Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce has again split from the Government, this time over voting against introducting a tax on biofuels. Full article
Author: admin
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New documentaruy on Iraq
After 9/11, Vice President Richard Cheney seized the initiative. He pushed to expand executive power, transform America’s intelligence agencies and bring the war on terror to Iraq. But first he had to take on George Tenet’s CIA for control over intelligence.
The damning 90-minute exposé stops short of laying those bodies at Vice President Dick Cheney’s feet. But it does finger Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — through more than 40 interviews with CIA veterans, journalists, politicians and others — as the ones who ignored, suppressed and manipulated intelligence after the 9/11 attacks to lead us into war with a country that had nothing to do with our attackers -
Canada: A Galloping Police State?
The June 2 arrests were done with massive police involvement. Snipers on rooftops, in full glare of the notified-in-advance media, guaranteed 24-hour TV coverage and screaming headlines, topped off by a full court press conference by the CSIS and the RCMP. A full-fledged national crisis was born, fueled by rumours and fear. Our whole national security was at stake, and Islam, and to a lesser degree, multiculturalism, was to blame, for enabling such individuals to function underneath our very noses. A new term, “home-grown terrorists,” was slammed into our vocabulary overnight.
While the frightening picture of religion-driven extremists was bombarding our senses, the lawyers of the accused complained that they could not find out what the evidence against their clients was, could not even talk to them without armed police presence. Two weeks after the arrest, the accused and their lawyers are still in the dark about what led to the extreme charges. The accused are kept in solitary confinement, forced to sleep with lights on and woken every half-an-hour during the night.
A media ban has been imposed, preventing the press and the lawyers from exposing the exact nature of the information or discussing the court proceedings. The initial horrific rumours are left standing, fueling more fears of all things Muslim (now interchangeable with “extremist”). Some of the Muslim community were also pulled into this vortex of hysteria, trying to do the impossible: disassociating themselves from “bad” Muslims and pledging to do “house cleaning,” to rid their mosques and communities of such individuals. For this they have received many pats on the back (and head) from the amen-corner in the media and security establishment.
Two weeks after the spectacular arrests, Canadians still know next to nothing of the doings and utterances of the 17: they were on chat lines (watched by the police), they played paint ball and did target practice in the woods (watched by their neigbours), they wore camouflage and military style boots, they had ordered a large amount of ammonium nitrate, a potential component of bombs, some of it delivered to their door by a police agent. We don’t know how many were involved in any of the above. Five pairs of boots were displayed for the cameras, six flashlights, one walkie-talkie set, one voltmeter, eight D-cell batteries, a cell phone, a circuit board, a computer hard drive, one barbecue grill, a set of barbecue tongs, a wooden door with 21 bullet marks and a 9 mm hand gun. That should do it clear proof that they were up to no good!
But wait a minute, is this scenario not deja vu from August 2003, when 24 Muslim men were taken down in an similar early-dawn police action, apprehended for planned terrorist acts such as bombing the CN tower and nuclear facilities in Ontario, their names and faces plastered on the media, far and wide? Much mutual congratulation among the intelligence community, the police and security forces ensued. Project Thread, as it was called, however, turned soon into Project Threadbare: nothing was found on the men, no evidence, no plans, no conspiracy, no tools to accomplish their dastardly deeds, and no membership in an “Al Quada sleeper cell,” as was initially claimed. They were cleared but not before being incarcerated, some for months. In the end, a couple of the men were found guilty of minor immigration infractions and deported. Others left the country, disgraced, their lives in tatters, only to find their “terrorist“ reputations following them to Pakistan, where some ended up being interrogated and jailed before being released. They have received neither an apology nor a penny of compensation from Canada.
Is it possible that the CSIS and the RCMP have learned their lessons, that they have worked harder to make the charges stick this time? Having watched the 17 men and boys for several years, with no terrorist acts having occurred, they appear to have helped the suspects along by entrapping them, including delivering an order of ammonia nitrate to one of the suspects (although with contents substituted). Perhaps we will find out that the purchaser was reluctant but the agent was ardent in his determination to make the terrorist charges hold, at last.
