Riding The Juggernaut

Never Fear, Wikileaks Is Here

2010-12-05T21:35:00.000-08:00

Critics of Wikileaks claim that some things must be kept secret, that governments need to be able to act confidentially, and that ordinary citizens cannot have a significant say in affairs of state because there are some things they should never know. That may be true, assuming your system of government is functioning properly. But as top-level inertia on major global crises indicates, our supposedly democratic systems are not working properly.

Global warming is surely the most pressing example of Western government failure. Despite decades of scientific evidence and ever-increasing public support for action, our governments (led by the USA) have proven themselves capable of little more than earnest platitudes. Big Business leaders have done everything possible to undermine the science, confuse the public, and successfully lobby against change in the corridors of power. Their efforts have been fully supported by a compliant corporate media.

The Middle East is another intractable problem. The central conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is so heavily politicised that professional Western commentators are reluctant to even discuss today's inhumane apartheid reality in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli lobby controls US government decision-making, while US client states support Washington's auto-reflexive veto of any UN condemnation of Israeli atrocities. Again, the media supports the charade. Well-meaning citizens are somehow brain-washed into thinking that Zionist interests equate to their own, never mind the terrorists being created as a result.

Then there's the financial turbulence afflicting economies around the world, with Ireland, Greece and Iceland only the latest major victims. If banks like Goldman Sachs are a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity" then the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank may be considered their major tentacles, reaching deep down into the bowels of national wealth. The elite "economic hit-men" do their jobs, the world's mega-billionaires grow ever more obscenely rich, profit-gorging on taxpayer-funded bailouts, and our governments pretend there's nothing they can do about it.

And let's not forget the bloody Energy Wars raging in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where millions of innocent citizens are being murdered, maimed and displaced as a result of Western lies, greed and criminal incompetence.

Enough! Evidently, something has to change. But what can be done?

The normal democratic avenues for regulation, accountability and change are simply not functioning as they supposedly should.

Public enquiries have become long-winded wastes of public money. Elaborate cover-ups are orchestrated with the help of willing stooges in the media, parliament and judiciary. Military enquiries are even more farcical. Whiste-blowers are exposed wherever possible, facing legal action and character assassination from the highest levels, while the crimes they reveal are brushed aside.

And don't even think that the Fourth Estate might come riding to the rescue. Independent media outlets face funding dilemmas and smear attacks, while the corporate media is hopelessly compromised by political and business agendas.

In such a deeply corrupted environment, the only remaining solution is for ordinary citizens to pry open the machinations of government and expose the truth to all who care to look.

Of course our leaders like to talk about "Open Government", but only during election campaigns (particularly when minor parties threaten their cosy hold on power). The reality terrifies them. But now Open Government has arrived, whether they like it or not, and there is no turning back.

It is no coincidence that those most loudly condemning Wikileaks have the most clearly vested interests in protecting their own dark secrets. Wikileaks is the most recent, potent and visible manifestation of widespread global anger at the ever-increasing confluence of government policy and Big Business interests. We, the people, have been steadily abandoned by our leaders. We want our democracies back.

It is therefore heartening to see a global outpouring of support from the general public. Ordinary citizens have nothing to fear, and much to celebrate, from this new cyber-space revolution.

Ten Self-Evident Truths

2010-03-29T03:27:00.000-07:00

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..." - Thomas Jefferson, US Declaration Of Independence.

Today, much of the world's most critically important debates are mired in time-wasting, dishonest, pseudo-scientific gobbledy-gook. Politicians and professional spin-doctors muddy the waters with ridiculous, headline-grabbing arguments that do nothing but stall progress. Teams of professional lawyers search for obtuse loopholes to protect their wealthy clients from socially important judgements. Media whores chase rabbits through thickets of steaming prose that grow denser by the day, till the truth is nowhere to be found.

It's time to draw a line in the sand. It's time to agree that certain issues are not up for debate any more. It's time to demand that certain facts be recognised as universal, self-evident truths. And if we can do this, then perhaps, like those who long ago overthrew slavery and imperial control, we can all move forward to a better future.

FACTS

I propose that the following ten facts be acknowledged as no longer worth debating:

1. Evolution is real. The world was created billions of years ago. Modern human beings evolved from ancestors who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.

2. Man-made global warming is real. Even if the earth is warming partly due to natural processes, there is absolutely no scientific basis for doubt that the earth is warming, and that human activity is accelerating this problem. Therefore, there is absolutely no excuse for not doing everything we can to urgently combat this growing crisis.

3. We don't know the whole truth about what happened on September 11th, 2001, because the US government's 9/11 Commission was a reluctantly organized cover-up. The commission heads were government stooges. Important evidence was ignored or suppressed. 48 pages of the final report were redacted. Conspiracy theories have only been able to proliferate because the official government version of events is so blatantly inadequate.

4. Dr Bruce Ivins did not single-handedly orchestrate the US anthrax attacks of October 2001. Robert Mueller's FBI mis-managed the investigation from the start by harassing innocent suspects, ignoring a host of important evidence, and then closing the case prematurely without conclusive evidence after Ivins died. Obviously they did not want to find the real killers.

5. The US-led invasion of Iraq was illegal. Saddam never had any WMDs, nor any ties to terrorists, and the people who made the decision to invade Iraq knew that perfectly well. They lied, they "sexed up" the intelligence, they side-lined the United Nations, and they intimidated or eliminated anyone else who stood in their way.

6. The USA and their international "Coalition Of The Willing" partners invaded Iraq for the oil. There were secondary motives, of course, including establishing a new US military foothold in the Middle East (especially after the USA quietly caved in to Bin Laden's demand to withdraw from Saudi Arabia). But with peak oil looming, control of Iraq's oil resources was always the primary objective. It's no coincidence that the President and Vice President of the USA at the time were both former oil company CEOs.

7. Israel's treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid, and Washington supports this because the US government is riddled with excessive pro-Israeli influences. US foreign policy is inordinately skewered towards Israel, and it is only US protectionism that makes international condemnation of Israeli apartheid impossible. US-support of Zionist expansion results in atrocious living conditions for Palestinians, and consequently not just a more dangerous Middle East, but also a more dangerous world for all of us.

8. Corporate media outlets are not trustworthy news sources. They have been heavily complicit in efforts to mislead the public about Iraq, Iran, the global financial crisis, global warming, and many other critically important issues. Moguls who control media monopolies collude with fellow billionaires and government leaders to keep the public confused, misled and uninformed. Rupert Murdoch in particular is as much a War Criminal as George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.

9. Despite a change of government, the USA still condones torture and holds people without charge in secret gulags around the world. It still spies on its own citizens and reserves the right to kill them without due process anywhere in the world. It still kills innocent civilians of other nations without due concern. All this has been justified by both major US political parties as part of a "war on terror" that has never been clearly defined, and which also has no clear goals. This implies that these illegal and unconstitutional US government actions will persist indefinitely, as will the self-declared "Long War" against anyone they chose to proclaim an enemy combatant. This is not acceptable behaviour for a civilized nation.

10. The richest 1% of people on this planet should not control 40% of the wealth. That's just wrong. Wealthy individuals and global corporations, particularly the financial sector, currently wield massively disproportionate power in comparison to ordinary individuals. This cannot be allowed to continue.

CONCLUSIONS

If we can agree that these ten, simple facts are true, then we are forced to draw some rather horrific conclusions. It's no wonder most people would rather ignore them!

There is a global conspiracy to keep the public uninformed. Such language may sound alarmist, but there is no other way to describe it. The world's super-rich elites have informally bonded together to keep the public ignorant about important issues - including war crimes - that these people just don't want to discuss. As the ten above truths demonstrate, this conspiracy is no longer a "theory" - it is an observable fact.

It is tempting to declare that Western democratic government is no longer functional in any meaningful sense. The social contract between people and government has been broken. The Fourth Estate is broken too. The corporations, the banks, the lobbyists and their employers have taken control of the decision-making process. There is no meaningful oversight or accountability. Even the public debating process is skewed to the point of farce.

Effectively, what we have now is economic class warfare, waged from the top down. Those of us at the bottom, who know what is going on, have nobody to represent us in the corridors of power. We have no real voice in the mainstream media. We are disenfranchised, even as we continue working and paying taxes to support the official lies.

As history shows, people cannot be treated like this forever without consequence.

Going Underground

2008-09-19T04:45:00.000-07:00

Some people might say my life is in a rut,
But I'm quite happy with what I got
People might say that I should strive for more,
But I'm so happy I cant see the point.
Something's happening here today
A show of strength with your boys brigade and,
I'm so happy and you're so kind
You want more money - of course I don't mind
To buy nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes

And the public gets what the public wants
But I want nothing this society's got -
I'm going underground, (going underground)
Well the brass bands play and feet start to pound
Going underground, (going underground)
Well let the boys all sing and the boys all shout for tomorrow

Some people might get some pleasure out of hate
Me, I've enough already on my plate
People might need some tension to relax
Me I'm too busy dodging between the flak

What you see is what you get
You've made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
You'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns

And the public wants what the public gets
But I don't get what this society wants
I'm going underground, (going underground)
Well the brass bands play and feet start to pound
Going underground, (going underground)
So let the boys all sing and the boys all shout for tomorrow

We talk and talk until my head explodes
I turn on the news and my body froze
The braying sheep on my TV screen
Make this boy shout, make this boy scream!

Going underground, I'm going underground!

Meuller Testifies On Anthrax

2008-09-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

Here's me playing Devils Advocate for Mueller on Glenzilla today:

Like I said yesterday, I would really like to believe that this is not a massive conspiracy to cover up the the real anthrax killers, because the implications of that are pretty horrific. So I have been searching my brain for other explanations.

It seems to me that the FBI - like DoJ, the CIA, and most newsrooms these days (not to mention a few boardrooms and even bedrooms) - is divided into pro- and anti-Bush camps these days, so discernible patterns of behaviour can be confusing.

For example, the FBI quickly refused to endorse the neocon lie (repeated by McCain among others) that Iraq was most like behind the anthrax attacks. If it's all a big cover-up job now, why did they bother doing that back in 2001? It was Mueller who was personally "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings back then.

Shortly after the attacks, Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, contacted an FBI Agent called Marion "Spike" Bowman, and told him that only a government lab could have produced this anthrax and he suspected people at Fort Detrick were involved.
"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor said.
Why did they do that? A question for Robert Mueller! I think the FBI have already admitted it was a mistake, but who authorized it and why?

(Without getting too side-tracked, this touches on another concern I have about the evidence that remains. It has all been in the hands of the FBI, so who is to say that the evidence has not been tampered with? I mean, assuming that the FBI's credibility is shot here, as seems to be the case.)

And then in 2003, "Spike" Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, despite a protest letter from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and despite the fact that Bowman was also the FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for access to Zacharias Moussaoui's computer prior to 9/11.

And then there is the media circus surrounding FBI agent Van Harp's original investigations into Stephen Hatfill. News crews with helicopters were beating FBI agents to the scene of new developments! Did Mueller ever try to find out who was tipping off the media about FBI leads? Did he ever fire anyone?

When an FBI case agent Robert Roth recommended a criminal probe of the leaks, Mueller resisted. Why? Roth said Roth said the case file was "an open book," used by "a huge group of people."
Mueller testified that he did not recall the episode. He said he had backed at least one other leak investigation but did not know if any action was taken.
In fact, Mueller personally instructed Van Harp to brief Daschle and Leahy on the case, in a break with normal strict confidentiality protocol: did the media somehow get access to those briefings? If so how?

Now back to playing Devil's Advocate (not doing a good job, am I?) ... OK, trying a bit harder to defend Mueller...

We live in interesting times and the FBI has a lot on their plate these days.

And sometimes I think that maybe Mueller knows who did the anthrax attacks, and he is just letting the media chase rabbits while the real investigation continues. I mean, he did at least threaten to resign in March 2004, when Bush tried to over-rule the DoJ's ruling that domestic wire-tapping was unconstitutional (never mind that the wiretapping has continued). And there was that crazy episode at Ashcroft's bedside:
Mueller arrived just after Card and Gonzales departed. He shared a private moment with Ashcroft, bending over to hear the man’s voice.

“Bob, I’m struggling,” Ashcroft said.

“In every man’s life there comes a time when the good Lord tests him,” Mueller replied. “You have passed your test tonight.”
So sometimes I wonder if there is not a deep, deep undercover FBI team set to blow the lid on the whole Bush administration. You can imagine the scene: Bush, Cheney, Rove, Gonzales, Rumsfeld and a host of others all arrested on the same day. The constitutional republic restored once more! Justice prevails! Hurrah!

But then I wake up and realise that Mueller has put his own credibility on the line here, time and again. His agents have hounded one innocent man for years, and driven another man to his death.

The best you could plausibly say for Mueller is that maybe he is just not very interested in this case - but again, that's inexcusable when five people are dead after a terrorist attack on US soil.

Or maybe he is powerless, surrounded by Bush Co. bad guys who are white-anting his reputation and blocking FBI investigations. Is that why he now says the FBI needs even MORE powers (yes, that is a big part of what's happening at these hearings today)? Again, that's very hard to believe, much as one might wish to do so. For starters, why doesn't he go public with what he knows?

Mueller became FBI Director on September 4, 2001, just one week before 9-11. Looking back, a lot of strange things happened in the weeks before 9-11. A few of them, relating to the FBI's decision not to search Moussaoui's computer, are described in the "bombshell memo" from FBI agent Coleen M. Rowley.

IMHO, we have reached a point where you cannot talk about these anthrax letters without also re-examining the official narrative of what happened on 9-11. It's that bad.

Notes In The Margin

2008-09-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

1. McCain's foreign advisor for Latin America is Otto "Death Squads" Reich. I kid you not. And he is busy comparing Hugo Chavez with Hitler and Mussolini.

2. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s top military official, is making a hasty visit to Pakistan after Pakistan troops received orders to open fire on U.S. troops if they launch another air or ground raid across the Afghan border. Afghan ministers have staged a walkout in protest at the high civilian death rates inflicted by US-led forces.

3. McCain is calling for a 9-11-style commission into the Wall Street collapse. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, compares the collapse of the GOP's patented "trickle-down" market fundamentalism with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, the US government is all but nationalising AIG by extending an 85-billion-dollar loan in exchange for a nearly 80-percent stake in the company, including all company assets.

4. Glennzilla today looks at the appalling anthrax testimony of FBI head Robert Mueller. My comments:

Welcome To The Crazy Conspiracy Theorists Club

This answer alone tells us all we need to know:
I don't know the answers to those questions as to how we eliminated Dugway and Battelle. I'll have to get back to you at some point.
Sorry? This is the cornerstone of the FBI's case! Mueller has had weeks - months - to prepare and he cannot even provide an answer to that central question? Not even a pretend answer to keep the press happy? In a sane world, that alone would be cause for dismissal.

Glenn, surely it is time to draw some conclusions? Unfortunately, they are downright scary.

And as soon as you say these things, your public credibility will be shot (in many people's eyes, anyway) and your words will be thrown back at you time and again as "proof" that you should not be taken seriously on any issue.

I know: I am one of the people who said, way back in March 2003, that Saddam had no WMDs and Iraq was only being invaded for the oil. I am one of the people who said the 911 Commission not only avoided difficult questions but was specifically designed to avoid those questions.

So are you ready to draw some conclusions here?

I mean, why would Mueller be lying? Why would they have chased the wrong guy for so many years? Why would they be so keen to close off a case with so many holes in it? Why has the corporate media given the FBI a free ride on this issue for so long? Why isn't Bush taking an interest on an issue of such critical importance? Why isn't Cheney warning the public that the anthrax killer might still be on the loose? Why aren't the Dems jumping up and down and screaming?

I'll tell you why.

This was Dick Cheney just five days after 911:
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
It's not that the Dems are scared of being targetted with anthrax. It's that the Dems have actively co-conspired with Cheney and Bush to do a lot of bad things on "the dark side". Now they too are complicit in a host of crimes. And whenever Cheney says "Don't go there" they just wink and walk away.

Same thing with the media. Your patriotic D.C. journos just love walking away from big stories whenever "national security" is at stake. It makes them feel important.

And you can say all that without saying that either 911 or the anthrax attacks were a LIHOP or MIHOP operation. But with the anthrax attacks in particular, you are pushing credibility.

I mean, Bin Laden has been blamed for 911, and there's a strange-looking tape of him saying he did it, and even though the FBI has never built a case against him, maybe they are sitting on information that we'll never see. Who knows?

But Bruce Ivins? The guy is dead. He worked in a highly secured government lab. There's no reason not to release all the evidence they have. There's no reason for a cover-up. Unless...

Unless..????! Well, you tell me.

This shit has been driving me crazy for years. If there's a rational explanation, I'd love to hear it!

And:

The Bush administration's failure to take this anthrax investigation seriously exposes (again) the fact they they actually do not really care all that much about the supposedly dire threat of terrorism.

Terrorism is a great excuse for spending money, launching wars, and repressing civil rights. It sells newspapers and can it makes a useful electioneering tool.

But when there's a potential killer still on the loose after seven years, it's nothing to worry about.

Is it because they don't really care about the well-being of the general population (see e.g. Katrina et al)?

Or it is because they know damned well who the real terrorists are?

I thought those comments might draw a few heated responses, but BushWorld seems to be stunned into silence today. Funny, that.

Finally, via Simon Jackman, here's a vid to cheer all you miserable Malditos Yanquis up:

Was I Right Or Was I Right?

2008-09-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

Me on Glenzilla's blog a couple of days ago:

Forget The Election

Obama just won.

Wall Street tomorrow is going to confirm everything that all the critics ever said was wrong with the Reagan/Bush "trickle-down" economic lies.

Depending on your personal situation, it's time for either panic or popcorn.

Of course the main thing is not the financial well-being of the planet, or the future of our children, but whether or not I personally was right.

Ego uber alles. Vorsicht wenn du runterkommst!

UPDATE: Here's Obama today on the economic crisis:

Obama said the role of ratings services must be examined as part of any revamping of the way markets are monitored and regulated, and he suggested that he doesn't favor having the government stepping in to rescue failing firms.

``The idea that taxpayers can continue to be on the hook for failures at firm after firm after firm I think is a real problem,'' Obama said in an interview tonight with Bloomberg Television.

Meanwhile, here's a former McCain shrill seeing the light:

Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised...

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty...

Karl Marx got one thing right -- what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

Potentially, the world is about to take a turn for the better. But just winning the election will be only the start for Obama.

Slippery As An Eel?

2008-09-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

If it's any comfort, I don't understand it either.

Bush's USA: Over-reaching and Under-achieving

2008-09-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

I blogged yesterday about that new poll showing most people around the world don't believe Al Quaeda was behind 9-11. Joshua Holland has a whole bunch of good observations to make.

Whatever one thinks of "alternative" theories of who the perpetrators were that day, the results are an eye-opening indication of how profoundly the world's confidence in the United States government has eroded during the Bush era...

Interestingly, Americans are also dubious, with more than a third of those polled by Scripps Howard News Service in 2006 saying it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that "federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them" because they "wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East." ...

In one sense, these findings should come as no surprise. America, like other countries, has been known to conduct "false-flag" operations before. And it has used falsehoods to justify going to war. In the now-infamous "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" -- the incident that would be used to justify America's involvement in that conflict -- a minor skirmish occurred between U.S. naval ships and two North Vietnamese coastal vessels. Two days later, the Johnson administration reported that there had been a second attack, which it claimed was evidence of "communist aggression" on the part of the North Vietnamese. But, as a National Security Agency report revealed in 2005 (PDF), the second incident -- the one that created a "pattern" of aggression -- was invented out of whole cloth. "It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night," reads the report.

In 1990, on the eve of the first Gulf War, Pentagon officials cited top-secret satellite images and said definitively that Saddam Hussein had amassed a huge army -- with 250,000 men and 1,500 tanks -- along the Saudi border in preparation for an invasion of that country. Jean Heller, a reporter with the St. Petersburg Times, purchased some Russian satellite images of the same piece of desert and found that in fact there was nothing there but sand. After the U.S.-led attack, a "senior (U.S. military) commander" told New York Newsday, "There was a great disinformation campaign surrounding this war."

Those incidents are in no way analogous to the attacks of 9/11. But in 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that the CIA might launch a series of terror attacks within the United States, blame Cuba, and use the ensuing panic to justify military action against the defiant island-nation. (The plan, called "Operation Northwoods," which became public in 1997, was reportedly killed off by John F. Kennedy himself -- it got that far up the food chain.)

Holland cites the lies around the Gulf War and the Iraq War as good reason not to believe more recent US government lies.

The credibility gap that's developed around the world's pre-eminent power is more than a matter of academic interest. Around the world, many of those who embraced us immediately after 9/11 and offered almost unconditional support for our policies now don't believe a word coming out of our officials' mouths, and that affects U.S. foreign policy, and the stability of the whole international system, in ways both obvious and subtle.

A good, obvious example is Pakistan... With almost half of the population saying the U.S. is the greatest threat to their own personal safety, any Pakistani government will be left between a rock and a hard place.

Holland concludes by voicing a great irony which I have often contemplated:

The neoconservative movement, which was so obsessed with the preservation of American power and the suppression of its rivals -- from its birth in the Nixon Administration, through Reagan's "Dirty Wars" in Latin America and culminating in the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- ultimately oversaw the crash and burn of the World's Only Superpower's ability to influence world events.

The Falling Man Remembered

2008-09-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

I have just spent over an hour watching The Falling Man, a documentary about the search to identify a man who jumped from the World Trade Center. I never had the time or the bandwidth to watch the whole thing before. Or maybe I just never had the inclination: it's a terrible image, a terrible story. I had tears in my eyes several times while watching it, and had to pause the video for a few seconds each time.

Strangely, the video has never been released in the U.S.A. Or perhaps it's not so strange. The photo itself provoked heated public anger when it was published on September 12th, 2001. People just didn't want to be confronted with this imagery.

A peculiar kind of media self-censorship ensued. Images like this were quickly replaced by heroic images of brave firefighters, dust-covered WTC survivors, a President standing in the rubble with a megaphone.

I am reminded of the Iraq War, and the War In Afghanistan, and how the media still refuses to show, or even acknowledge, the true horrors of such violence. Is it because a complicit media hides the truth from us? Or is it because their audience cannot handle the truth and does not want to know it? Perhaps a bit of both.

The parallel with war also makes for another interesting comparison. Why has the Falling Man been airbrushed out of history, while the Unknown Soldier is revered and remembered all over the world? Is it because the WTC jumpers were helpless victims, while soldiers are willing participants in the carnage that consumes them?

Here is another video of the jumpers:

Note the video of the plane hitting the second tower, just a few seconds into the clip. If you freeze it, the shape does not look much like a plane at all. Much more like a missile, in fact. Just look at these stills:

If these still images were all you had ever seen of the second plane hitting the tower, you could probably never be convinced that this was a plane and not a missile. And yet the whole world saw that second plane hit the tower! I saw it myself, live on TV. And there is plenty of other video which clearly shows that it was a plane, not a missile.

So what's the lesson?

Obviously, we cannot believe our lying eyes (if you watch the video instead of the stills, you can actually see the blurred flash of the airplane's wings).

So now tell me please, folks, what did YOU see on September 11th, 2001?

Did you see a vicious terrorist attack on the USA, perpetuated by ruthless Al Quaeda killers? Did you see an assault on US power from a bearded religious zeolot in a distant land? Did you see two planes hitting two towers, and bringing three towers down?

Did you see the Falling Man? Or have you airbrushed him from your memory?

UPDATE: The original Esquire article on the Falling Man is here, if you are interested.

Bernard Weiner lists Twenty-Six Things We Now Know Seven Years After 9/11 (an annual update) including for example that the illegal and widespread domestic spying was ordered by Cheney and Bush seven months BEFORE 9/11. So was the planning for the Iraq War and the forgeries used to justify it. The anthrax was almost certainly being prepared in some lab, ready to be mailed out after 9-11, and the PNAC documents about the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" were of course published years earlier. And after seven years they still haven't found Bin Laden or even proved that he was behind the attacks.

Who is the Falling Man? He is you and me, my friend.

You and me.

UPDATE 2: Via Antony Loewenstein:

With a close friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy now saying that the 9/11 attacks were not perpetrated by al-Qaeda, a new global poll finds similar skepticism:
A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 17 nations finds that majorities in only nine of them believe that al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

In no country does a majority agree on another possible perpetrator, but in most countries significant minorities cite the US government itself and, in a few countries, Israel. These responses were given spontaneously to an open-ended question that did not offer response options.

On average, 46 percent say that al Qaeda was behind the attacks while 15 percent say the US government, seven percent Israel, and seven percent some other perpetrator. One in four say they do not know.

Jean-Marie Bigard is a famous French comedian and The Independent calls him "a member of Mr Sarkozy's inner circle of showbiz friends". He says:

"We are now absolutely certain that these two planes - the one that supposedly fell into a forest (flight 93 in Pennsylvania) and onto the Pentagon don't exist... those planes are still flying.

"It's an enormous lie," he told Europe 1 radio.

"It's an American missile that hit the Pentagon, they provoked it themselves, they killed fellow Americans.

"Usually one learns of these things 30 years afterwards. We know it now," he went on.

Mr Bigard, who has staged shows to a full house in Paris' football stadium, le Stade de France, added: "We are beginning to seriously consider that neither Ben Laden nor al Qaeda were responsible for September 11."

