from:"Matthew"

Energy Dept. Discusses Worker Suspension
Energy Department officials say a federal safety officer's suspension from 
Los Alamos National Laboratory was unrelated to his having called attention 
to radioactive material stored improperly at the lab..( AP, 30 Jan 03)
Drug czar spurns complaint over anti-drug spending
Federal drug czar John Walters is claiming immunity from the Nevada law 
that otherwise would have required him to file a campaign expense report 
for his efforts to defeat the Nevada marijuana initiative in the last 
election. -- Las Vegas Sun
Feds plan new database
A forthcoming government database, proposed by President Bush, will compile 
information from all federal agencies and the private sector on people 
deemed possible terrorist threats. -- Business Week
9-digit 'Social' overused as ID
For many American companies and universities, it's common practice to use 
Social Security numbers as unique identifiers. But growing concerns over 
identity theft are pressuring state legislators to limit the practice. -- 
Wired
Oregon voters reject tax increase
Oregon voters rejected a large, three-year income tax increase, turning 
aside arguments by government apologists that schools, state police and the 
needy would be hurt by new budget cuts. -- Oregonian
Israeli voters hand balance of power to secular party
Israeli voters handed a victory to the hawkish Likud party, but they also 
selected as kingmaker, Shinui, a party devoted -- imperfectly -- to 
individual rights, limited government and free markets. -- BBC
Anti-war rally: 2,000 say 'pledge of resistance'
There was a big turnout at a Madison, Wisconsin, peace rally, whereabout 
2,000 people sent a message to President Bush at the "Not in Our Name" 
anti-war performance. -- Channel 3000
Pittsburgh ponders adult entertainment laws
Strip clubs and X-rated video shops would be barred from most city 
neighborhoods and stricter rules imposed on other adult businesses under 
ordinances introduced to Pittsburgh's City Council. -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
School officials consider drug-sniffing dogs
Officials at a Pittsburgh-area school are considering a controversial 
proposal to combat the use of illegal intoxicants with sniffing dogs. -- 
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Face scan set to replace passport check
A new air passenger identification system that uses automatic 
photo-matching technology instead of a Customs officer has been launched in 
Sydney, Australia. It could be coming to an airport near you. -- Australian 
Broadcasting Corporation
http://civilliberty.about.com/library/blnews.htm

Tim May is a Liar,thief and Jackass.

But we all know that from the archives...What about this nazi cuckold?
Britain Opens Files on Royal Intrigue of 1930s
"POW" was the Prince of Wales -- soon to become King Edward VIII of 
England -- and "Mrs. Simpson" was Wallis Simpson, the married American 
woman with whom the prince had fallen in love. Special Branch -- Britain's 
equivalent of the FBI -- was on the case, seeking dirt on the future king's 
lover.( Washington Post, 30 Jan 03)
Mrs. Simpson Cheated on Edward, Papers Show
British special police spied on King Edward VIII before he took the throne 
and discovered that his American lover and future wife, Wallis Simpson, was 
two-timing him, documents released today show.( Los Angeles Times, 30 
Jan 03)
A Queen who never forgot or forgave Mrs Simpson
.The visit of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Nazi Germany in 1937 
has remained a stain on their reputation. The newly released papers, 
however, contain scarcely any evidence that they nurtured Nazi sympathies 
(though I uncovered plenty about the then Prince of Wales when writing a 
life of George V)..( Daily Telegraph, 28 Jan 03)

No one present at the start knew how it would turn out in the end.

1) "No one present at the start knew how it would turn out in the end." 
This was fundamentally true for all; it was not just a case of a few 
doubting Thomases. George Washington was unsure that we up for the task; 
Washington in his last General Order, the author says, expressed his 
concerns about what would happen if the principles of federal government 
were not supported: "the honor, dignity and justice of the nation would be 
lost forever." Mr Ellis says plainly "what in retrospect has the look of a 
foreordained unfolding of God's will was in reality an improvisational 
affair in which sheer chance, pure luck - both good and bad...determined 
the outcome."
(2) Politically the period was marked by "shrill accusatory rhetoric, 
flamboyant displays of ideological intransigence, intense personal 
rivalries and hyperbolic claims of imminent catastophe." This reality is 
invariably overlooked when we grow wistful and nostalgic. We should 
remember that in the political culture of the day there was no formal 
recognition of the role of an opposition. As such there can be no doubt 
that the debates were vitriolic; Indeed, Mr Ellis says: "neither side 
possessed the verbal or mental capacity to regard the other as anything but 
treasonable." Statesmen and gentlemen they undoubtably were, but as this 
book reminds us, they were also political animals - sometimes savagely so.
It is against this backdrop that we can look at the first episode - "THE 
DUEL" - which illustrates the nature of the relationship between these men. 
This chapter refers to all the historical versions of the 1804 duel between 
Burr and Hamilton; the latter man we know lost his life. It explores all 
that led up to the duel and the fallout from it. Burr is shown to be a 
reckless opportunist whose influence swiftly waned following Hamilton's 
death. The author says that despite the differences between the men and 
their political passions "the energies released by national independence 
did not devour its own children"; the duel represents the only case in "the 
revolutionary generation when political difference ended in violence and 
death rather than in ongoing argument."
The famous DINNER between Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton in 1790, is the 
subject of the second chapter. Here the book develops on the men's opposing 
economic and political visions for the new republic. On one side were the 
Federalists (Washington, Hamilton and Adams) who advocated "the virtuous 
surrender of personal, state and sectional interests to the larger purposes 
of American nationhood." They saw the nation's economic future tied to 
commerce and manufacturing; Hamilton's fiscal plan favored bankers, 
merchants and the urban elite - it would create a national debt and a 
national bank and conjured up for the opposing Republican's (Jefferson and 
Madison), an image of the all powerful national government that they had 
just fought to overthrow. Jeffersonians favored an agrarian economy and saw 
the true spirit of '76 as a "liberation movement." Mr Ellis states that the 
outcome of the dinner was the Compromise of 1790 whereby Hamilton's fiscal 
policies were agreed on in exchange for assurances for Southerners that the 
nation's capital would be built on the Potomac River.
Another chapter episode is "THE SILENCE" where Mr Ellis sees further 
compromise. The chapter begins with the arrival of petitions to Congress 
calling for the abolition of slavery; one such petition was signed by the 
newly appointed president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society - Benjamin 
Franklin. The 1790 Congressional debates on the subject were very 
opinionated; Washington favored Abolition, because Mr Ellis says: "he 
tended to regard the condition of the black population as a product of 
nurture rather than nature - that is, he saw slavery as the culprit." Even 
slave owners such as Jefferson and Madison called the pro-slavery speeches 
invoking the defenses of biblical authority and racial superiority, by 
their proper name - "a moral embarrassment". They however went no further. 
Mr Ellis says that in the face of secessionist threats from South Carolina 
and Georgia, the founding fathers believed the question of Abolition had 
"the political potential to destroy the union." Thus the silence. Perhaps 
Mr Ellis is correct but it reads more like a clear sign (and to be fair, 
the only time) that the founders had a collective failure of statesmanship. 
They missed an opportunity to debate the issue; an opportunity that would 
never come that generation's way again.
The last chapter "THE FRIENDSHIP" explores the relationship between Adams 
and Jefferson. Mr Ellis is clearly an admirer of John Adams and he paints a 
glowing portrait of the man. "His refreshing and often irreverent candor 
provides the clearest window into the deeper ambitions and clashing 
vanities that propelled them all." Adams had been deserted by the others 
when he assumed the presidency; he relied on his wi

