[cia-drugs] Wilders' Film Fitna (Seduction of Evil)
Wilders' Film Fitna (Seduction of Evil) Friday, March 28, 2008 Here it is! Wilder' Seduction of Evil. While the film is artistically speaking, well done - it must be said there are many such compilations about, even more shocking then this semi-sanitised product. The PC Treason Brigade will no doubt opine that the Religion of Peace is here unfairly 'collated' with terrorism. Would retort that their failure to condemn terrorists, unfairly lumps the Hirabahists with the innocent, who deserve better: our support! In these pages we're rather on the side of the freedom and justice. The American provider has closed the Fitna site itself. This is not well understood in Wilders' country of origin, the Netherlands. The penny hasn't dropped yet that America is the symbol of liberty, as well as the birth place of petty political correctness. This phenomenon is also not seen for what it is: the redistribution of speech rights along Marxist lines. Present footage was collected from LiveLeak, which has also a Dutch version available. More supporting documentation on Freedom Ain't Free Take Our Country Back. http://www.liveleak.com/e/7d9_1206624103 http://newcitizenship.blogspot.com/2008/03/wilders-film-fitna-seduction-of-evil.html
[cia-drugs] The Transatlantic Gulf of Soft and Hardware
Wednesday, January 16, 2008 The Transatlantic Gulf of Soft and Hardware In an article in the LA Times Gates faults NATO force in southern Afghanistan the US Defense Secretary said he believes NATO forces currently deployed in the region do not know how to combat a guerrilla insurgency, a deficiency that could be contributing to the rising violence in the fight against the Taliban. In the interview, Gates compared the troubled experience of the NATO forces in the south - primarily troops from the closest US allies, Britain and Canada, as well as the Netherlands - with progress made by American troops in the eastern part of Afghanistan. He traced the failing in part to a Cold War orientation. Since Robert Kagan's book Of Paradise and Power we better understand the psychological mechanism that says that if you have a hammer, you happen see a whole lot of nails, or the other way about, if you don't have a hammer you fail to observe all the loose nails lying around. The fragmented Dutch political constellation demands that military missions carry the broadest possible parliamentary support. In order to get the Leftist parties aboard, the missions' aims often overemphasize peace related activities. Development efforts, civil engineering, and nation building projects render highly trained military personnel a sort of hybrids between construction handies, development workers and boy scouts, . Another problem is evidently, in order to have peace, the war first needs to be won, which - heaven forbid - might actually involve killing terrorists! Those that do fully engage in winning the war, are viewed upon as bloodthirsty cowboys. This attitude constitutes 'supporting the troops'. We also know of the heavy European reliance on post Cold War peace dividend. In fact, most European countries in the thralls of postmodernism imagine themselves to have passed beyond history altogether. They live under the illusion that war is a feature of pre-history, requiring some crude state of mind they have risen beyond. Such twisted ideas resulting from the abdication of moral choices are not just delusional and dangerous, they are inviting aggression from states that are very much still a part of the Hobbesian world operating fully in the good old-fashioned tradition of power play. Some have been developing great plans for themselves and for the world. Elsevier is reporting that - far from examining if the critique is possibly warranted - the Dutch Government is having nothing of it. Even the Atlanticist spokesman of the opposition Liberal party demands an explanation. The Minister responsible meanwhile has invited the American Ambassador in for a chat. He's expressed hope for some misunderstanding, emphasizing the military's professionalism and experience. The Netherlands after all, has participated in over fifty peace missions! That last expression - I'm afraid - explains it all ... - Related dossier: OSINT From the Afghan Front - - Related website: Dutch/Australian NATO Task Force Uruzgan, Afghanistan (ISAF III) (MilBlog) Update: - Reuters: Gates: Afghan shortfalls remain, no more U.S. troops - LA Times: Netherlands summons U.S. official to discuss Gates' NATO criticism http://newcitizenship.blogspot.com/2008/01/transatlantic-gulf.html Kaganpowerparadise.jpg
[cia-drugs] Flunking Fichte
Saturday, March 22, 2008 Flunking Fichte Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished. Meet the Professor from hell, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Head of Philosophy and Psychology of the Prussian University in Berlin anno 1810. He blamed all but God for the German defeat against Napoleon Bonaparte: corrupt royals, the nobility, the decadent influence of reason, and a succession of weak governments that undermined religion as a moral force. He confronted the German losers with the burghers of the Middle Ages and they did not compare well: the burghers had made the Holy Roman Empire great because they weren't individuals, but sacrificed to the common good. The emphasis in Fichte's educational system was on compulsion, duty for its own sake, obedience, the crush of free will, prohibition, fear for punishment, elimination of self-interest, religious immersion, pupils must become 'fixed and unchangeable machines' and 'links in the eternal chain of spiritual life in a higher social order.' Fichte applied Kant to education, as generations of continental school children, until well within the last century, may have been aware of, although perhaps not consciously so. Under proper guidance, the student will find at the end that nothing really exists but life, the spiritual life which lives in thought, and that everything else does not really exist, but only appears to exist. A belated