From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 04:52:21 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 04:52:21 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] jonathan "jack" idema part 1 Message-ID: American Bounty Hunter Jonathan ''Jack'' Idema Wednesday, 18 August 2004, 10:38 am Article: Richard S. Ehrlich American Bounty Hunter Jonathan "Jack" Idema by Richard S. Ehrlich BANGKOK, Thailand -- American bounty hunter Jonathan "Jack" Idema, who was put on trial in Kabul for allegedly torturing Afghans, arrived in Afghanistan alongside U.S. invasion forces in 2001 and enjoyed threatening to kill journalists. "That's what I love about Afghanistan, if you tell someone you are going to kill them, they fucking believe you," Idema said during several exclusive interviews in December 2001 and January 2002 in Kabul. "If I'm in New York and I tell someone I'm going to kill them, they say, 'Yeah motherfucker? Well, I'm going to kill you first.' But not Afghanistan. Here they believe you." On Aug. 16, Idema and two other Americans appeared on trial in Kabul denying allegations that they tortured Afghans they kept in a private jail.. Idema told the court he hunted alleged terrorists with the knowledge of the U.S. government. Washington and the Pentagon denied Idema worked for them after he was arrested in July. In the winter of 2001-2002, the short, stocky Idema liked to dye his salt-and-pepper hair black and show off his pistol and his Kalashnikov assault rifle which he occasionally fired using bullets capable of piercing body armor. He traveled with a handful of young, armed, Afghan men who he ordered about, often shoving wads of cash into their hands and waving a big hunting knife at them while theatrically laughing with maniacal glee. But in a truly terrifying display, Idema threatened to murder an American reporter representing the Stars and Stripes newspaper after the journalist revealed that Idema served time in a U.S. jail several years earlier "for a white-collar crime." "I just might have to fucking kill you!" an irate Idema shouted at the reporter during a December 2001 party while other foreign correspondents quickly exited the dining room, leaving the two men to argue amid frosted cake and drinks. "You don't believe me? Test me. Just test me. But get the fuck out of here now before I do." The shaken Stars and Stripes journalist was hosting the party in a house he rented, and politely reminded Idema that this was his house. "You think this house is yours?" Idema yelled at him, adding more expletives and threats until the journalist left the room. Several days later, the Stars and Stripes reporter said to anyone who asked about the confrontation: "Look his name up on Internet, and the story of him in jail will come up. His name is spelt I-D-E-M-A." As a result of his menacing behavior, most foreign journalists avoided Idema and told each other he was an unreliable trouble-maker who liked to brandish weapons and "play soldier" amid the anarchy of war. Idema, however, insisted he was acting to protect innocent Afghans from being exploited and abused by all sides, so they would not suffer either from the U.S. invasion nor from the ousted Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. When asked who he really worked for, Idema grinned and told me: "I work for God and country." After much coaxing, he displayed a resume that he kept on his laptop which listed military badges he said he had earned, including "El Salvadoran Master Parachute Wings", "Royal Thai Army Combat Parachute Wings", "Kuwaiti Police Commander Badge", "German Senior Parachute Wings" and "Nicaraguan Senior Parachute Wings." His resume also listed: "11 years in the United States Army Special Forces, 18 years in Special Operations", and "military adviser in Nicaragua and South Africa" in 1978. In 1979, he was "primary SWAT instructor for New York State Police Olympic SWAT Team, Lake Placid." His resume claimed he was "primary weapons and tactics instructor for British S.A.S. commandos during operation Honeygift" in 1980, and, in 1984, "Chief Instructor/Adviser for the U.S. AID Diplomatic Protection Guard during the Haitian coup attempt." In 1984, he was also "chief tactics and firearms instructor for Ron Reagan, Jr.," -- the son of the former U.S. president. In 1986, he was "director of training for the United States National Park Service and Park Police for the Statue of Liberty re-dedication ceremonies [including] SWAT, counter-terrorism and explosives training." Idema named a slew of courses he completed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, Fort Benning in Georgia, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Drum in New York and Fort Devens in Massachusetts. But his biography stopped in 1991. Asked about the 1990s, Idema replied: "For over 10 years, I've been 'black'," -- implying secret missions he could not divulge. In Afghanistan, he called himself "a civilian adviser to the Northern Alliance" of Afghans who were helping America topple the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. "I am a [former] Green Beret," no longer on active military service, he said. "My original purpose here was to help humanitarian aid efforts to both the Northern Alliance and the Afghan people." He claimed to have sent a report to the U.S. Defense Department which Secretary of State Colin Powell also read, describing problems with U.S. food aid during the first months of the war. He also boasted that armed Afghans recently threatened him on a road near the eastern city of Jalalabad, until he shouted that he was an American and bluffed that if anyone hurt him, a retaliatory U.S. air strike would obliterate the place. Laughing as he told the re-told the tale, Idema said the Afghans suddenly became gracious and allowed him to continue his journey. In January 2002, he said his personal Northern Alliance "intelligence assets" discovered videotapes showing al Qaeda operatives teaching foreign fighters how to kidnap, bomb and assassinate people. The techniques appeared to borrow from U.S., British and Israeli commando tactics, he said. The Pentagon tried to block his attempts to sell copies of the seven-hour-long videotapes to TV broadcasters, Idema complained. But he eventually sold the videotapes, and photographs from it, for thousands of dollars to television networks and an international photo agency. After watching the videotapes in Kabul, I asked Idema to take me to the former al Qaeda training camp where they were filmed. He initially demanded I pay him 100 U.S. dollars for access to the secret site, but he eventually provided me a free tour of the bomb-littered al Qaeda compound in Mir Bacheh Kowt village, 15 miles north of Kabul. The heavily damaged buildings were formerly a children's school, but were now littered with unused rockets, landmines, bullets and other ammunition scattered on the floor in dangerous heaps. The videotapes showed foreign men at the compound, disguised as janitors and golfers, acting out strategies to seize and kill hostages. A fake janitor, for example, was filmed sweeping in front of a building while fake office workers entered and exited. After a while, the janitor moved his broom cart into the foyer and, sweeping and keeping his head down, slowly climbed the stairs to sweep an upper hallway. At a key moment, the janitor dropped his broom and pulled weapons out of his broom cart, blasting pre-selected targets and chasing people into groups so they could be taken onto the roof as hostages while other terrorists emerged from their sleeper positions. "When the hostage thing started, he [the janitor] went and pulled out a hand gun," Idema explained during the tour of the training camp. To remind me of the action on the videotapes, Idema then pulled out a black pistol and charged forward, as if pushing a bunch of hostages. In other scenes videotaped at the school, dozens of men of various races and ethnic origin fired Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades while attacking a fake audience of VIPs at a mock golf tournament and a convoy of vehicles. "Arabic interpreters, and also Afghans, who viewed the tapes were able to identify the different dialects and we know for a fact there were Kuwaiti, Iranian, Iraqi and Libyan guys here," Idema said. He was proud about getting the videotapes, and delighted to cash in on the TV and photo rights. "It just goes to prove a point: one guy, operating by himself independently with the indigenous population can gain more intelligence than 5,000 guys in a room watching satellites," he said. Idema's infamous mood swings, meanwhile, continued. At a party in Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel, Idema heard a CNN employee belittle his analysis of the Afghan war and denounce Idema as "some old guy" who knew nothing. "I will break your fucking legs, I will break your fucking arms, and then I will..." Idema suddenly raged, escalating his threats and moving in on the CNN employee who became wide-eyed and distressed when he realized Idema's fury. After venting and receiving nervous apologies from the CNN man, their confrontation dissolved into jokes, but Idema's performance proved he could easily intimidate people. But his real goal, he said, was to "build a security force [in Kabul] with a whole bunch of [U.S.] former special forces guys," to help the Afghan government train Afghans in "professional soldiers' skills" so they could be bodyguards and commandos in a new, democratic Afghanistan. "We will start with 100 [Afghan trainees] and we'll try to get it up to 500," he said. "It will be to protect journalists, protect aid workers, protect foreign dignitaries and protect their own [Afghan] dignitaries. It won't be private. It will be Afghan government. It will partially under the control of the Ministry of Defense and partly under the control of the Ministry of Interior." **-ENDS-** Richard S. Ehrlich, a freelance journalist who has reported news from Asia for the past 26 years, is co-author of the non-fiction book, "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" -- Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews. His web page is http://www.geocities.com/glossograph/ Home Page | Headlines | Previous Story | Next Story Copyright (c) Scoop Media -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 04:57:25 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 04:57:25 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] jonathan "jack" idema part 2 Message-ID: Jonathan Idema on Trial Andrew North - BBC Pomp and farce at Kabul trial The Kabul courtroom was packed with journalists, officials, representatives from the US embassy and many spectators. The trial of Jonathan Idema and two other Americans is taking place in the main court for Kabul province, amid tight security. The court itself is a surprisingly grand place. Inside a fairly ramshackle, run-down government compound, white painted columns surround the walls of the court chamber, ornately decorated in gold at the top and bottom. Green and gold friezes decorate some of the walls. The presiding judge, Abdul Basset Bakhtiari, is imposing too, in a red and gold fringed gown with a shaped velvet hat. At the last hearing, he was wearing just a suit and open-necked shirt. 'Farce' But despite the relative grandeur of the occasion, the trial itself has sometimes verged on the edge of farce with Jonathan Idema sometimes shouting out at both the judge and prosecutor as he attacks the proceedings. He has called the process "insane" and "crazy". Twice the American, dressed in the same military-style fatigues and sunglasses, turned to the judge and said, "Why don't we just get this over with now - just give me the 15 years". The morning hearing and part of the post-lunch session was dominated by such exchanges. Idema said he had not been given an English copy of the charges against him. "How can I defend myself when I don't even have a copy of the indictment?" he demanded. Evidence The former US soldier said all the evidence he needs is being kept away from him. He said there are hundreds of photos, videos and documents that were at the house in Kabul where he was arrested in early July. He says this has been handed over to the FBI. Mr Idema also complained about the quality of the translation. This was a frequent source of confusion for others too, with many Afghans in the audience who speak English shaking their heads in surprise at some of the translations that were being made. After lunch the judge, Abdul Basset Bakhtiari, was able to impose more order and called first on Mr Idema's translator to speak. Edward Caraballo, who was arrested with Jonathan Idema, has also been speaking for the first time, saying he is just a journalist who is in Afghanistan to document the fight against terrorism. ... Round two for Kabul's trial of year Kabul's trial of the year is due to resume on Monday. Former US soldier Jonathan K Idema and two other Americans, Edward Caraballo and Brent Bennett, are facing charges including hostage-taking, torture, illegally entering Afghanistan and running a private jail. Four Afghan men arrested with them in Kabul in early July are also in the dock. Even the judge admits he has never tried a case like it. But the key question for this next stage is this: Will Mr Idema produce any evidence for the sensational claims he made at the first hearing three weeks ago? He said then that he was in Afghanistan on a secret anti-terrorist mission approved at the highest levels of the Pentagon - claims the US military denies. "We were in contact directly by fax and e-mail and phone with [Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld's office," Mr Idema said when journalists asked him to name names, "and with the deputy secretary of defence for intelligence." Civil war Wearing military style fatigues, he said he had uncovered a sophisticated plot ordered by al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden to assassinate key Afghan politicians including Yunus Qanuni, now a presidential candidate, and to drive truck bombs into US military and Nato bases. The aim of the plot, Mr Idema said, was to stoke a new civil war in Afghanistan. All this emerged in a kind of impromptu press conference Mr Idema held before the judge had arrived, with journalists and cameramen pressing around the dock. Mr Idema also said he had handed over a senior Taleban figure in May to the US military at its main Bagram base north of Kabul. American spokesmen later admitted they had received an Afghan man from Mr Idema. However, they said he was not who Mr Idema claimed and had been released two months later. The case has been embarrassing for both the US authorities in Afghanistan as well as in Washington. It has also raised new questions over the widespread use of private military contractors in Afghanistan. The best known are President Hamid Karzai's US bodyguards. And with their trademark beards and shades, and similar weaponry, they all look very alike. "It is very difficult to tell who's official and who's not," says one Kabul-based security specialist. 'Slew of evidence' In this climate, many find it quite possible that the American authorities were secretly employing Jonathan Idema. But the US military totally rejects this. "He is not an employee of the United States military," Lieutenant-General David Barno, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, told the BBC. "We have no relationship with him." And the general denied US forces were employing so-called "plausible denial" freelance operatives to carry out missions in Afghanistan. "Not at all, absolutely not," he said. However, Mr Idema's lawyer in America, John Tiffany, says he is assembling a "slew of evidence" which proves his client was working for the US government. He says it includes e-mails, photographs and video, but says he does not want to reveal any details for now. But he attacked the Afghan judicial system saying "nobody is afforded due process". Judge's warning The trial judge, Abdul Basset Bakhtiari, rejects this. In a BBC interview, he admitted the first hearing in this "very unusual case" had not been perfect. "We had some problems with translation," he said, "and there was some disorder." But he blamed this on the behaviour of journalists. "That doesn't mean the Afghan legal system is weak," he said. Next time, the translators would be better Judge Bakhtiari promised, but also warned that journalists could be expelled from the court "if they create disorder". One place the events of the next hearing will be followed especially closely is at the bar of the Mustafa hotel in central Kabul, a favourite haunt for the many people working in the private security industry. Before arrest, Jonathan Idema was sometimes among them. ... 10/2004 US vigilantes convicted in Kabul Three Americans have been jailed for up to 10 years for torturing Afghans and running a private jail in Kabul. Jonathan Idema and Brent Bennett were sentenced to 10 years in jail and Edward Caraballo eight years. Idema, who the US calls a bounty hunter, said his work had been approved by Afghan and US authorities. He told the court the FBI was setting him up. Four Afghans working with the Americans were also found guilty and sentenced to between one and five years in jail. Idema said after the trial: "I apologise that we tried to save these people... We should have let the Taleban murder every... one of them." The judge said the defendants, who were arrested in Kabul in July, had the right to appeal. A lawyer for Idema, John Edwards Tiffany, said an appeal would be launched. Chaotic Lawyers for the American defendants had called for the charges to be thrown out, arguing that the Afghan legal system was not fit to try them. The defendants denied charges of kidnapping, torture and illegal entry into Afghanistan. The BBC's Andrew North in Kabul says the verdict was a sensational end to what has often been a sensational trial. He says Idema, who claimed to have tracked down one hiding place of Osama Bin Laden, had failed to prove his actions had been sanctioned by Washington. Idema had taken the stand on Wednesday and was applauded from the public gallery as he swore "in the name of Allah to tell the truth and nothing but the truth". He said he had been given a passport by an unnamed American agency and had a visa similar to those owned by US special forces. He did not elaborate on his allegations against the FBI. The trial has been marred by scenes of chaos, and repeated objections from the defence. Little strong evidence has been presented. Wednesday's proceedings were reportedly the most orderly yet. The prosecutor, Mohammed Naim Dawarty, accused the defendants of opening private cells, abducting and torturing Afghan people and seizing their property. He said their activities "have created distress of the people of Afghanistan, the government and the United States". Plea rejected Defence lawyer Robert Fogelnest had called for an end to the trial because the Afghan legal system was unfit to carry it out. Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtyari rejected the plea, saying: "Come to the point if you have any arguments." The judge did allow the defence to show a video of the men apparently being greeted upon arrival in Afghanistan by several Afghan officials, including the Kabul police chief. "It's ridiculous to claim they entered illegally under these circumstances," Mr Fogelnest said. The video also showed one of the Afghans detained by the men confessing to plotting to kill senior Afghan leaders and bomb the US military base in Bagram, north of Kabul. During his trial, Idema alleged that hundreds of videos, photos and documents were removed by FBI officers after his arrest in Kabul. He said the documents would prove that "while we were not in the United States army, we were working for the United States army". The Pentagon denies any ties with the men. The three defendants were arrested when Afghan security forces raided a house in Kabul being used as a private jail and containing eight Afghan prisoners. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 05:05:25 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 05:05:25 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] jonathan "jack" idema part 3 Message-ID: AFGHANISTAN: Convicted Mercenary May Be Pentagon's Fall Guy by Ramtanu Maitra , Asia Times Online September 29th, 2004 On September 16, Jonathan Idema was convicted in Afghanistan on charges of torture and other crimes. Idema was arrested after Afghan police found eight men tied up or hanging in his private prison in Kabul. Idema, a former member of the US Special Forces, claimed that he was acting at the behest of sections of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Defense Department, including deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence General William Boykin. The conviction of Jonathan "Jack" Idema was a foregone conclusion. To begin with, Idema, a paid mercenary, is dispensable. Second, by all accounts he was - despite denials - assigned to do the job by Boykin, who in turn reports directly to the under secretary of defense for military intelligence, Stephen Cambone. Had the charges been reviewed in depth at a fair trial, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and even Vice President Dick Cheney could have been implicated. While the high-ups condone and protect the methods applied by the lower ranks, but stay aloof from incriminating details, both Boykin and Cambone are certainly more vulnerable. Not another Abu Ghraib But that could not have happened. After the Iraqi prison abuses in Abu Ghraib became public, and the Pentagon went into full swing to control the damage before it reached the top, the Idema case was a non-starter. Already the stench of prison abuse and the torture and death of detainees in Afghanistan had begun to make the rounds. Washington found it necessary to shut down the Idema-run operation, put him to trial in a kangaroo court in an occupied country, and send him to jail for 10 years. The Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, has made an account of prison abuses by the Americans in Afghanistan available online. The report, albeit unpublished, was prepared by Afghan military investigators, and includes a separate memorandum by officials of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, several other official Afghan documents, and interviews with a number of people with direct knowledge of the story. The story tells about the arrest of eight Afghan soldiers by US Special Forces on March 1, 2003, at a checkpoint in a remote mountain pass in southeastern Afghanistan in detail. Although they were allies, they were suspected as Taliban or al-Qaeda. They were subsequently taken for interrogation to Gardez. Seventeen days later they were released and handed over to the Afghan police. They had been severely beaten and tortured, and one was dead. Whether the Pentagon will ever carry out an investigation of this sordid affair is anyone's guess. But even if they do, the bureaucratic machine can easily bring such an inquiry to a standstill, at least until the US presidential election campaign is over in November, without determining who is to blame. The Idema case was different for various reasons. Unlike those unnamed US Special Forces operating in remote areas of Afghanistan, Idema was a former Green Beret who used to hang around Fort Bragg in North Carolina for assignments from the Special Forces. Reports indicate that in 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart, Sergeant Jonathan Keith Idema was sent to Lithuania to gather information. At the time, one columnist pointed out that "Idema's admirers claim Keith wowed the Lithuanian KGB guys by out-shooting them at the firing range and out-drinking them in the officers' club afterwards". The Big Kahuna The next year, 1992, Idema became the star at a Pentagon briefing by delivering the startling news that since the Soviet breakup, weapons-grade nuclear material had been not leaking, but pouring into the hands of the international terrorist underworld. After the Pentagon briefing two men approached Idema and said, "Great work, sergeant. We're FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and CIA. Give us your sources over there and we'll continue your great work." It is evident that Idema is part of a network, referred to as black ops, that functions in the shadows. As far as Idema is concerned, he has perhaps never functioned within legal parameters in his entire life. He is a cutthroat mercenary who gets paid on oral contracts and is left out in the cold to chill when things do not work out right and sensitive issues get exposed. That he did not get a fair trial should be no surprise because he worked for those who have the power to protect themselves. On the other hand, despite railroading the case and stonewalling the evidence, the Pentagon left behind enough documents to make clear why Idema needed to be silenced. With the presidential elections a few weeks up the road and the Bush administration's role in Iraq and Afghanistan getting more negative attention than before, any exposure made by Idema could affect the US electorate in a bad way. During the trial, Idema's lawyer, John Tiffany, began to play a videotape - shot by Edward Caballero, one of the two other Americans convicted and who was making a documentary to establish a connection between Idema and the Pentagon - of Idema's conversations with Boykin's office. The judge cut the presentation off summarily, however, and ended the trial. He refused to accept any of the defense's documents into evidence. In the video, Idema spoke with a Pentagon employee named Jorge Shim who promised that someone from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) would call Idema back on his cellular phone. Subsequently, Shim told the media that he had spoken to Idema on more than one occasion. Boykin in the background In one conversation, Idema is heard telling Shim that he was close to rounding up a whole cell of terrorists. The aide responds: "I told General Boykin that you called. I gave him the information and to the DIA." Idema says: "There are more bombs and more bombers, and we are hitting them in five hours." The aide replies: "Five hours? Jack, I'm going to have someone from the DIA contact you on your cell number, so give me a few minutes." A set of the videotapes that were presented as evidence but were not allowed to be played is now in the hands of the organization Democracy Now. The group contacted Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Conway to clarify the connection between the Pentagon and Idema. "We did not employ, sanction or sponsor Mr Idema," he told the group. While Conway claimed that the relationship between Idema and the Pentagon was largely one-sided, lawyers for Idema have released a video that appears to show Idema making arrangements with a Pentagon official about handing over a suspected terrorist he had caught. Democracy Now asked Conway about this, and he confirmed that Idema had indeed helped the Pentagon capture a suspected terrorist. But he again denied any formal relationship between Idema and the Pentagon. The Pentagon was clearly anxious to protect both Boykin and his boss, Cambone. As Seymour Hersh wrote in his article "The Gray Zone" in The New Yorker in May, Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, in essence because he had little experience in running intelligence programs; instead, he was known for his closeness to Rumsfeld. In 1998, Cambone had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. Cambone's name came up prominently during the Abu Ghraib investigations. He was recorded as saying that Boykin had briefed him on a report, which was prepared by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, on ways to improve intelligence-gathering at Abu Ghraib, that said Military Police (MPs) should help set conditions for the "successful exploitation" of detainees. Cambone went on to say that neither he, Miller, nor Boykin thought the report was "tantamount" to asking MPs to engage in abusive behavior. Boykin, for his part, is a former commander of Delta Force. He goes way back to the aborted attempt to free American hostages in Iran under president Jimmy Carter, which sank Carter's re-election campaign in 1980. He was part of the commando unit that failed in the attempt to rescue the hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran. Boykin's fangs show Boykin was also involved in Somalia, and a variety of hot spots around the world, including the first Gulf War in 1991. He is one of the most experienced special-operations commanders in the US military. It is not unlikely that he knows Idema at a personal, as well as at a professional, level. More than his background as a man in uniform, what has drawn attention to Boykin is his virulent Christian fundamentalist views targeted against Islam. On the record, he has said that terrorists are trying to destroy the US because it is a Christian nation. He told a Muslim warlord that his own god was a real god, and the Muslim warlord's was an idol. Rumsfeld, Boykin's boss, defended him, saying the comments were made in a "private capacity". He also praised Boykin's "outstanding record", which spans 30 years in the US Army's Delta Force, Special Forces and the CIA. There are many who agree that Boykin should have been removed from his post after his religious views came to light last fall. "I'm amazed, given that we have such horrible press overseas and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars for propaganda, that President [George W] Bush would keep somebody who is definitely anti-Muslim and who possibly is in charge of interrogations," said Yvonne Haddad, a professor at Georgetown University. In the chain of command, Boykin ranks above military intelligence officers in Iraq, some of whom have been implicated in the prison abuse scandal. His name briefly surfaced at a Senate hearing when discussion turned to a report that recommended that Military Police work closely with military intelligence officers in getting information from detainees that could be used to fight the anti-American insurgency. MPs should be "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful interrogation and exploitation" of prisoners, the report said. With the help of his "protectors", Boykin weathered the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse charges. And now the Idema case has been dispensed with. For the time being, Boykin is in the clear. As for Idema, there is no reason to shed crocodile tears. He will continue to function in the shadows, and will have no difficulty in understanding why Boykin cut him loose. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: s.gif Type: image/gif Size: 43 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 05:11:59 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 05:11:59 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] jonathan "jack" idema Message-ID: US admits 'bounty hunter' contact The US Department of Defense has admitted having contact with a former US soldier, Jonathan Idema, charged in Afghanistan with torturing civilians. But it says it rejected Mr Idema's offer to work together in capturing terror suspects in Afghanistan. Mr Idema - who was arrested by Afghan security agents in July - says his operation was approved by the US. He and two other US citizens are being tried for torture, kidnapping and running a private jail in Kabul. When Jonathan Idema, also known as Jack, first appeared in court in Kabul last month, he was asked to prove his claims to have had links with the US Department of Defense. One name he mentioned was Heather Anderson, the Pentagon's Acting Director of Security, who answers to the chief official responsible for intelligence matters in the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary. Mr Idema said Ms Anderson had applauded their work in Afghanistan and had wanted them to go on contract. Until now, the Department of Defense has refused to acknowledge any contacts at all between itself and the former US soldier, who it has described as an unauthorised freelancer. But a Pentagon official has now told the BBC that Mr Idema spoke to Ms Anderson by phone earlier this year. After doing some checking on Mr Idema, the official said, she then called him back. But Ms Anderson had turned down what she said was Mr Idema's request to be taken on by the Pentagon to work in Afghanistan. That was not the end of the matter. The official said Mr Idema continued to contact the Pentagon by phone, fax and email, "trying to establish a relationship". Jack Idema's US-based lawyer, John Tiffany, has rejected the Pentagon's version of events, describing them as completely false. If they had rebuffed him, he asked, why did they keep taking his phone calls? On the one hand, the Pentagon's admission could be seen as another concession to Mr Idema's story. On the other hand, it proves nothing more than that some telephone conversations took place. The US military has already admitted receiving a detainee from Mr Idema, although this man was later released. Mr Idema and two other Americans deny the charges of torture and kidnapping. If found guilty, they face up to 20 years in jail. During the his trial, Mr Idema has alleged that hundreds of videos, photos and documents were removed by FBI officers after his arrest in Kabul. He said the documents would prove that "while we were not in the United States army, we were working for the United States army". author: Andrew North news service: BBC url: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/360103... date: 2004-09-05 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: dot_clear.gif Type: image/gif Size: 49 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 05:19:45 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 05:19:45 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] jonathan "jack" idema Message-ID: Saturday, August 21, 2004 <> Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer: EMBASSY LETTER OPENED DOORS FOR IDEMA By Greg Barnes Staff writer "Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema got into Afghanistan in 2001 after an official at the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan wrote a letter identifying him as a contractor with the Department of Defense. Three years later, Idema stands accused of running an illegal jail in what has been termed a freelance search for terrorists. The U.S. government says it did not sponsor or employ him. A hearing in Idema's case is expected to resume in Kabul on Monday. Idema, Ed Caraballo of New York and Brent Bennett of Fayetteville are accused of kidnapping and torturing Afghan citizens in their makeshift jail. They could face 15 to 20 years in an Afghan prison. "Idema, a former Green Beret from Fayetteville, has said he tortured no one. He maintains he was only trying to elicit information from suspected terrorists using methods he learned in the Special Forces. The American and Afghan governments, he says, knew what he was doing and supported him. "The U.S. government has not explained why Idema had a letter from the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan. The letter, dated Nov. 2, 2001, asks Uzbekistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for help in issuing visas to Idema, Gary Scurka and Greg Long. It identifies the three men as Defense Department contractors. "Long is a member of the humanitarian aid organization Partners International Foundation. Idema and Scurka, a freelance TV producer, have known each other for years. Scurka and Caraballo have been working on a documentary about Idema's life. "According to sources familiar with Idema's work in Afghanistan, he joined with Partners International Foundation at the same time that Scurka got a job through National Geographic TV to produce a documentary on humanitarian aid work in Afghanistan. "Those sources think Idema and Scurka wanted to continue working on their own documentary on Idema. "A memo signed by Timothy Kelly, president of National Geographic TV, says Scurka would be going to Afghanistan as part of a humanitarian aid group known as KnightsBridge International. KnightsBridge's leader, Ed Artis, would be working with Idema, the memo said. "Artis, who is being sued by Idema, would not comment for publication. Others agreed to talk and provided documents to The Fayetteville Observer on the condition that they not be identified. They said they feared that Idema would retaliate, either physically or through lawsuits. Idema has sued dozens of people over the years...." [more] posted by Major Barbara | 10:29 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <> AP: AMERICAN SAYS HE WAS ON BIN LADEN'S By PAUL HAVEN "KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An American on trial for allegedly torturing Afghan terror suspects in a private jail claimed Saturday in his first interview from custody that he was hot on the heels of Osama bin Laden and other militant leaders when he was arrested on July 5. "Jonathan Idema told The Associated Press he had official sanction from Afghans and Americans to hunt down terrorists and said he has been prevented from showing the evidence in court. Prosecutors say Idema was waging a private war, and he faces up to 20 years in a crumbling Afghan prison if convicted. ""We would have had (renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin) Hekmatyar in 14 days or less. We would have had bin Laden in less than 30 days" had he and his team not been arrested, said Idema, a colorful former U.S. Army soldier who spent three years in jail in the 1980s for allegedly bilking 60 companies out of more than $200,000 in goods. "Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Idema came to Afghanistan and was featured in several books about the war and the search for bin Laden. He has also worked with several western TV networks. He said he came to Afghanistan again earlier this year because he felt U.S. anti-terror efforts were failing. "At least four Afghan intelligence officials sat in on the 75-minute interview in a sparsely decorated room on the top floor of a building at the National Security Directorate - Afghanistan's chief intelligence agency. "Though none interceded, Idema made frequent references to not being able to speak freely in their presence. He claimed he was badly beaten repeatedly by his jailers, though he had no visible cuts or bruises. ""Everything I was accused of doing (to the Afghan prisoners) got done to me," said the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-native, sitting in a T-shirt, black pants and brown combat boots on a couch between two of the officials. He was not handcuffed. "As he has done during his trial in a Kabul court, he wore dark sunglasses throughout the interview and refused a request to be photographed. "Idema accused the FBI of orchestrating his arrest, saying the agency was trying to cover up its own incompetence in hunting for terrorists. "But the U.S. government has described Idema as a vigilante working on his own. An Afghan government spokesman told AP that Idema had met with two top Afghan politicians. But there was no confirmation his mission was approved by either U.S. or Afghan officials. "After initially denying any knowledge of Idema's activities, the U.S. military announced in July that it had received a prisoner from the American and held him for more than a month at Bagram Air Base before deciding that he was not the man Idema said he was. A military spokesman said the military did not realize Idema was working on his own at the time...." [more] posted by Major Barbara | 5:15 PM FBI ACCUSED OF CONCEALING LINK TO MERCENARY JAILER IN AFGHANISTAN Declan Walsh and Kitty Logan in Kabul The Guardian "An American mercenary accused of kidnapping and torturing terror suspects in Afghanistan told a court in Kabul yesterday that the FBI was withholding hundreds of papers, photographs and videotapes showing that he was employed by the agency, as well as by the CIA and the US military. "The American government denies all links with the former special forces soldier, Jonathan "Jack" Idema, a convicted fraudster, but has agreed to return the controversial documents, the court hearing was told. "The case against Mr Idema was adjourned for a week to allow him to examine the documents and prove his alleged links with the US government. "Mr Idema, a 48-year-old former green beret, and his fellow Americans, Edward Caraballo and Brett Bennett, were arrested last month after police found a makeshift jail inside their Kabul house. Detainees