Let's hear John Stewart say that.

UPDATE 3: Incroyable!

In a press conference today, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino about the administration’s ongoing efforts to find Osama bin Laden, calling him the “mastermind” of 9/11. Perino interrupted the reporter, claiming bin Laden was not the true “mastermind” of the attacks:
Q But Osama bin Laden is the one that — you keep talking about his lieutenants, and, yes, they are very important, but Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11 –

PERINO: No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11, and he’s sitting in jail right now.

I suggest readers might want to back to that link above:

The attack on Afghanistan was based on the claim that bin Laden was behind the attacks, and the 9/11 Commission's report was written as if there were no question about this claim. But neither the Bush administration nor the Commission provided any proof for it.

Two weeks after 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," said he expected "in the near future . . . to put out . . . a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking [bin Laden] to this attack." But at a press conference with President Bush the next morning, Powell reversed himself, saying that although the government had information that left no question of bin Laden's responsibility, "most of it is classified." According to Seymour Hersh, citing officials from both the CIA and the Department of Justice, the real reason for the reversal was a "lack of solid information."

That same week, Bush had demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden. But the Taliban, reported CNN, "refus[ed] to hand over bin Laden without proof or evidence that he was involved in last week's attacks on the United States." The Bush administration, saying "[t]here is already an indictment of Osama bin Laden" [for the attacks in Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere]," rejected the demand for evidence with regard to 9/11.

The task of providing such evidence was taken up by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who on October 4 made public a document entitled "Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States." Listing "clear conclusions reached by the government," it stated: "Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001."

Blair's report, however, began by saying: "This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law." This weakness was noted the next day by the BBC, which said: "There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks. At best the evidence is circumstantial."

After the US had attacked Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said: "We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?" The answer to this question may be suggested by the fact that, to this day, the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorist" webpage on bin Laden, while listing him as wanted for bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, makes no mention of 9/11.

When the FBI's chief of investigative publicity was asked why not, he replied: "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."

Whenever the Commission had cited evidence for bin Ladin's responsibility, the note in the back of the book always referred to CIA-provided information that had (presumably) been elicited during interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives. By far the most important of these operatives was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), described as the "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks. The Commission, for example, wrote:

Bin Ladin . . . finally decided to give the green light for the 9/11 operation sometime in late 1998 or early 1999. . . . Bin Ladin also soon selected four individuals to serve as suicide operatives. . . . Atta---whom Bin Ladin chose to lead the group---met with Bin Ladin several times to receive additional instructions, including a preliminary list of approved targets: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Capitol.

The note for each of these statements says "interrogation of KSM."

Kean and Hamilton, however, reported that they had no success in "obtaining access to star witnesses in custody . . . , most notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." Besides not being allowed to interview these witnesses, they were not permitted to observe the interrogations through one-way glass or even to talk to the interrogators. Therefore, they complained: "We . . . had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information. How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed . . . was telling us the truth?"

An NBC "deep background" report in 2008 pointed out an additional problem: KSM and the other al-Qaeda leaders had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e., torture, and it is now widely acknowledged that statements elicited by torture lack credibility. "At least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report," this NBC report pointed out, "have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being "-tortured.'" NBC then quoted Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, as saying: "Most people look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, . . . their conclusions are suspect."

Accordingly, neither the White House, the British government, the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission has provided solid evidence that Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11.

In other words, the evidence of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's alleged guilt was extracted under torture and they have no other evidence. After seven bloody years! And they have nothing - zip - on Bin Laden himself, except a dodgy old video that even the FBI will not vouch for.

You are kidding, right?

Change Gonna Come?

2008-09-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

Howard Zinn:

Well you know, whatever hope there is lies in that large number of Americans who are decent, who don't want to go to war, who don't want to kill other people.

It is hard to see that hope because these Americans who feel that way have been shut out of the communications system, so their voices are not heard, they are not seen on the television screen, but they exist.

I have gone through, in my life, a number of social movements and I have seen how at the very beginning of these social movements or just before these social movements develop, there didn't seem to be any hope.

I lived in the south for seven years, in the years of the civil rights movements, and it didn't seem that there was any hope, but there was hope under the surface.

And when people organised, and when people began to act, when people began to work together, people began to take risks, people began to oppose the establishment, people began to commit civil disobedience.

Well, then that hope became manifest ... it actually turned into change.

From the comments at ICH:

ummm excuse me. football season just started. the revolution can wait.

Explaining Palin?

2008-09-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

Dilbert creator Scott Adams on the choice of Palin as VP:

Since selecting Palin, the discussion in the media and in kitchens across America has shifted from "Can you be too old to be President?" to "Can you be too young and inexperienced?" McCain has cleverly put his critics in the position of arguing that experience is a good thing. And McCain has more of it than Obama. If you believe that people only vote for presidents, not vice presidents, this was a clever move.

The Democrats' other big argument against McCain was that he's a phony maverick who won't really change anything. It's hard to make that case while at the same time criticizing him for making such a surprising pick for Vice President. You can argue with Palin's credentials, but you can no longer argue with McCain's willingness to buck conventional wisdom. That book is closed.

On the more obvious side of things, picking a young woman insulates McCain from being the charter member of the Old Boy's Club. It's politically correct to say voters are smart. But clearly there are millions of exceptions.

The corporate media is now coming out in full force to defend Palin from accusations on multiple fronts. Will it work? Probably. Because in Bush's USA it really doesn't matter if it's true or not, as long as you make enough noise.

The Clinton campaign spin-meisters used to talk about "wagging the dog". In McCain-Palin's case, it's all tail and no dog. But who cares as long as it's wagging, right?

And ... ummm.... Why am I being swept up in all this stupid election nonsense anyway?

I guess I just cannot stand the bullshit. And it's pouring out of every media orifice right now.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmnnn....

2008-09-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished listening (again) to this old taped interview with Jerome Hauer (22MB Mp3 download).

I was frustrated that the interviewer did not pursue the final question about John O'Neill's employment at the WTC. Hauer says O'Neill was not working for Kroll Associates, but directly for Larry Silverstein, who had his own team of WTC security people. What was that about? Anyone got more on that?

For anyone wondering about the "fake Bin Laden video" mentioned in the tape, see this link.

For anyone in the mood to reminisce ahead of the seventh 9-11 anniversary, I recommend this excellent reference site or (maybe after a beer) this story:

And as he led the charge out of Elaine's to Stage 3 at the China Club, his friends remember John O'Neill looking over and saying, "At least on my watch, I can say that there was never a terrorist attack in New York City."

'We were laughing that morning," remembers Valerie James, his girlfriend of eleven years. For once, John was in his own eleven-year-old Buick LeSabre, not a Bureau car, so he was permitted to drop her off at her job as sales director for the fashion line Sunny Choi.

He'd made it home from China Club at 2:30 -- typical -- but he was up now, and happy, and ready to take her to an 8:15 meeting she had for Fashion Week before heading to his office on the thirty-fourth floor of the north tower. "He was in a really good mood that day," James says.

James heard about the attack on the radio; it wasn't until 9:17 that a call finally came from John.

"There are body parts everywhere," he shouted. "Do you know what hit it?"James said the radio said it was a 747.

"I'll call you in a little bit," he said.

O'Neill also spoke to his 29-year-old son, J.P., who had taken the train in to visit his father at his new job but had made it only as far as Saint Vincent's Hospital. "As soon as you make it down here," he told him, "call me and I'll come and get you."

One FBI agent remembers talking with O'Neill in the lobby of Tower One, helping the Bureau and the Fire Department set up a command center. O'Neill asked him if they really got the Pentagon. He was last seen walking in the general direction of Tower Two minutes before it collapsed.

Seven years ago today, I was boarding a plane to Hawaii for my honeymoon... Now I can only wonder what my life might have been like if all this Bush shit had never happened.

Finally, for anyone not familiar with Hauer, I'll just lazily reproduce this text:

Who is Jerome Hauer?
Hauer seems to specialize in the art of holding down several different jobs at the same time. While he started to work for the NIH in September 2001, he remained a Managing Director at Kroll Associates - the official security and bodyguard company for all American presidents since World War II. Kroll Associates is also the security company for the Sears Tower.

Jerome Hauer (Human Health Institute) is the man who put John O'Neill at the WTC and tipped the White House off to Cipro - BEFORE the first anthrax attack!

In May 2002, Jerome Hauer became director of the federal Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP), succeeding Dr. D. A. Henderson from Johns Hopkins Institute.

He started to work for the NIH under Tommy Thompson on September 10, 2001 as an adviser on national security. On September 11th, he told the White House to take Cipro, the antibiotic that works against the anthrax virus, without bothering to reveal his warning to the American nation. It is not known how long Hauer worked at the NIH before Sept. 11, but we can confirm that he was working on Sept. 10. But things get really interesting when we consider that Jerome Hauer was also the man who in August 2001 arranged a new job for John O'Neill - the resigning chief of the FBI Terror Task Force - as head of security at the World Trade Center.

This might have something to do with the FBI HQ (O'Neill complained about them), but also with Jerome Hauer - who is a friend of the current prime anthrax suspect, Stephen Hatfill, who was working for the military anthrax program USAMRIID at Fort Detrick and Battelle, a huge pharmacy company with many ties to the CIA.

Hauer and Hatfill worked together at the SAIC's Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis in 1999. The SAIC (Scientific Applications International Corp) later received also a huge BioDefense budget in autumn 2001.

But first, more about Hauer:
In 1983, Hauer joined IBM where he was responsible for the company's Hazardous Materials Response and Crisis Management and Fire Safety programs. Hauer produced a series of hazardous materials training videos that earned him the International Film and TV Critics of New York Bronze award in 1986.

In the early 1990s, Hauer got his first contacts to military and biodefense. Hauer received a master's degree in emergency medical services from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. Then he became member of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian Bio Defense, where he wrote various articles about a possible bioterrorist attack.

In 1998, he started working at the OEM (Office for Emergency Management) in New York.

In the same year, Hauer and anthrax suspect Hatfill both supported the CFR as experts in their respective fields. The CFR is an acronym for Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most important think-tanks advising the US government, as well as many other governments abroad.

CFR members include the Pentagon's top advisers, Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, biosciences specialist Joshua Lederberg, and many others.

On May 28, 1998, Hatfill and Hauer spoke together at the same CFR meeting about "Building a 'Biobomb': Terrorist Challenge" Hatfill was at that time also Senior Research Associate at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (=USAMRIID)

Hauer seems to specialize in the art of holding down several different jobs at the same time. While he started to work for the NIH in September 2001, he remained a Managing Director at Kroll Associates - the official security and bodyguard company for all American presidents since World War II!

With Hauer's many sources of insider information (e.g. Kroll/President bodyguards), it makes sense that he also knew about the CIA briefing for George Bush on August 6, 2001, about warnings of an imminent terrorist "attack with planes."

Hauer is still trying to save the world.

On November 6th, 2001 he participated in the "Independent Task Force on America's Response to Terrorism" at the CFR. Participants there included James J. Zogby (President of the Arab American Institute and Central Asian Enterprise Fund), Newton L. Gingrich (Chief Executive Officer, The Gingrich Group), Harold Brown (former secretary of defense and counselor at CSIS: the Center for Strategic and International Studies), Henry A. Kissinger (Senior Fellow in National Security and European Affairs), Richard C. Holbrooke (Counselor, CFR and Vice Chairman of Perseus, LLC) and Philip A. Odeen (Executive Vice President, Washington Operations of TRW, Inc. and CEO of Reynolds + Reynolds, Dayton).

Their agenda, eight weeks after the attack of Sept. 11, was strange indeed:

"....Release a White Paper explaining our goals and rationale for the war in Afghanistan, and outlining the evidence that the al-Qa'eda network was responsible for the 9/11 attacks....
...Disseminate stories of particular victims to convey the range of people killed in the 9/11 attacks-stress range of religions, races, income levels, etc...

...counteract myth that Mossad was behind the attacks by showing Jews killed, etc...

...Routinely monitor the regional press in real time to enable prompt responses..."

Hauer's deep connection to disinformation circles for his own purpose are well known. In 1998, he convinced New York Mayor Rudi Guilliani to develop a vaccine against the West Nile virus - almost one year before this virus broke out in New York.

To this end, Hauer introduced Col. Thomas Monath of Oravax (now Accambis) to Guliani and organised a business deal.

Hauer also continued giving bioterror lectures and writing terror scenario scripts. He organized a July 26, 1999, conference in New York for journalists and "thought leaders," on bioterrorism and "Reporting on Weapons of Mass Destruction - Responsibility, Reliability, Readiness." At the same time, he was heading the West Nile spray operation in NYC.

Bioterrorism and vaccines - a perfect payroll combination for Hauer?

Among the participants at this 1999 conference was Brigadier General Bruce Lawlor of the U.S. Army and the former FBI assistant director, Lewis Schiliro (NYC).

General Lawlor has in the meantime become the Senior Director for Protection and Prevention at the Office of Homeland Security:

Lawlor was the first commanding general of Joint Task Force - Civil Support (JTF-CS), located in Fort Monroe, Virginia. JTF-CS is a standing joint task force assigned to U.S. Joint Forces Command. Lawlor has taught at the U.S. Army War College and served as a consultant to the Defense Science Board.

Nothing is known about his further influence in preventing attacks on America.

However, as FBI assistant director, Schiliro supervised several counterterrorism investigations, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. But Schiliro gave up supporting Hauer in February 2000, too. He left the FBI to move to credit card giant MBNA Corp. And Schiliro wasn't the only one. His close friend Louis Freeh - who was replaced in the FBI in August 2001 by Thomas Pickard as the acting head of the Bureau - started a new job as a Senior Vice Chairman at MBNA Corp in early September 2001 and began to collect shares.

The background of the MBNA is very interesting. They helped the FBI in tracing the hijackers' credit card transactions, and had a lot of prominent helping hands. Among them was James Kallstrom, the former head of Special Operations, FBI.

MBNA also has a controversial status among civil right groups. Since 1996, MBNA CORP has unleashed various bulldozers, dump-trucks and explosives in a savage attack on the Ducktrap Deeryard (major coastal wildlife area on Penobscot Bay, Maine USA) or continued with "dull roar of corporate jet noise".

Then, in April 2001, MBNA also had to deal with cheque fraud. Involved was Intelligent Finance, a Halifax-backed Internet bank and a bogus account for a guy named Vindel.

Also interesting is the bio of another director of the MBNA Corporation: Bernadine P. Healy. She also serves as a trustee of the Battelle Memorial Institute and is President and CEO of the American Red Cross. On May 10, 2001, a few months before Sept. 11, she testified on "human challenges that we will face during a WMD attack":

The Red Cross and the OEM under Jerome Hauer worked very closely together. Hauer's connections and insider information seem to be endless!

He also helped with the construction of the New York OEM headquarters known as "the bunker," on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center.

The CIA later confirmed that they also had an office in that building, next to the Department of Defense and the INS. For unknown reasons, 7 World Trade Center was the third skyscraper to collapse on Sept. 11. Officially, it began burning after debris from the Twin Tower collapses caused an illegal diesel-fuel tank inside the building to explode.

The presence of this large gas tank - also on the 23rd floor - with thousands of gallons of fuel far above ground, in violation of the fire code, was confirmed some weeks after Sept. 11th. There has never been an official verdict on the reasons for the collapse of WTC 7. A FEMA study failed to reach a clear conclusion.

In May 2000, the Johns Hopkins Center, in collaboration with the ANSER Institute for Homeland Defense, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Oklahoma Memorial Institute for the Study of Terrorism held a bioterrorism exercise at Andrews Air Force Base. Former Senator Sam Nunn played the President.

David Gergen played the National Security Advisor. Governor Frank Keating played himself, Frank Wisner was Secretary of State, ex-CIA director James Woolsey (ironically) played CIA Director, John White played Defense Secretary, and Dr. Margaret Hamburg was HHS Secretary. The Attorney General was played by George Terwilliger, William Sessions was FBI Director, and Jerome Hauer played FEMA Director.

"One of the striking observations of this exercise was the unfamiliarity of these distinguished and experienced professionals with the basic decisions and trade-offs associated with managing the response to the epidemic."

Observing was Tara O'Toole, MD, MPH Senior Fellow, Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and at that time Deputy Director of Johns Hopkins Institute.

This started a series of different "war games."

On June 22-23, 2001, the same crew organised their last big scenario before Sep11th. They called it DARK WINTER. It was about a possible smallpox attack. Hauer participated as well, this time "playing" the director of the FBI.

Among the other participants once again:
James Woolsey, ex-CIA director
Hon. Sam Nunn
George Terwilliger etc.

Observing, among many others, Thomas Inglesby, at that time Senior Fellow Johns Hopkins Institute

On July 14th, 2001 the testimony on DARK WINTER was released. But when the first anthrax attacks started, the only thing, which worked perfectly, was the distribution of the anthrax antibiotic Cipro, by Bayer. A couple of weeks later, Barbara Rosenberg of FAS (Federation of American Scientists), the magazine New Scientist, the biowarfare convention specialist Jan van Aken, and the ex-UN inspector Richard Spertzel came to the conclusion that the anthrax was homegrown.

Rosenberg was also supported by Dr. Francis Boyle, a human rights lawyer and professor of law at the University of Illinois. An expert on international law, U.S. criminal law and nuclear weapons, Boyle has studied many different biowarfare contracts in which "safety levels were atrocious." He is also author of "The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence":

Hauer ignored the report by Barbara Rosenberg, but he certainly knew who she was. He first met her on April 10, 1998, at a "roundtable on genetic engineering and biological weapons" under President Clinton. The small group of outside experts and cabinet members present there included: William Cohen (at the time Secretary of Defense), CIA boss George Tenet, Craig Ventner (Celera), Joshua Lederberg (Rockefeller University, Defense Science Board), Thomas Monath (Oravax/Acambis, former CDC and USAMRIID), Hauer, and Barbara Rosenberg.

In November 2001, Hauer was still ignoring the investigations by Barbara Rosenberg, who had already worked out a list of possible anthrax suspects, scientists who would have been able to gain access to the original Ames strain from USAMRIID, Fort Detrick.

Among the suspects on this list were Battelle and the Battelle Memorial Institute administrators, who supplied the Dugway anthrax proving facility in Utah, where the only virtually identical Ames strain of silica-impregnated hyper-weaponized anthrax was found. Meanwhile, Hauer in November started an initiative known as "De-Mystifying the Biological Weapons Debate," and as a member of this group he claimed at the time that the main suspects for the anthrax attacks included "Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network and sympathizers to US right wing extremists"

Therefore we have a lot of questions for him.

Is Hauer in any conflicts of interest?

What was his coordination with FEMA?

Can Hauer confirm, if a FEMA team was already dispatched to New York on September 10, as spokesman Tom Kennedy said in an interview with Dan Rather (CBS, shortly after the attack)?

(INFO: An interview with FEMA director Joe Allbaugh took place on September 12th on CBS at 7:40:20 accirding to the CBS transcript)

On May 8, 2001, Bush announced a new Office of National Preparedness for Terrorism at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. At the same time, he proposed to cut FEMA's budget by $200 million. Bush said that day that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack.

How deep was the communication transfer between Jerome Hauer, the Pentagon, FEMA and the CIA?

Hauer not only knew former CIA director James Woolsey, but also Milt Bearden, who was station commander and had managed America’s covert war in Afghanistan, helping the Moujaheddin drive out the Soviets between 1986-1989. Both spoke at the Nassau Community College (NYC) on October 22, 2001.

Hauer's connections to the CDC, Johns Hopkins and the CIA (James Woolsey) are well-established. What role did Jerome Hauer really play?

Why was the distribution of Cipro to White House staff on Sept. 11 classified for such a long time (AP)?

What exactly does Hauer know about Stephen Hatfill and his former USAMRIID colleague, Thomas Monath?

What was his main concern in organizing a security job for John O'Neill at the Twin Towers?

What exactly did Hauer organise on Sep11th? Is it true that his office ordered thousands of employees "back to their desks" after the first plane hit, causing hundreds of unnecessary deaths?

Did Hauer let both the Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks happen on purpose?

Left Is The New Right - So What's Left?

2008-09-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

Prof Q says the collapse of Fannie and Freddie spells the end of neoliberalism (whatever that is). Here's my comment:

The supreme irony? The Chinese socialist government is now fretting about how much exposure they have to the US capitalist meltdown.

In mid-2007 China owned around $376 billion of debt issued by U.S. government agencies, principally Fannie and Freddie. Do they now walk away, or follow Uncle Sam down the hole? As one Chinese analyst frets:

"For China, whether or not you buy the new treasuries, there will be losses: if you buy them, you're getting deeper in the hole; if you don't buy, your existing holdings will lose value."

Or as Vice-Premier Wang Qishan put it:

"If we don't buy U.S. treasuries and ABS, what else we can buy? China just has no way to avoid the risks. Whatever we do, we have to bear the losses."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/7781955

The old dictionary definitions of "Left" and "Right" just don't seem to be holding up too well for discussion purposes in this Brave New World. Maybe it's time to dump the corporate stock financial model?

Compare And Contrast Dept.

2008-09-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

A Japanese scholar says Kim Jong-Il has been dead for 5 years:

So who pulls the strings now if Professor Shigemura's claims are correct?

"Some of the military leaders, also the party leaders, and government leaders," he said.

"Several people are conducting North Korea's government. Actually the North Korean government is guided by those people, those leaders, not only one person. Now they are collective leaderships."

Meanwhile, Bob Woodward says that the top US military chiefs have been out-manouvered and outranked by the USA's collective administration:

Pace, Schoomaker and Casey found themselves badly out of sync with the White House in the fall of 2006, finally losing control of the war strategy altogether after the midterm elections. Schoomaker was outraged when he saw news coverage that retired Gen. Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff, had briefed the president Dec. 11 about a new Iraq strategy being proposed by the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank.

I wonder how the US public would react to a military coup?

Domestic Disputes

2008-09-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

It's been an interesting weekend in Australian politics, and I am pleased to say that I payed very little attention to any of it (it was Father's Day, it was my wedding anniversary, and my kids' soccer team was in the Preliminary Final). But now that things are settling into place, a few things are worth mentioning.

Firstly, NSW politics is totally corrupt. It has been corrupt since before Neville Wran played kingpin, and nothing has changed except the names, the pay cheques, and the media complicity. Now the farce has become so transparent that it threatens to derail public confidence in Teh System. Good.

Ordinary voters around the nation are slapping the major parties with a very big stick. And the beating is well deserved. Did they really think that after 11 years of Howard all we wanted was more of the same, with a different brand?

You won't see the mainstream media making much of it, but the Green Party's performance in Mayo was probably even more shocking than the Socceroo's triumph over Holland this weekend (we beat them at their own game, can you believe it?).

This is from greens.org:

Greens Leader Bob Brown says the Greens' near-win in Mayo, Rob Oakeshott's landslide in Lyne, and the 4% state-wide swing to the Greens in Western Australia spell disintegration for the two-party system in Australia.

"Had the Greens' Lynton Vonow got the column inches or TV time given the Liberals' Jamie Briggs, Mayo would have gone to the Greens," Senator Brown said.

"As it is, the seat will be decided on absentee and postal votes and we Greens are keeping our fingers crossed."

Bob Brown is not the only one with his fingers crossed. Stephen Smith says the ALP may still be able to govern WA if everything falls its way, but it looks more likely that the Nationals will hold the balance of power (see this story) and choose their partners accordingly.

That's all the more incentive for the Nats to walk away from John Howard's Liberal Party, who have become an embarrassing liability. But would the Nat's seriously consider forming a coalition with the minority ALP? And if they did, would that spell the death knoll for the Liberals?

I think somebody (me! me!) might have actually predicted this a while ago: the Greens taking over the role of "The Left" in Australian politics, while Rudd Labor moves to the right (now "The Center"), and the Lib/Nat/One Nation detritus fight over the "Far Right" mantle.

Meanwhile, it's interesting that some (relatively very minor) positives finally seem to be emerging from the debacle of John Howard's last-minute decision to do something - anything! - about Teh Aboriginal Problem. I wonder if JWH will dare claim credit for highlighting Aboriginal illiteracy levels?

I read a very strange Op-Ed in The Independent last week, by a man called Rupert, which was desperately trying to paint a rosy picture of how history might judge George W. Bush's legacy. All the positives the author managed to pull together were in fact issues where Bush had been forced to back down, if not completely reverse his position. For example, the current (100% forced) changes to the US financial system might be seen as a positive in years to come. Or the removal of Saddam might be seen as a positive if the USA is forced to hand power back to the Iraqis and leave the Middle East stage.

But will Bush really be given credit for these changes? Only if the GOP is writing the history books.

And what about history's view of John W. Howard? Five hundred years from now, if this delicate little planet still exists, will people talk about how Howard opened the doors for the Greens to take power, which not only saved the planet but also opened the door on a whole new era of transparent, democratic politics? And if so, will they dare give him credit for that?

PS: As I write, Mick Keelty is desperately trying to explain why his AFP attack dogs didn't let go of the Haneef case for so long. Dare we hope for a resignation statement later today? Err.... no:

"I look forward to making some public statements once the inquiry delivers its findings," said Mr Keelty, whose evidence was given in camera.