From Publishers Weekly
In October 1946, philosopher Karl Popper arrived at Cambridge to lecture at
a seminar hosted by his legendary colleague Ludwig Wittgenstein. It did not
go well: the men began arguing, and eventually, Wittgenstein began waving a
fire poker toward Popper. It lasted scarcely 10 minutes, yet the debate has
turned into perhaps modern philosophy's most contentious encounter, largely
because none of the eyewitnesses could agree on what happened. Did
Wittgenstein physically threaten Popper with the poker? Did Popper lie
about it afterward? BBC journalists Edmonds and Eidinow use the controversy
as a springboard to probe the whys and whats of these two great thinkers,
weaving biography, journalism and philosophy to produce one of the year's
most entertaining and intellectually rich books. The authors show that the
debate was a clash at several levels. First, of personalities: each was
"bullying, aggressive, intolerant and self-absorbed"; in other words,
accustomed to winning and unlikely to back down. Second, of class:
Wittgenstein was an Austrian aristocrat, Popper was bourgeoisie (each fled
Vienna to escape Hitler). And third, of ideas: Wittgenstein believed that
philosophy boiled down to nothing more than a series of linguistic puzzles,
while Popper thought philosophy involved real problems that immediately
affected the world at large. Clearly, the stakes were high for both men in
that lecture hall especially because their common mentor, the aging icon
Bertrand Russell, was also in attendance. The debate thus took on the
character of a succession for the throne. Tightly constructed and
extraordinarily well written, this is a marvelous blend of lay and academic
scholarship. It has every chance of becoming a classic of its kind.
(Nov.)Forecast: Smart, general readers will gobble up this latest addition
to narrative nonfiction. It will surely find a place for itself among The
Professor and the Madman and An Eternal Golden Braid.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060936649/ref=pd_sim_books_1/103-2932406-1249463?v=glance&s=books

Security Threat.

Halfway through a first viewing of Canadian documentary makers Ted
Remerowski's and Marrin Canell's riveting Security Threat it's a
cautionary examination of how America's home security policies and
surveillance initiatives have swept aside long-cherished human rights since
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks I remembered a package that had
arrived on my desk a few days earlier.
It was a press kit touting a Canadian software program that, when secretly
installed in a target computer's keypad, notifies a snooper's computer in
another location when a file is opened and tracks the text and responses,
stroke by stroke, in a pop-up window. An act of privacy invasion that would
have been criminal not so long ago is, in the new age of
technology-fuelled, neo-Orwellian paranoia, offered up as a simple and
functional appliance to secretly moniter people close to you.
Remerowski and Canell aren't surprised. In preparing Security Threat
they've seen much more sinister devices as the American government hands
out billions of dollars to develop surveillance systems that are the stuff
of science fiction nightmares unseen gizmos that connect us all to a
massive global identification database via the use of millions of
inexpensive, tiny, concealed digital video cameras, by credit card
scanners, by unseen iris and fingerprint monitoring, by encoded information
on our drivers' licences, by the digital examination of facial expressions
and other forms of biometric lie detection ... even by the way we walk.
"We learned that there are two massive studies being undertaken by the U.S.
government into what they call `gait recognition technology'," says
Remerowski in the midtown Toronto office of Paradigm Pictures, the company
he and Canell both grounded in the ancienne régime National Film Board
procedures set down by Donald Brittain in the 1960s and '70s started
seven years ago.
"That's worse than Orwellian ... it's Pythonesque. I wonder if they'll call
it The Department Of Silly Walks?"
Security Threat airs tonight at 9 in CBC's Witness series.
What's most terrifying about America's anti-terrorism security and
surveillance procedures, Canell adds, is how easily most people, even
Canadians, have accepted them.
"It's very easy for a democracy under attack to justify the denial of basic
rights and freedoms in the name of self-protection ... but who's watching
the watchers? That's what we're asking in this documentary."
Few in even the most independent media have dared ask that question since
Sept. 11.
The seasoned filmmakers know better than to encumber Security Threat with
liberal cant, or even with a decisive editorial voice. That's not the way
Brittain told his powerful stories.
Their point is made in two unadorned tales about Canadian citizens suddenly
deprived of ordinary rights a man born in Pakistan who was scooped off
the street in the U.S. and held in complete isolation for four months, and
five young Muslim students from Ottawa and Montreal who were detained,
searched, interrogated and held for a day by U.S. immigration, FBI and CIA
agents when they tried to cross the border all with apparent Canadian
Security Intelligence Service approval.
The material the documentary presents so objectively is in itself an
impressive indictment of a mighty political system that has over-indulged
itself with technological gimmickry for too long and has now found a way to
rationalize its use in every corner of human life.
"An agenda for mass surveillance has been in the works for at least 10
years," says Remerowski. "A secret National Security Agency satellite
system has allowed countries to spy on each other but not on their own
citizens until now.
Until Sept. 11, profiling was commonplace, but never admitted to be
official policy. That has changed now, as well. Bills and acts limiting the
rights of certain groups of people weren't just thrown together overnight.
They've been in a drawer waiting for an event like Sept. 11 to happen."
The filmmakers suspect they'll suffer some form of reprisal after Security
Threat airs.
"There's a possibility we may not get into the U.S. again at least (not)
without difficulty," says Remerowski.
"We didn't set out to point fingers and call people names. We hope viewers
will make decisions based on the evidence we've found. We're just
inspectors. What happens next is up to ... well, it's up to you."
Additional articles by Greg Quill

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035777204704&call_pageid=968867495754&col=969483191630

Dream of Reason.

Histories of philosophy tend either to be prodigious, learned works, like
F.C. Copleston's A History of Philosophy, or idiosyncratic tracts of
scholarly obfuscation, like Bertrand Russell's A History of Western
Philosophy, and they often present their subject through narrow,
ideological lenses. Gottlieb's elegant survey brings a breath of fresh air.
Executive editor of The Economist, Gottlieb mines primary sources with a
remarkably even hand. He demonstrates that, while cosmological questions
dominated early philosophy, Plato and Aristotle investigated metaphysical,
epistemological and ethical conundrums as well. He shows how the later
Hellenistic schools, like the Epicureans and Stoics; medieval thinkers,
such as Augustine and Aquinas; and Renaissance philosophers, including
Machiavelli and Bacon, built their systems either on Plato or Aristotle.
But Gottlieb's book is not just another plodding survey. His attention to
cultural context provides insight into why various thinkers thought as they
did about certain matters. Plato wrote his Republic, for example, because
he detested the kind of democracy in fashion in Athens, and he wanted to
return to the oligarchy of his childhood. Unfortunately, the book suffers
from a distorted perspective, covering almost 1,000 years of history, from
late antiquity to the Renaissance, in just under 100 pages, while giving
more than that to early Greek philosophy, most of which consists of
fragmentary sources. Thus, Hobbes and Machiavelli, who deserve their own
chapters more than do Democritus or Empedocles, are allotted only a few
brief paragraphs. Gottlieb also engages in some debatable readings: many
find that Kant's theory of self-consciousness, for instance, leads not to
relativism but to absolutism. Nonetheless, this eloquent book offers a
lively chronicle of the evolution of Western philosophy.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039332365X/qid=1044017906/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-2932406-1249463

Face of Jesus seen in turd.

How long oh lord!...
Fathers, sun and the holy post
Hundreds of believers are flocking to the Coogee Beach headland to see what 
they say is an apparition of the Virgin Mary.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/30/1043804464591.html
The PM is a turd...After watching our Prime Minister waffle and prevaricate 
with Kerry O'Brien, it seems the only comfort the Australian people can 
taken from his otherwise kow-towing blind support of George Bush and Tony 
'Some People I Know Think I'm Crazy' Blair, is that Australia won't lend 
support to a military war involving nuclear weapons. To think we should 
even need such reassurance?
Given that Blair must be off his rocker to even contemplate the unthinkable 
with his whatever it takes line of attack to topple Saddam Hussein, it was 
about the only unequivocal comfort you could take out of the PM's lapdog 
defence of an American industrial-military complex intent on an American 
war against Iraq.

Does anyone at this point seriously believe after the almighty build up of 
American and British military might, and now not even a token contribution 
from Australia, that somehow Saddam will blink in the face of such 
provocation? That regardless of any 'smoking gun' findings being produced 
by the UN weapons inspection team, that with no last minute and totally 
uncharacteristic change of heart from Iraq, the Bush war machine will not 
go to war? Sure there will be immense pressure on the likes of permanent 
Security Council allies Germany and France to change their currently 
strongly held position against war, but Russia and China will be far less 
likely to vote for war. For the US coalition to ignore potentially most of 
Europe is to invite political and diplomatic disaster for all concerned.

