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Britain and Australia Drifting Toward Police State

Judges liken terror laws to Nazi Germany

A powerful coalition of judges, senior lawyers and politicians has warned that the Government is undermining freedoms citizens have taken for granted for centuries and that Britain risks drifting towards a police state. One of the country's most eminent judges has said that undermining the independence of the courts has frightening parallels with Nazi Germany.

Senior legal figures are worried that "inalienable rights" could swiftly disappear unless Tony Blair ceases attacking the judiciary and freedoms enshrined in the Human Rights Act.

...

"I think it is terribly important there should not be this apparent battle between the executive and the judiciary. The judiciary has been put there by Parliament in order to ensure that the executive acts lawfully. If we take that away from the judiciary we are really apeing what happened in Nazi Germany," he [Lord Ackner] said.

...

Lord Carlile, a deputy High Court judge, warned against the whittling away of historic civil liberties. "We have to be acute about protecting what is taken for granted as inalienable rights. In the United States the Patriot Act included a system whereby a witness to a terrorist incident can be detained for up to a year. This is in the land of the free."

...

Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said Tony Blair was transforming Britain into an authoritarian state. "In eight years he has dismantled centuries of judicial protection. Britain's reputation as the world's most tolerant nation is now under threat," he said.

If Mr Blair's proposed terror legislation was unamended, said Anthony Scrivener QC, "Britain would be a significant step closer to a police state". The Prime Minister spoke of "summary justice", said the lawyer: "It would be better named street justice."

Marie Woolf, Raymond Whitaker and Severin Carrell
The Independent
Oct16.2005

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article320005.ece


Police state fears over terrorism laws

Australia is moving towards a police state with harsh anti-terrorism laws that could be pushed through Parliament too quickly, the Law Council says.

...

The Law Council of Australia said passing the proposed laws would push the nation closer to becoming a police state.

"We're moving down that path," council president John North told the Ten Network.

"The fact that the Government wanted to move these laws through Parliament with indecent haste and without letting us as a Law Council or other interested people have wide community consultation means that we're very concerned about them."

...

"We understand that the people are scared, we understand that terrorism is the major, major issue, but we must not take away fundamental rights without asking our Government to assure us that we are going to be safe," he said.

Australian Associated Press
Oct16.2005

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/police-state-fears-over-terrorism-laws/2005/10/16/1129401135040.html

US Troops 'Starve Iraqi Citizens'

A senior United Nations official has accused US-led coalition troops of depriving Iraqi civilians of food and water in breach of humanitarian law.

Human rights investigator Jean Ziegler said they had driven people out of insurgent strongholds that were about to be attacked by cutting supplies.

Mr Ziegler, a Swiss-born sociologist, said such tactics were in breach of international law.

A US military spokesman in Baghdad denied the allegations.

"A drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces are using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population," Mr Ziegler told a press conference in Geneva.

He said coalition forces were using "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare."

"This is a flagrant violation of international law," he added.

...

The Geneva Conventions forbid depriving civilians of food and water.

Cutting off food supply lines and destroying food stocks is also forbidden.

Mr Ziegler, who opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq, said he would urge the UN General Assembly to condemn this practice when he presented his yearly report on 27 October.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4344136.stm

Murder Them for Sport

A Gaza Diary: Scenes from the Palestinian Uprising

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker. 'Come on, dogs,' the voice booms in Arabic. 'Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!' I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: 'Son of a bitch!' 'Son of a whore!' 'Your mother's cunt!' The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos. Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered--death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo--but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

Chris Hedges
Harper's magazine
October 2001

Syria is Cambodia

GI's and Syrians in Tense Clashes on Iraqi Border

A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer  that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials.

The firefight, between Army Rangers and Syrian troops along the border with Iraq, was the most serious of the conflicts with President Bashar al-Assad's forces, according to American and Syrian officials.

[...]

One of Mr. Bush's most senior aides, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that so far American military forces in Iraq had moved right up to the border to cut off the entry of insurgents, but he insisted that they had refrained from going over it.