claimed they had been held for days, doused in scalding water or hung from the ceiling by their feet. "The three men were charged with hostage-taking, torturing eight people and entering Afghanistan illegally. "If found guilty they face up to 20 years in jail. "They made their second court appearance yesterday, alongside four Afghans who are accused of helping them. The hearing was a confused affair, marred by emotional outbursts from Mr Idema, rebukes from the presiding judge, Abdul Bakhtari, and poor translation. "Mr Idema, who wore dark glasses and a combat uniform decorated with US flags, conducted his own defence. Turning to the press gallery, he proclaimed the trial a sham. "This is a political trial, driven by unusual political motives," he called out to the cameras. "He complained that his indictment had not even been translated into English, and said both he and his co-defendants had been beaten and tortured in police custody. "Mr Idema admitted that he had detained suspects, but said he had used "very standard" interrogation techniques. "No one was hung upside down; there were no beatings," he said. The case, which could prove embarrassing to the US military, has highlighted the murky underworld of armed western mercenaries in Afghanistan. "Some work in the lucrative private security business; others come in search of the $50m (?27m) bounty on the heads of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership. "Mr Idema's source of employment remains unclear. He was discharged from the US army in 1983 with the rank of captain and arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 after having served three years in an American prison for wire fraud. "In Afghanistan, Mr Idema sometimes worked closely with the international media, selling a videotape to the US network CBS that purported to show an al-Qaida training camp. The tape was broadcast in January 2002. "But he said his main objective was to hunt for the "bad guys" in collaboration with the US army, through links that reached as high as the office of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld...." [more] posted by Major Barbara | 8:42 AM Monday, August 16, 2004 <> AP: N.C. VIGILANTE SUSPECTS DENY AFGHAN PRISONER TORTURE By STEPHEN GRAHAM Associated Press Writer "KABUL, Afghanistan - Three American counterterrorism vigilantes on trial for allegedly running a private jail in Afghanistan denied Monday that they tortured prisoners and won a week's recess to bolster their defense with documents returned by the FBI. "The group's leader, Jonathan Idema of Fayetteville, N.C., had accused authorities of withholding hundreds of documents, photos and videos he claimed will prove his group was working with the knowledge of the CIA, FBI and U.S. Department of Defense. "Idema, Brett Bennett and Edward Caraballo were arrested when Afghan security forces raided their makeshift jail in a house in Kabul on July 5. They face charges including hostage-taking and "mental and physical torture," which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The prosecutor has said Caraballo, 35, of New York, and Bennett, 28, also reportedly of Fayetteville, appeared to be journalists. "In the trio's second court appearance, along with four Afghans accused of helping them, Idema said that U.S. and Afghan officials were conspiring against him and that he could not defend himself properly because he received no translation of the indictment or laws on which he's being charged. ""We don't even know what the law says," said Idema. "Presiding Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtyari accused Idema, who is conducting his own defense, of failing to respond to the charges. "You just want to waste time. You understand perfectly," he said. "Idema said Afghan intelligence agents had confiscated some 200 videotapes, 500 pages of documents and more than 800 photos and given them to U.S. authorities. He claimed these materials are key to the defense because they give details of the interrogations of prisoners and prove the defendants were operating with the knowledge of U.S. military and law enforcers...." [more] * * * WaPost: TRIAL ON PRIVATE PRISON IN AFGHANISTAN IS UNDERWAY American Accused of Running Jail Says the Operation Had Tacit Approval >From U.S. Authorities By Pamela Constable Washington Post Foreign Service "KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 16 -- Jonathan Keith Idema, the American accused of running a free-lance anti-terror operation and private prison in Afghanistan, testified in court Monday that he could prove U.S. and Afghan authorities were fully aware of his actions and accused the FBI of confiscating evidence that would support his claim. "Often interrupting the judge and laughing in apparent disgust at the proceedings, Idema said FBI agents in Kabul had seized hundreds of documents, photographs and videotapes from his base here that showed "constant contacts" between him and U.S. military and intelligence officials this spring and summer. "They knew every single thing we did, every single day," he said. "Idema said FBI agents had questioned several Afghans after he took them prisoner and confirmed that they knew of a plot to kill two Afghan Cabinet ministers. He also read from a printed e-mail about his operations, which he said had been sent to him from the office of the multinational peacekeeping forces here. "U.S. military and intelligence officials here have repeatedly denied having any affiliation with Idema, although they acknowledge having received one prisoner from him. International peacekeeping officials in Kabul say they cooperated with him briefly until learning he was an impostor. "Idema and two American associates, along with four of their Afghan employees, have been charged with entering the country illegally, operating an illegal jail, detaining and imprisoning eight Afghan citizens, kidnapping and torture. All have been in custody since their arrest July 4. If convicted, they could face 20 years in Afghan prisons. "In listing the charges Monday, the prosecutor said police had found "torture equipment, bloody clothing, handcuffs, blindfolds and stored water" when they raided a building used by Idema to hold his prisoners. He said Idema's detainees had all proven to be "innocent Afghan citizens." "Although Idema did not deny holding a group of Afghans prisoner, he adamantly denied having tortured them, saying, "I assure this court, no one was burned with cigarettes, no one was hung upside down, no one was beaten, no one was in body bags . . . none of this happened." "Noting that his operations this spring coincided with the widening scandal over abuse by U.S. military guards and interrogators at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, he said, "everyone was very concerned about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. . . . W were very careful to use standard interrogation techniques."..." [more] posted by Major Barbara | 8:47 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 05:32:14 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 05:32:14 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] jack idema Message-ID: Outsourcing War Crimes Ted Rall Wed Jul 21, 2004 -- SAN DIEGO--It was late fall 2001, and the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan was nearly complete. A passel of foreign war correspondents milled about the lobby of the Hotel Tajikistan, waiting for the Tajik foreign ministry to issue permission papers we needed to pass the checkpoints between Dushanbe and the Afghan border, so we could go on to cover the siege of Kunduz. I popped into the Soviet-vintage hotel's business center to check my email. That's when I met Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema, the former Special Forces soldier charged on July 5 along with two other Americans for kidnapping and torturing Afghans as part of an unauthorized, vigilante anti-Taliban operation run out of a private home in Kabul. "U.S. citizen Jonathan K. Idema has allegedly represented himself as an American government and/or military official," the U.S. military said in a statement. "The public should be aware that Idema does not represent the American government and we do not employ him." That's their current story, anyway. Agents of the National Security Directorate, Afghanistan's new intelligence agency, say they found eight starved Afghan detainees--three of them hanging by their feet--in Idema's rented house in central Kabul, along with a few AK-47 rifles and blood-soaked clothes. None of Idema's prisoners were working against the Karzai regime, so the NSD plans to release them. Idema, say officials, was probably hoping to torture his victims into telling him the location of Osama bin Laden so he could collect a $25 million bounty. Idema was nice at first, chatting me up with jittery intensity as he alternately identified himself as belonging to--or, more accurately, implying identification with--the CIA and U.S. Special Forces. Griping about a Pentagon ban against supplying Northern Alliance forces with medical supplies, Idema slipped me a computer disc containing photos of gruesome wounds that had gone untreated because of the inhumane policy. He asked me to pitch a piece on the subject to my editors at The Village Voice, but with a caveat: "Don't publish those photos before talking to me first." I promised that I wouldn't. "If you do," he added, "you will die in great pain." He went on at length about the special shadowy brotherhood of Green Berets past and present, and described how anyone who crossed them would be marked for death. I would never have broken my pledge, but I didn't need a story that badly. I soon left for Afghanistan; so, eventually, did Idema. "Kabul is brimming with plainclothes agents and former military types working for private security firms," notes The New York Times. "United States Special Forces troops also move around unhindered in unmarked cars, sometimes looking like Afghans in Afghan clothes and beards, and sometimes more recognizable as Americans, in uniforms, baseball caps and sunglasses." This odd mix of the official and unofficial, public and private, was even more pronounced during November and December 2001. You'd see them speeding around in SUVs with tinted windows and sipping tea with Afghan warlords and commanders, barrel-chested men in their thirties and forties with short-cropped hair and accents from the South and Midwest. Ask them who they were or what they were up to and you'd get a broad, insolent grin. "Just visiting," one such goon replied. "Didn't you hear? Afghanistan's open for tourism!" He carried enough guns and ammo to take out a large Colorado high school. Who were these guys? Most journalists assumed that these non-uniformed soldiers were just what they wanted us to believe: U.S.-government employed covert operatives. Why not? Until the fall of Kabul, the uniformed U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was virtually nil. Burly men with big guns ran the war. Besides, Afghanistan is a dangerous, unpleasant and expensive place to live. No one would put in time there without good reason. But there was no reliable way to know for certain. Roughly a hundred six-man Special Forces commando units authorized to wear local garb, ignore standard rules of engagement and otherwise apply "unorthodox tactics" worked alongside a new CIA "Special Activities Division" composed of about 150 retired fighters, pilots and specialists. These 800 men, not officially employed by the Pentagon, spearheaded the U.S. war against the Taliban, coordinating air strikes, bribing Northern Alliance warlords, and allegedly supervising the massacre of thousands of Taliban POWs. Afghanistan was America's first fully privatized war. Jack Idema, reportedly retired from the Special Forces in 1992, fought alongside the Northern Alliance in 2001. He had enough money to buy goods and services at inflated war zone prices, not to mention references in the U.S. military--and a lot of chutzpah. He convinced Afghan cops to help him conduct raids. On three occasions he even got NATO's ISAF peacekeeping force to check buildings for mines and bombs. Admitted a duped NATO spokesman: "ISAF personnel believed that [Idema] was what he purported to be, which was a Special Operations agency and therefore they believed they were providing legitimate support to a legitimate security agency." Beginning in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, the Bush Administration has assigned jobs previously carried out by the traditional uniformed military to private contractors, covert intelligence officers and retired commandos. The idea is "plausible deniability"; should a character like Idema go too far, the government disavows his crimes as the acts of a renegade. Only Idema and the Pentagon will ever know the truth about his status. Unprecedented power has been placed in the hands of Soldier of Fortune types, to guys who carry grenades but not IDs and don't even bother to make up phony names. At Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, such men relied upon their anonymity--the prison's commanding general says that they refused to identify themselves to her--to deflect blame for their torture and rape of Iraqi inmates onto such minions as Private Lynndie England. In Kabul, Jack Idema allegedly took advantage of the blurred line between private and public soldiering to run his private war on terror. You don't need to be a four-star general to see that nameless soldiers in civilian clothes aren't America's ideal ambassadors, or that a lack of accountability invariably leads to confusion and rampant abuse. Considering the Bush Administration's disdain for law and order, maybe that's the point. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 11:49:43 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 11:49:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] And Then My Cavity Miraculously Healed Itself Message-ID: <20041206194943.29957.qmail@web13607.mail.yahoo.com> Some See Jesus In Dental X-Ray http://www.nbc4i.com/news/3968497/detail.html ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 14:49:05 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 14:49:05 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] (WashingtonPost) In the Kill Zone: The Unnecessary Death of Pat Tillman Message-ID: <20041206224905.44398.qmail@web13609.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120604Y.shtml Communication breakdown, split platoon among the factors contributing to 'friendly fire' It ended on a stony ridge in fading light. Spec. Pat Tillman lay dying behind a boulder. A young fellow U.S. Army Ranger stretched prone beside him, praying quietly as tracer bullets poured in. "Cease fire! Friendlies!" Tillman cried out. Smoke drifted from a signal grenade Tillman had detonated minutes before in a desperate bid to show his platoon members they were shooting the wrong men. The firing had stopped. Tillman had stood up, chattering in relief. Then the machine gun bursts erupted again. "I could hear the pain in his voice," recalled the young Ranger days later to Army investigators. Tillman kept calling out that he was a friendly, and he shouted, "I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" His comrade recalled: "He said this over and over again until he stopped." Myths shaped Pat Tillman's reputation, and mystery shrouded ........... Continues http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120604Y.shtml ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! ? Try it today! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 14:51:57 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 14:51:57 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Scientists Make Phone That Turns Into a Sunflower Message-ID: <20041206225158.405.qmail@web13608.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=7006679&src=eDialog/GetContent§ion=news Scientists Make Phone That Turns Into a Sunflower AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Scientists said on Monday they have come up with a cell phone cover that will grow into a sunflower when thrown away. Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development, at the request of U.S.-based mobile phone maker Motorola, has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded. Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste. "It's a totally biodegradable and non-toxic plastic," said Pvaxx spokesman Peter Morris. "This is the first product that we've made public. We're working with blue chip companies and will introduce several products next year," he said, adding it would be used in electronics, horticulture, ammunition and household cleaning. The company's new plastic, which was created over the past five years but was in development for longer, can be rigid or flexible in shape. Some 650 million mobile phones will be sold this year, and most of them will be thrown away within two years, burdening the environment with plastics, heavy metals and chemicals. A biodegradable cover can offer some relief for nature, Warwick University said. Motorola said it had not yet decided if it would introduce a model built with the new plastic, and that it would take until at least the second quarter of 2005 to get a commercial product. "(To improve) the quality (of the plastic) is something we're working on," said Motorola project manager Peter Shead, adding the new plastic may be used in snap-on covers first. Many young consumers buy cheap and interchangeable plastic covers to personalize their standard phone. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 19:19:45 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 19:19:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Arson suspected as fires destroy homes near Washington, D.C. Message-ID: <20041207031945.65488.qmail@web13621.mail.yahoo.com> " Taylor refused to say what led investigators to conclude it was arson. " ------------------------------------------------------- Hmmmmmmm being a reporter, you would think they could reach their own conclusion. I guess this is just further evidence that the media really is spoon-fed. IBB http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-12-06-dc-arson_x.htm Arson suspected as fires destroy homes near Washington, D.C. INDIAN HEAD, Md. (AP) ? More than a dozen expensive homes under construction were burned down early Monday in a suburban Washington housing development that had been criticized by environmentalists because it is next to a nature preserve, officials said. An FBI agent said the fires may have been set by environmental extremists. A dozen homes were destroyed and 29 others damaged near the state's Mattawoman Natural Environment Area. No injuries were reported. The damage was estimated at at least $10 million. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Faron Taylor, a deputy state fire marshal, said investigators believe fires were set in at least four of the homes, which were priced at $400,000 to $500,000. Taylor refused to say what led investigators to conclude it was arson. "At this point, our knowledge of the methodology is shared by us and the perpetrator, and we don't want to share that with anyone else," Taylor said. A Sierra Club report had called the development "quintessential sprawl" because it is far from existing infrastructure and "threatens a fragile wetland and important historical sites near the Chesapeake Bay." After the fires, the Sierra Club issued a statement saying it "strongly condemns all acts of violence in the name of the environment." FBI spokesman Barry Maddox said FBI agents were on the scene and would investigate whether the fires were an act of ecoterrorism. "Anything and everything will be considered, but we're not labeling this anything other than suspicious fires," Maddox said. The blazes were reported before 5 a.m., drawing firefighters from four counties to the subdivision about 25 miles south of the nation's capital. The houses, on lots of about a quarter-acre each, were spread across a 10-acre area, Taylor said. "This was a very, very affluent neighborhood under construction," Taylor said. Taylor said the fire would be investigated by agents from the Maryland fire marshal's office and the federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is routinely brought in to help investigate large fires. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 19:29:57 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 19:29:57 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Most U.S. cities have buildings with echoes of Islamic design Message-ID: <20041207032958.1832.qmail@web13603.mail.yahoo.com> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/28/INGMR9SEUB1.DTL Architectural Mecca Building design flavored by Islam Most U.S. cities have buildings with echoes of Islamic design Jonathan Curiel, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, November 28, 2004 In 1961, a year before designing the World Trade Center towers, American architect Minoru Yamasaki completed a much smaller project that would influence the look of his new creation in New York City. The project was 6,000 miles away, in a country Yamasaki would visit many times over the next decade, Saudi Arabia. It's clear from the layout of the World Trade Center that Yamasaki incorporated aspects of Islamic design into the towers. This pattern was most visible at the base of the buildings, which were ringed by pointed arches resembling those found in mosques and on Muslim prayer rugs. The plaza fronting the towers paid homage to Mecca, Islam's holiest place, by replicating that city's courtyard layout, according to architect Laurie Kerr, who has studied Yamasaki's work. Yamasaki himself described the trade center plaza, which featured a circular fountain and places to sit, as a mecca -- "an oasis, a paved garden where people can spend a few moments to relieve the tensions and monotonies of the usual working day." For 29 years -- from the time the first World Trade Center tower was completed in 1972 to Sept. 11, 2001, when two hijacked planes leveled the buildings -- there was little general awareness that New York's tallest and most visible towers reflected Yamasaki's interest in Islamic architecture. No plaque pointed out this connection. No literature extolled it. Yamasaki himself didn't publicize it, even though he dropped plenty of hints in his 1979 autobiography, "A Life in Architecture," in which he expressed his admiration for Islamic arches and included photos of all his important projects -- photos that reveal a pattern of Islamic-inspired design. "The idea of a pointed, ribbed arch was beautifully replicated in the World Trade Center," says Nezar AlSayyad, a UC Berkeley architecture professor who worked with Yamasaki for two years on another project. "It's ironic it was used in the World Trade Center, which is then understood by the hijackers as a symbol of Western capitalism." Although the trade center was perhaps the most prominent example of Islamic-influenced architecture in the United States, there are other notable examples in every major American city. In San Francisco, the Alcazar Theatre is an almost gaudy monument to Muslim architecture. In Berkeley, the Berkeley City Club Hotel designed by Julia Morgan has an obvious Moorish influence. And scholars say San Rafael's Marin County Civic Center -- with its blue, mosque-like dome and towering antenna, which resembles an ancient minaret -- reflects Persian and Islamic sensibilities. Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most noteworthy architect, designed the civic center in the late 1950s after going to Baghdad for a project commissioned by Iraq's ruler, King Faisal II. Wright, who also visited Iran, had a lifelong interest in Islamic architecture and a deep admiration for Persian aesthetics. He made no secret of this, but 40 years after his death, this side of Wright has been almost lost in the United States' collective memory of him. In fact, the history of Islamic-influenced architecture in the United States hasn't been given its due for many years. It dates back at least to the late 19th century -- longer if Moorish architecture (a blend of Islamic and Spanish) is considered. Moorish buildings have existed in the United States since before the 18th century, primarily in the Southwest, where former Spanish citizens brought with them an architectural sense influenced by years of Muslim rule in Spain. Southwestern buildings were often made out of adobe, a sun-dried brick that takes its name from the Arabic word for brick, al-toba. "American architecture that's been influenced by Islamic architecture goes back much before the World Trade Center," says Mina Marefat, an architecture scholar at the Library of Congress who directs the institution's Islamic Cities Project and who has taught at MIT, Johns Hopkins and Wesleyan University. "It goes back to the time when you had authentic adobe architecture in New Mexico, Texas and California. That architecture comes directly from the Moorish-Spanish Muslims in Spain. The indigenous housing (in the Southwest) was almost identical to the indigenous housing of the Middle East and the Islamic world." Islamic architecture is, of course, rooted in Islamic traditions, but the term itself refers to a style of building and design that, as used in the West, has no religious significance. Yamasaki, Wright and other architects were simply carrying out a long tradition of cross-cultural give-and-take, in which architects look to established traditions in other countries for inspiration. Architects in the Muslim world do it, too, as illustrated in the oldest surviving example of Islamic architecture -- the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Built in 692, the building took its cues from Byzantine architecture (hence its wall mosaics and hexagonal shape), but it also established a new visual identity for Muslims with its emphasis on floral geometric patterns, Koranic inscriptions and absence of any human likeness. Although floral designs were used by Greeks and Romans long before the advent of Islam, Muslims took the art form to a new level, just as they reinvented Byzantine arches and domes to produce their own style of architecture. Pointed arches became one of the trademarks of Muslim architecture and design, as symbolized by the mihrab, the mosque prayer niche that faces Mecca. Pointed arches and elaborate domes can be seen in major Muslim buildings around the world, including the Taj Mahal in Agra, India; the Sultan Ahmet mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque) in Istanbul, Turkey; and the turquoise arabesques of the celebrated Shah Mosque in Esfahan, Iran. Islamic architecture has influenced European culture even more than it has American culture, as is evident in Venice on Italy's Adriatic coast. In her book, "Venice & the East," scholar Deborah Howard, a professor of architectural history at the University of Cambridge, points out that Venetian builders in the 12th through 15th centuries borrowed heavily from Muslim architecture. Arch styles, heightened domes, relief works on walls, even staircase patterns were taken directly from the Muslim world, which had a flourishing commercial relationship with Venice. Today, major buildings in Venice, including the Palazzo Ducale, or Doges' Palace, built in the 1460s, testify to this influence. More modern examples can be seen in the works of Antonio Gaudi, the great Spanish architect who studied Islamic art and architecture and even incorporated its themes into Spanish church buildings, such as the school he built for a convent in Ejica, Spain. In the United States, some adaptations of Islamic architecture have bordered on the fantastical or the absurd. In 1917, when San Francisco architect T. Patterson Ross designed a Shriners' Temple at 650 Geary St. (it's now the Alcazar Theatre), he included traditional Islamic sayings on outside walls along with one in Arabic that reportedly read, "Great is Allah, and Great is Ross the Architect!" In the mid-1920s, developer Glen Curtiss bought land north of Miami and built an entire city of Moorish buildings. Under Curtiss' plan, nearly every building in Opa-locka, Fla., had a dome and minaret. It became known as "the Baghdad of the South" and "the Baghdad of Florida." Opa-locka still exists. It boasts of having the largest collection of Moorish architecture in the Western Hemisphere. Twenty of its buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places. Curtiss was inspired by his lifelong love of the book of Arab tales, "A Thousand and One Nights" (a book Wright also loved in childhood), as well as the popular 1924 silent film, "The Thief of Baghdad," which featured exotic film sets and starred Douglas Fairbanks as the robber who sneaks into the palace of a caliph and falls for a princess. Streets in Opa-locka include Ali Baba Avenue and Sharazad Boulevard. The 1920s saw a wave of Islamic-influenced architecture in the United States. Although some of these buildings were outrageous, there were also serious attempts to copy and understand Islamic art and architecture. In 1925, Princeton philosophy Professor Arthur Upham Pope, who would later write "Persian Architecture," came back from Iran and held a Philadelphia exhibit that featured re-creations of Muslim architecture, Marefat says. Marefat says Pope's embrace of Persian and Islamic themes inspired interest by a who's who of wealthy Americans, including banker Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller and Doris Duke, who recreated a 17th century Esfahan palace in Honolulu in 1936. Today, it houses the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. The 1950s and early '60s saw another wave of Islamic-inspired architecture in the United States, thanks to such figures as Wright, Yamasaki and Edward Durrell Stone who -- in the post-World War II United States -- not only looked to the East but traveled there for work. In 1953, Stone went to India, where, inspired by the Taj Mahal, he designed the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. When Stone returned to the United States, he infused all his buildings with aspects of Mughal and Muslim architecture, Kerr says, citing New York's 2 Columbus Circle, which features a series of curved arches, and Washington's Kennedy Center, whose colonnades are odes to Islamic architecture, she says. Yamasaki also went to New Delhi, where he designed a U.S. pavilion for the world's agricultural fair in 1959. (Starting in 1953, the State Department encouraged American architects doing U.S.-sponsored work overseas to "give serious study" to the host country's culture and architecture, a fact Kerr found in researching Yamasaki's and Stone's work.) Featured in his book "A Life in Architecture," Yamasaki's pavilion emphasized a series of shimmering mosque-like domes that were raised above its walkways. His subsequent work in Saudi Arabia, where his projects included the 1961 airport terminal in Dhahran and the 1982 Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency Headquarters in Riyadh, solidified his love of Muslim architecture. The Saudi government liked Yamasaki's interpretations of Muslim arches so much, AlSayyad says, that it called them Yamasaki arches and copied them in other Saudi projects, such as the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. The government also featured Yamasaki's Dhahran terminal on a Saudi bank note. It's in the context of all these projects that Yamasaki's World Trade Center fits in. The New York project wasn't an aberration but part of a 20- year pattern in which Yamasaki worked to integrate architecture from lands where Islam was prominent. After Sept. 11, a smattering of experts, including Kerr, pointed out the links between the World Trade Center and Muslim architecture, but Yamasaki's architecture firm, Minoru Yamasaki Associates, has been reluctant to discuss the connections and did not return calls for this story. (Yamasaki died in 1986.) Kerr and other experts say that, in a post-Sept. 11 environment where the word "Islam" has been closely associated with terrorism, some architects are reluctant to admit that their buildings have been influenced by Islamic architecture. Vic Roberts, the publisher of blank personal journals whose covers feature stunning examples of Islamic architecture, faced reservations when he discussed the project with bookstores and book reps in the United States. The series, "Islamic Tileworks," shows patterns of architecture from buildings in Esfahan, Casablanca, Samarkand and other famous Islamic cities. Since January, many thousands have been sold to people taken by their beautiful geometric forms. "A lot of people in America wanted me to change the name of it," says Roberts, whose company, Hartley & Marks Publishers, is based in Vancouver, B.C. "But I think that people have to recognize that Islamic architecture has a beautiful history. "In publishing it, we want people to reflect on their simple stereotypes. People see the beauty, then read the story (of that architecture) on the inside back cover. These books are about beauty, and they're about history." The history of Islamic architecture will always be intertwined with the United States, Europe and other continents, says Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan professor of Islamic architecture at MIT. Even during the Crusades, he says, Europeans who went to the Holy Land were changed by what they saw in Egypt, Syria and other countries. Gothic architecture may even stem from Crusaders who returned from the Middle East and applied the mathematical and architectural knowledge they learned there. It works in reverse, too, with architects in Islamic countries inspired by what they see or read about in non-Muslim countries. "Cultures have constantly mixed and seen one another, either in war or peace," Rabbat says. "It used to be that people thought of the world in terms of purely, independently developed cultures each having its own language, whether it's culinary, visual, literary, architectural. "But there are those of us who subscribe to the multicultural method, where we no longer believe in the notion of a purity and insularity of a cultural development. ... The influence is continuous, mutual and never ceases. " E-mail Jonathan Curiel at jcuriel at sfchronicle.com . ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! ? Try it today! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 20:06:16 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 20:06:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] This Report Blows the Lid Off of E-Voting Manipulation in South Florida Message-ID: <20041207040616.68221.qmail@web13604.mail.yahoo.com> This Report Blows the Lid Off of E-Voting Manipulation in South Florida Brad 06 Dec 2004 WHISTLEBLOWER AFFIDAVIT 12/6/2004 @ 10:57am PT... WHISTLEBLOWER AFFIDAVIT: Programmer Built Vote Rigging Prototype at Republican Congressman's Request! CLAIM: Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) Asked Company to Create E-Vote Fraud Software! *** A BRAD BLOG EXCLUSIVE! PLEASE CREDIT! *** In stunning revelations set to rock the vote from Tallahassee to Capitol Hill -- and perhaps even a bit further up Pennsylvania Avenue -- a Florida computer programmer has now made remarkable claims in a detailed sworn affidavit, signed this morning and obtained exclusively by The BRAD BLOG! - Affidavit in .PDF format - (Generously hosted by Raw Story!) The programmer claims that he designed and built a "vote rigging" software program at the behest of then Florida Congressman, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida's 24th Congressional District. Clint Curtis, 46, claims that he built the software for Feeney in 2000 while working at a sofware design and engineering company in Oviedo, Florida (Feeney's home district). Curtis, in his affidavit, says that as technical advisor and programmer at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) he was present at company meetings where Feeney was present "on at least a dozen occasions". Feeney, who had run in 1994 as Jeb Bush's running-mate in his initial unsuccessful bid for Florida Governor, was serving as both corporate counsel and registered lobbyist for YEI during the period that Curtis worked at the company. Feeney was also concurrently serving as a Florida state congressman while performing those services for YEI. Feeney would eventually become Speaker of the Florida House before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002. He is now a member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. At an October 2000 meeting with Feeney, according to the affidavit and BRAD BLOG interviews with Curtis over the past three days, Feeney inquired whether the company could build a "vote fraud software prototype". At least three YEI employees are said to have been present at that meeting; Curtis, company owner, Mrs. Li Woan Yang, and her executive secretary, Mike Cohen. Two other YEI employees may have come in and out at different points of the meeting according to Curtis. Curtis says that Feeney "was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program." "He detailed, in his own words, that; (a) the program needed to be touch-screen capable (b) the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment (c) the programming to accomplish this needed to stay hidden even if the source code was inspected." Though there was no problem with the first two requirements, Curtis explained to the Congressman that it would be "virtually impossible to hide such code written to change the voting results if anyone is able to review the uncompiled source code" Nonetheless, he was asked at the meeting by Mrs. Yang to build the prototype anyway. Curtis, "a life-long Republican" at the time, claims that it was his initial belief that Feeney's interest was in trying to stop Democrats from using "such a program to steal an election". Curtis had assumed that Feeney, "wanted to be able to detect and prevent that if it occurred." Upon delivery of the software design and documentation on CD to Mrs. Yang, Curtis again explained to her that it would be impossible to hide routines created to manipulate the vote if anybody would be able to inspect the precompiled source code. Mrs. Yang then told him, "You don?t understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in South Florida." [emphasis in affidavit] Mrs. Yang then took the CD containing the software from Curtis, reportedly for later delivery to Feeney. In other meetings with Feeny prior to the 2000 elections, it became clear to Curtis that Feeney had plans to suppress the vote in strong Democratic precincts. In the affidavit, Curtis claims that in those meetings Feeney had "bragged that he had already implemented 'exclusion lists' to reduce the 'black vote'." Feeney also mentioned that "proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%." Curtis says that he submitted his resignation to YEI effective December 2000, but stayed on until they had found someone to replace him in February of 2001. He eventually became employed by the Florida Dept. of Transportation (FDOT) after leaving YEI. But the scandals didn't stop there. In May of 2001, while at FDOT, Curtis and another FDOT employee, Mavis Georgalis, discovered and then reported several allegations to the Inspector General at FDOT concerning over-billing by YEI -- who had been an FDOT contractor -- and software that was never delivered by the company. Allegations also included the employment of a suspected illegal alien, Mr. Hai Lin Nee, who worked as YEI's "quality control" manager. Both Curtis and Georgalis were reportedly harassed after filing their complaints about malfeasance at YEI and pressure mounted on the FDOT -- purportedly from the powerful Feeney who was still working with YEI -- to have them both fired. In November 2001, after Curtis filed his complaints at FDOT, both he and Georgalis' were subsequently sued by YEI "in retaliation" for their complaints against the company. The charge was "theft of intellectual property", which Curtis has catagorized as "ridiculous" in interviews, because the "intellectual property" in question was, in fact, software that FDOT had long ago paid YEI to develop for them. YEI was represented in the lawsuit by Congressman Feeney's law firm. When the two had sought help from FDOT in fighting YEI's suit against them, they were told that FDOT couldn't help them because FDOT had not been named in the suit. After several rounds of court battles, Georgalis was finally successful in having FDOT added to the suit as a third co-defendant. The suit was originally filed in Seminole County, but moved to Leon County upon the addition of FDOT. In April of 2002 -- on the very same day -- Curtis and Georgalis were both fired by FDOT without explanation. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported extensively in 2002 on the case. They reported at the time that Curtis had written to the Inspector General at FDOT to inquire why no investigation had yet been made into YEI. As well, Curtis had contacted the Florida Bar, since Feeney was a member, to inform them that "Feeney has used his position to promote the profits of Yang Enterprises, from whom he received compensation under the guise of lobbyist and attorney." According to The Orlando Sentinel in 2001, of 160 Florida congressmen, Feeney was the only known registered lobbyist. He would later be cleared of all ethics violations brought against him in the Florida house on these matters by the Ethics Committee which included four Republicans appointed to the committee by Feeney. Curtis was never interviewed by the Ethics Committee concerning his allegations. After Curtis and Georgalis were fired by FDOT, each attempted to file "Whistleblower Suits" in the state of Florida. Georgalis' suit was successful and FDOT was eventually ordered, after lengthy court battles, to reinstate her with full back-pay by the circuit court. Curtis' suit was not successful due to having missed the filing deadline for the suit. That suit, filed over three years ago, is still pending. The reason, explained Curtis, is that YEI has since avoided all defendants attempts to depose company employees in the case. By May of 2002, the FDOT had finally taken up the investigation into malfeasance by YEI. In one particularly chilling paragraph in the affidavit, Curtis explains what became of Raymond Lemme, the inspector at FDOT who was said to be pursing the allegations against YEI, Tom Feeney and the other reported matters: "[I]n June of 2003, he told me that he had tracked the corruption 'all the way to the top' and that the story would break in the next few weeks and I would be satisfied with the results. A few weeks later, on July 1st, Mr. Lemme was found dead with his arm slashed in a hotel room in Valdosta, Georgia." The death was ruled a suicide by the Valdosta Police. The BRAD BLOG has obtained and is currently reviewing many official documents related to Mr. Lemme's death. Mr. Hai Lin Nee, "the ilegal alien" who had worked at YEI and was reported by Curtis, was arrested in March of 2004 on espionage charges which included "shipping radar guidance system chips for Hellfire Anti-Tank Missiles to a company in Communist China." Curtis discussed in detail, during our interviews, Mr. Nee having placed "wiretapping modules" into software code created by the company. The secret "wiretapping modules", Curtis claims, were to download information from programs built by YEI for contractors, and then either copy or send that information via Email back to YEI. Such software, Curtis claims, was created for companies such as NASA with whom YEI held substantial contracts. According to both the Curtis affidavit and email dated November 22, 2004 obtained by The BRAD BLOG, YEI is currently under investigation by the FBI. That information was sent to Curtis after he had attempted on several occassions to notify law enforcement authorities of his seemingly remarkable story of espionage, possible vote tampering and other ethical concerns. In July of this year, in an email we've reviewed which purports to be from a current YEI employee whose name we are withholding, Curtis was sent the following message in regard to a book that the employee had learned Curtis was working on: They know about the book. You should not have sent it to a bush supporter. They are going crazy...like they weren't after you already. So I get to warn you AGAIN. They will do everything thwey [sic] can to keep it from getting published. They are also going to try to take you out again. Don't be alone. They specifically want to limit casualities to just you. As long as they can't catch you alone they won't touch you. You are such a loser........ Moi In what he describes as "an attempt to get this story out there", Curtis told part of the tale on a website, www.justaflyonthewall.com where he has changed the names of some of the specific parties involved. (e.g. "Wong" is substituted for "Yang" on the site) Additional charges by Curtis also include that databases and information were routinely sent by Mrs. Yang to her brother in China who, Yang had told Curtis on one occasion, had previously been deported for "being a spy". The BRAD BLOG has not yet been able to confirm the espionage charges concerning Mrs. Yang's brother. Curtis' affidavit is being turned over this afternoon to staffers at the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. An investigation into Curtis' story is pending. While we've been working on this story for several days in order to get it right, we had hoped to hold it a bit longer to confirm a few more of the details. As well, we had hoped to allow the Judiciary Committee and others time to comment before making this story widely available. However, as of late Sunday night, Curtis' story has been reported elsewhere on the Internet by Wayne Madsen. His detailed account references an older, very short affidavit that Curtis had made in regards to the information contained in a self-published book on some of these matters. While Madsen's article was independently researched and reported -- and offers some very good detail in relation to Curtis, YEI, FDOT and Feeney, much of which that we can confirm -- he then ties those stories to a much grander CIA/Bush family conspiracy. While we have looked somewhat cursorily over the last several weeks into some of the larger matters which Madsen discusses, and has been reporting on for some time, we cannot confirm any of those grander details as playing any part in this particular story. While his claims may be true, The BRAD BLOG has seen no evidence to support them as being related to the Curtis story at this time. Frankly, we find the information related in Curtis' sworn affidavit, and via our interviews with him and others directly related to his story to be rather stunning as is, and we will stand by our reporting of those matters at this time. Given the importance of the many allegations in his story if they are true -- and we have so far been unable to identify any major holes or discrepancies in his information -- we thought it necessary to release the full details contained in this sworn affidavit immediately so that Curtis' story and the explosive allegations contained therein could be more accurately assessed. DEVELOPING...HARD... Embedded hotlinks for this article available at: http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/945375.htm LATEST CCNWON HEADLINES: http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/index.cfm?d=6&m=12&y=2004 Yesterday's: http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/index.cfm?d=5&m=12&y=2004 MARC PARENT Political tags?such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth?are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. - Robert A Heinlein The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H.L. Mencken CRIMES AND CORRUPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! ? Get yours free! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 23:46:45 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 23:46:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] The FBI is investigating allegations that Republicans in Florida mounted a large-scale campaign to tamper with ballots Message-ID: <20041207074646.96315.qmail@web13621.mail.yahoo.com> Dead voters on rolls, other glitches found in 6 key states By Geoff Dougherty, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune staff reporter Sarah Frank contributed to this report from Washington December 4, 2004 Michel Pillet died in 2002, but his name lives on at the University of New Mexico. He created the school's graduate architecture program and directed it for years. Pillet's name lives on in another way too. He's still listed as a registered voter in New Mexico, even though election officials are required to purge the names of deceased voters. A Tribune analysis of voter records suggests that more than 5,000 dead people remained on the rolls on Election Day in New Mexico. The presidential election there was decided by 6,000 votes. And New Mexico is not alone. The Tribune's review of voter data there and in five other key states--Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota--found widespread flaws in the integrity of voter rolls. More than 181,000 dead people were listed on the rolls in the six swing states, despite efforts to clean up the country's voting system after the 2000 election. Thousands more voters were registered to vote in two places, which could have allowed them to cast more than one ballot. Further, more than 90,000 voters in Ohio cast ballots without a valid presidential choice. Either they decided not to choose a candidate, the machine failed to register their choice, or they mistakenly voted for more than one candidate. And the FBI is investigating allegations that Republicans in Florida mounted a large-scale campaign to tamper with ballots. Those developments come after an election that most observers agree was a vast improvement over the 2000 vote. Data on which voters cast ballots in the November election are not available in some key states as they await county compilations. So it's unclear whether any people registered in two places voted more than once. Likewise, it's impossible to tell whether ballots were cast in the names of the deceased voters on the rolls. But the number of voters who should have been removed from the rolls and were not is considered cause for concern, especially in states where the presidential election was decided by just a few thousand votes. "The problem of bloated registration rolls is a serious problem," said Dan Seligson, editor of electionline.org, a voting reform clearinghouse. Legislation passed after the 2000 election was designed to fix some of those problems by requiring states to maintain better registration data. But those requirements take effect in 2006. New Mexico health officials each month supply a list of recently deceased residents that Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron uses to scrub the voter rolls. But Pillet died in France and apparently never received a New Mexico death certificate, she said. `Fell through the cracks' "He fell through the cracks," said Vigil-Giron. Francis Walsh, a former assembly worker at Chicago's American Can Co., retired and moved to Iowa. He died there in June 2002, but remains a registered voter in Des Moines. The Tribune's analysis suggests 4,900 other Iowa voters have died but remain on the rolls. Bush won Iowa by 10,000 votes. Phyllis Peters, spokeswoman for the Iowa secretary of state's office, said workers there anticipated that many deceased Iowans would appear on the rolls. Peters said her agency conducts a monthly purge of voters whose death certificates have been filed with the state vital statistics agency. But of course some people die elsewhere, complicating the process. Data-entry errors can create problems too. On Walsh's voter information, he is listed as a female. But his death certificate said he was male, so computers did not remove him from the voter rolls, Peters said. Despite the number of questionable registrations and Bush's thin margin of victory, Peters said she is confident in the election's outcome. That's due mostly to the 10,000 local election workers looking for suspicious voters, she said. "We really believe there's a lot of integrity at the local precinct level," she said. Among the states, Florida led the way with 64,889 registered voters who were also listed in a database of Social Security Administration death claims, the Tribune analysis found. Next was Michigan, with 50,051. The problem of duplicate voter registrations spurred Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state and top election official, to request help from the FBI before the election in weeding out double-voters. "We believe that immediate and decisive action on the federal level is necessary to send a strong message that this type of illegal behavior and manipulation of the electoral franchise will not be tolerated," said Hood's letter, written Aug. 26. William Fisher moved from Florida to Ohio and registered to vote. He was surprised to learn that he could have cast a second ballot in Florida. "I'm retired now, and out of Florida, so I shouldn't be listed as a Florida voter anymore," he said. In Ohio, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson is demanding a review of the election, saying too many questions have been raised to let Bush's win stand without further examination. "We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live with fraud and stealing," Jackson said Sunday at Mt. Hermon Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio. Voting complaints in Ohio have focused on the use of antiquated punch-card voting machines--the same type of machines that led to thousands of hanging chads in Florida four years ago. Ohio recount sought Meanwhile, third-party candidates, joined by Sen. John Kerry's campaign organization, have requested a recount in Ohio, which would begin after the election results are certified. That must happen by Monday. A hearing on the recount request was held in federal court in Columbus on Friday. County-by-county results provided to The Associated Press on Friday indicated Bush's margin of victory in Ohio will be about 119,000 votes, smaller than the unofficial margin of 136,000, mainly because of the addition of provisional ballots. Ohio's so-called spoilage rate, ballots cast without a discernable vote for president, was lower than Florida's in the 2000 election. But the number of discarded ballots--92,000--represents a significant number, given that Bush's margin of victory was about 119,000 . The state Democratic Party is watching the potential recount carefully, said spokesman Dan Trevas. "It could be that we lost it," he said. "But if there's a little more to it, we've got to check it out. Let's just make sure everything's aboveboard." In Florida, new touch-screen voting machines eliminated overvotes and chads. But some allege that ATM-like technology has created other problems. University of California, Berkeley, professor Michael Hout compared voting patterns in the Florida counties that used the new machines with those that relied on ballots similar to the multiple-choice forms on standardized tests. He found differences in those patterns that led him to conclude that computer problems with the new machines had given an edge to Bush. He suggested software glitches could have left some Kerry votes uncounted, or assigned them mistakenly to Bush. "Statistically what we have is a smoke alarm that's beeping," said Hout. "It's up to the local people in Florida to figure out what to do about it." Also in Florida, Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Fisher, who was defeated Nov. 2, said he had seen e-mails outlining a Republican plot to steal the presidential election. The plot, he said, involved election workers who created bogus voter registrations. The workers then rigged computers to show those ghost voters had cast ballots for Bush. The FBI confirmed that Fisher had filed a complaint and that agents were investigating. Copyright ? 2004, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0412040222dec04,1,2022369,print.story?coll=chi-news-hed ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Mon Dec 6 23:54:28 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 23:54:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Turn your back on Bush Message-ID: <20041207075428.90522.qmail@web13602.mail.yahoo.com> We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. ? Martin Luther King, Jr. http://www.turnyourbackonbush.org/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! ? What will yours do? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Tue Dec 7 00:14:23 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 00:14:23 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] The Tumbleweed: The Small House That Jay Shafer Built Message-ID: <20041207081424.69735.qmail@web13625.mail.yahoo.com> Since 1950, the average home in the United States has more than doubled in size, even while the number of people per household has shrunk. Subsequently, the typical American home now emits twice as much carbon dioxide per day as the typical American car, sends more than a ton of construction waste to the local landfill, and requires more than fifteen times as much land per inhabitant as a home in China. In light of these facts, and the resulting sprawl, I wanted a home that would meet my spatial needs without exceeding them. I figured the smaller the structure, the more I could save on land, energy, emissions, and building materials. My house (also known as Tumbleweed) was built with only about 4,800 pounds of building materials--less than 100 pounds of which went to the local landfill. It converts less than thirty dollars worth of propane into heat during a typical Midwestern winter, and at 8 ?-by-17-by-13-? feet, it fits snugly into a single parking space. In addition, Tumbleweed cost only about one-fifth the average home. With $42,000, I was able to put five times more money per square foot into quality materials and construction than is generally allowed a standard-size home. A house built of similar materials but measuring a more typical 2,500 square feet would weigh about 64,000 pounds and could be expected to dump at least an additional ton at the landfill. It would fill nine or eighteen parking spots (depending on whether it was one or two stories), and propane heating bills for the same Midwestern winter would probably run about $550, even if a passive solar design like that of Tumbleweed were used. For more on this unique, artfully created home-for-one, check out...... http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com IBB ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Tue Dec 7 09:20:05 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 09:20:05 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] New Book Documents Bush Judicial Attack on State, Local Environmental Initiatives Message-ID: <20041207172005.70383.qmail@web13621.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/ New Book Documents Bush Judicial Attack on State, Local Environmental Initiatives With Washington now in the almost monolithic control of politicians hostile to environmental safeguards, many environmentalists are looking to states and local governments as the only hope for environmental progress. But they could be in for another disappointment: the Bush Administration is actively working to ensure that these local "laboratories" of environmental democracy never yield results. A timely new book by the DC-based Community Rights Counsel called Redefining Federalism: Listening to the States in Shaping "Our Federalism," explains how the Supreme Court has been ignoring the views of states in a long series of rulings over the last 15 years. The rulings purport to protect what the Court calls "Our Federalism." The result is an incoherent form of federalism that looks unfavorably at governmental innovation at every level. Published by the Environmental Law Institute, the book traces the roots of this anti-government federalism to a cadre of far-right libertarian scholars and activists. Among the most prominent is University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein. In a series of books and articles, Epstein has argued that the New Deal and most federal and state health, labor and environmental safeguards enacted since the 1930?s are unconstitutional. Like-minded activists such as Michael Greve of the American Enterprise Institute, Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice, and Adam Thierer of the Cato Institute have taken this scholarship, added a strong antipathy to state and local environmental and other protections, and called it "federalism." Greve, for example, calls states the "real enemies of real federalism." As Redefining Federalism clearly explains, this radical right-wing agenda has nothing at all to do with federalism. "Federalism" the authors write, "is about assigning government authority to the correct level of government in our constitutional structure?... Federalism is primarily about allocating the powers the government does have, not about determining what government can do in the first place." Libertarian activists reject this neutral idea of federalism. Instead, they want to use federalism to promote their radical anti-government agenda and divide Americans, making federalism "an ideological affair," as Greve has written. Anti-government, libertarian federalism plays out in the Bush administration in two ways, according to Redefining Federalism. First, as BushGreenwatch reported in its December 3 edition, the Administration has argued that federal law broadly preempts state and local efforts to protect their citizens from environmental and other harms. Second, the strong imprint of libertarian federalism can be seen in the Bush Administration?s judicial nominees. Redefining Federalism notes that William Myers, Bush?s appointee to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Janice Rogers Brown, Bush?s pick for a seat on the D.C. Circuit (often called the second most important court in the country) share Greve and Epstein?s libertarian views. Bush appointees from the libertarian federalist camp, William Pryor, Jeffrey Sutton, and D. Brooks Smith, now have seats on various federal courts of appeals around the country. "Environmentalists need leadership at all levels of government," says Community Rights Counsel's Doug Kendall. "They don't need politicians who pay lip-service to federalism while striking out at state and local environmental safeguards." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Tue Dec 7 22:37:12 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 22:37:12 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Scientists' Ranking of Clean Vehicles Message-ID: <20041208063712.93251.qmail@web13625.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/cars_and_suvs/page.cfm?pageID=1567 Automaker Rankings 2004: The Environmental Performance of Car Companies --------------------------------- This is excerpted from the executive summary of the UCS report Automaker Rankings 2004: The Environmental Performance of Car Companies, December 2004. The pollution performance of just a handful of corporations has a dramatic impact on the air we breathe and the climate we will pass on to future generations. The six largest automakers in the U.S. market?General Motors (GM), Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan?are responsible for more than 90 percent of the heat-trapping and smog-forming emissions from new automobiles today. This lackluster environmental performance gives the industry a negative image and increases concern among investors that automakers are poorly positioned in a global market where environmental stewardship is becoming a competitive priority. Automaker Rankings 2004: The Environmental Performance of Car Companies uses government data to provide a quantitative analysis of automakers? environmental performance. By presenting a clear, objective ranking of the Big Six automakers, this report can help consumers, investors, and lawmakers sort through manufacturers? billion-dollar advertising campaigns and public relations efforts to find out which one is truly the greenest when the rubber meets the road. We analyze the average emissions of the fleet of cars, SUVs, minivans, and pickups sold by these six car companies to rank their performance based on an equal weighting of their relative contribution to smog and global warming. Ranking Results Clear differences exist among the automakers when it comes to environmental performance. Since our first automaker ranking report, for model year 1998 (MY98), a trend has emerged for the market leaders and laggards: Honda has consistently remained at the top, representing the cleanest of the Big Six automakers, while GM has consistently fallen in our rankings, from fourth place in our first ranking to last place in 2003, the latest model year for which data were publicly available. The difference between Honda and GM is most apparent in smog-forming pollution; Honda?s vehicles produce less than half the pollution of the fleet average, while GM?s produce nearly a third more than the average. Automaker Pollution Ranking for Average New-Vehicle Emissions Rank Model Year 1998 Model Year 20001 Model Year 2003 1HondaHondaHonda 2ToyotaToyotaNissan 3NissanNissanToyota 4GMFordFord 5FordGMDaimlerChrysler 6DaimlerChryslerDaimlerChryslerGM TablEee The pollution performance for other automakers has been less consistent, with Nissan taking over second place from Toyota due to reduced contributions to smog and global warming, Ford holding its position after making gains in MY01, and DaimlerChrysler moving out of last place for the first time in our rankings. Overall, the smog-forming pollution performance of the industry continues to improve in response to new regulations, while global warming pollution performance remains stuck in neutral. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Tue Dec 7 22:44:49 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 22:44:49 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] MUST READ: Pakistan and the True WMD Threat, By Robert Scheer Message-ID: <20041208064449.24659.qmail@web13601.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120804W.shtml Go to Original Pakistan and the True WMD Threat By Robert Scheer The Los Angeles Times Tuesday 07 December 2004 If it had been even a primitive nuclear weapon that hit the World Trade Center three years ago, hundreds of thousands of people would have died instead of fewer than 3,000, and the free society we enjoy almost certainly would have been a casualty as well. In the shock of that moment, the administration probably would have created a national network of detention camps for suspected terrorists, and military retaliation might have included the launch of nuclear missiles with the capability of killing millions. All of which is exactly why it was so terrifying to read in an investigative article in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday that our "allies" in Pakistan, who have done so much to spread nuclear weapons technology in recent years, are still capable of doing so. "Senior investigators said they were especially worried that dangerous elements of the illicit network of manufacturers and suppliers would remain undetected and capable of resuming operations once international pressures eased," The Times reported. The article dissected the inability of investigators worldwide to fully penetrate the illicit nuclear weapons bazaar, which was run until last year by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan is currently under the protection of Pakistan's military dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, the same man who pardoned Khan and refuses to allow foreign investigators to speak with him. Yet it was Musharraf whom President Bush spent the weekend praising and accommodating. As The Times article made clear, what "officials call the world's worst case of nuclear proliferation" - in which sophisticated nuclear technology was supplied to Libya, Iran and other rogue nations - never would have been possible without the support of the Pakistani military. This is the same complex and powerful organization that made Pakistan a dictatorship in a 1999 coup by Musharraf. Yet within two years of this coup, Bush dropped U.S. sanctions against Pakistan, showing clear disregard for international nonproliferation restraints. The rationale then and now was Pakistan's alleged support in the "war on terrorism" after 9/11. And despite the exposure of the Khan black market ring, nothing has changed: In a White House meeting Friday, Bush honored Musharraf - who since seizing power has purged his country's Supreme Court and rewritten its constitution - as a "courageous leader." The administration again hastened to explain that Musharraf was vital in the three-year effort to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," as Bush frequently has proclaimed. How embarrassing then, when hours later Musharraf conceded in a Washington Post interview that Bin Laden's trail had grown completely cold but that the arch-terrorist is still very much alive and functioning. Musharraf complained that attempts to pin down Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives had been seriously undermined by what he politely called "voids" in U.S. troop commitments to the area, which are equal to a mere 15% of the U.S. forces in Iraq. The U.S. strategy instead has been to rely on Pakistan's military to trap Bin Laden, a dependence that Bush administration officials have cited while refusing to pressure for access to Khan. Musharraf complains that calls for international access to Khan show "a lack of trust" in Pakistan, but his real problem is the scientist's enormous popularity as the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb program. Khan "has been a hero for the masses," said the general who has survived several assassination attempts and faces the possibility of a revolt if he tilts too far toward the West. Meanwhile, Bush is so eager to cater to Musharraf that he is even championing the dictator as key to the creation of a democratic Palestinian state "that is truly free. One that's got an independent judiciary; one that's got a civil society; one that's got the capacity to fight off the terrorists; one that allows for dissent; one in which people can vote. And President Musharraf can play a big role in helping achieve that objective." What balderdash. None of those conditions of a free society exist in Pakistan, nor are they likely any time soon in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Yet while we chase the chimera of democratizing the Islamic world through the use of force, the true cost of this crusade can be measured by our indifference to our original justification of the Iraq invasion: stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And there's no margin for error here. Next time the terrorists could take Manhattan and a whole lot more. ------- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Tue Dec 7 22:44:50 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 22:44:50 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] MUST READ: Pakistan and the True WMD Threat, By Robert Scheer Message-ID: <20041208064451.72184.qmail@web13621.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120804W.shtml Go to Original Pakistan and the True WMD Threat By Robert Scheer The Los Angeles Times Tuesday 07 December 2004 If it had been even a primitive nuclear weapon that hit the World Trade Center three years ago, hundreds of thousands of people would have died instead of fewer than 3,000, and the free society we enjoy almost certainly would have been a casualty as well. In the shock of that moment, the administration probably would have created a national network of detention camps for suspected terrorists, and military retaliation might have included the launch of nuclear missiles with the capability of killing millions. All of which is exactly why it was so terrifying to read in an investigative article in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday that our "allies" in Pakistan, who have done so much to spread nuclear weapons technology in recent years, are still capable of doing so. "Senior investigators said they were especially worried that dangerous elements of the illicit network of manufacturers and suppliers would remain undetected and capable of resuming operations once international pressures eased," The Times reported. The article dissected the inability of investigators worldwide to fully penetrate the illicit nuclear weapons bazaar, which was run until last year by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan is currently under the protection of Pakistan's military dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, the same man who pardoned Khan and refuses to allow foreign investigators to speak with him. Yet it was Musharraf whom President Bush spent the weekend praising and accommodating. As The Times article made clear, what "officials call the world's worst case of nuclear proliferation" - in which sophisticated nuclear technology was supplied to Libya, Iran and other rogue nations - never would have been possible without the support of the Pakistani military. This is the same complex and powerful organization that made Pakistan a dictatorship in a 1999 coup by Musharraf. Yet within two years of this coup, Bush dropped U.S. sanctions against Pakistan, showing clear disregard for international nonproliferation restraints. The rationale then and now was Pakistan's alleged support in the "war on terrorism" after 9/11. And despite the exposure of the Khan black market ring, nothing has changed: In a White House meeting Friday, Bush honored Musharraf - who since seizing power has purged his country's Supreme Court and rewritten its constitution - as a "courageous leader." The administration again hastened to explain that Musharraf was vital in the three-year effort to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," as Bush frequently has proclaimed. How embarrassing then, when hours later Musharraf conceded in a Washington Post interview that Bin Laden's trail had grown completely cold but that the arch-terrorist is still very much alive and functioning. Musharraf complained that attempts to pin down Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives had been seriously undermined by what he politely called "voids" in U.S. troop commitments to the area, which are equal to a mere 15% of the U.S. forces in Iraq. The U.S. strategy instead has been to rely on Pakistan's military to trap Bin Laden, a dependence that Bush administration officials have cited while refusing to pressure for access to Khan. Musharraf complains that calls for international access to Khan show "a lack of trust" in Pakistan, but his real problem is the scientist's enormous popularity as the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb program. Khan "has been a hero for the masses," said the general who has survived several assassination attempts and faces the possibility of a revolt if he tilts too far toward the West. Meanwhile, Bush is so eager to cater to Musharraf that he is even championing the dictator as key to the creation of a democratic Palestinian state "that is truly free. One that's got an independent judiciary; one that's got a civil society; one that's got the capacity to fight off the terrorists; one that allows for dissent; one in which people can vote. And President Musharraf can play a big role in helping achieve that objective." What balderdash. None of those conditions of a free society exist in Pakistan, nor are they likely any time soon in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Yet while we chase the chimera of democratizing the Islamic world through the use of force, the true cost of this crusade can be measured by our indifference to our original justification of the Iraq invasion: stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And there's no margin for error here. Next time the terrorists could take Manhattan and a whole lot more. ------- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 11:23:43 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 11:23:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Mark Morford: What Are You, On Drugs? Message-ID: <20041208192343.67007.qmail@web13603.mail.yahoo.com> ===== Mark Morford's Notes & Errata ===== SFGate.com - December 8, 2004 --------------------------------- What Are You, On Drugs? With so many Americans popping prescription meds, who needs nature and sex and exercise? By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist The odds are very good that you are on drugs. Right now. This minute. As I type this and as you read this and as false Texas dictators rise and sad empires crumble and as this mad bewildered world spins in its frantically careening orbit, there's a nearly 50/50 chance that some sort of devious synthetic chemical manufactured by some massive and largely heartless corporation is coursing through your bloodstream and humping your brain stem and molesting your karma and kicking the crap out of your libido and chattering the teeth of your very bones. Maybe it's regulating your blood pressure. Maybe it's keeping your cholesterol in check. Maybe it's helping you sleep. Maybe it's helping you wake the hell up. Maybe it's opening your bronchial tubes. Maybe it's brightening your terminally bleak outlook. Maybe it's adjusting your hormone levels or controlling your urge to weep every minute or relaxing the blood vessels in your penis or cranking the serotonin to your brain or pumping carefully measured slugs of alprazolam or fluoxetine or sertraline or atorvastatin or esomeprazole or buspirone or venlafaxine or any number of substances with Latin-rooted jawbreaker names through your flesh in a bizarre dance of miraculous vaguely disturbing death-defying scientific wonder. Forty-four percent of all Americans. That's the latest number. Almost half us are popping at least one prescription drug and fully one in six are popping three or more, (click here to read the rest) (Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/12/08/notes120804.DTL&nl=fix ) Have a lovely day ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! ? What will yours do? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Tue Dec 7 22:56:39 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 22:56:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Sailor refuses deployment in protest of war - AP Message-ID: <20041208065639.84735.qmail@web13603.mail.yahoo.com> Find this article at: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20041206-1325-ca-iraq-sailorsprotest.html San Diego-based sailor refuses deployment in protest of war ASSOCIATED PRESS 1:25 p.m. December 6, 2004 SAN DIEGO ? A Navy petty officer opposed to the war in Iraq refused to board his ship Monday as sailors and Marines deployed for the Persian Gulf. Petty Officer 3rd Class Pablo Paredes, 23, said he has opposed the war since its inception. Until recently, the weapons-control technician said he did not feel he had a direct role in the war. Two weeks ago, however, he said he was involuntarily transferred to the amphibious transport USS Bonhomme Richard, which ferries Marines to Iraq. "I don't want to be a part of a ship that's taking 3,000 Marines over there, knowing a hundred or more of them won't come back," he said. "I can't sleep at night knowing that's what I do for a living." Paredes of the New York City borough of the Bronx said he joined the Navy in 2000 and has 20 months left on his six-year enlistment. He said he was stationed previously in Japan. He said he was young and naive when he joined the Navy and "never imagined, in a million years, we would go to war with somebody who had done nothing to us." Paredes was at the ship's pier at Navy Base San Diego Monday as Expeditionary Strike Group Five left for its tour in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Military officials did not immediately comment on his actions. He could face a court-martial, a dishonorable discharge and possible time in a military jail. He said he hopes his protest might inspire other sailors, soldiers and Marines to refuse to take part in the war. "I know other people are feeling the same way I am, and I'm hoping more people will stand up," he said. "They can't throw us all in jail." Find this article at: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20041206-1325-ca-iraq-sailorsprotest.html ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 01:09:09 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 01:09:09 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] The Christmas Resistance Movement Message-ID: <20041208090909.7256.qmail@web13609.mail.yahoo.com> Join the Christmas Resistance Movement! The growing CHRISTMAS RESISTANCE MOVEMENT is joined in solidarity against the Shopping Season. For every 100 automatons who call you "Scrooge," there's a sparkly-eyed CHRISTMAS RESISTOR who supports YOU in NOT BUYING INTO THE HOLIDAY HYSTERIA. http://www.xmasresistance.org/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 12:07:41 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 12:07:41 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis Message-ID: <20041208200741.3600.qmail@web13606.mail.yahoo.com> Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis ?2004 Eric Schwartz http://www.ericschwartz.com/ Keep your Jesus off my penis Keep your bible off my balls Keep your prayers out of my ears And your crosses off my walls You can keep the virgin mother And the resurrection too Keep your Jesus off my penis I'll keep my penis off of you Well I'm frickin' sick and tired Of turning on the news And seeing the religious right's Ungodly fight to take our right to choose When to bear our children Who to love and how Education and protection If we're just practicing for now So dubya look obey a book If that's what works for you But I don't tell you how to pray So don't tell me how to screw Keep your Jesus off my penis Keep your bible off my balls Keep your prayers out of my ears And your crosses off my walls You can keep the virgin mother And the resurrection too Keep your Jesus off my penis I'll keep my penis off of you So you?re screaming bloody murder 'Bout the taliban regime For subjugating women And being too extreme And basing legislation On some ancient holy book Does that sound a bit familiar? Here's a mirror, have a look And as for the ten commandments They need one more at least Thou shall never cover up The acts of pervert priests How'd they let that happen Unless they just abhor us Well anyway it adds Another layer to the chorus Keep your Jesus off my penis Keep your bible off my balls Keep your prayers out of my ears And your crosses off my walls You can keep the virgin mother And the resurrection too Keep your Jesus off my penis I'll keep my penis off of you So you'll execute a person And protect a single cell But mercy-kill the terminally ill And you're goin' straight to hell I don't know much about The word of God Far be it from me But I can tell you what it ain't Hypochristianity I am not anti-Christian Before you grab a rope There is beauty in religion And joy and love and hope We're all looking for an answer Some colossal cosmic cause But who the fuck are you To turn your views into my laws? It's just believers in the bible That would have abortion banned Anti-choice agnostics? I could count?em on one hand And as for killing babies I have but one retort If someone raped your daughter George You'd beg her to abort And if some young girl from your church Shows up with child or some infection ?Cuz you taught her what a horrid sin It was to use protection One day you'll face the pearly gates And whatchu gonna say When that long-haired Jewish peacenick Sends your ass the other way sayin? Keep your Jesus off my penis Keep your bible off my balls Keep your prayers out of my ears And your crosses off my walls I've had it up to here With all the biblibile you spew Keep your Jesus off my penis (at least that's what I would do) Keep your Jesus off my penis I'll keep my penis off of you That's if'n you want me to ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 13:01:47 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 13:01:47 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Funds for Atomic Bomb Research Cut From Spending Bill Message-ID: <20041208210147.11475.qmail@web13606.mail.yahoo.com> You know thing are bad when this happens. IBB http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5554-2004Nov22.html Funds for Atomic Bomb Research Cut From Spending Bill By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 23, 2004; Page A06 Congress has eliminated the financing of research supported by President Bush into a new generation of nuclear weapons, including investigations into low-yield atomic bombs and an earth-penetrating warhead that could destroy weapons bunkers deep underground. The Bush administration called in 2002 for exploring new nuclear weapons that could deter a wide range of threats, including possible development of a warhead that could go after hardened, deeply buried targets, or lower-power bombs that could be used to destroy chemical or biological stockpiles without contaminating a wide area. But research on those programs was dropped from the $388 billion government-wide spending bill adopted Saturday, a rare instance in which the Republican-controlled Congress has gone against the president. The move slowly came to light over the weekend as details of the extensive measure became clear. Dropping the programs was praised by arms-control advocates and some members of Congress who tried unsuccessfully for several years to kill them. These opponents argued that such research by the United States could trigger a new arms race, and that the existence of lower-yield weapons -- sometimes called "mini-nukes" -- would ultimately increase the likelihood of war. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) described Saturday's result as "a consequential victory for those of us who believe the United States sends the wrong signal to the rest of the world by reopening the nuclear door." President Bush's fiscal 2005 budget contained $27 million to continue research on modifying two existing warheads for the earth-penetrator, or "bunker-buster," role, and it projected nearly $500 million over the next five years should a weapon be approved. While Feinstein and other Democrats had failed earlier this year to bar authorization of the program, it was a Republican, Rep. David L. Hobson of Ohio, who lead the successful effort to keep the programs out of the omnibus appropriations bill adopted Saturday. Hobson, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, oversaw dropping the money from an appropriations bill in June, and House-Senate conferees accepted that action in Saturday's bill. The Bush administration, Hobson said yesterday, "should read this as a clear signal from Congress" that any attempt to revive the funding in next year's budget "would get the same reaction." He added that he had not heard any threat of a veto and "nobody has come to me and said we can't have this." The action caught the administration by surprise. A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the nuclear weapons programs and the national nuclear laboratories, said the matter was under study. "We are disappointed Congress has not followed the administration's request in several areas, and we will assess what we will do down the road," said Bryan Wilkes, the security agency's spokesman. He added that it was too early to talk about what will be in the fiscal 2006 budget that will go to Congress in January. Also cut from the nuclear program was $7 million for selecting a site for a $4 billion facility that would build what are called plutonium pits, the nuclear triggers for thermonuclear warheads. Arms-control advocates had opposed the facility, arguing that with a sharp 50 percent reduction in the U.S. nuclear stockpile, a small facility operating now at Los Alamos National Laboratory could produce enough pits for the U.S. arsenal. Hobson said he decided the research money should be deleted after visits over the past two years with scientists and managers at the nuclear labs and test sites, and after watching steps being taken by the administration to cut the nuclear stockpile and designate "smart" conventional weapons for tasks once assigned to atomic warheads. He said that the $9 million Bush request to study ideas for new low-yield weapons had been redirected into studies of "current technologies to make existing warheads more robust and easier to maintain without more testing." Hobson added he had been against developing smaller-yield weapons "that someone might use," and instead wants the nuclear labs to employ modern technology to make "more reliable replacements" for the current warheads. Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), whose attempt to cut the new nuclear weapons program authorization in past years had failed, described what had occurred as a reversal of "the Bush administration's dangerous disregard for nuclear nonproliferation." She noted the "growing bipartisan concern and distrust" of the administration's nuclear policies and commended Hobson "for recognizing the need to halt spending for nuclear 'bunker busters' and an arsenal of new nuclear weapons." Hobson also received praise from Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, who said the Ohio legislator "has shown enormous courage to break ranks with the White House and apply common sense on its excessive and extreme nuclear proposals." Kimball warned the administration to "carefully consider whether it will try to revive its controversial nuclear weapons research programs." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:11:33 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:11:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] People's Choice Awards Nominates "Fahrenheit 9/11" as "Favorite Film of the Year" Message-ID: <20041209061133.63787.qmail@web13626.mail.yahoo.com> Dear Friends, May I take a break from our post-election despair to share with you a little piece of happy/silly/cool news? "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been nominated by the People's Choice Awards as the American public's "Favorite Film of the Year." The five nominees were chosen from a poll of thousands of Americans in mid-to-late November. The other nominees for best film are "Spiderman 2," "The Incredibles," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (with Jim Carrey), and "Shrek 2." It is the first time ever a documentary has been nominated for best film by the People's Choice Awards. The People's Choice Awards are considered, among all the awards shows, to be the one which most accurately reflects the "mainstream" public opinion in the United States. OK, now, here's the best part: YOU get to vote! Online. Now. Just go to http://www.pcavote.com/voting/film/f01.shtml, click on the little circle next to "Fahrenheit 9/11" in the "Favorite Movie" category and press the "vote" button. Voting is going on now and continues only through this coming Monday, December 13, at 3:00pm ET, so send an e-mail to your friends and let them know they can vote, too. Winners will accept their awards live on CBS on January 9. Now, normally I wouldn't make a very big deal out of something like this. It's nice and I'm honored, but it's not exactly the number one priority on any of our minds these days. In fact, when we found out we were nominated over a week ago, I didn't even think to tell you about it or put it up on our website. But then a group of top Republicans took out a full page ad in USA Today (and placed a similar one in the Hollywood trade magazine, Variety) proclaiming that "An election is over, but a war of ideas continues." The point of the ad was to say that while they, as right wing conservatives, were proud of getting rid of Kerry, there was still one more nuisance running around loose they had to deal with -- me! They also issued a not-so-subtle threat to the Academy Awards voters that, in essence, said don't even THINK about nominating "Fahrenheit 9/11" for Best Picture. And Bill O'Reilly recently bellowed that if the Oscars recognize my work this year, Middle America will boycott Hollywood. Oops. I guess he spoke too soon. Because now along comes Middle America's favorite awards show, the People's Choice, and the People's Choice this year, along with a Spiderman superhero and a lovable green ogre, is a film that apparently continues to resonate throughout the country. The truth about Iraq, Bush, terror and fear. The election has not altered or made irrelevant, unfortunately, a single one of these issues. That they (and the film that dealt with these issues) are still at the forefront of the majority of the public's minds should give serious pause to Mr. Bush as he brags about a nonexistent "mandate" and begins to spend his "political capital." He may have been (barely) the people's choice on November 2 (Ohio recount excluded), but now the people get to vote again, this time for a movie. It's about the best we can do right now, and, trust me, it won't be long before we start the real work we need to do to get our country back. Again, go to http://www.pcavote.com/voting/film/f01.shtml if you want to vote for our film. I promise, if we win, to give a nice and polite speech. Yours, Michael Moore www.michaelmoore.com mmflint at aol.com P.S. Please feel free to post or forward this to your friends... ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:12:59 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:12:59 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] christmas poem Message-ID: The Sands of Christmas I had no Christmas spirit when I breathed a weary sigh, and looked across the table where the bills were piled too high. The laundry wasn't finished and the car I had to fix, My stocks were down another point, the Dolphins lost by six. And so with only minutes till my son got home from school, I gave up on the drudgery and grabbed a wooden stool. The burdens that I carried were about all I could take, and so I flipped the TV on to catch a little break. I came upon a desert scene in shades of tan and rust, No snowflakes hung upon the wind, just clouds of swirling dust. And where the reindeer should have stood before a laden sleigh, eight hummers ran a column right behind an M1A. A group of boys walked past the tank, not one was past his teens, Their eyes were hard as polished flint, their faces drawn and lean. They walked the street in armor with their rifles shouldered tight, their dearest wish for Christmas, just to have a silent night. Other soldiers gathered, hunkered down against the wind, To share a scrap of mail and dreams of going home again. There wasn't much at all to put their lonely hearts at ease, They had no Christmas turkey, just a pack of MRE's. They didn't have a garland or a stocking I could see, They didn't need an ornament-- they lacked a Christmas Tree. They didn't have a present even though it was tradition, the only boxes I could see were labled "ammunition". I felt a little tug and found my son now by my side, He asked me what it was I feared, and why it was I cried. I swept him up into my arms and held him oh so near and kissed him on the forehead as I whispered in his ear. There's nothing wrong, my little son, for safe we sleep tonight, our heroes stand on foreign land to give us all the right, to worry about the things in life that really mean nothing at all, instead of wondering each day if we will be the next to fall. He looked at me as children do and said it's always right, to thank the ones who help us and perhaps that we should write. And so we pushed aside the bills and sat to draft a note, to thank the many far from home, and this is what we wrote, God bless you all and keep you safe, and speed your way back home. Remember that we love you so, and that you're not alone. The gift you give, you share with all, a present every day, You give the gift of liberty and that we can't repay. (I have no idea who the author is, I received it this morning as an email and knew it was too special not to share. I hope you all enjoy it.) Happy Holidays, -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: !cid_001201c4da54$2aff50e0$9DD4010C at tinyus.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1265 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:14:26 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:14:26 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] 20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA Message-ID: 20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA by Angry Girl http://www.nightweed.com/angrygirl.html Did you know.... 1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold 2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886 5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html 6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=26 http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.php 7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel27.html 8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates/pfindex.html 10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm http://www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm 11. Diebold is based in Ohio. http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm 12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml 13. Jeff Dean, Diebold's Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree. http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf 14. Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years. http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf 15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio. http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/26/loc_elexoh.html 16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie here < http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov>.) http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4874190 17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml 18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm http://www.rise4news.net/extravotes.html http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950 http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm 19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother. http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10544-2004Oct29.html 20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation. http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html http://uscountvotes.org/ _______________________________________________________ -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:16:59 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:16:59 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: Occupied Iraq and Palestine both Message-ID: Mid-East Realities Occupied Iraq and Palestine both approaching greater explosion and civil war MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 7 December: While so much of the dutifully compliant American media is busy parroting George Bush's purposefully deceptive talk of "democracy" and "elections", the realities of what is happening in occupied Iraq and Palestine are quite different and ominous. The Washington Neocons, working closely with the Israelis as they always have and do, have brought both occupied lands to the point of explosion and civil war. Even as they feverishly prepare to take on Iran one way or another -- some combination of further sanctions, attempted regime change, and/or destruction of weapons capabilities -- the lands so far 'liberated' by the new crusaders are in turmoil requiring still greater American blood and treasure to keep them under U.S. control. Oh yes, this applies to narco-state Afghanistan as well, even as the CIA's Hamid Karzai's 'swearing in ceremony' takes place today with VP Cheney and Pentagon Chief Rumsfeld smiling from the front rows. Whether the further explosions and greater yet bloodshed will erupt in weeks, or months, or years, the course is now far more clear than the corporate media usually deals with. But today the New York Times is used for major leaks from the under-purge under-blame CIA about what to really expect in occupied Iraq, and recently the brilliant British journalist Robert Fisk wrote in The Independentabout what to really expect in occupied Palestine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- 2 C.I.A. Reports Offer Warnings on Iraq's Path By DOUGLAS JEHL New York Times, 7 December - WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials. The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq. The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient. But over all, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon on the part of the Iraqi government, in terms of its ability to assert authority and to build the economy. Together, the appraisals, which follow several other such warnings from officials in Washington and in the field, were much more pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush administration before the elections scheduled for Iraq next month, the officials said. The cable was sent to C.I.A. headquarters after American forces completed what military commanders have described as a significant victory, with the retaking of Falluja, a principal base of the Iraqi insurgency, in mid-November. The American ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, was said by the officials to have filed a written dissent, objecting to one finding as too harsh, on the ground that the United States had made more progress than was described in combating the Iraqi insurgency. But the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., also reviewed the cable and initially offered no objections, the officials said. One official said, however, that General Casey may have voiced objections in recent days. The station chief's cable has been widely disseminated outside the C.I.A., and was initially described by a government official who read the document and who praised it as unusually candid. Other government officials who have read or been briefed on the document later described its contents. The officials refused to be identified by name or affiliation because of the delicacy of the issue. The station chief cannot be publicly identified because he continues to work undercover. Asked about the cable, a White House spokesman, Sean McCormack, said he could not discuss intelligence matters. A C.I.A. spokesman would say only that he could not comment on any classified document. It was not clear how the White House was responding to the station chief's cable. In recent months, some Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, have accused the agency of seeking to undermine President Bush by disclosing intelligence reports whose conclusions contradict the administration or its policies. But senior intelligence officials including John E. McLaughlin, the departing deputy director of central intelligence, have disputed those assertions. One government official said the new assessments might suggest that Porter J. Goss, the new director of central intelligence, was willing to listen to views different from those publicly expressed by the administration. A separate, more formal, National Intelligence Estimate prepared in July and sent to the White House in August by American intelligence agencies also presented a dark forecast for Iraq's future through the end of 2005. Among three possible developments described in that document, the best case was tenuous stability and the worst case included a chain of events leading to civil war. After news reports disclosed the existence of the National Intelligence Estimate, which also remains classified, President Bush initially dismissed the conclusions as nothing more than a guess. Since then, however, violence in Iraq has increased, including the recent formation of a Shiite militia intended to carry out attacks on Sunni militants. The end-of-tour cable from the station chief, spelling out an assessment of the situation on the ground, is a less-formal product than a National Intelligence Estimate. But it was drafted by an officer who is highly regarded within the C.I.A. and who, as station chief in Baghdad, has been the top American intelligence official in Iraq since December 2003. The station chief overseas an intelligence operation that includes about 300 people, making Baghdad the largest C.I.A. station since Saigon during the Vietnam War era. The senior C.I.A. official who visited Iraq and then briefed counterparts from other government agencies was Michael Kostiw, a senior adviser to Mr. Goss. One government official who knew about Mr. Kostiw's briefings described them as "an honest portrayal of the situation on the ground." Since they took office in September, Mr. Goss and his aides have sought to discourage unauthorized disclosures of information. In a memorandum sent to C.I.A. employees last month, Mr. Goss said the job of the intelligence agency was to "provide the intelligence as we see it" but also to "support the administration and its policies in our work." "As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in that memorandum, saying that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road." The memorandum urged intelligence employees to "let the facts alone speak to the policy maker." Mr. Goss himself made his first foreign trip as the intelligence director last week, with stops that included several days in Britain and a day in Afghanistan, but he did not visit Iraq, the government officials said. At the White House on Monday, President Bush himself offered no hint of pessimism as he met with Iraq's president, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar. Despite the security challenges, Mr. Bush said, the United States continues to favor the voting scheduled for Iraq on Jan. 30 to "send the clear message to the few people in Iraq that are trying to stop the march toward democracy that they cannot stop elections." "The American people must understand that democracy just doesn't happen overnight," he said. "It is a process. It is an evolution. After all, look at our own history. We had great principles enunciated in our Declarations of Independence and our Constitution, yet, we had slavery for a hundred years. It takes a while for democracy to take hold. And this is a major first step in a society which enables people to express their beliefs and their opinions." Catastrophe looms in reaction to Arafat's death By ROBERT FISK BRITISH COLUMNIST So the death of Yasser Arafat is a great new opportunity for the Palestinians, is it? The man who personified the Palestinian struggle -- "Mr. Palestine" -- is dead. So things can only get better for the Palestinians. Death means democracy. Death means statehood. That the final demise of the corrupt old guerrilla leader should be a sign of optimism demonstrates just how catastrophic the conflict in the Mideast has now become. It's a bit like Fallujah. The more we destroy it, the crueler we are, the brighter the chances of Iraqi democracy. The more successful we are, the worse things are going to get. That's what George W. Bush said on Friday: that violence will increase as Iraqi elections grow closer -- a total mind warp since the more violent Iraq becomes, the less the chances of any election ever being held. Note how President Bush could not even bring himself to mention Arafat's name. It's the same old agenda. The Palestinians have to have a democracy. They have to prove themselves; they -- not the Israelis -- have to show that they are a worthy "negotiating partner." And any new leader -- the colorless Ahmad Qureia or the equally colorless and undemocratic Abu Mazen -- must "control his own people." That was what Arafat failed to do even though he thought his job was to represent his own people, which is what democracy is supposed to be all about. It's worth noting how this narrative has been written. The Israelis, with their continued occupation, their continued illegal construction of colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, their air strikes and helicopter executions and live-fire shooting at stone-throwing children, are not part of this equation. They are just innocently waiting to find a new "negotiating partner" now that Arafat is in his grave. Ariel Sharon, held "personally responsible" for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre by the Kahan commission report, remains, in Bush's words, "a man of peace." No one asks whether he can control his own army. Or whether he can control his own settlers. He wants to close down the colonies in Gaza -- even though his spokesman has told us that this will put Palestinian statehood into "formaldehyde." So let's just take a look back at those tragic years of the Oslo accord. In 1993, we are supposed to believe, the Palestinians were offered statehood and a capital in Jerusalem if they accepted the right of Israel to exist. Oslo said nothing of the kind. It did set down a complex system of Israeli withdrawals from occupied Palestinian land and a timetable that the Israelis were supposed to meet. We all knew that any failure to do so would humiliate Arafat -- and make him less able to "control" his own people. And what happened? It's important, at this supposedly "optimistic" moment, to reflect on the facts of the previous "peace process" in which Europe as well as the United States spent so much time, energy and -- in the EU's case -- money. Under the Oslo agreement, the occupied West Bank would be divided into three zones. Zone A would come under exclusive Palestinian control, Zone B under Israeli military occupation in participation with the Palestinian Authority, and Zone C under total Israeli occupation. In the West Bank, Zone A comprised only 1.1 percent of the land whereas in Gaza -- overpopulated, rebellious, insurrectionary -- almost all the territory was to come under Arafat's control. He, after all, was to be the policeman of Gaza. Zone C in the West Bank comprised 60 percent of the land, which allowed Israel to continue the rapid expansion of settlements on Arab land. But a detailed investigation shows that not a single one of these withdrawal agreements was honored by the Israelis. And in the meantime, the number of settlers illegally living on Palestinians' land rose after Oslo from 80,000 to 150,000 -- even though the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, were forbidden from taking "unilateral steps" under the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians saw this, not without reason, as proof of bad faith. Since facts are sometimes elusive in the Middle East, let's remind ourselves of what happened after Oslo. The Oslo II (Taba) agreement, concluded by Yitzhak Rabin in September 1995 -- the month before he was assassinated -- promised three Israeli withdrawals: from Zone A (under Palestinian control), Zone B (under Israeli military occupation in co-operation with the Palestinians) and Zone C (exclusive Israeli occupation). These were to be completed by October 1997. Final-status agreement covering Jerusalem, refugees, water and settlements were to have been completed by October 1999, by which time the occupation was supposed to have ended. In January 1997, however, a handful of Jewish settlers were granted 20 percent of Hebron, despite Israel's obligation under Oslo to leave all West Bank towns. By October 1998, a year late, Israel had not carried out the Taba accords. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, negotiated a new agreement at Wye River, dividing the second redeployment promised at Taba into two phases -- but he honored only the first of them. Netanyahu had promised to reduce the percentage of West Bank land under exclusively Israeli occupation from 72 percent to 59 percent, transferring 41 percent of the West Bank to Zones A and B. But at Sharm el-Sheikh in 1999, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, reneged on the agreement Netanyahu had made at Wye River, fragmenting the latter's two phases into three, the first of which would transfer 7 percent from Zone C to Zone B. All implementation of the agreements stopped there. When Arafat finally went to Camp David to meet Barak, he was allegedly offered 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but turned it down and went to war with the second intifada. A study of the maps, however, shows that -- with the exclusion of Jerusalem and its extended boundaries, with the exclusion of existing major Jewish colonies and with the inclusion of an Israeli cordon sanitaire, Arafat was offered nearer to 64 percent of the 22 percent of mandate Palestine that was left to him. Then a new explosion of Palestinian suicide bombings, usually aimed at Israeli civilians, destroyed Israel's patience with Arafat. Sharon, who had provoked the second intifada by strolling on to the Temple Mount with a thousand policemen, decided that Arafat was a Bin Laden-style "terrorist" and all further contact ended. This is not to excuse the PLO or Arafat himself. His arrogance and corruption, and his little dictatorship -- initially encouraged by the Israelis and Americans who lent Arafat their CIA boys to "train" the Palestinian security services -- ensured that no democracy could thrive in "Palestine." And I suspect that while he personally disapproved of suicide bombings, Arafat cynically realized that they had their uses; they proved that Sharon could not provide Israel with the security he promised at his election, at least until he built the new wall, which is stealing further Palestinian land. But that was only one side of the story -- and last week Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair went back to the old game of seeing only the other side. The Palestinians -- the victims of 39 years of occupation -- must prove themselves worthy of peace with their occupiers. The death of their leader is billed as a glorious occasion that provides hope. All this is part of the self-delusion of Bush and Blair. The reality is that the outlook in the Middle East is bleaker than ever. Oh yes, and -- since we'd be asking this question today if Sharon had gone to meet his maker in an equally mysterious way -- just what did Arafat die of? The Independent - 17 November 2004 To unsubscribe to the MOM list send an email to mom-l-unsubscribe @mailman.montana.com --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.807 / Virus Database: 549 - Release Date: 12/7/04 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:18:10 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:18:10 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: Gunfight Erupts Near Baghdad U.S. Embassy Message-ID: --- Go to Original Gunfight Erupts Near Baghdad U.S. Embassy By Paul Garwood The Associated Press Tuesday 07 December 2004 Gunfight breaks out in Baghdad not far from Green Zone; five more U.S. troops killed. BAGHDAD, Iraq - A heavy gunfight broke out on a dangerous street in central Baghdad within blocks of the country's most fortified facilities, including the U.S. Embassy and interim Iraqi government headquarters. Six more American troops were killed in the volatile Anbar province. A dawn attack on a domestic oil pipeline supplying fuel from northern Iraq to Baghdad and clashes Monday that killed three militants in the country's turbulent west underlined the security difficulties ahead of Jan. 30 national elections. Heavily armed insurgents have been emboldened by a spate of attacks across Iraq that have claimed more than 80 lives in recent days, mostly Iraqis working for the coalition or Iraqi national security forces. On Baghdad's Haifa Street on Monday, witnesses said gunmen killed an Iraqi employed by coalition authorities not far from the Green Zone, a heavily guarded compound where American and Iraqi forces protect government officials, diplomats and private contractors. Initially, witnesses said the gunmen fought U.S. troops. But the U.S. military said late Monday that American troops were not involved. Haifa Street has been the site of previous battles between insurgents and coalition forces. Despite their overwhelming strength, U.S.-led troops and Iraqi security forces have yet to secure areas surrounding the country's most vital facilities. U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police continued to be targeted by insurgents. On Sunday, attackers with machine guns killed 17 Iraqi civilians employed by the U.S. military in Tikrit, shooting them as they stepped off a bus to work at a weapons destruction dump. The Ansar al-Sunnah Army, one of Iraq's most feared terror groups, claimed responsibility for the Tikrit attack in a statement on the group's Web site. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said three U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday and two Marines were killed on Friday in fighting in western Anbar province, a region that includes the battleground cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. More than 1,270 U.S. troops have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003. Another U.S. Marine assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died Tuesday in what the military described as "a non-hostile motor vehicle accident in Anbar province. Marines have led major operations in the region, particularly in Fallujah, to destroy a network of Iraqi and other Arab fighters blamed for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and the kidnapping and killing of Western hostages. The violence - including a roadside bomb attack on a U.S. patrol in Baghdad Monday that wounded one soldier - persisted despite offensives intended to suppress guerrillas ahead of the elections. The military on Tuesday said U.S. troops captured 14 Iraqis, including 10 wanted for making explosive devices to attack coalition forces. Seven, captured in As Siniyah, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Baghdad, on Monday, were alleged members of a car bomb-making cell. Another seven, including three accused of bomb-making, were captured in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown about 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of the Iraqi capital. Several hundred U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested 20 suspected militants Sunday in the southern Baghdad district of Rashid following a short firefight that caused no coalition casualties, the military said in a statement. In Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush met Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer, and told reporters it was impossible to "guarantee 100 percent security" in Iraq. Bush pledged the United States would do everything it could to make Iraq's elections as safe as possible. Al-Yawer, a Sunni Muslim, expressed resolve to defeat the insurgents, saying "victory is not only possible, it is a fact." He said most Iraqis want the elections. His White House visit is seen as a way to persuade Iraq's political minorities, comprising mostly Sunni groups, not to boycott the elections. Sunni Muslims represent one-fifth of Iraq's nearly 26 million people and wielded the power under Saddam Hussein. They fear the election will give Shiite Muslims, with 60 percent of the population, an overpowering grip on the nation. U.S. and Iraqi officials are concerned that a boycott by Sunnis could undermine the legitimacy of a new government. Police said an Iraqi translator working for U.S. forces in Ramadi, Bashar Mohammed, was kidnapped by militants Sunday. Gunmen in Baqouba, north of Baghdad, killed a child Monday in a failed attempt to assassinate police Col. Jalil Yassin and his two bodyguards. They were wounded. U.S. forces hit back in Haditha, a rural Anbar province town 225 kilometers (140 miles) northwest of Baghdad, on Monday, killing three insurgents and wounding four, according to Dr. Bassem Izaldeen of Haditha Hospital. American forces also announced the arrest of 42 suspected militants Sunday and early Monday in the northern cities of Mosul, Beiji, Tikrit and Samarra. ------- Jump to TO Features for Wednesday December 8, 2004 Today's TO Features -------------- Senator Feingold | "America Is So Much Better than This" Nat Hentoff | Alberto Gonzales's Record of Torture and Death U.S. Taxpayer Money Spent in Ukraine Election F.B.I. Saw Abu Ghraib-style Tactics at GITMO 8 Soldiers Challenge Policy of Extending Army Duty U.S.-Saudi Relations Strained after Consulate Attack U.S. Firmly Anti-Kyoto as U.N. Climate Talks Start Remy Ourdan | Iraqi Chaos and the Virus of War Bush Sets Up Fight on Civil-rights Board One Group Responsible for 99% of Indecency Complaints U.N.: Chaos in Darfur; Law and Order Collapsing Dollar Hits New Low against Euro Dean to Democrats: Campaign Nationwide Robert Scheer | Pakistan and the True WMD Threat Paul Krugman | Inventing a Crisis C.I.A. Says Situation in Iraq Deteriorating Heavy Gunfight in Baghdad, 5 U.S. Troops Killed t r u t h o u t Home ? Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org ------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:18:39 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:18:39 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: Pakistan and the True WMD Threat Message-ID: Go to Original Pakistan and the True WMD Threat By Robert Scheer The Los Angeles Times Tuesday 07 December 2004 If it had been even a primitive nuclear weapon that hit the World Trade Center three years ago, hundreds of thousands of people would have died instead of fewer than 3,000, and the free society we enjoy almost certainly would have been a casualty as well. In the shock of that moment, the administration probably would have created a national network of detention camps for suspected terrorists, and military retaliation might have included the launch of nuclear missiles with the capability of killing millions. All of which is exactly why it was so terrifying to read in an investigative article in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday that our "allies" in Pakistan, who have done so much to spread nuclear weapons technology in recent years, are still capable of doing so. "Senior investigators said they were especially worried that dangerous elements of the illicit network of manufacturers and suppliers would remain undetected and capable of resuming operations once international pressures eased," The Times reported. The article dissected the inability of investigators worldwide to fully penetrate the illicit nuclear weapons bazaar, which was run until last year by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan is currently under the protection of Pakistan's military dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, the same man who pardoned Khan and refuses to allow foreign investigators to speak with him. Yet it was Musharraf whom President Bush spent the weekend praising and accommodating. As The Times article made clear, what "officials call the world's worst case of nuclear proliferation" - in which sophisticated nuclear technology was supplied to Libya, Iran and other rogue nations - never would have been possible without the support of the Pakistani military. This is the same complex and powerful organization that made Pakistan a dictatorship in a 1999 coup by Musharraf. Yet within two years of this coup, Bush dropped U.S. sanctions against Pakistan, showing clear disregard for international nonproliferation restraints. The rationale then and now was Pakistan's alleged support in the "war on terrorism" after 9/11. And despite the exposure of the Khan black market ring, nothing has changed: In a White House meeting Friday, Bush honored Musharraf - who since seizing power has purged his country's Supreme Court and rewritten its constitution - as a "courageous leader." The administration again hastened to explain that Musharraf was vital in the three-year effort to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," as Bush frequently has proclaimed. How embarrassing then, when hours later Musharraf conceded in a Washington Post interview that Bin Laden's trail had grown completely cold but that the arch-terrorist is still very much alive and functioning. Musharraf complained that attempts to pin down Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives had been seriously undermined by what he politely called "voids" in U.S. troop commitments to the area, which are equal to a mere 15% of the U.S. forces in Iraq. The U.S. strategy instead has been to rely on Pakistan's military to trap Bin Laden, a dependence that Bush administration officials have cited while refusing to pressure for access to Khan. Musharraf complains that calls for international access to Khan show "a lack of trust" in Pakistan, but his real problem is the scientist's enormous popularity as the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb program. Khan "has been a hero for the masses," said the general who has survived several assassination attempts and faces the possibility of a revolt if he tilts too far toward the West. Meanwhile, Bush is so eager to cater to Musharraf that he is even championing the dictator as key to the creation of a democratic Palestinian state "that is truly free. One that's got an independent judiciary; one that's got a civil society; one that's got the capacity to fight off the terrorists; one that allows for dissent; one in which people can vote. And President Musharraf can play a big role in helping achieve that objective." What balderdash. None of those conditions of a free society exist in Pakistan, nor are they likely any time soon in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Yet while we chase the chimera of democratizing the Islamic world through the use of force, the true cost of this crusade can be measured by our indifference to our original justification of the Iraq invasion: stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And there's no margin for error here. Next time the terrorists could take Manhattan and a whole lot more. ------- Jump to TO Features for Wednesday December 8, 2004 Today's TO Features -------------- Senator Feingold | "America Is So Much Better than This" Nat Hentoff | Alberto Gonzales's Record of Torture and Death U.S. Taxpayer Money Spent in Ukraine Election F.B.I. Saw Abu Ghraib-style Tactics at GITMO 8 Soldiers Challenge Policy of Extending Army Duty U.S.-Saudi Relations Strained after Consulate Attack U.S. Firmly Anti-Kyoto as U.N. Climate Talks Start Remy Ourdan | Iraqi Chaos and the Virus of War Bush Sets Up Fight on Civil-rights Board One Group Responsible for 99% of Indecency Complaints U.N.: Chaos in Darfur; Law and Order Collapsing Dollar Hits New Low against Euro Dean to Democrats: Campaign Nationwide Robert Scheer | Pakistan and the True WMD Threat Paul Krugman | Inventing a Crisis C.I.A. Says Situation in Iraq Deteriorating Heavy Gunfight in Baghdad, 5 U.S. Troops Killed t r u t h o u t Home ? Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:23:00 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:23:00 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: Troops Put Tough Questions to Rumsfeld Message-ID: Go to Original Troops Put Tough Questions to Rumsfeld By Robert Burns The Associated Press Wednesday 08 December 2004 CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait - After delivering a pep talk designed to energize troops preparing to head for Iraq (news - web sites), Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld got a little "talking to" himself from disgruntled soldiers. In his prepared remarks, Rumsfeld urged the troops - mostly National Guard and Reserve soldiers - to discount critics of the war in Iraq and to help "win the test of wills" with the insurgents. Some of soldiers, however, had criticisms of their own - not of the war itself but of how it is being fought. Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that is comprised mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly three years after the war in Iraq. "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense. Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question. "We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson said after asking again. Rumsfeld replied that, "You go to war with the Army you have," not the one you might want, and that any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armor to produce it as fast as humanly possible. And, the defense chief added, armor is not always a savior in the kind of combat U.S. troops face in Iraq, where the insurgents' weapon of choice is the roadside bomb, or improvised explosive device that has killed and maimed hundreds, if not thousands, of American troops since the summer of 2003. "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up," Rumsfeld said. Asked later about Wilson's complaint, the deputy commanding general of U.S. forces in Kuwait, Maj. Gen. Gary Speer, said in an interview that as far as he knows, every vehicle that is deploying to Iraq from Camp Buehring in Kuwait has at least "Level 3" armor. That means it at least has locally fabricated armor for its side panels, but not necessarily bulletproof windows or protection against explosions that penetrate the floorboard. Speer said he was not aware that soldiers were searching landfills for scrap mental and used bulletproof glass. During the question-and-answer session, another soldier complained that active-duty Army units sometimes get priority over the National Guard and Reserve units for the best equipment in Iraq. "There's no way I can prove it, but I am told the Army is breaking its neck to see that there is not" discrimination against the National Guard and Reserve in terms of providing equipment, Rumsfeld said. Yet another soldier asked, without putting it to Rumsfeld as a direct criticism, how much longer the Army will continue using its "stop loss" power to prevent soldiers from leaving the service who are otherwise eligible to retire or quit. Rumsfeld said that this condition was simply a fact of life for soldiers at time of war. "It's basically a sound principle, it's nothing new, it's been well understood" by soldiers, he said. "My guess is it will continue to be used as little as possible, but that it will continue to be used." In his opening remarks, Rumsfeld stressed that soldiers who are heading to Iraq should not believe those who say the insurgents cannot be defeated or who otherwise doubt the will of the military to win. "They say we can't prevail. I see that violence and say we must win," Rumsfeld said. ------- Jump to TO Features for Thursday December 9, 2004 Today's TO Features -------------- FOCUS | Howard Dean: "We Cannot Win by Being Republican-lite" Troops Put Tough Questions to Rumsfeld t r u t h o u t Home ? Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:24:23 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:24:23 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: Deserters: We Won't Go To Iraq Message-ID: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Deserters: We Won't Go To Iraq Dec. 8, 2004 It's an offense punishable by death during wartime. It's been committed by 5500 soldiers since the war with Iraq began. The men, who have violated military orders and oaths, tell 60 Minutes Wednesday that it isn't cowardice, but rather the nature of the war in Iraq, that turned them into American deserters. American soldiers currently living in Canada tell Correspondent Scott Pelley why they made the decision to desert their units, in a report to be broadcast on Dec. 8, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. One soldier, Pfc. Dan Felushko, 24, tells Pelley, "I didn't want...'Died deluded in Iraq' over my gravestone." It was Felushko's responsibility to go with the Marines to Kuwait in January 2003. Instead, Felushko slipped out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., and deployed himself to Canada. "I was a warrior...I always have been," Felushko tells Pelley. "I've always felt...that if there are people who can't defend themselves, it's my responsibility to do that." "As we're sitting here, something just short of 1100 Americans have died. What do you say to their families about the choice you made?" asks Pelley. "I honor their dead. ...Maybe they think that my presence dishonors their dead, but they made a choice the same as I made a choice, and my big problem is that, if they made that choice for anything other than they believed in it, then that's wrong," says Felushko. "The government has to be held responsible for those deaths, because they didn't give them an option." Soldiers who want to be assigned to non-combat jobs have the option of applying for conscientious objector status. Spc. Jeremy Hinzman, from Rapid City, S.D., filled out those forms, and while he waited for the decision on his request, he worked in a kitchen in Afghanistan. The Army eventually told Hinzman he didn't qualify as a conscientious objector. "I was walking to the chow hall with my unit and we were yelling, 'Train to kill, kill we will,' over and over again," recalls Hinzman. "I kind of snuck a peek around me and saw all my colleagues getting red in the face and hoarse yelling, and at that point, a light went off in my head and I said, 'You know, I made the wrong career decision.'" Despite his decision to leave the army, Hinzman says he wasn't looking for a way out of his commitment to the military. "I was told in basic training that, if I'm given an illegal or immoral order, it is my duty to disobey it, and I feel that invading and occupying Iraq is an illegal and immoral thing to do," says Hinzman. "I think there are times when militaries or countries act in a collectively wrong way. ...Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy, but was he a threat to the U.S.?" Hussein may have been a threat to the Iraqi people, but Hinzman maintains that was not enough of a reason for Hinzman to risk his life fighting in Iraq. "Whether a country lives under freedom or tyranny or whatever else, that's the collective responsibility of the people of that country," says Hinzman. He later adds that his contract with the military was "to defend the Constitution of the United States, not take part in offensive, preemptive wars." ? MMIV, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: cbsnews_logo_bw.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1753 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:25:28 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:25:28 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: Take Action! Day 7 Message-ID: Tenzin Delek Week of Action - Day 7 Students for a Free Tibet Dear shadowgroup, We have some good news to report! Yesterday, the US Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling for Tenzin Delek's release. This is the result of your work and others like you - congratulations! Click here to see the text of the resolution. Today, please call the Chinese embassy in India and ask for Rinpoche's release. Dial the following numbers between 9am - 4pm (5 1/2 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time). Please call: +91-11-26886258. If you aren't getting through and would like to try other numbers in India, please call: Consular Section: +91-11-26116682 Administration: +91-11-26118939 Press Office: +91-11-26881249 If you would rather send a message by fax, please send to: +91-11-26885486. *If no one is picking up the phone in India, please call the Chinese Embassy in Ireland at +353-1-2691707 instead. Please say: - You are calling to ask China not to execute a Tibetan monk who is in prison, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche. - Tenzin Delek could be executed in the next few weeks for crimes he did not commit. - China must overturn his death sentence and free him. - Please make sure to pass this message on to Ambassador Hua Junduo (pronounced Whah Juen Doo-O) in India, or Ambassador Sha Hailin (pronounced Hai as in 'bye' and Lin as in 'bin') in Ireland). THANK YOU for all of your efforts. As you can see from the US Senate resolution and the strong stands that other governments have taken over the past few weeks, your actions do make a difference. --Tendor, Freya, Lhadon, Han, Alma and the SFT crew -------------------------------------------------------------- Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this. Tell-a-friend! If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for Students for a Free Tibet's Action Center. This message was sent to deano700 at msn.com. Visit your subscription management page to modify your email communication preferences or update your personal profile. To stop ALL email from Students for a Free Tibet's Action Center, click to remove yourself from our lists (or reply via email with "remove" in the subject line). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:27:12 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:27:12 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Rumsfeld Hears Gripes From GIs in Kuwait Message-ID: Why don't Bush and Co. quit paying lip service to the "support the troops" mantra and actually do it... ================ Rumsfeld Hears Gripes From GIs in Kuwait By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer FROM: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=2&u=/ap/20041208/ap_on_re_mi_ea/rumsfeld CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait - In a rare public airing of grievances, disgruntled soldiers complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Wednesday about long deployments and a lack of armored vehicles and other equipment. "You go to war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld replied, "not the Army you might want or wish to have." Spc. Thomas Wilson had asked the defense secretary, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Shouts of approval and applause arose from the estimated 2,300 soldiers who had assembled to see Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question. "We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson, 31, of Ringgold, Ga., concluded after asking again. Wilson, an airplane mechanic whose unit, the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee Army National Guard, is about to drive north into Iraq for a one-year tour of duty, put his finger on a problem that has bedeviled the Pentagon for more than a year. Rarely, though, is it put so bluntly in a public forum. Rumsfeld said the Army was sparing no expense or effort to acquire as many Humvees and other vehicles with extra armor as it can. What is more, he said, armor is not the savior some think it is. "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can (still) be blown up," he said. The same applies to the much smaller Humvee utility vehicles that, without extra armor, are highly vulnerable to the insurgents' weapon of choice in Iraq, the improvised explosive device that is a roadside threat to Army convoys and patrols. U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq are killed or maimed by roadside bombs almost daily. Adding armor protection to Humvees and other vehicles that normally are not used in direct combat has been a priority for the Army, but manufacturers have not been able to keep up with the demand. Wilson's ex-wife, Regina, said she was not surprised he challenged Rumsfeld. "It wouldn't matter if it was Bush himself standing there," she said. "He would have dissed him the same." Wilson joined the National Guard in June 2003; previously, he had served about four years in the Air Force, beginning in 1994. Rumsfeld dropped in to Camp Buehring  named for Lt. Col. Charles Buehring, who was killed in a rocket attack on a downtown Baghdad hotel in November 2003  to thank the troops for their service and to give them a pep talk. Later he flew to New Delhi for meetings Thursday with Indian government officials. In his prepared remarks in Kuwait, Rumsfeld urged the troops  mostly National Guard and Reserve soldiers  to discount critics of the war and to help "win the test of wills" with the insurgents. Wilson and others, however, had criticisms of their own  not of the war but of how it was being fought. During the question-and-answer session, another soldier complained that active-duty Army units seem to get priority over National Guard and Reserve units for the best equipment used in Iraq. "There's no way I can prove it, but I am told the Army is breaking its neck to see that there is not" discrimination of that kind, Rumsfeld said. Yet another soldier asked how much longer the Army would continue using its "stop loss" power to prevent soldiers from leaving the service who are otherwise eligible to retire or return to civilian life at the end of their enlistment. Rumsfeld said this condition was simply a fact of life for soldiers in times of war. Critics, including some in Congress, say it's proof the Army has been stretched too thin by war. "It's basically a sound principle, it's nothing new, it's been well understood" by soldiers, he said. "My guess is it will continue to be used as little as possible, but that it will continue to be used." Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., told Rumsfeld in a letter Wednesday that his response to the question about armored vehicles was "utterly unacceptable" and that it was the duty of the government to provide safety equipment. "Mr. Secretary, our troops go to war with the Army that our nation's leaders provide," he wrote. The deputy commanding general of U.S. forces in Kuwait, Maj. Gen. Gary Speer, said in an interview at Camp Buehring that as far as he knew, every vehicle deploying to Iraq from Kuwait had at least "Level 3" armor protection. That means it had locally fabricated armor for its side panels, but not bulletproof windows or reinforced floorboards. Speer said he was unaware that soldiers were searching landfills for scrap metal and discarded glass. However, Maj. Gen. Gus L. Hargett, the adjutant general of the Tennessee National Guard, disputed Speer's remarks. "I know that members of his staff were aware and assisted the 278th in obtaining these materials," he said. At the Pentagon, spokesman Larry Di Rita said production of armored Humvees had increased from 15 to 450 a month since fall 2003, when commanders in Iraq started asking for them because of insurgents' heavy use of roadside explosives. Overall, there are 19,000 armored Humvees in the Iraqi theater. Some were built with additional armor, others had it added on later. That's, 2,000 short of what commanders are asking for, Di Rita acknowledged. Military policy is that troops driving into Iraq in Humvees drive only in armored ones, Di Rita said. Some $1.2 billion has been included in the defense budget to pay for armored vehicles, he said. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:28:06 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:28:06 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: War Crime Message-ID: War Crime by Paul Craig Roberts December 8, 2004 On December 6 Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld promised four more years of death and destruction in Iraq. Assuming the war continues to cost the US taxpayers $6 billion per month - not including reconstruction costs, fat no-bid contracts for the Bush administration's major contributors, and replacement costs of the military equipment that is being blown apart and worn out - that comes to $288 billion. Add that sum to the $149 billion the war has already cost US taxpayers for a total of $437 billion. Turning to the human toll, from March 20, 2003 to December 7, 2004 (approximately 21 months) the Pentagon says 1,280 US troops have been killed and 9,765 wounded in Iraq. The Pentagon's wounded figure conflicts with the report from the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, that as of Thanksgiving week the hospital has treated almost 21,000 Americans injured in Iraq. According to the hospital, more than half were too badly injured to return to their units. Assuming no escalation in the insurgency, a continuation of four more years of war would result in another 2,925 US troops being killed for a total of 4,205. Using the Pentagon's wounded figure, 22,320 more US troops would be injured for a total of 32,085. Using the US military hospital's figure, another 48,000 US troops would be wounded for a total of 69,000. Assuming the US is able to keep 138,000 US troops in Iraq during Bush's second term, US dead and wounded (Pentagon figure) would comprise 26% of the US force in Iraq. Using the military hospital's figure, US dead and wounded would comprise 53% of our entire army in Iraq. The present military manpower system cannot provide replacements for these losses. Current troop strengths are being maintained by calling up reserve and national guard units and by extending soldiers' tours of duty beyond the contractual period, a practice that US troops are contesting in court. Tens of thousands of careers, marriages, and family finances are being disrupted and destroyed by the commitment of reserve and national guard units to war in Iraq. What is Bush achieving in return for such horrendous costs? Bush has destroyed our alliances and the good will of a half century of US foreign policy. Busy has created an insurgency where there was none. Bush has destroyed US prestige in the Middle East and reduced America's support among Middle Eastern populations to the single digits. Bush has made Osama bin Laden a hero and recruited tens of thousands of terrorists to his ranks, while simultaneously alienating Middle Easterners from the secular puppet rulers we have imposed on them. At a minimum Bush is responsible for between 14,619 and 16,804 Iraqi civilian deaths during the 21 months since the invasion. Compiled from hospital, morgue, and media reports, these figures understate civilian deaths. In keeping with Islam's quick burial requirement, many Iraqis were buried in sports fields and in back gardens during protracted US assaults on urban areas. A recent report in the British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since March 20, 2003. This figure does not include the large number of Iraqi deaths from the embargo and US bombing for more than a decade prior to the US invasion. Projecting the reported Iraqi civilian deaths for four more years of US occupation produces a figure of 51,621 civilians killed as "collateral damage." Projecting the Lancet's figure produces a figure of 328,571 civilian deaths by the end of Bush's second term. Then there are the civilian injured, for which there appear to be no figures. If we assume the same ratio of killed to wounded for civilian deaths as holds for the US military, the reported death figure gives a civilian wounded figure of 392,320. The Lancet estimate gives a wounded figure of 2,497,139. The ratio of 7.6 wounded US troops for each soldier killed is probably low for calculating civilian Iraqi wounded. US forces travel in armored vehicles, are protected with helmets and body armor and are not on the receiving end of artillery and massive bombs that kill everything in a quarter mile radius. The ratio could easily be 10 or 15 wounded Iraqi civilians for every one killed. Did the Americans who reelected Bush know that the president who will admit to no mistake is locked on a course that will squander a half trillion dollars for no purpose other than to kill and wound between 36,290 and 73,205 US troops, with "collateral damage" to Iraqi civilians ranging from 443,941 to 2,825,710 dead and wounded? If Saddam Hussein is a "mass murderer," what does that make President Bush and those who reelected him? http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts83.html ============================================== IF YOU'RE NOT PARANOID, THEN YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION! ============================================== To Post: ParanoidTimes at yahoogroups.com Home Page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ParanoidTimes Subscribe: ParanoidTimes-subscribe at yahoogroups.com ================================================== NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ================================================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Wed Dec 8 22:29:21 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 22:29:21 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Fw: Corporate "Environmentalists", the UN, CFR & the NWO Message-ID: Subject: Corporate "Environmentalists", the UN, CFR & the NWO Want to better understand the UN and the roll that so-called "environmentalists" play in the plans of the NWO? Read this... Bumper stickers around Grand Staircase Escalante warn against the Grand Canyon Trust. I am an activist environmentalist and it just about took a two-by-four to the head till I believed it. Story by Toni Thayer. Illustrations by John Bardwell. Iset out to get a little information, enough to at least disprove the bumper sticker "Don't Trust the Trust!" Instead, I was led into a worldwide web of names-separate, entangled, and branched. I thought they were environmentalists, but they weren't. I was finally investigating the Grand Canyon Trust's Board of Directors. My boyfriend, Steve Gessig, badmouthed the Trust during our first two years together, blaming them for his town's demise. He grumbled about the enviros' connections to the World Bank and United Nations and plans to eliminate American sovereignty. I, however, am the avid environmental activist and refused to believe his undocumented accusations. I had firsthand experience with the Trust in Flagstaff, Ariz. For years, I worked with their staff on joint projects and committees, attended their workshops, and met in their offices. They were my friends. Living in Escalante, Utah, Steve's perspective was different, encircled by the United States' largest land theft, the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. The Trust spearheaded the designation in 1996 with a mission to protect and restore the Colorado Plateau canyon country. The Plateau is, basically, the Colorado River basin-beginning in northern Utah, encompassing all of southern Utah and northern Arizona, and extending into western Colorado and New Mexico. The Colorado River is the giver of life, both water and electricity, to the southwest and the downstream metropolitan regions of Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego. The Trust made promises back then: "Other existing uses of these public lands are not affected by the proclamation [of the monument], including hunting, fishing, hiking, camping and livestock grazing." They lied. The 1.9 million acres have been shut down with access allowed in only a few areas. New federal workers moving into town freely come and go, beyond the "restricted" signs that keep locals from their families' traditional sites. New resource production has ceased even though the area is rich in coal, oil, gas, uranium, and timber. The world's cleanest-burning coal is located in only two spots-the Monument and Indonesia. The Grand Staircase field is so vast it can't be accurately valued. It has tentatively been estimated at $1.3 trillion. The Trust doesn't want any cattle grazing on the Plateau, an idea that's backed by federal government intimidation and harassment of the ranchers. The ranchers are feeling the pinch of the oppression, the drought, and their rising debt. They're selling out and ending centuries-old family cattle careers. Enviro groups are scooping up their grazing permits. Rich second homeowners and large cattle corporations are buying their lands. A million tourists each year have replaced the resource-based economies and 5,000 cows. They fly by all of the beauty and zoom through the little towns, not spending much, mainly wanting water and sewer services. The 11,000 residents in two affected counties carry the burden of providing infrastructure and services for the increased load. From tourist-haven Flagstaff, I know tourism does not pay livable wages and that it causes major disparity between the haves and have-nots. I couldn't understand why the Trust wanted tourism when enviros often cited studies showing its negative impacts and lost community revenues. It didn't make sense to take such a clean, pristine and remote area, and market it to a million tourists. I also knew that all profits stem from resource production. It was hypocritical and outright wrong for Americans to consume most of the world's resources and, at the same time, shut down our resource production. Then what? Go to other countries and rape and pillage their landscapes to fulfill our hungry resource needs? Rural, southern-Utah towns are reeling from the never-ending limitations and changes put upon them by the "citified" environmental groups. They have few jobs, if any. Houses are put on the market as older generations descended from the Mormon settlers die and their offspring move to the cities for work. In Flagstaff, no one knew much about the Trust's board, but everyone knew that current president, Geoff Barnard, brought his extremely rich contacts when he came to town in 1995. Some said the board changed then, from members who truly cared about the Colorado Plateau to ones who brought their big assets to the table. It turned into a "think tank" with interests other than the environment. (See "The Committee," p. 26.) I decided to get the answers myself and I sat down at my internet browser and entered board name after board name looking for key words. Amazingly, there they were with each and every search-international, global, worldwide, United Nations, World Bank. Only five of the 22 directors resided within their Colorado Plateau scope of interest. The remaining 17 were from all corners of the U.S.-New York City, Fort Worth, Aspen, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque. Tons of information surfaced. Business and industrial achievements popped to the forefront, not environmental endeavors. There were major news and magazine articles, partnerships and deals, foundation and nonprofit boards, published books and papers, committees and meetings. These were not your everyday leaders either. Their companies were the oldest, largest, and first in our nation. They were worldwide market leaders, global, the West's leading authority, the Best in America, and nationally recognized experts and attorneys. The more I looked, the more I found. There's more, more, more... United Nations' committees, World Bank conferences, international seminars, international inventions, economic development, zoning boards, intergovernmental panels, international ecotourism development, and Indian gaming. I began noticing that some of the Trust's officers and directors also served on the national boards of other big enviro groups-The Nature Conservancy (TNC), The Wilderness Society, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, A barricade of harvested trees outlines the new visitor center at Cannonville, Utah. Toni Thayer . World Wildlife Fund, Defenders of Wildlife. A few of them swapped positions amongst themselves and from group to group. My investigation into the national boards of the largest enviro groups confirmed investigative author Ron Arnold's findings of similar global, corporate interests and their foundation funding to many enviro groups. TNC seemed to be a major player in the Trust with president Geoff Barnard working for them for 23 years, office sharing in Flagstaff, and numerous crossover board members and paid staff. Barnard's wife represented TNC when they moved to Flagstaff. Rumor has it that Jim Babbitt found Barnard and brought him to the Trust. Most environmentalists are against monster corporate entities, but here they were, sitting on the board of our most "trusted" environmental group. Little ol' Flagstaff had some real heavy hitters in its midst. I knew this was no ordinary board with its highly influential members and well-thought-out structure. It was a secret hidden in plain sight. We just never thought to look. A few weeks into my research, I learned that the Trust had rejected a proposal from EcoResults to restore riparian areas on the Plateau with cows and the cattle stomp. EcoResults , as previously reported by this magazine, uses "rural land stewards-ranchers and farmers" and a twist on holistic management to bring back barren land. Local ranchers have produced "some of the healthiest riparian areas in the U.S." and have a multitude of endangered and threatened species moving onto their restored lands. I thought this was the perfect solution to the grazing problem. President Barnard thought differently, saying they couldn't be expected to change their minds about cows overnight. This seemed logical enough on the surface, but the Trust had known about Dan Dagget's restoration techniques for seven years since they funded the printing of his book, "Beyond the Rangeland Conflict." Okay, I admit it, I was wrong. I thought they were environmentalists, but they surely aren't. I thought they were my buddies, but I've been used and betrayed. Environmentalists need to realize who their partners are, and land-rights people should know that "worker bee" enviros are unaware of their leaders' true characters. My eyes have been opened, but I've got to ask, "Have yours?" My research didn't stop at industrial wolves disguised as enviro sheep. It goes much, much deeper, way down to the bottom of the Rockefeller "think tanks." This is only one small piece of a much larger pie. Webster's defines a legal conspiracy as "an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action." It's been coming together for quite some time. It's right before our eyes. We need only look. American leaders have talked about it for decades, authors have exposed it, and the information is readily available. Implementation is accelerating, and we are feeling many of its effects-terrorized citizens stripped of their constitutional rights, economy tumbling out of control, seizure of public lands, killer droughts and forest fires, torrential rains, desperately hungry wildlife, distressed and dying forests. The Trust's board members led me straight into the conspiracy. The Rockefeller "think tanks" have different names, but they all have the same board and membership structure. Each works towards the ultimate goal of One World Order, fulfilling their particular piece of the total pie. It's a pyramid effect, with the top groups planning strategies for their assigned geographical areas and setting timelines for completion. They implement the strategies through their numerous tentacles of lower subgroups that take action, track their progress and report back to the higher groups. Membership is by invitation only. They supposedly want "the highest level unofficial group possible," but actually have extensive U.S. government-appointed and elected officials. The U.S. Departments of State, Defense, Security and Treasury are well entrenched with multiple, high-ranking secretaries, ambassadors, trade reps, and chairmen. The remaining membership includes the world's richest CEOs and financiers, union leaders, media, nongovernmental organizations and educational facilities. Harvard is the predominant university involved. Just like the Trust, the directors hop back and forth from group to group, and members are involved in many groups. One of the first established was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It's the think tank for U.S. strategies. Marxist Edward Mandell House founded the CFR in 1921, after eight years as President Woodrow Wilson's chief advisor. House's dream was to socialize America from the inside out, by taking control of both political parties, using them to implement the socialist government, and by establishing a central state bank. During Wilson's first year in office in 1913, the U.S. passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing our central bank as the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB). This took control of money production and economy away from the U.S. Congress and gave it to an elite group of private bankers. William McDonough, FRB president, is a Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral member. The Trilateral Commission (TC) is a replica of the CFR in structure and membership interests, but has strategies for broader geographical areas-the Americas (U.S., Canada, Mexico), European Union, Pacific Asia. The Trilateral countries' "growing interdependence" from the 1970s is today "deepening into globalization" with "the need for shared thinking and leadership." The Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Foundation provided the critical initial funding for the CFR. David Rockefeller is listed as the founder, honorary chair and lifetime trustee of both the CFR and Trilateral Commission. Former or current elected Trilateral members are Vice President Dick Cheney; U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein, John D. Rockefeller IV, Charles Robb and William Roth Jr.; U.S. Representatives Jim Leach, Charles Rangel and former Speaker of the House Thomas Foley. For some interesting reading, check out one of their books, "The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose" (CFR) or "21st Century Strategies of the Trilateral Countries: in Concert or Conflict?" (TC). The world's government is the United Nations. Just a few months ago, Switzerland finally joined, the last country to do so. The only other member "country" outstanding is the Catholic Church. After it joins, all sought-after, prospective members will have been enlisted. Here's a few of their recent happenings: China's Accession to the World Trade Organization: The Red Work Begins; UN and Decolonization; International Conference on Financing for Development; Millennium Development Goals, New Agenda for the Development of Africa. The world's central bank is, of course, the World Bank with the International Monetary Fund (UN groups, both work together and are really the same entity). Developing countries borrow from traditional banks due to deficits. When they can't meet their repayment schedule, the WB/IMF steps in and pays off their debt. In turn, the country must change its government to a democratic state (countries in transition) and meet standards that are impossible to reach. As government and economy collapse, regional chaos