Yet that is exactly what Bush and Blair and Howard himself are ultimately 
prepared to do and why? Howard last night stated Saddam has weapons of mass 
destruction and he must be forced to give them up. So far he knows more 
than the UN. Plenty of other countries have them yet no such action is 
contemplated against them. But Iraq is a rogue state and we must remember 
they have gone to war against neighbours Iran and Kuwait. God knows the 
their own Kurds and many of his population live in dread of their dictator 
leader. But then the US had no problem when Saddam attacked Iran before so 
their outrage on that score is discredited. Worse Saddam is actually a 
former star pupil of American foreign opportunism.

As with the propping up of so many South American military juntas that now 
haunts the history of their foreign policy, it is part of the contagion 
abroad that now feeds if not hatred, then at the very least distrust and 
cynicism as to America's intentions. It is a consequence that seems to 
escape both the US Government and its people. Being internationally 
disliked or seen as the bad guy is simply not in the national psyche, and 
now Howard seems hell bent on Australian joining their company without the 
US financial and military might to say 'so what'?

The issue for Australia and its PM are these. Nobody elected John Howard to 
go to war yet he believes he has a moral right to do just that. Parliament 
has not sat and voted to go to war, and yet he is quite prepared to 
consider such debate when it is too late. Australian public opinion 
increasingly hardens against war unless it is specifically UN approved, but 
while he takes account of it, he makes it clear on the ABC is might be of 
little consequence should he so decide. His dismissive and seemingly 
unilateral leadership is frightening in its blind obedience to US interests.

Howard seems determined to carelessly involve Australia in a war where many 
think the real goals are less about toppling a dictator or rogue state 
(there are already plenty of those), than driven by America's future 
economic dependence on control or influence over foreign oil reserves. We 
have no business fighting for oil on the other side of the world, and why 
do we feel it's so necessary to be seen up front and centre as a primary 
lap dog of American economic/ political imperialism? Similarly we can only 
shake our heads and wonder why Tony Blair should revisit notions of empire 
by taking his own country to war where his countrymen are similarly 
unconvinced? How Iraq threatens our own interests when so many of our 
neighbours and trading partners will only view our complicity as hostile, 
is not only tragic but likely to be long remembered. As a small nation on 
the cusp of Asia, unlike the US we cannot just buy our way into future 
considerations when we risk massive alienation. The world does not owe 
Australia either a living or respectability when we lose our moral 
perspective or show scant regard for the broader feelings of that world.

The world does not need war and the war against terrorism is not predicated 
on the annihilation of the Iraqi military or Saddam as its head. They may 
not be our friends and yet the

Sharman Networks in top ten net ratings.

KaZaA: AN ONLINE AUSSIE SUCCESS STORY?
Sealed Section January 30
Can this be right? An Australian website in the world top 10. Surely not. A 
particularly web-savvy Crikey friend writes from London:
"Few people realise this but the amazingly popular file sharing program 
KaZaA, and its parent company Sharman Networks, are in fact based in 
Australia. On its website, Sharman Networks is described as a consortium of 
private investors with multimedia interests. Both the Sharman Networks and 
the www.KaZaA.com domain names are licenced by a Phil Morle of Cremorne in 
Sydney.
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Sharman Networks is one of the top ten 
biggest internet parent companies in the world, by volume of "unique 
audience", coming in at number nine. As you can see this certainly puts 
Sharman in the big leagues of online business, just behind online shopping 
giant, Amazon.
Top 25 Internet Parent Companies
Week end of January 19, 2003, U.S.
1. AOL Time Warner
2. Microsoft
3. Yahoo!
4. Google
5. eBay
6. United States Government
7. Amazon
8. Terra Lycos
9. Sharman Networks
10. About-Primedia
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings Audience Measurement Service.
Sharman's main product is the world's most popular person to person 
file-transfer application which allows people around the world to share 
files, such as music and movies. It was downloaded at www.download.com 
almost 3 million times last week alone, making it by far the most popular 
title on the site (the next best had only 610,000 downloads).
This popularity has placed KaZaA and Sharman at the forefront of the 
current debate about online piracy and copyright, which was sparked by the 
success of Napster. Sharman Networks is currently being sued in Los Angeles 
by major film and record companies for alleged copyright infringements, but 
launched a countersuit this week claiming that the entertainment companies 
had violated anti-trust laws by conspiring to control the online 
distribution of movies and songs.
The story has received coverage in the Fin Review and this San Francisco 
Chronicle article
Sharman must also have made a fortune for Telstra and other internet 
providers around the world, as an unattended connection to KaZaA,is the 
most common explanation for the huge bills, sometimes in the thousands of 
dollars, received by many new broadband users. This is due to the fact that 
all internet traffic, which includes uploading or sharing as well as 
downloading, is charged to your broadband account and it is not unheard of 
for more than 5 gigabytes to be uploaded through KaZaA in a single weekend.
Of course Telstra doesn't make this clear when you open your broadband 
account, as they charge 15 cents for every megabyte you use over your 
monthly allowance. So make sure you close your connection to any file 
sharing program such as KaZaA when you aren't using it."
A great feature about KaZaA entitled 'The Race to Kill Kazaa', can be found 
in the current issue of Wired Magazine.
http://www.crikey.com.au/media/2003/01/30/20030130kazaa.html

Why an attack now would be so very dangerous.

Why an attack now would be so very dangerous
January 31 2003

George Bush must wait for the weapons inspections in Iraq to run their 
course, writes Malcolm Fraser.

For many reasons, George Bush would be wrong unilaterally to attack Iraq 
before the United Nations weapons inspectors have completed their task.

It is not surprising, in the short time since they returned to Iraq, that 
they have not yet been able to inspect all facilities and all parts of the 
country. It would be wrong and irresponsible for President Bush to deny 
them time to do so.

It is not good enough for President Bush to say that Iraq has had 10 or 11 
years. In the past four years, the weapons inspectors have been out of the 
country. They have only just resumed their task, and the time scale must 
begin from their re-entry.

Nobody doubts the importance of this issue, but the way the process is 
followed is significant. In matters of this kind, the process by which a 
nation or the international community comes to a decision is almost as 
important as the decision itself.

If President Bush moves without UN sanction and before the inspectors have 
completed their task, the international community will be grievously 
weakened. The Security Council will have been snubbed and denigrated by the 
US, not because it was not doing what it ought to do, but because it was 
not able to do it within President Bush's time scale.

There will be many consequences from precipitant military action. It will 
be seen as an American action and not as an international action. While 
President Bush speaks of a coalition of the willing, the willing may be 
Britain and Australia alone. That hardly constitutes a balanced 
international force, as was the case in the first Gulf War. France and 
Germany have said they will not be involved. Russia will not be involved.

Importantly, if President Bush acts in defiance of the UN, it will 
seriously weaken efforts made over the past 50 years to establish an 
effective system of international law.

Very few Australians support a war in Iraq without UN sanction. Such a war 
will make it easier for Islamic fundamentalists to attempt to depict this 
as a Christian war against Islam, and perhaps too many will believe them. 
It will also make it easier for terrorists to gain recruits.

Opinion in Israel is seriously divided. Israelis have reason to fear the 
consequences of such a war. NATO allies will be disturbed. The prospect of 
a Kurdish state emerging from the ashes of the conflict would have serious 
implications for Turkey, which would oppose, possibly militarily, any such 
development. Autocratic regimes in the Middle East would have increased 
concerns about the prospect of terrorist actions from al Qaeda.

Some believe US soldiers will be welcomed by the Iraqi people. That may be 
so, but the West should not underestimate the capacity of the Iraq regime 
to persuade its citizens that America and the West are responsible for 
their difficulties.

There is talk of an American military government at the end of the 
conflict. It would not be long before such an occupation would come to be 
hated and opposed by most Iraqi citizens.

It is difficult to see how a unilateral war, led by the US, can avoid 
destabilising the Middle East to a much greater extent than is now the case.