With the defence of the current accused already thwarted, we can expect a show trial and a kangaroo court to justify the terrorism hysteria that is so aggressively being cultivated, day in and out, by authorities and much of the media. With several other Muslims being held for years on dubious “security certificates” challenged now in the Supreme Court of Canada we will likely see more Muslim men end up in the no-man’s-land of Canadian justice, without trial and due process. A galloping police state is emerging, in a fashion, familiar to those who know their history, of 1930’s Germany.
It is time for Canadians, living blindfolded and silenced in a fool’s paradise, to remember Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous warning to his fellow Germans, here freely paraphrased: “When they came for the Muslims/I remained silent/I was not a Muslim. //When they locked up the Aboriginals/defending their ancient lands/I remained silent/I was not an Aboriginal// When they came for the brown-skinned immigrants/ I did not speak up /I was not one of them// When they came for the critics, the dissidents, and the protesters/I did not speak out/I was not one of them// When they came for me/There was no one left to speak out.”
Marjaleena Repo is a free lance writer with a special interest in justice issues. She lives in Saskatoon and can be reached at mrepo@sasktel.net.
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Iraq and the End of Economics
Regardless of the very tangible and tragic outcomes of what has been called the greatest strategic debacle in American history, our media savants have yet to ponder the reasons why Bush went out of his way to sell the war to a gullible and vulnerable post-911 America.The clues to the answer are abundant. Just look at the line up of the countries that supported the president’s march to war. The Saudis wanted it. The Israelis and AIPAC put their neo-con operatives on the front lines of the effort to manufacture bogus WMD intelligence to market the war. The Kuwaitis and Qatar were more than happy to provide a launching pad for the invasion. And Tony Blair, the prime minister of an oil exporting country, was willing to stake his political future on the outcome.
And here is another clue. The countries most dependent on Gulf oil supplies were much less enthusiastic about the ill-fated venture. Why exactly did the Germans, the French, the Indians and the Chinese attempt to prevent the outbreak of hostilities?
A third clue might help. The United States can satisfy nearly 70% of its total energy needs domestically. Of the 21 million barrels of oil consumed by Americans on a daily basis, less than 3 million are imported from the Gulf region. And we don’t get any kind of discount as payback for our military intervention in the region. We pay $70 a barrel just like everybody else — double the pre-war price.
Add to these three clues one vital statistic — an American trade deficit that amounted to $804 billion in 2005. For every dollar of imports, America manages to export 53 cents worth of goods and services. In fact, contrary to popular belief, the United States is a trading wimp that has run up exponentially rising trade deficits for thirty consecutive years. Why are the folks in Washington constantly harping about the joys of the global economy when American producers have consistently demonstrated their inability to compete in world markets? The evidence of their lack of competitiveness is littered in thousands of communities from sea to shining sea which have been blighted by the loss of three million manufacturing jobs since Bush set foot in the White House.
The above clues tell the entire story of why Bush went to war and why he managed to line up so much Democratic Party support for his venture. Start with the trade deficit. Every twenty-four hours, Uncle Sam exports two billion dollars in newly minted currency to settle the daily trade deficit.
So, each and every day of the week, the world delivers to our harbors cars, toys, consumer electronics, oil and a thousand other necessities to maintain "our way of life." In consideration, we give them paper money. And they still come back the next day and get another box of American currency backed by nothing more than — you guessed it — Arab oil.
Take a moment here to digest the most brilliant imperial venture in human history — a feat that defies economic gravity. America has the sweetest deal with the kleptocratic custodians of the oil plantations in the Gulf. For their part, the House of Saud and the Kuwaitis have agreed to price their oil in dollars, to accept payment only in dollars and to "recycle" a good portion of those "petro-dollars" into American capital markets — buying up corporate stocks and the bonds the United States government issues to finance the $400 billion annual budget deficit.
In exchange, the American government provides protection to the ruling dynasties against all comers — domestic and foreign. Incidentally, one of the domestic threats against these police states is the very democracy that Bush has no intention of spreading. The nightmare scenario for the wizards in the State Department is the day common folks in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait get the right to hold their governors accountable for where the oil revenues go.
