I shouldn’t have started a precedent by noting these things, but I did. I had 2 .mil visitors from the DoD this morning. Could be spiders or something, but how should I know. No, referral links.
19 Apr, Fri, 01:46:17 BELVOIR-SUN2.IERN.DISA.MIL Netscape 3 Other
19 Apr, Fri, 01:46:29 WCS2-BELVOIR.NIPR.MIL Netscape 3 Other
DISA.MIL is from Defense Information Systems Agency and I’m assuming they’re in Ft. Belvoir, VA.
From the folks at cleancampaigns.org: Remember to vote ‘yes’ on Proposition 1: Austin Fair Elections Act (for austinites only) Election Date: Saturday May 4th, 2002 Early Voting starts April 17th. The measure will provide campaign financing for local candidates for less than a nickel a week per voter..which is around $2.60 or so a year. Not a bad idea. I first heard about this when I went to a show benefitting the Austin Green Party.
From Charley Reese’s syndicated column:
Yeah, Bush is an idiot and a disgrace.
George sent me a good link today regarding reports of members of Al-Qaida and Hezbollah operating inside Ecuador. Wow, what a surprise the US would suggest something like that. Of course, it’s complete bullshit. If I knew Hezbollah worked for the US I might believe it. In this case, consider the source, Richard “the killer” Armitage. Richard Armitage, one of the many vermin currently infesting the highest levels of government, is most famously known for illegally selling missiles to Iranian terrorists during the Iran-Contra scandal. Maybe he does have a nose for where terrorists are hiding. He has, after all, done business with them in the past. Illegal arms sales are not his only sin. He was investigated by President Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime (1984) for alleged links to gambling and prostitution.
The real reason islamic terrorists have suddenly been discovered in Ecuador has to do with the Ecuadorans lack of enthusiasm for Bush’s ‘war on terror’. They have balked at the US using airfields in Ecuador to prosecute ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. If this keeps up you can expect a change in government in Ecuador.
“Bringing all these people who are so associated with a polarised ideological crusade that committed human rights abuses threatens to rekindle that partisanship,” said Reed Brody, legal director of Human Rights Watch in New York. “What is very unfortunate is that history has revealed American complicity in serious atrocities in the 1980s and, in effect, all these nominations may serve to rewrite history and rehabilitate a very unfortunate period of our history.”
Mahmoud’s meetings on two separate missions with the Taliban were reported as a “failure.” Yet this “failure” to extradite Osama was part of Washington’s design, providing a pretext for a military intervention which was already in the pipeline. If Osama had been extradited, the main justification for waging a war “against international terrorism” would no longer hold. And the evidence suggests that this war had been planned well in advance of September 11, in response to broad strategic and economic objectives.
It’s not often worth mentioning, but I do like to wonder aloud about page hits from .gov and .mil hosts. I’m always curious what sort of information people in the military or the government are looking for even if it’s just Donald Rumsfeld mp3s.
Today our we got a hit from fw1.icpphil.navy.mil, but they just wanted information on the government ‘piracy’ sting, Operation Piratez. That host, as far as I can tell, is a proxy for the Inventory Control Point in Philadelphia which provides program and supply support for the weapons systems of the US Navy.
Does the creation of a military command with civil authority mark a step towards martial law? Rumsfeld says “Trust me.”
“Some in the past have worried that creation of a command that covered the United States of America could be inward-looking; nothing could be further from the truth,” Rumsfeld told a Pentagon (news – web sites) news conference.
“The creation of NorthCom means that we now have the command assigned to defend the American people where they live and work and it will be functioning in a supporting role to civil authorities as occasions arise,” he said.
From the Guardian: Greg Palast weighs in on the lies and distortions passed off as journalism about the Chavez coup:
What neither Bush nor the papers told you is that Chavez’s real crime was to pass two laws through Venezuela’s national assembly. The first ordered big plantation owners to turn over untilled land to the landless. The second nearly doubled, from roughly 16% to 30%, royalties paid for extracting Venezuela’s oil. Venezuela was once the largest exporter of oil to the USA, bigger than Saudi Arabia. This explains Chavez’s unpopularity – at least within that key constituency, the American petroleum industry.