Poor man. It must be so hard to do your job when you are not allowed to talk to the media. Err.... Well, whatever.

WTF??? Obama Sells Out His Base

2008-09-05T04:15:00.000-07:00

First it was FISA, now this:

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama said the surge of American forces in Iraq has ``succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,'' though Iraqis still haven't done enough to take responsibility for their country.

``The surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,'' Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a recorded interview broadcast tonight on Fox News's ``The O'Reilly Factor'' program.

I had some hope that Obama might be more than he seemed, perhaps ready to take on the establishment that he has so assidusously courted all these years. But this is not just appalling, it's also stupid.

I mean, here he is playing the GOP's game, giving away his prized antiwar credentials, and ridiculously signing up to the absurd fantasy that Bush's "surge" was some kind of military stroke of genius - and for what?

And he's doing this not just on FOX NEWS but on the freakin' BILL O'REILLY SHOW! Are you kidding?

Has somebody spiked his drinking water? Are they holding a gun to his daughter's head? Or is his campaign getting tactical advice from Doug Feith?

Sadly, this move is just the latest, most obvious sign that Obama is already preparing to take over the role of US warmonger-in-chief. But even politically, it doesn't even make sense. It's just totally stupid in every way.

A terrible pity, when so much is at stake. Sigh. Is it time to vote Green yet?

A recent Vanity Fair article about Murdoch revealed that Obama had lunch with Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the head of FOX. Obama slammed Ailes, who replied "What are we supposed to do when you keep ignoring us?" Was this part of the deal they cut? It sure looks that way.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Thick As Thieves

2008-09-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

From the Financial Times:

Watchers of political donations and property developers will be interested in the latest appointment of former attorney general Lord Goldsmith to the board of Frank Lowy's Westfield Holdings, the group behind London's biggest new shopping centres.

Lord Goldsmith was the attorney general who presided over the cash for peerages probe which focused on Labour Party fund raiser Lord Levy - an occasional tennis partner of Mr Lowy who collected £100,000 to advise Westfield on UK opportunities.

After the matter came up in parliament, then PM Tony Blair told the House of Commons that he was satisfied there was no conflict of interest in Lord Levy's relationship with Westfield, and the group maintained there was no political lobbying involved.

Lord Goldsmith, you might remember, is also representing the widow of former Georgian opposition leader and media tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili.

And worth noting that Imedi media, the TV and radio station, is now back up and running, and owned by Joseph Kay, a distant relative of Patarkatsishvili.

Classic Atrios

2008-09-04T02:27:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things I could fault about Atrios - he's lazy, and not as curious as he should be, and too eager to court the mainstream, and probably an alocholic by now, if he wasn't when he hit the big time - but this link is pure gold.

Peggy Noonan Explains

2008-09-04T02:26:00.000-07:00

But But But!

2008-09-04T02:12:00.000-07:00

Hilarious:

"I can't believe this has happened to one of our soldiers in his own country. He just didn't know how to react.

"We've been to America and their military get treated like heroes over there."

Even more hilarious: The Metro Hotel is owned by a company called American Amusements Ltd.

Seriously, maybe this is good news. If the military profession has sunk to such low levels, it's time for either a coup or world peace.

More Good Reasons To Move To New Zealand

2008-09-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

If only it was warmer, and the real estate was cheaper...

The New Zealand navy is finding it difficult to sail, the air force to fly and the army would struggle to take part in combat, the 2007/2008 Defence Force annual report reveals.

Seriously, who the *John Howard* is going to attack New Zealand anyway, except that big warmongering country to the west, or their nasty friends on the far side of the Pacific Ocean?

And from a taxpayer's point of view, this bit was interesting:

One of the main challenges was the high attrition rate - more than 15 per cent - and the loss of trained staff due to the civilian demand for trained staff.

In other words, taxpayers pay for these soldja boys to learn their nasty tricks, then they go pro with outfits like Blackwater. Why do we bother, eh?

Another Blog Bites The Dust

2008-08-18T02:42:00.000-07:00

As I wind down my blogging activity, I have decided to close off with any further posts at Bush Out, where it all began. I am basically just going to be marking time there till Bush is gone, and the USA is out of Iraq.

It's a pity. I had high hopes for this blog, but there is only so much you can do on your own in my situation.

UPDATE: Ah, WTF. There's only so much you can say about the final days of Bush, isn't there? I'm back.

Manufacturing Reality

2008-08-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

This might sound strangely familiar:

Imagine prisoners who have been chained since their childhood deep inside a cave: not only are their arms and legs immovable because of chains; their heads are chained in one direction as well so that their gaze is fixed on a wall.

Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which puppets of various animals, plants, and other things are moved. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. Behind this cave there is a well-used road, and upon this road people are walking and talking and generally making noise. The prisoners, then, believe that these noises are coming directly from the shadows they are watching pass by on the cave wall...

Suppose a prisoner's chains break, and he is able to get up and walk about (a process which takes some time, as he has never done it before). Eventually he will be compelled to explore; he walks up and out of the cave, whereby he is instantly blinded by the sun. He turns then to the shadows on the floor, in the lakes, slowly working his way out of his deluded mind, and he is eventually able to glimpse the sun.

That allegory is actually over 2300 years old. It from Plato and is known as the Allegory of the cave.

Meanwhile, in the Modern World, TV is still the leading source of news in the USA. But it's not all bad news:

Pew said the results show an increasing shift toward online news consumption, but that there is now a sizable group of a more engaged, sophisticated and well-off people that use both traditional and online sources to get their news.

The Pew researchers referred to these people as "integrators," and says they account for 23 per cent of those surveyed, spending the most time with the news on a typical day.

Anthrax: Hindsight and "Heroes In Error"

2008-08-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times says the FBI will release more details of the "new" scientific evidence they used to frame Bruce Ivins for the 2001 anthrax attacks. No doubt that evidence will be closely scrutinized by a nation which still struggles with big scientific "questions" - like Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Global Warming and the Big Bang.

Regrets? Having successfully avoided a lawsuit from Stephen Hatfill, Nicholas Kristof has a few:

Kristof told me he plans to write a column looking back on the case and apologizing to Hatfill for any “extra scrutiny and upheaval the columns brought to him, and wrestling with the journalistic issues involved.”

... Kristof said he had been concerned about the potential impact of what he was writing. He said he tried to humanize Hatfill by writing that Mr. Z’s friends “are heartsick at suspicions directed against a man they regard as a patriot.” After Hatfill was identified, Kristof wrote that there “must be a genuine assumption that he is an innocent man caught in a nightmare.”

I asked Kristof if he regretted focusing so much on Hatfill when the point was to spur the F.B.I. to a more vigorous investigation. He said, “I think I should have tried harder to find a range of other examples to underscore the incompetence of the F.B.I. anthrax investigation.”

Years from now, Kristof will still be telling his grandkids how he helped pressure the FBI into resolving the case.

The Murdoch Wall Street Journal is also indulging in a little hindsight:

In the days after attacks, suspected samples of anthrax began pouring into the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases. In Room 19 of the bacteriology division, Dr. Ivins's office was jammed with desks for six more staffers where once there had been just Dr. Ivins and perhaps one other.

"We were scared," says Col. Arthur Anderson, who at the time was chief of laboratory medicine in the diagnostic-systems division. Many of the scientists were seeing for the first time the weaponized version of a microbe they had worked with for years.

They were also fascinated, particularly Dr. Ivins, who talked repeatedly about the refinement of the spores sent with the Oct. 9 letter to then-South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle. The spores nearly floated out of the envelope.

"The stuff just came out without any prompting," he told Gerald Andrews, his boss at the time.

Dr. Ivins, his colleagues said, argued that al Qaeda was responsible. "He was very passionate about this," former boss Jeffrey Adamovicz said. "He was very agitated."

Maybe Ivins was a WSJ reader. Or maybe he read the New York Times. Whatever. He was obviously very unbalanced.

If Ivins was really guilty, you could expect to see heads rolling at the US military lab where he was employed, and at the top of FBI. But of course that will not happen - it never does.

Georgian Subplots: Berezovsky's Game

2008-08-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

Readers of my other blogs might remember a couple of posts looking into Rupert Murdoch's strange business deals with former Georgian opposition leader and media tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili.

Patarkatsishvili died in London earlier this week [WRONG: SEE BELOW] and UK police are treating it as a suspicious death:

His death drew comparisons to the 2006 radiation poisoning in London of ex-Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko. Moscow's refusal to hand over the primary suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, has strained relations between Britain and Russia.

Police found no trace of radiation at the Georgian's mansion, Britain's Press Association reported, citing police sources.

"Even if it is a heart attack, the recent situation in England with the deteriorating relations with Russia has led people to be suspicious even when there aren't any grounds to be suspicious," Natasha Chouvaeva, editor of the Russian-language newspaper London Courier, said of Mr. Patarkatsishvili's death.

In a strange twist, Mr. Lugovoi provided security for Mr. Patarkatsishvili and his businesses for 13 years.

The Imedi media network which was controlled by Patarkatsishvili and Newscorp is now the target of predators. It ceased news broadcasts in January of 2008.

According to Nina Ognianova, the program coordinator for Europe and Central Asia at the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the questions surrounding Imedi’s ownership highlight a particularly troubling aspect to Georgia’s media market.

"What is currently not available in Georgia is the transparency of who the owners are, what their interests are. There is a lot of speculation about who is who and what their real stake is in these stations and wherever there is a lot of rumor, there is a lot of room for speculation," she told EurasiaNet in a telephone interview.

And yet the media in Georgia has been hailed as a model for other former Soviet states. Well, I don't think we'll be hearing much more about that for a while.

In another twist, a US lawyer has just been jailed in Belarus:

Emmanuel Zeltser's sentencing Monday comes after being convicted at a closed trial for commercial espionage and using false documents. He is an expert on organized crime and money laundering.

The common thread in both these stories is self-exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky (photo above), who says his "dear friend" Patarkatsishvili complained to him of heart problems when they met just last week.

Yeah, I bet he did.

What's interesting is how these guys like Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili are on side with the UK government in all this. Guess who is representing Patarkatsishvili's widow in court? Lord Goldsmith, Tony Blair's former Attorney General, the man who famously changed his mind about whether it was illegal to invade Iraq.

This plot has lots of twists:

Emanuel Zeltser, who once testified on Capitol Hill about the Russian mob, is a key character in a wrangle over the $12billion (£6billion) fortune of a Georgian oligarch found dead at his country home in Surrey. He was arrested after flying to Belarus and accused of possessing false documents. According to Amnesty International, he has been tortured in custody.

Quite how Mr Zeltser ended up in Belarus is a mystery. The lawyer flew there on a private aircraft owned by the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky - even though Mr Zeltser and Mr Berezovsky are on opposite sides in the fight for the fortune of the dead Georgian, Arkadi Patarkatsishvili.

A law firm representing Mr Berezovsky had already tipped off the authorities in Minsk that the lawyer might be carrying bogus material on his laptop. Lord Goldsmith, now a private lawyer and representing Mr Patarkatsishvili's widow in the case, e-mailed the Belarus ProsecutorGeneral's office to support its investigation of Mr Zeltser and offering to swap information.

UPDATE: I have seen a few reports that Patarkatsishvili died back in February, which is strange. My first link above is from the Dallas News via Associated Press, dated Wednesday, August 13 and saying he dies "last Tuesday". But Wikipedia cites Feb 12, 2008 as the actual death date, with lots of solid news links to back it up:

"Patarkatsishvili, aged 52, collapsed at Downside Manor, his mansion in Leatherhead, Surrey, England on February 12, 2008 at 10.45 pm. Ambulance crew members tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the businessman, who was pronounced dead at 10.52 pm.[1] As in any other case of unexpected death, Surrey police treated the case as "suspicious" and launched an official investigation.[25]

The businessman spent his last day in the City of London office of international law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, meeting his business partner Boris Berezovsky, his spokesperson Lord Bell and his lawyer Lord Goldsmith QC, as well as fellow exiles, the Russians Nikolai Glushkov and Yuli Dubov [26] From the City he left for Down Street, Mayfair, to visit Berezovsky's office, and at 7.00 pm was returned to Leatherhead with his Maybach. Shortly after dining, Patarkatsishvili told his family he felt unwell and went upstairs to his bedroom where he was found unconscious after a heart attack."

Is this just crap reporting from AP again? Looks like it.

London Lite was first newspaper to inform the British public of the Georgian oligarch's death on the evening of 13 February 2008. In the news of 14 February 2008, Patarkatsishvili's death was covered in The Guardian, The Times, Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, etc.

Is the US media just catching up with the British press, six months later? I notice a few other Texas papers ran the misleading AP story last week, following Zeltser's arrest, but maybe it's all a bit too exotic for other US media players.

The Wikipedia entry on Imedi media doesn't give much more clues on Murdoch's involvement. Georgian politics and business are very secretive affairs, as is Murdoch's involvement in geopolitics. The whole thing is very shady indeed.

Bremer's CPA Tried To Fake WMDs, Targetted Ritter For Assassination

2008-08-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, writing at Information Clearing House:

According to the source, the CPA had passed to the Badr militia my name, the dates of my planned trip to Baghdad, my proposed agenda and a list of Iraqis I had planned to meet with, including Mohammed. This information was in turn passed on to the unit in the Badr militia which specialized in targeted assassination in Baghdad. “Mr. Ritter cannot come to Iraq,” the Mukhabarat agent told Mohammed. “If he does, his life is at risk, your life is at risk, and everyone associated with his visit’s life will be at risk.” And so Mohammed sent his e-mailed warning to me.

On the surface, Mohammed’s story was too much to believe. I was willing to accept any account that held that specific Iraqi groups, such as Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, were opposed to my visit to the extent that they might issue threats in an effort to intimidate me from coming. But the concept of the United States government being involved boggled the mind.

The problem with disbelieving was there were too many pieces of this puzzle that seemed to fit together...

That was in late 2003, when Ritter was on assignment for Harpers Magazine. But his source, a former Iraqi WMD scientist identified only as "Mohammed", also had a story from June that year:

Dave was on his feet, pacing before Mohammed, before turning to him and asking straight out, “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?” Mohammed, who had intimate knowledge of certain aspects of the Iraqi WMD effort, replied straight back: “There are no WMD in Iraq.”

Dave continued pacing back and forth in front of Mohammed. “My president,” he said, “is in trouble. Can you help him?”

Mohammed was taken aback by the question. “Excuse me?” he asked. “Could you repeat yourself?”

Dave sat down next to the Iraqi. “George Bush is in trouble. Our people did not find any WMD in Iraq. Can you help us?”

Mohammed looked back at Dave. “How?”

“Can we prepare something for that? We could bring in some nuclear material from the former Soviet Union, and pretend they are Iraqi.”

Mohammed, stunned by the unexpected nature of the request, indicated that such a ploy could be easily uncovered by forensic examination of the evidence by outside experts, such as UNSCOM (the United Nations Special Commission) or the IAEA, who would undoubtedly be called in to verify such a finding. Dave sat in silence for a few moments, before springing to his feet. “I have to leave for a meeting,” he said. “Stacey will show you out.”

Mohammed was to meet again with Dave, Stacey and Carol in the weeks that followed. The subject of WMD, Iraqi or otherwise, was never again broached by Dave or anyone else in his team.

The first reader comment on this story at ICH is a rather disturbing:

Question, sort of off topic: Have the good ICH readers notice that "Riverbend" has been absent for the past few months...

Is that meant to be a threat to ICH readers?

Oh, You Mean THAT Money...!

2008-08-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: GIVEN THAT I KEEP GETTING HITS FROM GOV DOT AU ON THIS POST, I AM GOING TO DIRECTLY ADDRESS THE MEMBERS OF MY GOVERNMENT WHO MAY BE INVOLVED IN THIS CASE AND WHO SEEM FOR SOME BIZZARRE REASON TO ACTUALLY GIVE A FUCK WHAT AN ORDINARY CITIZEN LIKE ME THINKS ABOUT THIS SHIT.

FRANK LOWY IS A CRIMINAL, A RICH BASTARD AND AN ELITE CORPORATE WANKER. PEOPLE LIKE LOWY ARE FUCKING UP OUR ENTIRE PLANET WHILE DECENT HONEST HARDWORKING PEOPLE LIKE ME SLAVE AWAY DAY AFTER DAY PAYING OUR TAXES AND GETTING FUCK ALL FOR OUR EFFORTS. WE PAY TAXES ON PETROL AND GST ON EVERYTHING AND EVEN TAX ON BOOZE WHEN WE CANT TAKE IT ANY MORE, WE GET RIPPED OFF LEFT RIGHT AND CENTER WHILE FUCKHEADS LIKE LOWY LIVE IT UP IN SEVEN STAR HOTELS AND PLUSH RESORTS.

YOU ARE NOW THE GOVERNMENT. AND THIS IS A TIME OF MAJOR GLOBAL FINANCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL AND POLITICAL CRISIS. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

JOHN HOWARD IS GONE, THANKS IN LARGE PART TO PEOPLE LIKE ME (SEE HOWARDOUT.BLOGSPOT.COM). SO NOW FIX THE FUCKING PROBLEMS! HOLD THE RICH ACCOUNTABLE! HOLD HOWARD AND HIS STOOGES ACCOUNTABLE! TAKE THE MEDIA BACK FROM ASSWIPES LIKE MURDOCH AND GIVE US A REAL, INDEPENDENT, FREE AND FAIR AUSTRALIA ONCE AGAIN. HOLD WAR CRIMINAL TRIBUNALS AND HAND HOWARD'S ENTIRE CONGA LINE OVER TO THE ICC!

OTHERWISE, GO FUCK YOURSELVES. SERIOUSLY, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT.

I REPEAT: YOU ARE NOW THE GOVERNMENT. PLEASE GOVERN WISELY AND FAIRLY FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME, AND MY CHILDREN.

OTHERWISE, FUCK OFF.

NOW BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST...

Offshore search nets $50m in unpaid tax:

TAX audits of Australians who have held bank accounts in the tax haven of Liechtenstein have already netted $50 million in unpaid tax and penalties, the Australian Taxation Office has revealed.

The billionaire businessman Frank Lowy has identified himself as among the Australians being investigated, but the Tax Office yesterday refused to give details on how many people, or from whom, the money had been recovered.

The second tax commissioner, Jennie Granger, said $20 million had been collected, with another $30 million being processed.

This puts the Tax Office halfway to the estimated $100 million it expects to recoup from people with Liechtenstein accounts.

A separate letter campaign to Australians asking them to voluntarily disclose offshore bank accounts has led to 858 people making disclosures about a combined $36 million in previously undeclared taxable income.

This ATO crackdown is separate from the "high-profile" (except that the media is scared to talk about it) investigation known as Project Wickenby.

On the investigations into the tax haven of Liechtenstein, Ms Granger said it would be up to the Director of Public Prosecutions to bring criminal charges against people if it saw fit. Strict legal requirements prevented the Tax Office from disclosing tax details of individuals.

But of course the DPP won't be laying charges against anyone, least of all Frank Lowy. A few million dollars for the tax man, some big donations to both sides of parliament, a couple of cognacs at the club, and it'll all be forgotten...

Meanwhile, in Bush's USA, things are even worse:

Remember the old Steve Martin routine on how to make a million dollars and not pay taxes: "First, make a million dollars... Second, don't pay taxes." Turns out Martin's joke is standard operating procedure for corporations in the United States -- only, in comparison, Martin was a piker.

Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study on taxes paid by corporations. In what Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) mildly called "a shocking indictment of the current tax system," the GAO found that about two-thirds of corporations operating in the US did not pay taxes annually from 1998 to 2005.

Now most corporations in America are start-ups or small, mom and pop operations that have adopted a corporate form to lower their tax rates. And a greater percentage of large corporations do pay some taxes. But in 2005, with corporate profits reaching new heights as a percentage of national income, the GAO found that over one-fourth -- 28% of large corporations paid no taxes...

Not surprisingly, the income collected from corporations has been declining as a percentage of GDP, with the burden transferred to your income and payroll taxes. According to a study by the Treasury Department, from 2000-2006, an average of 2.2% of GDP was collected in corporate taxes. This compares to an average of 3.4% in other industrial countries.

So what's the US Government going to do about it? Well, Bush and McCain are now campaigning to LOWER THE CORPORATE TAX RATE. I kid you not.

Credibility Lost

2008-08-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

So I was reading TPM the other day and noticed that Obama was polling well in Arkansas, a "deep red" state. And then today I check HuffPo and read that the Arkansas Democrat Party Chairman has been shot dead. And then I read that the alleged gunman was also shot dead by police.

The story is that he was pissed at losing his job. Maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't.

Again, we'll never know.

UPDATE: The familiar police refrain:

Lieutenant Hastings said the motive for the shooting was unclear.

"That's something that we'll be looking into. Right now we don't have an answer for you on that," he said, adding that the suspect was not a former Gwatney employee.

Cheney Is the Anthrax Killer

2008-08-13T05:06:00.000-07:00

Brad Friedman of the Bradblog has a good piece at The Guardian which nicely covers all the angles in the anthrax case of late, including this "embarrassing" hand-scrawled letter from Ivin's drug-challenged therapist, and also linking to this very good article at TPM (check the comments too):

Officially, the U.S. does not have or keep any weapons-grade anthrax. President Nixon ordered the dismantling of U.S. biowarfare programs in 1969 and the destruction of all existing bioweapons, including anthrax.

And there you have it. This is all part of the secret government that has been steadily building influence since WWII.

I think what's really telling about this case is that the idiots in the FBI do not really understand what they are talking about, and yet they assume that the rest of us are just as stupid - in fact, even more stupid. Because they think they are all so very clever.

"I'm #1 - Why try harder?"

This, like the election of Bush himself, is directly attributable to the dismal state of education in the USA. Bush's USA is a society in rapid decline, which is a good thing for the rest of the world. The big problem is that the idiots in charge are armed to the teeth.

Meanwhile, the PM of NZ got a white powder envelope today. Is that just coincidence? I note that the Otago Daily Times was top story at antiwar.com yesterday, with an article taking the piss out of the FBI's anthrax investigation in a way the US press would never dare attempt (even Brad Friedman has to write for the Brits). So was this a warning to the Kiwis?

Who knows.

Useful Tools

2008-08-12T04:35:00.000-07:00

Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 8 September 2002:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: The president’s going to address the General Assembly of the United Nations this week. He will lay out his concerns at that point. We have begun to share, as much as we can, with committees of Congress. A lot of this, I hope, eventually will be in the public arena so that we’ll be able to discuss it not only with our allies overseas, but also with the American people here at home. They have a right to know and understand what it is that’s happened here.

It’s also important not to focus just on the nuclear threat. I mean, that sort of grabs everybody’s attention, and that’s what we’re used to dealing with. But come back to 9/11 again, and one of the real concerns about Saddam Hussein, as well, is his biological weapons capability; the fact that he may, at some point, try to use smallpox, anthrax, plague, some other kind of biological agent against other nations, possibly including even the United States. So this is not just a one-dimensional threat. This just isn’t a guy who’s now back trying once again to build nuclear weapons. It’s the fact that we’ve also seen him in these other areas, in chemicals, but also especially in biological weapons, increase his capacity to produce and deliver these weapons upon his enemies.

MR. RUSSERT: But if he ever did that, would we not wipe him off the face of the Earth?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim? We don’t know.

MR. RUSSERT: Could it have been Saddam?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I don’t know. I don’t know who did it. I’m not here today to speculate on or to suggest that he did. My point is that it’s the nature of terrorist attacks of these unconventional warfare methods, that it’s very hard sometimes to identify who’s responsible. Who’s the source? We were able to come fairly quickly to the conclusion after 9/11 that Osama bin Laden was, in fact, the individual behind the 9/11 attacks. But, like I say, I point out the anthrax example just to remind everybody that it is very hard sometimes, especially when we’re dealing with something like a biological weapon that could conceivably be misconstrued, at least for some period, as a naturally occurring event, that we may not know who launches the next attack. And that’s what makes it doubly difficult. And that’s why it’s so important for us when we do identify the kind of threat that we see emerging now in Iraq, when we do see the capabilities of that regime and the way Saddam Hussein has operated over the years that we have to give serious consideration to how we’re going to address it before he can launch an attack, not wait until after he’s launched an attack.

Another Hit

2008-08-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

Interesting. I just got a hit from someone Googling the name "Richard O. Spertzel". The domain is army.mil and the ISP is listed as "HQ US Army Medical Research and Development Command".

I assume some of Bruce Ivins colleagues are trying to solve this case for themselves.

I haven't been posting much on this blog but I have left a few comments at Glenn Greenwald's blog over the past few weeks. Glenn is now on holidays and his comments section is deteriorating rapidly, unfortunately. You can read my comments to date here.

UPDATE: And now another hit from darpa.mil (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in Virginia. Obviously somebody is still on this story...

Is It Time To Panic Yet?

2008-08-10T05:16:00.000-07:00

Um, wait, let's see...

