General – Page 175 – Letter Never Sent

Politics — 1 Comment
17
Mar 02

X-Ray Specs

Thank goodness for the ACLU (membership 35$). They’re trying to block the use of an x-ray security machine that can view your body through clothing [pic].

NEW YORK — The American Civil Liberties Union today called upon Orlando International Airport to remove a controversial new X-ray body-scanning device that can see through clothing and show a person’s naked body.

“This body-scan technology is nothing more than an electronic strip search,” said Barry Steinhardt, ACLU Associate Director. “This technology brings an extraordinary potential for abuse. We certainly should not be using it in our airports before other, less intrusive alternatives have been tried out.”

Steinhardt cited as an example of a less-intrusive approach another technology being tested in Orlando, a particle analyzer that blows air on passengers as they walk through a short corridor and reacts if any explosives particles are detected.

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17
Mar 02

The Underground Pentagon?

One journalist’s experience trying to find out about shadow government bunker ‘Site-R’. This piece also illustrates the operating mentality of the FBI and other fascist cogs. *chuckle* I’m heartened to know that if and when we are attacked with nuclear weapons our fearless leaders will be snug and safe deep in their underground burrows:

It is officer Powers, the cop the candle lady told me about. And he immediately lets known his displeasure.

“Are you an American?” he shouts, shaking his head. “Do you speak English?

I answer yes to both.

“Do you read English?”

Before I can answer that question, he shouts again, demanding that I take my hands out of my pockets because, he says, “it makes me want to shoot somebody.”

Then he launches into his take on the media.

“Our boys are dying over there. Unacceptable. You guys in the media, don’t you think that Saddam Hussein was watching CNN?” …
Then Powers.

“Tell your buddies in the media to keep the body count down,” he says. “Now, I don’t expect to see you up here again. Understand?” …

And, this is from the secretive fellow who wanted to sell the reporter photos of Site R over the internet:

“Howard, I am letting you know ahead of time that what I am giving you will be the largest story since Sep 11, the governments secret base. It is nicknamed the underground pentagon, it has 5 buildings, each 3 stories, a helipad, a national satellite comm. center,direct lines to the president, moscow, norad, and other top notch organizations. Not only can I get you the pics, and/or film but I can give you the layout of any activities. So chump change will not be accepted for me risking my career. I know the shadow gov is the hottest thing going so be generous. Hope to do business soon. Mike.”

Politics — 1 Comment
16
Mar 02

‘Pioneers’

From Texans for Public Justice:

A little more than a year after more than 200 “Pioneers” narrowly helped put him in the White House, George W. Bush has rewarded at least 43 of these elite fundraisers with federal appointments. The Bush “Pioneers” raised a minimum of $100,000 for Bush by bundling together contributions of up to $1,000 (the legal limit) from other individuals. Bush’s 43 Pioneer appointees delivered more than $4.3 million to Bush’s presidential race. Collectively they also gave $204,000 to Bush’s two gubernatorial races.

“Political patronage is alive and well in the Bush White House,” said Craig McDonald, Director of Texans for Public Justice. “Rewarding big donors with ambassadorships is a sure-fire way to keep the campaign money rolling in. If Congress outlaws soft money, Pioneer bundling will become a blueprint for the future of special-interest politics in Washington.”

The highest-ranking Pioneers are Terrorism Czar Tom Ridge (a former Pennsylvania Governor) and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (an ex-Heritage Foundation Fellow and the wife of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell).

Other Pioneers who received Bush appointments include:

19 U.S. ambassadors to countries from Austria to Uruguay
Five members of the Energy Department Transition Team that first envisioned Bush’s supply-side energy policy (including ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay) and
Two seats on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

More on the ‘Pioneers’ and their backgrounds available here.

Politics — 6 Comments
16
Mar 02

Unsolved Mysteries

Which is more likely, that the bodies of an estimated 500-800 Al Quaeda supposedly killed by our military vanished into thin air, or that our government is full of shit? Amazingly, the brilliant success and firefight reported by the US Military at Shahikot has resulted in a paltry handful of actual dead ‘terrorists’. The US killed more people crashing helicopters in the past few weeks than they have the phantasmic Al Quaeda.

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16
Mar 02

Dangerous Legal Precedent

Using secret evidence destroys protections guaranteed by the Constitution. The PATRIOT Act authorizes broader use of secret evidence:

“The case in federal court in Chicago appears to be the first time the government has tried to use secret evidence–which would be shared with the judge but not with the charity or its attorneys–under a provision of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act signed in October by President Bush, legal experts said. …

Roger Simmons, an attorney for Global Relief, said the use of secret evidence to fight the charity’s lawsuit was “a very dangerous legal precedent.” On Thursday, Simmons asked the court to reject the government’s plan.

