Alisher Usmanov

Craig Murray's web site host pulled his blog because of the following post (via Lenin, see also):

Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist

I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you. You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media becuase he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:

“Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged. He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record.”

Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal. He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke "Gorbachev", a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue.

Usmanov's pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socilist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan. Karimov ordered the "Pardon" because of his alliance with Usmanov's mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev's side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.

Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the World's most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into the "privatisation" process at a time when gangster muscle was used to secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian Mafia and Russian security services was being formed.

Usmanov has two key alliances. he is very close indeed to President Karimov, and especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the 2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country's natural gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this. This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.

Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through Putin's long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski. Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college. Gazprominvestholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests outside Russia, Usmanov's role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom's bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.

Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has bought out - with the owners having no choice - the only independent national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish this through Gazprom. The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window.

All this, both on Gazprom and the journalist's death, is set out in great detail here:
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/russian_journal.html

Usmanov is also dogged by the widespread belief in Uzbekistan that he was guilty of a particularly atrocious rape, which was covered up and the victim and others in the know disappeared. The sad thing is that this is not particularly remarkable. Rape by the powerful is an everyday hazard in Uzbekistan, again as outlined in Murder in Samarkand page 120. If anyone has more detail on the specific case involving Usmanov please add a comment.

I reported back in 2002 or 2003 in an Ambassadorial top secret telegram to the Foreign Office that Usmanov was the most likely favoured successor of President Karimov as totalitarian leader of Uzbekistan. I also outlined the Gazprom deal (before it happened) and the present by Usmanov to Putin (though in Jastrzebski's name) of half of Mapobank, a Russian commercial bank owned by Usmanov. I will never forget the priceless reply from our Embassy in Moscow. They said that they had never even heard of Alisher Usmanov, and that Jastrzebski was a jolly nice friend of the Ambassador who would never do anything crooked.

Sadly, I expect the football authorities will be as purblind. Football now is about nothing but money, and even Arsenal supporters - as tight-knit and homespun a football community as any - can be heard saying they don't care where the money comes from as long as they can compete with Chelsea.

I fear that is very wrong. Letting as diseased a figure as Alisher Usmanov into your club can only do harm in the long term.

Krugman:

In fact, let me start this blog off with a chart that’s central to how I think about the big picture, the underlying story of what’s really going on in this country. The chart shows the share of the richest 10 percent of the American population in total income – an indicator that closely tracks many other measures of economic inequality – over the past 90 years, as estimated by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

Blasphemy

He ought have asked it, I guess, in cartoons.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

You're Not The Kind

Greenspan:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Krugman:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”

Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”

Who has the oil?

Click to enlarge:

Osama yo mama

From atol letters:



The man with the dyed beard returns [Sep 11] by Ramzy Baroud alludes to the group that translated the recent [Osama] bin Laden video, but no more. A little time spent searching for details about SITE [Search for International Terrorist Entities] finds the following info about SITE and one of its founders, Rita Katz. From Source Watch: "The Terrorism Library, on cursory investigation, looks to be a straight data scrape from the US Department of State's Patterns of Global Terrorism - 2003, Appendix B. The list of publications often provides a very short synopsis of a news item, with a reference given for a translation from their premium service; [at] other times they offer full mirrors of news items, poorly marked up. Rita Katz is director and co-founder of the SITE Institute. Born in Iraq, her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family moved to Israel [the move has been described as both an escape and an emigration in different sources]. She received a degree from the Middle Eastern studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997. Katz was called as a witness in the trial, but the government didn't claim she was a terrorism expert. During the trial it was discovered that Katz herself had worked in violation of her visa agreement when she first arrived in [the United States of] America in 1997. She also admitted to receiving more than [US]$130,000 for her work as an FBI [US Federal Bureau of Investigation] consultant on the case." It was telling that CNN, when airing the latest video from BL, never mentioned once who performed the translation. An article in the New York Times credits SITE with the translation. Guess they didn't want to get into sticky details, like the one that the head of SITE, Rita Katz's father, was executed for being an Israeli spy. Or that Katz has been receiving money from the FBI. But that wouldn't influence anyone's impartiality, now would it? And that bin Laden: the last time he appeared, the Republicans were needing help in the 2004 presidential elections. Now he appears just as the Republicans are needing help continuing the war against Iraq and selling the next war against Iran. Boy oh boy, is that BL clever or what? He should go to work for the CIA [US Central Intelligence Agency].
Greg Bacon
Ava, Missouri (Sep 12, '07)

Catastrophically Competent

Naomi Klein: Why failure is the new face of success

"So while the reconstruction of Iraq was certainly a failure for Iraqis and for US taxpayers, it has been anything but for the disaster capitalism complex. Made possible by the September 11 attacks, the war in Iraq represented nothing less than the violent birth of a new economy. This was the genius of Rumsfeld's "transformation" plan: since every possible aspect of both destruction and reconstruction has been outsourced and privatised, there is an economic boom when the bombs start falling, when they stop and when they start up again - a closed profit-loop of destruction and reconstruction, of tearing down and building up. For companies that are clever and far-sighted, such as Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, the destroyers and rebuilders are different divisions of the same corporations."