reaction to Fichte's will-crushing - but in full accordance with the extremes of the Hegel dialectic - was provided by Frankfurt School inspired anti-authoritarianism of the seventies of the last century. The Professor from hell has become the guidance counsellor called Bill. As National Socialism differed from Marxism in the national versus the international context, intellecituals of the Counter-Enlightenment movement applied universals, but restricted them to the national settings. In Fichte's case on education: Only the Germans, the salvation of Europe from the Napoleontic Enlightenment, are capable of true education. In Fichte we have a good example of Left and Right Socialism as mirroring ideologies, not opposing social systems. Like so many of the anti-modernist movement, he was undoubtedly a man of the Right, but pursuing what would today be seen as a Leftist subject: egalitarian public education. He may have inspired Marx to see school as a microcosm of the ideal society. http://newcitizenship.blogspot.com/2008/03/fichte.html Ornament.jpgfichte.jpg
[cia-drugs] FARC Uranium, Less than Meets the Eye
FARC Uranium, Less than Meets the Eye Friday, March 28, 2008 In a corporatist society such as the United States, anonymous government officials, Western diplomats, and military sources often telegraph the animus of ruling elites to mass media on questions deemed critical to their constituents: the executive class who exercise real power. No where is this more pronounced than on issues of U.S. foreign policy, particularly when natural resources (controlled by other nations) are assigned a strategic value by multinational corporations, their shareholders and the guardians of imperial order. Here too, the media's role is to serve as an objective observer simply reporting the facts as filtered through fixed frames of reference and agendas determined by the dominant political culture. Since the March 1 targeted assassination of FARC leader Raúl Reyes and 24 others by Colombia, there are clear signs that Washington's crusade against Venezuela's democratic socialist experiment have escalated. A key to unlocking the extent of Washington's current destabilization campaign is by deciphering the black propaganda product crafted by U.S. and Colombian disinformation specialists. One such product are the series of fraudulent documents I have dubbed Uribe's dodgy dossier, a trial balloon introduced by Washington and their regional surrogates as a potential casus belli for direct U.S. military intervention to topple the Chávez government. Three, sometimes four computer hard drives, are claimed to have been seized in the FARC encampment by Colombian commandos. But considering the concentrated firepower of multiple U.S. smart bombs dropped in the area, it seems highly unlikely that the hard drives would have survived such an onslaught. Nonetheless, Colombian officials claim their analysis of the files prove, among other things that the Ecuadorean and Venezuelan governments are colluding with the FARC. According to some readings, Defense Ministry spokespeople aver that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was planning to provide FARC with $300 million dollars. It has also been alleged, without a shread of documentary evidence to back up their assertions, that Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, has allowed the FARC to occupy its sovereign territory and create new firebases as launching pads for attacks into southern Colombia. Other readings even have the FARC bankrolling Correa's presidential campaign. The most explosive charges, however, are allegations that the FARC intend to purchase enriched uranium for the construction of dirty bombs. As resilient as the FARC may be as a fighting force, the group do not even field the most primitive ground-to-air missiles that would significantly hamper Colombian counterinsurgency operations, let alone possess the technical capacity to construct a uranium weapon. The most sophisticated ordnance in the FARC arsenal are highly-inaccurate gas-canister bombs, mortars, heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Depending on one's interpretation of FARC's commitment to a socialist transformation of society, it would be political suicide to even consider deploying a weapon such as a dirty bomb in a Colombian city! But allegations by Colombian and U.S. counterterrorist officials do however, fit a discernible pattern. As a species of news management and public diplomacy, U.S. disinformation serves the unmistakable purpose of fabricating the connection Chávez = $300 million = FARC = uranium = terrorism in the public mind. The standard practice of a continuous injection of known falsehoods into the media cycle (black propaganda) or more disingenuously, through nuanced media operations as in the run-up to the Iraq invasion where the intelligence and facts [are] being fixed around the policy, are all in play here. According to analyst Eva Golinger, a factor in U.S. elite planning, is the manufacturing of evidence that demonizes Chávez and links him to drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism, constructing a dictatorship, fomenting an arms race, and posing a threat against regional security. If Golinger is correct, then we are witnessing a new phase in U.S. psychological warfare operations that have as their target audience the Venezuelan and American people. According to declassified U.S. Army documents cited by historian Christopher Simpson, psychological warfare will employ any weapon to influence the mind of the enemy. The weapons are psychological only in the effect they produce and not because of the nature of the weapons themselves. In this light, overt (white), covert (black), and gray propaganda; subversion; sabotage; special operations; guerrilla warfare; espionage; political, cultural, economic, and racial pressures are all effective weapons. They are effective because they produce dissension, distrust, fear and hopelessness in the minds of the enemy, not because they originate in the psyche of
[cia-drugs] Bush Consolidates the National Security State
Bush Consolidates the National Security State Monday, March 17, 2008 The Washington Post revealed Friday that the FBI is continuing its systematic violation of Americans' Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures. A Justice Department report concluded that the Bureau had repeatedly abused its intelligence gathering privileges by issuing bogus national security letters (NSLs) from 2003-2006. On at least one occasion, the FBI relied on an illegally-issued NSL to circumvent a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain records the secret court deemed protected by the First Amendment. While the Bush regime claims that the Bureau requires sweeping authority to invade the privacy of American citizens to protect the homeland from the Afghan-Arab database of disposable intelligence assets, al-Qaeda, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine determined that fully 60 percent of the nearly 50,000 security letters issued that year [2006] by the FBI targeted Americans, according to Post reporter Dan Eggen. Despite the FISA court twice rejecting Bureau requests to obtain sensitive private records, determining the 'facts' were too thin and the request implicated the target's First Amendment rights, the FBI used an NSL as a work around and proceeded anyway. The stunning disregard for all legal norms under the Bush regime is encapsulated by FBI general counsel Valerie E. Caproni's statement to investigators that it was appropriate to issue the letters in such cases because she disagreed with the court's conclusions. Fine asserted in the Inspector General's report that the Bureau has recklessly used NSLs to sweep-up vast quantities of telephone numbers and internet searches with a single request. Jameel Jaffer, national security director at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Eggen, The fact that these are being used against U.S. citizens, and being used so aggressively, should call into question the claim that these powers are about terrorists and not just about collecting information on all kinds of people. They're basically using national security letters to evade legal requirements that would be enforced if there were judicial oversight. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesperson, said Fine's report should come as no surprise, tendentiously claiming new procedural changes would ameliorate future problems. According to FBI Assistant Director John Miller, a former correspondent and anchor for ABC News, NSL requests are now reviewed by a lawyer before they are sent to a telephone company, Internet service provider or other target. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has quietly stripped the independent Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) of much of its authority to root out illegal spying activities by the intelligence community, Boston Globe journalist, Charlie Savage reports. A little noticed February 29 executive order signed by Bush gutted the board's mandate to refer illegal activities by an ever-expanding national security state to the Justice Department. According to Savage, Bush's order also terminated the board's authority to oversee each intelligence agency's general counsel and inspector general, and it erased a requirement that each inspector general file a report with the board every three months. Now only the agency directors will decide whether to report any potential lawbreaking to the panel, and they have no schedule for checking in. In other words, we'll police ourselves. Move along! The IOB was created in 1976 by president Gerald Ford following congressional revelations that a panoply of U.S. intelligence entities including the CIA, FBI, NSA and DIA, had engaged in illegal domestic spying operations, organized the assassination of foreign leaders, incited coups and other destabilization campaigns around the world to advance U.S. geopolitical goals during America's anticommunist Cold War jihad. On the domestic front, the FBI's COINTELPRO, the CIA's Operation CHAOS, the NSA's Project SHAMROCK and the DIA's domestic operations under control of various Military Intelligence Groups, conducted illegal surveillance of antiwar, socialist, feminist and black liberation groups targeted for disruption and neutralization during the 1960s and '70s. Federal intelligence agents, in addition to conducting illegal surveillance and infiltration of domestic dissident groups, worked closely with local police red squads and actually financed and controlled far-right terrorist gangs such as the Minutemen, the San Diego-based Secret Army Organization and the Legion of Justice in Chicago. Dozens of attacks, including fire-bombings, physical assaults and attempted targeted assassinations of vocal antiwar activists and socialist organizers were the result. Even after the COINTELPRO era presumably ended with the 1971 Media, PA raid by the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI that
[cia-drugs] Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070327/62697703.html Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border 17:31 | *27*/ *03*/ 2007 MOSCOW, March 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran's borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday. The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran, the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched. He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost. He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran's military infrastructure in the near future. A new U.S. carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Gulf. The USS John C. Stennis, with a crew of 3,200 and around 80 fixed-wing aircraft, including F/A-18 Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers, eight support ships and four nuclear submarines are heading for the Gulf, where a similar group led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been deployed since December 2006. The U.S. is also sending Patriot anti-missile systems to the region.
[cia-drugs] Fwd: Turmoil in Asia from Rice and Grain Shortages, Prices Inflated by Int'l Traders
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 10:15 am Subject: Turmoil in Asia from Rice and Grain Shortages, Prices Inflated by Int'l Traders High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest By KEITH BRADSHER New York Times, March 29, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/business/worldbusiness/29rice.html?_r=1ref=worldoref=slogin HANOI — Rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export. The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest. Shortages and high prices for all kinds of food have caused tensions and even violence around the world in recent months. Since January, thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Protests have erupted in Indonesia over soybean shortages, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. But the moves by rice-exporting nations over the last two days — meant to ensure scarce supplies will meet domestic needs — drove prices on the world market even higher this week. This has fed the insecurity of rice-importing nations, already increasingly desperate to secure supplies. On Tuesday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines, afraid of increasing rice scarcity, ordered government investigators to track down hoarders. The increase in rice prices internationally promised to put more pressure on prices in the United States, which imports more than 30 percent of the rice Americans consume, according to the United States Rice Producers Association. The price that consumers pay for rice has already increased more than 8 percent over the last year. But the United States is fortunate in also exporting rice; poor countries ranging from Sengal in West Africa to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific are heavily dependent on imports and now face higher bills. Vietnam’s government announced here on Friday that it would cut rice exports by nearly a quarter this year. The government hoped that keeping more rice inside the country would hold down prices. The same day, India effectively banned the export of all but the most expensive grades of rice. Egypt announced on Thursday that it would impose a six-month ban on rice exports, starting April 1, and on Wednesday, Cambodia banned all rice exports except by government agencies. Governments across Asia and in many rice-consuming countries in Africa have long worried that a steep increase in prices could set off an angry reaction among low-income city dwellers. “There is definitely the potential for unrest, particularly as the people most affected are the urban poor and they’re concentrated, so it’s easier for them to organize than it would be for farmers, for example, to organize to protest lower prices,” said Nicholas W. Minot, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. Several factors are contributing to the steep rice in prices. Rising affluence in India and China has increased demand. At the same time, drought and other bad weather have reduced output in Australia and elsewhere. Many rice farmers are turning to more lucrative cash crops [for export], reducing the amount of land devoted to the grain. And urbanization and industrialization have cut into the [agricultural] land devoted to rice cultivation. In Vietnam, an obscure plant virus has caused annual output to start leveling off; it had increased significantly each year until the last three years. Until the last few years, the potential for rapid price swings was damped by the tendency of many governments to hold very large rice stockpiles to ensure food security, said Sushil Pandey, an agricultural economist at the International Rice Research Institute in Manila. But those stockpiles were costly to maintain. So governments have been drawing them down as world rice consumption has outstripped production for most of the last decade. The relatively small quantities traded across borders, combined with small stockpiles, now mean that prices can move quickly in response to supply disruptions. At the same time, prices set in international rice trading now have an increasingly important effect on prices within countries. This has been particularly true in an age of Internet and mobile phone communications when even farmers in remote areas can learn about distant prices and decide whether their own
[cia-drugs] Fwd: Propagandists Are War Criminals Too
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 10:42 am Subject: Propagandists Are War Criminals Too http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_walter_c_071230_william_kristol_2c_the.htm ? ...?[On]?December 30, 2007 the New York Times [decided] to hire William Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard) as a columnist. Although the Times calls Kristol a conservative, he is, in fact, a notorious neoconservative -- a member of a political cult that many traditional conservatives disavow. Readers who noticed this Orwellian elision by the Times might also recall that in January 1998, Kristol (and Robert Kagan) wrote an Op Ed titled, Bombing Iraq isn't Enough, which the Times was reckless enough to publish. Reckless? Yes, because, as Robert Parry has observed: Under principles of international law applied from Nuremberg to Rwanda, propagandists who contribute to war crimes or encourage crimes against humanity can be put in the dock alongside the actual killers. [Consortium News, Posted August 21, 2006]? Simply recall that, under international law, the unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state is considered the most egregious of war crimes. The decision by the Times to hire this effete, cowardly warmonger smacks of rank hypocrisy, especially when one considers that in May 2004, the Times issued an apology to its readers for problematic articles that depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under in creasing public debate in recent weeks. Yet, who has made more bogus warmongering assertions about Iraq than William Kristol? Who has less credibility today than William Kristol? As I've written elsewhere, According to Scott McConnell, in the very first issue published after 9/11, the Weekly Standard 'laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months.' Their line was 'to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers, and then lay out a strategy that actually gave attacking Saddam priority over eliminating al Qaeda.' [McConnell, The Weekly Standard's War, The American Conservative, September 21, 2005] With this immorality, hypocrisy and criminality in mind, I called the New York Times this morning to cancel my subscription. Having cancelled my subscription, I then sent the following email to the Times' Executive Editor and the VP for Circulation: I canceled my subscription to the New York Times -- with prejudice -- a few minutes ago. I've terminated my decades-long subscription because somebody at the Times made the immoral decision to hire William Kristol -- as close to a war criminal as a so-called journalist can become. You see, I can have nothing further to do with such a morally tainted newspaper. It's a matter of principle. You might use this moment to reflect on how the reporting by Judith Miller (AKA stenography for Perle and Chalabi) and your editorial decision to delay reporting on Bush's illegal wiretaps contributed to America's poor moral standing around the world.? Now, with the hiring of effete coward and warmonger Kristol, who (possessing any morals at all) can consider the Times to be anything but a whore? I will use my website to inform my thousands of readers about your immoral decision and I will exhort them to cancel their subscriptions as well. Sincerely Walter C. Uhler After all, simply consider that, ten years after the end of World War II, the editor of Das Schwarze Korps, Nazi SS leader Gunter d'Alquen, was fined 60,000 Deutsch Marks, deprived of all civic rights for three years and debarred from drawing an allowance or pension from public funds. He was found guilty of having played an important role in the Third Reich, of war propaganda, inciting against the churches, the Jews and foreign countries, and incitement to murder. [Wikipedia, see also Saul Friedlander, Nazi German and the Jews, Volume I, pp. 311-313] Think about it: If you do something similarly egregious in Bush's Amerika, you get your own column at the New York Times. Create a Home Theater Like the Pros. Watch the video on AOL Home.
[cia-drugs] Fwd: Bush to Create Homeland Security-Style Agency to Monitor CONTROL US Economy
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 7:32 pm Subject: Bush to Create Homeland Security-Style Agency to Monitor CONTROL US Economy To Keep Markets Stable, President Bush Proposes Economic Czar March 28, 2008 6:08 pm New York Times Edmund L. Andrews http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/business/29regulate.html?_r=1oref=slogin WASHINGTON — The Bush administration will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system. The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the country’s hodge-podge of regulatory agencies, which many specialists say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they triggered what is now the worst financial calamity in decades. According to a summary provided by the administration, the plan would consolidate what is now an alphabet soup of banking and securities regulators into a trio of overseers responsible for everything from banks and brokerage firms to hedge funds and private equity firms. While the plan could expose Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds to greater scrutiny, it avoids a call for tighter regulation. The plan would NOT rein in any of the practices that have been implicated in the housing and mortgage meltdown, like packaging risky subprime loans into securities carrying AAA ratings. Create a Home Theater Like the Pros. Watch the video on AOL Home.
[cia-drugs] The U.S. Is Poised to Hit a New Oil Gusher
That's twice the size of Alaska's reserves and potentially enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for two decades. http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast/archive/The_U.S._Poised_to_hit_New_Oil_Gusher_080317.html *The U.S. Is Poised to Hit a New Oil Gusher* *Oil drillers have their eye on a vast oil field in and around North Dakota, which promises a steady flow of domestic crude for years.* By Jim Ostroff, Associate Editor, The Kiplinger Letter March 17, 2008 A new black gold rush is under way, this time in North Dakota. The potential payoff is huge -- up to 100 billion barrels of oil. That's twice the size of Alaska's reserves and potentially enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for two decades. Until now, the obstacles to production seemed overwhelming. The crude oil is locked away in rocks that are buried miles underground in the Bakken Play, a field that stretches into Montana and Saskatchewan, Canada. But times have changed. High oil prices and new technology make it worth the effort. Computer analysis and remote sensing systems, plus smart drills that can probe horizontally or snake left and right, vastly improve the odds of locating new pools and putting them into production. And though oil is unlikely to remain priced at current stratospheric levels, prices won't drop to much lower levels, which happened several times since the 1970s, and cause new exploration to dry up. Even if prices fell by half, many barrels of oil could still be produced -- profitably -- from the region. An official government survey of the Bakken region's oil treasure trove is due out next month. The report is expected to play it very conservatively, because it will confine estimates to the amount of oil that likely can be produced profitably based on last year's oil prices. It will also not take into account any further technological advances that might make it even easier to extract more oil. The Bakken is much like the enormous natural gas field that sat for many years under and around Dallas until people figured out the geology and how to drill it out economically, says Lucian Pugliaresi, president of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. There's at least a smell of the Old West as petroleum companies rush to stake their claims in the Bakken Play. Marathon Oil recently acquired about 200,000 acres in the area and will drill about 300 oil wells within five years. Brigham Exploration and Crescent Point Energy Trust are also interested in some of the action. EOG Resources alone figures it can produce 80 million barrels of oil from its Bakken field. Figure on at least five years before the oil starts flowing in large volumes. A lot of work will need to be done first. In addition to installing drilling gear, firms must build supporting infrastructure, including roads, pipelines as well as new water, sewage and sanitation systems to meet the needs of workers and other area residents. Note that the Bakken Play region is not an environmentally sensitive area similar to Alaskan tundra that has stymied much oil field development because of concerns about damage to the fragile environment. Still, some environmental protests are sure to emerge and may gum up development for a while, but they're unlikely to stop oil production from the Bakken fields.
[cia-drugs] The Andean Crisis and the Geopolitics of Trade
http://www.counterpunch.org/carlsen03222008.html *Weekend Edition March 22 / 23, 2008* /From Bombs to Markets/ The Andean Crisis and the Geopolitics of Trade By LAURA CARLSEN Day One: the Colombian military and police forces launched an attack on an encampment of the Colombian guerrilla group /Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias/ /de Colombia/ (FARC) in Ecuadorian territory, killing over 20 people. Day Two: Ecuador's President Rafael Correa denounced the violation of his country's sovereignty and called the Colombian president a liar. Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe accused Ecuador and Venezuela of forging secret pacts with the guerrillas. Day Three: Ecuador had broken off diplomatic ties with Colombia, Venezuela had expelled the Colombian ambassador, and Colombian General Oscar Naranjo was saying that computers recovered at the camp revealed Venezuelan funding of the guerrilla group. Day Five: the Organization of American States convened a commission to investigate the incursion, reiterating its support of national sovereignty and noting that the attack had triggered a serious crisis between [Ecuador and Colombia] that led to grave tensions in the region. And then, on Day Seven, everybody made up and went home. Even for a continent famed for volatile political relations, the events of the Andean crisis passed by with dizzying speed and dangerous passions. Accusations tossed back and forth went way beyond the exchange of insults common in the past, and revealed deep fissures and mistrust among nations in the hemisphere. The immediate crisis has been averted. But the geopolitical divisions in the region threaten to lead to more conflicts in the near future. *Corssborder Attack on the FARC* In the pre-dawn hours of March 1, Colombian forces dropped a series of smart bombs on a FARC encampment. Military and police forces followed up by entering the Ecuadorean border province of Sucumbíos. The main target was Raúl Reyes (real name Luis Edgar Devia), a member of the FARC´s leading secretariat and possibly the next in line of succession following the ailing Manuel Marulanda. Reyes was killed in the attack. Reyes's death represents a major blow to the guerrilla and a victory for the Colombian government. Although the Colombian government at first asserted that it had crossed into Ecuador in pursuit of the guerrillas, an Ecuadorean government investigation of the site indicated that many had been killed in their sleep and that the attack was premeditated. Despite the illegality of Colombia's incursion, the FARC can hardly be considered an innocent victim. Its war on the Colombian government spans over four decades, including several unsuccessful peace negotiations. Particularly