Media, Authorities Hype “Blonde Haired Terrorist” Threat

Another attempt by the PTB to distract people from seeing that the government is the biggest terrorist threat.

Source: Steve Watson, Infowars.net.

Following in the footsteps of Fox News, and almost word for word repeating unsubstantiated claims by the head of the CIA, ABC News ran a piece earlier this week alleging that white westerners are being trained in Al Qaeda terror camps in Pakistan with the intention of carrying out attacks in Europe and the USA.

The ABC report appeared on World News With Charles Gibson this past Monday. Gibson stated:

“Intelligence officials say it is their number one concern. Caucasians from a European country who have graduated from an al Qaeda training camp. Such potential terrorists would be dressed in western clothing, drawing little notice as they board a plane bound for the US, coming to launch an attack. There’s no indication such an attack is imminent, but this scenario is of great concern to experts in and out of the government.”

In addition, an article from the London Telegraph today relates that police in Yorkshire have identified a 12 year old blonde haired schoolboy as an Al Qaeda extremist after he sent links to beheading videos posted on the internet to his classmates.

The boy was reported to police by his school, who also indicated that he had an “unnatural interest in guns and weapons”.

Clearly the child is a hardcore terrorist.

Police revealed that they are monitoring hundreds of children in a new anti-terrorism scheme which is designed to “target al-Qaeda inspired youths”.

As we have documented, the blue eyed blonde haired Al-Qaeda line is a familiar talking point that has been pushed on Fox News and within other Neo-Con circles in an attempt to turn the anti-terror apparatus around to target dissidents, protesters and the American people in general.

The origin of the concept was based on a comment by a single MI5 source that was subsequently picked up in a Scotsman article back in January, which claimed that Al-Qaeda have recruited 1,500 white Britons to carry out attacks in the UK.

Since that time the corporate media has increasingly focused on the idea and returned to the story again and again.

This hype culminated in a March announcement by CIA boss Michael Hayden that Al-Qaeda is training new fighters that “look western” and could easily cross U.S. borders.

“They are bringing operatives into that region for training — operatives that wouldn’t attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles (airport outside Washington) with you when you were coming back from overseas,” Hayden told NBC’s Meet The Press.

“(They) look western (and) would be able to come into this country without attracting the kinds of attention that others might,” he added, with Reuters forced to point out that Hayden offered nothing to substantiate his claim.

In addition, the concept was even debated earlier this month by elitists at the secretive 2008 Bilderberg meeting.

Sources inside the meeting leaked details of elitist talking points which included the need to highlight a new phenomenon of terrorist groups, recruits and sympathizers identified as blonde haired, blue eyed westerners.

“Under the heading of resisting terrorism there were points made about how the terrorist organizations are recruiting people who do not look like terrorists – blonde, blue eyed boys – they’re searching hard for those types to become the new mad bombers,” reported veteran Bilderberg sleuth Jim Tucker.

NAFTA, “Stemmers,” and the Dumbing Down of the Masses

Source: Rand Clifford, Cyrano’s Journal.

“Simply one of the many biocidal glories of NAFTA…not long after American companies started plopping their most toxic operations just across the border to capitalize on such as lax Mexican environmental laws, a shocking spike in the number of babies born without a brain (anencephalic) became a legacy of the massive industrial pollution.”

Bodies of evidence by the millions make the dumbing-down of Americans the most successful federal program of all time…. Not that a great challenge has been surmounted, nor much of a fight put up, nor any bounds of day-to-day comfort grossly exceeded; insidious is the motif. With shrewd play on human emotion—especially and always fear—people can be manipulated into consistently acting against their best interests, for the best interests of money-hung manipulators. By and large, the dumbed-down believe outrageous lies that defy all evidence if the lies are packaged and repeated appropriately. The official story of 9/11 for example, or its diabolical spawn, the war on terror—would these have any chance at all in a nation of alert and thoughtful people?

America propaganda…into the bouillabaisse of lies, stir in well-crafted bogeymen, along with heaping portions of distraction, envy, selfishness—and double-up on aversion to being different (who wants to be “the turd in the punch bowl” by controverting what we are officially supposed to believe?) In such a context, the term stemmer transcends sheer comic relief, into a realm of sobering relevance threatening to become terminal.