This is from the opening para at Newsweek today:

When the FBI publicly branded the late Dr. Bruce Ivins as the anthrax killer, it unsealed court affidavits suggesting a possible motive for the mailing to one target: NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. According to the affidavits, Ivins was angry about repeated Freedom of Information Act requests from Gary Matsumoto, identified as "an investigative journalist who worked for NBC News" who was looking into Ivins's work on an anthrax vaccine. "Tell Matsumoto to kiss my ass," the affidavit says Ivins wrote in an Aug. 28, 2001, e-mail, noting that was "weeks" before the Sept. 18, 2001, anthrax mailing addressed to Brokaw. But Matsumoto told NEWSWEEK the FBI never interviewed him as part of its investigation. If it had, he says, he could have told them he'd actually left NBC News five years earlier. At the time he was bombarding Ivins's lab with FOIA requests, he was employed by ABC. "They're trying to connect dots that don't connect," he said.

But of course, that's just Michael Isikoff's article. The Newsweek editorial is grandly titled:

FBI Makes a Powerful Case Against Ivins

It doesn't matter any more whether it is true or not, you see? We have entered into La La Land, where the New York Times can write a seemingly pro-Obama article with a throwaway line like this:

"Out of his hearing, Mr. McCain is called the White Tornado by some people who have worked for him over the years. "

Et tu, Brute?

George Washington has been wondering for some time whether a continuity of government plan is already in effect. I tell you what, that would be a good Get Out for the Dems, wouldn't it? "Yeah, we won control of the House and Senate but we couldn't say a damn thing about why we were still powerless..."

Given that the Zionist US neocons including McCain have just launched (by proxy) another (see Israel-Hezbolla circa 2007) stupid war of aggression which is backfiring miserably as we speak, bringing us all to the (once, not long ago, unthinkable) brink of a US-Russia military showdown, we are entitled to be worried.

Meanwhile, for the first time I can remember, antiwar.com is unreachable.... Coincidence?

The Horror.

2008-08-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

The horror.

If her husband's suspicions were correct, then whose "foreign" hand took her away?

The tape leaves no clue.

I blogged about Margaret Hassan's death (see my BushOut posts here and here and here). It was obvious back then what was happening. The murder of a peaceful, much-loved aid worker like Margaret was a warning to others like her.

No wonder things have been so silent for so long.

I asked some of the reporters how humans could commit such atrocities. None of them knew.

One suggested that 11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 – when Saddam still ruled Baghdad – an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to Iraqis. The Americans and British "want us to rebel against Saddam," the official said. "They think we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything – even give our own lives – to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don't worry about democracy or who your leaders are."

That official was Margaret Hassan.

We have come face to face with Evil.

PPS: I am going to stop blogging in a few weeks. This is not like my other breaks: this time a "lifestyle change" necessitates an end to my long blogging habit. Perhaps it's for the best. There is a role for those who document the atrocities, but each of us can only stand so much. I have been in a situation where I have read and absorbed a lot without necessarily being able to post about it all (due mostly to time constraints, which are about to get even tighter).

Things Are Getting Very Wierd Very Quickly

2008-08-07T05:42:00.000-07:00

Holy shit. A friend just sent me this news from Mike Whitney:

My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info which updates "news you won't find in the corporate media" every day. The site is strongly anti-war.

Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious.

Two days ago, Tom's wife found three well dressed men in their kitchen. The man who did all the talking, told Tom's wife (I won't give her name) that Tom must "Stop what he is doing on the Internet, NOW!" As crazy as it sounds, he pulled back his lapel and showed her a gun of some kind which she could not identify. Like I said, Tom has been threatened before, but nothing like this. 4 years ago, he was in a parking lot at Long's Drug store in Southern California and when he tried to open his door to get out, a man in a car next to him opened his door at precisely the same time which prevented Tom from getting out. Then, a 40-ish year old man got out of the passenger side of the vehicle and approached Tom saying, "You need to stop what you are doing on the web".

Tom said the man was overweight and had his shirt untucked. Tom was taken aback, but (after collecting himself said) "What the fuck? Who do you think you are telling me what I can do?"

The man answered, "Tom, I'm just giving you some good advice. You should take my advice, Tom."

This is all I know about the incident. Since, then, there have been occassional death threats, but nothing like what happened on Sunday. Tom's wife is hysterical and has not returned to the house since the incident. She contacted the FBI but the FBI said their was nothing they could do. Tom and his wife separated recently after a 30 year marraige, so he is publishing from a different location.

The well-dressed man told Tom's wife that he knew where her son lived, what line of work he was in, and how many children he had.

Last night, Tom's son and a friend cruised the neighborhood where his mother lives to see if anything strange was going on. They came across two men in a car a half-block from their mother's home using their laptops at roughly 12:30 AM. When Tom's son and friend approached them, the car sped off. Tom, does not know whether this is connected to his situation, but it is definitely suspicious.

I talked to Tom this morning and he is getting by, but he's clearly upset. I do not know his plans, but I know he is ditching his cell phone and (I assume) will have to go underground as much as possible. He plans to keep publishing.

I'll tell you this about Tom Feeley; he is no bullshitter. He is the "real deal" and completely committed to exposing the mob that is presently running our country. He does not understand why, (as he says) "They are reaching down SO far to get someone who just runs web site". But, the truth is, they are. Someone wants him to "shut up" and they apparently have the muscle to do it. He knows he is in danger.

I will probably only hear from Tom infrequently from this point on. But I will update information as I get it. Tom, knows some of the best writers on the Internet---many of them speak out regularly and forcefully on issues of civil liberties and war. Anything they can do to draw attention to Tom's situation will greatly improve his chances of getting through this ordeal safely. Beyond that, I have no idea of what can be done to help.

Mike Whitney

I can't see anything about this on ICH yet. If anyone has more info, please let me know. This is outrageous.

Tom Feeley is a hero, and ICH is a daily must-read, but he is hardly the only source of such information. Take him out of the game and others will fill the space, I guarantee it.

OTOH the top story at ICH right now is pretty scary too: Steve Watson cites a top Law Professor saying Counter Terrorism Czar Told Me There Is Going To Be An i-9/11 And An i-Patriot Act:

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

A friend is making backups of my blogs. Things are suddenly looking very wierd indeed.

I've spent quite a few hours over the last week looking into all this anthrax stuff and it is clear to me that (1) Ivins is not the lone killer presented by the FBI's flimsy evidence, (2) the FBI don't really give a shit whether you believe their story or not, (3) the anthrax attacks were a concerted effort by the neocon crazies to push through the Patriot Act.

Of course that means the same people were behind 911 as well, which is becoming all too obvious - is that why they are preparing to act?

Are we now going to see why they wanted the Patriot Act, and how they view the rule of Law is this "new post-911 world"? Bush's USA has crossed to "the dark side", as Dick Cheney called it. Anything is permissible as long as there's a shady threat used to justify it.

Regular readers will know that I do not write in these terms. But right now I am beginning to feel a very real sense of trepidation.

Interlude: Ghosts From The Past

2008-08-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

Laurie Garrett, September 22nd, 2001:

It doesn't help that the FBI has warned that intelligence indicates the terrorists were planning another attack upon New York, TODAY. Why today? We are told there is some significance to September 22, and that we must be prepared. Be prepared --- what the hell does that mean?

"There is very little you can do to protect yourselves from bioterrrorism," Jerry Hauer told the faculty of Rockefeller University yesterday. "There is very little you can do to protect yourself if a plane crashes into a building. If it happens, it happens. We have to go on."

Hauer, who created New York's emergency response system --- which performed remarkably well last week --- is now a bioterrorism advisor to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. With intelligence pouring in that indicated the terrorist network is allied with Sadaam Hussein's bioweapons laboratory personnel, as well as missing Russian BW scientists, Hauer said they are scrambling in Washington to get ready. (See today's Newsday web site for my article on why we are totally vulnerable to BT and have no solid preparedness policy in place.) As horrific as the deaths of more than 7,000 people in the WTC disaster and two other plane crashes may be, a bioweapon release would be orders of magnitude worse. And we are not ready, in any way, shape or form, for such an eventuality.

Yesterday Hauer spoke in the famous Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome audiorium on the Rokefeller campus. Security was tight. The scientists, an elite group at Rockefeller that includes several Nobel Prize winners, listened carefully to every word Hauer uttered. He told them what most these laboratory men and women already knew, if they'd thought about it: That microbes are the ultimate weapon. And when the question and answer period came every imaginable accent inflected their English. It has always been on of my favorite features of Science --- its intellectual internationalism --- and some of the questions came from scientists who had toiled amid terrorism elsewhere, such as the Middle East or south Asia.

One female scientist, speaking in an accent I believe was Lebanese or Syrian, asked a deeply profound question: Can we remain intact as souls? She wanted to know whether New Yorkers will be permanently psychically altered by these events in harmful ways. The venerable, elderly Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg rose carefully from his seat to respond.

"I've shared this fear," Lederberg said. "The horrors of people leaping out of buildings never leave me. Those are obvious. But I've had a much more deep-seeded anxiety and I can't share it exactly. An anxiety that we've been forced to put aside that which made u good people. I remember Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor started a process that ended with Hiroshima. My fear is that we are at the beginning of process now that may take us to something in the end like that. My fear is that we may change ourselves in ways that are not desireable."

Before the lecture Hauer, who I have known for years, confided that he had just been involved that morning in identifying the body of a close friend, John O'Neill, who died in the WTC. Hauer said "body", but from what else he indicated it was obvious O'Neill?s remains were nothing the family ought to view. Hauer hasn't slept in days. He is haggard and jittery. Distraught.

"John O'Neill was head of the FBI's counterterrorism branch in Washington," Hauer told me privately. "He led every important investigation you can name --- the USS Cole, Tanzania, Kenya bombings. He retired three weeks ago. I helped him get the job as head of security for the World Trade Center. And the irony is the guy he chased for most of his career killed him."

When Lederberg spoke of his fears for the future Hauer thought of O'Neill. And he told the audience a tory O'Neill had recently relayed to him, regarding the capture of a member of Bin Ladin's network two years ago. O'Neill and his prisoner were in a plane, flying in from overseas, "and he flew over the World Trade Center in a helicopter with this guy," Hauer said. "And the guy said to O'Neill, If I had more money I would have brought that building down."

On that same day, 22.9.01, Laurie Garret published a Newday article title "U.S. Ill-Prepared For Bioterrorism". According to Wikipedia, Garrett is currently the Senior Fellow of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

CFR members include the Pentagon's top advisers, Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, biosciences specialist Joshua Lederberg, and many other fine people. Again from Wikipedia:

The Council has been the subject of many controversies, partly due to the number of high-ranking government officials in its membership, its secrecy clauses, and the large number of aspects of American foreign policy that its members have been involved with, beginning with Wilson's Fourteen Points. The John Birch Society believes that the CFR plans a one-world government.[32] Wilson's Fourteen Points speech was the first in which he suggested a worldwide security organization to prevent future world wars.[33]
For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
—David Rockefeller, "Memoirs" autobiography (2002, Random House publishers), page 405

This is from 911review.org:

O'Neill's body was supposedly recovered in the debris of the World Trade Center. It was said by at least 1 source that it was recovered by non other than Jerome Hauer.

As head of Counter-terror, O'neill would have known more about Osama Bin Laden than anyone alive at the time. Leading some to say his death was not an accident.

If anyone would have known if Bin Laden was really behind 9/11, it would have been O'Neill.
O'Neill replaced Marvin Bush's Securacom as head of security for the WTC days before the 9/11 attacks.

Yeah, the company which handled security at the WTC until shortly before 9-11 just happened to have Bush family connections:

According to two articles in the Progressive Populist written by Margie Burns, from 1993 to 2000, [Marvin] Bush served on the board of Securacom (since renamed Stratesec). The chairman of the board of Stratesec is Wirt D. Walker III, a cousin of Marvin and George W. Bush. Securacom had contracts to provide security for Dulles International Airport (the airport from which American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, originated) and the World Trade Center in New York.

Securacom's backers include a number of Kuwaitis through a company called KuwAm Corp (Kuwaiti-American Corp.). Stratesec also has Saudi investors.

Walker also serves as a managing director of KuwAm, which maintains offices within the Watergate complex along with Riggs Bank, on whose board Bush's uncle, Jonathan Bush, sits. Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Bandar, used a Riggs account to funnel money to Omar al Bayoumi and Osama Basnan, two Saudi students in California associated with two of the911 hijackers.

But wait, there's more:

Marvin Bush has not responded to repeated telephoned and emailed requests for comment on this story.

The American Stock Exchange delisted Stratesec's stock in October 2002. Securacom also had a contract to provide security at Los Alamos National Laboratories, notorious for its security breaches and physical and intellectual property thefts.

According to its present CEO, Barry McDaniel, the company had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center "up to the day the buildings fell down." Yet instead of being investigated, the company and companies involved with it have benefited from legislation pushed by the Bush White House and rubber-stamped by Congressional Republicans.

Yep, Marvin Bush's company was handling security for Los Alamos National Laboratories, which had a long series of lax security issues, including one major incident on October 26th, 2001, involving anthrax. Two Los Alamos directors resigned in January 2003 after investigations into security breaches and missing equipment.

Cui Bono?

2008-08-06T19:22:00.000-07:00

According to the FDA:

There is only a single anthrax vaccine licensed in the U.S.; the vaccine is manufactured by BioPort Corporation, located in Lansing, Michigan.

That license is worth a lot of money to BioPort. It means that they and they alone are responsible for vaccinating US military and government personnel, and for stockpiling huge quantities of vaccine in case of a public outbreak. The contract is reportedly worth USD$?

BioPort's vaccine is called Biothrax .

Here's a little timeline of Jerome Hauer's recent life:

1993 - IBM Manager, Hazardous Materials Response and Crisis Management and Fire Safety. Also ran emergency management programs for the State of Indiana.

1996 to 2000 : Director of the newly-created Office of Emergency Management. In 1996, Giuliani shifted responsibility for the city's emergency preparedness from the Police Department to the new agency headed by Hauer.

1999: New $13 million Office of Emergency Management (OEM) crisis center HQ opened on the 23rd floor at 7 World Trade Center. Critics of the move cite WTC truck bomb attack in 1993.

Circa 2001 : national security advisor with the National Institute of Health, and managing director with Kroll Associates (the firm in charge of security for the World Trade Center complex).

August 2001 : Jerome Hauer arranges a new job for John O'Neill, the resigning chief of the FBI Terror Task Force - as head of security at the World Trade Center. O'Neill died in the Twin Towers on September 11th.

September 11, 2001: From Wikipedia:
Reports indicate that the OEM crisis center at the World Trade Center was not being used on 9-11 by the usual personnel. The center had been temporarily relocated to Pier 92 on Manhattan’s West Side, due to a FEMA drill which was supposed to begin on the day after 9-11, according to statements made by Mayor Giuliani.

May 5, 2002 - present : Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP)

Jim White (who blogs here) is even more suspicious of Spertzel following the FBI doc release:

I want to know the truth here. If RMR-1029 is purified spores with a high technology coating and was produced at Dugway, then Dugway and Battelle have a lot to answer for whether Ivins sent the attack material or not.

Spertzel has been a tool for the neocons for years and has been one of the leading dissemblers for the case for the invasion of Iraq. I don't trust him for a second. It is entirely possible that he is intentionally deflecting attention from Dugway.

This is from another informed poster at Greenwald's blog, CargoCult:

In addition, the FBI claimed in 2005 that the anthrax was not silica-coated, which is contradicted in their current report.

They come right out and say it, despite what Ed Lake has been preaching for years about it. This is a pretty critical point, isn't it?

However, why didn't they send samples out to others to do the typing of whatever it was they claim they found in Ivin's flask? Let alone the fact that noone was being investigated at Fort Detrick on 9/18 or 10/9, so how can they be so sure of what was and what was not in the flask at that time?

And what is their theory for how Bruce Ivins managed to prepare silica-coated absolutely pure, highly weaponized anthrax, even if he had the strain?

Finally, have they tested the strains at Dugway and Battelle in order to see how they compare to the letters?... Dugway and Battelle are not even being investigated. This is nothing but a coverup, I'm afraid.

I found this from 2005:

Hauer is critical of Secretary Simonson for not filling the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) with millions of vaccines in short order. Hauer then leaves HHS to take a very clear stance in support of BioPort’s discredited anthrax vaccine, in apparent opposition to VaxGen’s “next generation” anthrax vaccine.

VaxGen has recently announced delays in the production of their anthrax vaccine. They will deliver 75 million doses to the U.S. Government’s SNS later than expected – by the fourth quarter of 2006. Right when this is announced Hauer jumps to VaxGen’s competitor BioPort. Hauer is supporting a vaccine that is certain to cause injury and even death if deployed to tens of millions of people.

The controversial nature of BioPort’s anthrax vaccine was surely a key factor in their loss of a $280 million government contract to VaxGen. The safety and efficacy of the VaxGen vaccine is not yet publicly known.

According to Insight Magazine, the CEO of BioPort, Fuad El-Hibri, is friends with the Bin Laden family.3 The Carlyle Group has never disclosed whether or not they own a stake in BioPort.4 Both before and after 9/11, the Bin Laden family owned a stake in Carlyle.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shafiq bin Laden – Osama bin Laden’s brother – was meeting with George Herbert Walker Bush in Washington D.C.’s Ritz Carlton Hotel on official Carlyle business.

Bioport is nowadays the primary manufacturer of the Defense Department's anthrax vaccine, having won the contract from VaxGen in ??. Jerome Hauer, the former head of HHS's [Health and Human Services] biodefense program, is now on the Board of Emergent Biosolutions, which is Bioport's parent company.

He is also a consultant for several other biodefense firms, including SAIC, Batelle, CSC-DynCorp, Hollis-Eden, and one of the nation’s most powerful private investigative and security firms Kroll Inc., among others.

See: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/121505_jerome_hauer.shtml

Kroll were in charge of security of the World Trade Center on 9-11.

Jerome Hauer appeared on CBS news with Dan Rather on 9/11 and immediately blamed the attacks of the day on Osama bin Laden. He said that the twin towers had "collapsed" because of the "intense heat of the fires". He also reportedly advised the occupants of the White House that same day to protect themselves against anthrax by taking Cipro.

http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/2008/08/suicide-and-slander-enough-lies-to.html

From wikipedia:

in 2004 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services contracted with Vaxgen Inc. to supply up to 75 million doses of a recombinant anthrax vaccine, for $877 million.[14] To be acceptable to HHS, this vaccine was to be protective against anthrax in three doses or less. On December 19, 2006, HHS voided the contract, because of stability problems with the vaccine, and a failure to start a Phase 2 clinical trial on time.

http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Vaccinations,Forced.shtml

http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Hauer,Jerome.shtml

Sorry for the quality of this post, it's just a draft I will try to tidy when I can. Too much going on.

The Anthrax Killer? Richard Spertzel

2008-08-05T23:02:00.000-07:00

Is this is the man who made the anthrax that killed five people soon after 9-11? I think so.

Of course, the FBI are protecting him by pointing the finger at others. And Spertzel himself is busy weighing in with his expert opinion to confuse the media, and using his high-level contacts to confuse investigations, just to muddy the waters.

But I think this is the guy. Richard Spertzel.

He is on the books at Benador Associates (with Amir Taheri, Charles Jacobs, Charles Krauthammer, Dennis Prager, Herbert London, James Woolsey, Laurie Mylroie, Meyrav Wurmser, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Natan Sharansky, Richard Perle and others), he's a regular on Murdoch's FOX News, he writes articles for the Murdoch WSJ. You get the picture?

Zionist. Neocon.

Of course, he was not working alone.

More articles from Spertzel here and more investigation ongoing at Glenn Greenwald's blog, where a highly informed commenter recently said:

"Spertzel is really scary and seems to just taunt the world from the neocon perspective."

Spertzel has repeatedly insisted that the anthrax sent to Daschle and Leahy was very highly sophisticated:

"In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them," said Richard O. Spertzel, chief biological inspector for the U.N. Special Commission from 1994 to 1998. "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."

One the one hand that is a boast. On the other hand it is a threat.

Now ask yourself why the head of the FBI has been protecting this man for nearly seven years?

UPDATE: Spertzel is of course loudly telling people that he doesn't believe that Bruce Ivins was the killer. Given that the FBI has not been able to make a strong case against Ivins, and they know it, that's not really surprising. It helps give Spertzel some much-needed credibility in the public eye.

The DoJ has just released documents (PDFs here) related to the case but are not going to close the case yet "because of incomplete administrative details". Yeah, like a motive! And proof!

This is the motive currently being bandied about:

Authorities were looking at whether Ivins may have released anthrax to test a vaccine he was working on, another official said.

I don't have time to read through all the docs today, but details emerging don't indicate any bombshell of proof. It's hard to believe the FBI really thought they could charge and convict Ivins on this evidence alone.

According to one affidavit made public, Ivins submitted false anthrax samples to the FBI, was unable to give investigators "an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of" the attacks and sought to frame an unnamed co-worker.

He was also said to have received immunizations against anthrax and yellow fever in early September 2001, several weeks before the first anthrax-laced envelope was received in the mail.

Um, wouldn't everybody working in an anthrax lab be taking immunizations regularly? But that bit about framing an unnamed co-worker is interesting: was that Assaad, or Hatfill?

Then there's the corporate element, and an email that much is being made of:

[Ivins] was under pressure to assist a private company that had lost federal approval to produce an anthrax vaccine and sent a suspicious e-mail a few days before the anthrax attacks.

The e-mail warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists "for sure have anthrax and sarin gas" and had "just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans." The affidavit said the language in the e-mail was similar to warnings in the anthrax letters, such as: "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. . . . DEATH TO AMERICA . DEATH TO ISRAEL."

Note how WaPo reproduced that text in the original CAPS, just to make sure you saw it. But what's new? It's already been established (e.g. his letter to the local paper) that Ivins was a Christian Zionist, but so was the whole Fort Detrick lab (see Camel club antics). And no doubt half the USA had similar thoughts after 9-11. I mean, Bin Laden hates Jews? Duh!

And if Ivins really believed, as many others did, that Al Quaeda might have anthrax, surely that would explain his late nights in the lab after 9-11. OTOH:

The spike in his evening hours began in mid-August, almost a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators said.

That's a little harder to explain. But it's still not incriminating evidence.

And then there's this:

Moreover, the envelopes that held the letters were “federal eagle” envelopes, so-named because of the eagle perched on a bar bearing the initials “USA” in the upper right-hand corner, and bore tiny but tell-tale defects that searchers determined were bought from a post office in Maryland or Virginia, the official documents relate.

And of the 16 government, commercial and university laboratories that had virulent anthrax strains like the one used in the deadly mailings, only one was located in Maryland or Virginia — the Fort Detrick lab where Dr. Ivins worked before his July 29 suicide, the documents say.

Yeah, real tight evidence right there. Not.

One search warrant doc indicates the Feds seized a copy of "The Plague" by Albert Camus from Ivins' home. That's ironic: the "surface" story is about a doctor battling to stop a plague, but Camus wrote it as an allegory of how one decent man can stand up to the spreading influence of tyrants, especially based on his experiences in the French underground combating the Nazis.

Selected Anthrax Quotes

2008-08-05T04:55:00.000-07:00

This is what George Tenet said in his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA:

“The most startling revelation from this intelligence success story was that the anthrax program had been developed in parallel to 9/11 planning. As best as we could determine, al-Zawahiri’s project had been wrapped up in the summer of 2001, when the al-Qaida deputy, along with Hambali, were briefed over a week by Sufaat on the progress he had made to isolate anthrax. The entire operation had been managed at the top of al-Qai’da with strict compartmentalization. Having completed this phase of his work, Sufaat fled Afghanistan in December 2001 and was captured by authorities trying to sneak back into Malaysia. Rauf Ahmad was detained by Pakistani authorities in December 2001. Our hope was that these and our many other actions had neutralized the anthrax threat, at least temporarily.”

This is what former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said:

"The quality anthrax sent to Senator Daschle's office could be produced by a Ph.D. microbiologist and a sophisticated laboratory."

This is what Richard Spertzel said in a Murdoch WSJ article today:

"I believe this is another mistake in the investigation.

Let's start with the anthrax in the letters to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute.

Information released by the FBI over the past seven years indicates a product of exceptional quality. The product contained essentially pure spores. ...

The FBI spent between 12 and 18 months trying "to reverse engineer" (make a replica of) the anthrax in the letters sent to Messrs. Daschle and Leahy without success, according to FBI news releases. So why should federal investigators or the news media or the American public believe that a lone scientist would be able to do so?"

But this is from Wikipedia:

Erroneous press reports in 2003 indicated the FBI failed to reverse engineer the type of anthrax found in the letters.[11][12] According to Chemical & Engineering News, December 4, 2006,[10] there was never any attempt to "reverse engineer" the attack anthrax. Instead, the Dugway Proving Grounds "used the Leahy powder as the culture starter to 'produce several different preparations using different media, and different ways of drying and milling the preparation' that the FBI could use for comparison purposes." They "never analyzed the Leahy powder and did no comparative analyses between the preparations made and the Leahy powder."

This is what Rupert Murdoch's media goons said in March 2008:

But in an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.

"Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared ... to duplicate the letter material," the e-mail reads. "Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, 'But I told the General we didn't make spore powder!'"

Did that FOX News article trigger the FBI's interest in Ivins? Will the FBI produce it as evidence? Who wrote it?

I have posted a few comments at Greenwald's blog.

PS: Has anybody else noted that between the town where the first letter incriminating Dr Asaad was sent, and the Princeton Uni campus where the other anthrax letters were sent, there is a little town called WASHINGTON?

UPDATE: I think the guy who made the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was Richard Spertzel. And of course he was not acting alone. And the FBI is still protecting him.