There are other consequences for particular regions. To our north is the 
largest Muslim state. In Indonesia, moderate Muslims have been able to 
prevail over fundamentalists, but the Bali bombing was clearly a 
fundamentalist act and one designed to destabilise the Indonesian economy. 
A unilateral US invasion of Iraq will make it harder for the Indonesian 
Government to oppose and thwart the efforts of the fundamentalists. Up to 
this point, there must be praise for the way Indonesia has pursued the 
post-Bali investigations. Australia's capacity to work with Indonesia would 
be much diminished. Our association with the US would be cemented in 
people's minds. Our capacity to assist in regional difficulties would be 
much weakened.

Most of these negative factors would diminish or disappear entirely if the 
UN process is allowed to continue to its logical end. The fact that the UN 
inspectors have come across empty shells capable of carrying chemical 
weapons is not sufficient cause for going to war. Indeed, if the US is as 
sure as President Bush seems to be that Iraq still has weapons of mass 
destruction and still has a nuclear program, why can he not share that 
evidence with the weapons inspectors and point them in the appropriate 
direction so that proof could become public?

The fact that the US has been unwilling or unable to do so strongly 
suggests it does not have that capacity or firm knowledge. Despite the 
rhetoric from the US and Britain, the case is not yet proven.

Also, Iraq and al Qaeda are separate problems. Iraq went to war against 
Iran because of Iranian fundamentalism. In that conflict, Iraq had the 
support of

Throwaway E-mail threat to kill from a library and a net cafe.

Poison water threat claim
By Christine Caulfield
31jan03

A MAN threatened to poison Melbourne's water supply unless his dwindling 
shares rose on the stock market, a court heard last night.

Prime Minister John Howard and Victorian premier Steve Bracks were woken in 
the middle of the night by the National Crime Authority with the news the 
city's water supply could be threatened.
But police arrested Cezary Robert Konarzewski, 42, at 10am yesterday, 
charging him with blackmail, extortion, threatening to contaminate goods 
and making a false report.
An out-of-sessions court heard last night Mr Konarzewski had accessed the 
National Security Council website, and e-mailed his threat to contaminate 
Melbourne's water with cyanide if his demands were not met.
Sen-Det Amanda Napier, from the Tactical Response Squad, told the court Mr 
Konarzewski had demanded the stock market be manipulated in his favour, an 
unspecified amount of money and advertisements every Saturday until the end 
of March with coded messages to Melbourne Water.
Man charged over threat to Melbourne's water
January 31 2003





A Melbourne man has been charged over an alleged threat to poison 
Melbourne's water supply with cyanide.

Cezary Robert Konarzewski, 42, of Tiber Close, Werribee, appeared at an 
out-of-sessions court hearing last night where he was charged with 
blackmail, extortion, making a false report to police and threats to 
contaminate goods with intent to cause public alarm or economic loss.

Police told the hearing Mr Konarzewski e-mailed the threat to the National 
Security hot-line from a Melbourne Internet cafe on January 22.

The e-mail said explosive charges connected to caches of mining-grade 
cyanide planted in three of Melbourne's water reservoirs would be detonated 
by remote control unless certain stockmarket share prices were manipulated, 
the court was told.

Detective Senior Constable Amanda Napier of the tactical response squad 
said money was mentioned in the alleged blackmail e-mail but not a precise 
amount.
The note demanded coded messages be inserted in advertisements in the 
Saturday Age newspaper every week until March to communicate with the 
blackmailer.

Senior Constable Napier said police did not believe the accused had the 
means to carry out his threats.

Mr Konarzewski was arrested at his home yesterday morning by the tactical 
response squad.

The court was told the accused went to the Wyndham City Council library on 
Tuesday, January 21, and after supplying identification, used a library 
computer to open a Yahoo e-mail account and gained access to chat rooms and 
stockmarket websites.

The following day he allegedly went to a city Internet cafe and created a 
document, which he saved on to a floppy disk. That file, allegedly 
containing the threat and cash demands, was signed Mr Water.

Police said that he gained access to the National Security hot-line website 
at another Internet cafe and attached the file from the floppy disk.

He was then said to have phoned the terrorism hot-line, announced that he 
was Mr Water and drawn the hot-line staff's attention to the extortion threat.

Asked by bail justice Rob Taylor last night if he understood what was 
happening, Mr Konarzewski replied: "I'm not sure what is going on here now."

Mr Konarzewski was remanded in custody to appear in the Melbourne 
Magistrates Court this morning.

http://theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/30/1043804469622.html

Blair Today - Gone Tomorrow.

Blair Today Gone Tomorrow (english)
Paul White 11:52pm Thu Jan 30 '03
address: 63 Dundrennan Road Langside Glasgow G42 9SA phone: 0141 636 1532 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  article#232637

Why Tony Blair and ''New '' Labour are patently crucifying this country 
over Iraq and theyre victimisation of the poor--amongst other things

Blair Today Gone Tomorrow

Tony Blair possibly might be he Anti-Christ.With a war no-one wants but Him 
and Redneck Bush he blatantly defies public opinion.On matters of mental 
health and poverty he is a joke. Our transport infrastructure is crumbling 
we have thugs in the streets unemployment escalating widespread poverty the 
firefighters issue because Two Jabs can't be bothered getting oiut of 
bed--tough luck if youre granny burns to death(move on as Blair might say)...

On differentials between Rich and Poor Toady Blair is an appalling 
catastrophe thats already happened. I never thought I would be ashamed of a 
Labour Government--a primae facie case for revolution. Nonetheless we musy 
be patient and give him enough rope...not only can we tie him in knots but 
eventually hopefully he will hang himself . Presumably as the Wars death 
rattle goes on hopefully he can take Redneck with him...

Ultimately Bushs ''thinking'' is a joke--we need the oil babe. This is a 
man whom can hardly add 2+2 on a calculator. And we re not even fighting 
for truth or justice just the American Way.This Armageddon is self 
inflicted by The Ultra Right Wing in America.Hopefully we re not powerless 
or helpless...Change is possible.

In the end however we are temporarily stuck with Tony Blair--not a 
statesman but he is a spokesman for the elite.Not a Messiah then just a 
naughty boy. Ultimately he has no pretensions other than serving The 
System--over Mental Health the firefighters and Iraq--one could go on --he 
is patently lacking. How long can this atrocity of a government continue?.

Indeed from top -up fees as well-he incidentally has total support from The 
Tories --always a bad sign(Token resistance by some notwithstanding). This 
country is largely broken first by Thatcher and now by Toady. We have had 
enough. In the final analysis then is it ultimately a matter of Blair Today 
Gone Tomorrow?...


http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=232637&group=webcast

Crypto streaming your home movies.




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Free Speech Coalition on techno-tyranny.

