question: Were there any other doctors from the hospital taking part in the operations of cutting out Falun Gong practitioners' organs?

Answer: I know there were some. All these things have been carried out secretly. Many doctors at our hospital involved were practicum doctors transferred from other hospitals. Because the government does not want to be responsible for Falun Gong practitioners' bodies and lives, their lives are treated as garbage by the regime, and their bodies were used in experiments by new doctors doing their practitcums.

Many doctors came and left the hospital because they suffered a lot after having been involved in these kinds of things. They either requested to be transferred to other places, or changed their names. Some might have been killed to eliminate the evidence, their identity files were taken out from the hospital's filing system, or their names were changed. Nobody knows where the doctors have gone.

The hospital staff all know that the rear part of the hospital is forbidden. It is always watched. The staff avoids talking about the place.

Question: It is said the hospital is equipped with an incinerator. The person whose organs were removed will be burned when he or she is still alive. Is that true?

Answer: The employees in our hospital call this place "the incinerator." Actually, it is a boiler room. Some poor farmers from nearby places were hired to work in the boiler room. They were penniless when they first came here. But they could scrape up some watches, finger rings, necklaces, and so on. The amount is not small. It is said by the employees in the hospital these jewelry and watches were collected from the Falun Gong practitioners whose organs had been removed when they were about to be thrown in the boiler to be burned. It is also said by the employees in the hospital, some were still alive when being thrown into the boiler.

Question: Do they get injection of anesthetic when in surgery?

Answer: Yes. There is a cap to the anesthetic quantity used in mainland China's hospitals. Generally, the supply of anesthetic was determined according to the accommodation of the hospital. To the public, the number of patients in our care appears to be very small, and publicly reported number of surgical procedures performed is quite low. But the equipment and articles used in surgery are abundant. Because the amount of anesthetic is limited, these secret surgeries could not use the normal anesthetic doses. In order to save anesthetic, they economized on the anesthetic used in surgeries on these Falun Gong practitioners. The amount of anesthetic used was very small. However, many whose organs were removed were still alive. You can imagine the pain suffered by the Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were removed.

Question: Are there any survivors among the 6,000 people detained since 2001?

Answer: Nobody has come out alive. The number of them gets smaller and smaller. The Falun Gong practitioners detained at Sujiatun are fewer now than before. But I believe that the sin of removing the organs of the Falun Gong practitioners is still continuing.

Question: Where are these organs usually sold to? Do the higher authorities in the government know about this?

Answer: They are mainly sold to Thailand, but I believe they are also sold to other regions of the world. Nowadays, there are many patients in China who need human skin, corneas, and kidneys for organ transplant surgeries. Many patients have to wait in line to purchase organs. Currently, a kidney can be sold up to the price of 30,000 to 100,000 U.S. dollars. The profit from selling organs is simply too great. The people who benefit from this are not only the top leaders of hospital and the officials of the Chinese Communist Party's Heath Department. This is a crime present across the entire nation. People ranging from government officials to doctors to organ sellers are all involved in this and are profiting greatly.

Question: Why did they target Falun Gong practitioners as the source of organs?

Answer: Because relatives of many Falun Gong practitioners don't even know that their family members were arrested. So if the Falun Gong practitioners are killed, there will be no one to come and claim their dead bodies.

Question: Why did you want to expose this? This may bring great danger to you.

Answer: I know that there are many Falun Gong practitioners who are currently detained at the hospital. I would like to expose this to the international community, so those who are not yet killed can be saved. Also, I would like to expose this as an atonement for my family.

I am not a Falun Gong practitioner. But as a former staff member of the hospital, I have the responsibility to expose the truth, and let the world to save those Falun Gong practitioners who are still alive. Organs of some Falun Gong practitioners are still living on patients' bodies. I would like to call on all society to pay attention to this issue and stop this shocking crime.

you can find out how you can help at www.fofg.org

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MONSANTO AND FOX, PARTNERS IN CENSORSHIP

2006-03-16T08:07:15Z

This article was first published as "Monsanto and Fox: Partners in Censorship (www.prwatch.org/prwissues/...tml)", PR Watch, volume 5, number 2, Second Quarter 1998. The original article was authored by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

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

By all accounts, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson are tough, bulldog reporters--the sort of journalists you'd expect to make some enemies along the way.

That, according to Florida TV station WTVT, was why it hired the husband-and-wife team with much fanfare in November 1996 to head the station's "news investigative unit." Now, in the wake of their firing barely a year later, the Fox network affiliate is accusing them of theft for daring to independently publish the script of the story that they were never allowed to air.

"This is really not about a couple of disgruntled former reporters whining that their editors wouldn't let them do a story they thought was important," Wilson said in announcing that he and Akre are suing WTVT for breach of contract. "Jane and I have each spent more than 20 years in the news business. . . . It doesn't take that long for every reporter to learn that every now and then--usually when the special interest of your news organization or one of its friends is more important than the public interest--stories get killed. That's bad enough, but that's not what happened here. . . . Fox 13 didn't want to kill the story revealing synthetic hormones in Florida's milk supply. Instead, as we explain in great detail in our legal complaint, we were repeatedly ordered to go forward and broadcast demonstrably inaccurate and dishonest versions of the story. We were given those instructions after some very high-level corporate lobbying by Monsanto (the powerful drug company that makes the hormone) and also, we believe, by members of Florida's dairy and grocery industries."

The hormone in question is genetically-engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), the flagship product in Monsanto's campaign to take command of the ultra-high-stakes biotechnology industry. Injections of rBGH (sold under the brand name Posilac®) induce higher milk production in dairy cows, but critics warn of potential health risks to both cows and humans.