But other officials, who say they got their information in the field or by talking to Special Operations commanders, say that as American efforts to cut off the flow of fighters have intensified, the operations have spilled over the border - sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.

Some current and former officials add that the United States military is considering plans to conduct special operations inside Syria, using small covert teams for cross-border intelligence gathering.

[...]

Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the Iraq war what Cambodia was in the Vietnam War: a sanctuary for fighters, money and supplies to flow over  the border and, ultimately, a place for a shadow struggle.

[...]

In the summer firefight, several Syrian soldiers were killed, leading to a protest from the Syrian government to the United States Embassy in Damascus, according to American and Syrian officials.

A military official who spoke with some of the Rangers who took part in  the incident said they had described it as an intense firefight, although it could not be learned whether there had been any American casualties.  Nor could the exact location of the clash, along the porous and poorly marked border, be learned.

[...]

"There is no finding on Syria," said one senior official, using the term for presidential approval of a covert action program.

"We've got our hands full in the neighborhood," added a senior official involved in the discussion.

Some other current and former officials suggest that there already have been initial intelligence gathering operations by small clandestine Special Operations units inside Syria. Several senior administration officials said such special operations had not yet been conducted,  although they did not dispute the notion that they were under consideration.

(excerpts)

James Risen and David E. Sanger
The New York Times
Oct15.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/15/politics/15syria.html

Homeland Security Terrorist List Excludes Right Wing Groups

Animal Rights Groups and Ecology Militants Make DHS Terrorist List, Right-Wing Vigilantes Omitted

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation’s security.

According to the list — part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security — between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.

It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.

DHS did not respond to repeated requests for comment or confirmation of the document’s authenticity.

The conspirators behind the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and wounded more than 500, were inspired by radical right-wing movements. Eric Rudolph, the man charged with carrying out the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, which killed one woman and injured more than 100, was a member of the radical anti-abortion group Army of God. Initially, Rudolph was the object of a massive North Carolina manhunt in connection with a Birmingham, Ala., abortion-clinic bombing that killed a police officer and seriously maimed a nurse.

Another Army of God member, James Kopp, was convicted in the 1998 shooting of a doctor who performed abortions.

Individuals affiliated with such groups have also been involved in many smaller terrorist acts, including mailing hundreds of bogus anthrax letters to abortion clinics, and in plots to obtain and use conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons against civilians. In 2003, for instance, a Texas man prosecutors say was a white supremacist and anti-government radical pleaded guilty to charges of possessing a weapon of mass destruction. Authorities had discovered enough sodium cyanide bombs to kill hundreds of people; machine guns and several hundred thousand rounds of ammunition; 60 pipe bombs; and remote-control explosive devices disguised as briefcases in a storage space he rented. The man, William J. Krar, was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.

‘Still a Threat’

Domestic terror experts were surprised the department did not include right-wing groups on their list of adversaries.

“They are still a threat, and they will continue to be a threat,” said Mike German, a 16-year undercover agent for the FBI who spent most of his career infiltrating radical right-wing groups. “If for some reason the government no longer considers them a threat, I think they will regret that,” said German, who left the FBI last year. “Hopefully it’s an oversight.”

James O. Ellis III, a senior terror researcher for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), said in a telephone interview Friday that whereas left-wing groups, which have been more active recently, have focused mainly on the destruction of property, right-wing groups have a much deadlier and more violent record and should be on the list. “The nature of the history of terrorism is that you will see acts in the name of [right-wing] causes in the future.”

Focusing on Left-Wing Movements

Last year, following arson and vandalism sprees on both coasts attributed to radical left-wing groups such as ALF and ELF, the FBI made those movements its top domestic terror priority. But right-wing groups remained a concern, according to one FBI official.

“That doesn’t de-emphasize our interest in other domestic terror groups,” stressed the official, who would not be named discussing the bureau’s counterterror strategy, during a phone interview Friday. “For us, the right-wing patriot movement remains a continuing threat.” (The FBI considers militias, tax protesters, and anti-government groups part of the right-wing movement, the official said; the bureau considers violent anti-abortion extremists a separate movement.)