VAN NUYS, Calif. - The first general meeting of the Free Speech Coalition 
for 2003 focused on cybersex issues and mainstream media's recent coverage 
of the adult industry.
FSC Executive Director Bill Lyon challenged a Jan. 12 Los Angeles Times 
Magazine cover story, which contended lack of government regulation has 
resulted in epidemic levels of sexually transmitted diseases such as 
chlamydia, plus several AIDs cases, among adult industry performers.
"The reason we've been unregulated is because we've done such a good job of 
self-regulation," Lyon said. He disputed statistics quoted in the article, 
"The Porn Scene No One is Watching" and criticized media bias and 
concentration.
Ironically, perhaps, Lyon's remarks were videotaped by a mainstream camera 
crew, purportedly from the CBS news program "60 Minutes."
Increased adult industry media bashing comes as Bush-Ashcroft's Homeland 
Security and Total Information Awareness Network impose what First 
Amendment attorney Greg Piccionelli called "techno-tyranny," which could 
effectively spell an end to privacy. The Internet law practitioner said, 
"We're in grave danger on multiple fronts, maybe facing the greatest 
deprivation of civil liberties since the British. This is a scary future 
we're going into."
Lyon added, "Ashcroft convinced Americans security must precede liberty. 
The opposites true: Freedom's always been risky."
But all's not doom and gloom according to Piccionelli, who spoke about 
emerging technologies and e-porn's power. "Fox News' Bill O'Reilly is 
considered ultra-conservative, but Jan. 3, in debating someone opposed to 
distributing adult materials, O'Reilly said porn is the largest 
entertainment industry in the U.S., grossing more than all professional 
sports teams put together. Haven't the American people said 'we want this 
stuff; leave us alone?'" Piccionelli added, "More people know who Jenna 
Jameson is than who Germany or France's leaders are. Future historians may 
note adult entertainment saved our civil liberties."
Passionately invoking the Founding Fathers, lawyer Joe Obenberger compared 
today's adult industry to 1776's patriots, and likened repression of porn 
to Nazi persecution of Jews. Attorney Jeffrey Douglas, chair of FSC's board 
of directors, added, "Bush considers porn part of the 'axis of evil.'" 
Supporting privacy rights and legislation, Douglas cautioned adult 
Webmasters against collaborating with the government by revealing users' 
identities.
Ira Rothken of www.techfirm.com, an intellectual property lawyer with a 
video gaming background, warned adult sites against spam e-mails. He 
discussed 10 practical points Webmasters should follow, such as not sending 
bulk e-mails with hardcore subjects and/or content, which could be received 
by children or others not wanting explicit spam. "We're under a legal 
microscope," Rothkin warned.
As the meeting came to a close, Scott Tucker, president of FSC's board of 
directors, introduced FSC board members, including Danni Ashe. Other top 
pornsters, such as Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley, were in attendance, plus 
new talent, and 100 FSC members and supporters.
http://www.avnonline.com/issues/200301/newsarchive/012703_lead.shtml

Mary Hatchet.

Peace Activist VS US Military Aircraft

As Ireland mobilises against war an Irish peace activist was arrested 
yesterday after attempting to disarm a US military plane parked at Shannon 
Airport in Ireland.
Mary Kelly (audio entered the airport last night and succeeded in damaging 
the nose of the plane with a hatchet before she was apprehended. Mary said 
that she felt compelled to act after the statement last weekend from the 
Irish Transport Minister that he was allowing the transport of US munitions 
through Shannon and because the Irish police were not doing their job, 
investigating and preventing illegal military use of Shannon, properly. Her 
actions, while controversial, have been supported by the Shannon Peace Camp 
and by Irish Green Party leader Trevor Sargent and highlight the US 
military's use of Shannon airport in the buildup to war on Iraq.
pic.
[ IMC Ireland | Shannon Peace Camp ]
http://www.indymedia.org/

Homes made out of Ticky Tacky.

US Department of State
International Information Programs
Washington File
_
29 January 2003
Bush to Create Terrorist Threat Integration Center
(White House fact sheet on strengthening U.S. intelligence) (1520)

President Bush is creating a new terrorist threat intelligence center,
combining elements of several different government agencies, to
provide assessments of the terrorist threat for the U.S. national
leadership, according to a White House fact sheet.

The Terrorist Threat Integration Center is designed to be one central
location where all foreign- and domestically-generated terrorist
threat information and intelligence is gathered, assessed and
coordinated, the fact sheet said.

The center will be composed of elements of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the new
Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. It will
be headed by a senior U.S. government official, who will report to the
director of Central Intelligence.

In addition, the fact sheet provides details on progress made since
September 11, 2001, in the global war against terrorism by the FBI,
the CIA and the Defense Department, and on the proposed anti-terrorism
functions of the new Department of Homeland Security.

Following is the text of the fact sheet:

(begin fact sheet)

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
January 28, 2003

STRENGTHENING INTELLIGENCE TO BETTER PROTECT AMERICA

Today's Presidential Action

-- In his State of the Union Address, President Bush announced a new
initiative to better protect America by continuing to close the "seam"
between analysis of foreign and domestic intelligence on terrorism.

-- The President announced that he has instructed the Director of
Central Intelligence, the Director of the FBI, working with the
Attorney General, and the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense
to develop the nation's first unified Terrorist Threat Integration
Center [TTIC]. This new center will merge and analyze
terrorist-related information collected domestically and abroad in
order to form the most comprehensive possible threat picture.

-- Since September 11, 2001, our government has been working together
and sharing information like never before. The creation of the
Terrorist Threat Integration Center is the next phase in the dramatic
enhancement of the government's counterterrorism effort. The President
has now directed his senior advisors to take the next step in ensuring
that intelligence information from all sources is shared, integrated,
and analyzed seamlessly -- and then acted upon quickly.

-- The administration will ensure that this program is carried out
consistently with the rights of Americans.

The New Terrorist Threat Integration Center

-- Elements of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI's
Counterterrorism Division, the DCI's Counterterrorist Center, and the
Department of Defense will form a Terrorist Threat Integration Center
to fuse and analyze all-source information related to terrorism.

-- The Terrorist Threat Integration Center will continue to close the
"seam" between analysis of foreign and domestic intelligence on
terrorism.

Specifically, it will:

- Optimize use of terrorist threat-related information, expertise, and
capabilities to conduct threat analysis and inform collection
strategies.

- Create a structure that ensures information sharing across agency
lines.

- Integrate terrorist-related information collected domestically and
abroad in order to form the most comprehensive possible threat
picture.

- Be responsible and accountable for providing terrorist threat
assessments for our national leadership.

-- The Terrorist Threat Integration Center will be headed by a senior
U.S. government official, who will report to the Director of Central
Intelligence. This individual will be appointed by the Director of
Central Intelligence, in consultation with the Director of the FBI and
the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of
Homeland Security.

-- The Terrorist Threat Integration Center will play a lead role in
overseeing a national counterterrorism tasking and requirements system
and for maintaining shared databases.

-- The Terrorist Threat Integration Center will also maintain an
up-to-date database of known and suspected terrorists that will be
accessible to federal and non-federal officials and entities, as
appropriate.

-- In order to carry out its responsibilities effectively, the
Terrorist Threat Integration Center will have access to all
intelligence information -- from raw reports to finished analytic
assessments -- available to the U.S. government.

-- A senior multi-agency team will finalize the details, design, and
implementation strategy for the stand-up of the Terrorist Threat
Integration Center.

Transforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation

-- Immediately after September 11, the President directed the FBI and
the Attorney General to

Goodwill Hunting.

Jan. 30  Bounty Hunter Billy Wells admits his profession has an image 
problem.
"There's a picture that pops up your mind when you say 'bounty hunter,'" he 
said. "You think of a thug."
It's an image that is not helped by regular  if infrequent  horror 
stories of bounty hunters' apparent abuses and mistakes, such as the 
killing of a Virginia man last month. Police say a bounty hunter with 
criminal record raided the wrong home and fatally shot an innocent man. And 
it's more than just an image problem for those who make their living as 
skip tracers. Pressure from lawmakers is slowly reining in the storied 
profession, eroding unparalleled freedoms born in the days of the Wild West.


Reality vs. The Wild Bunch

Bounty hunters are hired by bail bond agents to track down and arrest 
clients who have failed to appear in court as required. They haul in an 
estimated 30,000 bail jumpers every year, earning a typical fee of about 10 
percent of the bail amount.

The thousands of agents working in business range from private 
investigators and former police officers, to people like Crystal McElroy, a 
26-year-old mother of three who works as a bounty hunter in Santa Fe, N.M.

The profession has long been a fixture of the American imagination, 
appearing in movies such as The Wild Bunch, Midnight Run, and even Star 
Wars. But the reality is usually not very glamorous, those in the industry 
say.

Bounty hunters spend days tracking down and staking out their prey. 
Professionals admit chases and high drama are rare, and many seasoned 
agents say they often just call the police when they've tracked down a 
particularly dangerous fugitive.

Only a few hundred agents around the country are able to support themselves 
as full-time bounty hunters, experts say.

"It's a tough business," said Wells. "I recommend to people  and I always 
have  don't quit your day job."

The Rambo Approach

Most bounty hunters are responsible professionals, but traditionally, 
virtually anyone could enter the field, and under a Supreme Court decision 
in 1872, they have enjoyed police-like powers. It's the freedom and the 
racy image that have attracted some of the wrong sorts of people.