The Florida dispute offers a rare look inside the newsroom at the way stories get spun and censored. It is also cracks the facade that Monsanto has erected through a highly effective, multi-million-dollar PR offensive aimed at preventing the news media from reporting the views of rBGH critics.

Coordinated by the DC-based PR/lobby firm of ]]Capitoline/MS&L]], the pro-rBGH campaign brings together drug and dairy industry groups in an ad hoc network called the Dairy Coalition, whose participants include university researchers funded by Monsanto, as well as carefully selected "third party" experts; the International Food Information Council, an industry funded coalition that attacks health and safety concerns about food as unwarranted and unscientific; the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, representing the top executive of every department of agriculture in all fifty states; the American Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful right-wing lobby behind the movement to pass food disparagement laws like the one under which Oprah Winfrey was sued in Texas; the American Dietetic Association, the national association of registered dietitians which hauls in large sums of money advocating for the food industry; the Grocery Manufacturers of America; the Food Marketing Institute; and other dairy and food associations at the state and regional levels.

Immediately after FDA approval of rBGH, attorneys for Monsanto sued or threatened to sue stores and dairy companies that sold milk and dairy products advertised as being free of rBGH, to make sure that any dissenters within the well-organized food industry would be frightened into towing the industry line.

Extensive media monitoring and aggressive intervention and punishment of offending journalists has been critical to the media management campaign. As early as 1989 the PR firm of Carma International was hired to conduct a computer analysis of every story filed on rBGH, ranking reporters as friends or enemies. This information was used to reward friendly reporters while complaining to editors about those who filed reports that were deemed unfriendly.

Leaked internal documents from the Dairy Coalition reveal how journalists who do not toe the line are handled. In January of 1996 dairy officials wrote Mary Jane Wilkinson, assistant managing editor of the Boston Globe, to complain about an upcoming food column by Globe writer Linda Weltner. "On February 23rd, [Dr.] Samuel Epstein . . . made unsupported allegations linking milk and cancer. We're concerned that Ms. Weltner will give Epstein a forum in the Boston Globe to disseminate theories that have no basis in science." The letter invoked carefully cultivated contacts to smear Epstein as a scaremonger with "no standing among his peers in the scientific community and no credibility with the leading health organizations in this country." It noted that "others in the news media who attended Epstein's press conference or reviewed his study--such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Washington Post--chose not to run this 'story.' . . . USA Today was the only newspaper to print these allegations and we recently held a heated meeting with them."

Another internal dairy industry document bragged about the handling of USA Today health reporter Anita Manning, whose balanced article on the subject offended the rBGH lobbyists. "On Wednesday representatives of the Dairy Coalition met with reporter Anita Manning and her editor at USA Today. When Manning said that Epstein was a credible source, the Dairy Coalition's Dr. Wayne Callaway pointed out that Epstein has no standing among the scientific community. . . . When Manning insisted it was her responsibility to tell both sides of the story, Callaway said that was just a cop-out for not doing her homework. She was told that if she had attended the press conference, instead of writing the story from a press release, she would have learned that her peers from the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press chose not to do the story because of the source. At this point Manning left the meeting and her editor assured the Dairy Coalition that any future stories dealing with [rBGH] and health would be closely scrutinized."

A February 1996 internal document of the Dairy Coalition notes that "The Coalition is convinced its work in educating reporters and editors at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Associated Press led to those organizations' dismissal of Samuel Epstein's pronouncements that milk from [rBGH] supplemented cows causes breast and colon cancer. They did not run the story."

The same document brags of knocking prominent New York Times food reporter Marian Burros off the beat entirely: "As you may recall, the Dairy Coalition worked hard with the New York Times last year to keep Marian Burros, a very anti-industry reporter, from 'breaking' Samuel Epstein's claim that milk from . . . supplemented cows causes breast and colon cancer. She did not do the story and now the NYT health reporters are the ones on the [rBGH] beat. They do not believe Epstein. Marian Burros is not happy about the situation."

Given this climate of systematic intimidation and capitulation by news media management, the remarkable fact about the case in Florida is not that the story was killed. What makes this case unique is the dogged persistence that Akre and Wilson have shown in standing by their story.

Steve Wilson is an Emmy award-winning former top investigative reporter for the TV news program "Inside Edition." His past work has produced stories that forced two recalls of faulty door latches in Chrysler minivans and exposed ABC news anchor Sam Donaldson's moves to accept farming subsidies while criticizing them on the air. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz calls Wilson "a dogged and careful investigator" with a "high-decibel level of journalism." Jane Akre has been a reporter and news anchor for 20 years and has won a prestigious Associated Press award for investigative reporting.

The couple's contract with the station stipulated that Akre would be paid $149,500 over two years to to file short investigative pieces every few days and anchor the station's weekend morning newscasts. Wilson's contract offered $85,500 for 10 hours of work per week on larger stories that would be timed for the all-important "sweeps" rating periods.

At the time of their hiring, it seemed like a good deal for all concerned. Akre had recently given birth to the couple's first child, and Wilson hoped signing up with a local station would give him the chance to spend more time at home and less on the road. "Jane and Steve, quite frankly, were only interested in a package deal . . . which suited me. They're both talented individuals who happen to be married," explained news director Daniel Webster.