A man called Whizzer in the novel CASTLING, first published in 1995, identifies stemmers as a blight metastasizing among the American people under careful nurture at highest levels of government. A self-described Professor of Social Science, Whizzer deliciously merges charisma with science, employing experiments in human behavior to prove his theories.

Many people keen to America’s profound intelligence deficit cling to solid theories of a chemical dumbing-down…from fluoridation of public water supplies, to aerial spraying (chemtrails), to ubiquitous bisphenol-A plastics, to heavy metal contamination, to the enormous prevalence in our foods of neurotoxins such as MSG (in its many nefarious manifestations), and aspartame, on and on…. But, Whizzer’s extensive research supports his theory of atrophy…the simple, “use it—or lose it”. His theory of stemmers:

“It all has to do with how much of your brain is functioning,” he insists. “Scientific evidence is very clear that about all you really need to survive is a brain stem…your reptile brain.”

Whizzer’s research into stemmers grew from babies born without a brain down along the Rio Grande, such as in Brownsville, Texas. Simply one of the many biocidal glories of NAFTA…not long after American companies started plopping their most toxic operations just across the border to capitalize on such as lax Mexican environmental laws, a shocking spike in the number of babies born without a brain (anencephalic) became a legacy of the massive industrial pollution. Some of the babies born with only a brain stem are still able to live indefinitely with proper care. Enter Whizzer’s trademark comic relief: “But then again,” he says, “maybe nature’s just saying ‘Hey, you wouldn’t use the thing anyway. You’d be better off not lugging around all that waterlogged tissue.’ Yep, looks to me like the hand of evolution at work. Maybe we’re seeing the emergence of a new subspecies. Homo Sapiens Americanus Sans Cerebrum.” Note: Whizzer’s penchant for humor never fouls his fundamental science; his strict adherence to the scientific method puts to shame anything we now must categorize as “Bush science”, or, The Official Stuff. (Please see: Only One kind of science http://www.starchiefpress.com/articles/article05.html).

At a huge kegger wrapping up an annual tournament involving American and Canadian softball teams, Whizzer delivers a monologue regarding stemmers that captivates the crowd (he also uses “The Party” to run a key experiment to expose major differences in “gut-reaction” aggression between Canadians, and Americans; except for the border, these people are virtual neighbors).

Basics of Whizzer’s stemmer theory, in his own words: “The Rio Grande is a sewer and toxic cauldron. But that’s not the point. The point is a lot of babies born nearby have only a brain stem, but they can survive, sometimes for years and years…. Yeah, way way back, millions of years before they invented Canadian bacon or 4X4s, our ancestors had little more than a brain stem. The reptile brain. Over the years, cerebral cortex grew on top of the stem ‘cause they started puttin’ together a lot of abstract thoughts, and figuring out how to make life less of a bugger…how to get a little comfort. They worked hell outa those brains and like a muscle the brains kept growing and growing…. And that’s why now we lug around these big bone casings we call skulls—to protect all that brain mass we inherited. Well, down at the heart of all that grey matter lies the ol’ brain stem—all anyone really needs to survive. With it you can still eat, drink, sleep, reproduce, and fight…which brings us to my theory…. The human brain has stopped evolving. The human brain is currently devolving back toward stemhood, and fast. Proliferation of consumerism, of gadgets and celebrities, spectator sports and lottery, television, mega-religion, fast food, smart bombs, drive-by violence, main stream propaganda and the coolness of being stupid, just to name a few—they’re causing the bulk of Americans to slough their brains. Who needs all that gray matter? Around here we call those obviously running on little or no more than brain stem…we call them stemmers. Basically, they’re lizards in sheep’s clothing….”

In Part II: Stemmers, and the future of The American Experiment. Bilderberg, The Council On Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission…with the Nation so poised for martial law to usher in the New World Order, is there even time to identify America’s intellectual nadir for public evaluation of solutions, or will “My Pet Goat” herald our oblivion after all?

Rand Clifford is a writer living in Spokane, Washington, with his wife Mary Ann, and their Chesapeake Bay retriever, Mink. Rand’s novels CASTLING, TIMING, VOICES OF VIRES, and PRIEST LAKE CATHEDRAL are published by StarChief Press: http://www.starchiefpress.com

Five Myths About the New Wiretapping Law: Why it’s a lot worse than you think.