"There's a lot of people who take the 'Rambo' approach," admits Dennis 
Bartlett, the executive director of the American Bail Coalition.

Something like that apparently is what happened in Virginia.

A bounty hunter named James Dickerson allegedly went to the wrong home on 
Christmas Eve while pursuing a fugitive. Dickerson and another man broke 
down the door, dragged a man outside and killed him, police said.

Dickerson had a criminal record; his alleged victim, Roberto Martinez, did 
not.

In Virginia, as has been the case in many states, virtually anyone can work 
as a bounty hunter, without obtaining a license or undergoing a background 
check. Horror stories like the Martinez case are not new.

Earlier this year, two bail bondsmen in Fairfax, Va., were arrested after 
allegedly taking money from a couple they had recaptured after posting bond 
for them, police there reported.

In Houston last month, Thang Quoc Le pleaded not guilty to hiring a bounty 
hunter to kill a man who had been seeing his wife.

Last June, a 23-year-old man died after struggling with three bounty 
hunters in Kansas City. One of the men was charged with involuntary 
manslaughter and pleaded not guilty.

Breaking Down the Door to Your Home  Legally

The extensive power granted to bounty hunters stems from an 1872 U.S. 
Supreme Court decision, Taylor vs.Taintor. The high court ruled that a bail 
bond agent or bounty hunter can pursue bail jumpers across state lines, 
break into their homes, and arrest him or her at anytime.

These cases and others have highlighted the unusual police-like power and 
latitude given to bounty hunters.

Last year, the Ohio Supreme Court granted bounty hunter Michael Kole a new 
trial, on the grounds that he had the legal authority to arrest a defendant 
"at any time or place." Kole had been convicted of abduction and burglary 
after he and a partner had entered a fugitive's home and held the man at 
gunpoint.

With Little Success Curtailing Their Power

Lawmakers have repeatedly tried to curtail bounty hunters' powers, 
generally without success.

Efforts were jumpstarted in 1997, after a young couple was killed in their 
Phoenix, Ariz., home by men who claimed to be bounty hunters. The case 
prompted Arizona to pass a law requiring bounty hunters to be licensed and 
to obtain permission before entering a home.

Similar cases have periodically renewed interest in cracking down on the 
profession in other states, but bounty hunters have fiercely fought such 
efforts.

Bartlett and other bounty hunter advocates insist it would be impossible to 
do the job without the power to make arrests and enter home without warrants.

"If you don't have some sort of coercive authority you're never going to 
pick the guy up," said Wells.

Bounty hunter

UH-60 Recall.Sikorsky Aircraft urge owners to return all aircraft.RECALL.

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. army helicopter with four Americans aboard crashed 
near the Bagram air base in Afghanistan yesterday and all four were killed, 
an American official said.

The UH-60 helicopter crashed several kilometres east of Bagram air base in 
an area known as the East Training Range, said Jim Wilkinson, director of 
strategic communications at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

"I can confirm that there are U.S. casualties and at this time this 
incident does not appear to be related to hostile action," Wilkinson said.

He said all four aboard were killed, but he declined to provide other 
details about them or the circumstances of the crash. The helicopter and 
its crew were on a routine training mission, he said.

Wilkinson did not immediately have information on the military service or 
unit to which the four victims belonged.

Details were sketchy and officials said it was not immediately clear what 
caused the helicopter to crash. They stressed that it appeared to be an 
accident.

The UH-60, known as a Black Hawk, is a utility transport aircraft that is a 
key to the U.S. army's mobility.

Downtown Pripyat USA.

'Dirty bomb' constructed
Al-Qaida did job in Afghanistan
By AP

LONDON -- The al-Qaida terrorist network successfully built a crude 
radiological device known as a "dirty bomb" in Afghanistan, the BBC 
reported yesterday.

British intelligence agents infiltrated the network and found documents 
that showed al-Qaida members had built the device near Herat in western 
Afghanistan, the BBC said, citing unidentified British government officials.

It was one of two major developments involving al-Qaida.

In Kandahar, a powerful bomb destroyed a bridge outside the southern Afghan 
city today, killing 18 people on a bus, a deputy police chief said.

Only two people on the bus survived the explosion on the Rambasi Bridge, 
some 10 km south of Kandahar, Ustad Nazir Jan said.

No one immediately took responsibility for the explosion, but Jan blamed 
fugitive members of the Taliban and al Qaida.

Meanwhile, in London, Britain's Foreign Office said the intelligent agents' 
report substantiates expert opinion that al-Qaida wanted to develop a 
nuclear weapon.

"The evidence presented in the BBC report speaks for itself," a spokesman 
said.

"It provides proof to substantiate expert opinion that al-Qaida was 
interested in developing nuclear weapons."

In Washington, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 
there was no doubt about accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden's 
interest in acquiring a "dirty bomb" -- a conventional bomb capable of 
spreading radiation.

But the U.S. official said: "We have no evidence to substantiate that he's 
built such a device."

The British intelligence agents did not find the device itself and it has 
not since been recovered, the BBC reported.

The BBC said the Taliban regime in Afghanistan helped al-Qaida construct 
the device.

The BBC report did not say where the agents found the documents, when the 
device was thought to have been constructed or how much radiation it could 
spread.

The documents were sent to the British government's weapons research 
facility in Porton Down, southern England.

Scientists concluded al-Qaida had built a small "dirty bomb," not a 
full-blown nuclear device.

There has been previous evidence of al-Qaida's interest in developing a 
"dirty bomb." Such a radiological weapon would be far less deadly and 
damaging than a nuclear explosion.

Computers found by journalists and U.S. troops at a variety of facilities 
in Afghanistan indicated al-Qaida had sought to obtain and develop nuclear 
and other potent weapons.

http://www.canoe.ca/CalgaryNews/cs.cs-01-31-0010.html

Central Europe Review - Ghost Town: Chernobyl Twelve Years On
... Pripyat is three things: it is the name of the town which had a 
population of 48,000
until the nuclear power station on its doorstep, Chernobyl, went into ...
www.ce-review.org/99/9/kinoeye9_horton1.html - 25k - Cached - Similar pages

The Social Hack.


Kevin Mitnick: Consumer vigilance can thwart high-tech crooks
By Kevin D. Mitnick


CORPORATE security is an illusion. So is personal financial privacy. I 
should know; I spent five years of my life in federal prison for proving it.

A recent survey by the Computer Security Institute and the FBI found that 
90 percent of U.S. companies responding had detected security breaches 
during the preceding year. Many companies believe that they can protect 
their information and networks from the bad guys by acquiring security 
technologies such as fire-walls, anti-virus software and biometric 
authentication systems. But while it's essential to use technology to 
prevent and detect hackers, it is naive to rely on technology alone.

I know because hacking was what I did before March 2000, when I pleaded 
guilty to breaking into a series of computer networks around the country.

The greatest vulnerability for computer security doesn't come from 
technological flaws in hardware and software but from the weakest link in 
the security chain: people. And not just dishonest employees. Trusted 
insiders can be duped or deceived into giving away the keys to the kingdom.

An attacker, foreign or domestic, can easily take advantage of the trust we 
have in fellow employees and the respect we have for people in authority. 
For example: A caller tells you that there has been an ongoing problem with 
your server and you're in danger of losing all your data. He needs to put 
you on another server; you'll have to change your password and stick with 
it until the problem is resolved. He gives you a new password to use and 
waits while you make the change and verify that it works. You hang up, a 
little annoyed at the interruption but maybe feeling good that the people 
in information technology are taking such good care of you.

But was that really a man from IT, or a hacker who now has access to your 
computer system?

It's not just business and government agencies that are the targets. One of 
today's fastest-growing crimes, identity theft, often uses the very same 
techniques against individuals.

What's more, your personal information is not private at all. Anyone with 
Internet access and an anonymous prepaid phone card can, in just a few 
minutes, obtain your driver's license number, Social Security number and 
mother's maiden name and the names of your spouse, children and pets. Much 
of this information is readily available on the Internet or through one or 
two telephone calls.