A few months after their hiring, however, Webster was shown the door as part of a management shakeup following a $2.5 billion package deal in which WTVT and nine other stations were sold to the Fox network. By then, Webster had already given Wilson and Akre the editorial go-ahead for their first big investigative piece--an exposé about possible health risks of rBGH-treated milk, which also provided solid documentation of numerous disturbing facts about Monsanto and its product:

Posilac® was never properly tested before FDA allowed it on the market. A standard cancer test of a new human drug requires two years of testing with several hundred rats. But rBGH was tested for only 90 days on 30 rats. Worse, the study has never been published, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has refused to allow open scientific peer review of the study's raw data.
Some Florida dairy herds grew sick shortly after starting rBGH treatment. One farmer, Charles Knight--who lost 75% of his herd--says that Monsanto and Monsanto-funded researchers at University of Florida withheld from him the information that other dairy herds were suffering similar problems.
Interviewed on camera, Florida dairy officials and scientists refuted Monsanto's claim that every truckload of milk from rBGH-treated cows is tested for excessive antibiotics.
Also on camera, Canadian government officials described what they called an attempt at bribery by Monsanto, which offered $1 to $2 million to gain rBGH approval in Canada.
A visit by Akre to seven randomly-selected Florida dairy farms found that all seven were injecting their cows with the hormone. Wilson and Akre also visited area supermarket chains, which two years previously had promised to ask their milk suppliers not to use rBGH in response to consumer concerns. In reality, store representatives admitted that they have taken no steps to assure compliance with this request.
Finally, the story dwelt heavily on concerns raised by scientists such as Epstein and Consumers Union researcher Michael Hansen about potential cancer risks associated with "insulin-like growth factor-I" (IGF-1). Treatments of rBGH lead to significantly increased levels of IGF-1 in milk, and recent studies suggest IGF-1 is a powerful tumor growth promoter.

The resulting story, a four-part series, was cleared by management and scheduled to begin airing on Monday, February 24, 1997. As part of the buildup to network ratings sweeps, the story was already being heavily promoted in radio ads when an ominous letter arrived at the office of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, the former Republican political operative who now heads Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network. The letter came from John J. Walsh, a powerful New York attorney with the firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, who accused the reporters of bias and urged the network to delay the story in order to ensure "a more level playing field" for Monsanto's side of the story. "There is a lot at stake in what is going on in Florida, not only for Monsanto but also for Fox News and its owner," Walsh wrote.

"Monsanto hired one of the most renowned lawyers in America to use his power and influence," Wilson says. "Even though our stories had been scheduled to run, even though Fox had bought expensive radio ads to alert viewers to the story, it was abruptly cancelled on the eve of the broadcasts within hours of receiving the letter from Monsanto's lawyer."

Initially, the story was postponed for a week, during which station editors and lawyers fine-combed the story but could find no inaccuracies. Akre and Wilson also offered to do a further interview with Monsanto and supplied a list of topics to be discussed. In response, Walsh fired back an even more threatening letter: "It simply defies credulity that an experienced journalist would expect a representative of any company to go on camera and respond to the vague, undetailed--and for the most part accusatory--points listed by Ms. Akre. Indeed, some of the points clearly contain the elements of defamatory statements which, if repeated in a broadcast, could lead to serious damage to Monsanto and dire consequences for Fox News."

What followed next, according to Wilson and Akre, was a grueling nightmare of perpetual delays and station-mandated rewrites--83 in all, none of which proved satisfactory to station management. "No fewer than six airdates were set and cancelled," Wilson recalls. "In all my years as a print and radio and local and national television reporter, I've never seen anything like it."

At one point, their lawsuit claims, WTVT general manager David Boylan told them he "wasn't interested" in looking at the story himself and pressured them to follow the company lawyer's directions, adding, "Are you sure this is a hill you're willing to die on?" On another occasion, Boylan allegedly told them, "We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is." Boylan then notified them they would be fired for insubordination within 48 hours and another reporter would make the requested changes.

"When we said we'd file a formal complaint with the FCC if that happened," notes Wilson, "we were not fired but were each offered very large cash settlements to go away and keep quiet about the story and how it was handled." The reporters refused the settlement, which amounted to nearly $200,000, and ultimately were fired in December 1997.

Notwithstanding the dramatic issues and allegations at stake for reporters everywhere, the lawsuit has generated almost no national media attention and only a few stories in the Florida press--most of which are couched in timid "he said, she said" language that is sure to please Monsanto. One editorialist could not resist putting quotation marks around the word "facts" in discussing the case: "The 'facts' at issue were as slippery as a just-milked cow. . . . And the lines between advocacy, truth integrity and insubordination thin to pencil width when an expensive lawsuit's in the offing."

"Is this an example of local TV's growing reluctance to air hard-hitting investigative news pieces?" asked Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times before concluding that "The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle." After examining "the personality conflicts and lack of definitive scientific evidence" about rBGH, Deggans concludes that "Wilson's and Akre's case may not be the perfect example to illustrate the trend of increasingly irrelevant reporting in TV news."

Actually, the case is a perfect example to illustrate that trend. In fact, Deggan's response to the case shows how corporate interests have succeeded in dramatically shifting the terms of acceptability in journalistic discourse. Good journalism--in particular, good investigative journalism--is almost always controversial and accompanied by "personality conflicts." In dealing with technologically novel products like genetically-engineered hormones, "lack of definitive scientific evidence" is part of what makes the story controversial.

"Is there smoking-gun, iron-clad evidence available today that drinking milk from hormone-treated cows will lead to cancer in you or your children?" asks Wilson. "No. Many scientists will tell you because this is a drug injected into animals and not directly into humans the testing of its effects on milk-drinkers has never been thorough enough to know for sure. But ask yourselves this: how long did it take us all to learn about the effects of tobacco while the special interests insisted there was no evidence of any harm? Was it wrong to raise those issues before the link was indisputable? Or how about Agent Orange, dioxin, PCBs--all Monsanto products, by the way, all approved by the government, sworn by Monsanto to be safe. Was it wrong to raise those issues before we knew for certain?"