The DHS document, entitled “Integrated Planning Guidance, Fiscal Years 2005-2011,” is dated January 2005. Its pages are marked “Sensitive — Do Not Distribute Outside the Department of Homeland Security — Draft.” Each paragraph in the document is marked “(U/FOUO),” which typically indicates it has been reviewed by a government censor and determined to be unclassified, but “for official use only.”

Under a section marked “Threat and Vulnerability Assessment,” the document asks and answers the question “Who are the adversaries?”

First and foremost, the draft document says, are al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Second are new radical Islamist groups that arise overseas amid the rubble of the old al Qaeda organization. These organizations “could try to supplant” al Qaeda and “would see a Homeland attack as a way to attain that goal,” the document states.

Domestic radical Islamic groups concern the department, because of their potential to support al Qaeda operations within the country, or to serve as a “recruiting pool” for the movement.

“However,” the document reads, “we are not convinced that any of these organizations acting alone would pursue a major attack against the Homeland.”

As a final item, the list notes the threat of eco-terrorists, who “will continue to focus their attacks on property damage in an effort to change policy.” The document notes that although “publicly ALF and ELF promote nonviolence toward human life . . . some members may escalate their attacks.”

Priorities Questioned

The document lists several groups or sources of radical violence that DHS does not consider threats to the homeland.

Lebanese Hizballah and various Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad, are unlikely to attack the United States, the report’s authors conclude.

Several high-profile terror prosecutions, including cases against the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation and Florida professor Sami al-Arian, rest on their connection to such groups.

“Why are we expending so many resources targeting people who have allegedly provided support to groups that don’t threaten us?” asked David Cole, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a frequent critic of the U.S. government’s war on terror. “How does that make us safer?”

State-sponsored terrorism also is not an immediate concern to the department, according to the document. “In the post 9/11 environment, countries do not appear to be facilitating or supporting terrorist groups intent on striking the U.S. homeland,” it reads. In fact, of all the countries designated state sponsors of terrorism, only Iran “appears to have the possible future motivation” to use terrorist groups to plot against the United States.

In the past few years, according to MIPT researcher Ellis, left-wing violence has overtaken right-wing violence as the primary form of domestic terror. “When a conservative government comes to power, you see more activity from the opposite side of the spectrum,” he explained. At the same time, the membership and activity of right-wing groups has suffered since the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the broadcasting of images of the children who died in the building’s second-floor day care center.

“A lot of people said, ‘I’m fighting against the Zionist Occupied Government, I’m not here to kill children,” Ellis explained.

Still, Ellis warned, the movements remain worthy of the government’s concern. Last October, the FBI arrested a man in Tennessee who tried to buy sarin nerve gas and C-4 explosive to attack a government building. The man, Demetrius “Van” Crocker, had also inquired about obtaining nuclear waste or other nuclear material, according to the FBI.

And in 2003, a Pennsylvania man was convicted of mailing hundreds of letters containing fake anthrax to abortion clinics around the United States.

Although their activities appear to be decreasing, such groups are still dangerous, said Ellis. “We don’t have the luxury of ignoring threats from either side of the political spectrum.”

Justin Rood
Congressional Quarterly
Mar25.2005

http://www.cq.com/public/20050325_homeland.html

Michael Ledeen's Doctrinaire Fascism

Flirting with Fascism

Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.

...there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.

Ledeen has gained notoriety in recent months for the following paragraph in his latest book, The War Against the Terror Masters. In what reads like a prophetic approval of the policy of chaos now being visited on Iraq, Ledeen wrote,

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

[...]

...Ledeen criticizes Mussolini precisely for not being revolutionary enough. “He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism.” Ledeen therefore concurs with the fascist intellectual, Camillo Pellizi, who argues—in a book Ledeen calls “a moving and fundamental work”—that Mussolini’s was “a failed revolution.” Pellizzi had hoped that “the new era was to be the era of youthful genius and creativity”: for him, Ledeen says, the fascist state was “a generator of energy and creativity.” The purest ideologues of fascism, in other words, wanted something very similar to that which Ledeen himself wants now, namely a “worldwide mass movement” enabling the peoples of the world, “liberated” by American militarism, to participate in the “greatest experiment in human freedom.”