Truly Mos Def

Bill Maher: You don't think Bin Laden knocked down the World Trade Center?

Mos Def: Absolutely Not!

Bill Maher: Come aaaawn...

Mos Def: I don't! I don't. I don't. I don't - and in any barber shop I am so not alone. I am so not alone.

Jana Aranya

part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16

FOX News: "All hell is breaking loose on Sixth Avenue."

September 8th 2007: an extraordinary moment, live on US TV. On the street near Radio City Music Hall, Fox News hairdo Geraldo Rivera attempts to interview three cloned blondes about moms-from-hell and sex-in-cubicles -- and is rudely interrupted by a group of noisy protestors. Eventually, the cops arrive.

Geraldo comments, sweating through his 'tache:

"...I wish I could, uh, ahaha, a-a-a-hahaha! [clenches fist, grins weakly]... You know, you, uh, you need a permit to protest or demonstrate here in New York... but this anarchist group...This bunch of anarchists came forward, they really are one of the, uh... least attractive groups of demonstrators I've ever seen... er....ah-haha, a-haha... They, uh, one of their leaders, I guess... [we see protestors being arrested] - If violence breaks out, don't worry! Our Fox News team can take this bunch of, uh... ah-haha, ah-hahaha!... er... I don't want to use any foul language, but, uh... In support of Kyla, our team has, uh, dressed identically...[cut to blonde babes, plus a token brunette]... a-haha, a-haha ...Uh, Kyla, did you ever imagine..."

BBC: Osama is neither dead nor dyeing

What's wrong with this beard?

The BBC's comedy security correspondent Frank Gardner is here to help:

"analysts have suggested that, rather than being dyed, it may be actually false, and that to help avoid detection he is clean-shaven these days."

Journalistic rubbish??

i heartily agree that GCC countries are useless at monetary and fiscal policy, and, well, at everything else, which is why any talk of economic, let alone monetary union is simply quite absurd..

i noticed subtle propaganda/disinformation in that exclusive article so I promptly emailed the author..

To my pleasant surprise, he replied the same day (from his Bloomberg Mobile MSG, no less).

How courteous and professional, but then i should expect that from a company I think has the best ever customer service in the world..


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: GCC
From: MATTHEW BROWN, BLOOMBERG/DUBAI OFF" <>
Date: 12:32 AM
To: ###############??????????@@@@@@

Islamist terrorism was the perceived threat from iranian islam after the
revolution. Of course this wasn't made explicit in any official documentation.
Regards.




---
Sent From Bloomberg Mobile MSG

---- Original Message ----
From: &^*$* ##@ 
At: 9/8/2007 0:17

You wrote:

"The Gulf Cooperation Council, as the alliance is known, was created in
May 1981 as a military accord to protect members from the Iran-Iraq war
and Islamist terrorism."


From "Islamist" terrorism??

What rubbish.


When you have the time maybe you can lead me to an original 1981
document that mentions this.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------




LAZY RETORT?? I THINK SO

"I love capitalism because...

...it means I have the choice of so many people to look after my kids while my wife and I work to pay them instead of wasting 40 hours a week looking after them ourselves."

Posted by Sim-O at LT.

Oopsie

via The Field Negro:

A B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads and flown for more than three hours across several states last week, prompting an Air Force investigation and the firing of one commander, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The mistake was so serious that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were quickly informed and Gates has asked for daily briefings on the Air Force inquiry, said Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell.

He said Gates was assured that "the munitions were part of a routine transfer between the two bases and at all times they were in the custody and control of Air Force personnel and at no time was the public in danger."

Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called the mishandling of the weapons "deeply disturbing" and said the committee would press the military for details. Rep. Edward J. Markey, a senior member of the Homeland Security Committee, said it was "absolutely inexcusable."

Pav Teaching

(Susan Mentzer at 22)

Argentinian Graffiti

Memorial

via

Let's jam!

(With bonus zombies towards the end)

Party Tape

The Life and Times of Alasdair Gray (so far)

Alasdair Gray 0-70, a 25-minute documentary made by Kevin Cameron for the BBC in 2004:

Part One (Early Life & "the possibilities of delight and horror")

Part Two (Art School & the idea of "a fantastic modern Divine Comedy or Pilgrim's Progress, without the religion")

Part Three (Teaching, the dole & "a formidable Danish teenager who accepted my clumsy wooing")

Part Four (Lanark)

Part Five (1982 Janine & the Oran Mor ceiling)

- From Gray's storyboard for a projected film version of

Lanark: A Life in Four Books:

Conspiracy Praxis: Lockerbie

From today's Observer. (The priceless reference to "conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists" in the last paragraph speaks volumes about the current state of journalism.)

Vital Lockerbie evidence 'was tampered with'

Fragments of bomb timer that helped to convict a Libyan ex-agent were 'practically carbonised' before the trial, says bankrupt Swiss businessman

Alex Duval Smith, Europe correspondent

Sunday September 2, 2007

The Observer

The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.

Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21 December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy [sic!] investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial 'timer' - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime.