In reality, journalistic reluctance to discuss hypothetical, as-yet unproven health risks is driven more by fear of corporate lawsuits than by a desire to be "responsible." One such lawsuit by the Food Lion grocery store chain resulted in a $5.5 million judgment against ABC-TV in January 1997--just one month prior to Monsanto's threatening letter aimed at killing the Akre-Wilson story. It was a verdict that Monsanto's attorney made sure to mention in his letter to Roger Ailes. "What has Monsanto concerned . . . is the assault on their integrity . . . blatantly carried on by Ms. Akre and Mr. Wilson," Walsh wrote. "In the aftermath of the Food Lion verdict, such behavior would alone be cause for concern."

"A lot of people now are more fearful of doing investigative journalism since Food Lion . . . which is why we have so many lawyers involved," admits Phil Metlin, who took over as WTVT's news director in July 1997. "We have to be careful . . . and prudent."

The result, of course, has been that attorneys rather than reporters are empowered to make journalistic decisions.

For its part, WTVT insists that this system of institutional self-censorship must be defended in order to avoid "chilling the give-and-take essential in any newsroom in getting the news on the air in a timely and responsible manner." In legal court filings, the station insists that its "editorial discretion and judgment should not and cannot be the subject of second-guessing by a judge or jury, consistent with the First Amendment."

WTVT also objects to the fact that Akre and Wilson "conducted two press conferences the day they filed their suit" and "have also created a web site to publicize their issues, where they have posted the complaint and exhibits and where they are soliciting public comments." Worse yet, the website includes two complete scripts of their controversial rBGH report--one version showing how they wanted to write the story, and the other showing how the network wanted it edited. Neither version has ever aired. In fact, its filings in court claim that by posting the scripts on their website, Akre and Wilson "have misappropriated . . . property. . . . This misconduct by Plaintiffs is in itself a material and serious breach of the employment agreements [and] amounts to theft."

Theft it may be, in some strange legal sense, but Akre and Wilson don't care at this point. "I am risking my career by doing this, and I will probably never work in television again," Wilson said, "But we wanted to get this story out." "As a mother, I know this is important information about a basic food I've been giving my child every day," Akre said. "As a journalist, I know it is a story that millions of Floridians have a right to know. The television station we worked for promised the story would be told. Instead, we spent nearly a year struggling to tell it honestly and accurately, and four months after we were fired for standing up for the truth, the station has done nothing but continue to keep this important news secret. It is not right for the station to withhold this important health information, and solely as a matter of conscience we will not aid and abet their effort to cover this up any longer. Every parent and every consumer has the right to know what they're pouring on their children's morning cereal."

Postscript: In May 1998, a month after Wilson and Akre filed suit, the station aired an rBGH story by the investigative reporter who was hired to replace them. His story, predictably, omitted many of their criticisms of Monsanto.

They won a "landmark whistleblower lawsuit" against the station and were awarded $425,000 in damages. However, Fox appealed and prevailed February 14, 2003 when the jury decision was reversed on a legal technicality: the appeals court agreed with Fox that it is technically not against any law, rule or regulation to deliberately distort the news on television [1] (www.foxbghsuit.com/), "an argument that had been rejected by three other judges on at least six separate occasions."

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Local Control Over Land Use Threatened by WTO

2005-12-15T09:00:11Z

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2099

Public Citizen Briefing Paper Reveals Push by Big Box Retailers to Use Trade Rules to Undermine Local Zoning and Other LandUse Laws

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A controversial World Trade Organization (WTO) services agreement that will be discussed at this week’s WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong poses a serious threat to state and local authority over land use policy, according to a briefing paper released today by Public Citizen.

Public Citizen released the paper, Big Box Backlash:The Stealth Campaign at the World Trade Organization to Pre-empt Local Control Over Land Use, as trade negotiators flew to Hong Kong in a last-ditch effort to revive stalled WTO talks. The briefing paper exposes how big box retailers such as Wal-Mart are pushing for new provisions in the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) that could further undermine local zoning and other land use and development policies. The briefing paper is available here.

“This briefing paper points out that, unlike many European and Asian nations, U.S. trade negotiators failed to safeguard local land use laws from the existing WTO services agreement, much in the same way that they failed to protect state gambling laws from the GATS,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, referring to a recent WTO ruling against U.S. gambling laws. “Rather than paring back our commitments under the GATS to protect state sovereignty and the right to regulate as a local governing entity, the Bush administration is hoping for an agreement in Hong Kong that would deliver a vast expansion of the GATS, including into areas largely regulated by states, such as higher education.”

In 1994, the United States committed retail and wholesale distribution, as well as the hotel and restaurant sectors, to the terms of the GATS, one of 17 Uruguay Round agreements enforced by the Geneva-based WTO. The GATS expansive “market access” rules are geared toward facilitating the entry of foreign service providers into the U.S. market by incorporation or acquisition of U.S. firms. These GATS rules forbid limits on the number of services suppliers, as well as measures that would reduce the value of a service transaction or limit the number of employees. Policies containing economic needs tests, like that in the city of Los Angeles for very large retail operations, are explicitly forbidden.

Unless the United States takes action to fix this problem in the current round of negotiations, local governments could see challenges to state and local land use laws brought before WTO tribunals, which are empowered to authorize trade sanctions against countries that refuse to conform their domestic policies to WTO dictates. Across the country, state and local officials are working to put laws in place to protect their communities, their environment, their wage base and tax dollars by putting land use limits on “big box” retailers, as well as retail chains and other development projects they deem destructive to the community or the environment or out of step with local needs and planning.

Among the local laws threatened by GATS rules are those that impose:
-size and height restrictions on big box stores;
-limits on hours of operation;
-economic needs tests before stores can be approved; and
-limits on development to protect the environment or protect historic and cultural sites.