Source: Patrick Radden Keefe, Slate Magazine.

Sometime today, the Senate is likely to approve the most comprehensive overhaul of American surveillance law since the Watergate era. Unless you’re a government lawyer, a legal scholar, a masochist, or an insomniac, chances are you haven’t read the 114-page bill. Don’t beat yourself up: Neither have most of the 293 House members who voted for it last week. Ditto the mainstream press, who seem to have relied chiefly on summaries provided by the same lawmakers who hadn’t read it.

To be fair, wiretapping is so classified, and the language of the bill so opaque, that no one without a “top secret” clearance can say with any authority just how much surveillance the proposal will authorize the government to do. (The best assessment yet comes from former Justice Department official David Kris, who deems the legislation “so intricate” that it risks confusing even “the government officials who must apply it.”)

Out of the echo chamber of ignorance and self-serving political cant, a number of myths have begun to emerge. We may never know for sure everything that this new legislation entails. But here are a few things that it most certainly doesn’t.

Myth No. 1: This bill is a compromise.

The House bill “is the result of a compromise,” one of its architects, Steny Hoyer, D-Md., maintained the other day. But in truth, Hoyer and his colleagues gave the White House most of what it asked for, dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance capabilities without demanding any serious concessions in exchange. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., calls the deal “a capitulation,” and he’s right. Why else would the White House express its approval so quickly, after a full year in which President Bush petulantly vowed not to sign any legislation that obliged him to concede too much? Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., offered an honest appraisal: “I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped.”

Myth No. 2: We need the bill to intercept our enemies abroad.

One frequent refrain in favor of the new legislation is that without it, America’s intelligence capabilities will dry up, leaving the country vulnerable to attack. The National Security Agency wants to intercept communications that pass through routers in the United States, even when both parties to the communication are abroad. The administration has argued that the NSA should not have to obtain a court order to intercept those communications. Seems reasonable, right?

Of course it’s reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that House Democrats proposed to fix the problem a year ago. They were rebuffed. Why? Because their plan contained too much judicial oversight. (They ended up folding, just as they have this time around.) So when people say that this legislation is all about exempting foreign-to-foreign communications that happen to pass through the United States from the warrant requirement, don’t buy it.

You see, the new law goes a lot further, basically doing away with warrants altogether in the domestic-to-international context. Under the proposal, the NSA can engage in what David Kris calls “vacuum cleaner surveillance” of phone calls and e-mails entering and leaving the United States through our nation’s telecom switches. Provided that the “target” of the surveillance is reasonably believed to be abroad, the NSA can intercept a massive volume of communications, which might, however incidentally, include yours. When authorities want to target purely domestic communications, they still have to apply for a warrant from the FISA court (albeit only after a weeklong grace period of warrantless surveillance). But where communications between the United States and another country are concerned, the secret court is relegated to a vestigial role, consulted on the soundness of the “targeting procedures,” but not on the legitimacy of the targets themselves.

This is a huge departure from FISA. As Glenn Greenwald argues in Salon, the underlying suggestion of the new proposal is “not that the FISA law is obsolete, but rather, that the key instrument imposed by the Founders to preserve basic liberty—warrants—is something that we must now abolish.”

Myth No. 3: The courts will still review the telecom cases.

Perhaps most controversially, the bill effectively pardons the telecom giants that assisted the Bush administration in the warrantless wiretapping program. They will now be shielded from dozens of civil lawsuits brought against them after their involvement was exposed. House Democrats insist that the telecoms are not automatically getting off the hook. Instead, the companies must go before a federal judge. But here’s the catch: For the suits against them to be “promptly dismissed,” they must demonstrate to the judge not that what they did was legal but only that the White House told them to do it.

This is another bit of face-saving window dressing, and its essence is best captured in a breathtaking remark from Sen. Bond: “I’m not here to say that the government is always right. But when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree … that is something you need to do.” That more or less sums it up—one part Nuremberg defense, the other part Nixon.

Myth No. 4: The Democrats must fold because of the November election.