The disaster killed 270 people when the London to New York Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air. Britain and theUS blamed Libya, saying that its leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, wanted revenge for the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life.

He is currently serving his sentence in Greenock prison, but later this month the Scottish Court of Appeal is expected to hear Megrahi's case, after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled in June that there was enough evidence to suggest a miscarriage of justice. Lumpert's confession, which was given to police in his home city of Zurich last week, will strengthen Megrahi's appeal.

The Zurich-based Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, who has spent nearly two decades trying to clear his company's name, is as eager for the appeal as is Megrahi. Bollier's now bankrupt company, Mebo, manufactured the timer switch that prosecutors used to implicate Libya after they said that fragments of it had been found on a Scottish hillside.

Bollier, now 70, admits having done business with Libya. 'Two years before Lockerbie, we sold 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military. FBI agents and the Scottish investigators said one of those timers had been used to detonate the bomb. We were shown a fuzzy photograph and I confirmed the fragments looked as though they came from one of our timers.'

However, Bollier was uneasy with the photograph he had been shown and asked to see the fragments. He was finally given permission in 1998 and travelled to Dumfries to see the evidence.

'I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our prototype. But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green boards. I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the investigators this.'

Back in Switzerland, Bollier's company was in effect bankrupt, having faced a lawsuit from Pan Am and having lost major clients, such as the German federal police to which Mebo supplied communications equipment.

In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. 'I was a defence witness, but the trial was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had to say was ignored. A photograph of the fragments was produced in court and I asked to see the pieces again. When they were brought to me, they were practically carbonised. They had been tampered with since I had seen them in Dumfries.
'
Few people apart from conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists working on the case were prepared to believe Bollier until the end of last month, when Lumpert, one of his former employees, walked into a Zurich police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2160655,00.html

Come Together

"Gay and inventive ferocity": Liverpool supporters singing 'She Loves You', at The Kop, Anfield Stadium, 1964 (YouTube video, 4:35; from a BBC Panorama documentary.)

The late Ian McDonald on the Beatles, the Sixties, the Left and the Right:

"It was hard for (Christopher) Booker, or Malcolm Muggeridge, or Mary Whitehouse to understand that much of what appeared to be profane in Sixties youth culture was quite the opposite ... by a devilish paradox, those who thought they were at the cutting edge of social development in the Sixties - the hippies, the New Left - soon found themselves adrift in the wake of the *real* social avant-garde of the period: ordinary people. The individualism of the Me Decade, as Tom Wolfe dubbed the Seventies, was a creation of the Sixties' mass mainstream, not of the peripheral groups which challenged it. Former hippies and radicals who abandoned the utopian 'we' for rueful self-interest in the Seventies, far from leading public taste, were merely tagging along behind it. As for the punks, their blurt of betrayal in 1976-8 was apprehended by the comfortable, sensible majority of Western society with no more than mystified amusement.

The irony of modern right-wing antipathy to the Sixties is that this much-misunderstood decade was, in all but the most superficial senses, the creation of the very people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties. It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites condemn a decade in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of material security within an economy of high development and low inflation. The social fragmentation of the Nineties which rightly alarms conservatives was created neither by the hippies (who wanted us to "be together") nor by the New Left radicals (all of whom were socialists of some description). So far as anything in the Sixties can be blamed for the demise of the compound entity of society it was the natural desire of the 'masses' to lead easier, pleasanter lives, own their own homes, follow their own fancies and, as far as possible, move out of the communal collective completely.

The truth is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of the Fifties had broken down, there was nothing - apart from, in the last resort, money - holding Western civilisation together ... It is, in short, no accident that Mrs Thatcher should have founded her outlook on the conviction that society does not exist - and no surprise that her favourite Sixties tune is 'Telstar' by The Tornados, a record symbolising the rise of technology-driven post-war prosperity and mass social emancipation. She and her radicalised, post-consensus Conservative voters are the true heirs of the Sixties. *They* changed the world, not the hippies (and certainly not the New Left). What mass society unconsciously began in the Sixties, Thatcher and Reagan raised to the level of ideology in the Eighties; the complete materialistic individualisation - and total fragmentation - of Western society. Hoist with its own petard, the New Right now seeks to pin the blame for the unhappier aspects of the Sixties' social revolution on groups whose influence on the course of events oover the past quarter of a century has been at best peripheral, at worst non-existent ... When contemporary right-wing pundits attack the Sixties, they identify a momentous overall development but ascribe it to the very forces who most strongly reacted against it. The counterculture was less an agent of chaos than a marginal commentary, a passing attempt to propose alternatives to a waning civilisation ... At their heart, the (Sixties) countercultural revolt against acquisitive selfishness - and, in particular, the hippies' unfashionable perception that we can change the world only by changing ourselves - looks in retrospect like a last gasp of the Western soul. Now radically disunited, we live dominated by and addicted to gadgets, our raison d'etre and sense of community unfixably broken."

- from "Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties" (1994).

Quoted by Robin Carmody, who writes:

Brought up in an age of consensus the like of which I know I'm never going to see, [Ian McDonald] could still remember the days of togetherness - his greatest break with Received Wisdom, and hence his finest moment, was his claim that "All You Need Is Love" was not the start of a new era in Western society but the end of the one that came before, the final moment when Everyone Joined In.