The oil-for-dollars-and-only-dollars policy forces oil importers around the globe to hoard American dollars. China and Japan now have an estimated $1,700 billion ($1.7 trillion) in US dollar reserves. Given their trade history with the United States, they definitely are not holding on to these dollar reserves to buy American products. Rather, those dollars have intrinsic value because they are directly convertible into Arab oil. That’s why they call them petrodollars. Conveniently enough, the rise in oil prices has further increased demand for the dollar — at a time when the American trade deficit is going through the roof.
The business of America used to be business. Now, the United States government has figured out a way to produce real tangible wealth out of paper and green ink. It is a venture that dwarfs anything ever imagined by Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford. America’s biggest business is the US Mint. We have become a currency exporting economy — a new economic phenomenon that undermines every economic theory postulated since Adam Smith. Someone should tell Francis Fukuyama that before we ever get to the end of history we will first have to take a stroll through the end of economics.
Now here’s the bad news. The "Arab-oil-for-American-dollars" racket is no longer a cost free proposition. With the mounting tab in blood and treasure from Bush’s dice game in Iraq, the more sober pencil pushers in the CIA and the State Department will soon realize that their currency-exporting venture has gone from being a virtual El Dorado to a resource hogging sink hole.
Make no mistake, when the politicians in Washington talk about our "national interests" in the region — they are talking about maintaining our lucrative currency exporting franchise. Cpl. Michael Estrella’s ultimate sacrifice and the death of 2,499 of his comrades was part of the price America was willing to pay to sustain our two-billion-dollar-a-day trade deficit. That is why I have long argued that we can best support our troops by either bringing them home or paying them like the corporate mercenaries who are compensated at a rate of $1000/day for much less hazardous duties.
It is really unfortunate that the ordinary people caught on both sides of this conflict are paying the price for Bush’s wild-eyed gamble in blood. Perhaps what is more tragic is that the people in the Middle East have come to believe that this is about a western religious crusade instead of an exercise in imperial voodoo economics — aided and abetted by their dynastic rulers who are Machiavellian enough to pose as "defenders of the faith." On the flip side, many Americans have developed increasingly racist attitudes towards their colonial subjects who are portrayed by the mind warping media titans at CNN and FOX as irrational culturally inferior sub-humans resisting our noble efforts to civilize them with an infusion of our democratic values.
The "culture clash" nonsense is nothing more than a convenient diversionary ruse by both Arab and American elites. Consider the fact that Prince Walid Ibn Talal is the third largest investor in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the media conglomerate most likely to infect the public square with pro-war jingoism and anti-Arab racism. Not to be outdone, Murdoch — the man who made bigotry respectable again — is reportedly buying into Rotana, the Arab media giant owned by Walid Ibn Talal — who is reputedly a front man for the Saudi Royals.
Both Arabs and Americans need to clear their minds of this culture clash trash and start asking a few basic questions. Why are two hundred thousand American soldiers permanently garrisoned in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain? Why did the Saudis and Kuwaitis support the invasion of Iraq? Where do Saudi and Israeli interests converge? What role does the trade deficit play in formulating American policy in the region? Why do other nations hold huge dollar reserves when they obviously have no intentions of buying American products? Where do the oil revenues go? What would be the economic consequences of the emergence of democratic governments in the region that refused to price their oil in dollars? Ponder that last question and try to visualize what the "end of economics" will look like.
Ahmed Amr is the editor of NileMedia.com. He can be reached
at: Montraj@aol.com .
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Mitre Corp had means for 9/11
When American Free Press interviewed Eckehardt Werthebach, former president of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, in December 2001, he said “the deathly precision” and “the magnitude of planning” behind the 9/11 attacks would have required “years of planning.”
Such a sophisticated operation, Werthebach said, would require the “fixed frame” of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a “loose group” of terrorists like the one allegedly led by Mohammed Atta.
Many people would have been involved in the planning of such an operation, Werthebach said. He pointed to the absence of leaks as further indication that the attacks were “state organized actions.”
Andreas von Bülow, who served on Germany’s parliamentary commission and oversaw the three branches of the German secret service, told AFP that he believed that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, was behind the terror attacks. The attacks, he said, were carried out to turn public opinion against the Arabs and boost military and security spending.