John Laughland
The American Conservative
Jun30.2003

http://www.amconmag.com/06_30_03/feature.html#


Serving President George W. Bush as US International Affairs Analyst is well-known Zionist Neoconservative Michael Leeden. He is a long-time advocate of a US led regime change in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, for the sake of Israel.

[...]

“Ledeen’s ideas are frequently repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America’s manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq. Now Michael Ledeen is calling for regime change beyond Iraq. In an address entitled “Time to Focus on Iran – The Mother of Modern Terrorism,” for the policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) on April 30, he declared, “the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon. Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the Neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned.”

William O. Beeman

William O. Beeman teaches anthropology and directs Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is author of “Language, Status and Power in Iran,” and two forthcoming books: “Double Demons: Cultural Impediments to U.S.-Iranian Understanding,” and “Iraq: State in Search of a Nation.”

http://usa.altermedia.info/index_print.php?p=449

Possible Police Role in 2002 Bali Attack

Indonesian police or military officers may have played a role in the 2002 Bali bombing, the country's former president, Abdurrahman Wahid says.

In an interview with SBS's Dateline program, on the third anniversary of the bombing that killed 202 people, Mr Wahid says he has grave concerns about links between Indonesian authorities and terrorist groups.

While he believed terrorists were involved in planting one of the Kuta night club bombs, the second, which destroyed Bali's Sari Club, had been organised by authorities.

Asked who he thought planted the second bomb, Mr Wahid said: "Maybe the police ... or the armed forces."

"The orders to do this or that came from within our armed forces not from the fundamentalist people," he says.

The program also claims a key figure behind the formation of terror group Jemaah Islamiah was an Indonesian spy.

Former terrorist Umar Abduh, who is now a researcher and writer, told Dateline Indonesian authorities had a hand in many terror groups.

"There is not a single Islamic group either in the movement or the political groups that is not controlled by (Indonesian) intelligence," he said.

Abduh has written a book on Teungku Fauzi Hasbi, a key figure in Jemaah Islamiah (JI) who had close contact with JI operations chief Hambali and lived next door to Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.

He says Hasbi was a secret agent for Indonesia's military intelligence while at the same time a key player in creating JI.

Documents cited by SBS showed the Indonesian chief of military intelligence in 1990 authorised Hasbi to undertake a "special job".

A 1995 internal memo from the military intelligence headquarters in Jakarta included a request to use "Brother Fauzi Hasbi" to spy on Acehnese separatists in Indonesia, Malaysia and Sweden.

And a 2002 document assigned Hasbi the job of special agent for BIN, the Indonesian national intelligence agency.

Security analyst John Mempi told SBS that Hasbi, who was also known as Abu Jihad, had played a key role in JI in its early years.

"The first Jemaah Islamiah congress in Bogor was facilitated by Abu Jihad, after Abu Bakar Bashir returned from Malaysia," Mr Mempi said.

"We can see that Abu Jihad played an important role. He was later found to be an intelligence agent. So an intelligence agent has been facilitating the radical Islamic movement."

Hasbi was disembowelled in a mysterious murder in 2003 after he was exposed as a military agent and his son Lamkaruna Putra died in a plane crash last month.

Another convicted terrorist, Timsar Zubil, who set off three bombs in Sumatra in 1978, told the program intelligence agents had given his group a provocative name - Komando Jihad - and encouraged members to commit illegal acts.

"We may have deliberately been allowed to grow," he said.

Abduh also told the program his terrorist organisation, the Imron Movement, was incited to a range of violent action in the 1980s when the Indonesian military told the group that the assassination of several Muslim clerics was imminent.