Miles Davis (VI)

Miles Davis (V)

Miles Davis (IV)

Miles Davis (III)

Miles Davis (II)

Miles Davis (I)

Mission Accomplished

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy.

(...)

At the very outset of the occupation, when L. Paul Bremer was installed as head of the CPA, one of his first brilliant ideas for managing the country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors, he'd have agents go to the various stashes -- a pile of $200 million in one of Saddam's former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out to lunch -- withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the bills. When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million he'd withdrawn. Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation" for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts to only 602. An agent who was told by auditors that he still owed $1,878,870 magically produced exactly that amount, which, as the auditors dryly noted, "suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash."

In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's exactly what our government did."

(...)

In perhaps the ultimate example of military capitalism, KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as "sailboat fuel."

(...)

Sometimes the government simply handed out money to companies it made up out of thin air. In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers found itself unable to award contracts by the September deadline imposed by Congress, meaning it would have to "de-obligate" the money and return it to the government. Rather than suffer that awful fate, the corps obligated $362 million -- spread out over ninety-six different contracts -- to "Dummy Vendor." In their report on the mess, auditors noted that money to nobody "does not constitute proper obligations."

But even obligating money to no one was better than what sometimes happened in Iraq: handing out U.S. funds to the enemy. Since the beginning of the war, rumors have abounded about contractors paying protection money to insurgents to avoid attacks. No less an authority than Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, claimed that such payoffs are a "significant source" of income for Al Qaeda. Moreover, when things go missing in Iraq -- like bricks of $100 bills, or weapons, or trucks -- it is a fair assumption that some of the wayward booty ends up in the wrong hands. In July, a federal audit found that 190,000 weapons are missing in Iraq -- nearly one out of every three arms supplied by the United States. "These weapons almost certainly ended up on the black market, where they are repurchased by insurgents," says Chatterjee.

El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Let them eat stone

In February, the BBC reported on "noisy, passionate and angry" mass protests in Mexico, following a 400% rise in the price of corn flour:

President Felipe Calderon has said the government will clamp down on hoarding and speculation to ease the problem. But some blame the rise on demand for corn to make environmentally-friendly biofuels in the United States.

Today:

Wheat prices reach record level

Wheat prices have hit record highs on global commodity markets, bringing the threat of rising bread prices. Bad weather in key grain growing areas such as Canada and parts of Europe has limited supplies as demand has risen, sparking fears of a supply shortfall. Surging prices are also expected to have widespread fallout for consumers. While it will mean higher bread prices, it could also trigger an increase in meat and dairy prices as farmers battle to pass on rising feed costs.

Global wheat stockpiles will slip to their lowest levels in 26 years as a result, official US figures predicted earlier this month.

"WHAT 'human price'? Gimme a break!"

John Pilger's 93-minute documentary War on Democracy is available free online at Google Video.

In this three-minute extract, Duane R. 'Dewey' Clarridge, the CIA's chief in Latin America from 1981 to 1984, scoffs at the deaths in Chile under Pinochet and says it was worth it:

PILGER: It was a period which almost everyone in the present moment thinks was a dark time, in which the CIA played a major role.

CLARRIDGE: That's right, they played a major role in overthrowing, uh, wh-wh- whatsisname.

PILGER: 'Whatsisname' was Salvador Allende. He was democratically elected.

CLARRIDGE: Right. OK.

PILGER: Is that OK, to overthrow a democratically elected government?

CLARRIDGE: It depends on what your national security interests are.

Because...

(Also: '"Why did you support the Iraq war?" Gerson asked [Kissinger]. "Because Afghanistan wasn't enough," Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them."')

Conspiracy Praxis: The US-UK Energy Dialogue, April 2002

Reminder:

Blair: Iraq oil claim is 'conspiracy theory'

Matthew Tempest, political correspondent
Guardian, Wednesday January 15, 2003.

Tony Blair today derided as "conspiracy theories" accusations that a war on Iraq would be in pursuit of oil, as he faced down growing discontent in parliament at a meeting of Labour backbenchers and at PMQs. ...

At The Oil Drum yesterday, David Strahan placed this desperate 'derision' in its (underpublicised) historical context:

Britain and America’s shared energy fears were secretly formalised during the planning for Iraq. It is widely accepted that Blair’s commitment to support the attack dates back to his summit with Bush at Crawford in April 2002. The Times headline was typical that weekend: Iraq Action Is Delayed But ‘Certain’. What is less well known is that at the same summit Blair proposed and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent diplomatic liaison dedicated to “energy security and diversity”. No announcement was made, and the Dialogue’s existence was only later exposed through a US Freedom of Information enquiry by Rob Evans and David Hencke of the Guardian.

Both governments continue to refuse to release minutes of meetings between ministers and officials held under the Dialogue, but among some papers that have been released, one dated February 2003 notes that to meet projected world demand, oil production in the Middle East would have to double by 2030 to over 50 million barrels per day, and proposed “a targeted study to examine the capital and investment requirements of key Gulf countries”. So on the eve of the invasion British and American officials were secretly discussing how to raise oil production from the region and we are invited to believe this is mere coincidence. Iraq was evidently not just about corporate greed but strategic desperation.

Conspiracy Praxis (Cops as "anarchists")

At the North American summit in Montebello, Quebec, three masked "anarchists" - at least one of them holding a rock - are exposed by a protest organiser. The three then melt back into police lines, entirely unhindered, where they are gently "forced to the ground" and then led away in handcuffs - without having their masks removed. Later, there is no record of any of them ever having been arrested.

Five-minute YouTube video here.

The Toronto Star reports:

A video, posted on YouTube, shows three young men, their faces masked by bandannas, mingling Monday with protesters in front of a line of police in riot gear. At least one of the masked men is holding a rock in his hand.

The three are confronted by protest organizer Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. Coles makes it clear the masked men are not welcome among his group of protesters, whom he describes as mainly grandparents. He urges them to leave and find their own protest location.

Coles also demands that they put down their rocks. Other protesters begin to chime in that the three are really police agents. Several try to snatch the bandanas from their faces.

Rather than leave, the three actually start edging closer to the police line, where they appear to engage in discussions. They eventually push their way past an officer, whereupon other police shove them to the ground and handcuff them.

Late Tuesday, photographs taken by another protester surfaced, showing the trio lying prone on the ground. The photos show the soles of their boots adorned by yellow triangles. A police officer kneeling beside the men has an identical yellow triangle on the sole of his boot.

Kevin Skerrett, a protester with the group Nowar-Paix, said the photos and video together present powerful evidence that the men were actually undercover police officers. "I think the circumstantial evidence is very powerful," he said.

The three do not appear to have been arrested or charged with any offence.

Conspiracy Theories

Dr B is alleged to have used, in his academic publications, "phrases and key words" also used by a militant group, among them "inequality" and "gentrification". The police found it suspicious that meetings occurred with German activists in which the sociologists did not bring their mobile phones; the police deemed this a sign of "conspiratorial behaviour". (...) He's not actually accused of writing anything inflammatory, but seen rather to be intellectually capable of "authoring the sophisticated texts" a militant group might require; further, our scholar, "as employee in a research institute has access to libraries which he can use inconspicuously in order to do the research necessary to the drafting of texts" of militant groups, though he hasn't written any.

Synaphaï

Mycenae Alpha

Michael Parenti on JFK, Stupidity, Chomsky and Cockburn

An amazing speech, one of the best I have ever heard:

"The JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State"

(Two-part mp3 audiofile, about 50 minutes total.)

Electrifying, fast & furious, brilliantly funny, and completely unanswerable. Delivered at Yale on the 30th anniversary of the assassination, and today more pertinent than ever. (He addresses the now-inexcusable foolishness of Chomsky and Cockburn in the second half.)

Happy Days

Post-Trifecta, at a memorial service for the dead of 9/11.

No dignity

we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.

'Throughout history there has been only one thing that ruling interests have ever wanted - and that is everything: all the choice lands, forests, game, herds, harvests, mineral deposits, and precious metals of the earth; all the wealth, riches, and profitable returns; all the productive facilities, gainful inventiveness, and technologies; all the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law with none of its constraints; all the services, comforts, luxuries, and advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and costs. Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.'

- Michael Parenti, 1996.

The Iraq War Will Not Be Ended

...because "the American way of life is not negotiable." (George Bush senior, at the Earth Summit in Rio, in 1992.)

Yesterday's NYT provided further evidence, if any were needed, that the U.S. is definitely in Iraq for the (very) long haul:

Democrats Say Leaving Iraq May Take Years

[Translation: Democrats Have No Intention Of Ever Abandoning 'The Prize'.]

At present, the U.S. imports 42% of its natural gas, and a massive 60% of its oil, of which 17% from the Middle East. Worse: American dependence on foreign resources is rising constantly. Meanwhile (to take just one example), China has been "developing" at a rate of around 10% annually for the last several years, and is therefore also increasingly desperate to acquire and maintain access to foreign oil and gas reserves.

The world's first commercial oil well was drilled in Canada in 1858, followed one year later by the Seneca Oil Corporation's 69-foot well in Pennsylvania. Since then -- and largely because of that -- the world's population has more than quintupled. There are now 6.6 billion people on the planet; and by 2040, they will be joined by 2,000,000,000 more. And if the world hasn't hit the Peak of oil production already, it will certainly do so sometime in the next few years.

Therefore: Ceding control of the world's last major accessible fossil-fuel reserves is simply not an option. Richard Cheney knew this no later than eight years ago*, and the leadership of the Democratic Party undoubtedly knows it too.

Conclusion: The Iraq War will not be ended.

Not by Hillary, not by Obama, certainly not by Giuliani, and not by any imaginable present or future Democratic or Republican administration. There is much more at stake here than "national pride" or any such nebulous concept; the American way of life is not negotiable, and will therefore not be negotiated. In 2007, the Way of Life means cars, computers, iPods, cheap flights, plasma TVs, refrigerators and freezers, air-conditioning, central heating, suburban homes, ten-lane highways to well-appointed office-blocks, and gargantuan hypermarkets that offer everything from everywhere all the time, at a surprisingly reasonable price.

Which is not to deny that many, many Americans are "against the war" right now. It costs precisely nothing to present that opinion to a pollster. Actually abandoning the Way of Life in favour of global equity is another thing entirely.

The US currently consumes approximately 24% of the world’s energy, and any antiwar movement that aspires to be effective is going to have to face up to the energy issue, sooner rather than later. There are, no doubt, a variety of reasons for the current absence of any real, organised, mass opposition to the Iraq "quagmire". But it surely also has something to do with the fact that so many Americans (and Brits) have an American way of life; not necessarily a palace, but a car, a computer, an oil-heated home, a well-stocked fridge and the rest of it. And at some level of consciousness, every one of them is queasily aware that this war is for them, too.

Nearly everyone has something to lose; and, "pro-war" or "anti-war", hardly anyone is giving anything away.

*"By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means: by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies; even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."

- Richard Cheney, CEO of Halliburton, addressing the Institute of Petroleum in London, Autumn 1999.

It's a Quagmire

Quote

On all these topics, White House policy is completely at odds with what public opinion wants. But the media rarely publish the polls that highlight this persistent public opposition. Not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion.

Unity is Strength

Lions versus crocodiles versus buffalo. This eight-minute YouTube video has been viewed more than 11,000,000 times in just three months, and it is truly extraordinary:

"Battle at Kruger"

In the comments box, 'PriTommy' asks some very good questions:

"would any ethologists like to explain the buffalo's behaviour? how can one buffalo tell the others, nearly a hundred, in such a short time to act together? Why would other buffalo parents [be] willing to save the other's cub?"

War, what is it good for?

Tuesday night Sanchez said she could not support the protesters because the $145 billion in Iraq war funding was in the same bill that would provide money to build the C-17 aircraft in California.

"I never voted for this war," she said. But "I'm not going to vote against $2.1 billion for C-17 production, which is in California. That is just not going to happen."

Scriabin

Development

The cause of the longevity was never pinned down. Some scientists credited genes, others the hard labour and vegetable and fruit diet. Sceptics said the elders exaggerated their age.

There is wide agreement, however, on why the phenomenon seems to be ending: modernity and its sins - noise, chemicals, pollution and stress. Nelson Jurado, a gerontologist in the capital, Quito, said a "tsunami of development" had damaged Vilcabamba's fragile ecosystem. "Now these people live at a faster pace and that has affected their quality of life and longevity."

What was a sleepy hamlet has in less than a generation become a tourist centre. Just a 45-minute drive from an airport, the permanent population has almost doubled to 4,200 and is swollen by hundreds of tourists who pack the more than 30 hotels and hostels.

Mules wander the streets but they are outnumbered by 4x4s, taxis and young people drinking beer. There are dozens of restaurants and bars, two nightclubs, and a shopping centre is due to be built. Few places serve guarapo, sugar cane juice, but most serve Coca-Cola.

Un dernier verre

Hiératique

E cada gol, cada toque, cada jogada... É um deleite para os apaixonados do esporte bretão: Zico!

Education & Training

Tellur

Soy loco por ti, América

Ryōan-ji

Todas las promesas de mi amor se irán contigo

Ramifications

L'eclisse

Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Video of the lecture and full text at the link:

I have to go to the geology literature and ask the literature, “What do you think is the total amount of oil we will ever find on this earth?” The consensus figure in the literature is 2000 billion barrels. Now, that’s quite uncertain, plus or minus maybe 40 or 50%. If I plug that in and do the fit, the peak is this year (2004). If I assume there is 50% more than the consensus figure, the peak moves back to 2019. If I assume there’s twice as much as the consensus figure, the peak moves back to 2030.

So no matter how you cut it, in your life expectancy, you are going to see the peak of world oil production. And you’ve got to ask yourself, what is life going to be like when we have a declining world production of petroleum, and we have a growing world population, and we have a growing world per capita demand for oil. Think about it.

In the March 1998 issue of Scientific American, there was a major article by two real petroleum geologists. They said this peak would occur before 2010, so we’re all in the same ball park. Now, that article in Scientific American triggered a lot of discussion. Here is an article in Fortune magazine, November 1999, talking about “Oil Forever,” and in that article, we see a criticism of the geologists’ analysis, and this is from an emeritus professor of economics at MIT. And he said, “This analysis (by the geologists) is a piece of foolishness, the world will never run out of oil, not in 10,000 years.” So let's look at what’s been happening.

Here we have two graphs, on one scale, we have here in the graphs, that’s the annual discoveries of oil each year (pointing); here is the annual production of oil each year. Notice since the 1980s, we’ve been producing about twice as much as we’ve been finding. Yet you’ve seen and read and heard statements from PhD non-scientists saying that we have greater resources of petroleum now than ever before in history.