No state or local group has yet recognized the threat posed to land use laws and local sovereignty by the WTO’s one-size-fits-all rules for service firms. One group that has recognized this threat is major retail firms.

“Major big box retail corporations have been eyeing the GATS as a way of gutting local zoning and land use laws that have kept them out of communities in Europe and the United States,” said Saerom Park, Public Citizen’s GATS outreach coordinator. “They are pursuing a strategy of global pre-emption. Citizens concerned about setting sane land use policies need to know that Wal-Mart is just one of the firms that has been lobbying both the U.S. government and the WTO on this issue.”

Indeed, Wal-Mart, in a May 1, 2002, submission to the U.S. Trade Representative, asked that Bush administration trade negotiators press countries to remove “any size limitations on individual stores” and “geographic limitations on store locations” in member countries. Similarly, at a Sept. 12, 2002, conference on the GATS organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, a retail industry representative identified IKEA (the Swedish furniture retailer) and Royal Ahold (the Netherlands-based owner of the Stop & Shop and Giant Food chains in the United States) as among the globalized companies facing problems with local land use policies. The representative identified regulations related to the “size and location of stores” as a specific trade barrier.

The threat posed by the GATS to state and local governments was highlighted this year by the WTO’s ruling in an Internet gambling case. Over the strenuous objections of the U.S. government, the WTO Appellate Body declared hat the United States had signed up (or committed) the entire gambling sector to the GATS, even though the word “gambling” never appeared in U.S. negotiating papers. Because of this ruling, all federal, state and local laws governing gambling must comply with GATS rules, which forbid bans on activities (such as gambling) in committed sectors and forbid a variety of other limits on gambling. While the United States dodged a bullet in this case, because the WTO said it could rely on the public morals exception contained in the GATS to argue that Internet gambling posed a unique hazard, no such exception would protect local zoning policies, and the GATS does not include even a weak exception for the protection of natural resources found in many other trade agreements.

The WTO service negotiations are a key part of the WTO’s negotiating mandate heading into the WTO’s 6th Ministerial, which begins this week in Hong Kong. New services negotiations launched in 2000 have been tied up with bitter debates over the pace and results of services liberalization, especially in the developing world. Services talks are scheduled to conclude in 2007.

Public Citizen briefing paper, "Big Box Backlash: The Stealth Campaign at the World Trade Organization to Pre-empt Local Control Over Land Use", available here: http://www.citizen.org/documents/Zoning_Memo_Final.pdf

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Big Box Mart

2005-10-16T09:01:12Z

More fun from the folks at jibjab. Click on "Big Box Mart" and enjoy...after the commercial that is.

jibjab.com/Home.aspx

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Halliburton Giving Iran Nukes

2005-08-06T20:14:05Z

By Jason Leopold

© 2005 Jason Leopold

Scandal-plagued Halliburton, the oil services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney was secretly working with one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and, allegedly, selling the officials' oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, according to Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies’ business dealings.

Just last week a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, whose miltary unit just reported a 284 percent increase in its second quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the financial means to build a nuclear weapon.

With Iran's new hardline government now firmly in place, Iranian officials have rounded up relatives and close business associates of Iran's former President and defeated mullah presidential candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani, alleging the men were involved in widespread corruption of Iran's oil industry, specifically tied to the country's business dealings with Halliburton.

On July 27, one of Iran's many state countrolled news agencies, FARS, an 'information' arm of the Islamic judiciary, announced the arrest of several of the executives of the Oriental Oil Kish Company, which is owned by Rafsanjani's children and other relatives.

"They were brought up on charges of economic corruption," according to a report posted on Iran Press News' website. “Following the necessary investigations by the judiciary's bailiffs, with warrants from the public prosecutor's office (mainly mullahs who only dole out Islamic jurisprudence), the case of economic corruption and malfeasance, certain of the authorities of Oriental Kish Oil Company have been arrested and under questioning. The head of the board of directors was also among those detained.”

Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting U.S. law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies, on oil and natural gas development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team and has been negotiating Iran's nuclear development issues with the European Union and at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with US energy companies to develop the country's oil industry,” the Financial Times reported.

“A reliable source stated that given the parameters, the close-knit cooperation and association of one of the key members of the regime's nuclear negotiation team with Halliburton, can be an alarm bell which will necessarily instigate the dynamics of the members of the regimes' negotiating committee,” according to the Iran Press News story.

Oriental Oil Kish is registerd in the United Kingdom and Dubai.

Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets and accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton, according to Iranian government officials. During the first round of interrogations in the judiciary a huge network of oil mafia has been exposed, according to the IPS report.

It’s unclear whether Halliburton was privy to information regarding Iran’s nuclear activites. Halliburton sources said the company sold centrifuges and oil and natural gas drilling parts to Oriental Oil Kish and advised Nasseri on nuclear related projects.

Halliburton received a subpoena last year from a federal grand jury in Texas in connection with a Justice Department investigation into allegations that the firm violated U.S. sanctions law prohibiting American companies from directly doing business in Iran. That case is ongoing.

A company spokesperson did not return numerous calls for comment. A White House spokesperson also did not return calls for comment.

In 1991, Halliburton sold Libya, another country that sponsors terrorism, nuclear detonator devices. The company paid more than $3 million in fines for violating a U.S. trade embargo that President Ronald Reagan imposed in 1986 because of Libya's ties to terrorist activities.

Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton became public knowledge in January when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars natural gas drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered in the Cayman Islands.

Following the announcement, Halliburton said the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. The BBC reported that Halliburton, which took in $30-$40 million from its Iranian operations in 2003, "was winding down its work due to a poor business environment."