Another terrorism expert, George Aditjondro, said a bombing in May this year that killed 23 people in the Christian village of Tentena, in central Sulawesi, had been organised by senior military and police officers.

"This is a strategy of depopulating an area and when an area has been depopulated - both becoming refugees or becoming paramilitary fighters - then that is the time when they can invest their money in major resource exploitation there," he said.

Australian Associated Press
Oct12.2005

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Possible-police-role-in-2002-Bali-attack/2005/10/12/1128796591857.html#

Project Stormfury

The federal government’s hurricane modification program was called Project Stormfury. The idea was raised during the Eisenhower administration after several major storms hit the East Coast in the mid-1950s, killing 749 people and causing billions in damages.

But it wasn’t until 1961 that initial tests were conducted on Hurricane Esther with a Navy plane releasing silver iodide crystals. Some reports indicate winds were reduced by 10 percent to 30 percent.

During Stormfury, scientists also seeded hurricanes in 1963, 1969 and 1971 over the open Atlantic Ocean far from land.

Researchers dropped silver iodide, a substance that serves as an effective ice nuclei, into clouds just outside of the hurricane’s eyewall. The idea was that a new ring of clouds would form around the artificial ice nuclei. The new clouds were supposed to change rain patterns and form a new eyewall that would collapse the old one. The re-formed hurricane would spin more slowly and be less dangerous.

Did it work?

Sometimes, the experiments appeared to work. Hurricane Debbie in 1969 was seeded twice over four days by several aircraft. Researchers noted that its intensity waxed and waned by up to 30 percent.

For cloud seeding to be successful, clouds must contain sufficient supercooled water that is still liquid even though it is below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (zero degrees Celsius). Raindrops form when the artificial nuclei and the supercooled water combine.

But scientists also learned that hurricanes contain less supercooled water than other storm clouds, so seeding was unreliable. And, hurricanes grow and dissipate all on their own, even forming new walls of clouds called “concentric eyewall circles.”

This made it impossible to determine whether storm reductions were the result of human intervention. Project Stormfury was abandoned in the 1980s after spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

Other storm modification methods that have been suggested include cooling the tropical ocean with icebergs and spreading particles or films over the ocean surface to inhibit storms from evaporating heat from the sea.

The nuclear option

Occasionally, somebody suggests detonating a nuclear weapon to shatter a storm.

Researchers say hurricanes would dwarf such measures. For example, Hurricane Rita measures about 3,500 miles (5,600 kilometers) in irregular circumference and 350 miles (560 kilometers) across.

According to the center for atmospheric research, the heat energy released by a hurricane equals 50 to 200 trillion watts or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.

(excerpts)

Joseph B. Verrengia
The Associated Press
Sept24.2005

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9440978/

Full Spectrum Dominance

No Weapons In Space

THE BUSH administration is clearly moving toward putting weapons in outer space. It has spent about $500 million a year in research on those potential weapons in the past few years, according to the Center for Defense Information, although often burying it in categories that make hard accounting extremely difficult.

In the research phase are antisatellite weapons, space-based antimissile systems, laser beam weapons and bombardment satellites using kinetic impact, directed energy and possibly nuclear explosions. Some of these weapons will be powered by orbiting nuclear reactors.

In its document "Visions for 2020," the U.S. Space Command announced the new doctrine of "Full Spectrum Dominance," saying that "the nation which dominates outer space will dominate the earth." Space, according to the Space Command, is a legitimate and final frontier from which the United States should project its power.

Space is already militarized because satellites are used to identify targets on Earth and to accurately direct land-based weapons - tactics that have been used successfully in the Iraq war and in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Intercontinental ballistic missiles enter and exit space in their journey to their land-based targets on other continents. Antiballistic missiles launched to destroy them also would operate in space.

If one genie is already out of the bottle for space militarization, another genie can and must be contained by preventing space weaponization. Weapons do not now orbit in outer space. There are powerful reasons why such weapons should be forbidden.

First, placing weapons in space inevitably would provoke an arms race there. Such a race eventually would consume hundreds of billions of dollars. It is simply inconceivable that the United States could place weapons in outer space without provoking other nations such as China, Russia, Japan and countries in the European Union to do the same.