Anthrax Leaks

2008-08-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a deliberate process of leaks going on ahead of any possible "case closed" press conference. AP is all over this college girl sorority angle, never mind how thin the argument is (apparently the Feds have a lot of emails to show off), while WaPo reveals that Ivins borrowed freeze-drying equipment:

Ivins's possession of the drying equipment, known as a lyopholizer, could help investigators explain how he may have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores to U.S. senators and news organizations, causing five deaths...

The lyopholizer Ivins used in the fall of 2001 is commonly employed by pharmaceutical companies and laboratories as well as food processors to freeze a liquid broth of bacteria and quickly transform it into a dry solid without a thawing stage.

Scientists and biodefense experts familiar with USAMRIID's procedures say that Ivins's department rarely used such freeze dryers, because the researchers there worked with anthrax bacteria in a liquid form.

"Dry anthrax is much harder to work with," said one scientist familiar with Ivins's lab. A lyopholizer would fit inside the ventilated "biosafety cabinet" at the lab and could have been used without drawing notice, the scientist said. The machine could have processed a few small batches of anthrax liquid in less than a day, he said.

Other biodefense experts noted that the drying step could have been carried out with equipment no more complicated than a kitchen oven. "It is the simplest . . . but it is the least reproducible," said Sergei Popov, a former Soviet bioweapons scientist who now specializes in biodefense at George Mason University. "If you go too fast you get 'sand,' " he said, referring to the coarser anthrax powder used in the first attacks, in September 2001.

The second batch of letters contained a much finer powder. "To me, it all indicates that the person experimented with the ways to dry the spores, and produced small batches -- some of them not so successfully -- he later used to fill up different envelopes," Popov said. "The spores are naturally clumpy. As I understand, he just over-baked the first batches."

Hmmn. This is interesting too:

Significant mysteries remain, including whether the attacks that involved letters mailed from Florida and Princeton, N.J., could have been carried out by one person.

But did he mail the Quantico letter too?

This is just in from the NYT:

Dr. Ivins, who had a history of alcohol abuse, had for years maintained a post office box under an assumed name that he used to receive pornographic pictures of blindfolded women.

Years ago, he had visited Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at universities in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, an obsession growing out of a romance with a sorority sister in his own college days at the University of Cincinnati — although someone who knew him well said the last such visit was in 1981.

I think it's important to remember that Ivin's character is not the issue here. Even if he was a sleazy pervert, as the Feds seem to be trying to establish, that doesn't make him guilty. Conversely, even if he is innocent that does not make him a saint (he may have been a willing member of the Camel Club's anti-Arab harrassment, for example).

The NYT article also notes some more disturbing elements of the investigation:

They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the F.B.I.’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’s daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

“It was not an interview,” Dr. Byrne said. “It was a frank attempt at intimidation.”

Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

Another former co-worker, Dr. Kenneth W. Hedlund, who collaborated on anthrax research with Dr. Ivins in the 1980s, had a similar theory.

“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody. They went after all of them but he looked the most susceptible to pressure,” Dr. Hedlund said. “It is like prisoners of war: if they are harassed enough, they will be driven to do anything. But I don’t believe he would have done what they say he did.”

But I guess the really critical part of the NYT article is the scientific explanation, which goes pretty far:

F.B.I. officials say they do know a great deal about what happened and will make it public, possibly as early as Wednesday. They say the core of their case will be the science, which produced the giant step from a globe of possible suspects to a single lab and a single flask...

Further, the attack strain contained bacteria with both the flipped and the unflipped DNA, showing that it was a mixture of two strains, which analysts later found reflected a mix of origins — 85 percent from the Dugway Proving Ground of the Army in Utah and 15 percent added at Fort Detrick, according to one person close to the investigation.

To make sure the case for the distinctive features of the attack anthrax could hold up in court, agents collected thousands of samples of Ames strain anthrax from labs around the world, said scientists familiar with the F.B.I.’s thinking. “This is the step that took so long,” one scientist said.

There's a lot more scientific stuff in the article.

Suskind Alleges White House Forgery Linked Saddam To Al Quaeda

2008-08-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting.

Also the stuff about Cheney is interesting, although hardly surprising at this stage. First he says that Bush had to ask Cheney to take a less prominent role in meetings, because it was making the Chimp look like a Chump. And then this:

Suskind contends Cheney established “deniability” for Bush as part of the vice president’s “complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president.”

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

US Iraq Withdrawal By 2011: Is It A Done Deal?

2008-08-04T20:08:00.000-07:00

That's what the Iraqi press is saying:

Iraqi and US teams negotiating a controversial security pact have reached an initial agreement that states that US troops will withdraw from Iraq between 2010 and 2011, the pro-government Iraqi Al-Sabah newspaper reported Monday.

The newspaper reported that 'the Iraqi and American technical teams have already reported the outcome of their negotiations to their political leaders during the past days.'

Of course we all know that the Iraqis cannot be trusted and nothing is real until you read it in a US newspaper. So let's see how this goes.

Anthrax Suicide Fallout: Let's Go Down The Rabbithole

2008-08-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo today says Ivins was a patsy. He says the FBI deliberately mismanaged the case, failing to chase up important evidence like the Quantico letter:

"I make no connection between Rippy and Foster's discovery of "writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match" to the Quantico letter. It's just that inquiring minds want to know…"

More about that later.

Glenn Greenwald says "no rational person could possibly assume" that Ivins is guilty based on the evidence to date. He takes a closer look at Jean Carol Duley, the social worker on whose claims so much negative press about Ivins has been based:

She has a rather lengthy involvement with the courts in Frederick, including two very recent convictions for driving under the influence -- one from 2007 and one from 2006 -- as well as a complaint filed against her for battery by her ex-husband.

Larisa Alexandrovna has more details on Duley. But why are we getting this news from bloggers, not the media? Could it be that the media doesn't want to know about it?

Greenwald examines an email from ABC News's Brian Ross suggesting Fort Detrick scientists themselves may have been the source of his false bentonite claims:

That would mean, if the FBI's accusation against Ivins is true, that the same Government lab where the attacks originated was the source for falsely telling Ross that tests revealed evidence linking the attacks to Iraq. In light of that, how can Ross possibly continue to conceal which Government scientists disseminated this false story?

It is also worth noting that Ross, who was a key witness in the Steven Hatfill litigation (since he had published numerous incriminating leaks from the DOJ) badgered at least one of his government sources, FBI spokesman Edwin Cogswell, to provide Ross with a release authorizing Ross to disclose the source's identity (allowing Ross to avoid being held in contempt by the court). Has Ross sought a similar release from his bentonite sources?

While Ross keeps silent, others in the media give a voice to public skepticism. The WaPo quotes fellow scientists dismissing the whole idea that Ivins could have been guilty. NYT says the evidence so far is purely circumstantial. Even the "sensible" folks at TPM are wondering what's going on:

I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm convinced there's a cover-up going on.

Perhaps the biggest story today is from The Daily News, which says the FBI was under massive pressure from the White House:

In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

"They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, "There may be some possible link" to Bin Laden, adding, "I wouldn't put it past him." Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden's henchmen were trained "how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together."

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. "Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with," the ex-FBI official said. "They couldn't go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next."

Again we see how the Bush gang's first response was hard political spin aimed at a pre-set agenda, rather than any kind of concerned, responsible approach to this shocking crime.

The White House pressure ties in nicely with the attempt to frame Dr. Ayaad Assaad: a letter denouncing Assad as a terrorist was sent BEFORE the anthrax letters and he was questioned immediately after the anthrax attacks. Did somebody in the White House know about that letter?

This is from Raimondo's article:

In September 2001 – before the news of the anthrax letters broke, but after they had been postmarked – a letter addressed to the "Town of Quantico police" was received that accused Assaad of being a terrorist who was planning to wage biological warfare against the U.S. on American soil. As the first anthrax letters were opened, Assaad got a call from the FBI. Agent Gregory Leylegian wanted to have a little talk with him.

Hmmn. Laura Rozen has a lot more details in this January 2002 article:

On Oct. 2, Ayaad Assaad, a U.S. government scientist and former biowarfare researcher, received a call from an FBI agent asking him to come in for a talk. It was well before anthrax panic gripped the nation -- in fact, it was the same day that photo editor Robert Stevens, 63, was admitted to a Florida hospital. It wasn't until the next day that Stevens was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, and another two days later, on Oct. 5, when he would become the first of five eventual fatalities caused by the apparent bioterrorist attack.

The day after hearing from the FBI, Assaad met with special agents J. Gregory Lelyegian and Mark Buie in the FBI's Washington field office, along with Assaad's attorney, Rosemary McDermott. They showed Assaad a detailed, unsigned, computer-typed letter with a startling accusation: that the 53-year-old Assaad, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who filed an age discrimination suit against the U.S. Army for dismissing him from a biowarfare lab, might be a bioterrorist.

"Dr. Assaad is a potential biological terrorist," the letter stated, according to Assaad and McDermott. The letter was received by the FBI in Quantico, Va., but Assaad did not learn from the FBI where it had been mailed from. "I have worked with Dr. Assaad," the letter continued, "and I heard him say that he has a vendetta against the U.S. government and that if anything happens to him, he told his sons to carry on."

According to Assaad, "The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor where I work now, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live.

"The letter warned the FBI to stop me," he said.

After their meeting, Assad was thanked by the FBI agents, who have not contacted him since. The bureau says it cleared Assaad of the anonymous allegations against him.

"We received an anonymous letter with certain allegations about Dr. Assaad," Chris Murray, an FBI spokesman, told Salon Thursday. "Our investigation has determined those allegations are unfounded. Our investigation is complete. Period."

So the FBI quickly discounted this letter, even as the White House was pressuring them to name a Middle Eastern link to the case. It was only after the case against Assaad fell over that Ashcroft and others (like Kristof) started fingering Hatfill, and only after that case fell over that they went after Ivins. The whole think stinks.

"I'm the perfect scapegoat," Dr. Assaad explained. "I'm Arab-American. I'm a scientist who knows about biological and chemical agents. I'm suing the U.S. Army," he said. "Whoever did this clearly wants revenge."

Let's speak clearly for a moment. It looks like someone at the Fort Detrick lab framed Assaad by sending the letter ahead of their premeditated anthrax attack, and it looks like somebody in the White House knew what was happening, and it looks like the people who did that are now being protected, which would explain why the whole FBI case looks so bumbling, incompetent and illogical.

And now the Feds are desperate to wrap up the case in the public eye by convincing everyone of Ivin's guilt. The latest anonymous official leaks to the media suggest that Ivins was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Princeton University:

Despite the connection between Ivins and the sorority, authorities acknowledge they cannot place the scientist in Princeton the day the anthrax was mailed. That remains a hole in the government's case. Had Ivins not killed himself last week, authorities would have argued he could have made the seven-hour round trip to Princeton after work.

You see how easy it is to make a connection? If I say "Saddam" and "WMDs" and "Terrorists" in the same sentence, they are connected! Voila!

Ivin's local paper writes an editorial obituary that makes grim reading:

Bruce E. Ivins apparently killed himself, but that doesn't make him guilty. Given the FBI's overzealous handling of the case in which Mr. Ivins only lately emerged as a suspect, it's in the realm of possibility that he was hounded to death...

The FBI had Mr. Ivins in a pressure-cooker. He did not bear up well. Diagnosed with depression, he told a therapist he was considering suicide. Mr. Ivins was stripped of high-security access at his government job and given a police escort to a hospital for residential treatment. He was forced to retire.

We're not weighing in on Mr. Ivins' innocence or guilt. In light of the FBI's handling of the case against Mr. Hatfill, however, we are concerned that Mr. Ivins may have been the victim of overzealous investigation.

Congress should press the Justice Department for a full and public accounting of this case. Forcing the FBI to lay out its evidence against Mr. Ivins is the only way the public can be sure the agency's methods were reasonable. It's only fair.

The editor notes that former Attorney General John Ashcroft was the man who originally fingered Steven J. Hatfill.

When you compare this anthrax story with the 9-11 attacks, isn't it odd how this anthrax case has the same shady characters and groups on the sidelines, the same anti-Muslim motives apparent, the same lack of investigation from the corporate media on seemingly critical issues, the same bumbling incompetence from government investigators, the same high-level White House push for political capital...?

Very odd indeed. You would almost think the same people were involved, for the same reasons. The highly politicized 911 Commission cleaned up that other mess. But this time they have screwed it up a whole lot worse.

OK, now sit back and hold on tight.

First, let's note that whoever did this was not working alone. There was a concerted effort within the Fort Detrick lab to get rid of Assaad (and remember, this all started years before 9-11):

It appears that the conspirators created an extremely toxic workplace on purpose in order to take control of the laboratory. The lab became very dysfunctional and hostile to the few "good" scientists that worked there which included Dr. Assaad. Dr. Assaad said "This person knew in advance what was going to happen and created a suitable, well-fitted scapegoat for this action. You do not need to be a Nobel laureate to put two and two together." Dr. Assaad said he reported everything to his supervisor, Col. David R. Franz, but that Colonel Franz "kicked me out of his office and slammed the door in my face, because he didn't want to talk about it." Dr. Assaad was eventually dismissed by Colonel Franz as were two other scientists of Arab descent.

And remember that all these people were US military types, who are supposed to obey orders. There was a chain of command here.

Now for the bombshell, which actually dropped some time ago but was not heard. This is reprinted in full from After Downing Street (via Hollow Mantras Of Vision):

Anthrax Coverup: A Government Insider Speaks Out

Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2007-07-03 20:08. Media

By Steve Watson

Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 advisor thinks it is.

Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress," Boyle said in a radio interview with Austin-based talk-show host Alex Jones. "That would have set up a police state.

"Senators Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, come these anthrax attacks."

"At the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either with respect to September 11 or the anthrax attacks, but then the New York Times revealed the technology behind the letter to Senator Daschle. [The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined with] special electro-static treatment. This is superweapons-grade anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly
proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you could have gotten that."

Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job, Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School. Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the spores used in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that there was a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of the attempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through. Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that most members of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law to all Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that, under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant.

Continued Boyle: "In other words, they have taken the position that at some point in time, if they want to, they can unilaterally round up United States native-born citizens, as they did for Japanese-Americans in World War II, and stick us into concentration camps." Boyle asserted that top officials, such as White House legal advisor John Yoo and former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith (now a professor at Harvard Law School), are pushing for the legalization of torture as well.

"The Nazis did the exact same thing," said Boyle. "They had their lawyers infiltrating law schools. Carl Schmidt was the worst, and he was the mentor to Leo Strauss, the [ideological] founder of the neoconservatives. So the same phenomenon that started in Nazi Germany is happening here, and I exaggerate not. We could all be tortured; we could all be treated this way."

Boyle stressed that it is vital to keep up the pressure on Senator Leahy, who now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, giving him subpoena power. Since Leahy was himself a target, he may have sufficient motivation to get to the bottom of the attacks. The FBI and the Justice Department have so far refused full disclosure to Congress.

In addition to his credentials as a government advisor, Boyle also holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard University. He teaches international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Boyle also served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court.

Boyle alleged that due to his activities as a lawyer, he was interrogated by an agent from the CIA/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in the summer of 2004. The agent tried to recruit him as an informant to provide the FBI with information on his Arab and Muslim clients. When he refused, according to Boyle, the FBI placed him on the government's terrorism watch lists.

More about Francis Boyle here. This is not some batshit crazy lunatic.

The Gift Of Giving

2008-08-03T22:10:00.000-07:00

If this Senate enquiry into tax evasion never achieves anything, we will all know why. This is from WaPo:

Bank officials named in an unfolding Senate investigation have directed more than $2 million into this year's congressional and presidential campaigns, some of it arriving just as investigators finished a report accusing the bank of helping clients hide billions of taxable dollars from the Internal Revenue Service.

At the heart of the probe is UBS of Switzerland, one of the world's largest banks, which in June alone distributed $98,000 to members of Congress through its political action committee...

UBS always has been a major donor in Washington, in addition to spending close to $1 million a year on lobbying. The bank has spent more on the 2008 elections, which are still more than three months away, than during the entire 2006 cycle. The UBS political committee distributed $2.21 million to politicians and political groups over the past 18 months.

Peter Lowy has doled out $92,000 to members of Congress from both parties, while Westfield has handed out thousands more.

Lowy's attorney, Robert S. Bennett, said he had no idea what motivated his client's contributions. "Why does anybody give?" Bennett said. "He's very interested in politics. And he gives to both sides."

Bruce Ivins' Daily Diary, July 10 2008

2008-08-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

Just another day at the office:

9:00 am - 12:00 am

Work on athrax spores and other deadly material at U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.

12:00 am - 1:00 pm

Lunch.

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Attend sensitive briefing on a new bubonic plague vaccine under development at the Army's elite biological weapons testing center.

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Undergo major psychological assessment as part of FBI murder investigation in which I am the prime suspect.

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Tenpin bowling with Dr. Zack and the other Arab-hating lab guys.

From this Wapo story: Researcher Kept Security Clearance as FBI Closed In.

The Inmates Are Still Running The Asylum

2008-08-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

That's all I can think after reading more stories about this anthrax case.

I mean, if Ivins did it, then how the f*** does a psychopath run free for seven years with all the Feds running around the place (actually taking "expert" advice from him) etc? I mean, this guy was right under their noses all along, and yet they chased one red herring after another, at the behest of some very "usual suspect" types (like Nicholas Kristol, who said he knew who did it).

And if Ivins didn't do it, why the f*** are the Feds fingering the wrong guy again, and letting the real killer(s) remain free, unless it's yet another massive cover-up (one lie leading to another)? And if that's the case, well, this case is a lot clumsier than the others. Is the thread unravelling?

Either way, the FBI investigation has been a f***ing disaster. Heads should roll.

The latest reports suggest greed was Ivins' motive: he stood to make "tens of thousands" if the US government aggressively produced his experimental anthrax vaccine (it was dropped after a 2 year study with no deal cemented). But while a social worked and an estranged brother take that "batshit crazy" line, friends and associates insist Ivins was innocent. So does his lawyer.

In cases like this, you have to accept that the Feds have access to a lot more info that you do, and until they make it public there is only so far you can go with speculation. But I'd like to know that Philip Zack is doing these days (strange how none of the media reports even mention him this week), and why Ivins - of all those who worked in his lab - was fingered.

Another big issue here is Qui Custodiat Custos? Is the USA's massive stockpile of weapons actually endangering its citizens more than the allegedly critical issue of foreign terrorists? The links above explore this (thanks antiwar.com again).

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has more today, including demands for a 9-11 Commission style (oh no!) investigation. Among Greenwald's list of questions:

If it's really the case -- as principal Ivins antagonist Jean Duley claims -- that Ivins, as far back as 2000, had "actually attempted to murder several other people, [including] through poisoning" and had threatened to kill his co-workers at his Fort Detrick lab, then why did he continue to maintain clearance to work on biological weapons, and why are his co-workers and friends, with virtual unanimity, insisting that he never displayed any behavior suggestive of being the anthrax attacker?

I noted (again) that Daschle and Leahy were targetted after media reports saying they were holding up passage of the Patriot Act, which was passed just a few weeks after the attacks.

You Still There, Frank?

2008-08-02T13:56:00.000-07:00

Nice to see the ATO's audit of Lowy staying in the news:

Labor MP Sharon Grierson, who chairs the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, said she would be seeking reassurance from the tax commissioner that any deliberate tax evasion emerging from money stashed in Liechtenstein would be pursued.

The report has more on Lowy's 1995 ATO deal:

The year before that, Mr Lowy had settled a disputed assessment with the Tax Office with a payment of $25million, which outraged auditors.

Part of that investigation had centred on Mr Lowy's $110 million super yacht, Ilona, which has 18 guest bedrooms, a gym, massage room and a helicopter. It is understood much of the investigation focused on the boat's log book.

The Tax Office calculated that about $50 million was owed based on outstanding tax, penalties and interest for undeclared payments to a Lowy family company, Cordera, in 1997 and 1998.

Because it was unclear which director of Cordera was responsible, auditors drafted assessments, reportedly totalling $300 million, against all Lowy family directors and Cordera. The Tax Office intended to pursue $50 million but accepted $25 million. Details of the settlement have only just been made public.

Ms Grierson does not want any future settlement with Mr Lowy to be shrouded in such secrecy.

"If there is any talk of a settlement we would want the tax commissioner to adhere to our recommendations [of transparency]," she said.

Another Can Of Worms

2008-08-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald is all over this anthrax story. As well as slamming ABC News for telling lies in the wake of the attacks and never acknowledging their errors, he dishes up this quote from Dr Bruce Ivins (pic above) to his local paper:

Rabbi Morris Kosman is entirely correct in summarily rejecting the demands of the Frederick Imam for a "dialogue."

By blood and faith, Jews are God's chosen, and have no need for "dialogue" with any gentile. End of "dialogue."

Given that Ivins was a pracitising Catholic, this letters seems to expose him as a likely Christian Zionist. And it will be interesting how the media deal with that, given that Ivins had no other apparent motive for the attacks.

The DoJ have confirmed they were about to charge Ivins (but are not saying more till they have talked with families of those who died in the attacks). So if Ivins didn't do it, he was probably being framed (which might be enough reason to go mad and suicide).

Despite a fair bit of reading I never even heard Ivin's name before in all this - Zack and another member of the Camel Club got attention because they quit, which looked suspicious. All the more reason it will be interesting to see what DoJ dish up: if they think Ivins did it, there's no reason not to publish all details of the case, right?

Meanwhile, the rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper. One of the biggest mysteries of these anthrax attacks (aside from the FBI's apparent and repeated incompetence) is how and why the media have ignored them for so long. Meanwhile, the information vacuum and assorted red herrings have spurned all kinds of speculation elsewhere. As the Palm Beach Post points out:

Entering the search words "anthrax" and "conspiracy" on the internet search engine Google produces nearly 1.5 million pages.

The Post covers some of the major conspiracy-related issues, including this:

The Hartford Courant, quoting an internal Army inquiry, reported in 2002 that lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens disappeared from Fort Detrick in the early 1990s, during a time of labor complaints and spats among rival scientists.

And this:

The FBI has said 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers lived in South Florida, and as many as 12 had links to Palm Beach County. Several lived in Delray Beach or Boynton Beach, not far from the AMI building in Boca Raton.

In 2003, Leonard Cole, author of the book The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story, pointed out several other links between the Sept. 11 hijackers and the anthrax attacks:

Ahmed Al Haznawi was treated at a Fort Lauderdale hospital for a leg ulcer.

The doctor later said the ulcer was probably cutaneous anthrax. Gloria Irish, a real estate agent who is the wife of Mike Irish, editor-in-chief of AMI's The Sun, helped two of the hijackers, Hamza Alghamdi and Marwan Al-Shehhi, rent apartments in Delray.

In addition to Cole's contentions, Gregg Chatterton, co-owner of Huber Drugs in Delray Beach, has said a man came in during the summer of 2001 seeking an ointment for his irritated and red hands. Chatterton later identified the man as Mohamed Atta, believed to be the ringleader of the hijackers. Chatterton said he also sold Al-Shehhi a bottle of Robitussin for a chest cold and directed him to a nearby clinic.

So you have these leads pointing towards the Muslim hijackers, but then you have a pro-Jewish US scientist (who presumably wouldn't have anything to do with such fanatical Islamists) facing charges. Hmmn.

Something certainly doesn't add up, unless somebody is deliberately spreading lies. And why would anyone do that?

The ball is in DoJ's court.

Was This Really The Anthrax Killer?

2008-08-01T03:45:00.000-07:00

The LA Times broke the story, headlined Apparent suicide in anthrax case. Here's that breaking story in full:

By David Willman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, August 1, 2008

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI.

The death -- without any mention of suicide -- was announced to Ivins' colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, through a staffwide e-mail.

"People here are pretty shook up about it," said Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for USAMRIID, who said she was not at liberty to discuss details surrounding the death.

The anthrax mailings killed five people, crippled national mail service, shut down a Senate office building and spread fear of further terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government's payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI's chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

The payout to Hatfill, a highly unusual development that all but exonerated him in the mailings, was an essential step to clear the way for prosecuting Ivins, according to lawyers familiar with the matter.

Federal investigators moved away from Hatfill -- for years the only publicly identified "person of interest" -- and ultimately concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III changed leadership of the investigation in late 2006.

The FBI's new top investigators -- Vincent B. Lisi and Edward W. Montooth -- instructed agents to reexamine leads or potential suspects that may have received insufficient attention. Moreover, significant progress was made in analyzing genetic properties of the anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two senators.

The renewed efforts led the FBI back to USAMRIID, where agents first questioned scientists in December 2001, a few weeks after the fatal mailings.

By spring of this year, FBI agents were still contacting Ivins' present and former colleagues. At USAMRIID and elsewhere, scientists acquainted with Ivins were asked to sign confidentiality agreements in order to prevent leaks of new investigative details.

Ivins, employed as a civilian at Ft. Detrick, earlier had attracted the attention of Army officials because of anthrax contaminations that Ivins failed to report for five months. In sworn oral and written statements to an Army investigator, Ivins said that he had erred by keeping the episodes secret -- from December 2001 to late April 2002. He said he had swabbed and bleached more than 20 areas that he suspected were contaminated by a sloppy lab technician.