Halliburton, under mounting pressure from lawmakers in Washington, D.C., pulled out of its deal with Nassri's company in May, but has done extensive work on other areas of the Iranian gas project and was still acting in an advisory capacity to Nasseri's company, two people who have knowledge of Halliburton's work in Iran said.

In attempt to curtail other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations, the Senate approved legislation July 26 that would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct business in Libya, Iran and Syria, and avoid U.S. sanctions under International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is part of the Senate Defense Authorization bill.

“It prevents U.S. corporations from creating a shell company somewhere else in order to do business with rogue, terror-sponsoring nations such as Syria and Iran,” Collins said in a statement.

"The bottom line is that if a U.S. company is evading sanctions to do business with one of these countries, they are helping to prop up countries that support terrorism - most often aimed against America," she said.

The law currently doesn’t prohibit foreign subsidiaries from conducting business with rogue nations provided that the subsidiaries are truly independent of the parent company.

But Halliburton’s Cayman Island subsidiary never did fit that description.

Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.

According to a February 2001 report in the Wall Street Journal, “Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is non-American. But, like the sign over the receptionist's head, the brochure bears the company's name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world.”

Moreover, mail sent to the company’s offices in Tehran and the Cayman Islands is forwarded to the company’s Dallas headquarters.

Not surprisingly, in a letter drafted by trade groups representing corporate executives vehemently objected to the amendment saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite terrorist attacks on the U.S and “greatly strain relations with the United States’ primary trading partners.”

“Extraterritorial measures irritate relations with the very nations the U.S. must secure cooperation from to promote multilateral strategies to fight terrorism and to address other areas of mutual concern,” said a letter signed by the Coalition for Employment through Exports, Emergency Coalition for American Trade, National Foreign Trade Council, USA Engage, U.S. Council on International Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Foreign governments view U.S. efforts to dictate their foreign and commercial policy as violations of sovereignty, often leading them to adopt retaliatory measures more at odds with U.S. goals.”

Still, Collins’ amendment has some holes. As Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney pointed out in a July 25 story, “the Collins amendment would seek to penalize individuals or entities who evade IEEPA sanctions — if they are "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States."

“This is merely a restatement of existing regulations," Gaffney said.

"The problem with this formulation is that, in the process of purportedly closing one loophole, it would appear to create new ones. As Sen. Collins told the Senate: "Some truly independent foreign subsidiaries are incorporated under the laws of the country in which they do business and are subject to that country's laws, to that legal jurisdiction. There is a great deal of difference between a corporation set up in a day, without any real employees or assets, and one that has been in existence for many years and that gets purchased, in part, by a U.S. firm."

"It is a safe bet that every foreign subsidiary of a U.S. company doing business with terrorist states will claim it is one of the ones Sen. Collins would allow to continue enriching our enemies, not one prohibited from doing so,” Gaffney said.

Going a step further, Dow Jones Newswires reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sent letters in June to energy corporations demanding that the companies disclose in their security filings any business dealings with terrorist supporting nations.

“The letters have been sent by the SEC's Office of Global Security Risk, a special division that monitors companies with operations in Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, which were created by the U.S. Congress in 2004,” Dow Jones reported.

The move comes as investors have become increasingly concerned that they may be unwillingly supporting terrorist activity. In the case of Halliburton, the New York City Comptroller's office threatened in March 2003 to pull its $23 million investment in the company if Halliburton continued to conduct business with Iran.

The SEC letters are aimed at forcing corporations to disclose their profits from business dealings rogue nations. Oil companies, such as Devon Energy Corp., ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. that currently conduct business with countries that sponsor terrorism, have not disclosed the profits received from terrorist countries in their most recent quarterly reports because the companies don’t consider the earnings “material.”

Devon Energy was until recently conducting business in Syria. The company just sold its stake in an oil field there. ConocoPhillips has a service contract with the Syrian Petroleum Co. that expires on Dec. 31.

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.

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Corporate Welfare At It's Worst

2005-07-27T07:36:24Z

From commondreams.org by Rep Bernie Sanders 5/15/02

"The Import/Export Bank, Corporate Welfare at it's worst"

This country has a 6 trillion dollar national debt, a growing deficit and is borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund government services.

We can no longer afford to provide over 125 billion dollars every year in corporate welfare---tax breaks, subsidies and other wasteful spending--that goes to some of the largest, most profitable corporations in America.

One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little known federal agency called the "Export Import Bank", and institution that has a budget of 1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk 15.5 billion in loan garuntees annually.

At a time when the government is underfunding veterans' needs, education, health care, housing and many other vital services, over 80% of the subsidies distributed by the Export Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations.

Among the companies that receive TAXPAYER support from the EX IM are Enron, Boeing, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon, and United Technologies.

Needles to say, many of the same companies recieving TAXPAYER SUPPORT pay exorbitant salaries and benefits to their CEO's. IBM, for example, gave their former CEO Lou Gerstner over 260 million in stock options while they were lining up for their EX IM handouts.

The great irony of EX IM policy is not just that TAXPAYER SUPPORT goes to wealthy and profitable corporations that don't need it, but that in the name of "job creation" a substantial amount of federal funding goes to precisely those corporations that are eliminating hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

In other words, American workers are providing funding to the very companies that are shutting down the plants in which they work and are moving them to China, Mexico, Vietnam and wherever else they can find cheap labor.

General Electric has received over 2.5 billiion in direct loans from the EX IM bank. And what was the result? From 1975 to 1995, GE reduced it's workforce from 667,000 to 398,000.

General Motors has received over 500 million in direct loans from the EX IM. The result? GM has shrunk its US workforce from 559,000 to 314,000.