It’s no secret that congressional Democrats wanted to resolve the FISA debate before the August convention in order to avoid the perennial charge that they’re softies. After the House vote last week, Barack Obama issued a statement backing off his earlier tough stance on telecom immunity. The calculus seemed clear: McCain had just reversed his own position on illegal wiretapping and was spoiling for a fight, arguing that “House Democrats, the ACLU, and the trial lawyers have held up legislation to modernize our nation’s terrorist surveillance laws.” You can’t stand with the trial lawyers and the ACLU if you want to win a general election.

But does it really make sense to stand with AT&T and George W. Bush instead? As the Anonymous Liberal blogger pointed out, you could hardly ask for a more disreputable opposing team than a president with historic-low popularity and a bunch of corporate fat cats. And by reneging on his earlier position, Obama put himself in a box: If he lets the bill sail through the Senate, he will alienate his base. But if he attempts a filibuster or an amendment now, he will appear to be pandering to the objections of Moveon.org and other groups. It would have made more sense for the party leadership and the nominee to stick to their guns.

Myth No. 5: The law will be the “exclusive means” for surveillance.

The Democrats’ most pathetic bit of self-deluded posturing involves the inclusion of a clause suggesting that the new law represents the “exclusive means” by which “electronic surveillance and interception of certain communications may be conducted.” According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., this means “the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president.” But, then, FISA always said that it was the “exclusive means.” And in 2001, pretty much on a whim, the president set it aside. So for those of you keeping score back home, the Democratic leadership is patting itself on the back for including in the new law a provision that was already in the old law—and which the Bush White House chose to ignore.

Here, then, is the bitter joke of the new legislation: From 2001 to 2007, the NSA engaged in a secret program that was a straightforward violation of America’s wiretapping laws. Since the program was revealed, the administration has succeeded in preventing the judiciary from making a definitive declaration that the wiretapping was a crime. Suits against the government get dismissed on state-secrets grounds, because while the program may have been illegal, it was also so highly classified that its legality can never be litigated in open court. And now suits against the telecoms will by dismissed en masse as well. Meanwhile, the new law moves the goal posts, taking illegal things the administration was doing and making them legal.

Whatever Hoyer and Pelosi—and even Obama—say, this amounts to a retroactive blessing of the illegal program, and historically it means that the country will probably be deprived of any rigorous assessment of what precisely the administration did between 2001 and 2007. No judge will have an opportunity to call the president’s willful violation of a federal statute a crime, and no landmark ruling by the courts can serve as a warning for future generations about government excesses in dangerous times. What’s more, because the proposal so completely plays into the Bush conception of executive power, it renders meaningless any of its own provisions. After all, if the main lesson of the wiretapping scandal is that we need more surveillance power for the government, what is to stop President Bush—or President Obama or President McCain—from one day choosing to set this new law aside, too? “How will we be judged?” Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., asked in a stirring speech deploring the legislation yesterday. “The technical argument obscures the defining question: the rule of law, or the rule of men?”

Seizing Laptops and Cameras Without Cause

More hassles for the average person—get used to being treated like cattle. As for the terrorists? Yeah, they are so going to airports with their computers full of sensitive information. Riiiiight.

Source: Alex Kingsbury, U.S. News & World Report.

Returning from a brief vacation to Germany in February, Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Agents searched Hogan’s luggage and then popped an unexpected question: Was he carrying any digital media cards or drives in his pockets? “Then they told me that they were impounding my laptop,” says Hogan, a freelance investigative reporter whose recent stories have ranged from the origins of the Iraq war to the impact of money in presidential politics.Shaken by the encounter, Hogan says he left the airport and examined his bags, finding that the agents had also removed and inspected the memory card from his digital camera. “It was fortunate that I didn’t use that machine for work or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information,” he said. When customs offered to return the machine nearly two weeks later, Hogan told them to ship it to his lawyer.

The extent of the program to confiscate electronics at customs points is unclear. A hearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution hopes to learn more about the extent of the program and safeguards to traveler’s privacy. Lawsuits have also been filed, challenging how the program selects travelers for inspection. Citing those lawsuits, Customs and Border Protection, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, refuses to say exactly how common the practice is, how many computers, portable storage drives, and BlackBerries have been inspected and confiscated, or what happens to the devices once they are seized. Congressional investigators and plaintiffs involved in lawsuits believe that digital copies—so-called “mirror images” of drives—are sometimes made of materials after they are seized by customs.