"In retrospect, although my concern for biosafety was honest and my desire to refrain from crying 'Wolf!' . . . was sincere, I should have notified my supervisor ahead of time of my worries about a possible breach in biocontainment," Ivins told the Army. "I thought that quietly and diligently cleaning the dirty desk area would both eliminate any possible [anthrax] contamination as well as prevent unintended anxiety at the institute."

The Army chose not to discipline Ivins regarding his failure to report the contamination. Officials said that penalizing Ivins might discourage other employees from voluntarily reporting accidental spills of "hot" agents.

But Ivins' recollections should have raised serious questions about his veracity and his intentions, according to some of those familiar with the investigation. For instance, although Ivins said that he swabbed areas near and within his personal office, and bleached surfaces to kill any spores, and that some of the swabs tested positive, he was vague about what should have been an essential next step:

Reswabbing to check whether any spores remained.

"I honestly do not recall if follow-up swabs were taken of the area," Ivins said. "I may have done so, but I do not now remember reswabbing."

"That's bull----," said one former senior USAMRIID official. "If there's contamination, you always reswab. And you would remember doing it."

The former official told The Times that Ivins might have hedged regarding reswabbing out of fear that investigators would find more of the spores inside or near his office.

Ivins' statements were contained within a May 2002 Army report on the contamination at USAMRIID and was obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

Soon after the government's settlement with Hatfill was announced June 27, Ivins began showing signs of serious strain.

One of his longtime colleagues told The Times that Ivins, who was being treated for depression, indicated to a therapist that he was considering suicide.

Soon thereafter, family members and local police officers escorted Ivins from USAMRIID, where his access to sensitive areas was curtailed, the colleague said.

Ivins was committed to a facility in Frederick for treatment of his depression. On July 24, he was released from the facility, operated by Sheppard Pratt Health System. A telephone call that same day by The Times verified that Ivins' government voice mail was still functioning at the bacteriology division of USAMRIID.

The scientist faced forced retirement, planned for September, said his longtime colleague, who described Ivins as emotionally fractured by the federal scrutiny.

"He didn't have any more money to spend on legal fees. He was much more emotionally labile, in terms of sensitivity to things, than most scientists. . . . He was very thin-skinned."

FBI spokeswoman Debra J. Weierman said Thursday that the bureau would not comment on the death of Ivins.

Last week, FBI Director Mueller told CNN that "in some sense, there have been breakthroughs" in the case.

"I'll tell you we made great progress in the investigation," Mueller added.

"And it's in no way dormant."

Ivins, the son of a Princeton-educated pharmacist, was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio, and received undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a doctorate in microbiology, from the University of Cincinnati.

The eldest of his two brothers, Thomas Ivins, said he was not surprised by the events that have unfolded.

"He buckled under the pressure from the federal government," Thomas Ivins said, adding that FBI agents came to Ohio last year to question him about his brother.

"I was questioned by the feds, and I sung like a canary" about Bruce Ivins' personality and tendencies, Thomas Ivins said.

"He had in his mind that he was omnipotent."

Ivins' widow declined to be interviewed when reached Thursday at her home in Frederick. The couple raised twins, now 24.

The family's home is 198 miles -- about a 3 1/2 -hour drive -- from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., where anthrax spores were found by investigators.

All of the recovered anthrax letters were postmarked in that vicinity.

So was this man, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, really the man who mailed out the anthrax letters in 2001? Personally, based on my prior investigations, I was inclined to think that Ivin's fellow scientist Philip Zack was a more likely culprit. OTOH I never even heard the name Bruce Ivins mentioned on any website I visited, even though he worked in the same lab as Dr Zack.

It's interesting that Ed Lake, whose anthraxinvestigation.com website has a lot of information, just updated his site two weeks ago with a post defending Zack from mounting online suspicion:

On the morning of April 11, 2008, someone who truly believes that al Qaeda sent the anthrax letters sent me a clipping from the July 28, 1974, issue of The Zanesville, Ohio, Times Recorder. Here is the section of that clipping which refers to Dr. Zack:

Lake suggests that the article proves that Zack was not Jewish, which means any Zionist-influenced conspiracy theories (like mine) should be put to rest. OTOH Lake's credibility takes a blow when he calls Justin Raimondo a "conservative"!

But why does Mr. Raimondo point at Dr. Zack? Why not point at others who belonged to "The Camel Club" at Ft. Detrick? Why ignore the fact that Dr. Zack lived in Colorado at the time of the attacks? Why ignore the fact that the incident with Dr. Assaad took place ten years before the attacks? Why ignore the fact that it took place at the time of the first Gulf War when many Americans were "anti-Arab?" Why ignore the fact that the attack anthrax was made no more than two years before the attacks? Why ignore the fact that there is really nothing that points at Dr. Zack other than a mistaken belief that he's a Jew and part of The Great Jewish Conspiracy?

Do conservatives like Mr. Raimondo think that Dr. Zack is a liberal Arab hater? Is there such a thing as a liberal Arab hater?

If Dr. Zack is not a Jew, who conservatives readily label as "bigots" because Jews don't seem to like the Arabs who want to exterminate them, what kind of "bigot" could Dr. Zack be? If he's a Catholic who didn't like Arabs at the time of the first Gulf War, what kind of "bigot" would that make him? Does "conservative bigot" seem a reasonable term? It appears that Mr. Raimondo is pointing the finger at a fellow conservative!

Hmmn. That's strangely incoherent and uninformed, in contrast with other information Lake has provided.

It's possible that Raimondo jumped to conclusions because only two members of the Camel Club were publicly named, and even that was only because they quit their jobs. I haven't seen any other websites mentioning Ivins' name. And yet, as I said a month ago:

It seems clear that the prime suspects in the anthrax case today must be Dr. Philip M. Zack, Dr. Marian K. Rippy, their "camel club" colleagues, and their supervisors.

So now we find out that Bruce Ivins was a member of the Camel Club, and he is conveniently dead. His Wikipedia page has already been updated (just 5 hours after the LAS Times story broke):

After Hatfill was no longer considered a suspect, Ivins began "showing signs of serious strain". As a result, he lost access to sensitive areas at his job. He began being treated for depression and expressed some suicidal thoughts.[2]

Late in July 2008, investigators informed Ivins of his impending prosecution for his alleged involvement in the 2001 Anthrax Attacks that Ivins himself had previously assisted authorities in investigating.

Ivins apparently committed suicide on July 29, 2008 by overdosing on Tylenol with Codeine.[3]

Does that mean he was the author of the anthrax letters? No.

Does it mean he wasn't? No.

We should expect a lot more information about this case to come through soon. Keep your eyes open for what is NOT said. There are a lot of unanswered questions at this point.

If Ivins did it, what was his motivation? Why did he frame Arabs for the attacks? Who fingered Dr Assad? Who fingered Dr Hatfill, and why did the FBI (ad the corporate media) pursue these leads so aggressively while ignoring others?

What did the Feds find in that lake?

Did the DoJ try to block this investigation? If so, why? As I write, the DoJ still has no comment.

Did those reporters reveal their sources?

And could all this have anything to do with Jerome Hauer?

$12 Billion Is Not Enough

2008-07-31T17:52:00.000-07:00

Greed knows no boundaries:

Exxon Mobil Corp has reported second-quarter earnings of $US11.68 billion ($A12.38 billion), the biggest profit from operations ever by any US corporation, but the results were well short of Wall Street expectations and its shares fell.

Teh Legacy! Teh Legacy!

2008-07-31T15:30:00.000-07:00

Condi's talk of a final push for Middle Eastern peace is not fooling anybody:

According to a press release sent out by Time, this Friday's edition of the magazine will reportedly include a article that describes how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is deeply involved in an effort to "clean up [President] Bush's foreign policy legacy."

But one newspaper in the Persian Gulf believes the negotiations are tailored for the benefit of John McCain during the fall election season. In a Thursday editorial entitled "Negotiations for the Sake of Rice," the UAE's Al-Khaleej writes that leaders in the United States, Israel and the Palestinian Territories all know that no breakthroughs can be expected in President Bush's last few months in office.

"But since the attention is focused on helping the Republican candidate John McCain in the presidential election in November, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will increase her pressures in an attempt to change some positions and facts, and sign a document - a mere document - that would be regarded as an accomplishment," the paper claims, adding that the negotiations are "pointless."

It's tempting to think that the Bush team's sudden and dramatic turn towards realism on multiple fronts might signal a change of heart within the administration, some desperate acts of contrition, a belated recognition of widespread and sometimes horrific errors, and an attempt to at least salvage something of worth from their remaining months in office. It would be nice to think so.

But the fact is that this is all just political theater designed to help John McCain win office.

Too Clever By Half

2008-07-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

I hate it when I reach a new milestone in understanding how things work in this sorry, fucked-up world. But here we go again...

First, take a look at this mushy interview with Frank Lowy:

The Australian tycoon's cheery optimism in the face of the present pessimism about British prospects may well stem from the almost biblical narrative of his life. Born into a Jewish family in Hungarian-speaking Czechoslovakia, he survived the Holocaust along with his mother, brother and sister. 'My father was taken to Auschwitz and never returned,' he states sparely.

Now ask yourself why is Frank Lowy doing an interview like this right now? Shouldn't he be busy trying to fend of that US Senate investigation?

Lowy is doing the interview because he's in trouble. He has already put a lot of money into these London developments, and he stands to make a lot more. But if his financial backers get cold feet, the whole deal could collapse.

So he's gone to his friends, calling in favours:

Lowy (a former director of DMGT, the owners of the Mail and This is Money) is remarkably optimistic about the future of shopping in Britain...

Yeah, that's right, he's a former director of the company publishing this drivel. Well, at least they had the decency to mention that fact, even if they conveniently forgot to tell their readers about Lowy's big tax troubles.

Now pay careful attention to this bit at the bottom of the interview:

At a time when much of the property world is struggling to secure loans, he seems to be able to finance his projects. Westfield has been a customer of the National Australia Bank since 1960, although these days his bankers are spread across the globe and the company has debt outstanding in Britain, the US and Australia.

See that? OK, now read this:

NAB's new chief executive Cameron Clyne and chairman Michael Chaney today left open the option for NAB to finally bite the bullet in relation to the UK market and either make an acquisition or get out.

At a media conference in Melbourne, Clyne said he would be reviewing the bank's strategic direction in response to changed market conditions.

You see? NAB is getting cold feet. And why wouldn't they, especially given their own difficulties of late?

Chaney made clear today that NAB is not going to launch into an acquisition frenzy under Clyne's leadership with the sort of silly “double the business” target that has caused trouble at other companies. He did not rule out the sale of assets.

Clyne made reassuring noises about his commitment to reviewing risk management at NAB after last week's sudden $830 million provisioning charge. He said reviewing risk management was “one of my priorities”. That contrasts with Stewart's comment last week that risk management was fine.

"Stewart", of course, is the NAB director who just resigned in disgrace. And Frank Lowy is now categorized as a "risk".

PS: Seriously, I hate this shit. What sort of dumb bastard stays up till 11:30 pm joining these kind of dots, unless he is making a lot of money out of it himself? (I am not). I must be stupid, or mad, or both. Good night.

Oh and by the way, the new head of NAB is only 40 years old but already making $7.5 million per year.

Whitney Down Under

2008-07-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

Mike Whitney says the NAB's recent move was a "game-changer" which will send shockwaves through the global markets:

The scariest news of the week comes from down-under, where the National Australia Bank (NAB) announced it would "slash a £400m bond sale by two thirds. The retreat comes days after the Melbourne lender shocked the markets by announcing a 90pc write-down on its £550m holdings of US mortgage debt, an admission that it AAA-rated securities are virtually worthless....The decision by National Australia Bank to make drastic provisions on its US mortgage debt could have ramifications in the US itself. It opted for a 100pc write-off on a clutch of "senior strips" of collateralized debt obligations (CDO) worth £450m - even though they were all rated AAA. (Ambrose Evans Pritchard, "Australia faces worse crisis than America", UK Telegraph)

This is a huge story with grave implications for America's struggling banking system. No wonder the establishment media is avoiding it like the plague. If AAA rated CDOs are worthless, then some of the biggest financial institutions in the country will be packed off to the boneyard feet-first.

The original article appeared in the Business Spectator and was titled "NAB will shock Wall Street", by Robert Gottliebsen. "Shock" is an understatement. This is more like a meat cleaver crashing down on a butcher block. Schwook! This is a must-read for anyone who is following the meltdown in the financial markets. Here is an extended excerpt from Gottliebsen's article:
"The National Australia Bank's decision to write off 90 per cent of its US conduit loans will have dramatic repercussions around the world. Wall Street will be deeply shocked when they understand the repercussions of what NAB has done. It is clear global banks have nowhere near provided for their exposures to US housing loans which in the words of John Stewart are experiencing a “meltdown”.

We are now way beyond sub-prime. NAB says that it is suffering a 55 per cent loss on American housing loans – an event that has never happened in the history of a developed country in recent memory. This is an unprecedented event and means that the cost of bailing out the US financial system is now far beyond the highest estimates. A US recession is now locked in, but more alarmingly, 55 per cent loan losses point to the possibility of a depression.

It means the cost of bailing out housing exposures to the two mortgage insurers will be so great that it will leave no room to bail out anything else and there are several US banks that are now in big trouble. NAB says that the dislocation in the residential market is separate from the corporate market, but the flow on is inevitable." ( The Business Spectator,"NAB will shock Wall Street")
The conduits are off-balance sheets operations run by the banks which contain hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds which are now essentially worthless. So far, many of the banks have not accurately reported the losses from these operations hoping that the housing market will stabilize and the value of the bonds will rebound. The action taken by the National Australia Bank is a "game-changer"; it's like the Grim Reaper swooping down on Wall Street and lopping-off the top of every big investment bank in downtown Manhattan.

Ouch.

Teh Anti-Semitism! Teh Anti-Semitism!

2008-07-29T23:02:00.000-07:00

TIME's Joe Klein comes under attack for daring to point out an unspeakable truth:

There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003. Their motivations involve a confused conflation of what they think are Israel's best interests with those of the United States. They are now leading the charge for war with Iran.

He is talking about the Richard Perle, Netanyahu and others involved in A Clean Break. And yes, the similarities with the PNAC ideological manifesto are more than a little bit interesting (e.g. Perle helped author both docs).

Via Joshua Micah Marshall (another self-hating Jew, I suppose).

A Vote Of Confidence

2008-07-29T22:43:00.000-07:00

Not! A big fund just completely dumped 3,211 shares Westfield Group shares. One would assume that any serious investigation of the Lowy family's tax affairs is going to affect the share price.

Frank Lowy's Fat Lawyer Caught Out

2008-07-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

This is pretty funny. The Real News Network has video of Frank Lowy appearing before the US Senate, where Lowy refused to talk but his fat lawyer waved papers in the air claiming the subpoena was based on mistaken assumptions. But the NPR film crew followed Lowy and his lawyer into the lift after the hearing, and their cameraman caught Lowy's lawyer whispering to him:

"This will be the story."

Confronted by the film crew, Lowy's lawyer lies:

Q: "Sir, did you just say 'This will be the story'?"

A: "No. (shuffles in front of Lowy) No I said the... this will be the... People will focus on the... this statement, which is false, is what I am talking about..."

You can watch the video here.

The program points out that the estimated $100 billion per year lost to US taxpayers (that's just the annual interest on an estimated $1.5 trillion hidden in these havens) is more than the US government budget spends on education, triple what they spend on the environment, and nearly five times what they spend on helping the needy.

From the comments:

The smirk on Mr. Lowy's face most of the time says pretty much all that needs to be said of what these people's attitudes are.

I have just added The Real News to my bookmarks.

I See Dead People

2008-07-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

Haiti has always been the canary in the coal mine of global poverty, and people there are now eating mud:

As desperation rises so does production of mud cakes, an unofficial misery index. Now even bakers are struggling. Trucked in from a clay-rich area outside the capital, Port-au-Prince, the mud is costlier but cakes still sell for 1.3p each, about the only item immune from inflation. "We need to raise our prices but it's their last resort and people won't tolerate it," lamented Baptiste, the Cité Soleil baker.

Vendors of other foods who have increased prices have been left with unsold stock...

How did it come to this?

Haiti's woes stem from global economic trends of higher oil and food prices, plus reduced remittances from migrant relatives affected by the US downturn. What makes the country especially vulnerable, however, is its almost total reliance on food imports.

Domestic agriculture is a disaster. The slashing and burning of forests for farming and charcoal has degraded the soil and chronic under-investment has rendered rural infrastructure at best rickety, at worst non-existent.

The woes were compounded by a decision in the 1980s to lift tariffs, when international prices were lower, and flood the country with cheap imported rice and vegetables. Consumers gained and the IMF applauded but domestic farmers went bankrupt and the Artibonite valley, the country's breadbasket, atrophied.

Now that imports are rocketing in price the government has vowed to rebuild the withered agriculture but that is a herculean task given scant resources, degraded soil and land ownership disputes.

So what's the alternative?

Walk along a beach in the morning and you find Haitians gazing at the azure ocean horizon, dreaming of escape. They are fiercely proud of their history in overthrowing slavery and colonialism but these days the US, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic - anywhere but home - seems the best option.

The only thing stopping an exodus are US coastguard patrols, said Herman Janvier, 30, a fishermen on Cap Haitian, a smuggling point. "People want out of here. It's like we're almost dead people."

More here.

UPDATE: And of course, let's not forget why Bush dumped Aristide. From Common Dreams:

Haiti is sending approximately $1 million each week in debt service payments to the World Bank and other creditors...

Nice Dream

2008-07-29T14:51:00.000-07:00

From Ted Rall:

And - blow me down with a feather - Bill Leak actually has a funny cartoon again in Teh Organ:

I have been watching Leak on a near-daily basis and I reckon he averages about one funny cartoon every three months. Maybe he'd be funnier if his job spec didn't include parroting the Murdoch talking points of the day.

LowyGate: Spotlight On The ATO

2008-07-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

Australia's Tax Commissioner, Michael D'Ascenzo, turned down a request to appear before the US Senate commission looking into tax havens:

In a letter dated July 15 to Senators Carl Levin and Norm Coleman, D'Ascenzo thanked them for the invitation "to attend and give testimony".

"Unfortunately, a prior commitment in Australia prevents me from attending at this time," he wrote, noting that "the Australian Taxation Office is very supportive of the good work of your subcommittee".

But the ATO is also conspicuously silent on this issue. The Australian arm of Swiss banking giant UBS is still providing offshore banking services, despite its US counterpart banning the practice:

"Our business model is not going to change," a UBS spokeswoman told The Australian.

The spokeswoman said the Australian offshore investment model was different from that of the US because of different reporting requirements, but he was unable to explain further.

Repeated requests for further information from UBS offshore investment experts went unanswered.

According to the Australian Taxation Office, $5 billion flowed from Australia to known tax havens each year, with much of that driven by wealthy individuals.

The ATO says "most" Australians using tax havens are doing so within the law. So it's pretty obvious that we need to change the law! Why isn't Michael D'Ascenzo pressuring Kevin Rudd on this issue?

UPDATE: Interesting that this innocent little blog post has sparked a flurry of interest from .gov.au readers in Canberra. Who says Big Brother is not watching very carefully indeed? Hey guys! You should be watching the look on Frank Lowy's face when his lawyer gets caught out.

See that jugular vein popping out? That's your target, right there. Now go for it - that's why I am paying you guys. To work for me, not them.

A Fucking Medal

2008-07-29T04:49:00.000-07:00

OK, so you have been blogging against Bush for what? Three, five, eight years? So what do you want...?

Actually, this idea is not as cynical as it might sound. I think all of us who have worked so hard to bring the Bush regime to its knees deserve some recognition, respect, and reward.

This medal is my way of saying "Thank You" to everyone who joined the anti-Bush online throng. If you think you deserve the medal, save it to your blog. If you think someone else deserves it, send it to them (along with a big thank you).

But be warned: posting this image in Bush's USA could bring you a fine and even a 6 month jail term. I am not kidding. It is based on the US Medal Of Honour, "the highest military decoration awarded by the United States government". Given that the US military has been busy killing innocent civilians and invading sovereign countries while the rest of us went after the real criminals, I think we have a right to claim the image for our own purposes, don't you? In fact, given the upside down, right-is-wrong, good-is-evil madness that is and was BushWorld, I think it is a totally appropriate form of much-needed celebration, which simultaneously rewards the true heroes of the day while giving the finger to the military stooges and the legal eunuchs who let Bush and his gang get away with it all.

And as a special bonus, just for you my dear readers, I am also giving away Presidential Pardons.

That's right, anyone who has done anything even remotely illegal (as long as it was not violent) while blogging against Bush is welcome to cut-and-paste the following text, insert their name, print it out on a piece of paper, and present it to a judge in a court of law:

"By the power endowed in me by the overwhelming forces of public opinion, I hereby declared that [INSERT NAME HERE] was momentarily overcome by the daily horrors of cognisant existence in the reality-based zone of BushWorld. I hereby decree that [INSERT NAME HERE] is pardoned for any non-violent crimes he/she may have committed during this horrendous period in US history.

Yours Presidentially,

Gandhi"

Enjoy.

Is This The End?

2008-07-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

Mike Whitney gets apocalyptic:

Bank runs are a direct hit on the foundation of the free market system. Unchecked, the tremors can ripple through the entire society and trigger violent political upheaval, even revolution. The public may not grasp their significance, but everyone in Washington is paying attention. They take it seriously, very seriously. It is a sign that the system is disintegrating and it may be irreversible.

An article in the San Francisco Business Times said that the FDIC is worried about the reporting on Internet blogs. They'd rather keep banking system's troubles out of the news. The publicity just further undermines the publics confidence and spreads fear. Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., summed it up like this after the run on Indymac:
"The blogs were a bit out of control. We're very mindful of the media coverage and blogs in controlling misinformation. All I can say is were going to continue to stay on top of it. The misinformation that came out over the weekend fed a lot of depositors' fears."
Is that a threat? The cure for a failed banking system is adequate capital and prudent oversight not threats to critics of the system.

It's ironic, isn't it? Those who turned to fear as their main political weapon are now afraid that widespread fear of an economic crash could signal the end of the world as they know it.

From the comments at ICH:

What is $20,000 worth of debt when it will cost that much for a bag of groceries.

And:

There's one case where I'd work very hard to eliminate debt: if I'd bought a fully loaded SUV on poor terms last year. It's way past time to unload that for an economical second hand car or if homeless looms as a potential, a van you can sleep in.

And:

The american dream was sold to the ignorant, and now they will pay for there easy life. They will pay for the blood of 20,000,000 human beings the CIA/Pentagon has murdered with their tacit consent of the last 60 years. They will pay and their children will pay with poverty, disease, and violence. I am in Argentina looking at the history of the monetary devaluation which the Chicago Boys orchestrated here in 2002 when the peso was devalued from 1 to 1USD to 4 to 1 USD overnight.

OTOH:

People should start eating alot while they can. Put some weight on if you're not fat.

Take your pick of the free advice on offer!

No More Mandatory Detention

2008-07-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

Suddenly it becomes clear how stupid and unnecessary the whole thing was:

"Desperate people are not deterred by the threat of harsh detention - they are often fleeing much worse circumstances."

But it sure did bring in the votes when it mattered.

Is It Even Possible For Bush's USA To Experience a Brain Drain?

2008-07-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

Australians with the greenback blues:

"We joke that America is the new Thailand: a great place for a cheap holiday."

Oliver Stone's "W"

2008-07-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

Here's the trailer, via HuffPo.

Crazy RightWing Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists

2008-07-27T22:07:00.000-07:00

It's good to know that "leftwingers" (like me, I suppose) are not the only ones going crazy these days. As Jane Mayer explains, even Bush's top-level DoJ lawyers started talking to each other in code because they were in fear for their lives.

The comments on that post at Digby's are interesting. There seems to be a widespread feeling that we are all "moving on" now that the election is only 100 days away. Will all these Bush/Cheney crimes and misdemeanors be forgotten? That question was a recurrent theme in this recent interview with Glenn Greenwald:

You know, I think this mentality that we're hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they'll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, "Oh, there's good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute." And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it's important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.

And now you have an administration that -- we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, "Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that." Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, "Well, we can't criminalize policy disputes."

And what this has really done is it's created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they'll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, "Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it's really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison." And so, we've incentivized lawlessness in this country.

I think that is the key issue right there: if you do not hold Bush and Cheney accountable, if you let rich bastards like Frank Lowy thumb their nose at the law, then what incentive is there for ordinary citizens to obey the law?

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who is described as "an informal adviser" to Barack Obama, argues in that interview that Greenwald and those who talk about impeachment are getting "emotional". He says Amerika cannot afford such partisan "divisiveness".

You know, if I had a big cancerous growth in my rectum, I guess it would be pretty painful to cut it out. I guess I would be pretty emotional about the whole thing. And it would certainly be divisive! But if I didn't cut it out, it would kill me.

What's Going On?

2008-07-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

Richest Get Richerer:

In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years.

The British government's IRS is now offering tax haven clients another amnesty deal:

The move is designed to flush out those with secret savings in offshore bank accounts ahead of legal moves by the Revenue to force 117 foreign and UK institutions to disclose customers’ details.

It raised £400m last year after taxpayers with money in offshore accounts operated by five high-street banks — Barclays, HBOS, Lloyds TSB, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland — were offered leniency in return for voluntary disclosure. Most account holders with those banks who took up the offer paid 10% of outstanding tax, rather than 100%.

I wish I could get away with not paying tax, then declare that I had been avoiding tax, and only pay back one tenth of what I originally owed!

Speaking of tax dodgers, 1974 World Cup Socceroos coach Rale Rasic today takes a shot at Frank Lowy:

“I honestly think there is a lot of bullshit under the cover, put it that way. I think people are speechless, people fear something: no-one is saying anything. But you cannot ignore history: I tell you, the bubble will burst as soon as people wake up and say to themselves ‘what is going on?’”

MUST WATCH: Bugliosi Demands White House War Crimes Be Punished

2008-07-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

Via Juan Cole, here are Vincent Bugliosi's opening statements during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the constitutional limits of executive power:

Watch this explosive testimony, hear the bursts of applause (admonished by John Conyers) from the public gallery, and then go do a Google News search on the name "Vincent Bugliosi" and ask yourself why not one single mainstream media corporation is going anywhere near this story.

Then ask yourself why all the top "progressive" leftwing bloggers in the USA are not all over this story today either. I can't see anything on HuffPo, Atrios, Kos or TPM, for example.

Yeah, it's all about Teh Credibility. Teh Realism. Teh Campaign. Teh Politics.

Ye Olde Corruption: Nothing Changes

2008-07-27T16:15:00.001-07:00

Two years after his father's funeral, Abe Saffron's son comes clean:

Despite Saffron's lifelong denial of involvement in criminal activity, in Gentle Satan Saffron's only son, Alan, 59, says his father controlled the vice trade, including illegal gambling and prostitution, in every state except Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and bribed a host of politicians and policemen to ensure he was protected.

Not just any politicians and policemen: the former Liberal premier Sir Bob Askin and the police commissioner Norm Allan.

"There have been many accounts of my father's relationship with these two men but none realised the depth of his association and influence. Both were totally corrupt ...

And of course it was not just these two men, but many others who still cannot be named:

"I wish I could tell you who they are," he said, but lawyers for his publisher, Penguin, had asked him to remove a number of names from the book.

This is from Saffron's wiki page:

In an interview with Lisa Carty of The Sydney Morning Herald, Alan Saffron said that he had received death threats over the book because it would name some of the people involved the conpsiracy, and that he was unable to name everyone involved for legal reasons, because some were still alive. Saffron claimed he could name people "much bigger" than former NSW premier Robert Askin and former police commissioner Norman Allan, with whom his father corruptly dealt to protect his gambling, nightclub and prostitution businesses. Saffron specifically referred to:
"... one particular businessman I was desperate to name, and there's one particular police officer who is extremely high ranking. They're the biggest names you can imagine in Australia".
According to the Herald article, all the conspirators are named in the original manuscript of the book, which is now in the possesion of Saffron's publishers, Penguin, and that the book will be re-published after as the others allegedly involved in the Nielsen case die.

Well, the biggest name I can imagine in Australia's police forces is AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty:

Commissioner Keelty is the Chair of the Board of the Australian Crime Commission, membership of which includes his counterparts from State and Territory Police and the heads of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Australian Securities & Investment Commission, Australian Customs Service and Attorney-General's Department.

He also Co-chairs with Indonesia the Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering, which comprises 32 member countries and is affiliated with the Financial Action Taskforce - the international policy making body on money laundering.

Commissioner Keelty is a member of the Business Government Advisory Group on National Security. This group provides a forum for high-level dialogue between business and government on national security, which works closely with bodies such as the Trusted Information Sharing Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (TISN). He is also Patron of the Australian Section of the International Police Association.

As AFP Commissioner, he assumes the role of representative of Interpol in Australia, and as a result of the collaborative relationships formed between the AFP and the Asian region, he represents Australia at ASEANPOL which includes the heads of 10 Asian police forces.

Commissioner Keelty is one of 21 members on the Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police Committee and holds a position on the Board of Government of the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC). A joint training and capacity building initiative between Australia and Indonesia, JCLEC is situated in Semarang, Indonesia.

In addition, the Commissioner chairs the Australian Institute of Police Management (AIPM) Board of Control. The AIPM provides executive training courses for emerging managers from Australasian police services, and the Board of Control comprises Commissioner Keelty’s counterparts from State, Territory and New Zealand police jurisdictions.

Commissioner Keelty also joins State, Territory and New Zealand Police Commissioners as a member of the Australia and New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency (ANZPAA) Board of Management. ANZPAA provides cross-jurisdictional policing services including input into the strategic direction of Australasian policing. It also critically reviews issues to improve cross-jurisdictional information exchange and to provide an independent perspective for significant policing and law enforcement matters.

Commissioner Keelty holds a Master of Public Policy and Administration, a Graduate Certificate in Criminal Justice Education, is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management. He also is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and an Advisory Fellow of the Australian National University Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet).

In 2003, Commissioner Keelty received the Bintang Bhayangkara Utama Medal – Indonesia’s highest policing award - from the President of Indonesia, in recognition of the AFP’s close cooperation with the Indonesian National Police (INP). He was awarded an Australian Police Medal for distinguished service in 1996 and in 2003, the Centenary Medal for service to the AFP. In 2008 the President of the Republic of Singapore, Mr Sellapan Ramanathan, presented Commissioner Keelty with Singapore’s Distinguished Service Order, in recognition of his contribution to strengthening the working relationship between the AFP and Singapore’s Police Force.

In addition, Commissioner Keelty has been recognised by the Australian Financial Review (AFR) Boss magazine as one of Australia's 25 True Leaders. Furthermore, the 2007 AFR Power issue – profiling Australia’s major ‘power players’ across politics, business, the professions and the cultural arena - has highlighted the Commissioner as one of Australia's Top 10 most influential people.

The Commissioner was also named by The Bulletin as the fifth most powerful person in the Government category for the magazine's first Power 100 edition in 2007. The category judge, former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chief Allan Fels, recognised the Commissioner for his part in the transition of the AFP from "an unimportant role to a central position of power in security crime detection, dealing with our South Pacific neighbours and the rising tide of global crime".

Now I do not personally know if Mick Keelty is the man to whom Alan Saffron is referring, but certainly it is Keelty's job to ensure that person is exposed to justice.

UPDATE: Antony Loewenstein quotes a Green Left Weekly letter suggesting that a Sydney charity was recently raided by the police because it supported the Palestinians. According to the Murdoch media, they must be terrrrrsts:

The NSW Government, through its Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing, confirmed it would examine MAA following The Australian's revelations that the Sydney charity worked with Interpal earlier this year to distribute aid in Gaza.

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs is also considering whether to refer the case to the Australian Federal Police.

So here's the official government line in Australia:

Give money to Israeli Zionist expansionists = good.

Give money to Palestinians = bad.

Clearly, the USA is not Israel's only client state.

To be clear: if any charity is supporting violence by anyone, it is to be deplored. But we do not seem to have a very open and honest debate about these issues within Australia, where our most powerful political and business leaders (and seemingly our military and police forces as well) are clearly taking sides with Israel. Given that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is at the heart of the West's "war on terror", which dominates all talk of global security these days, it is clearly in the best interests of ordinary Australians if we can at least have a balanced approach to the issue. That does not seem to be happening.

We are still waiting for the Lowy family to name the Israeli "charities" to which they donated $62 million in Australian taxpayer funds.

UPDATE 2: This story in the Age really nails the substance and urgency of Saffron Jnr's allegations:

Mr Saffron said he had received death threats and that copies of his unedited manuscript had been handed to police in Australia and California so suspects could be identified if he met foul play.

Mr Saffron got a police escort when he landed in Sydney on Thursday to launch the book, and his publisher has hired bodyguards to attend public appearances.

Mr Saffron said he feared some people might try to suppress the book's publication with endless court action designed to keep it off the shelves. Publisher Penguin had promised him it would re-release the book with a new name every time one of his targets died.

"I have countless names and Penguin has them all," he said. Mr Saffron said the corrupt officials were "much bigger" than former Premier Bob Askin and one-time Police Commissioner Bill Allen, whom Abe Saffron bribed to protect his gambling, nightclub and prostitution businesses. Both are dead. He said he wanted to name "one particular businessman" and a high-ranking police officer. "They're the biggest names you can imagine in Australia and it's really sad that I can't come out and tell the truth."

Saffron Jnr also says his father forced him into electric shock treatment in Sydney's infamous Chelmsford Hospital:

Alan Saffron says he escaped with the help of his mother just before a lobotomy was due to be performed by Dr Harry Bailey, who took his own life in 1985 after the hospital's bizarre psychiatric practices and deep-sleep therapy were exposed.

My epileptic grandfather died in Sydney after similar prolonged electric shock treatment in the 1960s.

Obama Versus McCain The Corporate Media

2008-07-27T15:37:00.001-07:00

McLellan admits that the Bush White House issues talking points to Fox News. Think Progress has more on this story.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign trainwreck rolls on. As Josh Marshall says:

McCain has now abandoned virtually everything he's been campaigning on for the last year.

But the media is still not calling him on it. Instead they keep pretending this election will be a cliffhanger:

"Trumpeting this race as a toss-up, almost certain to produce another nail-biter finish, distorts the evidence and does a disservice to readers and viewers who rely upon such punditry. Again, maybe conditions will change in McCain's favour, and if they do, they should also be accurately described by the media. But current data do not justify calling this election a toss-up."

And even FAUX NOOS can't help:

A Fox News Poll found that 51 per cent of Americans think Senator Obama will win. Only 27 per cent pick Senator McCain (from 32 per cent last month).

Peter Lowy Takes The Fifth

2008-07-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

They are so bloody predictable, these immoral braggarts, aren't they? After complaining that their case has been pre-judged and telling everybody they want to explain their side of the story, the Lowy's get their day in front of the US Senate and... refuse to speak.

Peter Lowy's decision to take the Fifth means there is still no public account from the Lowys of why the files of the LGT Bank in Liechtenstein recorded a corporate trail involving two Liechtenstein foundations, a Swiss trust, an Australian trust, three Australian companies, two British Virgin Island companies, a US company and two Liechtenstein foundations to manage between $US54 million and $US68 million on the family's behalf from 1996 until 2001.

That's a pretty complicated way of giving money to charity, especially when donations to charities are tax-deductible under Australian law. Elisabeth Sexton in SMH today goes into a lot more detail on how the money was moved around.

And get this ATO response:

This week's submission from the Tax Office suggests that even if it manages to uncover the details of a Liechtenstein foundation, an Australian taxpayer might be in the clear.

"The ATO has encountered difficulties in applying Australian taxation laws to non-common law entities, such as Liechtenstein foundations," the submission said.

"These hybrid entities possess characteristics of both a common law trust and a corporation" - and therefore do not fall squarely within the rules intended to prevent taxpayers indefinitely deferring their tax.

"Until legislative or judicial clarification is provided on this issue, the ATO will continue to characterise these hybrid entities on a case by case basis," it said.

You see, corporations have more rights than individuals under ATO laws.

If you don't know what this is all about, see a movie called "The Corporation" (youtube part 1 below) which explains how millionaires over many decades have successfully lobbied politicians for more and more corporate power, so that their corporations were first treated like individuals under law, and then got even more rights. So now we ordinary taxpayers are really second-class citizens.

Adele Horin today has more on tax havens:

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development lists 38 countries that are tax havens, and that's not even including Switzerland, Austria or Luxembourg, for heaven's sake, although their bank secrecy laws are pretty dependable. If you don't fancy a bank in the Cayman Islands, Jersey or the Isle of Man, there are plenty closer to home - Vanuatu, for example - that offer depositors anonymity and banking secrecy. A cluster of Pacific micro-states has leapt on board. Why sell bird droppings or sullenly watch your island sink into the ocean when you can make some money robbing other countries blind?...

Liechtenstein is not on every traveller's itinerary, but it is the supreme destination for tax tourists. The OECD classes it as one of the world's three "unco-operative" tax havens, absolutely steadfast and zealous in its passion for banking secrecy. The other recalcitrants are Andorra and Monaco...

Liechtenstein has more companies than citizens (35,000), is only twice the size of Manhattan island and has a crown prince who has a view of tax that would make Kerry Packer smile in his grave. He said recently: "We just don't behave like a nanny and ask people continuously, 'Have you paid your taxes?' "...

An analysis of tax dodging by the international charity Christian Aid published in May says the practice has become so popular and widespread that it is tantamount to "a new slavery".

It estimated more than 5 million children could be saved in the developing world if the super-rich and the world's biggest companies paid their fair share in tax.

It also estimated that governments in the poorest countries are being cheated out of at least $165 billion a year in tax revenues, much more than the World Bank estimates is needed to halve poverty by 2015.

The report, called Death and Taxes: the True Toll of Tax-dodging, says: "The inescapable fact is that there are only four reasons for banking 'offshore': to avoid tax, to evade tax, to function in secret, [and] to sidestep regulations controlling financial services or monopolistic practices. In each scenario, the pursuit of profit outweighs all other considerations, including good citizenship and social responsibility."

For all his high profile talk about feeding the world's poor, U2's lead singer Bono is one of those cited as a leading tax haven culprit. I guess he will be staying silent about that too.

Money talks, but those who have it don't.

It's Time To Go...

2008-07-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

Gordon Brown.

The Independent calls this East Glasgow by-election defeat "a devastating blow":

The defeat means Mr Brown faces the real threat of an attempt by senior Labour figures to force him out of office as alarm intensifies over the party's plight.

The Guardian says Labour now faces either defeat or "obliteration" at the coming election, where Brown looks likely to lose his own seat:

Every part of Britain has turned against the party. The opinion polls have been showing it for months. Last night brought the proof.

Brown should have strung Tony Blair up by the balls over Iraq, but of course he had blood all over his own hands as well. Now they can both face the dock together.

The British people seem to have a much firmer grasp on basic concepts of their democracy than either the US or Australian public.

Let's Have A Caption Competition!

2008-07-24T18:37:00.001-07:00

This photo of two sad old has-beens is just begging for a bit of editorial input!

Howard and Costello were at the funeral of former Victorian premier Lindsay Thompson. And they had lots of party invites to hand around:

In the great tradition of political egotism, there is growing tension between the pair over who will stage the grander farewell in Canberra in coming weeks.

Mr Costello has invited hundreds of Liberal Party supporters to a swanky $150-a-head fundraiser in Canberra on August 29. Mr Howard, meanwhile, is planning a blockbuster farewell in Parliament's Great Hall on September 3.

It is not yet known whether either man will be on the other's guest list.

Howard's victory lap of the world must be just about over. Tickets to last night's post-funeral bash in Tassie were a miserly $120 a head. And what's Johnny planning for this "blockbuster farewell"? Will Dubya be jumping out of a cake, or Osama even?

Anyway, here's my effort:

Look Kev! Over Here!

2008-07-24T18:37:00.000-07:00

As you decide on your new Defense White Paper options, you might want to take a good look at what France is doing:

France's military will slash its ranks by 54,000 personnel and close dozens of air, army and other bases in an overhaul meant to slim forces at home while making it easier and faster to deploy troops abroad, the prime minister announced Thursday.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the 15 percent cut in manpower and base closings will save billions of dollars but still permit an agile military suited to the country's security needs.

No One Can Sing The Blues

2008-07-24T17:16:00.000-07:00

Like Blind Willie McTell:

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem."
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Well, I heard the hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Were his only audience
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
(And) see the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
(I can) hear the undertaker's bell
(Yeah), nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

There's a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He's dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There's a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell.

Why The Rich Dont Pay Taxes

2008-07-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

In February 1988, an ATO officer named Bob Fitton discovered a log book recording the details of faxes sent out by an accountancy firm, including dialling codes for tax havens against some client names. This was the start of the ATO's investigations into Mr Frank Lowy.

Yesterday Bob Fitton made a scathing submission to a parliamentary inquiry on ATO policy:

"It is my submission that the system cannot continue in its present form," Mr Fitton told the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audits suggesting a review process independent of the tax commissioner was needed.

"At the moment, the commissioner hides behind the mask of the secrecy provisions of the Income Tax Assessment Act when it comes to large settlements," he said.

There appears to be continual leaks concerning these large settlements to the point where the average Australian citizen is convinced that the big end of town is treated more generously by the commissioner than they," said Mr Fitton.

Peter Lowy is due to testify in front of the US Senate tonight. But nobody seems to be expecting anything to change:

So far, Westfield investors have shrugged off the matter. While the affair has made headlines in Australia and the U.S., it has barely rated a blip on the radar for Australian equities managers, none of whom has revised advice as a result of the scandal. The Sydney-listed Westfield Group owns 118 malls in the U.S., Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The portfolio includes 55 properties in the States, covering 63 million square feet of retail space, including the 1.5 million-square-foot San Francisco Center and the 874,000-square-foot open-air Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles. The company has committed $635 million to the redevelopment of the retail precinct at New York's World Trade Center site.

Tomorrow's media coverage in Australia should be interesting.

Intelligence and Ethics

2008-07-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

Nancy Pelosi has chosen Porter Goss as head of a Congressional ethics office. What can you say?

Porter Goss.

Porter Fucking Goss.

On the morning 11 September, 2001, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with General Ahmad. Ahmad's network had ties to Osama bin Laden and directly funded, supported, and trained the Taliban.

Now shut up, you fools, and go vote Democrat. And make sure you don't miss Obama's speech in Berlin. That boy sure can talk the talk, know what I mean.

The "No Fun" Olympics

2008-07-23T23:51:00.000-07:00

I couldn't have thought of a better slogan. What with all the drugs and professionalism and government interference (not just Chinese, but all the world leaders eager to attend) this is definitely NOT shaping up as a "fun" Olympics. Via antiwar.com:

These Games are the most politically charged ones we have seen in a long time, and the entire world seems to be waiting for some event to spoil the party for Beijing. But China is using all the tools a Communist dictatorship has at its disposal to ensure that this does not happen.

It's Not All Judith Miller's Fault

2008-07-23T15:12:00.001-07:00

But that might be a good place to start working out what went wrong at the New York Times and other media outlets. The NYT's quarterly profits are down 82% and the paper is now cutting staff, outsourcing IT work (to India, I presume) and raising it's newstand price to $1.50. Here's how the NYT stock price is going this year:

Meanwhile the Tribune newspapers chief tells reporters:

"We're looking at some of the worst advertising numbers in the history of the world."

Here's the standard expert analysis:

The main reason why newspapers have lost so much ground over the past 20 years is that the adults who grew up reading a daily newspaper with their cornflakes and toast in the 1930s and 1940s (and so made reading a newspaper a daily habit) are dying off, and they are not being replaced. The growth of radio and the Internet are other factors behind the decline in newspaper sales, as is the shortage of time for newspaper reading.

What didn't get a mention there is Teh Credibility! The fact is that people don't trust politicians, but now they are less likely to trust their newspaper or other media sources too.

Now, it seems to me that in this current climate, there is a massive opportunity for credible, independent, progressive and informative news-based websites to grow.

The problem with traditional newspapers like NYT is that they have always operated as both content providers and public portals. That is, they have reporters on the ground providing news stories, and they publish that news in their papers (with their own political slant, of course). Compare that with the business model of wire services like Reuters, AP and AFP, who just supply information to others but do not publish their own papers.

Both traditional newspapers and wire services now have online portals. But a lot of the traditional papers' content is coming from the wire services. And they have to pay for that.

Mind you, wire service profits are also dramatically sinking nowadays. But to get a realistic picture, you have to factor in the obscene financial bubble manufactured by Alan Greenspan over the last eight years. Just take a look at this graph, which compares WaPo's 5-year share price (blue) against the New York Times (grey) and and Thomson-Reuters (black):

It's pretty obvious that NYT is The Biggest Loser. And it also seems clear that the wire service business model looks stronger in the long term.

Just by way of comparison, here's the News Corp graph. But remember, Murdoch makes a lot of his profits nowadays from movies and other ventures, which subsidize his losses on newspapers like the New York Post:

(That big jump occurred when Rupert Murdoch bent over one day on late 2004, and people realized that the sun really does shine out of his arse.)

Anyway, my point is that the traditional newspaper business seems to be shrinking, and personally I think Teh Credibility is a big part of that. Meanwhile, people are going online searching for news from sources they can trust. Look at the phenomenal growth of HuffPo, for example, or Josh Marshall's TPM. If you build it, they will come.

Isn't it way beyond time that somebody did the same thing in Australia? I know - Crikey have tried. But their subscriber-dependent business model is only one of that site's big problems. And Lawd knows I have made my own efforts in that direction, with very minimal success.

I think it's time somebody else with some high ideals and a bit of cash to spare gave it a shot.

LowyGate: The Nation's Take

2008-07-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

The Nation has an information-packed article on the Lowy Senate hearings. For example:

The theatrics included ... Douglas H. Shulman, our sixth IRS commissioner in eight years, who conceded that offshore tax evasion must be a "serious, growing" problem even though the IRS has no idea how large it is; and Mark Branson, CFO of UBS's Global Wealth Management group, who apologized profusely, pledged to cooperate with the IRS (within the limits of Swiss secrecy) and surprised the Committee by announcing that UBS has decided (for the third time since 2002) to "exit" the shady business of providing new secret Swiss accounts to wealthy Americans.

And:

Also missing from the roster were two prominent UBS executives: Robert Wolf, CEO of UBS Americas, who has bundled more than $370,850 for Barack Obama so far this year, making UBS his fifth-largest corporate donor; and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, vice chairman of UBS Securities LLC, a leading lobbyist for UBS until March, and until recently, John McCain's senior economics adviser.

I've seen Gramm's name in the news a lot lately without realising he was connected to this. Another top McCain fundraiser, James Courter, also resigned last week after his telecom firm was fined $1.3 million by the FCC for using a haven company in the Turks and Caicos to pay bribes to former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

And that's just in the first few paras... Read the rest here, including some intriguing post-WWII history of the Swiss banks' attempts to get US millionaires to invest there.

The Invisible Enemy Is Always There (And Can Never Be Defeated)

2008-07-22T16:57:00.001-07:00

And you thought YOU were the crazy Conspiracy Theorist! What to make of these addle-brained war "experts" in media, politics and the military? Today Rupert's Paul Kelly backs up retired Major General Jim Molan's assessment of the modern Australian "defence" forces:

Molan argues that Australia’s political and military mindset has a view of the ADF “skewed too far towards humanitarian operations, peacekeeping and peacemaking, and away from war-fighting”...

In his book, Molan says: “Iraq confirmed my long-held belief that even a small country such as Australia needs to be up to world standard in the fighting part of operations. Every soldier’s bone in my body tells me that modern counterinsurgency operations in what may be a long war will require the ADF, not just our special forces, to fight jointly as well as do all the other clever things that are necessary in a three-block war."

Yes, folks, it is imperative that our troops go and put their lives on the line in places like Falluja - not necessarily to help win that war, but just so that they can get some practice at this kind of urban warfare. Kelly/Molan says "the enemy knows Western technological advantage is weakened in urban warfare" and "it is Australia’s enemies that will have a major say in dictating our future military engagements, not Canberra’s strategic experts."

Who are these "enemies"? It doesn't matter! There will ALWAYS be enemies to fight, otherwise... err... we, umm.... well, wouldn't need to spend billions of dollars on the military, would we?

"We delude ourselves to think Australia can just decide how and when to fight."

So we can decide who comes into our country, when and how, but not when our own soldiers go abroad to kill? Oh come on! As if we Aussies had no choice but to invade Iraq, and Afghanistan!

Thank goodness there are still decent ordinary folk like Marilyn out there, speaking up in the comments:

Bleat and babble. We don’t have any enemies and if we stopped and said no to Britain and the US we would never have any enemies.

I prefer the humanitarian stuff, less people are murdered.

I wonder if Marjorie realises this "bleat and babble" is actually part of a concerted effort to ensure that Rudd's upcoming Defence White Paper gives lots and lots of taxpayer money to a certain "class" of people?

The Business Of Oz Soccer

2008-07-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

Channel 7 is in trouble again with soccer fans, after deciding not to live broadcast the final 15 minutes of an Olyroos game:

Channel 7 has enjoyed a fractious relationship with many Aussie football fans.

This stems back to the network's coverage of the NSL at the turn of the century - a coverage that was widely panned by football fans as being half-hearted.

That contempt for the sport appeared to have been revealed during a court case at the turn of the century.

Seven took action against Foxtel partners over claims they conspired to drive its pay-TV sports channel C7 out of business by ensuring it did not win bids for the NRL or AFL rights in December 2000.

During the court case a C7 executive Steven Wise revealed in one email that the AFL was not giving Seven credit for virtually killing off football by buying the rights to NSL - and then keeping it off TV.

His email said: "We have secured the soccer rights and suffocated the sport, much to the chagrin of its supporters (by giving AFL games preference)".

Despite its widespread support in the community, Australian soccer remains in media oblivion. This is from my comment at FourFourTwo magazine's website:

Whatever happened to Frank Lowy's magic business touch, which was supposed to ensure that Big Media got behind soccer at last?

Oh yeah, they pulled the game from SBS and sold the exclusive rights to Rupert Murdoch. Now even registered soccer clubs have to pay a fortune just to get a FAUX subscription.

Now we find out that Frank Lowy has been screwing us in both holes, giving millions of dollars or Aussie taxpayer money to Zionist "charities" in Israel.