Motorola has received almost 500 million in direct loans from the EX IM bank. The result? A mere 56% of it's work force is actually located in the US.

And conservatives worry about mexicans coming HERE and stealing their jobs and they worry about the single mom on welfare getting handouts.

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Billboard Subvertising (from Subvertise.org)

2005-05-16T09:29:18Z

Destruction of any of the State's ideological weapons of control will always be a rewarding experience. Most times it may be you don't need any more than a tin of paint, a little humour and a quiet night to turn a multinational's expensive advertising hoarding into your own guerrilla tapestry.
But maybe there's a tobacco advert that really bugs you. Maybe you've got a graphic that would look good as a poster but would look great - if only it fitted over a ten foot high Malboro smoking cowboy (still retaining the beautiful sunset over the Rockies). Maybe you`d like to wreak a joyful and subversive doubletake on unsuspecting victims of the advertising machine.

Methods of devastation and total obliteration are covered in the rest of the manual. This section deals with the direct subversion of the billboard's message- to answer it, question it, or overturn it, all at their expense.

With the use of a few simple tools it is possible to take their glossy hi-tech death culture billboards and turn them back on themselves. We`ll start with straight up graffiti and work up to do-it-yourself, no holds barred Big Art.

If you want to use spray cans then beware illegible scrawl and spelling mistakes during the excitement. Also: like the hip hop graffitos, get yourself a pistol grip plastic handle that fits around the can, saving on tired fingers and ensuring that the paint goes in the right direction. These are cheap and easily available at any autoshop.

But maybe you want to go a little further. Well the most effective alterations are certainly the simplest: the addition of one or two letters; or a speech bubble: or pasting over certain words or letters with appropriately coloured paper. All over Britain during election time `you can`t trust Labour` became `You can trust Labour` by pasting plain white paper over the offending `T`- the message was wrong but the method simplistically brilliant.

It must be said that the skilfully reworked billboard directs the passer-by to a consideration of the original corporate strategy in the context of a thoughtful reaction.

A huge slogan or subversive graphic on a roadside billboard helps you reach the people that these are aimed at - car drivers - to make it plain to them how destructive and alienated a car obsessed culture really is.

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WITH THIS IN MIND, LET ME INTRODUCE YOU . . . .

THE PHOTOCOPIER AS A WEAPON OF SUBVERSION . .
Get access to a photocopier. It has to be one with an enlargement function. Some will only enlarge up to 141%- that is, it will turn an A4 into an A3. Others might go 200%, the best copiers will go 400%. Try to find one of these. Universities & Arts centres might be a good place to start looking
The most accessible and cheapest machines have a set enlargement button; that gives 141% Why 141%- well, it's a dimension that always retains the relative dimensions of the two sides (that's why A4 paper is the size it is). Really. Divide the length of an A4 by its width and you get 1.41. Width divided by length is 0.71. What it means practically is that if you take an A4 and blow it up 141% it becomes an A3. An A3 blown up 141% again doubles in size exactly (to become an A2). And so on, A1, AO etc.

Doing this you can take a graphic on A3 and keep doubling (141%) each half of the paper the copier spits out and watch it grow to the size you want.

No problem. Except that this is incredibly wasteful of paper, and time consuming (though quite straightforward). If you can get at a copier that goes up in 400% steps then you'll be able to miss out all the stages in between.

To explain this method, take an A4 piece of paper. Fold it. It is now 71% of its size (an A5 in fact, which enlarged by 141%, will be the A4 again). Fold the paper again- that's 50% (an A6- put a picture this size on a copier and blow it up 200% and it magically becomes an A4 once more). Now fold twice more and it will be one sixteenth the area of the original A4, the sides being a quarter of the original. If you unfold it, it'll have grid marks on it. This is the essence of 400% enlargement.

Easy so far, eh? So do the same origami with an A3. Now get your graphic as big as you can on an A3. Turn it over and draw lines onto it to make it into quarters, and then again into sixteenths (like you done with the folding lark above). You can then cut the picture up and have sixteen little bits of paper- don't lose them! Each one of these you blow up 397% (not 400%- you don't want to lose any of the graphic off the edges) and hey presto you've now got 16 A3 jigsaw pieces which, when put together, makes you a big fuck off poster 1.6 metres x 1.1 metres. If you start with an original made up of four or more A3's you got big enough to cover whole billboards (or building). [Laser copiers will do this sectioning for you- its called 'tiling'- they spew out all the pieces from an uncut A3.]

If you can only get to a copier that goes 200% then you have to quarter the picture, blow it up then quarter each quarter again- if you see what I mean. You can paste all the tiles together indoors with PVA/Copydex/Water soluble glue like you used in school (or Sellotape on the back). You can redo bits in coloured paper; pick out bits using coloured toner; or paint on it; the limits are your imagination. Mind you, don't try to paste up graphics any bigger than 2m x 1m; if your message is larger, make it up of big chunks and butt the sections together as they go up.

If you want to fit something over an irregular size picture then you have to measure up the original and work backwards. Draw up a sketch of what you want to subvert and see how to fit A3's into it. Stare at it long enough and it becomes apparent.

For lettering, you can do letraset and keep blowing it up, but again it's wasteful. Either paint your slogan on paper or better still, find a computer and do the alphabet, one letter on each A4 printout. These are your originals, don't paste them up. When you want a slogan take each letter in turn on a copier and blow them up. With a computer you should be able to find the exact right typeface as is already on the billboard. Very impressive was some bright spark's addition to Volkswagon's "We put people in front of cars" by reproducing in exact type underneath: "And children under the front wheels".