A ruling this year by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that DHS does indeed have the authority to search electronic devices without suspicion in the same way that it would inspect a briefcase. The lawsuit that prompted the ruling was the result of more than 20 cases, most of which involved laptops, cellphones, or other electronics seized at airports. In those cases, nearly all of the individuals were of Muslim, Middle Eastern, or South Asian background.

Travelers who have their computers seized face real headaches. “It immediately deprives an executive or company of the very data—and revenue—a business trip was intended to create,” says Susan Gurley, head of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, which is asking DHS for greater transparency and oversight to protect copied data. “As a businessperson returning to the U.S., you may find yourself effectively locked out of your electronic office indefinitely.” While Hogan had his computer returned after only a few days, others say they have had theirs held for months at a time. As a result, some companies have instituted policies that require employees to travel with clean machines: free of corporate data.

The security value of the program is unclear, critics say, while the threats to business and privacy are substantial. If drives are being copied, customs officials are potentially duplicating corporate secrets, legal records, financial data, medical files, and personal E-mails and photographs as well as stored passwords for accounts from Netflix to Bank of America. DHS contends that travelers’ computers can also contain child pornography, intellectual property offenses, or terrorist secrets.

It makes practical sense to X-ray the contents of checked and carry-on luggage, which could pose an immediate danger to airplanes and their passengers. “Generally speaking, customs officials do not go through briefcases to review and copy paper business records or personal diaries, which is apparently what they are now doing now in digital form?these PDA’s don’t have bombs in them,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. More troubling is what could happen if other countries follow the lead of the United States. Imagine, for instance, if China or Russia began a program to seize and duplicate the contents of traveler’s laptops. “We wouldn’t be in a position to strongly object to that type of behavior,” Rotenberg says. Indeed, visitors to the Beijing Olympic Games have been officially advised by U.S. officials that their laptops may be targeted for duplication or bugging by Chinese government spies hoping to steal business and trade secrets.

Re: The George W. Bush Sewage Plant

Kinda insulting for the sewage plant.

Source: Dan Savage, The Stranger.

The question really isn’t “Why didn’t we think of this,” Jen, but “Why don’t we do this too?”

Every time I pass through George H. W. Bush airport in Houston, Texas, or the Reagan National in D.C., this thought runs through my head: One day I’m gonna fly into George W. Bush International Airport and my head is going to explode. The right is aggressive about getting shit named after their ex-presidents—anyone flown into William J. Clinton International Airport lately? or James Carter International?—and the left isn’t. It’s part of their Great Man/Dear Leader/crypto-fascist schtick.

Anyway, you can bet your ass that when Mr. 23% is out of office—oh, blessed day—right-wing sycophants will set about memorializing W by naming airports, highways, federal buildings, flower pots, and children after him. This name-shit-after-W campaign will organized and aggressive and it will have two primary goals: Make right-wingers feel better about voting the moron into office in the first place (exonerating themselves, really, for the damage he’s done to this country) and confuse future generations of voters about just how universally loathed this president was.

So naming naming sewage treatment plants—or other suitably disgusting facilities—after the bastard seems like a great idea to me. The campaign to name shit after W once he’s out of office will be political; a political campaign to name sewage plants after him before he gets out of office is just good defense. And it is not, as some in the comments would have it, a waste of time and effort. Humor has its place at the ballot box. If gathering signatures to memorialize W in this way gets people involved, and if the chance to name a sewage treatment plant after W brings more people to the polls (or their mailboxes) come November, then it’s all to to the good.

So: What shall we name after the bastard?

Ex Weapons Inspector: Iran Not Pursuing Nukes, But U.S. Will Attack Before ‘09

This is one of the more rational assessments of Iran’s nuclear “threat.”

Source: Jason Leopold, The Public Record.

In 2002, Scott Ritter, the former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector In Iraq, publicly accused the Bush administration of lying to Congress and the public about assertions that Iraq was hiding a chemical and biological weapons arsenal.

By speaking out publicly, Ritter emerged as one of the most prominent whistleblowers since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in the early 1970s.

Ritter’s criticisms about the Bush administration’s flawed prewar Iraq intelligence have been borne out by numerous investigations and reports, including one recently published by the Senate Armed Services Committee that found President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other senior administration officials knowingly lied about the threat Iraq posed to the United States.