ensues. The WB and UN step in to create peace and take collateral for the unpaid debt. One theory says our federal lands are held by the WB for U.S. debt, but as yet this remains undocumented. [we believe that there is executive order trail-documentation, and we have it somewhere...T&G] It's time to wake up and to wake up all of those around you. We've run out of time for complacency. Do you care about your kids' and grandkids' futures? Do you really approve of the plan lying on the table? It's time to stand up, exercise our rights and demand an America that works for Americans! What happened to us-the land of the free and the brave? Free and brave are interlocked. You can't have one without the other. It's time to take it back. This whole scenario and Americans' sleepiness reminds me of the Jews and Hitler. Do you remember what happened to the Jews who didn't act? Toni Thayer is a researcher, writer, political activist and consultant. Her website > has information on public lands "and the state of the Earth." -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Committee: Invitation Only Trust Director Vincent Mai is Chairman of AEA Investors, the private equity fund of America's richest industrial families-Rockefeller, Mellon and Harriman. It's grown to include CEOs from the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia. They are reported as "secretive" and "with an exclusive club-like reputation." They've invested in chemicals, the third biggest global industry, with the purchase of BF Goodrich's chemical division and Sovereign Specialty Chemicals. Sovereign, one of the world's largest adhesives manufacturers, grew quickly "through the strategic acquisition of established niche leaders." AEA has entered the biotech market with investments in genomics. In his spare time, Mai serves on the board of directors for the Council on Foreign Relations and acts as chair of the International Center for Transitional Justice, a nonprofit to support countries "in transition" to democratic states in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe. This group is funded by the same industrial names that kept surfacing-Rockefeller Funds, Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corp. Until recently, Mai served on the boards of the Carnegie Corp. (Pittsburgh Steel fortune) and Fannie Mae (largest U.S. mortgage buyer). Business Week labeled Trust Director (and The Wilderness Society Treasurer) David Bonderman as "deal-hungry" and "globe-trotting" in his favorite investment climate of "rock-bottom valuations and distressed companies eager for saviors." His Texas Pacific Group, valued at $10 billion, is a leveraged-buyout firm operating in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The Forbes "Money List" names Bonderman as one of the six most active global investors in 2000. Bonderman has endless businesses and investments with multi-layered subsidiaries: oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico; Appalachian coal mining; Los Alamos National Laboratory project; U.S., European, and African airlines; microchips for phones and cards; Korean and German banks; disk drives, silicon wafers, semiconductors, transponders; Del Monte food; Beringer Wine; Ducati Motorcycles; real estate; health insurance. To capitalize on the water industry, Bonderman established Aqua International Partners with Bill Reilly (World Wildlife Fund chair), former head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They invest in companies that provide products and services to the water sector. Bonderman and Richard Blum, husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), partnered to establish Newbridge Capital for Asian and Latin American investments. Our country's leading newspapers alleged collusion between the senator opening China to trade and Blum investing millions there. Also of interest is Feinstein's help to China Ocean Shipping, a Chinese government company, to lease a closed U.S. Naval Base at Long Beach, Calif. China Ocean Shipping was a client of Newbridge Capital's manager at the time. According to The Wall Street Journal, Feinstein denied it all, saying she and her husband don't share information. Feinstein is a member of the Trilateral Commission. Trust Vice Chair Carter Bales is head of The Wicks Group of Companies and its zillion operating companies. He specializes in international management buyouts of media, communications, and information businesses. His companies include educational publishers, radio stations, a Reuters' information company, outdoor advertising, internet transferring and radio broadcasting softwares. His background is with McKinsey & Company where he serviced U.S., European and Japanese companies. Bales is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and on the boards of The Nature Conservancy President's Conservation Council and two New York chapters. He has formerly been chair and vice chair of The Nature Conservancy. Other current positions are director of McKinsey Advisory Council and vice chair of the Cancer Research Institute. Trust Director Bert Fingerhut (The Wilderness Society chair and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance director) is chair of Cortech, Inc., a Delaware corporation working with research for new types of drugs. Fingerhut and Bonderman are instrumental in The Wilderness Society throughout the U.S. Between the two, they are listed on 12 state chapter boards. Trust Director Jim Freeman was previously on the board of Lincoln Property, the largest privately held property management firm in the nation. Lincoln specializes in high-quality residential communities and commercial industrial real estate in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. One of their joint ventures is with American International Group (AIG) for markets in Spain, Germany, Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary and Italy. Together they offer "an innovative combination of expertise in global development and an international network of financial resources." AIG's chair, Maurice Greenberg, is a member of the Trilateral Commission and is vice chair of the Council on Foreign Relations. Freeman also served as the construction coordinator for the Arizona Science Center. Was Freeman going to coordinate Canyon Forest Village (CFV), a proposed "model" gateway community for all of our national parks? CFV was a Trust project with Italian investors to build a complete city just south of the Grand Canyon. Luckily, voters soundly defeated it. Then we have Trust Director Jim Babbitt, brother to former Secretary of the Interior Bruce (former Trust director, CFR and Trilateral Commission member). Congress questioned Bruce about pushing the Monument through by using the Antiquities Act. They thought he might also have a conflict of interest since brother Jim runs cattle in Arizona on federal lands. Bruce told 'em, "Nope, no conflict here!" http://www.rangemagazine.com/archive/stories/winter03/dont-trust.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 30_footer.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 4621 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: BackGrnd.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2513 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 10:46:05 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:46:05 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] (AP) US Soldiers Challenge Enlistment Extensions Message-ID: <20041209184606.1280.qmail@web13625.mail.yahoo.com> http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20041206%2F1619819180.htm&sc=1152&photoid=20041206BAG105 Soldiers Challenge Enlistment Extensions By SAM HANANEL WASHINGTON (AP) - An Army specialist, saying it was ``a question of fairness,'' filed a lawsuit Monday with seven other soldiers challenging a policy forcing them to serve in Iraq beyond their terms of enlistment. ``I served five months past my one-year obligation and I feel that it's time to let me go back to my wife,'' David Qualls told a news conference. Qualls and seven other reserve members filed a suit in federal court seeking a judge's order to require the Army to immediately release them from service. Other soldiers have filed similar suits over the past year, but this was believed to be the first by active duty service members. Under the Pentagon's ``stop-loss'' program, the Army can extend enlistments during war or national emergencies as a way to promote continuity and cohesiveness. The policy, invoked in June, could keep tens of thousands of personnel in the military beyond their expected departure. The policy was also used during the buildup to the 1991 Gulf War. Qualls signed up in July 2003 for a one-year stint in the Arkansas National Guard but has been told he will remain on active duty in Iraq until next year. The lawsuit contends the policy is a breach of the service contract because it extends the length of service without a soldier's consent. It also alleges the contracts were misleading because they make no reference to the policy, said Staughton Lynd, an attorney for the soldiers. Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, said he could not respond to the lawsuit because the Pentagon had not yet reviewed the filing, but he defended the policy as necessary to maintain cohesive units in the war on terror. ``The alternative is people start leaving that unit in the middle of a tour,'' he said. Qualls, the only plaintiff who is publicly identified, is home on leave. The other seven, listed as John Does to protect their privacy, are now serving in Iraq or are in Kuwait en route to Iraq, Lynd said. Qualls and two other plaintiffs enlisted under one-year ``Try One'' contracts that have expired. Four others are serving under multiyear contracts that also have run out. The remaining soldier's contract doesn't expire until spring, but he has been told to expect to serve in Iraq beyond the expiration date. The lawsuit names Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Army officials. 12/06/04 16:19 ? Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 10:50:51 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:50:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] (UPI) US Homeless Iraq Vets Showing up at Shelters Message-ID: <20041209185051.31826.qmail@web13603.mail.yahoo.com> http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041207-121848-6449r.htm Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters By Mark Benjamin UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL Washington, DC, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era. "When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that." "I drove off in my truck. I packed my stuff. I lived out of my truck for a while," Seabees Petty Officer Luis Arellano, 34, said in a telephone interview from a homeless shelter near March Air Force Base in California run by U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans. Arellano said he lived out of his truck on and off for three months after returning from Iraq in September 2003. "One day you have a home and the next day you are on the streets," he said. In Iraq, shrapnel nearly severed his left thumb. He still has trouble moving it and shrapnel "still comes out once in a while," Arellano said. He is left handed. Arellano said he felt pushed out of the military too quickly after getting back from Iraq without medical attention he needed for his hand -- and as he would later learn, his mind. "It was more of a rush. They put us in a warehouse for a while. They treated us like cattle," Arellano said about how the military treated him on his return to the United States. "It is all about numbers. Instead of getting quality care, they were trying to get everybody demobilized during a certain time frame. If you had a problem, they said, 'Let the (Department of Veterans Affairs) take care of it.'" The Pentagon has acknowledged some early problems and delays in treating soldiers returning from Iraq but says the situation has been fixed. A gunner's mate for 16 years, Arellano said he adjusted after serving in the first Gulf War. But after returning from Iraq, depression drove him to leave his job at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He got divorced. He said that after being quickly pushed out of the military, he could not get help from the VA because of long delays. "I felt, as well as others (that the military said) 'We can't take care of you on active duty.' We had to sign an agreement that we would follow up with the VA," said Arellano. "When we got there, the VA was totally full. They said, 'We'll call you.' But I developed depression." He left his job and wandered for three months, sometimes living in his truck. Nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, and almost half served during the Vietnam era, according to the Homeless Veterans coalition, a consortium of community-based homeless-veteran service providers. While some experts have questioned the degree to which mental trauma from combat causes homelessness, a large number of veterans live with the long-term effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse, according to the coalition. Some homeless-veteran advocates fear that similar combat experiences in Vietnam and Iraq mean that these first few homeless veterans from Iraq are the crest of a wave. "This is what happened with the Vietnam vets. I went to Vietnam," said John Keaveney, chief operating officer of New Directions, a shelter and drug-and-alcohol treatment program for veterans in Los Angeles. That city has an estimated 27,000 homeless veterans, the largest such population in the nation. "It is like watching history being repeated," Keaveney said. Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that as of last July, nearly 28,000 veterans from Iraq sought health care from the VA. One out of every five was diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the VA. An Army study in the New England Journal of Medicine in July showed that 17 percent of service members returning from Iraq met screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety disorder or PTSD. Asked whether he might have PTSD, Arrellano, the Seabees petty officer who lived out of his truck, said: "I think I do, because I get nightmares. I still remember one of the guys who was killed." He said he gets $100 a month from the government for the wound to his hand. Lance Cpl. James Claybon Brown Jr., 23, is staying at a shelter run by U.S.VETS in Los Angeles. He fought in Iraq for 6 months with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines and later in Afghanistan with another unit. He said the fighting in Iraq was sometimes intense. "We were pretty much all over the place," Brown said. "It was really heavy gunfire, supported by mortar and tanks, the whole nine (yards)." Brown acknowledged the mental stress of war, particularly after Marines inadvertently killed civilians at road blocks. He thinks his belief in God helped him come home with a sound mind. "We had a few situations where, I guess, people were trying to get out of the country. They would come right at us and they would not stop," Brown said. "We had to open fire on them. It was really tough. A lot of soldiers, like me, had trouble with that." "That was the hardest part," Brown said. "Not only were there men, but there were women and children -- really little children. There would be babies with arms blown off. It was something hard to live with." Brown said he got an honorable discharge with a good conduct medal from the Marines in July and went home to Dayton, Ohio. But he soon drifted west to California "pretty much to start over," he said. Brown said his experience with the VA was positive, but he has struggled to find work and is staying with U.S.VETS to save money. He said he might go back to school. Advocates said seeing homeless veterans from Iraq should cause alarm. Around one-fourth of all homeless Americans are veterans, and more than 75 percent of them have some sort of mental or substance abuse problem, often PTSD, according to the Homeless Veterans coalition. More troubling, experts said, is that mental problems are emerging as a major casualty cluster, particularly from the war in Iraq where the enemy is basically everywhere and blends in with the civilian population, and death can come from any direction at any time. Interviews and visits to homeless shelters around the Unites States show the number of homeless veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan so far is limited. Of the last 7,500 homeless veterans served by the VA, 50 had served in Iraq. Keaveney, from New Directions in West Los Angeles, said he is treating two homeless veterans from the Army's elite Ranger battalion at his location. U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans, found nine veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in a quick survey of nine shelters. Others, like the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training in Baltimore, said they do not currently have any veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in their 170 beds set aside for emergency or transitional housing. Peter Dougherty, director of Homeless Veterans Programs at the VA, said services for veterans at risk of becoming homeless have improved exponentially since the Vietnam era. Over the past 30 years, the VA has expanded from 170 hospitals, adding 850 clinics and 206 veteran centers with an increasing emphasis on mental health. The VA also supports around 300 homeless veteran centers like the ones run by U.S.VETS, a partially non-profit organization. "You probably have close to 10 times the access points for service than you did 30 years ago," Dougherty said. "We may be catching a lot of these folks who are coming back with mental illness or substance abuse" before they become homeless in the first place. Dougherty said the VA serves around 100,000 homeless veterans each year. But Boone's group says that nearly 500,000 veterans are homeless at some point in any given year, so the VA is only serving 20 percent of them. Roslyn Hannibal-Booker, director of development at the Maryland veterans center in Baltimore, said her organization has begun to get inquiries from veterans from Iraq and their worried families. "We are preparing for Iraq," Hannibal-Booker said. Copyright 2004 United Press International ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Send holiday email and support a worthy cause. Do good. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 11:30:39 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 11:30:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] No Escape From Dependency Message-ID: <20041209193039.69465.qmail@web13607.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20701/ No Escape From Dependency America is more dependent on foreign oil than ever before and the Bush administration has no exit strategy for getting out of the perpetual crisis. When George W. Bush entered the White House in early 2001, the nation was suffering from a severe "energy crisis" brought on by high gasoline prices, regional shortages of natural gas and rolling blackouts in California. Most notable was the artificial scarcity of natural gas orchestrated by the Enron Corporation in its rapacious drive for mammoth profits. In response, the president promised to make energy modernization one of his top concerns. However, aside from proposing the initiation of oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he did little to ameliorate the country's energy woes during his first four years in office. Luckily for him, the energy situation improved slightly as a national economic slowdown depressed demand, leading to a temporary decline in gasoline prices. But now, as Bush approaches his second term in office, another energy crisis looms on the horizon ? one not likely to dissipate of its own accord. The onset of this new energy crisis was first signaled in January 2004, when Royal Dutch/Shell ? one of the world's leading energy firms ? revealed that it had overstated its oil and natural gas reserves by about 20 percent, the net equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels of oil or the total annual consumption of China and Japan combined. Another indication of crisis came only one month later, when the New York Times revealed that prominent American energy analysts now believe Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, had exaggerated its future oil production capacity and could soon be facing the wholesale exhaustion of some of its most prolific older fields. Although officials at the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) insisted that these developments did not foreshadow a near-term contraction in the global supply of energy, warnings increased from energy experts of the imminent arrival of "peak" oil ? the point at which the world's known petroleum fields will attain their highest sustainable yield and commence a long, irreversible decline. How imminent that peak-oil moment may in fact be has generated considerable debate and disagreement within the specialist community, and the topic has begun to seep into public consciousness. A number of books on peak oil ? "Out of Gas" by David Goodstein, "The End of Oil" by Paul Roberts, and "The Party's Over" by Richard Heinberg, among others ? have appeared in recent months, and a related documentary film, "The End of Suburbia," has gained a broad underground audience. As if to acknowledge the seriousness of this debate, the Wall Street Journal reported in September that evidence of a global slowdown in petroleum output can no longer be ignored. While no one can say with certainty that recent developments portend the imminent arrival of peak oil output, there can be no question that global supply shortages will prove increasingly common in the future. Nor is the evidence of a slowdown in oil output the only sign of an unfolding energy crisis. Of no less significance is the dramatic increase in energy demand from newly-industrialized nations ? especially China. As recently as 1990, the older industrialized countries (including the former Soviet Union) accounted for approximately three-quarters of total worldwide oil consumption. But the consumption of petroleum in developing nations is growing so rapidly ? at three times the rate for developed countries ? that it is soon expected to draw even. To meet the needs of their older customers and satisfy the rising demand from the developing world, the major oil producers will have to boost production at breakneck speed. According to the DoE, total world petroleum output will have to grow by approximately 44 million barrels per day between now and 2025 ? an increase of 57 percent ? to satisfy anticipated world demand. This increase represents a prodigious amount of oil, the equivalent to total world consumption in 1970, and it is very difficult to imagine where it will all come from (especially given indications of a global slowdown in daily output). If, as appears likely, the world's energy firms prove incapable of satisfying higher levels of international demand, the competition among major consumers for access to the remaining supplies will grow increasingly more severe and stressful. To further complicate matters, many of the countries the Bush administration considers potential suppliers of additional petroleum, including Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, are torn by ethnic and religious conflict or are buffeted by powerful anti-American currents. Even if these countries possess sufficient untapped reserves to sustain an increase in output, as long as they remain chronically unstable, the desired increases are unlikely to appear. After all, any significant increase in day-to-day energy output requires substantial investment in new infrastructure ? investment that is not likely to materialize in countries suffering from perpetual disorder. At best, production in such countries will remain flat or rise sluggishly; at worst, as in Iraq today, it may even threaten to fall. Indeed, the persistence of political turmoil in countries like Angola, Colombia, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela has largely been responsible for the higher gasoline prices still evident, despite recent modest decreases, at the neighborhood pump. If anything, the potential for conflict in such countries is likely to grow as demand for their petroleum rises. The reason is simple. Increased petroleum output in otherwise impoverished nations tends to widen the gap between haves and have-nots ? a divide that often falls along ethnic and religious lines ? and to sharpen internal political struggles over the distribution of oil revenues. Because the wealth generated by oil production is so vast, and because few incumbent leaders are willing to abandon their positions of privilege, internal struggles of this sort are prone to trigger violent clashes between competing claimants to national power. In many cases, these clashes may take the form of attacks on the oil infrastructure itself, further jeopardizing the global availability of energy. As shown in Colombia and Iraq, where raids on oil pipelines and pumping stations have become a near-daily occurrence, such infrastructure ? stretched out over miles and miles of jungle or desert ? represents an unusually vulnerable and inviting target for terrorism. Not only do such attacks deprive the prevailing regime of vital revenues, but they also constitute an assault on the United States and the large multinational corporations that are deemed responsible for so many of the developing world's afflictions. With oil demand regularly outpacing supply and disorder spreading in major producing areas, global shortages and resulting high prices are likely to become the norm, not the exception. Ideally, the United States could compensate for any shortfalls in the global availability of petroleum by increasing its reliance on other sources of energy. When producing electricity, for example, it is often possible to switch from coal to natural gas and back again. But most of our petroleum supplies are used in transportation ? mainly to power cars, trucks, buses, and planes ? and, for this purpose, oil has no readily available substitutes. Indeed, we have so organized our economy and society around the availability of cheap and abundant petroleum that we are severely ill-equipped to deal with the sort of shortages and supply disruptions that are likely to become the norm in the years ahead. It is here that the performance of the Bush administration should come in for close scrutiny. In response to the earlier energy crisis of 2001, the president appointed a National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, to analyze America's energy predicament and devise appropriate solutions. The NEPDG issued its final report, the National Energy Policy (also known as the Cheney Report), in May, 2001. How the group arrived at its final assessment is a matter of some speculation, as the administration has refused to make its deliberations public, but its conclusions are incontrovertible: rather than stress conservation and the rapid development of renewable energy sources, the report called for increased U.S. reliance on petroleum. And because domestic oil production is in an irreversible decline, any rise in American oil usage necessarily entails an increased reliance on imported petroleum. In a crude attempt to mislead the public about the nature of our oil dependency, the Cheney Report called for increasing U.S. energy "independence" by exploiting the untapped oil reserves of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and other protected wilderness areas. But ANWR only possesses sufficient petroleum to provide this country with (at most) 1 million barrels per day for an estimated 15-20 years, a tiny fraction of the 20 million barrels of additional oil that will be needed to supplement domestic output in 2025. What this suggests is that the overwhelming bulk of this additional energy will have to be acquired from foreign sources. To obtain all this imported energy, the Cheney Report calls on the president and his chief associates to place a high priority on acquiring additional petroleum from producers in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, Africa and Latin America ? that is, from regions especially susceptible to instability and anti-Americanism. As a result, we are more dependent on foreign oil in 2004 than we were in 2001, and all the indicators suggest that this dependency will only become more pronounced during Bush's second term. Yes, the administration has proposed modest investment in the development of hydrogen-powered fuel cells and other new energy systems; but, at current rates of development, these new technologies will not prove capable of substituting for oil on a significant scale during the next few decades. This means that we will face our looming energy crisis with no viable fallback measures in sight. We remain trapped in our dependence on imported oil. In the long run, the only conceivable result of this will be sustained crisis and deprivation. When, and in just what form, the United States enters the coming energy crisis cannot be foreseen. Perhaps it will be provoked by a coup d'?tat in Nigeria, a civil war in Venezuela or a feud among senior princes in the Saudi royal family (possibly brought on by the impending death of King Fahd). Or it could be thanks to a major act of terrorism or a catastrophic climate event. Whatever the case, our existing energy system, already stretched to its limits, will not be able to absorb a major blow like this without considerable readjustment and pain ? or worse. While President Bush is likely to respond to a new energy crisis, as he has in the past, with renewed calls for drilling in ANWR and the further relaxation of U.S. environmental standards, nothing he has proposed to date even suggests a viable exit strategy from perpetual crisis. Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Depedency. " ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 11:33:35 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 11:33:35 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Medical Marijuana Keeps on Rolling Message-ID: <20041209193336.91374.qmail@web13604.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/20693/ Medical Marijuana Keeps on Rolling Pot for patients may run into trouble with the Supreme Court, but in New York the cause has grown in popularity. When Assemblyman Richard Gottfried proposed a bill legalizing marijuana for sick people in 1997, his odds of success seemed slim. State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican, vowed to defeat Gottfried's bill. And even Gottfried, a Democrat from Chelsea, admitted that turning his bill into law would be "an uphill battle." Back then, only two states permitted sick people to smoke pot legally. Fast-forward seven years and the cause of medical marijuana has become a full-fledged political movement, with two national organizations running campaigns across the country. Medical marijuana is now legal in 11 states. And in New York, the cause has grown in popularity. Now even Bruno, who battled prostate cancer last year, has begun to sound much more receptive. The battle over medical marijuana was back in the news again last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard the appeal of two sick women from California. Their case seeks to stop federal law enforcement agents from arresting pot-smoking patients who are obeying the laws of their own state. A ruling is not expected for months. Even if the court decides against the two women, the medical-marijuana laws in states like California would not change; they would still permit patients to smoke pot (though these patients would be vulnerable to arrest by federal agents). "Nobody ever expected this case to get this far," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which helped finance this lawsuit as well as medical-marijuana campaigns in eight states. "If we win this, it would be a very significant step forward. If we lose, it's just a tiny step backward." Whatever the court's final decision, it will certainly affect the movement's momentum, and may determine the fate of Gottfried's bill in Albany next year. For New Yorkers with long memories, the debate over medical marijuana may feel like old news. During the 1980s, New York was one of seven states in the country that distributed marijuana cigarettes. The pot came from a federal farm down South. Through a research program, it was dispensed at hospitals around the state to people with glaucoma or cancer. (According to doctors and patients, marijuana relieves eye pressure in glaucoma sufferers and fights nausea induced by chemotherapy.) New Yorkers had former assemblyman Antonio Olivieri to thank for this program. In 1979, Olivieri discovered he had a brain tumor. He underwent chemotherapy, and smoked marijuana to battle the side effects. Along the way, he became an outspoken crusader for legalizing medical marijuana. From his hospital bed, he lobbied the chair of the senate health committee by phone. The bill passed in 1980, and Olivieri died shortly afterward. Between 1982 and 1989, the New York State Department of Health handed out almost 6,000 joints, to more than 200 people. Eventually the availability of Marinol capsules ? which contain THC, the active ingredient in marijuana ? decreased the demand for the cigarettes. (Many people do prefer marijuana, however, which they say is more effective.) At any rate, by the end of the decade, New York's medical-marijuana program had shut down, as had all the programs in other states. California kicked off the recent wave of medical-marijuana victories in 1996, when Proposition 215 prevailed, with 56 percent of the vote. Now, with a doctor's recommendation, people in California who suffer from AIDS, cancer, or glaucoma can legally grow and smoke marijuana. Over the next four years, several states followed California's lead: Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Maine, Colorado, Nevada. Each state put the issue on the ballot, and every time voters approved it. Last month, voters in Montana approved yet another medical-marijuana ballot initiative, this time by 62 percent. Meanwhile, in 2000, Hawaii became the first state to remove criminal penalties for medical marijuana by using a different method: passing state legislation instead of putting an initiative on the ballot. Campaigns for ballot initiatives can be incredibly costly; given a choice, medical-marijuana activists usually prefer to achieve their goals through legislation. While it can be much more difficult to win over state legislators than regular voters, this strategy has begun to work. The Maryland state legislature passed a medical-marijuana bill in 2003, and Vermont did the same earlier this year. A legislative victory in New York State ? getting Gottfried's bill through the assembly and the senate, and then signed by Governor Pataki ? would represent yet another substantial victory for the pro-pot movement. The Marijuana Policy Project, a national organization that spent $3 million on campaigns this year, will be targeting New York in 2005, as well as Rhode Island, Illinois, and a few other states. Already, the group has a lobbyist working in Albany. Gottfried's bill would permit people to smoke marijuana legally with a doctor's certification if they have a "life-threatening condition." These include cancer, HIV, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and hepatitis C. Doctors who certify patients to obtain pot would be required to send a copy of their certification to the state health department. Patients would be allowed to receive a month's supply of marijuana at a time. The bill has 45 sponsors in the assembly; seven are Republicans. One of the first Republicans to join the cause was Patrick Manning, who represents Dutchess County. A close friend of his has cancer, and has been smoking marijuana to battle the effects of chemotherapy. "If this could help someone make their life a little bit better, a little more pleasant, while they're going through such a horrible disease, then it would be wrong for me not to stand up," Manning says. "I started talking to my colleagues and asked them to join me, so we can really make it a bipartisan bill." The talk show host Montel Williams traveled to Albany to lobby legislators in May. Williams, who uses pot to combat the pain caused by multiple sclerosis, met with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Bruno, and others. In June, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau met with Williams, then announced his support for legalizing medical marijuana. A few weeks later, the New York City Council passed a resolution supporting Gottfried's bill. And in September, Williams returned to Albany to have a meeting about the issue with Governor Pataki. For any state that does legalize medical marijuana, the crucial question is always: Where does the pot come from? The federal government grows marijuana on a farm in Mississippi, and supplies joints to seven patients across the country through a research program run by the University of Mississippi. But this farm does not supply pot to new patients in states where medical marijuana has been legalized. These patients must either grow their own weed, or else buy it on the black market. One idea that has been floating around for years is to redistribute marijuana that has been confiscated by the police. In past years, in New York State, this pot has been handed over to the state health department. Workers placed it on a conveyor belt, which delivered it to an incinerator. (The process wasn't always seamless; in 1986, workers took 63 pounds of marijuana for themselves, lifting it off the conveyer belt.) Gottfried's bill suggests a few possible sources of medical marijuana, including the state's confiscated stash. While some legislators will likely want to wait to make a decision about Gottfried's bill until the Supreme Court makes its decision, Gottfried is pushing for faster action. "I think the fact that the Supreme Court decision is pending creates one argument for passing a bill at this very moment, because state action helps send a message ... to the Supreme Court," he says. That message, of course, would be that the public wants to permit sick people to smoke pot without having to worry about a phalanx of police officers bursting through their front door. Jennifer Gonnerman is a staff writer for the Village Voice and the author of Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Send holiday email and support a worthy cause. Do good. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 14:40:40 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 14:40:40 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Times Reporter Coached Soldiers On Rumsfeld Questions Message-ID: <20041209224040.57809.qmail@web13603.