What in the world are they smoking? (audience laughter)

One shmall shtep

Neil Armshtrong

Master Signifier

By far the most compelling confirmation of the phallic meaning of the president's aircraft-carrier cakewalk was found on the hot-selling "George W. Bush Top Gun action figure" manufactured by Talking Presidents. I originally ordered one to use as part of the cover design for this book. The studly twelve-inch flyboy not only comes with a helmet and visor, goggles and oxygen mask, but underneath his flight suit is a full "basket" --- a genuine fake penis, apparently constructed with lifelike silicone.

Christians United for Israel

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost and Vimeo.

Family Business

A BBC Radio 4 investigation sheds new light on a major subject that has received little historical attention, the conspiracy on behalf of a group of influential powerbrokers, led by Prescott Bush, to overthrow FDR and implement a fascist dictatorship in the U.S. based around the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler.

"President (Alvaro) Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted into their bodies before they are permitted to enter the United States to work on a seasonal basis. I doubted whether the implantation of microchips would be effective since the immigrant worker might be able to remove them." — Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican, April 26, 2006, after returning from an official visit to Colombia

(via)

Peter Dale Scott on Chomsky

Eight-minute YouTube interview, June 2007.

Le Tourbillon

whirlwind

Terrorists

"Charges of 'Acts of Terrorism' will stand against thirteen of fourteen defendants arrested at a July 2nd protest against water privatization in Suchitoto, a judge ruled Saturday. Judge Ana Lucila Fuentes de Paz of the Special Tribunal of San Salvador denied bail for the accused, sending them to an estimated 90 days in jail while prosecutors gather evidence for trial."

Visual Listening

Ionisation

Action Hero

Some Hamlet for you:

Princess Raccoon

Messi

Copa

Looks like Copa America's a success, so far, technically and organizationally (well, to a lesser extent).

Many 'Western' newsources have kept on doubting Venezuela's ability to pull the event off, but it's clear that was all just failed anti-Chavez propaganda. And the Guardian's been doing its best to find anti-Chavez discontent during the tournament.

Ho ho (Derision in High Places II)

BBC:

[The outgoing US ambassador to Venezuela] poked fun at President Chavez's anti-American rhetoric, saying Americans were likely to do "very conspiratorial things" during the Independence Day holiday, such as attending baseball games.

Mr Maduro told reporters that "William Brownfield came to Venezuela with one mission: to destabilize the government of President Chavez, to help topple him. And his mission has failed."

Maduro states an obvious truth. But look closely at the preceding factory-built sentence, if you can bear the pain: "poked fun" (a capital offence already, that locution); "anti-American" (ditto); "rhetoric" (in BBC English, this means 'disgraceful eloquence in the articulation of unwelcome truths'); and finally, the joke: "very conspiratorial things". (Geddit?!?!)

How wry. I think it's fair to say that Mr. Brownfield was deriding the idea that the US government would ever do what it always does and always has done .

What's wrong with 'lenin'? Ask Francis Boyle.

'lenin' informs us that he's going to be presenting his thoughts at the Marxism 2007 conference, which starts tomorrow. Title of his paper: "'What's Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?"

What's wrong with 'lenin' is that he is still cheerfully deploying this thoughtstopper, without once stopping to ask himself who gave him it, or what it's actually for, and who else uses it, and why. No doubt 'lenin' has his reasons; it's just a little strange that he never explains them. Perhaps his next paper will be entitled "What's wrong with Islamofascism?", or "What's Wrong With Political Correctness?" No need to distance himself with quotemarks or anything. Words are innocent, after all. You can just pick them up and use them as you find them. Right, 'lenin'?

Francis Boyle would most certainly disagree. As would Jamey Hecht:

THE TERM ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’

This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder than it is. “Conspiracy theory” is a trigger phrase, saturated with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while it’s a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than useless as an explanatory category.

So why is 'lenin' still riding that allegedly tireless workhorse? Everyone else can see that it's ripe for the knacker's yard.

************************************************************************************

UPDATE THURSDAY: BREAKING NEWS -

Australia admits oil motive in Iraq

AlJazeera, THURSDAY, JULY 05, 2007

Australia has admitted for the first time that securing the supply of oil is a key motive for its involvement in the US-led war in Iraq.

Brendan Nelson, the defence minister, said "energy security" was one of the main priorities behind his country's support for the war, which is unpopular among Australians.

HISTORICAL NOTE:
Blair: Iraq oil claim is 'conspiracy theory'

Guardian, Wednesday January 15, 2003

Tony Blair today derided as "conspiracy theories" accusations that a war on Iraq would be in pursuit of oil, as he faced down growing discontent in parliament at a meeting of Labour backbenchers and at PMQs.

"Derided"? Aha. And note that Blair achieved that derision without using a single adjective. If he'd said (for example) "a ridiculous conspiracy theory", then it would have been a tautology. The compound noun itself is already a term of derision; a loaded term, not quite as innocent as 'lenin' pretends it is. Now, it's not surprising that the Vicar of Downing Street would reach for that trusty loaded weapon when under fire himself. But why is 'lenin' waving it around, like a three-year-old with a hand-grenade? Maybe he can tell us. He doesn't have to explain whose interests he serves in deploying it.