“You don’t get the higher echelons,” von Bülow said, referring to the “architectural structure” which masterminds such terror attacks. At this level, he said, the organization doing the planning, such as Mossad or British intelligence, is primarily interested in affecting public opinion.
In a recent article in AFP, " The Perfect Terrorist Plan To Level the Twin Towers Created In 1976" by Greg Szymanski, it was reported that the U.S. Army devised a plan in 1976 to bring down the towers using commercial airliners and box cutters as weapons.
At the time, George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA and Martin R. Hoffmann was Secretary of the Army. Hoffmann told AFP that he did not recall being involved in this planning reportedly done by the U.S. Army.
An architect, even of destruction, needs a contractor. Proponents of the anti-government version of 9/11 provide evidence to support their claims, but do not explain how the U.S. military and civil aviation control systems could have been hijacked to allow the aerial attacks to occur.
Because the attacks involved systems used by the FAA, NORAD, and the U.S. Air Force, the conspirators would have needed "super user" access to the command and control centers of these three separate organizations.
Super user means the most privileged user on a computerized data system. The super user has complete access to all files on the system. For the previously mentioned agencies, and virtually all other U.S. defense and intelligence organizations, there is one such possible super user: a little-known private not-for-profit organization, based in Bedford, Mass., known as MITRE Corp. MITRE also has a headquarters in McLean, Va., on a campus it shares with Northrop Grumman.
The MITRE Corp. is a major defense contracting organization headed by the former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), Dr. James Rodney Schlesinger. Schlesinger, who was reportedly made DCI at the request of Henry Kissinger in 1973, later served as Secretary of Defense.
Schlesinger, a former director of strategic studies at the RAND Corp., was described in a 1973 biography as a "devout Lutheran," although he was born in New York in 1929 to immigrant Jewish parents from Austria and Russia. Schlesinger earned three degrees from Harvard University.
Schlesinger’s father, an accountant, founded the accounting firm Schlesinger & Haas, and was a trustee and chairman of the budget of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. His father was also a member of the New York State Grand Lodge of Masons.
The MITRE Corp., of which Schlesinger is chairman of the board of trustees, is connected to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, and Mitretek Systems of Falls Church, Va.
Schlesinger is a senior advisor for the Lehman Brothers investment firm and a member of the Defense Policy Board and advisory council for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The MITRE Corp. has provided computer and information technology to the FAA and the U.S. Air Force since the late 1950’s. MITRE is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) for the Dept. of Defense, the FAA, and the Internal Revenue Service.
The chairman of the board of trustees of Mitretek Systems, a spin-off of MITRE Corp., is Martin R. Hoffmann, who served as Secretary of the Army when the "perfect terrorist plan" was reportedly prepared in 1976.
MITRE’s Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) FFRDC for the Dept. of Defense was established in 1958. The C3I "supports a broad and diverse set of sponsors within the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. These include the military departments, defense and intelligence agencies, the combatant commands, and elements of both the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," according to MITRE’s website. "Information systems technology," it says, "coupled with domain knowledge, underpin the work of the C3I FFRDC."
The U.S. Air Force maintains its Electronic Systems Center (ESC) at the Hanscom AFB in Bedford, Mass. The ESC manages the development and acquisition of electronic command and control (C2) systems used by the Air Force.
The ESC is the Air Force’s "brain for information, command and control systems," according to Charles Paone, a civilian employee of the ESC. It is the "product center" for the Air Force’s Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (J-STARS), Paone said.
Asked about MITRE’s role at the ESC, Paone said, "MITRE does the front-end engineering. It’s basically our in-house engineer." MITRE employees operate the computer systems at Hanscom AFB, Paone said.
MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories, the parent of MITRE, is located on the Hanscom AFB.
A second FFRDC, the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) provides computer engineering and technology to the FAA. MITRE’s support of the FAA began in 1958, when the company was created.
The FAA’s Airspace Management Handbook of May 2004, for example, was written and published by the MITRE Corp.
Jennifer Shearman, MITRE’s public relations manager for "corporate identity" in Bedford, told AFP that MITRE is a "trusted mentor" for the FAA and is a "unique" provider of "objective and independent" information for the U.S. civil aviation authority.