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_59663.asp Drudge Report Says Times Reporter Coached Soldiers On Rumsfeld Questions Pitts Says Had "One Of My Best Days As A Journalist " posted December 9, 2004 A Chattanooga reporter coached area soldiers to ask Defense Secretary a question that drew international attention, according to the Drudge Report. The Internet news and commentary service said Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts worked with soldiers to get a question out after a lack of armor for troops headed into Iraq. The Drudge Report ran an email allegedly from Mr. Pitts to newspaper staffers about the incident, which he said was "one of my best days as a journalist." A local soldier, Sgt. Thomas Wilson, asked the question, which apparently caught Mr. Rumsfeld off guard. Mr. Pitts is embedded with the 278th Regimental Combat Team, now in Kuwait preparing to enter Iraq. Mr. Pitts said in the email he made sure that one of the soldiers he had given the question to was called on. He said he did it because he believes "lives are at stake with so many soldiers going across the border riding with scrap metal as protection." Tom Griscom, Chattanooga Times Free Press publisher, could not be reached for comment immediately. Regina Wilson, the wife of Sgt. Wilson, appeared on the Good Morning, America TV show on Thursday morning. She works at UnumProvident in Chattanooga. Here is the email posted on the Drudge Report: From: EDWARD LEE PITTS, MILITARY AFFAIRS Sent: Wednesday, December 8, 2004 4:44 PM To: Staffers Subject: RE: Way to go I just had one of my best days as a journalist today. As luck would have it, our journey North was delayed just long enough see I could attend a visit today here by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. I was told yesterday that only soldiers could ask questions so I brought two of them along with me as my escorts. Before hand we worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have. While waiting for the VIP, I went and found the Sgt. in charge of the microphone for the question and answer session and made sure he knew to get my guys out of the crowd. So during the Q&A session, one of my guys was the second person called on. When he asked Rumsfeld why after two years here soldiers are still having to dig through trash bins to find rusted scrap metal and cracked ballistic windows for their Humvees, the place erupted in cheers so loud that Rumsfeld had to ask the guy to repeat his question. Then Rumsfeld answered something about it being "not a lack of desire or money but a logistics/physics problem." He said he recently saw about 8 of the special up-armored Humvees guarding Washington, DC, and he promised that they would no longer be used for that and that he would send them over here. Then he asked a three star general standing behind him, the commander of all ground forces here, to also answer the question. The general said it was a problem he is working on. The great part was that after the event was over the throng of national media following Rumsfeld- The New York Times, AP, all the major networks -- swarmed to the two soldiers I brought from the unit I am embedded with. Out of the 1,000 or so troops at the event there were only a handful of guys from my unit b/c the rest were too busy prepping for our trip north. The national media asked if they were the guys with the armor problem and then stuck cameras in their faces. The NY Times reporter asked me to email him the stories I had already done on it, but I said he could search for them himself on the Internet and he better not steal any of my lines. I have been trying to get this story out for weeks- as soon as I foud out I would be on an unarmored truck- and my paper published two stories on it. But it felt good to hand it off to the national press. I believe lives are at stake with so many soldiers going across the border riding with scrap metal as protection. It may be to late for the unit I am with, but hopefully not for those who come after. The press officer in charge of my regiment, the 278th, came up to me afterwords and asked if my story would be positive. I replied that I would write the truth. Then I pointed at the horde of national media pointing cameras and mics at the 278th guys and said he had bigger problems on his hands than the Chattanooga Times Free Press. This is what this job is all about - people need to know. The solider who asked the question said he felt good b/c he took his complaints to the top. When he got back to his unit most of the guys patted him on the back but a few of the officers were upset b/c they thought it would make them look bad. From what I understand this is all over the news back home. Thanks, Lee ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Jazz up your holiday email with celebrity designs. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 17:00:51 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 17:00:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] No street signs, crosswalks, and accidents... How? Message-ID: <20041210010051.6767.qmail@web13601.mail.yahoo.com> No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer. By Tom McNichol Wired Magazine http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html?pg=1&topic=traffic Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things." Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer. Monderman and I are tooling around the rural two-lane roads of northern Holland, where he works as a road designer. He wants to show me a favorite intersection he designed. It's a busy junction that doesn't contain a single traffic signal, road sign, or directional marker, an approach that turns eight decades of traditional traffic thinking on its head. Wearing a striped tie and crisp blue blazer with shiny gold buttons, Monderman looks like the sort of stout, reliable fellow you'd see on a package of pipe tobacco. He's worked as a civil engineer and traffic specialist for more than 30 years and, for a time, ran his own driving school. Droll and reserved, he's easy to underestimate - but his ideas on road design, safety, and city planning are being adopted from Scandinavia to the Sunshine State. Riding in his green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior - traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point. Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road." It's no surprise that the Dutch, a people renowned for social experimentation in practically every facet of life, have embraced new ideas in traffic management. But variations of Monderman's less-is-more approach to traffic engineering are spreading around the globe, showing up in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US. In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen other towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents. In the US, traffic engineers are beginning to rethink the dictum that the car is king and pedestrians are well advised to get the hell off the road. In West Palm Beach, Florida, planners have redesigned several major streets, removing traffic signals and turn lanes, narrowing the roadbed, and bringing people and cars into much closer contact. The result: slower traffic, fewer accidents, shorter trip times. "I think the future of transportation in our cities is slowing down the roads," says Ian Lockwood, the transportation manager for West Palm Beach during the project and now a transportation and design consultant. "When you try to speed things up, the system tends to fail, and then you're stuck with a design that moves traffic inefficiently and is hostile to pedestrians and human exchange." The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a recognition that the way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether pedestrians feel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses and housing spring up along it. "A wide road with a lot of signs is telling a story," Monderman says. "It's saying, go ahead, don't worry, go as fast as you want, there's no need to pay attention to your surroundings. And that's a very dangerous message." We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the nearby village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road junction with traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign in 1999. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you." With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions. >From the beginning, a central premise guiding American road design was that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport, and that the two should be segregated as much as possible. The planned suburban community of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as "a town for the motor age," took the segregation principle to its logical extreme. Radburn's key design element was the strict separation of vehicles and people; cars were afforded their own generously proportioned network, while pedestrians were tucked safely away in residential "super blocks," which often terminated in quiet cul de sacs. Parents could let kids walk to the local school without fearing that they might be mowed down in the street. Radburn quickly became a template for other communities in the US and Britain, and many of its underlying assumptions were written directly into traffic codes. The psychology of driver behavior was largely unknown. Traffic engineers viewed vehicle movement the same way a hydraulics engineer approaches water moving through a pipe - to increase the flow, all you have to do is make the pipe fatter. Roads became wider and more "forgiving" - roadside trees were cut down and other landscape elements removed in an effort to decrease fatalities. Road signs, rather than road architecture, became the chief way to enforce behavior. Pedestrians, meanwhile, were kept out of the traffic network entirely or limited to defined crossing points. The strict segregation of cars and people turned out to have unintended consequences on towns and cities. Wide roads sliced through residential areas, dividing neighborhoods, discouraging pedestrian activity, and destroying the human scale of the urban environment. The old ways of traffic engineering - build it bigger, wider, faster - aren't going to disappear overnight. But one look at West Palm Beach suggests an evolution is under way. When the city of 82,000 went ahead with its plan to convert several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings. Property values along Clematis Street, one of the town's main drags, have more than doubled since it was reconfigured. "In West Palm, people were just fed up with the way things were, and sometimes, that's what it takes," says Lockwood, the town's former transportation manager. "What we really need is a complete paradigm shift in traffic engineering and city planning to break away from the conventional ideas that have got us in this mess. There's still this notion that we should build big roads everywhere because the car represents personal freedom. Well, that's bullshit. The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars." Today some of the most car-oriented areas in the US are rethinking their approaches to traffic, mainly because they have little choice. "The old way doesn't work anymore," says Gary Toth, director of project planning and development for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. The 2004 Urban Mobility Report, published by the respected Texas Transportation Institute, shows that traffic congestion is growing across the nation in towns and cities of all sizes. The study's conclusion: It's only going to get worse. Instead of widening congested highways, New Jersey's DOT is urging neighboring or contiguous towns to connect their secondary streets and add smaller centers of development, creating a series of linked minivillages with narrow roads, rather than wide, car-choked highways strewn with malls. "The cities that continue on their conventional path with traffic and land use will harm themselves, because people with a choice will leave," says Lockwood. "They'll go to places where the quality of life is better, where there's more human exchange, where the city isn't just designed for cars. The economy is going to follow the creative class, and they want to live in areas that have a sense of place. That's why these new ideas have to catch on. The folly of traditional traffic engineering is all around us." Back in Holland, Monderman is fighting his own battle against the folly of traditional traffic engineering, one sign at a time. "Every road tells a story," Monderman says. "It's just that so many of our roads tell the story poorly, or tell the wrong story." As the new approach to traffic begins to take hold in the US, the road ahead is unmarked and ambiguous. Hans Monderman couldn't be happier. With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions. >From the beginning, a central premise guiding American road design was that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport, and that the two should be segregated as much as possible. The planned suburban community of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as "a town for the motor age," took the segregation principle to its logical extreme. Radburn's key design element was the strict separation of vehicles and people; cars were afforded their own generously proportioned network, while pedestrians were tucked safely away in residential "super blocks," which often terminated in quiet cul de sacs. Parents could let kids walk to the local school without fearing that they might be mowed down in the street. Radburn quickly became a template for other communities in the US and Britain, and many of its underlying assumptions were written directly into traffic codes. The psychology of driver behavior was largely unknown. Traffic engineers viewed vehicle movement the same way a hydraulics engineer approaches water moving through a pipe - to increase the flow, all you have to do is make the pipe fatter. Roads became wider and more "forgiving" - roadside trees were cut down and other landscape elements removed in an effort to decrease fatalities. Road signs, rather than road architecture, became the chief way to enforce behavior. Pedestrians, meanwhile, were kept out of the traffic network entirely or limited to defined crossing points. The strict segregation of cars and people turned out to have unintended consequences on towns and cities. Wide roads sliced through residential areas, dividing neighborhoods, discouraging pedestrian activity, and destroying the human scale of the urban environment. The old ways of traffic engineering - build it bigger, wider, faster - aren't going to disappear overnight. But one look at West Palm Beach suggests an evolution is under way. When the city of 82,000 went ahead with its plan to convert several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings. Property values along Clematis Street, one of the town's main drags, have more than doubled since it was reconfigured. "In West Palm, people were just fed up with the way things were, and sometimes, that's what it takes," says Lockwood, the town's former transportation manager. "What we really need is a complete paradigm shift in traffic engineering and city planning to break away from the conventional ideas that have got us in this mess. There's still this notion that we should build big roads everywhere because the car represents personal freedom. Well, that's bullshit. The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars." Today some of the most car-oriented areas in the US are rethinking their approaches to traffic, mainly because they have little choice. "The old way doesn't work anymore," says Gary Toth, director of project planning and development for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. The 2004 Urban Mobility Report, published by the respected Texas Transportation Institute, shows that traffic congestion is growing across the nation in towns and cities of all sizes. The study's conclusion: It's only going to get worse. Instead of widening congested highways, New Jersey's DOT is urging neighboring or contiguous towns to connect their secondary streets and add smaller centers of development, creating a series of linked minivillages with narrow roads, rather than wide, car-choked highways strewn with malls. "The cities that continue on their conventional path with traffic and land use will harm themselves, because people with a choice will leave," says Lockwood. "They'll go to places where the quality of life is better, where there's more human exchange, where the city isn't just designed for cars. The economy is going to follow the creative class, and they want to live in areas that have a sense of place. That's why these new ideas have to catch on. The folly of traditional traffic engineering is all around us." Back in Holland, Monderman is fighting his own battle against the folly of traditional traffic engineering, one sign at a time. "Every road tells a story," Monderman says. "It's just that so many of our roads tell the story poorly, or tell the wrong story." As the new approach to traffic begins to take hold in the US, the road ahead is unmarked and ambiguous. Hans Monderman couldn't be happier. ------------------------- How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation 1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - dictates traffic flow. 2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the intersection is. 3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas. 4. Do it in the road: Caf?s extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space. 5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather than commonly ignored signs. 6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Send holiday email and support a worthy cause. Do good. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:17:53 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:17:53 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] FW: : FEDS FEAR SUICIDE BOMBERS COULD ENTER U.S. Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:21:01 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:21:01 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Marine who turned up in Lebanon charged with desertion Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:25:29 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:25:29 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] FW: Police Identify Alleged Gunman In Deadly Nightclub Shooting Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:32:59 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:32:59 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] FW: An Agent; Mega Was the Boss' Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:35:09 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:35:09 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Sailor Refuses Orders for Iraq Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:36:34 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:36:34 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] FW: Jewish Graffiti - Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:38:18 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:38:18 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] FW: Take Action! Day 8 Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Thu Dec 9 19:40:32 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 19:40:32 -0800 Subject: [Shadow_Group] Video Of Sailor Who Refused War Duty Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Fri Dec 10 00:26:20 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:26:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Halliburton's Iraq Contracts Now Worth over $10 Billion Message-ID: <20041210082621.59155.qmail@web13621.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121004A.shtml Rep. Henry A. Waxman Ranking Minority Member Committee on Government Reform U.S. House of Representatives December 9, 2004 Fact Sheet Halliburton's Iraq Contracts Now Worth over $10 Billion The value of Halliburton's Iraq contracts has crossed the $10 billion threshold. Halliburton has now received $8.3 billion in Iraq work under its LOGCAP troop support contract and $2.5 billion under its no-bid Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO) contract, a total of $10.8 billion. The mounting value of the contracts has been accompanied by a growing list of concerns about Halliburton's performance. Over the last year, government auditors have issued at least nine reports criticizing Halliburton's Iraq work, and there are multiple criminal investigations into overcharging and kickbacks involving Halliburton's contracts. Former Halliburton employees have testified before Congress about egregious instances of over billing. Despite these concerns, the Bush Administration continues to reject the recommendations of its auditors that 15% of Halliburton's LOGCAP reimbursements be withheld until the company can provide better substantiation for its charges. Value of the Contracts Halliburton has several major contracts in Iraq. The largest, called the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), is a cost-plus contract to provide support services to the troops. As of December 2, 2004, the value of Halliburton's Iraq task orders under LOGCAP was $8.26 billion. (1) The second largest Halliburton contract is the cost-plus RIO contract to restore and operate Iraq's oil infrastructure, which Halliburton was awarded on a no-bid basis in March 2003. The value of the work Halliburton performed under this contract is $2.51 billion. (2) The combined value of these two contracts is $10.77 billion. This is significantly more than any other contractor has been awarded in Iraq. For example, the maximum value of Bechtel's Iraq infrastructure contracts is $2.8 billion. Halliburton will reap profits of between $133 million and $424 million on its two contracts. (3) The actual value of Halliburton's Iraq contracts is likely higher than $10.77 billion. In January 2004, Halliburton received a follow-on oil contract for southern Iraq worth up to $1.2 billion. The Administration has not disclosed the value of the work given to Halliburton under this contract. Investigations and Audits At the same time that the value of Halliburton's contracts is increasing, auditors are finding extensive problems with Halliburton's billings, and criminal investigations of Halliburton and its employees continue. Auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General (CPA IG) have repeatedly and consistently criticized multiple aspects of Halliburton's activities in Iraq. In nine different reports, these government auditors have found widespread, systemic problems with almost every aspect of Halliburton's work in Iraq, from cost estimation and billing systems to cost control and subcontract management. Key findings from these audits include the following: In December 2003, a DCAA draft audit reported that Halliburton overcharged the Defense Department by $61 million to import gasoline into Iraq from Kuwait through September 30, 2003. (4) On December 31, 2003, a DCAA "Flash Report" audit found "significant" and "systemic" deficiencies in the way Halliburton estimates and validates costs. According to the DCAA audit, Halliburton repeatedly violated the Federal Acquisition Regulation and submitted a $2.7 billion proposal that "did not contain current, accurate, and complete data regarding subcontract costs." (5) On January 13, 2004, DCAA concluded that Halliburton's deficiencies "bring into question [Halliburton's] ability to consistently produce well-supported proposals that are acceptable as a basis for negotiation of fair and reasonable prices," and it urged the Corps of Engineers to "contact us to ascertain the status of [Halliburton's] estimating system prior to entering into future negotiations." (6) In a May 13, 2004, audit, DCAA reported "several deficiencies" in Halliburton's billing system that resulted in billings to the government that "are not prepared in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and contract terms." DCAA also found "system deficiencies resulting in material invoicing misstatements that are not prevented, detected and/ or corrected in a timely manner." The report emphasized Halliburton's inadequate controls over subcontract billings. The auditors "identified inadequate or nonexistent policies and procedures for notifying the government of potential significant subcontract problems that impact delivery, quality, and price" and determined that Halliburton "does not monitor the ongoing physical progress of subcontracts or the related costs and billings." (7) On June 25, 2004, the CPA IG found that, as a result of poor oversight, Halliburton charged U. S. taxpayers for unauthorized and unnecessary expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. According to the IG, the overcharges would have amounted to $3.6 million per year. (8) A July 26, 2004, CPA IG audit report found that Halliburton "did not effectively manage government property" and that the company's property records "were not sufficiently accurate or available to properly account for CPA property items." The IG "projected that property valued at more than $18.6 million was not accurately accounted for or was missing." (9) In July 2004, GAO found ineffective planning, inadequate cost control, and insufficient training of contract management officials under LOGCAP in Iraq. GAO reported that, when Halliburton acted as a middleman for the operation of dining halls, costs were over 40% higher. (10) In an August 16, 2004, memorandum, DCAA "identified significant unsupported costs" submitted by KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, and found "numerous, systemic issues . . . with KBR's estimates." According to DCAA, "while contingency issues may have had an impact during the earlier stages of the procurements, clearly, the contractor should have adequate supporting data by now." When DCAA examined seven LOGCAP task orders with a combined proposed value of $4.33 billion, auditors identified unsupported costs totaling $1.82 billion. (11) On November 23, 2004, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (formerly the CPA IG) examined a $569 million LOGCAP task order and found that Halliburton "did not provide . . . sufficiently detailed cost data to evaluate overall project costs or to determine whether specific costs for services performed were reasonable." The IG concluded that the Army "did not receive sufficient or reliable cost information to effectively manage" the task order. (12) Multiple criminal investigations of Halliburton's Iraq contracts are also ongoing. The Justice Department is investigating Halliburton's admission that two of its employees received up to $6.3 million in kickbacks to steer LOGCAP subcontracts to a Kuwaiti contractor. (13) The Defense Department Inspector General, the FBI, and the Justice Department are investigating allegations of fraud and overcharging for gasoline under the RIO contract. (14) Disclosures by Former Employees and Independent Experts The concerns expressed by government auditors have been corroborated by the testimony of former Halliburton employees. Over the past year, six former employees came forward publicly to provide Congress with information about egregious overcharges by Halliburton. Others have contacted congressional staff privately to echo these concerns. For example: Marie deYoung, a Halliburton logistics specialist, testified about subcontracts under which Halliburton paid $45 per case of soda and $100 per 15-pound bag of laundry. Ms. deYoung also disclosed that Halliburton did not comply with the Army's request to move Halliburton employees from a five-star hotel in Kuwait, where it cost taxpayers approximately $10,000 per day to house the employees, into air-conditioned tent facilities, which would have cost taxpayers under $600 per day. (15) Henry Bunting, a Halliburton procurement officer, described how he and other buyers were instructed to split large purchase orders into multiple purchase orders below $2,500 in order to avoid the requirement to solicit multiple bids. Supervisors routinely told the employees responsible for purchasing: "Don't worry about price. It's cost-plus." (16) David Wilson, a convoy commander for Halliburton, and James Warren, a Halliburton truck driver, testified that brand new $85,000 Halliburton trucks were abandoned or "torched" if they got a flat tire or experienced minor mechanical problems. Mr. Warren brought these and other concerns to the personal attention of Randy Harl, the president and CEO of KBR. He was fired a few weeks later. (17) Mike West, a Halliburton labor foreman, described how he and other Halliburton employees spent weeks in Iraq with virtually nothing to do, but were instructed to bill 12-hour days for 7 days a week on their timesheets. In addition, his superior directed him to buy unnecessary equipment, telling him: "Don't worry about it. It's a cost-plus-plus contract." (18) Similarly, independent experts have criticized Halliburton's inflated gasoline prices under the RIO contract. Phil Verleger, a California oil economist and the president of a consulting firm, said of Halliburton's price: "It's as if they put the gasoline on the Queen Mary and take it around the globe before they deliver it." (19) Jeffrey Jones, until recently the Director of the Defense Energy Support Center, stated: "I can't construct a price that high." (20) Another expert, who asked that his identity not be disclosed, characterized Halliburton's prices as "highway robbery." Failure To Withhold Funds Reflecting the growing problems with Halliburton's Iraq contracts, government auditors have recommended that the Army begin to withhold partial payment to Halliburton under LOGCAP as required by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. On August 16, 2004, DCAA strongly encouraged the Army to begin withholding 15% of Halliburton's reimbursements, stating, "It is clear to us KBR will not provide an adequate proposal until there is a consequence." (21) On November 23, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction supported this recommendation with respect to the $569 million LOGCAP task order it attempted to audit. (22) Instead of following the advice of these independent auditors, the Army has refused to withhold payments for the last eight months. To the contrary, the Army has given Halliburton multiple extensions to provide the adequate cost estimates and supporting data needed to finalize the terms of the contract. --------------------------------- Notes (1) U. S. Army Field Support Command, Media Spreadsheet for AFSC LOGCAP (Dec. 2, 2004). (2) U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, Frequently Asked Questions: Engineer Support to Operation Iraqi Freedom (Oct. 7, 2004). (3) Under Halliburton's cost-plus contracts, the government reimburses the company for its actual costs and then pays an additional fee. For LOGCAP, Halliburton receives a base fee of 1% of its costs and an additional award fee of up to 2%. This yields a profit range of $83 million to $248 million. For RIO, Halliburton's base fee is 2% of its costs and its additional award fee is up to 5%. This yields a profit range of $50 million to $176 million. (4) Department of Defense, DOD News Briefing (Dec. 11, 2003). The minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee later determined that the total overpayment to Halliburton through April 1, 2004, was $167 million. See Minority Staff, Committee on Government Reform, Halliburton's Gasoline Overcharges (July 21, 2004). (5) Defense Contract Audit Agency, Audit Report No. 3311-2004K24020001 (Dec. 31, 2003). (6) Defense Contract Audit Agency, Status of Brown & Root Services (BRS) Estimating System Internal Controls (Jan. 13, 2004). (7) Defense Contract Audit Agency, Audit Report No. 3311-2002K11010001 (May 13, 2004). (8) Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General, Federal Deployment Center Forward Operations at the Kuwait Hilton (June 25, 2004). (9) Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General, Audit of the Accountability and Control of Material Assets of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad (July 26, 2004). (10) Government Accountability Office, DOD's Extensive Use of Logistics Support Contracts Requires Strengthened Oversight (July 2004). (11) Memorandum from Defense Contract Audit Agency to U. S. Army Field Support Command (Aug. 16, 2004). (12) Memorandum from Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Task Order 0044 of the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program III Contract (Nov. 23, 2004). (13) House Committee on Government Reform, Hearings on Unprecedented Challenges: Contracting and the Rebuilding of Iraq (June 15, 2004). (14) Letter from John R. Crane, Assistant Inspector General, Department of Defense, to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (June 30, 2004); FBI Investigating Contracts with Halliburton, New York Times (Oct. 29, 2004). (15) House Committee on Government Reform, Hearings on Contracting and the Rebuilding of Iraq: Part IV, 108th Cong. (July 22, 2004). (16) Senate Democratic Policy Committee, Hearings on Iraq Contracting Abuses (Feb. 13, 2004). (17) House Committee on Government Reform, supra note 15. (18) Statement of Mike West (June 6, 2004). (19) The High Price of Gasoline for Iraq, NBC News (Nov. 5, 2003). (20) Army Eyes Halliburton Import Role in Iraq, Associated Press (Nov. 5, 2003). (21) Defense Contract Audit Agency memorandum, supra note 11. (22) Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction memorandum, supra note 12. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Fri Dec 10 01:06:05 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 01:06:05 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Jan 20 One-Day Protest Strike and Demonstrations on Inauguration Day Message-ID: <20041210090605.70254.qmail@web13607.mail.yahoo.com> CALL TO ACTION: ONE-DAY PROTEST STRIKE AND DEMONSTRATIONS ON INAUGURATION DAY, JANUARY 20 The "election" that has sentenced the world to four more years of the most right-wing government in US history is merely the most glaring recent expression of a global crisis of democracy. We simply miss the point if we focus our outrage on the narrow question of whether the election was stolen, lost through incompetence or conceded too early. A process so dominated by money and corporate interests is by definition non-democratic. The fact that the choice in this election was effectively limited to Kerry or Bush, excluding any real alternative from the start, is only one symptom. As a whole, the US electoral system is a screen spectacle, a mirage of democracy that compels a minimum of pseudo-participation simply by its monopoly over what passes for politics and public debate. Capturing popular energy and channeling it into the dead-end of hierarchical parties, it enforces an impoverishment of social imagination and wages a war of attrition on the desire for real change. Never has a power produced in this way been legitimate. G.W. Bush's claims of a "popular mandate" are mere propaganda in the crudest sense. Every opportunity must be taken to contest the forms and functioning of US-style "democracy." January 20, Inauguration Day, is a moment of unavoidable vulnerability for the Bush regime and is thus the first major opportunity to make it feel the shakiness of its "mandate." We cannot of course expect other governments to contest seriously the official results of a US election. The power to do this belongs only to the global multitude, to those who have the courage to create new forms of egalitarian politics. A real, transparent democratic voice from below can actively demonstrate that lies and naked power do not constitute legitimacy. Indeed, as has always been the case, only such a voice - persistent, uncompromising and for-all - can stop the destructive violence wreaked by antidemocratic states. And today only such a voice can stop the Bush regime. Real democracy is not the result of spectacular elections and obscene expenditures. Instead, it emerges from direct collective actions that dismantle the conditions for war-mongering, economic and social violence, servitude and abasement. It emerges wherever people work together to render impossible endless militarization, state and non-state terrorism, and a global regime of nations and borders that gives free passage to capital while denying it to real people. United for Peace and Justice, Not In Our Name, DC Anti-War Network, Turn Your Back on Bush and other groups have called for massive protests in Washington DC on "j20." We support these calls, but are also convinced of the need for people to organize protests right where they are. Blocked democracy is a global problem, as this election in particular shows. Not only US citizens but people everywhere are threatened by aggressive US policies. We therefore call for a one-day protest strike and demonstrations across the United States and for marches on US embassies in as many other countries as possible. We know that for most people January 20 is a workday, and that work conditions can vary drastically. We suggest people reach out to others in their workplaces, campuses and neighborhoods and either call in sick or walk out at noon on January 20. College and university students can easily take a day off from classes. Whether you then choose to join an organized protest action or form a local affinity group of friends to organize an action of your own, join us and others in the streets to reclaim our power. We don't consent, and we won't obey! In the streets for real democracy! Act together for real alternatives! -- An internationalist collective based in Berlin ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Fri Dec 10 01:53:22 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 01:53:22 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Woman hit teens after golf ball struck car Message-ID: <20041210095322.77498.qmail@web13607.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/12/07/boys.hit.ap/Police: Woman hit teens after golf ball struck car Tuesday, December 7, 2004 Posted: 7:24 PM EST (0024 GMT) ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida (AP) -- A woman ran over two teenage brothers after they accidentally hit her sport utility vehicle with a golf ball they were bouncing in a parking lot, officials said. One of the boys suffered life-threatening injuries. The 14- and 16-year-old boys were bouncing the golf ball in a shopping center parking lot Sunday afternoon when it went astray and struck the SUV driven by 47-year-old Kathy Feaganes Allen, sheriff's Deputy Greg Suchy said. No damage was done, and the boys apologized and began to walk away, Suchy said. Allen started to drive away, but suddenly made a U-turn, ran over a median and struck the teens before knocking over a light pole, Suchy said. "I tried to run. I blacked out. I woke up bleeding," Justin Marshman, 16, told The Florida Times-Union. She then allegedly went after a third brother, but did not hit him. A witness said that after the SUV came to rest, Allen got out of the car and smoked a cigarette with the boys lying on the ground in pain. "She charged them. This was the most deliberate act," witness Russell McPhee said. "After she ran them down, she got out of the car and lit a cigarette like a movie star." Isiah Grayer, 14, was in critical condition Monday. Justin Marshman, his stepbrother, was treated for non-life threatening injuries. Brent Woolbright of the St. Johns County Public Defender's Office said he was assigned Allen's case Monday and was trying to get all the facts. "I talked to her, and her story is a little different that what was reported," he said. Allen told the court she has mental problems. A judge ordered her held without bail Monday on three counts of attempted murder ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sat Dec 11 23:01:45 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 23:01:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] 20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA Message-ID: <20041212070145.94997.qmail@web13622.mail.yahoo.com> Did you know.... 1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold 2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886 5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html 6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=26 http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.php 7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel27.html 8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates/pfindex.html 10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm http://www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm 11. Diebold is based in Ohio. http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm 12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml 13. Jeff Dean, Diebold's Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree. http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf 14. Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years. http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf 15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio. http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/26/loc_elexoh.html 16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie here < http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov>.) http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4874190 17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml 18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm http://www.rise4news.net/extravotes.html http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950 http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm 19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother. http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10544-2004Oct29.html 20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation. http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html http://uscountvotes.org/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! ? What will yours do? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sun Dec 12 11:05:28 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 11:05:28 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] (BBC) Trial Begins for Israeli Soldier in Shooting of Palestinian Girl Message-ID: <20041212190528.16988.qmail@web13601.mail.yahoo.com> Israel trial over slain Gaza girl An Israeli military court has charged an army officer with illegally using his weapon when he allegedly shot a Palestinian girl who was already dead. The schoolgirl, Iman al-Hams, was killed in Gaza by Israeli soldiers who suspected she was carrying explosives. Witnesses said the officer emptied the magazine of his weapon into the girl as she lay dead on the ground. The officer - who has not been named - was also charged with inappropriate behaviour and obstruction of justice. The charges follow a military police investigation into the incident on 5 October when 13-year-old Iman was killed after soldiers said she strayed close to an Israeli army outpost in the town of Rafah on Gaza's border with Egypt. An earlier internal investigation by the army cleared the officer of any wrongdoing. Close range According to the indictment, Iman al-Hams was injured in the initial burst of fire from the army outpost. The officer and another soldier then approached the wounded girl, but the officer allegedly went on ahead and on reaching her "pointed his weapon, an M16, down and shot her - two shots at very close range". After moving away from the girl's body, the indictment says, "he turned around and returned to the place where the girl was lying... he aimed his weapon and fired, in automatic mode, about 10 bullets until he emptied his magazine." The soldiers in the platoon told Israeli newspapers that the officer was "confirming a kill", military slang for firing into the bodies of combatants to ensure they are dead and present no further danger. The practice goes against Israeli military regulations governing the rules of engagement in the occupied territories. The officer denies all the charges. School trip Army chief Moshe Yaalon said the troops had believed the girl was sent by Palestinian militants to lead them away from the outpost so they could be attacked by snipers. The girl's family said she was on her way to school when she was shot. Her bag contained only school books. Hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli troops during the Palestinian uprising or intifada. It is unusual for the army to launch an investigation into the circumstances of Palestinian deaths. Israel's armed forces have occupied the Gaza Strip since 1967. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants to pull troops and settlers out of the territory while retaining full control of its borders, coastline and airspace. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sun Dec 12 11:18:09 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 11:18:09 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] (Retuers) Militant Chief Wounded in Gaza Message-ID: <20041212191809.87805.qmail@web13606.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51367-2004Dec9.html Militant Chief Wounded in Gaza By Nidal al-Mughrabi Retuers Thursday, December 9, 2004; 10:37 AM GAZA, Dec 9 - A militant leader survived an Israeli missile strike on his car in Gaza on Thursday in Israel's first assassination attempt in the Palestinian territories since Yasser Arafat died in a Paris hospital. Jamal Abu Samhadana, head of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), an umbrella organisation of militant factions, was slightly wounded along with two of his aides. His group vowed revenge with a "painful and earthquake-like" response. "The senior operative (targeted in the strike) was responsible for numerous terrorist attacks," the army said. A resurgent cycle of violence in occupied Gaza threatened to complicate efforts to instil calm for a Jan. 9 presidential selection for a successor to Arafat. Israel had promised to restrain its military operations in the West Bank and Gaza as long as calm prevailed during the run-up to the Palestinian election. But Sharon, who had reserved the right to strike at "ticking bombs," can ill afford to look soft on the Palestinians as he tries to win over hardliners in his own party for a planned Gaza withdrawal they have condemned as a "reward for terror." His rightist Likud's central committee was voting on Thursday on whether to let him negotiate a unity coalition with centre-left Labour that would avoid early elections and pave the way for the evacuation of Gaza settlements next year. Thursday's strike was Israel's first targeting a top-level militant chief since Arafat's death on Nov. 11. Palestinian cabinet member Saeb Erekat said the "continuation of assassination attempts" undermines efforts to revive peace talks. It came amid efforts by moderate former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, the leading presidential candidate, to coax militants into halting suicide bombings and other attacks. ISRAELI TANKS DESTROYED The PRC has staged numerous attacks on Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers during a four-year-old Palestinian uprising, including bombings that destroyed three Israeli combat tanks, killing seven crewmen. In Thursday's air strike, the militants jumped from their car seconds before the missile launched from an unmanned drone aircraft overhead destroyed the vehicle. "God willing, we will always be in the trench of resistance," said Samhadana, his head bandaged as he lay on a hospital stretcher. The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the blast, which took place between the towns of Khan Younis and Rafah, an area of frequent Israeli-Palestinian fighting. It was the second time in four months that Samhadana, 40, had survived an Israeli attempt to kill him. He escaped a missile strike on his car in August. The PRC, along with the militant Islamic Jihad group and the Abu Rish Brigades, claimed responsibility for a raid that killed three Israeli soldiers at an army post in a Jewish settlement in Gaza in September. Palestinian security sources had blamed the PRC for a bombing last year that killed three U.S. security men in a diplomatic convoy passing through Gaza. It had denied involvement. Four members of the group were detained as suspects but were later acquitted by a Palestinian court. Three escaped prison earlier this year after Arafat froze the court's ruling. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Jazz up your holiday email with celebrity designs. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sun Dec 12 12:24:23 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:24:23 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] Help needed: fliers, posters, video: Tacoma Peltier March Message-ID: <20041212202423.26435.qmail@web13601.mail.yahoo.com> PLEASE POST WIDELY From: TACOMA LEONARD PELTIER SUPPORT GROUP P.O. BOX 5464 TACOMA, WA 98415-0464 Tacoma-lpsg at ojibwe.us bayou at blarg.net HELP NEEDED FOR TACOMA REGIONAL PELTIER MARCH AND RALLY Greetings All, GETTING OUT FLIERS AND POSTERS We have about a month and a half before the march. We need help getting fliers and posters out. There are many events that fliers can be passed out at (go to: www.seattle.indymedia.org and look on the left hand side for the link to the peace and justice calendar and you will find many events you can pass out fliers at. For those of you in Portland go to www.portlannd.indymedia.org and you will find events in your area).. You could also get out fliers and posters at colleges and other places where people gather. You can also get them out to groups, organizations, family members and friends. If you are willing to help please contact us at bayou at blarg.net and send us your mailing address. VIDEO AND PHOTOGRAPHS Though the purpose of the Annual Tacoma Marches for 12 years has been to keep Leonard?s case out in the public, to build support for Leonard and to educate people on Leonard?s case and other Native issues going on, we will not be intimidated by the City of Tacoma and their police force into not marching for Leonard. The City of Tacoma has tried to stop our marches and when we stood up to them and demanded our right to march for Leonard Peltier, last year they pulled out a massive police force that was nothing more than a political statement against our right to march. Police on bikes tried to provoke a conflicts with marchers, including make racist remarks to Native marchers. Our security team handled the situation very well and the provocateurs were unsuccessful. Our marches includes people of all ages from Elders to children and people in wheelchairs. We work hard to keep our marches open to all people and to keep them safe. Our all-Native security team has done a great job at that over the years. Those people who have video or camera equipment can help the security team by being in different parts of the march and record what takes place. Also, this will help our legal team should something take place. And we continue to pressure the City of Tacoma for out right to march and having video and photos helps us in that effort. Video of our marches and rallies gets send to other people in North America and is used to help build support in their areas. Photos are also sent to Leonard. So if you can help us please do and send copies of all video and photos to the Tacoma LPSG. Thank you. FUNDRAISINNG We have our large mass mailing coming up, we mail out packets of fliers and posters and we have other expenses. The only money we get to pay for these things is from grassroots supporters. Please, if you can send us a donation of any amount that will help. Please make checks out to: Tacoma Leonard Peltier Support Group, and send them to the address above. Thank you. 12TH ANNUAL NORTHWEST REGIONAL INTERNATIONAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY WITH LEONARD PELTIER MARCH AND RALLY FOR JUSTICE SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2005. TACOMA, WA MARCH FOR JUSTICE: 12:00 NOON Portland Ave. Park (on Portland Ave. between E. 24th and E. Fairbanks Ave. Take Portland Ave. exit off I-5 and head east) RALLY FOR JUSTICE: 1:00 PM U.S. Federal Court House, 1717 Pacific Ave. Program (more to be added later) Harold Belmont: Elder, Native People?s Alliance With Friends and Allies Dorothy Ackerman: Lakota Elder, Portland, OR Aztec Dancers Matilaja: Yu?Pik/Yakama Pete Sanchez: Ktunaxa (Kutenai), Drummer Jim Page: Folk Singer/Activist Michael One Road: AIM, Portland, OR Jeanette Bushnell: Anishinaabe Kerwin Hemlock: Drummer Russell Redner: AIM. Larry Mosqueda: Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace and Olympia CISPES. Juan Jose Bocanegra: Community organizer and long time Peltier supporter. Steve Hapy, Jr: Tacoma LPSG Arthur J. Miller: Tacoma LPSG NW AIM DRUM Leonard Peltier is an American Indian Movement Activist who was framed-up by the government after a firefight on the Pine Ridge Oglala Reservation that happened because of an illegal government operation to steal Oglala land for uranium mining. The head of the local FBI office at the time, Norman Zigrossi, defended the illegal actions by saying: ?Indians are a conquered nation and the FBI is merely acting as a colonial police force? He went on to say, ?When you?re conquered, the people you?re conquered by dictate your future.? ?I have no doubt whatsoever that the real motivation behind both Wounded Knee II and the Oglala firefight, and much of the turmoil throughout Indian Country since the early 1970s, was?and is?the mining companies.? Leonard Peltier In 2003 the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals stated in their ruling, ?Much of the government?s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.? The Oglala People were never conquered and Leonard Peltier will not give up the fight for justice. In today?s world it is even more important than ever to stand-up to political persecution. The last two years the City of Tacoma has tried to stop our march and last year the city tried to intimidate us with a massive show of police force. It was the support of many good people and a legal team that won us the right to march in Tacoma. Though our focus has been for 12 years to hold a peaceful march of solidarity with Leonard Peltier, we will not stop marching, we will not be intimidated and we demand the right to come out in public in support of Leonard Peltier without persecution. We ask you to join us at our Annual Regional Tacoma March and Rally in Solidarity with Leonard Peltier as we send the message, we will not give up, we will not surrender, we will continue to stand for justice for Leonard Peltier for how ever long it takes! This action is in support of the important legal efforts of Leonard?s legal team (for more information of to: www.leonardpeltier.org ) In The Spirit Of Crazy HouseSteve Hapy, JrArthur J. Miller Tacoma LPSG ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sun Dec 12 12:42:16 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:42:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] More Troops Express Doubts on War Mission Message-ID: <20041212204216.15630.qmail@web13605.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121304X.shtml U.S. Soldiers' Grilling Fields By Tim Harper The Toronto Star Sunday 12 December 2004 More talk heard of desertion, disgruntlement. `Backdoor draft' adding to worries for some troops. WASHINGTON - David Qualls reluctantly returned to Iraq yesterday, but not before he made a louder statement about the state of U.S. troop morale than any of the pointed questions from soldiers to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this week. Qualls, an army specialist from Morrilton, Ark., and seven other soldiers who have remained nameless, have sued the Pentagon, claiming they are improperly being kept in Iraq beyond their agreed tour of duty. It is a burgeoning problem for Rumsfeld and the Bush administration because more and more soldiers in Iraq are questioning the rationale for their mission, the way in which they have been equipped and how long they've been deployed. In so doing, they are shining new light on the price being paid for what is widely seen as inadequate war planning and piecemeal responses as U.S. troops battle an insurgency better armed and more determined than any scenario drawn up. As the U.S. death toll in Iraq tops 1,270 and the looming Christmas season only magnifies the frustration of families at home, stories of desertions and disgruntled troops began dominating the airwaves. There was the now-famous grilling of Rumsfeld by troops stationed in Kuwait, who challenged him on a lack of armoured vehicles, lengthened deployments, antiquated equipment and unpaid benefits. The Toronto case of Jeremy Hinzman, a 26-year-old South Dakotan who said he fled to Canada instead of deploying to Iraq after realizing he could not kill another human being, was given prominence in many U.S. media outlets. A navy petty officer is at large and been declared a deserter after refusing to board a troop transport ship in San Diego, bound for Iraq. "I just couldn't sleep at night knowing that I took 3,000 people to a place where 100 of them might die," 23-year-old Pablo Paredes told National Public Radio. The U.S. Army wants to prosecute First Lt. Julian P. Goodrum of Knoxville, Tenn., for being away without leave (AWOL) after the 34-year-old, 16-year military veteran checked himself into a civilian psychiatric hospital, claiming he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The mysterious case of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, a 24-year-old Lebanese-born U.S. Marine who disappeared from his camp near Falluja last summer, led to a charge of desertion this week. Dan Felushko, a 24-year-old marine, told the CBS program 60 Minutes this week that he left Camp Pendleton, Calif., and came to Canada rather than Kuwait, because he felt it would have been wrong to fight. "I didn't want, you know, `died deluded in Iraq' over my gravestone," he said. According to the CBS program, some 5,000 American men and women have deserted the military since the war began. They are largely accused of cowardice back home, but they say they are acting out of conscience. Some say they saw no link between the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Iraq war, others lost faith when it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many who remain are clearly becoming disillusioned. Erik Leaver, of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, said this week's confrontation in Kuwait show many soldiers believe Washington is not being straight with them. "This is not a well-articulated mission," Leaver said. "More and more we are hearing from military families that their sons or daughters are coming home on leave and saying, `Mom, I don't know what I'm doing over there.' The soldiers on the front lines there understand U.S. policy is not working." Leaver said the shortage of armoured vehicles, coming on the heels of last year's controversy over a lack of body armour, is particularly distressing because this a war of choice for the Bush administration, which determined its timing and still did not prepare properly. The Qualls case focused attention again on a program known officially as "stop-loss," but is more popularly known on the home front as a "backdoor draft." Many believe the program, which allows the Pentagon to extend voluntary deployments in time of war or national emergency, is the single most morale-damaging program in place. The Pentagon is not forthcoming on how many soldiers will have their stays extended, but many estimate it could affect 40,000 to 47,000 soldiers, both regular service and reservists - about a third of the 150,000 Americans who will be in Iraq for the run-up to scheduled Jan. 30 elections. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, who appears to be mulling another presidential run in 2008, this week called the stop-loss program the single most damaging morale issue for the military and pointed the finger of blame at an ill-prepared Pentagon. "It just adds another layer of stress to families left at home who are not able to plan moves, or enrol kids in school," says Michelle Joyner of the National Military Families Association, a support group for those with loved ones in Iraq. Joyner, whose brother, Adam Smith, is serving in Iraq, said her group has fielded calls from families who lost college tuition deposits or are having difficulty getting straight answers from units as to when their family members could be expected to return. "It forces some families to live day to day without being able to plan for the future," she said. "If you can't get clear answers, it just feeds gossip and increases stress. So when we get some calls from families, we simply have to tell them there are some questions for which we have no answer." Many of those raising questions, like Qualls, are older and more experienced. About 45 per cent of the 138,000 troops now on the ground in Iraq are drawn from the U.S. Reserve and National Guard and tend to be less deferential to authority than younger active duty troops. The 35-year-old Qualls failed in his attempt to win a court injunction keeping him in the U.S. until his lawsuit could be heard. He left Camp Taji about 24 kilometres north of Baghdad last month and returned to Arkansas for U.S. Thanksgiving. He first enlisted in the army in 1986. He was on active duty until 1990 and then was a member of the Individual Ready Reserves before leaving the military in 1994. In July 2003, Qualls entered the service again, under an Army National Guard policy known as Try One, which allows veterans to serve for only one year on a trial basis before committing to a full enlistment, according to the lawsuit. Qualls was deployed to Iraq in March but has been told his stay will be extended. The news for those who have come home is equally bleak. The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans reported this week that Iraqi war veterans are beginning to show up at shelters in California, raising fears of a repeat of the generation of homeless Vietnam vets. And another study released in the New England Journal of Medicine this week showed medical advances have saved the lives of many soldiers in Iraq who would have died in previous wars. However, many of the 10,300 soldiers wounded so far are attempting to re-integrate into their country with much more horrific and debilitating injuries than veterans of any other previous war. Meanwhile, the death toll mounts. Death dropped in this reporter's in-box three times during the writing of this story. The Pentagon confirmed the deaths of Sgt. Arthur C. Williams, IV, 31, of Edgewater, Fla.; Capt. Mark N. Stubenhofer, 30, of Springfield, Va.; and Sgt. 1st Class Todd C. Gibbs, 37, of Angelina, Texas. They came by way of separate e-mails that drop with such numbing regularity, they are often treated as spam - unless you remind yourself that three more families have paid the ultimate price. ------- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! ? Get yours free! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sun Dec 12 21:24:00 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 21:24:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] U.S. Government Moves to Muzzle Dissident Voices Message-ID: <20041213052400.68559.qmail@web13605.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/7652.html U.S. government moves to muzzle dissident voices By Scott Martelle | Associated Press December 7, 2004 In the summer of 1956, Russian poet Boris Pasternak -- a favorite of the recently deceased Joseph Stalin -- delivered his epic "Doctor Zhivago" manuscript to a Soviet publishing house, hoping for a warm reception and a fast track to readers who had shared Russia's torturous half-century of revolution and war, oppression and terror. Instead, Pasternak received one of the all-time classic rejection letters: A 10,000-word missive that stopped just short of accusing him of treason. It was left to foreign publishers to give his smuggled manuscript life, offering the West a peek into the soul of the Cold War enemy, winning Pasternak the 1958 Nobel in literature and providing Hollywood with an epic film. These days, Pasternak might not have fared so well. In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval. The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States, a country that prides itself as the international beacon of free expression. "It strikes me as very odd," said Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University and former constitutional legal counsel to former Presidents Reagan and Bush. "I think the government has an uphill struggle to justify this constitutionally." Several groups, led by the PEN American Center and including Arcade Publishing, have filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York seeking to overturn the regulations, which cover writers in Iran, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea and, until recently, Iraq. Violations carry severe reprisals -- publishing houses can be fined $1 million and individual violators face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. "Historically, the United States has served as a megaphone for dissidents from other countries," said Ed Davis of New York, a lawyer leading the PEN legal challenge. "Now we're not able to hear from dissidents." Yet more than dissident voices are affected. The regulations already have led publishers to scrap plans for volumes on Cuban architecture and birds, and publishers complain that the rules threaten the intellectual breadth and independence of academic journals. Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has joined the lawsuit, arguing that the rules preclude American publishers from helping craft her memoirs of surviving Iran's Islamic revolution and her efforts to defend human rights in Iranian courts. In a further wrinkle, even if publishers obtain a license for a book -- something they are loathe to do -- they believe the regulations bar them from advertising it, forcing readers to find the dissident works on their own. "It's absolutely against the First Amendment," fumed Arcade editor Richard Seaver, who hopes to publish an anthology of Iranian short stories. "We're not going to ask permission (to publish). That reeks of censorship. And `censorship' is a word that gets my hackles up very quickly." Officials from the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees OFAC, declined comment on the lawsuit, but spokeswoman Molly Millerwise described the sanctions as "a very important part of our overall national security." "These are countries that pose serious threats to the United States, to our economy and security and our well being around the globe," Millerwise said, adding that publishers can still bring dissident writers to American readers as long as they first apply for a license. "The licensing is a very important part of the sanctions policy because it allows people to engage with these countries," Millerwise said. "Anyone is free to apply to OFAC for a license." Critics say they shouldn't have to. "We have a long tradition of not accepting prior restraint," said Wendy Strothman of Boston, who hopes to serve as Ebadi's literary agent should the regulations be struck down. "The notion of getting a license seems to me to be completely counter to the spirit of the First Amendment. ... It's really, for me, mostly about the notion of freedom of expression." The literature that might be lost to American readers is impossible to measure, but in recent months the bestseller lists have been dominated by Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran," a memoir she wrote in exile. And Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel, "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood," written and published after her family left Iran for France, has found an international audience. Tom Miller, author of "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba," said the regulations not only "nullify the First Amendment" but would dampen the hopes of censored Cuban writers. "It would be all the more depressing," said Miller, who travels to Cuba several times a year under U.S. licenses for journalistic, academic or cultural purposes. "There are two places Cubans get published outside of Cuba -- Spain and the States. To cut that short list in half is devastating. In the U.S., it means less artistic and literary infusion from overseas." Curt Goering, deputy executive director for the Amnesty International human rights monitoring group, criticized the regulations as "a violation of some fundamental human rights." Goering said international covenants recognize the right of people to receive and distribute information regardless of political boundaries. "It's yet another example of the hypocrisy of this administration on human rights," Goering said, adding that while the United States defends its role in Iraq as a defense of liberty at home it is "blocking" publication of dissident voices. Kmiec, who is not part of the legal challenge, said the First Amendment -- and subsequent court rulings -- generally preclude the government from restricting publications before they are made. "It does allow for limitations where there are clear and present dangers and compelling foreign policy or other interests that can be tangibly and authentically demonstrated," Kmiec said. "But short of that special application and very rare circumstance, government censorship is properly off-limits. These efforts to restrain in advance are almost sure to fail." The dispute centers on a Treasury Department interpretation this year of regulations rooted in the 1917 "Trading With the Enemy Act," which allows the president to bar transactions with people or businesses in nations during times of war or national emergency. A 1988 amendment by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif.,relaxed the act to effectively give publishers an exemption while maintaining restrictions on general trade. In April, OFAC regulators amended an earlier interpretation to advise academic publishers that they can make minor changes to works already published in sanctioned countries and reissue them. But the regulators said editors cannot provide broader services considered basic to publishing, such as commissioning works, making "substantive" changes to texts, or adding illustrations. The regulations seem shaded by Joseph Heller's classic novel "Catch-22." American publishers are allowed to reissue, for example, Cuban communist propaganda or officially approved books but not original works by writers whom the Cuban government has stifled. In a letter to Treasury officials this past spring, Berman described the regulations as "patently absurd" and said they form a "narrow and misguided interpretation of the law." "It is in our national interest to support the dissemination of American ideas and values, especially in nations with oppressive regimes," Berman said. "At the same time, (the Berman amendment) is intended to ensure the right of American citizens to have access to a wide range of information and satisfy their curiosity about the world around them." ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? All your favorites on one personal page ? Try My Yahoo! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sun Dec 12 21:51:09 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 21:51:09 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] A Beautiful Mind, The Story of William Cottrell Message-ID: <20041213055109.58311.qmail@web13606.mail.yahoo.com> http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1451&IssueNum=79 A BEAUTIFUL MIND by Jennifer Hahn Did the same intellect that drove William Cottrell into physics at CalTech also make him part of an anti-SUV arson spree? Billy Cottrell and his friend Tyler Johnson had done this kind of politically motivated vandalism before. Cottrell, a graduate student in Physics at CalTech, claimed that he and Johnson, a recent alum, had once scaled a Starbucks to change the sign to ?Starfucks.? Another time, according to trial testimony, they plastered Pasadena with ?Go Metric? stickers. But nothing like this. In the early hours of August 22, 2003, according to Cottrell?s testimony at his recent trial, the two men and Johnson?s girlfriend Michie Oe allegedly spray-painted such messages as ?SUVs Suck,? ?Smog Machine,? and ?Is your penis really that small? on SUVs at four car dealerships and a few cars at private residences around West Covina. But then ? again, according to Cottrell, who called SUV dealers ?evil? ? Johnson and Oe allegedly set fire to at least 11 Hummers, one Ford Expedition, and a parts warehouse using Molotov cocktails. Authorities believe Johnson and Oe have fled the country, and they have not been formally charged, but on November 19, 2004, William ?Billy? Cottrell, 24, was convicted of seven counts of arson and one count of conspiracy for his role in the firebombing and vandalizing of about 125 SUVs. The spree caused nearly $5 million worth of damage. Cottrell was acquitted of the most serious charge, using a destructive device during a violent crime, which carries a sentence of 30 years to life. The other counts carry mandatory minimum sentences of five years, which can be served concurrently. He will be sentenced March 7. May Alhassen, operations manager for Clippinger Hummer, which bore the brunt of the attacks, says owner Ziad Alhassen is pleased with the verdict. Alhassen, who came to the U.S. from Syria in 1968 with $40 in his pocket, owns four other dealerships. She says he was devastated by the attacks. ?At that point, he had sold more global electric vehicles than Hummers,? she said, adding that he had also donated GEMs ? groovy golf-cart-like electric vehicles ? to local schools. ?We?re trying to impart some sort of consciousness,? she says. ?The big problem is trying to get the people in Detroit to want to build those cars.? The Earth Liberation Front isn?t waiting that long. The tag ?ELF? appeared repeatedly on the spray-painted cars, alerting police to the likely involvement of the Front, a so-called ecoterrorist organization known for taking direct and often destructive action to preserve the environment. The FBI considers ELF and its sister organization, Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the ?most active criminal extremist elements in the United States.? Since 1976, the groups have committed over 1,100 criminal acts in the U.S., resulting in at least $110 million worth of property damage, but very little, if any, harm to humans. After September 11, foiling domestic terrorism became even more of a priority, lending new energy to the hunt for ELF/ALF. Cottrell denies any involvement with these groups. His defense believes that he was prosecuted with unusual vigor since the Justice Department is under pressure to break the elusive ELF network. On that August night in 2003, Cottrell went out to dinner, hung out at a comedy club, and ate cake at a fellow grad student?s place before heading home. He says that at around 1 a.m. Johnson and Oe showed up. Johnson had given Cottrell $200 to print up some bumper stickers reading ?Your SUV supports terrorism.? Annoyed that they had not yet arrived, Cottrell said in his testimony that Johnson offered to cancel the debt if he agreed to come spray-painting with him and Oe. When Johnson allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a Ford Expedition to see how well it would burn, Cottrell protested. ?I was kind of shocked,? Cottrell testified. ?I told him I thought that was bad.? Johnson said it wouldn?t happen again. ?Now, most people would probably say, ?Look I?m out of here,?? says Cottrell?s lawyer, W. Michael Mayock. ?But a person with Asperger?s ? would maybe take two hours or so to figure this out that something was wrong, that it was going to happen again.? Billy Cottrell has been diagnosed with Asperger?s Syndrome, considered by many physicians to be a mild form of autism. Those with the condition have difficulty picking up social cues such as facial expressions and gestures, often take things too literally, and have trouble changing course once they?ve started something, among other things. The defense contends that Asperger?s made it difficult for Billy to extricate himself from a bad situation, but this information was precluded from the trial. Believing it relevant, Mayock presented a motion for a new trial on November 24. As a kid, Billy?s intellectual brilliance and social incompetence conspired to cause him a lot of trouble. ?We?ve always known that Billy?s different,? says his mother, Heidi Schwiebert, who?s finally found a word for Cottrell?s eccentricity in his recent Asperger?s diagnosis. ?When he was in third grade, it was explained to me that on the bell curve he?s as far to the right as somebody who?s mentally retarded is ?? to the left, and so you have just as many social issues.? Cottrell spent his childhood getting left out, picked on, and beaten up. ?Billy retreated and he loved his books,? says Schwiebert. A typical trait of Asperger?s is a near obsessive interest in a particular subject, and for Billy it was physics. In first grade, he was reading about ?black holes and the fabric of space and time,? his mother says. In second grade, it was Carl Sagan?s Cosmos. ?He wants to be the world?s greatest physicist,? Schwiebert says. At 10, he filled out a questionnaire in school which asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He wrote in astro- or nuclear physicist. When asked what frustrated him, he answered, ?trying to explain relativity to people.? Bored by school, Cottrell tried to amuse himself as best he could. He got kicked out of one school when he doused a dollar bill in alcohol and lit it on fire to show that only the alcohol would burn. In middle school, he started an underground newspaper in his mother?s garage. His article about how the school needed better teachers was not well received. He once got in a fight with a teacher who claimed that Texas was the biggest state in the U.S. Cottrell said no, it was Alaska. The teacher got out a ruler and measured the two states. When an outraged Cottrell pointed out that the scale for Alaska was different, the teacher sent him to the principal?s office. Cottrell finished up high school by simultaneously enrolling at a local community college and in the fast-track Physics program at the University of Florida. He attended college at University of Chicago, winning the school?s top prizes in physics and math. At CalTech, he seemed to have found a home. ?He met some people that like to go rock climbing and then run and do physics,? his mother says. ?When you can find that combination, then you?ve got a companion. They?re few and far between.? One of Cottrell?s friends testified at the trial that on Saturday nights CalTechies get together and work out physics and math problems for fun. Geekdom, in fact, was part of his undoing. Scrawled in spray paint on the side of an SUV at Duarte Mitsubishi was the equation ei + 1 = 0. Known as Euler?s Theorem, the equation is a favorite of math mavens everywhere. But it wasn?t until Cottrell began communicating via e-mail with a Los Angeles Times reporter about the case that the FBI began sniffing him out. By contacting the Times, Cottrell was trying to exonerate Josh Connole, a local peace activist that the FBI had mistakenly arrested for the crime. The IP address of the computer Cottrell was using at CalTech?s library eventually led investigators to the young man his mother affectionately calls ?socially retarded.? Cottrell will continue to work on physics while he?s in prison, perhaps even publishing from behind bars. He and his mother are currently working out a system to make sure that he has access to the latest physics books and papers. He makes up his own problems to keep his mind sharp, and when he can?t look something up in a needed reference book, he spends hours deriving the equation himself. ?I said, ?Well, you?ve got the time,?? Schwiebert tells him. ?Maybe you?ll come up with a better way to do it.? He keeps himself busy by tutoring fellow inmates who are trying to get their GEDs in basic math and biology, and by teaching himself Mandarin Chinese. He quickly became the chess champion at both San Bernardino County Jail and Metropolitan Detention Center, where he resides now, before the other inmates gave up trying to beat him. Many of them have taken an interest in his trial. Mayock is hoping that the judge will consider Asperger?s in the sentencing phase of the trial. After September 11, the government introduced tougher sentencing guidelines for domestic terrorism. When asked if Cottrell might face these guidelines, prosecutor Beverly Reid-O?Connell would only say, ?We won?t know until the sentencing occurs what type of guideline range he will face.? The judge, at least, seems to be personally familiar with the social improprieties that accompany Asperger?s Syndrome. During the trial, he asked Cottrell if string theory was an area of physics. Cottrell replied, ?It?s the area of physics.? When asked by the prosecution if his sister had helped him write an e-mail, he said, ?Objection, relevance,? cracking up the court room. ?Nice try,? the judge retorted. CalTech would not comment on Cottrell?s academic performance for legal reasons, but a spokeswoman hinted at his brilliance saying that he was working with ?the most brilliant minds in the country? in a ?pretty esoteric and difficult field? at one of ?the most competitive institutions in the world.? She added that CalTech has not yet determined whether or not Cottrell can come back to the institution after he finishes serving his prison sentence. ?He is one of the great minds of this century,? says Mayock. ?I mean, it is clear. That?s why this is such a tragedy to have this happen. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! ? What will yours do? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca Sun Dec 12 23:22:10 2004 From: shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca (shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 23:22:10 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Shadow_Group] The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia and Resources Message-ID: <20041213072210.40337.qmail@web13607.mail.yahoo.com> The Culture Jammer's encyclopedia http://www.sniggle.net/ CULTURE JAMMING: RESOURCES http://courses.dsu.edu/laffeym/f01-02/cj_resources.htm IBB ++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++ www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Jazz up your holiday email with celebrity designs. Learn more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: