Author: Bush nominee helped mask FBI's pre-9/11 failures and kept al Qaeda's infiltration of US intelligence from view

Peter Lance
Raw Story
Tuesday September 25, 2007

This is the first of two op/ed exposes by Peter Lance, the best-selling author of Triple Cross, which will be released by HarperCollins in a new edition next month.

In the coverage of Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush's nominee to replace Alberto Gonzales, the line in his resume that has resonated the most with the media is his experience presiding over the 1995 terrorism trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

The blind Sheikh, a top al Qaeda confederate who was cited in the infamous Crawford Texas PDB just weeks before 9/11, was convicted with nine others in the so-called "Day of Terror Plot" to blow up New York's bridges and tunnels, the U.N. and the FBI's New York office.

Citing the trial in a Sept. 20 New York Times piece that lionized the ex-judge, reporter Adam Liptak described how Mukasey, with "a few terse, stern and prescient remarks," sentenced the blind sheik to life in prison:

"Judge Mukasey said he feared the plot could have produced devastation on 'a scale unknown in this country since the Civil War' that would make the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which had left six people dead, 'almost insignificant by comparison.'"

Liptak was correct in citing the 1993 Twin Towers bombing in his story, but he failed to mention that the "Day of Terror" trial was really a desperate attempt by the FBI's New York office and prosecutors for the Southern District of New York (Mukasey's old office) to mop up after their failure to stop the blind Sheikh's "jihad army" prior to its first two attacks on U.S. soil: the murder of Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990 and the Trade Center bombing on Feb. 26, 1993.

Worse, during the 1995 trial, Judge Mukasey helped bury the significance of Ali A, Mohamed, a shadowy figure who was working at the time for both Osama bin Laden and the FBI.

If Mohamed had been called to the stand and cross-examined in open court, defense lawyers could have ripped open the scandal of how the FBI failed to stop the first Trade Center attack. More important, they could have exposed the depth and breadth of al Qaeda's shocking plan to attack America, six years before 9/11.

Al Qaeda's master spy

An ex-Egyptian Army intelligence officer, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA in 1984, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg from 1987-89 and the FBI itself -- where he served as an informant on the West Coast from 1992.

Known to his jihadi brothers as "Ali Amiriki," aka "Ali the American," Mohamed not only moved bin Laden and his entourage from Afghanistan to the Sudan in 1991 but he set up most of al Qaeda's training camps in Khartoum, trained Osama's personal bodyguard, and literally wrote the "manual on terror."

Mohamed actually slipped Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri -- bin Laden's number two -- into the US on a fund raising tour of US mosques in the early 1990s.

This feat of deception was roughly the equivalent of a German spy smuggling Heinrich Himmler, the head of Hitler's dreaded S.S., into America at the dawn of World War II to raise deutschmarks on a tour of German-American churches.

All of this is chronicled in my book Triple Cross, due out in an updated edition from HarperCollins next month. The book flings the door open on a closet in Judge Mukasey's past -- a dark little room where one enormous skeleton lives.

It's the story of how New York prosecutors Andrew McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald (later CIA leak Special Prosecutor) went out of their way to keep Ali Mohamed out of the "Day of Terror" trial.

Why would they do that? Because Mohamed had penetrated three of the Big Five intelligence agencies, and defense attorneys like Roger L. Stavis believe that once he was on the stand, under oath, the truth would have come out.

"In Ali Mohamed," says Stavis, "You have a man that's working for us and being paid by us at the same time as he's working for Osama bin Laden who is the greatest enemy that this country has had since 1941. We had him, and he played us... The last thing federal prosecutors wanted back in 1995 was to have that story exposed."

Training the "jihad army"

At the time, the Feds were in possession of shocking evidence that Mohamed had trained two of the very members of the "jihad army" sitting in front of Judge Mukasey's bench: El Sayyid Nosair, the pill-popping Egyptian emigre who'd murdered Kahane four years earlier, and Clement Rodney Hampton-El, a U.S. Muslim and Afghan war veteran known as "Dr. Rashid."

Worse, as we'll see, the FBI had those two terrorists under surveillance from as early as 1989, when they'd also begun tracking additional Ali Mohamed trainees: Mahmoud Abouhalima, a six foot two inch red-headed Egyptian cab driver, Mohammed Salameh, a diminutive Palestinian, and Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti Rutgers grad, all three of them later convicted in the WTC bombing.

So the potential for "blowback" and embarrassment to the Feds was enormous -- holding open the potential of derailing the "Day of Terror" prosecution itself.

And if those revelations weren't enough to inspire federal prosecutors to hide their "informant," Mohamed -- who'd been captured in 1993 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police trying to smuggle an al Qaeda terrorist into the US -- was later released on the word of an FBI agent. Once set loose, he began to plan the devastating East African Embassy bombings executed in 1998.

After getting sprung from the Mounties on the word of Special Agent John Zent, Mohamed traveled to Kenya where he took the surveillance pictures of the US Embassy that Osama bin Laden personally approved in 1994, pinpointing the precise spot where a truck bomb would detonate four years later, killing 212.

Mohamed himself would later run the Kenyan bombing cell while he commuted back and forth to the US, all the while keeping in touch with New York prosecutors and FBI agents on both coasts.

Ali's first sit down with the Feds

In December, 1994, as he was setting up the Embassy bombing cell, Mohamed was summoned back to his home in Santa Clara, California for a meeting with Andy McCarthy and FBI agent Harlan Bell. The Feds had deemed him so important to the upcoming trial that he'd been named as an un-indicted co-conspirator along with bin Laden himself.

At the time, Roger L. Stavis, Nosair's attorney, was prepping a subpoena to compel Ali's testimony. "I wanted him," Stavis told me for Triple Cross, "and I tried everything to find him."

Jack Cloonan, the ex-FBI agent who later debriefed Mohamed after his 1998 arrest, noted that "If Ali would have been put on [the stand] at that point in time, [he] would have been viewed as an agent provocateur... Maybe there would have been an issue of entrapment raised. It wouldn't have helped the Government's case... That subpoena became "a huge, huge issue for Ali" as well.

Stavis was prepared to argue that the Feds had been winking at Mohamed for years as he trained the Sheikh's "army" to wreak havoc for the Jihad in New York City. But after McCarthy's Santa Clara sit down with him, Ali mysteriously went missing.

Later, Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, Nosair's cousin and a "Day of Terror" co-defendant, argued in an appeal that Ali had told him to his face that the Feds had urged him to duck the subpoena.

McCarthy denies this, but he stayed in touch with Mohamed after their Santa Clara meeting and Ali never showed up at trial.

Mukasey jokes about "the missing witness"

In the course of the proceedings, unable to produce the phantom spy, Stavis had shown a videotape of Ali shot at Fort Bragg, in which he was literally training top Green Beret officers.

While an active duty U.S. Army sergeant, Mohamed had been commuting on weekends up from North Carolina to New York, where he schooled Nosair, Hampton-El, Abouhalima, Salameh and Ayyad in small arms and automatic weapons training.

Before leaving Fort Bragg, Ali would rifle the files at the JFK Special Warfare Center, stealing intelligence to pass on to his al Qaeda "brothers" in New York, including top secret memos from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He would stay at Nosair's house in Cliffside Park, N.J., where FBI agents later recovered the highly secure documents the night of the Kahane murder.

One memo, which can be downloaded from my website, even contained the positions of all Special Forces and Navy SEAL units worldwide on Dec. 5, 1988 -- a nugget of intel that the Soviets would have paid a fortune for at the height of the Cold War.

As I noted in Triple Cross:

El Sayyid Nosair's attorney Roger Stavis was doing his best to keep Mohamed's presence alive in the "Day of Terror" case. On Sept. 1, 1995, an exasperated Stavis requested a "missing witness instruction [to the jury] with regard to Ali Mohamed."

He reminded Judge Michael B. Mukasey that "Mohamed, was the person who came from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who was assigned to the United States Army Special Forces."

At that point the judge quipped, "Yes, we saw him on that splendid videotape." But Stavis countered, "When we attempted to find Ali Mohamed, we could not bring him in."

Yet Mohamed was in the country during much of the eight-month trial. According to an affidavit filed by the FBI after his 1998 arrest, Mohamed had two meetings with DIS investigators in August 1995 and one on November 8th. In each instance he was home in Santa Clara.

Under federal law, a trial judge has the discretion to give a missing witness instruction "if a party has it peculiarly within his power to produce witnesses whose testimony would elucidate the transaction."

If such a person does not appear and one of the parties -- the Feds in this case -- has some special ability to produce him, the law permits the jury to draw an inference, namely that the missing witness would have given testimony damaging to that party.

Ali Mohamed was an un-indicted co-conspirator. Judge Mukasey was aware of his infiltration of the US Army at Fort Bragg. Andy McCarthy had visited him in the presence of an FBI agent within months of the trial. So Stavis had every right to expect that jury charge.

Mukasey's response? "I don't think a missing witness charge on that gentleman is warranted and I am not going to give one."

By Oct. 1, 1995, the issue of Mohamed's absence in the trial was rendered moot. Characterized by the New York Times as "the biggest terrorism trial in US history," it ended with guilty verdicts for Sheikh Rahman and the nine remaining co-defendants. AUSAs McCarthy, Fitzgerald, and Robert Khuzami even succeeded in convicting El Sayyid Nosair for the murder of Meier Kahane.

The skeleton in Mukasey's closet

Why does it matter now that Judge Mukasey, touted by the New York Times for his prowess as an anti-terror judge, made light of Ali Mohamed's failure to show at the "Day of Terror" trial? Because if Ali had testified, lawyers like Stavis would have ripped the lid off the years of failure by the FBI to stop bin Laden's juggernaut.

Al Qaeda's capabilities, their bench strength and sheer resolve to strike again at New York might have been exposed years before 9/11, giving other agencies like CIA and DIA a chance to examine the intel being gathered by Bureau agents in this country.

At a minimum, Mohamed's exposure at trial would have blown his cover as a double agent and interdicted his supervision of the Embassy bombing cell. But Judge Mukasey, the man President Bush wants to run the Justice Department, didn't want to tip the jury to the significance of his absence.

NSA 'may not realize' it collected info on innocent Americans, top US spy says

David Edwards and Nick Juliano
Raw Story
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Powerful supercomputers are vacuuming up so much information that logs of calls to or from innocent Americans could exist in government databases indefinitely, the nation's top intelligence official said Tuesday.

"You may not even realize it's in the database because you do lots of collection," Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said, referring to the "inadvertent collection" of Americans' communications through a vast surveillance program instituted after 9/11.

An untold number of communication logs on US citizens could exist within a National Security Agency database of information gained through warrantless wiretaps of foreigners abroad, McConnell said, because NSA spies do not examine the full contents on all the information it collects until it has a reason to do so.

"If it's foreign intelligence, it's treated the way we discussed," and the government works to secure a warrant against anyone within the US it has reason to believe deserves further surveillance, McConnell said. "If it's now recognized as incidental, it would be expunged from the database."

The full scope of Americans who have been inadvertently and unknowingly snared in the warrantless wiretapping program remains murky and elusive. On Tuesday, Sen. Russ Feingold pressed McConnell on whether recent updates to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized "bulk collection" on calls from abroad into America.

"It would be authorized, if it were physically possible to do so," McConnell said. "But the purpose of the authorization is for foreign intelligence."

Feingold pressed, "So there is no language actually prohibiting this?"

As long as the communication is "foreign, in a foreign country, for intelligence purposes," there's not, McConnell said.

McConnell told the El Paso Times last month that "100 or less" US persons were targets of foreign intelligence gathering. But that number only represents those for whom the government received a warrant to spy on, McConnell clarified in later congressional testimony.

The intelligence director then insisted that a "small" number of Americans had been spied on -- purposefully or not -- although he noted that designation should be judged in context of the "billions of transactions" monitored by the NSA.

President Bush initiated a warrantless wiretapping scheme he later referred to as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" soon after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Details on the early days of the program and its legal justifications remain out of view as the White House has steadfastly refused to hand over documents on the program requested by congressional judiciary and intelligence committees.

Just before a month-long summer recess -- and in a week when Republicans raised terror fears with a "bogus" bomb plot aimed at the Capitol -- the Democratic Congress approved sweeping new wiretapping powers that critics say sweepingly authorized the extra-legal powers President Bush had claimed for himself.

The Protect America Act, as spying-expansion was called, set a six-month limit on its expansions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. McConnell has been scuffing the corridors of Capitol Hill since early last week pushing Congress to not only make permanent the FISA expansions, but to give the government more authority and immunize telecommunications companies that have helped the government collect data on its citizens.

McConnell's testimony has been carefully crafted to give lawmakers the impression that analysts are accessing little information beyond their specific surveillance of known terror targets, but a careful parsing of his statements reveals a program that could be collecting far more information that the administration has acknowledged.

"They obtain an enormous amount [of information] ... that they can search by computer," Lisa Graves, deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, told RAW STORY.

McConnell stresses the "minimization" efforts that are in place requiring that information unrelated to terror investigations be expunged from national security databases. But his clarification that NSA analysts must first examine the collected data leaves open the question of how much information on Americans continues to be subject to data-mining efforts of information electronically swept into government databases, Graves said.

Analysts, Graves said, are trying to examine "the ocean of communication, to look in it for grains of said, when the vast, vast, vast majority of communications are innocent." The following video is from C-SPAN 3, broadcast on September 25.

Reason Magazine calls NAU agenda "a Xenophobic Fantasy"

Shikha Dalmia and Leonard Gilroy
Reason Magazine
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Comment: According to these two authors you are a "protectionist xenophobe" if you believe there is an agenda to create a North American Union. Apparently being concerned about the selling off of U.S. infrastructure to foreign owned companies means you are "paranoid". They also call the NAFTA Superhighway a "fantasy". All this in the face of actual documentation and serious concern among members of Congress.

The U.S. is known for its "paranoid style" of politics, so brace yourself for the next Big Scare coming down the pike (literally) -- the Trans-Texas Corridor. Isolationist conservatives, emboldened by their jihad last year against the Dubai Ports World deal, have identified this road project as the spearhead of a conspiracy to dissolve the United States of America.

The corridor is a proposed two-phase project meant to ensure that the Lone Star State has the transportation infrastructure necessary to handle the growing international commerce coming across the border. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement has doubled U.S.-Mexico trade, three-fourths of which flows through Texas. And the movement of goods through the state is expected to increase exponentially in the near future as Asia routes more exports through the newly expanded Panama Canal.

Texas awarded a planning contract in 2005 for the first phase of the corridor to Cintra, a Spanish multinational company, and its San Antonio partner, Zachry Construction. (Cintra also won a $1.3-billion contract last year to build a 40-mile extension of Highway 130, a state toll road connecting Austin to San Antonio that was conceived separately from the corridor, although conspiracy activists claim otherwise.) The first 600-mile section, planned to include such features as tollways, freight-rail and truck-only lanes, will run parallel to the cramped, north-south Interstate 35 from the border town of Laredo to Oklahoma. Construction contracts for that portion haven't been awarded.

The second phase of the corridor, whose planning contract has yet to be handed out, would build a similar highway from the western edge of the Mexico border to east Texas. This might one day link to a separate, federally initiated eight-state expansion of Interstate 69, which currently runs between Port Huron, Mich., and Indianapolis.

This is all too sinister for Jerome Corsi, the Vietnam War veteran who helped lead the Swift Boat charge against John Kerry. Corsi has knitted disparate strands of each of these separate road projects to help convince fellow xenophobes such as Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Lou Dobbs and the John Birch Society that the corridor is the first leg of a secret federal project called the NAFTA Superhighway, a four-football-field wide monstrosity that would run from Mexico's Yucatan to Canada's Yukon.

Never mind that I-69 originated in a 1991 federal transportation law -- pre-dating NAFTA -- and that the planning for the Trans-Texas Corridor has been fully documented on the Web.

Yet even Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican candidate for president, has fallen for the paranoia. You'd think that Paul would be chanting hosannas to anything that facilitates free trade, but he too fears that the "superhighway" is part of a scheme by foreign companies to erode U.S. borders and create a North American Union combining the United States, Mexico and Canada -- complete with a single government and a common currency called the "amero."

Superhighway opponents regard even routine dialogue between the three neighbors as a treasonous assault on U.S. sovereignty. They are apoplectic about the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), a forum created in 2005 for bureaucrats to discuss such radical topics as how to snag terrorists before they enter the continent and how to speed up cross-border traffic for just-in-time deliveries.

All of this could be dismissed as the paranoid rantings of a protectionist fringe -- except that it is beginning to have a tangible negative effect on public policy.

Montana's Legislature this summer overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning the superhighway and any union of the three countries, and 18 other states are considering similar legislation. El Cajon Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter successfully amended the 2008 Transportation Appropriations Act to prohibit use of federal funds for any SPP working group. Virginia Republican Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. has introduced a House resolution against both the mythical superhighway and the fantasy union.

After the Dubai Ports debacle, in which anti-terrorism hysteria forced Congress to thwart the transfer of U.S. port management leases held by a major British ports operator to a company based in Dubai, the atavistic idea that foreign investment erodes American sovereignty is back into vogue.

Hunter, for instance, has added hoops to the review process that foreign bidders for U.S. companies must go through to prove that they're not a national security threat. This limits the pool of buyers for U.S. companies, thereby lowering their value and the value of 401(k) plans that invest in them. Hunter has also extended the review process to foreign companies vying to build "critical infrastructure." Should his definition include transportation projects, state governments would be deprived of crucial capital and knowledge to modernize their infrastructure.

The paradox of protectionism is that it damages the very thing it seeks to protect. Labor unions, for example, almost killed U.S. auto and steel companies by helping erect barriers against foreign companies, which made domestic products globally noncompetitive. But the impact of today's isolationists threatens to affect the entire economy. If unchallenged, these ideologues of fear will kill the United States' prosperity in the name of protecting its sovereignty.

George Hunt:UN UNCED Earth Summit 1992 - The dark side of the sustainable development movement

George Hunt:UN UNCED Earth Summit 1992 - The dark side of the sustainable development movement

Google Video
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Very Interesting short feature made in 1989 that documents the beginning of the hijack of the environmental movement by the elite in order to usher in more restriction and a policy of population reduction. Everything covered is now unfolding before our eyes.

Note: The quality of the video is not the best but it is almost 20 years old.

George Hunt, a business consultant, was present at the 1987 Fourth World Wilderness Congress as a member of the staff. He initially wanted to buy a ticket, but this proved to be much too expensive ($650).

At the conference he noticed it had very little to do with the conventional environment movement and was surprised to see people like Maurice Strong, Edmund de Rothschild (Pilgrims Society), David Rockefeller (Pilgrims Society), and James A. Baker (Pilgrims Society; Cap & Gown; trustee American Institute for Contemporary German Studies; Atlantic Council of the United States; National Security Planning Group; Bohemian Grove; CFR; Carlyle; advisor George W. Bush in his 2000 election).

In his two videos, produced in 1989 and 1992, he plays audio recordings of several of the 1987 speakers, including Maurice Strong and Edmund de Rothschild .

Anti-Bush Protesters Arrested Near UN

AP
Tuesday September 25, 2007

NEW YORK - About a dozen anti-war protesters were arrested Tuesday morning during a peaceful demonstration of President Bush's speech before the U.N. General Assembly.

The arrestees were among about 400 protesters opposing the Bush Administration's war in Iraq, and its incarceration in Guantanamo Bay of more than 300 men on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Many in the crowd wore orange jumpsuits in solidarity with the Guantanamo detainees.

The arrested demonstrators were taken into custody by police after kneeling on the sidewalk in an act of civil disobedience at the rally near the United Nations. One of them, 58-year-old Bill Ofenloch said they were trying to serve an "arrest warrant" on Bush for "high crimes against humanity."

Members of the anti-war group Code Pink performed a bit of street theater where a person wearing a Bush mask was arrested.

"What do we say?" shouted Code Pink's Medea Benjamin. "Arrest the criminal!"

The crowd picked up the chant. Once the arrests were made, the rest of the group began marching downtown. The demonstrators, in orderly fashion, walked along the sidewalks since they lacked a permit for a street march.

Olbermann Bush adminstration use of bogus terror threat is 'most overt accusation yet'

David Edwards and Jason Rhyne
Raw Story
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Former US Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein joined Keith Olbermann to discuss recent charges that the Bush administration employed false intelligence to convince lawmakers they should temporarily expand domestic spying powers under the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

"These charges...are the most overt accusation yet of a government gone so wrong that it is using the terrorist's weapon of fear against its own people--and against other legislators who will not go along with the program," Olbermann said.

At a forum on FISA hosted by the Center for American Progress, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said that on Aug. 2, word of specific intelligence prompted increased security on Capitol Hill. The House and Senate passed the FISA expansion bill days later.

In what she called a "Rovian strategy of using terrorism as a wedge political issue," Rep. Harman charged that the threat, "it turned out, was bogus; the intelligence agencies knew that."

"The President continues to insist...that he can spy on Americans without warrants irrespective of what a statute says--that he has constitutional authority to override whatever Congress may do," said Fine.

"There is no disinclination of this administration," he continued "to stoop to misrepresentations and omissions to heighten the sense of danger to get whatever they wish in the legislative package."

Before passage of the FISA expansion, Fein said that "the administration was openly telling members of Congress if they voted against the bill that the administration insisted upon, Americans would die."

"There wasn't any substantiation of that," he said. "It was just: 'Trust me, we always tell the truth."

Fein insisted that the president would continue to "have his way if he continues to frighten the Congress and Congress refuses to demand information and facts rather than just rumor."

"The mind reels," Olbermann responded.

The following video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast on September 24.

A NY Republican Club Says No To Ron Paul Fund Raising Event

Larry Fester
USA Daily
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Ron Paul’s campaign stated on its website that the New York Republican club told the campaign that there wasn’t enough support on its board to allow Ron Paul to host a fund raiser at the club.

Paul’s campaign is looking for another location for the October 12th fund raiser.

The Metropolitan Republican club states on its website that:

“We are a varied and enthusiastic group with the common goal of supporting New York City Republican candidates and ideals. Met Club activities include election campaigns, informational programs, and social events.

Anyone who shares our basic goals and beliefs is welcome to become a member of the Metropolitan Republican Club.”

The clubs facilities are privately owned but the cold shoulder does seem to conflict with its stated policies. Paul activists think NY Republicans should allow all of the candidates to be heard.

Paul, a darling of many rank and file Republicans has been occasionally getting a cold shoulder from some Republican organizations, a possible indication of a divide between party leadership and party membership.

Ron Paul’s campaign has centered on ‘repealing the police state’ ‘securing and policing U.S. borders’ ‘a noninterventionist foreign policy’ which includes opposition to the Iraq war and preventing a war with Iran.

The Republican presidential candidate also proposes to abolish federal income taxes and the Federal Reserve. Paul also opposes what he has described as attempts to erase U.S. borders and form a North American Union.

EU treaty debate 'must end'

ePolitix.com
Tuesday September 25, 2007

The debate over the new EU treaty must be resolved if Britain is to have any chance of tackling 21st century challenges, according to the leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party.

Gary Titley told Labour delegates at the party's annual conference in Bournemouth that globalisation brought with it the challenges of climate change, people trafficking, terrorism and the need to regulate corporations.

And he said that Gordon Brown would ensure the treaty agreed in December "is one that represents the best deal for Britain".

"The 21st century challenges are tough and if the EU is to face them, then we have to get away from debates about treaties, institutions and processes," Titley said.

"That is why we need to ratify the reform treaty and move on. The deal that Tony Blair struck in June ripped the constitutional heart out of the treaty."

He added: "It shows once and for all that the European Union is not a state, it is a political process. A process which allows us to work together to meet global challenges more effectively and to protect ourselves from shared vulnerabilities."

Titley argued that people who oppose the treaty "do so because they oppose the EU" and do not want environmental regulations or working directives "getting in the way" of free markets.

"The truth is this: the battle over the reform treaty is a battle being fought against the neo-conservatives on the right," he said.

California could be 3rd state to ban forced RFID implants

Orr Shtuhl
Stateline.org
Tuesday September 25, 2007

It would be an interesting feature of an employee’s first day: sign a contract, fill out a W-2 and roll up your sleeve for your microchip injection.

Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s happened, and now a handful of states are making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip implanted under their skin.

If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signs a bill passed Sept. 4, California would join Wisconsin and North Dakota in banning human implanting of these tags without consent.

No one’s quite sure how real a threat these forced implants might be, or why states are feeling compelled to protect their residents from being physically tagged. Lawmakers are calling the legislation pre-emptive, while the industry that produces the technology sees the states’ action as fear mongering.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags – tiny, data-storing microchips about the size of a grain of rice – are in passports, in Wal-Mart factory shipments and in subway passes in cities from New York to Taiwan. They are also in humans. On one less-than-likely episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," a paranoid actor Bob Saget even uses one to monitor his adulterous wife.

Unlike Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which is used for constant, real-time tracking, RFID tags are scanned at close range – usually from a few feet to a few inches. The tags are tracked by scanners installed at checkpoints, such as office doors or warehouse loading docks. The systems are also commonly used in highway toll collection and as theft protection in car keys.

In humans, they have been used to store medical information, to track movement and to gain access to locked rooms. To date, 2,000 RFID chips have been sold for implantation in humans, says VeriChip Corp., the only manufacturer with a Food and Drug Administration-approved implantable chip.

The company is focusing its technology on medical patient identification, and about 400 patients, including those with Alzheimer's disease, have RFIDs implanted. Other VeriChip human implants have been used by a Spanish nightclub to allow VIPs with implanted chips to bypass entrance lines and by the Mexico attorney general’s staff to safeguard identity information at a time when the kidnapping of government officials there is not uncommon.

Some customers are using them as high-tech keys. Ohio security firm CityWatcher.com raised eyebrows in 2006 when it requested that some of its employees be “chipped,” or implanted with tags for access to certain rooms. According to published reports, only two employees got the implants before the company dropped the program. CityWatcher.com has since shut down.

But forced chipping has been a rare practice, leading some industry spokespeople to decry regulation as “scare tactics.”

Wisconsin enacted the first RFID ban in May 2006, and North Dakota in April. Colorado and Ohio have bills in committee, and Oklahoma and Florida saw theirs die last session. Except for one U.S. House proposal to use RFID tags to track prescription drugs, Congress has not widely addressed the technology.

Legislators admit that the few laws being enacted are pre-emptive. Wisconsin state Rep. Marlin Schneider (D) had never heard of CityWatcher.com when he drafted the first implant ban.

“I had heard about this device from CNN or someplace, and I went into the office and said, ‘Get a bill drafted that prohibits this,’” he said. “This is beyond even what Orwell imagined.”

State Sen. Joe Simitian (D), who authored California’s bill, said he first looked into RFID legislation after grade schools in Sutter County, Calif., required students to wear IDs containing the chips to help monitor attendance. The move prompted privacy complaints from parents, and the school eventually stopped using the technology.

Simitian introduced four other RFID bills, dealing with criminal punishment for identity theft, security standards and use of these tags in driver’s licenses and school IDs.

All four proposals were originally pieces of California’s Identity Information Protection Act of 2006, which passed but was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. In a statement, he recommended waiting for standards from the federal Real ID Act, a plan to organize states’ driver’s licenses into a national system. The governor has until Oct. 14 to sign or veto the newly passed bill.

The lack of security in the chips is particularly alarming, Simitian said, and is a major reason he thinks the state should step in with regulation. A May 2006 story in Wired Magazine featured Jonathan Westhues, a 24-year-old engineer who demonstrated how he could (and did) covertly scan a company’s RFID employee badge and break into the office – all with a cheap, homemade reader. He’s since posted detailed instructions on how to make the reader on his Web site.

Westhues likens RFID chips to “a repurposed dog tag. … The Verichip is built with no attempt at security, and is therefore not very special to clone,” he writes on his Web site.

How low-tech are these homemade readers?
Determined to show the security flaws to skeptics in the Legislature, Simitian asked a tech-savvy grad student from his office to build one. The student then wandered the state Capitol one afternoon with the reader in his briefcase. In the process, he stole the security numbers of nine representatives. The reader could send out any of those numbers, getting him past any locked door a state senator would have access to. And he would appear as the senator in the electronic records.

Manufacturers and industry representatives say that no cases of such identity theft have been documented. But depending on the desired level of security, cameras and guards should be used in addition to RFID tags, says the AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association).

The technology is being embraced by a few government agencies. Both Vermont and Washington state have agreed to work with the Department of Homeland Security to test RFID driver’s licenses, although they won’t be required by citizens. The U.S. Department of Defense has been tracking shipments with RFID tags since 2003.

Besides possible privacy breaches, the new technology also has raised health alarms. Studies of implants used in the past 12 years have linked RFIDs to cancer in lab mice and rats, according to The Associated Press.

The studies did not have control groups for the cancer, and manufacturers report no complications with the millions of pets that have had various chip implants over the last 15 years. But the results were enough for some scientists to question the FDA’s approval of the technology.

Dollar's slump reaches far beyond tourism

Rachel Beck
Associated Press
Sept. 25, 2007 11:05 AM

NEW YORK - The markets and Washington may be nonchalant about the tumbling dollar, but the rest of us can't afford to be.

The dollar has been declining for a while. In recent weeks, things have deteriorated, however, as the greenback has plunged to record lows against the euro and reached parity with the Canadian dollar for the first time since 1976.

There is a lot more to this story than just vacations abroad getting pricier. A plunging dollar comes with widespread economic risk, which could mean everything from higher costs for gas at the pump to mortgage rates rising.

The U.S. currency weakened sharply on the back of last week's decision by the U.S. Federal Reserve to cut its benchmark interest rate by a bigger-than-expected half point to 4.75 percent.

The central bank's rate move was intended to stem the economic fallout caused by recent financial turbulence. It ended up creating another worry by spurring investors to sell dollars as they looked to put their money into markets where interest rates are rising and economies have better growth prospects than the United States.

That has sent the dollar tumbling to new lows against the euro, which rose as high as $1.4130 on Monday to its highest level since the 13-nation euro debuted in 1999. So far this year, the dollar is down 8 percent against a weighted basket of major currencies, according to the Federal Reserve.

Even with all this going on, U.S. officials haven't talked much about the dollar's fall. Instead, they've been out in force discussing the credit-market turmoil and the housing collapse.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has only rehashed the Bush administration's party line that says it wants the dollar to be strong, but isn't going to do anything about getting it there. "We believe that currency values should be set in a competitive marketplace based on underlying economic fundamentals," he said on Friday.

There are certainly reasons for the administration to like the dollar where it is right now. A weak greenback makes American goods cheaper and more competitive abroad. It also juices up the profits of U.S.-based companies doing a good portion of their business overseas.

But the dollar's steep fall also has downsides that can't be overlooked.

The Fed took a gamble by lowering interest rates when inflation was already a concern. Now that the dollar's value has collapsed even further, there are worries about increasing pricing pressures. A weak dollar raises import prices, so goods manufactured abroad and sold in the United States cost more.

The weak dollar also boosts the price of oil and other commodities that are traded internationally in dollar contracts. That is certainly clear by the record-setting move in oil prices, which have shot above $80 a barrel since the Fed cut rates and the dollar tumbled. American consumers can count on that soon showing up in higher prices at the gas pump.

The slumping dollar also makes it less attractive for foreign investors to own dollars. In recent months, they've already shown some willingness to move out of the U.S. currency, and the recent decline in the greenback threatens to exaggerate that.

Even before the recent market turmoil began, foreign buying of U.S. financial assets had slowed. A Treasury Department report showed foreign holdings of long-term securities such as equities, notes and bonds increased by a net $19.2 billion in July, the slowest pace in seven months and well below the $97.3 billion tallied in June.

Worries about foreigners wanting to diversify out of dollars rose last week after Saudi Arabia decided for the first time not to cut interest rates in lock step with the U.S. Fed, leading to some speculation that it would soon end its currency's peg to the dollar.

Also last week, an investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi bought a 7.5 percent stake in the management operations of the Carlyle Group, a U.S. private-equity firm. In addition, the Nasdaq Stock Market announced it intended to sell a nearly 20 percent stake to Borse Dubai, and Borse Dubai and a group from Qatar also moved to become the largest stakeholders in the London Stock Exchange.

If foreigners' buying habits change, that could have a broad impact on financial markets - and U.S. consumers, too. For instance, if they sell their U.S. Treasury holdings, or don't buy new government bonds or notes, then Treasury prices will go down and yields will go up. That will likely send mortgage rates higher since they are pegged to the 10-year Treasury note.

That could unravel any good that has come from the Fed's rate-cutting action and put the economy in a precarious spot. It makes you wonder why this administration isn't doing more - or anything - to help the dollar.

The Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut does not help Americans

merkfund

Axel Merk, September 25, 2007

In our assessment, the Federal Reserve’s (Fed’s) interest rate cut was wrong. Forget about the “moral hazard” of whether the cut would plant the seeds for further bubbles. Lowering interest rates is wrong because it will do few any good, but cause many a lot of harm.

As the most imminent result, the U.S. dollar has accelerated its decline versus hard currencies. When a country’s central bank cuts interest rates, it is rare that the currency reacts in textbook fashion and declines more than a token amount versus other currencies; that’s because, amongst others, lower interest rates may boost growth and make the currency more attractive for investments. Not so this time with the Fed’s cut: lower interest rates are unlikely to boost economic growth. The reason? The markets are facing a valuation problem, not a liquidity problem.

Will a subprime borrower be helped by the cut in interest rates? Will his or her adjustable rate mortgage that is about to reset to a much higher rate suddenly become affordable? Will mortgage derivatives suddenly become tradable? Or will these illiquid derivatives be accepted as collateral once again for speculators to borrow money? We believe the answer is a clear NO because the problems are prices, not access to money. To heal the excesses of the housing bubble, we need lower home prices; subprime borrowers are best helped by downsizing, not by receiving subsidies (see also “If you want a subprime bailout, do it properly”). There is no shortage of consumers to borrow; there is a shortage of lenders to lend. Conversely, there is plenty of cash around; it’s just that those who have cash are not willing to pay the prices demanded.

The Fed’s grave mistake was to lose control of money supply during the credit driven expansion (please see our February 2007 analysis “How the Fed lost control of money supply”). As volatility, risk and fear are returning to and are priced back into markets, we are facing a market-induced credit contraction. As investors pare down their leverage and demand higher yields to be compensated for risk, the Fed is nothing but a small, and in this case almost irrelevant, participant in the markets. It’s in this context that former Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan is correct when he laments in his memoirs that central banking is becoming less important.

The markets are facing a major challenge, though, if acting central bankers, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, believe they are stronger than the markets. Pushing liquidity at any cost when the markets demand a contraction is what gold bugs have been waiting for; that’s a positive way of saying Bernanke may live up to his “Helicopter Ben” reputation, flood the market with fiat money and risk further destroying the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.

The problem gets more severe as many U.S. policy makers believe a weak dollar may actually be good for Americans. Bernanke, in his academic work before becoming Fed Chairman, has expressed that had the U.S. veered away from the gold standard during the Great Depression, it would have alleviated the hardship on the people. In his book “Essays on The Great Depression”, Bernanke values this reprieve higher than preserving the purchasing power of the dollar. In the past, only the Treasury Secretary talked in public about the U.S. dollar. Bernanke, however, has made the U.S. dollar a focus of his decision making process. By considering the U.S. dollar a valve to alleviate hardship, he throws the baby out with the bathwater.

We are not in the Great Depression. Importantly, because of significant current account and budget deficits, our position versus our trading partners is far weaker than during the 1930s. If we make the U.S. dollar less attractive, foreigners may well demand to be compensated through higher interest rates. Incidentally, in a recent speech in Germany, Bernanke pointed out that longer-term interest rates are likely to move higher. He thinks that we may see higher long-term interest rates within the next decade. In our opinion, we might be faced with higher long-term borrowing costs much sooner. Bernanke seems to subscribe to the view that borrowing costs will be contained because it is in no one’s interest for the dollar to plunge and for foreigners to refrain from purchasing U.S. debt. He is right that in particular Asian economies are highly dependent on selling to American consumers; in our assessment, much of Asia would rather destroy their own currencies than to allow the dollar to fall too much, as it would throw their domestic economies into turmoil. But that does not mean one can turn good policy upside down and force foreigners to invest in the U.S. This is where academically trained central bankers looking at econometric models of past behavior are playing with fire. At the end of the day, market forces are stronger than central bankers, and bad policy will cost dearly.

The major downside risk of a weaker dollar is inflation. Consumers see it best at the price at the gas pump. But as foreigners may reduce their appetite for U.S. debt, and as the market as risk continues to be priced back into markets, credit will continue to be tight. Tight credit means less economic activity, a recession. Central bankers ought to take away the punch bowl when the economy gets too hot; instead, the current breed at the Fed seems to believe recession is a four-letter word.

Does anyone benefit from the lowering of interest rates in this environment? In conjunction with higher long-term rates, it steepens the yield curve. Banks tend to have short-term deposits (the short end of the yield curve) and lend money for longer-term projects (the long end of the yield curve). The Fed’s policies are thus aimed at restoring profitability at banks. The challenge for the Fed is, of course, that it is difficult to help both mortgage holders (and with it consumer spending) and banks at the same time, as the policies required to assist each group are diametrically opposed. The Fed may be better of getting out of subsidizing pockets of the economy and instead focus on what ought to be its mandate, to preserve price stability.

The Fed’s efforts to boost liquidity in an environment when market forces call for a recession will cause commodity prices to continue to be at elevated levels. It is not surprising that the Canadian dollar has reached parity versus the U.S. dollar: Canada is a resource dependent economy that has its fiscal house in order. The major downside risk for Canada, their dependence on the U.S. economy, is mitigated by the Fed’s determination to keep at least resource utilization at high levels.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has so far recognized the distinction between the varying challenges the markets face. By keeping interest rates high, they acknowledge that inflationary risks are real. Switzerland just raised rates, also acting prudently. There has been a lot of criticism of the Bank of England’s (BoE) flip-flopping. While we share much of the criticism, we have called the BoE a yoyo-central bank for some time and are not surprised by their actions: of the Western central banks, the BoE has the most volatile policy, reversing course on policy decisions rather frequently; the Brits wouldn’t want to live without this “flexibility”; on a more serious note, this behavior is well priced into the British pound.

A weak dollar may boost the earnings of a couple of multi-nationals based in the U.S.; but it will weaken the competitive position of the U.S., planting seeds for more protectionist policies in the future. And a country dependent on the mercy of foreign creditors can ill afford protectionism. Rather than protectionism, the solution is to cut spending, for the government to live within its means.

In the more likely event that the government will not drastically reduce its spending in the wake of a slowing economy, investors may want to consider how to navigate through what the future bears. We believe that risk continues to be under-priced, and that the credit contraction will not only continue for much longer, but that it will further spread to overall corporate and consumer activity. Budgets for 2008 are decided upon now; many companies prefer to err on the side of caution in the wake of the recent turmoil. For Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth to turn negative, we only need to have much of corporate America institute marginal cutbacks.

We manage the Merk Hard Currency Fund, a fund that seeks to profit from a potential decline in the dollar. As a result, some say we may be biased in our outlook. We would like to point out that we brought this product to market in 2005, as we predicted an environment in which investors may want to mitigate equity, interest and credit risk, but also diversify out of the U.S. dollar. To learn more about the Fund, or to subscribe to our free newsletter, please visit www.merkfund.com.

Axel Merk
Manager of the Merk Hard Currency Fund, www.merkfund.com.

Data pushes dollar to record low vs euro

By Lucia Mutikani

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar fell to a record low against the euro on Tuesday as an unexpected plunge in U.S. consumer confidence to near two-year lows raised expectations of another Federal Reserve interest rate cut next month.

This was the fourth straight session that the dollar tested all-time lows against the euro. Investors' perceptions of more monetary easing, a step that would further reduce the dollar's global yield appeal, were also supported by another report showing more weakness in the housing market.

"The drop below 100 (in consumer confidence) was just an ugly psychological number for the market and that pushed the euro way above the 1.40 level," said Boris Schlossberg, strategist at Forex Capital Markets in New York.

The Fed's quarter point cut in its benchmark overnight lending rate last Tuesday left the dollar on the defensive.

Interest rate futures are pricing in a roughly 95 percent perceived chance of a 25 basis point rate cut at the Fed's October meeting, up from 72 percent at Monday's close. The fed funds rate is at 4.75 percent.

The euro jumped to a record high of $1.4153 and was last trading at $1.4130, up about 0.3 percent on the day, according to Reuters data. The dollar also fell against the yen, trading at 114.38 yen, down 0.4 percent on the day.

"Underlying dollar weakness is still there, but I think the fact that the market corrected overnight also gave the euro a little more strength on the upside," said Meg Browne, a senior currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York.

Earlier, the euro was unfazed by a report showing German Ifo business confidence survey surprised on the weaker side.

Analysts said the Ifo survey was yet another sign of a softening in the euro zone economy, a situation that hinted at steady interest rates there for the rest of 2007 and possible monetary easing early next year.

"We might see a cut starting early next year, but the market hasn't come to that idea, and that is helping to give the euro some support," said Browne.

Given this risk of an interest rate cut by the European Central Bank, analysts said the euro's rally against the dollar could be close to an end, but cautioned that much depended on U.S. economic data.

"It's not inconceivable for the euro to make a run to an all-time high around $1.4500, but should it reach those levels there will be so much rhetoric coming out of the euro zone," said Schlossberg.

On Monday, the government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy repeated its complaints that the euro's strength was eroding the competitiveness and productivity of firms.

"The euro rally is getting a little long in the tooth at this point. The euro strength itself is causing a tremendous amount of problems back home. At these levels it is trading on momentum and not so much on interest rate differentials," said Schlossberg.

The dollar rose against sterling, however, after a report in a British newspaper sparked worries over troubles in the UK financial sector arising from the credit crisis. Sterling traded at 2.0166, down 0.3 percent on the day.

The U.S. Conference Board's index of consumer sentiment fell to 99.8 in September, the lowest since November 2005 and down from 105.6 in August. The median forecast of economists polled by Reuters was for a slip to 104.0.

Fed Projects a Four Year Long Recession

Michael Swanson
Safe Haven.com
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Aside from the dollar and long-term bonds all markets went up last week as the Fed demonstrated that it is more fearful of a slowing economy and banking woes than inflation. In fact, it is willing to sacrifice the dollar to save the banks. Just last month, the Fed was saying that the threat of inflation is just as great as the threat of a slowdown in the economy. Now it is cutting rates in a huge way as the DOW is near its all-time high, gold is making new highs, and the price of oil is exploding.

The Fed is obviously terrified. I have noted in the last podcast that Bernanke built his career on a doctoral thesis that claimed that the Fed didn't cut rates fast enough during the 1929 stock market crash. But if you look at a chart of the Depression bear market with an overlay chart of interest rates you'll see that the Fed cut interest rates as the market topped. A few years later when the market finally bottomed you'll see that they had been lowering rates all of the way down.

What Bernanke believes is that the Fed should have cut rates all at once during the start of the bear market instead of gradually over two years. He seems to be putting this belief to work right now. It means that he is gravely concerned about the state of real estate and banking in the United States.

As the NYT reports:

Those wanting to understand the Fed's reversal can profit from reading two papers by Fed officials which were released this summer as the credit squeeze was worsening.

Taken together they constitute an admission that the Fed was surprised by the housing and borrowing boom on the upside, and now it fears it will be surprised on the downside.

One paper, by Karen E. Dynan, a Fed economist, and Donald L. Kohn, the Fed's vice chairman, asked why a strong economy had left Americans deeper in debt than ever before.

"The most important factors behind the rise in debt and the associated decline in saving out of current income have probably been the combination of increasing house prices and financial innovation," they concluded. In other words, Wall Street and rising home prices made it easier to borrow more money, and consumers did so.

That led to more consumption than would have been expected. Now, the authors say, "an unexpected leveling out or decline" in home values could have the opposite effect.

And, Frederic S. Mishkin, a Fed governor, said in the other paper that this leveling or decline could, in turn, have a bigger effect on the economy than the Fed anticipated.

"Although I generally do not place the housing and mortgage markets close to the epicenter of previous cases of financial instability," he wrote, "I would note that the current situation in the U.S. could prove to be different."

Mr. Mishkin said he had modified one Fed economic model, concluding that a 20 percent fall in home prices could cause consumer spending to fall by 2 percent within two years, about twice what the old model forecast.

But that was not the point Mr. Mishkin wanted to emphasize. Instead, his model showed that much of that damage could be averted if the Fed acted rapidly to cut rates -- as it is now doing.

When Alan Greenspan was at the Fed he often had Fed governors write papers to rationalize and justify changes in Federal Reserve policy. One should read the Mishkin paper mentioned above to understand what the Fed is doing now. If the credit markets don't revitalize in the next few weeks you can expect to see the Fed lower rates again by another 50 points at their October FOMC meeting no matter where the Dollar, Gold, or the DOW are. They have signaled that they don't give a damn about the Dollar. All they care about is Wall Street.

One could look at this another way though. One could say that they don't care about inflation because they see a total bust in housing that will create deflationary pressures in the economy. Mishkin's paper projects negative GDP growth for the next five years, a Federal Funds rate falling two full points lower, consumer spending shrinking for five years, and the CPI going down and staying negative if housing prices decline by 20%. These negative trends are expected to begin now and accelerate for two and a half years.

He sees such a housing price decline as very likely as house prices fell by 16% from late 1979 through late 1982. Contrary to people who believe that real estate is the best investment you can buy because it never drops, it has dropped in the past. And with bubbles leading to busts it is happening right now. The question remains, when will it stop? When the Nasdaq topped in March of 2000 it didn't bottom for two full years. Real estate topped out a year ago.

Mishkin isn't just a normal Fed governor. He is one of Ben Bernanke's closest friends. The two served at Columbia university together and in 1997 they wrote a book together calling on central banks to make public targets for inflation. Mishkin's views dovetail with Bernanke's.

According to Mark Zandi, co-founder of Moody's Economy.com, housing prices will decline by at least 11% in the next 3 1/2 years. Zandi sees prices in New York city falling from between 1 percent and 7 percent for each of the next five quarters so there is a lot of leeway in his projections. Hey, if we only get an 11% decline and you cut the Fed model projections in half we're still facing a horrible recession.

Mishkin argues that "the task for a central bank confronting a bubble is not to stop it but rather to respond quickly after it has burst." Instead of lower ratings as economic conditions deteriorate as his models do, and show practically a depression coming as a result, he advocates cutting rates all at once just as Bernanke's doctoral thesis about the 1929 stock market crash argues.

What I have to wonder though is what happens if the Fed lowers rates by one percent or more in the next three months and real estate doesn't rebound? These theories have never been tried before by a Central bank. We don't know if cutting rates all at once will prevent the damage caused by a bursting bubble. It has never been tested. Even when the tech bubble burst in 2000, Alan Greenspan didn't lower rates until almost a year later and after the Nasdaq fell to almost half its value.

The problem is real estate is still overvalued just as tech stocks became overvalued in 2000. One would think that real estate will have to drop and return to a normal valuation before it can bottom out, so simply lowering interest rates may not have the wonderful effects that Mishkin and Bernanke hope they will.

What I do know for sure, which is all you need to know to make money, is that they are setting up an inflationary trend. As the Fed prints more money it has to go somewhere. Of course this is bullish for gold and commodities which are now leading the stock market. But it is possible that the DOW and broad market could also continue to go up too.

Neocons Insult Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Kurt Nimmo
Tuesday September 25, 2007

It doesn’t take much to read through the corporate media bombast on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “showdown” at Columbia University, as the Associated Press characterized what in essence was an ambush and a heaping dose of disrespect by the Iranian leader’s surly hosts. In the very first sentence of the report, we learn that “Ahmadinejad defended Holocaust deniers and raised questions about who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks,” both entirely legitimate topics of discussion, that is outside the purview of Bushzarro world.

“Thousands of people jammed two blocks of 47th Street across from the United Nations to protest Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly session. Organizers claimed a turnout of tens of thousands. Police did not immediately have a crowd estimate,” the Associated Press reports. “The speakers, most of them politicians and officials from Jewish organizations, proclaimed their support for Israel and criticized the Iranian leader for his remarks questioning the Holocaust.”

In other words, thousands of people are outraged by something Ahmadinejad never said, a lie fabricated by MEMRI, a Mossad front designated to provide propaganda to convince Americans they are obliged to squander their hard-earned money and precious lives for the sake of Israel’s territorial ambitions, although of course this is rarely mentioned. Instead we are warned ad nauseam the Arabs and Muslims “hate us for our freedom”—to shop until we drop and run up the credit cards—and are keen to slaughter our grade schoolers, thus we have to fight them over there before they swarm over us like “Islamofascist” vermin here with a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other.

If you sincerely believe you are free, attempt to question the Holocaust and see how far you get. For that matter, attempt to discuss the plight of the Palestinians, as Ahmadinejad did, and see how far you get. Simply insisting the Palestinians are human and are grossly and habitually victimized by the Israeli state is a dangerous pursuit, on occasion leading to not only ad hominem attacks but threats of violence, lost careers, as the American political scientist Norman Finkelstein recently discovered, and even prison time, as questioners in Europe and Canada have learned.

“Asked why he had asked to visit the World Trade Center site—a request denied by New York authorities—Ahmadinejad said he wanted to express sympathy for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks,” the Associated Press continues. “Then he appeared to question whether al-Qaida was responsible, saying more research was needed.”

Indeed, more research is needed, but we will not get it, as the neocons will not be challenged on their preposterous claim that a gaggle of cave dwelling Arabs were responsible and a hand-picked whitewash commission, leaving out enough contrary evidence to fill a large hole at the Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island, have put aside all question, at least all questions the corporate media and our Congress critters refuse to ask, preferring instead the absurd claim Arabs defied physical science and magically, as if through a voodoo trance, made Norad stand down on September 11, 2001.

“If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly—why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved—and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined,” Ahmadinejad said.

Not exactly, although Ahmadinejad will be excoriated severely for the crime of offering a critique. As we know—or a small number of us know—the attacks served as a much anticipated and meticulously plotted “Pearl Harbor event,” not designed to prevent “crisis in Iraq,” and soon enough Ahmadinejad’s Iran, but precisely for the opposite reason—to inflict a series of violent crimes of the sort familiar to the Nazis on the people, culture, and society of the region. Simply reading a few neocon documents makes this perfectly and horrifically obvious, not that we should expect the average American to read anything more or less than the side of his morning cereal box.

Obviously, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walked into a trap at Columbia University, as he should realize far too many Americans have surrendered to the brutal vision of the neocons and their Jabotinskyite mentors, preferring to insult and harangue foreign visitors and, provided with the appropriate contrived pretext, bomb their nations into Neolithic condition, as the neocons will do soon enough to Iran.

If Ahmadinejad had his wits about him, he would stay as far away from America as possible and prepare the inevitable—cruise missiles and bunker busters with his name attached, a prospect disgusting as children signing artillery shells last summer at Kiryat Shmona, Israel.

Syria refuses peace talks with Israel

UPI
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Senior Syrian officials said Monday the U.S. airstrike on a Syrian nuclear facility Sept. 6 has ruined all chances of peace with Israel.

The announcement came after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said earlier Monday there would be no war with Syria, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Olmert said ongoing tension with Syria in the past few weeks would not turn into armed conflict, and while Syria's troops are "on alert," Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal said Syria would not initiate an attack, Ynetnews reported.

Regarding talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Olmert said they "have gained momentum since the Palestinian unity government was dissolved and Hamas took over the Gaza Strip," the report said.

Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu challenged Olmert, saying the prime minister was "the only one in the State of Israel who believes (Abbas) is a partner," the report said.

Big Brother is keeping tabs on satnav motorists

Wilton D. Alston
JBS
Tuesday September 25, 2007

A secret 'Big Brother' operation is allowing officials to pinpoint the exact location of thousands of vehicles with satellite navigation systems.

The controversial scheme is built into the small print of a contract between the Department for Transport and the satnav company Trafficmaster.

Currently the 'spy in the sky' system is limited to some 50,000 drivers who have Trafficmaster's Smartnav system.

However, the system could provide the blueprint to monitor the location, speed and journey details of millions of drivers in years to come.

Such a system might be used to manage a system of road pricing, where motorists are charged according to which roads they use and the time of day. It might also be used to identify speeding drivers.

It could also be used by everyone from the police to the taxman to discover whether an individual is

where they claim to have been at any point in time.

The Daily Mail has seen details of the £3million contract. The partnership, which began in July, is described by the DfT and the company as necessary to monitor traffic flows and congestion blackspots.

However, the small print makes clear that the information being collected and handed over to the Government is far more detailed and, potentially, sinister.

The document states: "The unprocessed data to be supplied - by Trafficmaster - will consist of individual vehicle location reports and associated information."

It then gives an example of what this 'associated information' is together with how it should be collated and presented.

This includes a unique number identifying the vehicle, two six-figure Ordnance Survey readings for the location, and the date and time when the information was captured. It also includes what kind of vehicle it is, the speed it is travelling and the direction.

A snapshot of this information is collected at 15-minute intervals and then collated and provided in its raw form to the DfT. A Trafficmaster spokesman said: 'Our responsibility is to provide the data. It is not necessarily our responsibility or decision as to how it is used.'

The revelations will fuel concerns that Britain is turning into a surveillance society.

However, the DfT stressed that all the information is anonymised to ensure they do not have the personal details of drivers.

A spokesman said: "This contract provides anonymous data about sections of journeys made so we have a good understanding of where and when congestion is forming. Without fully understanding the effects of congestion we cannot develop ways of tackling it.

"We have no interest in knowing where people are travelling to and from."

Bush Homosexual Allegations Resurface In New Book

Leola McConnell releases tell-all memoirs

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, September 24, 2007

Allegations that George W. Bush performed a homosexual act on current U.S. Ambassador to Poland Victor Ashe in the mid-1980's have resurfaced in the tell-all memoirs of the woman who first made the claim.

Leola McConnell, former Liberal Democratic Candidate for Governor of Nevada and one time prostitute-for-hire, was met with deafening silence on behalf of the majority of the corporate media last year when she sensationally alleged that Bush and Ashe regularly hired bisexual men for secret sex sessions in the 80's when Bush was a private citizen.

"In 1984 I watched George W. Bush enthusiastically and expertly perform a homosexual act on another man, one Victor Ashe," said McConnell.

"Ashe is the current U.S. ambassador to Poland; and he too should come out, like former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevy, and admit to being a gay American."

"Other homo-erotic acts were also performed by then-private citizen George W. Bush. I know this because I performed one of them on him myself."

According to Radar Online, in the year since McConnell made the claim, she has been subjected to constant harassment and death threats. An attempt to get her story told in the pages of Larry Flynt's Hustler Magazine fell through, so she has chosen to self-publish a series of memoirs called Lustful Utterances.

In the books, McConnell (pictured below) also claims to expose a network of clientele that regularly enjoyed her "services", most of which come from the Evangelical wing of the Republican Party and the Neo-Con crowd.

Bush is a regular attendee at the the all-male Bohemian Grove club, an annual gathering of the elite which takes place at a forest encampment in Monte Rio, California. In 2004, the New York Post reported that homosexual porn stars were being hired by the Grove to "service" the members, supposedly without their knowledge.

However, the Grove is notorious for its homosexual activity and a reporter who worked at the camp during the summer of 2004 and 2005 told us that he was regularly propositioned by men seeking homosexual intercourse.

On June 29 1989, the Washington Times' Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald reported on a Washington D.C. prostitution ring that had intimate connections with the White House allegedly all the way up to President George H.W. Bush. According to the story, male prostitutes had been given access to the White House and the article also cited evidence of "abduction and use of minors for sexual perversion."

Photos of George W. Bush embracing Jeff Gannon, the gay escort turned fake news reporter, who was allowed unmitigated access to the White House press corps with no background investigation or credentials, were popular at the height of the Gannon/Guckert scandal.

Newsmax Presidential Poll Skewed Against Ron Paul

National Expositor

Tuesday September 25, 2007

Below is a copy of the poll from Newsmax's site. Notice how Ron Paul is left out of questions 4 and 5. If Ron Paul supporters leave 4 and 5 blank the final percentage will be skewed towards all neocon candidates. It's a no brainer. Newsmax wants to report that they received many Ron Paul votes, but in the end, Fred Thompson will get the higher percentage. Is Newsmax showing their true colors with this clear bias?

---- Poll Below

Many polls show Fred Thompson could emerge as a leading contender for the GOP nomination in 2008. We want to know what you really think. Key media and others want to know your opinion about Fred Thompson. Vote today!

1) What is your overall opinion of Fred Thompson?

Favorable

Unfavorable

No Opinion

2) Is Fred Thompson your candidate for president in 2008?

Yes

No

3) In the following field, who is your 2008 candidate?

	John McCain	Condi Rice	Mike Huckabee
	Mitt Romney	Rudy Giuliani	Fred Thompson
	Tom Tancredo	Ron Paul	Newt Gingrich
	Duncan Hunter	Sam Brownback	Other

4) In a Republican primary of the following, who would you vote for?

	Rudy Giuliani	John McCain
	Newt Gingrich	Fred Thompson

5) If the 2008 President race was between Fred Thompson & Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?

Fred Thompson

Hillary Clinton

6) Who did you vote for in the 2004 election?

Bush

Kerry

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Gordon Brown's vision: UK as a work camp

Andrew Gimson
London Telegraph
Tuesday September 25, 2007

Gordon Brown received his most enthusiastic applause before he had spoken: there was real warmth in the greeting extended to the new Prime Minister as he arrived on the podium.

But as Comrade Brown addressed the party, he achieved a most dispiriting effect.

It was admirable stuff, at least in parts, but there was so much of it and such unrelieved earnestness and such a continual and relentless emphasis on hard work.

Comrades, we are building a land fit for workaholics and if you cancel your holiday in order to get the new tractor factory finished on time, you are a hero of our time.

The Prime Minister has resolved that for the greater good of us all, he will turn Britain into a work camp.

If you work hard, things will go well for you, or as Comrade Brown put it: "If you try hard, we will help you make the most of your talents."

But he warned that "immorality" will not be tolerated.

Comrade Brown expects "discipline, respect, responsibility", and "anyone who is caught selling drugs or using guns will be thrown out".

What is more, he thundered, "No one who sells drugs to our children or uses guns has the right to stay in our country."

We are surprised that some commentators said they could find "nothing new" in Comrade Brown's speech, for it seems to us that his promise to deport drug dealers and gun-toting criminals is a striking innovation in penal policy.

But perhaps the Brownites will point out that it is simply a return to the wholesome 18th-century practice of deportation, from which the American colonies and Australia benefited so enormously, receiving as they did so many of the most energetic and freedom-loving inhabitants of these islands.

We cannot help wondering how easy Comrade Brown will find it to deport French or German criminals.

But where there is a will, there must be a way, and the vital thing, as the Prime Minister pointed out, is to defend our British way of life.

The British way of life used to include a place for the bumbler, the idler and the joker and used to value freedom and spontaneity over state control and regimentation.

We are told that people in the olden days used sometimes to laugh at authority and liked to sit down for a cup of tea and a chat, and even thought it a good idea, at the end of the day, to relax with a pint of beer and a cigarette.

But that almost unimaginably barbaric era is over and so is the ridiculous notion that the answer to some of our problems might be to give people more freedom, not less.

So Comrade Brown told the conference: "We will send out a clear message that drugs are never going to be decriminalised."

Some of us could not help raising an eyebrow as we heard the word "never".

It appears that Comrade Brown intends to guide our destinies until the end of time.

Surely he has not already succumbed to the monstrous vanity of thinking that his moral tyranny, firmly buttressed by extracts from his estimable father's sermons, will endure forever?

As if sensing that he had failed to delight everyone, and had even inspired vague, involuntary feelings of gloom in some of his supporters, Mr Brown told the conference at the end of his address: "Sometimes people say I am too serious and I fight too hard and maybe that's true."

One of the things people actually used to say about the Brownites, in the long years before their man got the top job, was that they could never see a belt without hitting below it.

But those days are also past and moral seriousness lies at the heart of the appeal the new Prime Minister is making to us.

His tone of voice is different, but Mr Brown turns out to be every bit as self-righteous as Tony Blair.