Second, most space-based weapons are inefficient in relation to those based on the ground or in the atmosphere. If we want to destroy a missile site or a troop deployment or bomb a nuclear reactor, it is far more effective to do this with a ground-based missile or pilotless aircraft. Space-based weapons are also radically more expensive than land-based weapons or aircraft.

Third, the United States is already the dominant military power in the world, spending about $500 billion a year on the defense budget, including money for current wars, with technology that far exceeds any possible rival, including Russia and China. Adding outer space as a new dimension of our military presence is simply not necessary. Such a move adds a new gesture to our military posturing without increasing our security.

Finally, a response to any possible arms race in outer space is already available: a draft international treaty forbidding space weaponization that was proposed by Russia and China in 2002. The United States has been alone among the great powers in refusing to endorse U.N. General Assembly resolutions on outer space and the draft treaty.

Other countries are eager for an agreement, just as they are for a nuclear test ban that includes underground testing, an international criminal court, an agreement on global warming as well as treaties on land mines, small arms and chemical and biological weapons.

In refusing to sign a treaty on space weaponization and these other significant international accords, the United States is virtually alone in thwarting the world in its efforts to achieve disarmament and environmental sanity through multilateral agreements.

In 1967, the United States led the world in pursuing the Outer Space Treaty, which forbids the orbiting of weapons of mass destruction - but not non-WMD. Today, we are the ones obstructing the world in its desire to seal off space as a potential area of weaponization.

U.S. policy is driven not by a need to ensure our security but by lobbyists who need to secure contracts for their defense industry corporate employers.

It is beyond time for the United States to agree to sign an international treaty to prevent weapons from being deployed in outer space, a policy that would serve the country and not a select group of corporations.

The issue of space weaponization is a test case for this administration to reach out to other nations and to set the safest and most sensible direction for the nation and, indeed, the world.

Dr. Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath
The Baltimore Sun
May 19.2005

http://www.nuclearpolicy.org/index.cfm?Page=Article&ID=2326

Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) on Martial Law

MARTIAL LAW CONCERNS
House of Representatives - March 11, 2003

Madam Speaker, I come to the House floor tonight to talk about an issue which I think is of grave concern to this country.

I recently read an article published in the Sydney, Australia, Morning Herald entitled "Foundations Are in Place for Martial Law in the United States.''

The author is a man named Ritt Goldstein, an investigative reporter for the Herald, and he said that recent pronouncements from the Bush administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States.

When President Ronald Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua, he issued a series of executive orders which provided FEMA with broad powers in the event of a crisis, such as the violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition against a U.S. military invasion abroad. They were never used.

But with the looming possibility of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, recent pronouncements by President Bush's domestic security chief, Tom Ridge, and an official with the Civil Rights Commission should fire concerns that these powers could be employed or a de facto drift into their deployment in the future.

On the 20th of July, the Detroit Free Press ran a story entitled "Arabs in U.S. Could Be Held, Official Warns.'' The story referred to a member of the Civil Rights Commission who foresaw the possibility of internment camps for Arab Americans. FEMA has practiced for such an occasion.

FEMA, whose main role is disaster response, is also responsible for handling U.S. domestic unrest.

From 1982 to 1984, Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil defense preparations. Details of those plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal. They included executive orders providing for suspension of the Constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the President and FEMA.

A Miami Herald article on the 5th of July, 1987, reported that the former FEMA director's, Louis Guiffrida's, deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial law portion of the planning. The planning was said to be similar to one Mr. Guiffrida had developed earlier to combat a national uprising by black militants. It provided for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps. Today, Mr. Brinkerhoff is with the highly influential Anser Institute for Homeland Security. Following a request by the Pentagon in January that the U.S. military be allowed the option of deploying troops on American streets, the institute in February published a paper by Mr. Brinkerhoff arguing the legality of this. He alleged that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which has long been accepted as prohibiting such deployments, had simply been misunderstood and misapplied. The preface to the article also provided the revelation that the national plan he had worked on under Mr. Guiffrida was approved by Reagan and actions were taken to implement it.