Now Ritter, who was a Marine Corps intelligence officer for 12 years, is speaking out about what he sees as history repeating itself regarding U.S. policy toward Iran and the inevitability of a U.S.-led attack on the country, which he believes will happen prior to a new president being sworn into office in January 2009.

“We’re going to see some military activity before the new administration is sworn in.” Ritter said. But he added that “Iran is not a threat to the United States and Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. That’s documented.” Ritter teamed up with the Los Angeles-based U.S. Tour of Duty’s Real Intelligence, a nonprofit organization that represents former intelligence officials who openly discuss domestic and foreign policy issues. Ritter went on the road nearly a year ago to promote his recently published book, Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement. But over the past several months, issues related to Iran have dominated his discussions.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Public Record, Ritter said he has been keeping close tabs on the issue for years and continues to approach the issue as if he were still employed as an intelligence officer. He explained why he believes the U.S. is gearing up toward launching a military strike in Iran and how the media has misrepresented a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) regarding Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium.

AIPAC

He said one of the reasons he believes Democratic lawmakers have been reluctant to address the issue is the powerful Israeli lobby, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC has been pressuring the Bush administration to be even tougher on Iran. The lobby is largely responsible for drafting a resolution calling for stricter inspections and harsher economic sanctions against the country, which is expected to be voted on by the House next week.

Resolution 362 introduced by Congressman Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, has 170 Democratic and Republican co-sponsors.

The bill “demands that the president initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program.”

The resolution calls on President Bush to impose “stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran”

Ritter says AIPAC’s involvement in Iran policy is partially the reason Democrats have not been been willing to take a stand against the Bush administration’s hard-line tactics toward Iran.

“Congress has linked Iran policy to Israel. In this day and age of presidential politics no one wants to take on the Israeli lobby. That’s just the facts,” Ritter said. “You have to find a way to address this issue that sidesteps Israel. Some people may object to that. On the other hand, if you couch this thing in economic terms I think you now empower Congress to address this issue in a manner that sidesteps Israel.”

Last week, a Senate committee approved legislation to strengthen sanctions against Iran by restricting the import of Iranian carpets, caviar, and nuts to the United States.

“The strong sanctions we’ve approved today will work to deter the Iranian government from producing a nuclear weapon,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Ritter said the public would likely become more outspoken on the Bush administration’s policies toward Iran if they understood how an attack on Iran could lead to an economic collapse here at home.

“You have to talk about what’s going to happen to the price of oil, the price of food. People have to focus on that. Iran does not pose a threat whatsoever to the average American. We’ve got this hyped up threat. We need people to understand that they are being sold a bill of goods. There is no threat. Our welfare is going out the door right now because of this policy. We have to find a way to get this to resonate.”

Intelligence vs. Smoking Guns

One of the first questions Ritter says he is asked when he explains why the administration is planning an air assault against Iran is “where’s the smoking gun.”

“People will say ‘how do you know for certain,’” Ritter said. “You know I was in the in the intelligence business for a long time and we don’t make a living off of smoking guns. That’s what politicians do. We evaluate the totality of the available information and we make informed assessments and we do it in a systematic fashion. And that’s what I’ve been doing on the issue of Iran.”

Ritter said the increased rhetoric toward Tehran by various White House officials is a key indicator in understanding the Bush administration’s intent.

“I don’t like the word intent usually because the Bush administration used that with Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Intent void of a factual basis is speculation. But here we do have documentation. We have a national security strategy. We have repeated statements by the current players themselves that they seek regional transformation in the Middle East inclusive of regime change in Iran. This is the policy objective of the Bush administration.

“So we have the intent. Now with the intent we have the escalation of rhetoric. So we not only have stated intent we now have statements that reinforce those intents and seek to activate this intent,” Ritter added. “And then you have the rhetoric that’s matched with the capabilities. Clearly you have the capabilities deployed in the region to act on this. We’ve seen the nature of the strike be defined down to a limited strike to one or two strikes inside Iran affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard command. So you have all of these facilitators taking place.”

IAEA Report

In May, the media characterized a report by the IAEA into Iran’s uranium enrichment program as evidence that Tehran is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration held up that report as evidence that Iran is a grave threat to the United States and Israel.

But Ritter said the media misrepresented the report and likely did not thoroughly review its findings.