(Of course, it's always possible that Britain and Australia are in Iraq for different reasons: the Aussies for the oil, the Brits as humanitarians or archaeologists or sun-worshippers or something. Just as it's always possible, though sadly unlikely, that the left will finally, belatedly, grow up.)

Prof. Francis Boyle: 2001 anthrax attacks were a covered-up inside job

From After Downing Street.org, Tue, 2007-07-03:

Anthrax Coverup: A Government Insider Speaks Out

[...] Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by PresidentGeorge H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job, Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School. Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the sporesused in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that therewas a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and thePentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award byFBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of theattempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through.Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that mostmembers of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law toall Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that, under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant. [...]

--full text here.

For Lenin's Tomb: 9/11 and "the territory of the aggressor"

Andreas Hauss writes:

In a Spin: the German Federal Constitutional Court

Dear Reader,

Germany's highest court has just passed down its ruling on the deployment of German Tornado jets abroad [it's permitted]. But what on earth do they mean by "the territory of the aggressor" ? Hm? The USA? Germany? Iraq? Or even... Afghanistan?

Yes, indeed: Afghanistan! We are defending ourselves. Afghanistan was the aggressor - and is, it seems, still aggressing away right now.

A tornado can easily knock some screws loose.

The Tale of Evil Osama, who attacked NATO from his cave in Tora Bora on September 11th, has still never been proven to be true; and it is now providing the basis for an unacceptable legal ruling.

TWO purely political consequences:

1. The left is going to have to address the issue of 9/11, whether it wants to or not.

2. When NATO's contractual and legal foundations can be twisted to suit any purpose, by means of garbled Arabian Nights fairy tales and plain lies, then Germany must leave NATO. (The Original Sin was Yugoslavia in 1999.)

Anyone who accepts lies as the implicit basis of a transaction will eventually be dragged across the desk and led by the nose round a circus ring. The left must, finally, grow up.

-- by Andreas Hauss at medienanalyse-international.de (Freely translated from the German.)

Aggressors

don't get around much anymore

Everyday Language

Judith Butler.

Proud Members Of A Post-Legal Society

Bush Commutes Libby's Prison Term

"declined to comment specifically"

As ABCNews.com reported, U.S. law enforcement officials received intelligence reports two weeks ago warning of terror attacks in Glasgow and Prague, the Czech Republic, against "airport infrastructure and aircraft."

The warnings apparently never reached officials in Scotland, who said this weekend they had received "no advance intelligence" that Glasgow might be a target.

Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff declined to comment specifically on on the report today...

La Cosa Nostra

Closing ranks...

Obama says he doesn't favor impeachment of Bush, Cheney

Source: Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) -

US Senator Barack Obama says he doesn't favor impeachment proceedings for President Bush and Vice President Cheney.Obama made that comment today in response to a question asked at a meeting in Washington with his Illinois constituents.The Illinois Democrat says he's distressed by the Bush administration's ethical standards and secrecy. But the presidential hopeful says impeachment should be reserved for "grave" breaches of the president's authority.Both Obama and US Senator Dick Durbin say having to deal with month after month of impeachment hearings wouldn't be in the best interest of America.

Orwell & Adorno

IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY?

George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature

BY JAMES MILLER

These are trying times for the left in America, which may be one reason why a bitter debate has erupted among avowedly left-wing academics and intellectuals over a venerable topic--"Politics and the English Language," to borrow the title of George Orwell's famous 1946 essay. Must one write clearly, as Orwell argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write radically and subversively--or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly? That is the question.
...

-- via wood s lot

Vulgar Materialism

a) Who appointed this 'envoy'?

b) How democratically?

c) What is his salary?

d) How much is this 'envoy' going to 'earn'?

e) No, really: How much money is this 'envoy' going to get for even more unspeakable lying, but this time without any pretence whatsoever that he has any kind of public mandate for his lying?

f) Who appointed him?

g) Who's paying?

h) Why?

i) How many multiples of an average Palestinian wage will this 'envoy' rake in every year?

j) From whose pockets?

k) Why?



P.S. One final thought: Exactly how many dollars per year will the 'envoy' be pocketing? (In addition to his pension, his investments, his savings, and his speaking fees.)

Killing Time

The Booker School was almost directly in line with the runways of Sarasota International Airport--just 20 airliner seconds away. The Secret Service surely knew this.

"Kill another half-hour, Flight 93 took off late."

Tell The Truth

Books

Osama bin Laden may have chartered a plane that carried his family members and Saudi nationals out of the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks, said FBI documents released Wednesday.

Three heads bad

"The creature - which has six legs - has stunned a BBC wildlife expert who said it could be an early warning of environmental problems. "



It's not as if nobody saw it coming. Nor is it as if anybody really gives a shit. And it remains to be seen whether further meditation on the teachings of Lacan or David Lynch can help us out here.

Samarra: "Inside Job"

February 26th 2006: Fox News asks:"All-out civil war in Iraq - could it be a good thing?"

June 13th 2007: Someone is working very hard to make the good thing happen.

Who but a Conspiracy Nut could imagine that this was "an inside job"? Who, indeed?

(Gouda has some interesting links and comments here.)