over the past two decades, the guerrillas have adopted tactics that have been widely documented and denounced by human rights organizations. These include forced recruitment of minors, massacres of indigenous and peasant communities, and financing through drug trafficking and kidnapping. On February 4, hundreds of thousands of Colombians marched in protest of the FARC and the displacement and violence that the guerrilla war has caused throughout the country. Although the FARC is a major nemesis of the Colombian government, the militarization of the conflict since the rise to power of President Alvaro Uribe has dimmed prospects of peaceful resolution. Continuous scandals involving evidence of the government's close ties to paramilitary groups have deepened divisions. The arming of both sides in large part as a result of U.S. military aid under Plan Colombia has heightened the violence. The cross-border attack of March 1 weakened the guerrillas but also further entrenched the conflict and threatened to spread it to neighboring nations. In the short term, it scuttled hopes of obtaining the release of FARC prisoners. Under mediation efforts led by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, several had been liberated over recent months, and negotiations seemed close to obtaining the release of the guerrilla's most high-profile hostage, former senator and French citizen Ingrid Betancourt. France's Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner revealed shortly after the attack that Reyes had been the contact for negotiating her release. *Regional Diplomacy* When Latin American and Caribbean heads of state met in the already-scheduled Rio Group summit on March 7, tensions were high. The group had two tasks before it: to calm the waters and to keep Washington as far out of the picture as possible. They succeeded. After a morning name-calling session, the group exacted an apology from the Colombian government and a promise not to repeat incursions in foreign territory. Photo ops at the end of the meeting showed Uribe and Correa shaking hands cordially. The Organization of American States (OAS) also faced a critical test of its relevancy. A resolution passed on March 5
[cia-drugs] The End of the Line for The Anglo-Dutch System
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2008/3513end_of_line.html *The End of the Line for The Anglo-Dutch System* by John Hoefle When President Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold reserve standard on Aug. 15, 1971, he effectively ended the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency-exchange rates. Nixon's action, taken at the urging of bankers' boy George Shultz (then director of the Office of Management and Budget), set into motion the creation of the largest financial bubble in history, a bubble the collapse of which is now laying waste to the global banking system and securities markets. The mantra rising from financial circles after such disasters is that no one could have foreseen the unexpected events which developed from policies and decisions that everybody agreed to at the time. You hear it frequently today, from people ranging from former Federal Reserve chairman Sir Alan Greenspan, to bankers whose allegedly fundamentally sound banks vaporize seemingly overnight. Who knew this could happen? One man did know http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2008/2008_10-19/2008-13/pdf/24-25_3513.pdf, and said so at the time, loudly and forcefully. That man is Lyndon LaRouche, who understood the implications of the demise of the Bretton Woods system http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2008/3513lar_1971_forecast.html, and has been campaigning ever since for a return to Bretton Woods-style fixed exchange rates. LaRouche understood the matter not as a technical one about currencies, but as a fundamental fight between sovereign governments and the imperial oligarchs centered around the British empire and its parasitic Anglo-Dutch Liberal financial system. Any nation which cannot control its own currency is not sovereign, and any nation which is not sovereign is vulnerable to assault and subversion by this oligarchy. Will society be organized for the benefit of all mankind, or will it be organized for the benefit of a small elite who feed off the rest? LaRouche understood this in 1971, and that understanding formed the basis for the creation of an international political movement to organize mankind to educate and defend themselves. LaRouche scored a stunning victory against prominent economist Abba Lerner at a debate at Queens College in New York, in December 1971, in which he laid bare the fascist roots of Lerner's outlook, and forced Lerner to admit his self-damning belief that had Germany capitulated to the demands of banker Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler would not have been necessary. The response from the parasites was immediate and predictable: Never again, they informed LaRouche, would he be allowed to challenge them publicly. Keep your mouth shut and follow the rules, or we will destroy you. It was a big mistake. Rather than cowering in fear as so many had done, LaRouche decided to fight back, drawing upon his studies of the great ideas of history and his commitment to truth above all else. Since then, LaRouche and his movement have been attacked by virtually every means in the Venetian tool-kit, from physical assaults to press slanders to prosecutorial frame-ups and even jail; hard blows were landed, but LaRouche persisted, knowing that despite its demonstrated power, the Anglo-Dutch liberal system was crumbling from within, that it would inevitably collapse as a result of its own cannibalistic policies. That day has arrived. The events of the past year, from the turmoil in the mortgage-related financial markets to the blowout of the banking system, have proven LaRouche's analysis of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system to be correct. What LaRouche saw as the inevitable result of Nixon's action in 1971, has now exploded upon the world http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2008/3513lar_1971_forecast.html. Bretton Woods