July, 2002

F*ck the Bushes: Harken Energy a CIA front??

Harken Energy is likely a CIA front, according to well-known left-wing rag (haha), Fortune Magazine:


    Harken, which is engaged in oil and gas exploration, development, and production in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica, soldiered on after Bush left. CEO Mikel Faulkner and COO Bruce Huff, CPAs who have been with the Harken since 1980 and 1990 respectively, pursued a variety of deals to jump-start its operations. But without much luck. The company’s Latin American operations in particular were a drag, and Harken lost some $263 million over the past five years. And in a complex series of transactions, Harken recently moved its South American operations into a British company called Global PLC, of which Harken owns 92%. “It was always suspected that something was fishy, but not because of the Bush connection,” says Gheit of Fahnestock. “That for a small company like Harken to be involved in foreign drilling operations getting concessions from foreign governments, things just didn’t add up. A lot of people had suspected that this was a CIA front.” That particular point, of course, is just a rumor.

Of course, only rumor.

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If the blog world were like high school…

… I would be one of the vocational tech kids. I didn’t even know about this blogathon thing until after it was over. Making some money for charity can be a good thing. I would’ve done mine for either the EFF or the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu.

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Philip K. Dick and the Black Iron Prison

From Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference by Erik Davis:


    Just as William Blake condensed the coming horrors of industrialism into his image of “Satanic mills,” Dick’s Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the “disciplinary apparatus” of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a “technology of power” was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, “The Empire never ended.”

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Religion/philosophy — 3 Comments

Excerpts from 1984

From 1984: Theory of Hierarchical Society by Emmanuel Goldstein

Chapter 4: God is Power


    …

    And so it remains true that the first critique is the critique of religion; the first revolt is against the supreme tyrannies of theology and the phantom of God. Ever since the fantasy of a Divine Being took shape in humanity’s imagination, God — all gods, and among them above all the God of the Christians — has always taken the side of the strong and the rich against the ignorant and impoverished masses. Through his presence, he has blessed the most revolting privileges, the basest oppressions, and the vilest of exploitations.

    As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth, and our reason and ability to create our own lives will be annulled. As long as we believe that we must unconditionally obey — and, vis-a-vis God, no other obedience is possible — we must of necessity passively and totally submit, without the least reservation, to the holy authority of all his agents, messiahs, prophets, divinely-inspired lawmakers, emperors, kings, and all their functionaries and ministers, representatives and consecrated servants of the two greatest institutions which impose themselves upon us, and which are established by God himself to rule over men and women — namely, the Church and the State. All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority.

    Authority is the negation of freedom, of human self-determination and self-management. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of humanity will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated. To annihilate totally hierarchical power and thereby bring about human equality, it is necessary to annihilate God; to “kill” God, it is necessary to annihilate totally hierarchical earthly power. This is the inner secret of the slogan GOD IS POWER.

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‘SECRETS: THE CIA’S WAR AT HOME’

Here:


    1984
    CIA organized the Unauthorized Disclosures Analysis Center (UDAC) to monitor the news media and to stop leaks. Commanded by Dell Bragan, UDAC was staffed by full-time intelligence officers. CIA officers around the nation were tasked to by UDAC to keep track of reporters who obtained news stories through leaks. Mark Mansfield said UDAC was the coordinating center to combat disclosures. In addition to UDAC, CIA had an even more secretive unit that investigates leaks, performs damage assessments, and investigates journalists. Located in the Office of Security and called the Special Security Office, the unit reports to UDAC. Journalists were analyzed by how many unauthorized disclosures they printed a year — columnist Jack Anderson, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and Bill Gertz were often at the top of the list. pp. 178-180.

    1984-90
    VP Bush chaired a cabinet-level Task Force on Combating Terrorism. He used terrorism as justification for domestic spying against groups lobbying Congress to ban Contra funding. This when statistics showed domestic terrorist incidents declining rapidly. But the 34-page “Public Report of the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism of 1986 ,” urged Intel agencies involve themselves in “conventional human and technical intelligence capabilities that penetrate terrorist groups and their support systems.” This when the FBI said domestic terrorism was virtually nonexistent. Following directions, FBI conducted 8,450 domestic terrorism investigations in 86, even though they reported only 17 actual terrorist incidents that year. The FBI was conducting political spying under the terrorism label. pp. 147-151.

