-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Monica Lewinsky's ex-boyfriend's wife Hillary's Ratings Take a Dive "Hmm. I better get over into the war zone quick." THE voters of New York seem to be going cool on the idea of electing Hillary Clinton as one of their senators. A poll released earlier this week showed that 52 per cent of New Yorkers now think Mrs Clinton should not run for the Senate, against 42 per cent who think she should. Polls taken in January, when the idea of her candidacy was first mooted, pointed to a landslide victory over Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the likely Republican candidate. This week's poll has Mrs Clinton and the Mayor almost neck and neck. Asked yesterday why she wanted to run for office in a state she had never lived in, Mrs Clinton said: "I love New York to start with. We have everything in New York that we have in America ... I have always been very excited by the dynamism of the people here and the real cutting-edge approach." The drop in her popularity, however, suggests that accusations of carpet-bagging, that she is using New York as no more than a stage for her wider political ambitions, and her husband's sagging approval ratings are starting to hurt. She remains most popular in the liberal stronghold of New York City, and least popular in the rural areas of upstate New York. This week is likely to be crucial in Mrs Clinton's final decision on whether to run. Friends have suggested that her early enthusiasm has been tempered by warnings of the likely mud-slinging of a campaign and the logistical difficulty of running for office while still living in the White House. At a lunch for succesful women in the media on Monday, however, speakers including Meryl Streep, jokingly thanked the First Lady for taking time off from flat-hunting to join them. Harold Ickes, the former White House deputy chief of staff and the likeliest manager of Mrs Clinton's campaign if she decides to run, said her meetings this week should give her a better feel for what a Senate campaign would entail. He said: "There will be more press, more people talking to her and so I think she'll come away with a much better feel about the intensity of the situation." Mrs Clinton will not be restricting herself to New York city on this trip. Yesterday, she ventured out to Long Island for a speech and tomorrow she will go up to Niagara Falls, the northernmost point in New York state, to make a speech to the politically powerful New York State United Teachers Union. In between, she will be hosting fund raising events for politicians who supported her husband through the year of impeachment. No formal announcement on her candidacy is expected until June or July. If she decides not to run, however, she is expected to take up an international role at the head of a major charity or with the United Nations. Her planned trip to Albania and Macedonia to meet refugees driven out of Kosovo by Serbian forces and to assess the humanitarian crisis should help her to decide if that is the route she would prefer. The London Telegraph, April 21, 1999 Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia Who Is Running This War, Anyway? Take Britain, for example. Then Clark. THE Chief of the Defence Staff's office is next door to the Defence Secretary's. In the last weeks the green carpet on the sixth floor in the Ministry of Defence has grown worn as Britain's most senior soldier and his political master have met countless times a day to discuss Yugoslavia. Somewhere along the corridor the fuzzy border between military and political worlds is crossed. The key men running the war in Downing Street are Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, John Sawers, the private secretary responsible for foreign affairs, and Alastair Campbell, the press secretary. They have day-to-day dealings with their opposite numbers in Washington and Nato headquarters in Brussels. For the men in uniform, this war, unlike the Gulf war, is an untidy affair. The "wiring diagram" of who commands what and who talks to whom is not the neat, linear, parade-ground affair of the Gulf. In Yugoslavia, it is more of a web - and webs are built to ensnare. As Britain's top military man, Gen Sir Charles Guthrie has command of all of our forces fighting for Nato. Although he has handed over day-to-day command to the alliance, he retains some control of them. This is exercised through the new Permanent Joint HQ (PJHQ), in the north London suburb of Northwood. This tri-Service command is the fiefdom of Vice-Adml Sir Ian Garnett, chief of joint operations. Every morning, Gen Guthrie and a coterie of generals, admirals, air marshals and senior civil servants take the express lift down to the basement and walk the few yards to the MoD's Defence Crisis Management Centre. In this dimmed, air-conditioned room, with encrypted, secure television links, Gen Guthrie and his planners spend 40 minutes talking to PJHQ. Armed with information, Gen Guthrie goes back to the sixth floor for the 8am meeting with George Robertson, the Defence Secretary, in his office at the Ministry of Defence. It is usually attended by Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, and Mr Campbell, or one of his deputies, and the other chiefs of staff. They receive news, review the political situation and how the campaign is treated by the media. The meeting also looks ahead to the daily briefing for press and television at the MoD and what issues will be discussed. Mr Blair is briefed regularly on the progress of the conflict by Sawers, Campbell and Powell. There is not a formal War Cabinet - as Mrs Thatcher had during the Falklands conflict or Mr Major had during the Gulf. There is an informal inner group of ministers and officials - Blair, Cook, Robertson, Guthrie, Campbell and Powell. Campbell is a highly influential figure, closely involved in the British end of the war - and not just the media operation. The main Cabinet forum dealing with the war is the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee - this meets every few days, often the same day as the Cabinet. It is chaired by the Prime Minister and includes John Prescott, his deputy, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and Stephen Byers, the Trade and Industry Secretary. The Chiefs of Staff attend as necessary, but it is more concerned with the overall objectives rather than day-to-day operations. The real military effort, where targets are decided and strategy hammered out, is being carried out several hundred miles away in Mons, Belgium, and the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers in Europe. For all its impressive title, the building itself is a nondescript post-war office block. In his office in the core of what one Nato officer called "a security controlled environment" sits Gen Wesley Clark, Nato's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (Saceur). From his wood-panelled, but otherwise unexceptional office, he commands every