MITRE’s Bedford headquarters are located near Boston’s Logan airport where the two planes that struck the World Trade Center supposedly originated. Bedford lies directly under the flight path of westbound flights leaving Logan.
MITRE developed the technology "to aid controllers in solving problems while keeping aircraft close to their route, altitude, and speed preferences." Shearman was unable to say why the MITRE technology apparently failed on 9/11.
Indira Singh, an "IT consultant" who previously worked on a Defense Advanced Research Project, and who was employed by J.P. Morgan on 9/11, in risk management, pointed to MITRE’s role at the FAA during the 9/11 Citizens’ Commission hearings in New York last September.
"Ptech was with MITRE Corporation in the basement of the FAA for two years prior to 9/11," Singh said. "Their specific job is to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force in the case of an emergency. If anyone was in a position to know that the FAA – that there was a window of opportunity or to insert software or to change anything – it would have been Ptech along with MITRE."
A representative of Ptech could not be reached. [Ptech appears to have been a Mossad front company created to provide insecure Trojan Horse software to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Ptech has the typical Arab owners and financiers – and Mossad operators.]
For example, see Michael Goff, former marketing manager at Ptech, Inc. http://www.goffpr.com/about.asp
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Iran courts support against US
Mr Ahmadinejad’s latest success came at last weekend’s meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a pan-Asian economic and security grouping dominated by China and Russia. Iran hopes to win full SCO membership soon.
The Iranian leader said his talks with China’s president, Hu Jintao, and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, were "very fruitful". Iran has the second largest natural gas reserves in the world and is second only to Saudi Arabia in Opec as an oil exporter.
As Mr Ahmadinejad spoke in Shanghai, a senior Chinese minister, Ma Kai, was in Tehran expressing interest in extended joint oil, gas and petrochemical projects. "The economies of China and Iran are closely tied together," he said.
Much the same may be said of Iran’s growing business with Russia. Mr Putin said he wanted more collaboration with Iran aimed at winning control over downstream energy supplies to "third countries", presumably including Europe. "We are talking about setting up a joint venture on the basis of Russian and Iranian deposits … We support these initiatives with our Iranian partners," Mr Putin told the Itar-Tass news agency.
Mr Putin also said Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, was "willing to take part in the construction of an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline". The US has strongly urged both India and Pakistan to shelve the pipeline plan as part of its efforts to isolate Iran.
Mr Ahmadinejad has not been slow to spell out the political and strategic implications of his Shanghai hobnobbing with China and Russia, on whose support the US will depend if it seeks UN and other sanctions on Tehran in the nuclear dispute. "Under the present situation, when policies of certain states [are] based on unilateralism, threats and destruction, the SCO can play a crucial role in establishing a justice-based system for the region and the world conducive to peace and stability," he said.
Iran’s diplomatic fightback is taking place on other fronts across the Arab and Islamic spheres. "Iran is coming into its own," said Seyed Muhammad Adeli, Iran’s former ambassador to Britain and the head of Econotrend, a respected independent thinktank in Tehran. "Iran’s regional profile has never been higher in modern times. Our neighbours are ever more convinced that Iran is being unfairly treated by the Americans."
To drive home the point, Tehran is actively building closer links with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and other central Asian countries. Mr Ahmadinejad is planning a Tehran summit of Caspian Sea littoral states to discuss how to stop "foreign intervention" in the area. Iran also recently wooed a Washington favourite, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in Tehran, and is busily mending fences with Pakistan.
It has won the support of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Arab League for its nuclear stance. Its envoys have recently visited Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and some north African states. It has reportedly become the biggest single state contributor of funds to Palestine in the wake of the west’s ostracism of the Hamas government.
And in a groundbreaking move earlier this month, Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and the second most influential government figure after Mr Ahmadinejad, met Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, in Cairo. It was the highest-level contact between the two countries since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Mr Ahmadinejad’s outspoken hostility to Israel has won him a big following in the Arab world, Tehran officials say. And that is something Egypt, its notional leader, cannot entirely ignore.
"Shanghai was a big success," Dr Karimi said. "All our neighbours support our [nuclear] policy, even Mubarak. We are successful in building up relations. That is why the American position is changing … They thought we were encircled because of Iraq and Afghanistan. But we’re not. That’s why they want to talk to us now."
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