“We have a situation where the IAEA has published several technical reports all of which state there is no evidence Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. None. Zero,” Ritter said.

Ritter explained how the IAEA report was drafted.

“Information has been provided to the IAEA by member nations, intelligence information. Now the IAEA has to be very circumspect when it says this but we all know that it’s basically intelligence provided to the agency by the United States of America, a nation openly hostile to Iran, a nation that has a track record of fabricating, exaggerating, and misrepresenting intelligence data. The data that’s been provided to the IAEA has derived from a laptop computer which even the IAEA claims is of questionable providence,” he said.

Ritter said that because the United States has such a dominating role in the United Nations Security Council and in the Board of Governors the IAEA couldn’t ignore the information it receives from the United States about Iran.

“The IAEA can’t go to Iran with information that isn’t serious. So they say it’s serious and it needs to be investigated. So they go to Iran and the Iranians say, correctly so, ‘this is bullshit.’ You’re basically serving as a front to the CIA. The CIA is asking intelligence based questions about issues that are not relevant to the safeguards agreement, which, by the way, is the legally binding mandate that gives the IAEA the authority to do its work in Iran. You have to read the small print.

“The IAEA acknowledges that what it’s asking Iran to answer has nothing to do with its mandate of the nuclear non proliferation treaty. It is related to Security Council resolutions calling for the suspension of uranium and an investigation into a nuclear weapons program but the bottom line is what the IAEA has said is that Iran has not been forthcoming and Iran is saying it’s not their job to answer the CIA’s questions. So the IAEA reports that Iran is not being forthcoming on these issues and now it’s unnamed diplomats, i.e. American and British diplomats, who say they are very concerned because Iran’s refusal to cooperate only reinforces their concern that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

“This is purely CIA instigated tripe. When we get down to the nuts and bolts of the technical question of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and whether or not there’s any infrastructure in Iran that supports a nuclear weapons program and the IAEA technical find says there is none,” Ritter said.

Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, said in an interview last week with Al Arabiya Television that he would resign from the agency if Iran is attacked and warned that a military strike against the country would be catastrophic.

“I don’t believe that what I see in Iran today is a current, grave and urgent danger. If a military strike is carried out against Iran at this time … it would make me unable to continue my work,” ElBaradei said. “A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible. It would turn the region into a fireball,” he said, emphasizing that any attack would only make the Islamic Republic more determined to obtain nuclear power.”

Israel Not Involved

Ritter said an attack on Iran would come in the form of a “sustained aerial bombardment.” He added that a military strike would not involve Israel as asserted last weekend by John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who told Fox News that Israel would attack Iran after the presidential election in the fall. Moreover, Ritter said a report in The New York Times last week that alleged Israel conducted a major aerial exercise over the eastern Mediterranean as a warning to Iran is simply untrue.

“Only a few analysts have reflected on what I’ve said all along: Israel cannot initiate and sustain an air strike against Iran,” Ritter explained. “They’re incapable of it because they don’t have the military force. They don’t share a common border [with Iran]. They have to fly over sovereign states. The immediate international outcry would be tremendous. When we sought to fly U2 aircraft into Iraq when I was a weapons inspector if we felt that the Iraqis delayed in their acknowledgement the United States Air Force would SORTE a support package to go in. That included electronic warfare aircraft, refueling aircraft, etc. Just to get one U2 to fly a mission over Iraq with a support package involved 80 aircraft.

“For Israel to strike Iran, and remember Iran isn’t Iraq, Iran has a viable air-defense system, an Air Force, radar, and Israel would have to suppress it all and it can’t do it,” Ritter added. “Israel just doesn’t have the capability. Israel does not have the ability to initiate and sustain major combat operations against Iran. Israel is not going to start this fight. It will be the United States. All this talk about Israel getting involved I minimize that. Israel’s not going into Iran.”

Ritter said Bolton’s comments is an indicator that the “clock is running out” for ideologues in the Bush administration.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that John McCain is not going to become the next president of the United States of America, which means the next administration has the potential of deviating in a meaningful fashion away from the policies of the current administration,” Ritter said. “Clearly, the Bush administration is populated by ideologues that are very serious about what they want to accomplish. They aren’t playing games here. They aren’t children. They are serious. They believe there is a threat to the United States and that the United States has to take action. Why I bring this up is that the clock is running out for them.”