airman, soldier, sailor and marine in theatre. In the next office is his deputy, Gen Sir Rupert Smith, the British Gulf war veteran and former para. Unlike Gen Schwarzkopf, who had only President Bush to answer to, Gen Clark must deal with the 19 member states of Nato. For although he has operational command, he must report back to Nato's military committee, the 19 permanent military representatives, each one of whom has an equal voice. Just to make things more complicated still, he is at the call of his political masters, the North Atlantic Council, in another building many miles away. This council, in Nato's main headquarters, housed in a former maternity hospital on the road to Brussels airport, is made up of the 19 Nato ambassadors, each with their own country's disparate interests to represent. If that is not complicated enough, Gen Clark wears two hats; his Nato one, and as commander of American forces in Europe. As one of America's 10 commanders-in-chief, he has direct access to the President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is no wonder that Gen Clark has such a haggard look about him. Also, unlike Gen Schwarzkopf, who was known affectionately by his men as "The Bear", according to a senior Nato officer, Gen Clark's men simply call him "sir". Every morning, at about the same time as Gen Guthrie is talking to his subordinates, Gen Clark, too, makes the walk to his command centre, which links him via Nato's security links to the field commanders. He, too, spends 30 minutes being briefed by the American commander of the air war and the two British generals commanding the forces in Macedonia and Albania, Lt-Gen Sir Michael Jackson and Lt-Gen John Reith, both former paras. Gen Clark must also work hard to keep all of the chiefs of staff of all 19 alliance members on side. He is known to be a sharp diplomat, and speaks frequently to Gen Guthrie. Thus far the war has gone as smoothly as could be hoped. The reports of a spy in Nato's upper echelons appeared to be confirmed after Shape stopped passing targeting data to Brussels, but the test of any campaign is when things start to go wrong. Then, it will not be the video conferences and secure links that count, but the man operating them. It will be a test not of technology, but of leadership. The London Telegraph, April 21, 1999 Cypherpunks on Trial Carl Johnson Found Guilty by Judge You don't mess with the government, boy TACOMA, Washington -- A federal judge on Tuesday ruled an itinerant musician and cypherpunk was guilty of threatening government officials and Bill Gates. "There's a line between free speech and criminal speech," said US District Judge Robert J. Bryan. He declared Carl Johnson guilty on four counts brought against him by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. The charges stem from a series of freewheeling essays posted last year to the cypherpunks mailing list, an online discussion area populated by an anarchic collection of encryption and privacy advocates. The government said that three of Johnson's posts went too far in threatening government officials and rejected arguments that the messages were protected by the First Amendment. Bryan dismissed an additional charge that accused Johnson of attempting to threaten a judge who presided over a 1997 challenge of White House encryption regulations. He scolded the cypherpunks, several of whom testified last week, including Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore. "A great deal of what the cypherpunks people put out on that list is based on ignorance of the legal system," Bryan said. "I wish those who would criticize the legal system would educate themselves first," Bryan told the handful of people in the tiny courtroom. Johnson, a large, ungainly fellow, wore a brown T-shirt and slacks, and appeared very nervous. When handing down the verdict, Bryan scolded Johnson for threatening officials. One message, posted anonymously but believed to be from Johnson, painted the image of a man hell-bent on revenge. It said: "'You can fuck some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you are going to end up in a body bag or a pine box before you manage to fuck all of the people all of the time.' Am *I* going to whack you out? Maybe ..." The anonymous message was signed with a digital signature that the court said could be clearly linked to Johnson. A copy of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) key used to sign the message was posted anonymously to the list after Johnson's arrest, but his attorney said the mail was not significant to the case. Bryan said that courts should not take threats lightly. "Mr. Johnson, I had a friend of mine blown up at his desk," he said. "There are people who follow through on their threats against the judiciary. "The ordinary person would think this [threat] was for real," he continued. "What is Gates or someone else [who reads his mail] to think but that someone was planning his assassination?" In a last-minute twist, Johnson on Tuesday tried to fire Gene Grantham, his court-appointed public defender. The judge denied the request because the trial was essentially over. Bryan earlier denied a similar request. Grantham said his client had pronounced and serious mental health issues, though at a pre-trial hearing the judge had ruled him competent to appear. It is still unclear who will represent Johnson at his sentencing hearing on 11 June. Grantham said he would like to pursue an appeal. In court documents, Justice Department attorneys said they will ask Judge Bryan to sentence Johnson to at least seven years. "The government has decided that it will seek a high-end sentence of 87 months, and may even seek an upward departure based on the additional threats to Bill Gates and others." The Supreme Court has said that advocating violence against government officials is protected by the First Amendment, but realistic threats can be punished. The government has tried to link Johnson's case to Jim Bell, a Washington state cypherpunk currently in prison. Bell had spent much of 1996 and 1997 railing against government officials -- especially IRS agents -- and talking about ways to encourage their assassination using anonymous digital cash and remailers. In a phone interview Saturday from a Seattle prison, Bell said that Johnson -- who used the alias Toto -- was not a close friend. "Toto's connection with me is more of a vague Internet acquaintance than anything else," Bell said. He said Johnson was being persecuted by "a typical out-of-control" prosecutor. "This certainly is an interesting trial with respect to the fact that the government is trying to put pressure on people not exactly for their revolutionary speech but for their disrespectful speech, being disrespectful of the government," Bell said. The IRS arrested Johnson in Arizona last August. His trial began in Tacoma last Monday. Wired News, April 20, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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