A READY ASSEMBLED GRAPHIC CAN BE PASTED UP IN LESS THAN THREE MINUTES
Use wallpaper paste for the hit, a bucket and a paint brush. Coat the area to be covered with lots of paste, place on the graphic and go over it again with lots of paste (a little pva in the mix makes it set quicker and waterproofs it as well.) A broom will get you higher- cut down the head to fit inside the bucket.
Watch the billboards for when they change them - in our area they get recovered every third Thursday, so if you catch them right you can get plenty of outside studio space and time for your visual banditry.

Rather than skulking around in the middle of the night looking suspicious and getting nicked, put on some overalls, get a gang together and go for it during daylight hours- you`ll be able to see what you are doing for starters. Job's worths giving you shit are- in our experience- few and far between; most passers by we've met think it's a good laugh. If the beast catches you while putting it up, "Why officer, look, it peels straight off again!". Hope this has been of some interest and future use for you (if you got this far!). Once you start doing it, it just seems to flow. Oh, and remember, happiness is subversive when it's collective.

"People tend to do a double-take on billboards we've tampered with. We think it's far more effective than just spray painting a billboard because people automatically dismiss that. With our slogans they don't immediately recognise it as agit-prop."- AVI Billboard Interventions

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Publish The Method
Generalise Knowledge - Increase Self Activity
The billboard artist's goal is to throw a well aimed spanner into the media's gears, bringing the image factory to a shuddering halt. We work to unmask the real corporate activity behind the glamourous image, and to assault the billboard itself, to question its given function of marking out urban geographies (areas defined for consumption, the territory devoted to the car, the space set aside for leisure that always seems to lkack meaningful participation). Our actions reclaim these billboards and use them as our own canvasses, maybe to advertise our own campaigns but ultimately recreate our communities for what we would rather see. After all, it's our walls that are being rented out for business propaganda. So we should recycle them to integrate once more the notion of Life and Living into the urban centres of the 20th century. We can turn the tables on capitalism if we recognise that we can all be artists- if we don't compete, but play, play hard and play seriously. Billboard banditry is also excellent preparation for more advanced forms of monkeywrenching. as well as being empowering through having immediate visible results, it's fun too.

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BILLBOARD FELLING
The following section is taken from the American Earth First! book "Ecodefense".
Safety

It is important to remove billboards. It is also important not to get caught (so we can remove more billboards).

Personal safety from self-inflicted injury is also extremely important when using the methods described below. Think of a sign as a giant fly swatter and yourself as the bug. Get the picture? Never stand in the area where a sign can fall (front or back). Walk outside of this danger zone. Don't take short cuts. Watch a sign closely the entire time you are cutting. Leave the outermost poles for last. Always have an escape route planned if the sign shows evidence of falling prematurely. Sawdust can get in your eyes and prove irritating. A pair of good safety goggles, available at any hardware stores, can eliminate this problem. They are essential for contact lens wearers. Remember that goggles are reflective. Always pull them off your face before looking at passing cars.

Sign-Cutting
When sawing, duck down while cars pass if they can see you in the periphery of their headlights. Stop periodically to listen for any indication of discovery. Felling is accomplished by pushing on the outermost poles, aided sometimes with ropes. See the illustrations for techniques on use of the rope. Use the rope(s) only for monkeywrenching since it may have to be abandoned if your work is disrupted- you don't want it accumulating fibres, dirt and oil stains that can link it with your home or workplace. store it in a plastic trash bag between jobs. Dropping a billboard face-up will allow you to inflict additional damage by spray painting across the front of the advertisement.
Billboarding is dirty work. Evidence that will remain on your clothing includes bits of brush, dirt on boots and knees, and sawdust. if you wear overalls, remove them before the pick up and wrap the tools in them. After a night's work, clean off your boots and launder your clothes. Vacuum your car boot, seats and floor carpets. Drop the vacuum cleaner bag in a public bin, away from home.

Field Notes
*Effective sign cutting requires a three person team: a driver and two cutters. With four, your cutting team can have a look-out who can also alternate with the cutters in shifts. A five person team is the largest size for safe operations and permits two teams of cutters and thus faster work at the target site.
*Axes are the least desirable billboarding tools. Sometimes microscopic marks left on the wood can be matched to a specific axe in the possession of a suspect. Saw marks, on the other hand, are usually impossible to match up. like files and grinding wheels, their surfaces are constantly changing and so are the marks they leave.

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EARTH FIRST'S LONG ARM OF THE LAW
If you wanna write on a billboard that's too high to reach, you can either get a ladder (which isn"t particularly convenient) or build a spray can extension rod:
Obtain a broom handle or another solid, strong but lightweight wooden pole (#1 in the illustration).

At one end cut out a wedge, half the width of the pole. Fit a flat metal bar to the remaining wood (#2).

About one foot from this bar (or the hight of your spray can), attach a support clamp on which the can will rest (#3).

Fit an angle bracket on each side of the pole, about 8 inchesfrom the end (#4).

The spray can should fit between these brackets. Tie a length of plastic coated wire to the flat metal bar (#2)and feed it through a hole in support clamp (#3)and screw-eyes attached the length of the pole (#5).

This wire, when pulled will press down the nozzle of the spray out.

An optional extra is the roll-top of a deodorant bottle, fitted to the support clamp (#6). This will help maintain an even distance between the spray can and the billboard. You may have to experiment a bit to get the right measurements to fit your can of spray paint.

Although these extension rods are clumsy to use at first (you're not kidding) with practice they become very effective.

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posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies

Kmart Supports People's Liberation Army

2005-05-09T13:12:22Z

Thought I would start with this....
http://www.nwlaborpress.org/1997/kmart.html

posted in Corporate Watchdogs - 0 replies