In the movie ``Catch Me If You Can,'' protagonist Frank Abagnale Jr. 
illustrates the art of deception behind such social engineering attacks. By 
impersonating authority figures -- a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer -- he 
influences his victims' attitudes and gains their trust, enabling him to 
pass bad checks all over the world.

The hacker who uses social engineer tactics steals your trust in much the 
same way. Consider: Your phone rings and on the other end of the line is a 
man from the phone company. He says you have an overdue balance of $63.14, 
and if it isn't paid by 5 p.m., your phone will be disconnected and you'll 
be required to make a $300 deposit before service is restored.

You insist that you paid on time. The caller says no payment was received 
and that a disconnect notice was mailed to you. In the spirit of good 
service, the man offers to search the records to see if he can locate the 
payment. This drags on for some minutes while you hear him clicking keys 
and making occasional comments. He still can't find anything, so he asks 
you to get out your checkbook and give him the details of your bank, check 
number and amount of payment. Still nothing. He asks you to read off the 
numbers printed at the bottom of your checks.

You have just given him your checking account number. Before long, 
unfamiliar checks begin being cashed from your account or the hacker 
obtains access to your charge accounts by going through information 
gathered from the checking account. One key to preventing this from 
happening to you, at home or at work, is to be vigilant about verifying the 
identity of anyone requesting sensitive information.

``Loose lips sink ships'' was a slogan meant, during World War II, to 
educate military personnel and civilians on the importance of maintaining 
secrecy of troop movements. It is time to update it to promote awareness of 
tricksters who may want your company's secrets or to hijack your personal 
credit history: ``Be alert or you'll lose your shirt.''

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5070983.htm

FREE Richard C Reid.POW.

Reid, 29, remained defiant, describing himself as a soldier of war and 
denouncing U.S. policies against Muslim nations as justification for his 
attempted downing of American Airlines Flight 63 in December 2001. Nearly 
200 passengers and crew members were aboard the Paris-to-Miami flight.
In a dramatic climax to the two-hour proceeding, Reid was muscled out of 
the courtroom in handcuffs by four federal marshals after shouting at U.S. 
District Court Judge William G. Young.
Reid, partially shaven with straggly hair falling to his shoulders and a 
goatee, stood up immediately to his full, imposing height of 6-foot-4 and 
pointed at the judge. Several of the crew members and passengers who were 
on the flight looked stunned, glancing at each other and shaking their 
heads. One woman cried.
"That flag will be brought down on the day of judgment and you will see in 
front of your Lord and my Lord and then we will know," Reid said, in a 
heavily accented, rapid-fire cadence. "You will be judged by Allah."
When he pleaded guilty in October, Reid pledged his support to al Qaeda 
leader Osama bin Laden and declared himself an enemy of the United States. 
He declared that allegiance again today in a federal courthouse surrounded 
by bomb-sniffing dogs and armed federal agents.
"Your government has sponsored the torture of Muslims in Iraq and Turkey 
and Jordan and Syria with their money and their weapons," Reid said. "I am 
at war with your country."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3758-2003Jan30.html
Solidarity Richard,we'll try and swap you out for Dick Armitage or some 
other pig.

Blix screed..."I saw nothing..."

Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a War
New York Times - 2 hours ago
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 30  Days after delivering a broadly negative report 
on Iraq's cooperation with international inspectors, Hans Blix on Wednesday 
challenged several of the Bush administration's assertions about Iraqi 
cheating and the notion that ...
Bush to Meet Blair on Iraq, Europe Divided on War Reuters
Don't go it alone, Graham tells US Toronto Star
The Globe and Mail - Washington Post - Kansas City Star - Financial Times 
(subscription) - and 1332 related »

DieCorpse.

The suburbs of Washington, from Alexandria in the south to Dulles Airport 
in the west, make up the defense industry's fertile crescent.

Within a short drive of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the national 
security state, one immaculate office park after another rises above the 
oleander, gleaming facades capped with muscular logos - Raytheon, TRW, 
Bechtel. It's the neighborhood of choice for the nation's military contractors.


Michael Grecco
With war in the air and a new market in homeland security booming, many 
private firms are looking to expand their government work. Which is why 
Computer Sciences Corporation, a California-based technology services 
company, came to this part of the Beltway to do a bit of Christmas 
shopping. On a Friday in mid-December, CSC announced it would buy a 
little-known contractor named DynCorp in an acquisition worth nearly $1 
billion. Ranked 13th in the dollar value of its federal business - and 
dwarfed by Lockheed Martin by a factor of 16 - DynCorp has operated in the 
shadows of the capital for five decades. It is neither the most visible nor 
the most powerful of the companies that rely on government contracts. But 
it has thoroughly mastered the byways of Washington, and its purchase by 
CSC shines a spotlight on the modern military techno-industrial complex.

DynCorp represents nothing less than the future of national security. While 
outfits like Raytheon make their money developing weapons systems, DynCorp 
offers the military an alternative to itself. In 2002, the company took in 
$2.3 billion doing what you probably thought was Pentagon work. DynCorp 
planes and pilots fly the defoliation missions that are the centerpiece of 
Plan Colombia. Armed DynCorp employees constitute the core of the police 
force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai. 
DynCorp manages the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the 
Pentagon's weapons-testing ranges, and the entire Air Force One fleet of 
presidential planes and helicopters. During the Persian Gulf War, it was 
DynCorp employees, not soldiers, who serviced and rearmed American combat 
choppers, and it's DynCorp's people, not military personnel, who late last 
year began "forward deploying" equipment and ammunition to the Middle East 
in preparation for war with Iraq. DynCorp inventories everything seized by 
the Justice Department's Asset Forfeiture Program, runs the Naval Air 
Warfare Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, and is producing the smallpox 
and anthrax vaccines the government may use to inoculate everyone in the 
United States.

That security work earns DynCorp about half its bread and butter. The other 
half comes from serving as the information technology department of just 
about every three-letter national security, law enforcement, and 
defense-related agency of government, as well as the more peaceable 
kingdoms of the Departments of State and Justice, the Federal Aviation 
Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Centers for 
Disease Control. Among its lucrative contracts, DynCorp is networking all 
the American embassies abroad, taking the government's emergency phone 
system wireless, and building a 29,000-terminal computer network for the 
FBI called Trilogy. As many as three dozen companies do contract work for 
the Pentagon, and many more sell IT services to the Feds. But DynCorp is 
special, because it manages both bits and bombs for Uncle Sam.

All of this perfectly positions DynCorp to take advantage of the post-9/11 
trend to privatize almost every aspect of national security. And it 
perfectly explains why CSC came courting. At DynCorp, 98 percent of sales 
come from federal contracts. When the acquisition is completed this spring, 
CSC will feel that windfall, boosting its government business from 27 
percent of revenue to 40 percent. More to the point, CSC - a purely 
IT-focused operation - now gets a piece of a military market that so far 
has proved elusive. "CSC does infrastructure work," DynCorp CEO Paul 
Lombardi said the day the sale was announced. "But they don't have the 
capability to train troops and offer logistical support in real time."

Today, half of all defense-related jobs are done by private sector 
contractors, an increase of about 25 percent since the 1970s. But taking on 
this type of business will bring CSC controversies it never faced doing 
systems integration. That the Pentagon outsources management of military 
bases and IT tasks is not, in itself, troublesome. "It makes a lot of 
sense," says David Isenberg, a defense analyst who once worked for a 
DynCorp subsidiary. "You want the 101st Airborne training to kill people 
and destroy things, not figuring out how to create a Web site or link this 
database to that database."

It's the expansion of private firms into core functions of the military 
that is, for many, an alarming trend. A State Department spokesperson told 
me that DynCorp, with its "

Bulimic Rats.

Scientists have found evidence that fat and sugar may be addictive, 
possibly explaining why many obese people cannot get enough junk food, 
despite all the warnings.

Scientists already know that the area of the brain that moderates eating 
behaviour is influenced by the blood's level of leptin, a substance 
secreted by fat cells.

But a new study by a psychologist at New York's Albert Einstein College of 
Medicine has found that rats fed high-fat diets take only three days to 
lose their ability to respond to leptin.