Can we get a new King Of Soccer please???

Soccer is only ever going to enjoy the status it deserves (and enjoys in the community) when every A-League, Socceroos and Olyroos and Matildas game is on Free-to-air, just like the other codes.

Make it happen, ~~Soccer~~ Football Australia, or resign.

Speaking of Frank Lowy, it seems a few other big Aussie businessmen will be named by the US Senate on Friday. Get yer popcorn ready.

UPDATE: Well, you gotta laugh! I have just been labeled an anti-Semite and then banned... from a SOCCER website!

DEAR GOD, TAKE YOUR CONSPIRACY CRAP ELSEWHERE.

People's religion has nothing to do with football.

I'm going to make it very easy for you not be called a anti-Semite again. You're banned. Easy.

KA

Edited by Kevin Airs: 23/7/2008 11:39:56 AM

My crime, of course, was criticising the God of Australian Soccer, the Messiah himself, Frank Lowy. Who says soccer is not a religion???!

Here's a simple question: if Frank Lowy is not a Zionist, just a good Jew who gives millions to harmless charities, then why did he vigorously oppose moderate Palestinian Hanan Ashrawi's 2003 Sydney Peace Prize award (as detailed to death in Antony Loewenstein's My Israel Question)?

Why doesn't he name the "charities" to which he donated Australian taxpayer money? Was one of them perhaps the United Jewish Israel Appeal, which just happened to have Lord Levy (to whom he quietly gave $500,000) as its Honorary President at the time?

Bush Is No Longer "The Decider"

2008-07-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

Caught off camera again...

Bush says Wall Street "got drunk" without admitting that he hosted the party.

Via Greg Mitchell at HuffPo.

More Charges Against Frank Lowy?

2008-07-21T22:12:00.001-07:00

Stephen Mayne suggests Lowy may have breached the rules for RBA Chiefs:

Ryan and Lowy would also presumably know a bit about the responsibilities imposed by the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act 1997 on Reserve Bank directors.

One section explains that a Commonwealth officer "must exercise his or her powers and discharge his or her duties with the degree of care and diligence that a reasonable person would exercise".

The business judgment rule makes mention of Commonwealth officers requiring decisions to be made with “good faith for a proper purpose”.

Section 26 deals with "good faith, use of position and use of information" and section 27F goes to “material personal interest -- director’s duty to disclose”.

If the RBA board ever discussed Commonwealth revenue, tax havens or related subjects it would be interesting to know if Lowy declared his "material personal interest" during his "active" and “vigorous” board contributions.

Frank Lowy's Cash Connection To Blair's Lord Levy

2008-07-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

Remember Tony Blair's big "cash for peerages" scandal? I was taking another look at this page on Frank Lowy and noticed the Frank Lowy connection to Lord Levy, which I'd missed and/or forgotten to note:

LORD LEVY, one of Tony Blair's closest and most trusted aides, was paid at least £250,000 by an Australian property group headed by one of the world's richest men.

The payments, which the company has attempted to keep private, are far higher than previously thought and began in 1999, the year Levy was appointed Blair's envoy to the Middle East, reporting directly to the prime minister.

They were authorised by Frank Lowy, the head of the Westfield corporation, who has business and political interests in Israel and whose company is seeking planning permission to develop shopping centres across Britain...

The disclosure has raised questions of "cash for foreign policy". MPs expressed concern at Levy's potentially conflicting roles as a consultant for a powerful multinational company and supposedly impartial and unpaid envoy. Levy said he paid privately for trips he made on behalf of Blair. In a letter to Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, said:

"I am concerned the Foreign Office's diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East should apparently be so closely tied to the aims of one of the world's richest men."

Baker said Levy appeared to be "simultaneously a quasi-minister, Labour fundraiser and consultant to a company seeking to influence government policy".

MPs have also demanded to know why a company with big expansion plans in Britain should employ a man with no obvious expertise in the field. Levy has earned up to £3,800 a week since 1999 from Westfield, the world's biggest developer of shopping centres. Over the same three years, Levy made 45 trips to 19 countries, meeting Arab and Israeli leaders and reporting back to Blair and the Foreign Office. He terminated his arrangement with Westfield last month, shortly before he would have been under pressure to make it public by tighter rules on parliamentary disclosure...

Westfield refused to elaborate on its relationship with Levy, saying only that he was retained "to advise on and identify potential business opportunities or partners". His payments over three years totalled "at least £250,000", according to Whitehall sources.

Lord Levy's history is one of being a pop impresario, starting off Alvin Stardust and Chris Rea.

At the time this story broke, April 2002, it was assumed Lowy's main interest in Levy was to build more and bigger Westfield stores in Britain, in the face of growing community protests. But wait a minute...

Levy was getting this money throughout 2001, when the 9-11 operation was unrolled. This means Lowy had personal access to the UK's top man in the Middle East as well as control (with Larry Silverstein) of the WTC site. Think about that.

Also from the Crimes of Zion page:

Frank Lowy funded and launched the Israeli Institute for National Strategy and Policy, which operates within the framework of Tel Aviv University in Israel. Lowy is the Chairman and former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk is Vice-Chairman.

Furthermore, he is a founding member of the International Advisory Council of the pro-Israel Brookings Institution in Washington. According to wikipedia, "Brookings is generally considered one of the three most influential policy institutes in the U.S", and focuses on five main areas of research: Economic Studies, Foreign Policy, Governance, Global Economy and Development, and Metropolitan Policy. The aforementioned Martin Indyk, Vice Chairman of Lowy's Institute for National Strategy and Policy at Tel Aviv Uni and former US ambassador to Israel, is also a Director at Brookings. You can read about Indyk here.

Indyk was born in London but raised in Sydney, gaining a BEcon from the University of Sydney in 1972 and a PhD in international relations from the Australian National University in 1977. He served two stints as United States Ambassador to Israel, from April 1995 to September 1997 and from January 2000 to July 2001.

Finally a bit more on Frank's local Australian connections:

Lowy was vice president of a publication called the Australia/Israel Review (AIR), whose parent body is AIJAC (Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council), the Australian counterpart of its US equivalent, AIPAC. The AIR is a right-wing Zionist publication whose editor, Michael Kapel, was forced to quit in '98 after the magazine published stolen membership lists of the One Nation party, an Australian nationalist political group.

When Palestinian political activist and politician Hanan Ashrawi was awarded the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize, Frank Lowy was one of the most vociferous among the chorus of Zionist protestors and Jewish lobbyists that decried the result and tried to dissuade NSW premier Bob Carr and members of the Sydney Peace Foundation from giving the award to Ashrawi. Lowy, among others, claimed Ashrawi 'supported suicide bombings' and opposed the two-state solution set out in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Sydney-based Jewish-Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein shows how fraudulent these claims are in the opening chapter of his book My Israel Question, arguing that the real reason behind Lowy and co's objection is her support for the Palestinian cause and anti-Zionist disposition.

Nelson Threatens To Kill Costello (And Other News)

2008-07-21T20:43:00.000-07:00

Well, that's one way to read Nelson 's talk of a Costello handover:

"I can assure you he'll be on to the frontbench with a bullet."

Time to round up the wagons, Malcolm.

Meanwhile, some good news from the Rudd team:

Federal cabinet has backed the abolition of the "conclusive certificates" which give ministers the power to block access to documents requested under FoI legislation.

Decisions on whether to release the documents would fall solely to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which could no longer have its rulings overturned by government ministers keen to keep documents private, Senator Faulkner said.

I wonder if that article by Richard Ackland had anything to do with this?

And I wonder if any reporters at today's Inside Kevin 07 book launch asked Mr Rudd about his plans for Australian troops in Iraq if the USA withdraws by 2010, as Obama is promising and the Iraqis are demanding?

Soccer Politics

2008-07-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

Plus Ca Change

2008-07-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

The New York Times explains why they knocked backed MCCain's Op-Ed: if you want to talk about "victory" in Iraq, you have to explain what you mean by that. Jason Linkins says the Times was actually doing McCain a favour (again):

The Times put bros before prose, and in so doing, spared McCain no end of embarrassment, because the op-ed is rivetingly dumb and laden with inaccuracies.

Dumb and inaccurate? That's McCain's whole campaign strategery, isn't it? Who cares if it makes sense, as long as it's red, white and blue! The reality-based community is for wimps! Hey, it worked for Dubya for nearly 8 years...

Funny how the NYT calls McCain "the presumptive Republican nominee". Is anybody else still in the race?

Also, it looks like Condi might be angling for a job under President Obama. You go, girl! But first get those stains off your dress.

Elsewhere, Juan Cole notes that - for all the talk about less violence in Iraq after Teh Surge - there were actually more deaths in the month before this Obama visit than in the month before his January 2006 visit.

Why a return to the bad situation in late 05 and early 06 should be greeted by the GOP as the veritable coming of the Messiah is beyond me. You have people like Joe Lieberman saying silly things like if it weren't for the troop escalation, Obama wouldn't be able to visit Iraq. Uh, he visited it before the troop escalation, just fine.

The troop escalation, which actually allowed the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis of Baghdad and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from the country, has largely been pushed as propaganda by the White House and the AEI.

I guess it's like the price of oil. After going so high for so long, a little drop in prices is hailed like a return to the 1960s. "The sense of relief throughout the land is palpable," says a wary Raymond J. Leary. Yeah, we have all been there before.

Who Pays The Piper? And Who Listens?

2008-07-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

Ian Verrender doesn't expect Peter Lowy will have much to say to the US Senate on Thursday:

Peter, who has not taken a high-profile role in business since his less than spectacular performance as the head of Northern Star Holdings - the owner of the Ten Network in the late 1980s - was unavailable to appear before the committee last week.

Perhaps he's been busy rehearsing his answers. Perhaps they go something like: under the advice of my lawyers, I decline to answer that question on the grounds it may incriminate me.

He wouldn't be the first to "take the fifth". The Lowy case is one of just seven test cases US authorities have decided to put to the blowtorch of public examination. Of the three others that so far have been compelled to appear, two have invoked their Fifth Amendment rights - refusing to answer - and the other failed to show.

Peter Lowy hasn't played a prominent role in the Westfield juggernaut for quite some time.

His younger brother, Stephen, is the Lowy who has been in control of the rapidly growing US operations for most of the past decade. But unlike Stephen, Peter became a US citizen. That puts him in the firing line of US authorities, And it is Peter who was the chairman of a Delaware corporation that has attracted the attention of the Internal Revenue Service.

According to US authorities, the Delaware-based company, Beverly Park Corporation - owned by another Lowy trust - was directing Luperla, an entity run through the tax haven of Liechtenstein which US regulators allege was established to hide assets and avoid tax.

Verrender also has this observation:

It is fair to say the Lowys would never have been subjected to this sort of public scrutiny in Australia.

Despite being the bastion of free enterprise, America takes a much harder line on corporate behaviour. Any form of malfeasance is pursued vigorously and in public.

That's not always the case here. Australia's corporate regulation is among the most lax in the developed world. White-collar crime is not taken as seriously as in other OECD nations. And unlike actions in the US, big corporate cases take far longer to bring to prosecution and often have a lower success rate.

Perhaps it is partly because Australia is a smaller pond. And the bigger fish in the business world often forge close links with both sides of politics, neither of which is keen to pursue tougher corporate regulation.

Indeed. I was looking at Westfield's political donations over the years to both Labour and Liberal parties, at both state and federal level. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars, year after year, to numerous party offices around the country.

As Liberal backbencher Ken Aldred told Parliament on October 25, 1995:

"The Government owes honest Australian taxpayers an explanation for the Lowy taxation scandal."

We are still waiting. Verrender says Peter Lowy might provide an explanation this week. But don't hold your breath.

I am surprised (I know - I shouldn't be) that this story is not getting more attention in the blogosphere. Have we all become so conditioned to corruption that we no longer even hope for justice to prevail?

Are people scared to criticize a man as powerful and rich as Frank Lowy in public? Is it the fear or being labelled an anti-Semite? Or do they just not realize the potential implications of this story?

Vids

2008-07-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a thought-provoking video from Nasking "elevated from the comments" (I've alwasy wanted to say that):

And here's Robert Fisk on air:

QLD Prepares For A Lynching

2008-07-21T04:56:00.000-07:00

So there's this Ferguson guy, a child molestor on the run from angry mobs. That's the media story. And now Dr Patel lands, and is granted bail.

Seriously, would you want to be him, wandering "free" in QLD? I ask that as a man whose own father died at the hands of QLD Health. The man should not be granted bail, for his own safety.

Goodbye, Tehran?

2008-07-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

I almost feel guilty for bothering Justin Raimondo yesterday.

Today, Raimondo latches onto a critically important "rationale for mass murder". WP, you know what I am talking about here - blatantly obvious broadcasting of intent to kill:

In what has to be the most widely circulated blackmail note ever written, Morris announces, "It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear strike" – so take out the Iranians, or we will. To be fair, he also says it won't be a good thing if "both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate," but since Iran has no nuclear weapons and has given up all attempts to make them, this is just window-dressing for a genocidal agenda.

Here's what troubles me.

Israel has no skin in the game of rising oil prices, right? I mean, high oil prices benefit Israel's oil-producing neighbours, right? So how can that be good for Israel?

Or do Israeli-friendly interests have so much invested in oil companies that it's still considered in their interests to push the threat of war with Iran?

I don't understand this. The Bush-Cheney US cabal might push the threat of war as a means of pushing up oil prices, in which they and their gang members own stock, but for the Israeli people it's surely a no-brainer. Right?

What if Israel really does control the US government? What if Israel just thinks it does?

In either case, here's Raimondo's conclusion:

We must forget our national interests and go to war for Israel's sake, or else the Israelis will unleash their illegal and unaccounted-for nukes, killing tens of thousands, poisoning the atmosphere, and forever scarring human history with the mark of their heinous crime. This is like one of those hostage dramas in which a mad gunman grabs someone and uses them as a human shield, braying his demands to horrified onlookers.

Americans must reject this attempt at moral blackmail with the contempt it deserves – and perhaps begin to reexamine the "special relationship" that enables Israel to even contemplate such crimes against humanity. As for Morris, he should be shunned by every decent human being, although perhaps that description doesn't apply to the editors of the New York Times.

The Black Rudd

2008-07-20T18:10:00.000-07:00

My January characterisation of Obama as "The Black Rudd" (Bukko's term) is now looking even more prescient. The US election seems to be following the last Australian one in many ways.

Libs Cling To Burning Deathstar Debris

2008-07-20T13:27:00.000-07:00

After Johnny's emotional plea last week, it was interesting that the Libs chose Howard's boy (who helped build WorkChoices) for the seat of Mayo. It shows Howard still has influence, even if that's mostly due to the power and policy vacuums elsewhere in the party. Now, with Vaile following Downer out the door over the weekend, the pressure is on Costello to go.

Let's hope the Libs ensure their political demise by sticking with Johnny until the grave. Death to all the heretics like Costello, whose lack of focus allowed Kevin Skywalker to use Teh Farce against us! All who have ever criticized Howard must be jettisoned! We shall rebuild the Deathstar as a pantheon to Howard's memory! Grab all the floating debris you can find, my friends!

Who Cares What Iraqis Want?

2008-07-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

The big story over the weekend was al-Maliki in Der Spiegel agreeing with the Obama timeframe for withdrawal, and the US media trying to ignore that, and then US officials in Iraq leaning on al-Maliki, and then an al-Maliki spokesman issuing a denial, which curiously came via Centcom, and then the US media using that as the headline, and burying it anyway. When it comes to exposing US lies about Iraq and the US media bias, you just don't get much more transparent than that.

TPM was on the case. I had to send an email to antiwar.com, who had swallowed the CNN line (their headline has now changed).

The GOPers are soon going to realise that they need a new Iraqi PM. And quickly. Is it assassination time?

Lowy's 1995 Canberra Deal

2008-07-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

SMH follows up on that old story:

The Tax Office file was passed to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, who initiated an investigation into possible corporate and tax offences.

Investigators combed the world to trace the money trail.

They believed it originated in the US, where Westfield had completed its first large international acquisition at Garden State Plaza in New Jersey in 1986.

Investigators suspected the money was moved from the US through Caribbean and Liechtenstein tax havens to Sydney but they received little co-operation from US authorities and could not penetrate Liechtenstein's bank secrecy laws.

In May 1995 the Chatswood office's deputy commissioner Jan Brady received a call from Canberra to say the case had been settled for $25 million, roughly the amount of primary tax that should have been paid on the original $48 million deposit without any penalties.

According to Jill Margo's biography Frank Lowy: Pushing The Limits, Mr Lowy "was flooded with relief at being saved from having to defend himself in a public court". The DPP eventually dropped its investigation for lack of evidence.

What's the bet Westfield made some very large political donations ahead of the 1996 elections?

Saturday

2008-07-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall today notes that that some major Bush backflips (talking to Iran and setting a "time horizon" for Iraq withdrawal) are a sign that the Bush and McCain camps are now working together to neutralize Obama's big winning issues. It doesn't matter if it completely contradicts everything you have ever said, it's all about maintaining that GOP elite grip on power. It's sad that US foreign policy is based on this.

SMH today leads with the Frank Lowy story, which is good to see. The Herald has been on the story for a while:

The Herald reported in 1995 that Lowy had paid $25 million to settle a dispute with the Tax Office involving Yelnarf in May that year, a month before he was appointed to the board of the Reserve Bank, where he served for a decade.

Federal Parliament was told in October 1995 that Yelnarf was involved in a dispute with the Tax Office over $48 million relating to the 1987 and 1988 tax years.

Ken Aldred, who was then an Opposition backbencher, said Frank Lowy had told an Administrative Appeals Tribunal hearing that the money was a capital injection from "unknown international sources".

"How lucky can you get?" Aldred said. "A settlement was reached only a few days after the AAT hearing. Why? If the money paid to Mr Lowy was from 'unknown international sources', as he claimed, why was he willing to pay $20 million if it was not his money?

"Can anyone seriously believe that 'unknown international sources' based in the tax haven of Liechtenstein would provide Lowy with $47.8 million?"

A month later, Lowy was appointed to the Reserve Bank Board anyway. And I am still waiting to see which Israeli "charities" were the lucky beneficiaries of this Australian taxpayer money. It'll also be interesting to see if Peter Lowy has anything to say to the US Senate next week: he's had a year to prepare his story, but others in the chair this week invoked the Fifth (nice to see one quaint old US law still survives).

The Sydney tax barrister Michael Inglis stayed up overnight on Thursday to watch the "historic" Senate committee hearings. "This is not just the wheel turning, it's not just the tipping point, it's not just a sea change, I think this is in the realms of a seismic shock."

Well, at least somebody is paying attention.

Meanwhile, I just realised that the funeral for SAS Signaller Sean McCarthy, who died in Afghanistan recently, was just held yesterday less than a kilometre from my place of work. Rudd, Nelson and all the other warmongers were in attendance. If only I'd known, I might have gone and paid my respects.

Fish Kills Man

2008-07-17T21:56:00.000-07:00

How's this for crap journalism. The headline is 'I got a bite' - fisherman's last words but it turns out that's not quite true:

Coroner Carey said on the third occasion, after starting to drift, the angler suddenly moved sideways after telling his friend "I got a bite again".

The dinghy capsized and although the men managed to right the boat, a combination of wind and swell caused it to again overturn.

Mr Carey said the fisherman swum away from the boat saying something about a fishing rod just before disappearing under water.

The story of the "ill-fated boat" also emphasizes the beer-drinking angle, although the victim's blood alcohol level was only 0.10%, which might be double the legal limit for driving but is not unusually high for a fisherman (in my experience).

They're Ba-a-a-ack

2008-07-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

The Fadhils are blogging again at IRAQ THE MODEL:

Anyway, if I were the PM of Iraq, I would gladly allow the Israeli air force to use the desert south of Samawa as a forward operating base-Tehran’s threat to Israel’s long-established democracy and to Iraq’s fledgling democracy must be stopped at all costs.

Heed the voice of ordinary Iraqis!

Peter Lloyd Arrested In Singapore

2008-07-17T19:01:00.001-07:00

It looks like the Singapore government might be tryng to test Kevin Rudd's commitment to "Asian values" (translation: lack of commitment on human rights). ABC News reporter Peter Lloyd has just been arrested:

Singapore police say Lloyd was arrested for possessing a small quantity of the drug 'ice', one improvised smoking pipe, and six syringes.

Police say his urine tested positive for amphetamines and he is being investigated for trafficking a controlled drug.

If convicted, Lloyd faces imprisonment of between five and 20 years and between five and 15 strokes of the cane.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Lloyd has been an outspoken critic of the Singapore government. For example, here's one report on the appalling treatment of Singapore's 150,000 foreign maids (who are not legally allowed to get pregnant) and another report examining how Singapore's government-owned companies like Singtel and Singapore Airways lobby Canberra to buy companies like Optus and Air New Zealand.

This could be interesting.

UPDATE: The Rudd government's initial response is underwhelming.

The People Are Watching

2008-07-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

I find it quite encouraging that this article by Richard Ackland is rated "Most Viewed" at SMH today. Ackland deplores a Federal Court ruling on "security" yesterday, whereby the Attorney General can now issue "magic certificates in so-called security cases".

As if this legislative regime were not troubling enough, the court's handling of it can be described only as depressing. The reasons on Tuesday came from Justices Mark Weinberg, Annabelle Bennett and Richard Edmonds.

They accepted that even if hypothetically Hussain could have a complete answer to whatever is in the ASIO assessment, nonetheless the tribunal can never learn of that answer because it is not in a position to test any evidence led against him.

Even the Commonwealth's counsel, the next solicitor-general, Stephen Gageler, acknowledged that "a hearing of this nature could not be characterised as fair".

The important question then was whether judges who take part in this sort of process would erode the public confidence in the judiciary and judicial independence.

Not at all, the full court pronounced, and then gallivanted off to explain that there are lots of circumstances where judges quietly cross-dress as administrators. It cited the issuing of various warrants and control orders, judges sitting as royal commissioners and even Sir Owen Dixon becoming ambassador to the United States while on leave from the High Court, between 1942 and 1944.

Nonetheless, there remains a very nasty taste in the mouth about the raw and brutal way that judges are being jigged up under the security law to provide a "veneer of impartiality" to what really are rigged proceedings.

The court said it doubted that "ordinary members of the community" would be concerned that judicial integrity could be compromised by such an arrangement.

Where's the evidence for that?

I think the evidence is pretty obvious, given how many people are interested enough to follow this. Let's just hope Kevin Rudd is also paying attention.

Riding The Juggernaut

Never Fear, Wikileaks Is Here

Ten Self-Evident Truths

Going Underground

Meuller Testifies On Anthrax

Notes In The Margin

Was I Right Or Was I Right?

Slippery As An Eel?

Bush's USA: Over-reaching and Under-achieving

The Falling Man Remembered

Change Gonna Come?

Explaining Palin?

Things That Make You Go Hmmmnnn....

Left Is The New Right - So What's Left?

Compare And Contrast Dept.

Domestic Disputes

WTF??? Obama Sells Out His Base

Thick As Thieves

Classic Atrios

Peggy Noonan Explains

But But But!

More Good Reasons To Move To New Zealand

Another Blog Bites The Dust

Manufacturing Reality

Anthrax: Hindsight and "Heroes In Error"

Georgian Subplots: Berezovsky's Game

Bremer's CPA Tried To Fake WMDs, Targetted Ritter For Assassination

Oh, You Mean THAT Money...!

Credibility Lost

Cheney Is the Anthrax Killer

Useful Tools

Another Hit

Is It Time To Panic Yet?

The Horror.

Things Are Getting Very Wierd Very Quickly

Interlude: Ghosts From The Past

Cui Bono?

The Anthrax Killer? Richard Spertzel

Selected Anthrax Quotes

Anthrax Leaks

Suskind Alleges White House Forgery Linked Saddam To Al Quaeda

US Iraq Withdrawal By 2011: Is It A Done Deal?

Anthrax Suicide Fallout: Let's Go Down The Rabbithole

The Gift Of Giving

Bruce Ivins' Daily Diary, July 10 2008

More Anthrax Questions

The Inmates Are Still Running The Asylum

You Still There, Frank?

Another Can Of Worms

Was This Really The Anthrax Killer?

$12 Billion Is Not Enough

Teh Legacy! Teh Legacy!

Too Clever By Half

Whitney Down Under

Teh Anti-Semitism! Teh Anti-Semitism!

A Vote Of Confidence

Frank Lowy's Fat Lawyer Caught Out

I See Dead People

Nice Dream

LowyGate: Spotlight On The ATO

A Fucking Medal

Is This The End?

No More Mandatory Detention

Is It Even Possible For Bush's USA To Experience a Brain Drain?

Oliver Stone's "W"

Crazy RightWing Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists

What's Going On?

MUST WATCH: Bugliosi Demands White House War Crimes Be Punished

Ye Olde Corruption: Nothing Changes

Obama Versus McCain The Corporate Media

Peter Lowy Takes The Fifth

It's Time To Go...

Let's Have A Caption Competition!

Look Kev! Over Here!

No One Can Sing The Blues

Why The Rich Dont Pay Taxes

Intelligence and Ethics

The "No Fun" Olympics

It's Not All Judith Miller's Fault

LowyGate: The Nation's Take