“It’s completely contrary to anything that’s ever happened in this country,” he said. “The country was founded on the idea of confronting your accuser. If they submit secret evidence or present it to the judge in such a way that we can never see it, we can’t cross-examine and we can never rebut,” he said.

Members of Congress have attempted several times to make the use of secret evidence illegal, and Bush said he would support such a law, but those efforts died after Sept. 11.

General — 4 Comments
16
Mar 02

No One Remembers

Fifty-seven years ago, before the crimes at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the US firebombed Tokyo killing an estimated 100,000 civilians. A little later, the US went on to win the distinction of being the only government in history that has used atomic weapons against human beings. Our government is worse than the worst serial killer or terrorist. At its best it’s dishonest and corrupt and at its worst it’s organized genocide and institutionalized criminality.

Of course, war crimes and megadeaths are permissable if you are the victor.

“Until the San Francisco Treaty in 1952, Japan was under control of the occupation forces, and when they arrived, they applied media restrictions, saying that one should not report things which reflected negatively on the United States,” said Shinichi Arai, a historian who has written a comparison of European and Japanese civilian bombing. Later, as the country formed a close alliance with the United States, he said, “we were too busy trying to rebuild our country, and trying to forget the past.” …

For Americans, it would raise questions about the prosecution of the war according to standards that Washington had long denounced as inhuman. “With the firebombings, we crossed the line that we had said was clearly beyond the pale of civilization,” said John Dower, a leading American historian of Japan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The American reaction at the time was that they deserved it. There was almost a genocidal attitude on the part of the American military, and it extended to the American public.”

Military and defense — Comments Off
16
Mar 02

CIA Anthrax

From a BBC tv program, the anthrax deaths as a CIA operation gone awry.

“A Newsnight investigation raised the possibility that there was a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail which went madly out of control.

The shocking assertion is that a key member of the covert operation may have removed, refined and eventually posted weapons-grade anthrax which killed five people.

In the wake of Sept 11th, the anthrax attacks caused panic throughout the States and around the world. But has the FBI found the whole case too hot to handle?

FULL TRANSCRIPT

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15
Mar 02

US Government Kidnappers

The U.S. Government is using US-registered Gulfstream V jets to secretly transport dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to countries other than the United States, bypassing extradition procedures and legal formalities. The same type of jets which secretly flew into Queenstown airport last Saturday putting that community in a spin over clandestine CIA activities. Maree Howard writes.

According to Scoop’s intelligence sources the CIA is plucking people with suspected terrorist links from countries such as Indonesia and transporting them to other countries where they can be subjected to interrogation tactics – including torture and threats to their families – that are illegal in the U.S.

In some cases U.S. intelligence agents remain closely involved in the interrogation.

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Military and defense — Comments Off
15
Mar 02

Cheney’s Cave

From December 2001: Cheney’s hiding in a cave, too….in Pennsylvania. Via Cryptome.org.

WAYNESBORO, Pa.–Three hours after Osama bin Laden turned the Pentagon into a disaster area, five helicopters touched down a few hundred yards from Hal Neill’s house at the base of Raven Rock Mountain along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.

Within minutes, a convoy of SUVs with black-tinted windows zoomed up Harbaugh Valley Road, turned left, and deposited the weight of the free world inside Site R, the inexplicably named city-in-a-mountain from which the Pentagon has operated and, from all indications Vice President Cheney has directed his office in the days since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Site R, with its six-stories of underground offices, a subterranean water reservoir, and banks of mysterious antennas, dishes and massive, steel doors, has been a designated backup command center since it was hewn out of the mountain in 1951.

For decades, Site R’s presence was a village secret, barely acknowledged to outsiders and attracting little outside interest in turn.

”There are four entrances, but I’ve only ever been able to find three of them,” said Neill, as he stood in his back yard, looking over at the guard station next to two oversize metal doors in the hillside. Six military men in sweatsuits jogged their way down the driveway and back up again.

”They weren’t doing that before the attacks,” Neill said. ”Now they’re working out.”

The tidy equilibrium of rural life has been upended. ”Day and night, you hear the airplanes,” said Bonnie Wolfe, whose model railroad shop sits below the flight path of the military jets and helicopters that intermittently pass by, usually unseen, inevitably heard.

Pictures of Site R – Raven Rock Some of the snake holes they hide in.
Cold War Infrastructure
Underground base and tunnel links. Very interesting.

the old stuff