Congress Refuses to Act

Ritter had some tough words for Washington lawmakers for continuously failing to put any obstacles into place to block the Bush administration from even attempting to attack Iran without first consulting Congress.

“We see not only has Congress not seeking to put any obstacles in the way of this policy but in fact Congress is actively facilitating this policy by refusing to enact legislation that would require the president to get the consent of Congress before going into Iran,” Ritter said. “The fact that Congress has opted out from tying the president’s hands reinforces, at least in the Bush administration’s mind, that Congress is legitimizing the potential of action.

“So when you put all of this together you start to see that there is not only a real risk of war but that those who would like to do it see that there aren’t any obstacles being put in the way of their accomplishing this, which makes the likelihood of military action even greater. Everyday that goes by without Congressional action is another day that reinforces that there will be a military strike against Iran.”

Ritter has been trying to pass along his intelligence analysis on Iran to Congress for some time. He said “given the political situation that exists I don’t think you’re going to find any politician on either side of the political spectrum reaching out to me or talking with me directly.”

But he has been able, at the very least; distribute his intelligence to middlemen who can get the information to Congress.

“What I am saying to you is being said to the powers that be in Washington so there is no way [Democrats and Republicans] can say that they haven’t been made aware of this analysis,” Ritter said. “Ideally, there would be hearings and I would be invited to testify. So that not only these words would be given to the policymakers but it would be done in a way that the constituents would be cognizant of the fact that this is an analysis that was made available to policymakers who chose to act upon it or ignore it at their own risk.”

I contacted aides in the Democratic leadership offices of both Houses over the past week and also spoke to aides in minority offices. No one would comment on the record about the Bush administration’s policies toward Iran or discuss whether they have been made aware of Ritter’s intelligence analysis on the issue.

An aide to John Conyers, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, pointed to the congressman’s May 8 letter sent to President Bush stating that Conyers would initiate impeachment proceedings if an attack on Iran was launched without first receiving approval from Congress.

“Late last year, Senator Joseph Biden stated unequivocally that ‘the president has no authority to unilaterally attack Iran, and if he does, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, I will move to impeach’ the president,” Conyers’ letter says. “We agree with Senator Biden, and it is our view that if you do not obtain the constitutionally required congressional authorization before launching preemptive military strikes against Iran or any other nation, impeachment proceedings should be pursued..”

Ritter was critical of the letter Conyers sent to Bush, saying the congressman is still avoiding the issue.

“John Conyers is so off base on this one,” Ritter said. “I appreciate his passion, but the fact is rather than Conyers say [to President Bush] if you attack Iran I am going to impeach you why doesn’t Conyers reflect on the fact that there is no basis for impeachment because he’s been constitutionally empowered by Congress. If Conyers is so worried about this what Conyers needs to do is work with Congress to revoke the two existing war powers resolutions concerning Afghanistan and Iraq and then reconfigure the president’s war powers authority in a manner which constitutionally permits ongoing combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but tells the president that if you seek any expansion of your authority you have to get the consent of Congress. Now if the president attacks Iran you can impeach him.”

Conyers office declined to comment.

Ritter said he understood that the hotly contested presidential election makes it difficult for Democratic lawmakers to address the issue of Iran.

“Let’s talk about political reality here. You cannot expect a politician, especially Democrats who want to retain control of Congress and want a Democrat to be president of the United States, to commit political suicide,” Ritter said.

Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill

Source: By Greg Palast, MWC News.

Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won’t have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon’s liability by 90% to half a billion. It’s so cheap, it’s like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon’s US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, “Admit it; the oil spill’s the best thing to happen” to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal – but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.

In today’s ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon’s recklessness was ”profitless” – so the company shouldn’t have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it’s oil shipping partners saved billions – BILLIONS – by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, “Drunken Skipper Hits Reef.” But don’t believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska’s Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here’s the unreported story, the one you won’t get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land — for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives’ specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises – cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.

Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was “state-of-the-art” on-ship radar.

We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.

• Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, “The Miracle Barrel.”
• In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply “not possible” to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows — exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.
• The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.

In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos.

Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America’s greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests — the profit-driven disregard of the law — made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can’t happen again. They promise.