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Beating an FBI polygraph

Found at Cryptome.org, some useful tips and countermeasures to foil the FBI polygraph. It’s easier than you might think. Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

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No recording in the Gulag: Eroding Basic Freedoms

From NPR.org:


    Jason Beaubien reports that many states have cut back on the media’s access to correctional facilities — barring cameras and tape recorders, or restricting interviews with inmates. But some critics and legal experts argue that the media plays an important role in protecting against prison corruption and abuse. (4:30)

    “There are well-established conditions for granting press interviews with prison inmates, such as the safety of staff and other inmates.” writes jjgiddes. “Now, state correctional facilities in the US are starting to place further restrictions on media access: prohibiting recording equipment other than pens and paper; denying interview requests outside of normal visiting hours. and demanding that they result in ‘a significant benefit to law enforcement agencies'; and setting additional conditions on which inmates can be interviewed, and when.

    “In my mind, many of these restrictions count as fairly clear cases of prior restraint: not-so-rhetorical questions about prison abuses or the wrongly convicted rear their ugly heads. As mentioned in the report, the Society of Professional Journalists notes that nine states have restricted media access to prisons, up from five a year ago. All in all, it seems as if it’s been a very bad year for the Freedom of Information Act and the Eighth Amendment. What’s the point of even having a free press if it’s going to die a death by a thousand cuts?”

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    And the rich get richer, while the rest pay taxes…

    Surprise. Crafty tax lawyers for the extremely wealthy have found further loopholes to keep the elite from paying their fair share. Read it and weep for yourself. Of course, that shitbird in the Whitehouse goes making the long face for estate tax abolition and huge tax cuts for the wealthy. From the NyTimes:


      Through a technique invented by a lawyer in New York and a chemical engineer in California, each dollar spent on this insurance can typically eliminate $9 in taxes. Spend $10 million on this insurance, avoid $90 million or more in income, gift, generation-skipping and estate taxes.

      “I’m not saying this is the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s really good for pushing wealth forward tax free,” said Jonathan G. Blattmachr, the New York lawyer who heads the estate tax department at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and who explained the plan in a half-dozen interviews.

      The technique is legal, blessed by the I.R.S. in 1996. But some leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say it shouldn’t be. They say it effectively disguises a gift to one’s heirs that should be taxed like any other gift involving millions in wealth. They also say it is but one example of how a tax exemption on life insurance that was approved by Congress in 1913 to help widows and orphans has been stretched to benefit the very richest Americans.

      Several thousand of these jumbo policies have been sold, according to agents who sell them, all under confidentiality agreements with the buyers and their advisors. One member of the Rockefeller family took out a policy, according to people who have seen documents in the deal.

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    Compassionate Conservative Union Buster

    Okay. So, 170,000 government employees were moved into this new ‘Homeland Security Department’. As far as I can tell the only thing new to this is a stupid Orwellian name and the fact that Bush effectively succeeded in stripping 170,000 people and an entire department of its union rights and protections. Bravo, you waterhead.

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    Cheney should be dope slapped

    A courier was threatened with arrest by SS (Secret Service) thugs for trying to serve Vice President Dick Cheney with a lawsuit accusing him of defrauding investors while at the helm of oil giant Halliburton. Cheney should be pilloried in the public square while wearing a tricornered hat. Do we even have public squares anymore? Ok, forget it. From Yahoo News:


      Judicial Watch said its process server went the White House on July 22 to deliver the lawsuit to the vice president, who was chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. But the group said the courier was turned away by the Secret Service and allegedly threatened with arrest.

      “We have served many a lawsuit on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton when they were in the White House … Never before have our process servers been threatened with arrest,” said Larry Klayman, who serves as chairman and general counsel of the 8-year-old legal foundation that has filed a number of highly publicized lawsuits against government officials.

    I’m surprised Judicial Watch has been this dogged. I admire their stance as it puts millions of dollars in Republican donations in jeopardy.

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