By April, the U.S. military had created a Northern Command to aid homeland security. Reuters reported that the command is mainly expected to play a supporting role to local authorities. However, Mr. Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security, has just advocated a review of U.S. law regarding the use of military for law enforcement duties.

Disturbingly, and it just really should disturb people, the full facts and contents of Mr. Reagan's national plan remain uncertain. This is in part because President Bush took the unusual step of sealing the Reagan Presidential papers last November. However, many of the key figures of the Reagan era are part of the present administration, including John Poindexter, to whom Oliver North later reported.

At the time of the Reagan initiatives, the then-Attorney General, William French Smith, a Republican, wrote to the National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane: ``I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised executive order exceeds its proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency preparedness. This department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an emergency czar role for FEMA.''

Criticism of the Bush administration's response to September 11 echoes Mr. Smith's warning. On June 7 of last year, the former Presidential counsel, John Dean, spoke of America sliding into a, quote, ``constitutional dictatorship,'' close quote, and martial law.

The reason I raise this issue is that I come from a State where in 1941 under executive order by the President, 9661, we rounded up all the Japanese Americans in this country and put them in concentration camps. We have set in place the mechanism to do that again and we must not, we cannot sacrifice the Constitution in this rush to war that we are doing in Iraq.

http://www.house.gov/mcdermott/sp030311.shtml

The Lying Society

"If a ruler hearken to lies, all his servants are wicked."
Proverbs, 29:12

The word [liar] is derived from the Indo-European root, leugh, and the old-English, leogan: "to tell a lie". With the prefix, waer, "faith" or "pledge", we get the old-English, waerleogan, or "oath breaker". Waerleogan, in modern English, is Warlock: "a male witch, a demon".

The fossils of the world tell us that false representation, oath breaking, and witchcraft, are part of that complex process known as "lying". A liar, then, is a witch or demon who distorts reality, to your injury and his gain. To establish credibility with you, he may give the appearance of helping you. But in the long term, he claims your life, just as another liar will claim his.

Lying is deadly, and highly contagious. The man who receives his information from a liar will spew out lies when he passes the information on. When you have liars, trained in the demonic arts, controlling the highest seats of governmental authority, you will have liars controlling the information channels. When their lies fill the printed pages, loudspeakers, and TV screens, you will have liars administering the workplaces, marketplaces, schools, churches, and homes. Without realizing it, your nation becomes possessed by demons; your nation practices the politics of witchcraft.

A liar's fortunes are very cleverly established on his pretenses of virtue; otherwise, well-meaning people would have nothing to do with him. He will not think twice about murdering to protect his good reputation.

In a lying society, murder is an acceptable alternative to radically changing one's views. In lying societies, the virtues are brutishness, deceit, sodomy, theft, debt, and suicide. He who is most menacing and monstrous is most popular.

Though powerful in appearance, lies are in reality extremely fragile. There is no protection for a liar except (1) darkness, or (2) the mercy of a more powerful liar. This is why lying societies crave dimness of room and of mind. It is why they seek bondage to human authority.

(selected excerpts)

Tennessee Waltz: The Making of a Political Prisoner
By James Earl Ray
St. Andrew's Press, St. Andrews, TN, 1987
The Politics of Witchcraft
Afterword by Frederick Tupper Sausee.

http://www.totse.com/en/religion/satanists/ussatan.html

Bush Administration Disseminated "Covert Propaganda" in the United States

Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: "We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet."

But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were "no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public."

The G.A.O. said the Education Department had no money or authority to "procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition" in federal law.

The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a "video news release" [ VNR ] narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush's program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children "gets an A-plus."

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The G.A.O. did not say how many stations carried the reports.

[...]

But the accountability office said on Friday: "The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing."

(excerpts)

Robert Pear
The New York Times
Oct01.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01educ.html?pagewanted=print