There remains the charge that, in the words of the New York Times, “Chavez ordered soldiers to fire on a crowd [of protesters].” This bloody smear, sans evidence, stained every Western paper, including Britain’s newest lefty, the Mirror. Yet I could easily reach eyewitnesses without ties to any faction who said the shooting began from a roadway overpass controlled by the anti-Chavez Metropolitan Police, and the first to fall were pro-Chavez demonstrators.
Related links:
The same message was echoed on Saturday by the US ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), Roger Noriega, at an emergency meeting in Washington.
One OAS diplomat said: “We were in that room for 14 hours, and for most of that 14 hours, Noriega was pushing the line that it was Chavez that had created the problem.”
The OAS denounced the coup attempt, as did all Venezuela’s neighbours. Washington, however, acknowledged the new government. “A transitional civilian government has been installed,” Mr Fleischer said on Saturday. “This government has promised early elections.”
Some of the key participants in US meetings with Venezuelan figures in the run-up to the coup were veterans of Reagan-era “dirty tricks” operations. Mr Pardo-Maurer served as the chief of staff to the Nicaraguan contras’ representative in Washington between 1986 and 1989.
Mr Reich was the head of the office of public diplomacy in the state department, which was later found to have been involved in covert pro-contra propaganda.
Military visitor of the day:
17 Apr, Wed, 07:39:24 WCS3.NORFOLK.NIPR.MIL Netscape 3 Other
According to this site “NIPR hosts are most likely fat, secure proxies for all DoD access. This implies that there need not nessisarily be surveilance going on (might be guy simply interested in the contents of my page).”
From what I could gather WCS3.NORFOLK.NIPR.MIL is either most likely from Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station Atlantic (NCTAMS LANT) or DOD Regional Command Center in Columbus, Ohio. By the way, I forgot to announce that someone else will be adding posts to LNS. You can see his debut right below this entry. It should be very interesting as he and I agree on a lot of things, but disagree on a lot of other things. He is completely wrong in those cases, of course. :p
My good friend, George, sent me a great link today about a film-maker who was in Caracas during the failed US-backed coup against Hugo Chavez. He describes how the private business media attempted to influence and manipulate the situation with meticulously planned propaganda. The aim was to legitimize the coup leaders and to delegitimize Chavez. Most members of the elite understand how much of power rests in perception and when you can alter perception you can create ‘legitimacy’. This is exactly what took place in Venezuela last week.
As Wayne Madsen reported, the US government provided signal jamming capabilities from inside Colombia and off the coast of Venezuela. This is most likely why the signal was cut.
“The television continued to broadcast a steady diet of soap operas, saying nothing about the huge mobilisation, which was now making a deafening racket outside. Then came the news that Chavez had been freed and was taking a helicopter to Miraflores. The crowds went wild. The presidential guard made a tunnel from the palace gates to a helicopter pad across the street. The sound of choppers buzzing overhead.
In other Chavez coup news, the US has caved-in to international outrage and has begun to admit more and more details of their support for the coup against Chavez. The US acknowledged that Iran-Contra criminal and convicted propagandist, Otto Reich, was in contact with the leaders of the failed coup attempt. Reich, who is Bush’s secretary of Western Hemisphere Affairs, telephoned the ‘interim’ president, Carmona, to offer advice and words of caution on Friday. Reich, who is rabidly anti-Castro, shared an interest in overthrowing Chavez because of his policy of detente with Cuba. Pentagon spokesman, Victoria Clarke, further admitted that “the chief of the Venezuelan military high command, Gen. Lucas Romero Rincón, met recently with Rogelio Pardo-Maurer, a Pentagon official responsible for Latin America. She did not provide details of the meeting, or say whether intelligence was shared.”
As I said, Reich is a convicted propagandist and he showed his true colors clearly in libelous statements directed toward Chavez:
Mr. Reich, who declined to be interviewed today, offered no evidence for his assertion, the official said.
He is clearly trying to poison the well for Chavez. Most of the people killed were actually Chavez supporters. I challenge Reich to produce evidence of this pack of lies. Make no mistake about Otto Reich. He is a snake. Under his watch the US government planted false domestic propaganda in American newspapers often writing fake letters to the editor among other things. Read more about his crimes at the National Security Archive.