During July 1944, a United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was held at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The 44-nation conference established what became known as the Bretton Woods monetary system, a key component of which was the establishment of a fixed system of currency exchange rates among nations. Under Bretton Woods, a gold reserve standard was established, with the U.S. dollar pegged to gold at $35 an ounce. This arrangement was the economic bedrock upon which the post-World War II world was rebuilt, led by the industrial might of the United States. Bretton Woods was a victory for President Franklin Roosevelt, and his view that the post-war world should be free of empires and their colonies. FDR intended to use the power of the United States and other nations to elevate the status of the common man worldwide, and end the domination of the economic royalists. It was a grand vision, and had he lived to implement it, the world would be in far better shape than it is today. The British were apoplectic at the prospect of a Rooseveltian/American System world, and pulled out all
[cia-drugs] Tibet, the 'great game' and the CIA
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JC26Ad02.html *Tibet, the 'great game' and the CIA* By Richard M Bennett Given the historical context of the unrest in Tibet, there is reason to believe Beijing was caught on the hop with the recent demonstrations for the simple reason that their planning took place outside of Tibet and that the direction of the protesters is similarly in the hands of anti-Chinese organizers safely out of reach in Nepal and northern India. Similarly, the funding and overall control of the unrest has also been linked to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, and by inference to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) because of his close cooperation with US intelligence for over 50 years. Indeed, with the CIA's deep involvement with the Free Tibet Movement and its funding of the suspiciously well-informed Radio Free Asia, it would seem somewhat unlikely that any revolt could have been planned or occurred without the prior knowledge, and even perhaps the agreement, of the National Clandestine Service (formerly known as the Directorate of Operations) at CIA headquarters in Langley. Respected columnist and former senior Indian Intelligence officer, B Raman, commented on March 21 that on the basis of available evidence, it was possible to assess with a reasonable measure of conviction that the initial uprising in Lhasa on March 14 had been pre-planned and well orchestrated. Could there be a factual basis to the suggestion that the main beneficiaries to the death and destruction sweeping Tibet are in Washington? History would suggest that this is a distinct possibility. The CIA conducted a large scale covert action campaign against the communist Chinese in Tibet starting in 1956. This led to a disastrous bloody uprising in 1959, leaving tens of thousands of Tibetans dead, while the Dalai Lama and about 100,000 followers were forced to flee across the treacherous Himalayan passes to India and Nepal. The CIA established a secret military training camp for the Dalai Lama's resistance fighters at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, in the US. The Tibetan guerrillas were trained and equipped by the CIA for guerrilla warfare and sabotage operations against the communist Chinese. The US-trained guerrillas regularly carried out raids into Tibet, on occasions led by CIA-contract mercenaries and supported by CIA planes. The initial training program ended in December 1961, though the camp in Colorado appears to have remained open until at least 1966. The CIA Tibetan Task Force created by Roger E McCarthy, alongside the Tibetan guerrilla army, continued the operation codenamed St Circus to harass the Chinese occupation forces for another 15 years until 1974, when officially sanctioned involvement ceased. McCarthy, who also served as head of the Tibet Task Force at the height of its activities from 1959 until 1961, later went on to run similar operations in Vietnam and Laos. By the mid-1960s, the CIA had switched its strategy from parachuting guerrilla fighters and intelligence agents into Tibet to establishing the Chusi Gangdruk, a guerrilla army of some 2,000 ethnic Khamba fighters at bases such as Mustang in Nepal. This base was only closed down in 1974 by the Nepalese government after being put under tremendous pressure by Beijing. After the Indo-China War of 1962, the CIA developed a close relationship with the Indian intelligence services in both training and supplying agents in Tibet. Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison in their book The CIA's Secret War in Tibet disclose that the CIA and the Indian intelligence services cooperated in the training and equipping of Tibetan agents and special forces troops and in forming joint aerial and intelligence units such as the Aviation Research Center and Special Center. This collaboration continued well into the 1970s and some of the programs that it sponsored, especially the special forces unit of Tibetan refugees which would become an important part of the Indian Special Frontier Force, continue into the present. Only the deterioration in relations with India which coincided with improvements in those with Beijing brought most of the joint CIA-Indian operations to an end. Though Washington had been scaling back support for the Tibetan guerrillas since 1968, it is thought that the end of official US backing for the resistance only came during meetings between president Richard Nixon and the Chinese communist leadership in Beijing in February 1972. Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer has described the outrage many field agents felt when Washington finally pulled the plug, adding that a number even [turned] for solace to the Tibetan prayers which they had learned during their years with the Dalai Lama. The former CIA Tibetan Task Force chief from 1958 to 1965, John Kenneth Knaus, has been quoted as saying, This was not some CIA black-bag operation. He added, The initiative was coming from ... the