"The fatter a person becomes, the more resistant they will be to the 
effects of leptin," says Luciano Rossetti in the February 1 issue of New 
Scientist.

The magazine reports that another researcher, Sarah Leibowitz, a 
neurobiologist at New York's Rockefeller University, found that the level 
of galanin, a substance that stimulates eating and curbs the body's use of 
energy, increases in the brains of rats that dine on even one fatty meal.
In another experiment rats developed "the shakes" when taken off a 
sugar-rich diet, developing symptoms similar to people withdrawing from 
nicotine or morphine.

When the rats were given drugs blocking their opiod receptors they 
displayed the same neurochemical patterns seen in humans in opiod withdrawal.

"The implication is that some animals - and by extension some people - can 
become overly dependent on sweet food," the researcher said.

A University of Wisconsin neuroscientist also reported that rats which 
over-indulged showed "long-lasting changes in their brain chemistry similar 
to those caused by extended use of morphine or heroin".

But Australian nutritionist Rosemary Stanton was not convinced. "I need 
more proof -
all this is based on rats," she
said yesterday, suspecting that eating problems had more to do with habit.

She feared the findings could send the wrong message to the obese. "People 
might think there is nothing they can do and will say, 'I might as well go 
and have three Big Macs'."

Andrew Byrne, a Sydney doctor who has worked with addicts for 15 years, 
warned that addiction was hard to define. However, if the symptoms of 
over-eating included being unable to cut down, needing regular consumption, 
suffering an adverse reaction, feeling guilty and attracting the attention 
of others saying "you are fat", then food was addictive.

Both Ms Stanton and Dr Byrne agreed that if fat and sugar were addictive, 
all fast-food ingredients should be listed on packaging.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/30/1043804466415.html

Scalded Manatee's?

An Australian-designed, steam-driven jet engine is set to revolutionise 
water travel by providing a more efficient, clean and safer alternative to 
conventional outboard motors.
New Scientist magazine says the Pursuit Marine Drive - described as an 
underwater jet engine - could soon be powering dinghies and speedboats.
The drive system, invented by engineer Alan Burns, produces thrust by using 
the energy from high-pressure steam to draw in water through an intake at 
the front and expel it at high speed through the rear.
Burns' idea has been developed in Britain by engineers at Pursuit Dynamics.
The drive should be kinder to the environment as it does not leak oil like 
conventional outboards and has no propeller that could injure large sea 
creatures.

@media print {.nopr {display:none}}
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/30/1043804465832.html
Pursuit Dynamics hopes to have licensed other manufacturers to make the 
engine by the end of the year.

We will stop this attack on Iraq.




As troops gather in the Middle East and the US hypes up rhetoric for war on 
Iraq, an army of protesters across Australia is mustering its forces to 
fight for peace.

The latest poll shows only six per cent of the population backs a war in 
Iraq without United Nations approval, with 30 per cent opposing Australian 
involvement under any circumstances.

Tens of thousands will join rallies nationwide on February 15 and 16 as 
part of an international weekend of action against war.

If war is declared before that, it will trigger immediate action by 
thousands of protesters in every capital city.

The protests are set to be bigger than the Vietnam War demonstrations; a 
rally in Melbourne last November drew 45,000 and organisers are preparing 
for an even bigger turnout next month.

Most of those joining Australia's peace movement are not activists, just 
ordinary citizens spurred into action by their moral objections to the war.

Victorian Peace Network co-ordinator Damien Lawson said levels of anti-war 
sentiment in the community were unprecedented.

"There's never been this level of protest prior to a war even happening," 
he said. "People just think this is very wrong and they're starting to find 
ways to express it."

The Network was formed in September by more than 50 of Victoria's peak 
organisations to oppose the looming war with Iraq.

Its chief objection is that the war would result in "widespread slaughter" 
of countless Iraqi civilians.

"The second concern is that it increases the likelihood of terrorist 
attacks on Australian civilians; it is actually a threat to the security of 
Australian people if Australia supports a US-led attack," Mr Lawson said.

"The third reason from our point of view is that the war will be illegal 
and is clearly not going to increase security in the Middle East."

Mr Lawson pointed out that the United States "has more weapons of mass 
destruction - nuclear, biological, chemical weapons - than any other country".

He said America itself posed the greatest threat to world peace.

"The US is taking a completely unilateral course," he said. "It's saying 
that it can strike anywhere, any time, on the flimsiest of pretexts.

"It is the real rogue state in the world today and unfortunately it's the 
most powerful."

Sydney's Walk Against The War Coalition spokeswoman Hannah Middleton said 
unpopular US policy was propelling many into the peace movement.

She said people were fed up with the double standard of America targeting 
Iraq while possessing its own weapons of mass destruction and ignoring the 
weapons stockpiled by nations such as Israel and Pakistan.

"America says, 'We can launch pre-emptive strikes' - which of course is 
just the new buzz word for what the United Nations calls 'aggression'," Dr 
Middleton said.

"It's bully-boy destruction of international accepted standards and 
replaces the rule of law by the rule of the jungle."

The motives behind US warmongering also troubled Australians, she said.

"People see through the rhetoric and say it's not about democracy, it's not 
about weapons of mass destruction; it's about oil, and that's in America's 
interests and not ours."

The Walk Against The War Coalition expects up to 40,000 to join Sydney's 
protest in Hyde Park on February 16.

It also holds peace vigils every Friday at Sydney Town Hall.

Spokesman Nick Everett said the protest movement was growing particularly 
strong at local and regional levels, with people from every conceivable 
background united by their opposition to the war.

"In almost every country, the polls are registering majority opposition to 
this war," Mr Everett said.

"That passive opposition has built up and we're now starting to see a more 
active opposition, with many more people coming into the anti-war movement 
for the first time.

"A protest movement gives people a sense of their ability to change things, 
their potential to put pressure on a government."

Nikki Ulasowski, an activist in Perth's No War Alliance, said as military 
preparations for war intensified, so too did protest activity.

"As time ticks by and (US President George W) Bush looks more like he's 
going launch his war in Iraq you see the phones start ringing hot with 
people wanting to know what they can do, wanting to actively get involved 
with the campaign," Ms Ulasowski said.

She said the US and its allies, Australia and Britain, seemed "determined 
to push ahead with this war with no legitimacy".

"Even though there's massive opposition around the world, they seem pretty 
set on their agenda.

"When you've got that happening, people need to go out on the streets to 
actively oppose it and to force them not to wage a war on Iraq."

Ms Ulasowski said February's wave of national protests "will be by far the 
biggest ... we think the urgency's there".

"It's exploded in a big way in the last couple of weeks," she said.

"It's building up to the sort of movement that, in the end, will stop this 
war fro

USA weenies scared of Europe.

Anti-Europeanism in America
By Timothy Garton Ash
This year, especially if the United States goes to war against Iraq, you 
will doubtless see more articles in the American press on "Anti-Americanism 
in Europe." But what about anti-Europeanism in the United States?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16059

UK Decay.

30 January 2003 ]

Stitched up: How the Big Four accountancy firms have PFI under their thumbs 
(PDF)
Report on the revolving door between UK government and the 'Big Four' 
accountancy firms, illustrating the means by which they simultaneously 
devise and profit from New Labour's privatisation policies ( Unison )
»
See also this press release, this Guardian coverage, this BBC article, and 
this earlier Unison report (PDF)
»
The Big Four are PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Ernst & Young and Deloitte & 
Touche

Competition and Quality: Evidence from the NHS Internal Market 1991-99 (PDF)
'Payer-driven competition has been widely advocated as a means of 
increasing efficiency in health care markets. The 1990s reforms to the UK 
health service followed this path. We examine whether competition led to 
better outcomes for patients, as measured by death rates after treatment 
following heart attacks. Using data on mortality as a measure of hospital 
quality and exploiting the policy change during the 1990s, we find that the 
relationship between competition and some measures of quality of care 
appears to be negative.'
( Carol Propper et al via CMPO )
»
See also this press release (PDF, page 7), this commentary by Polly 
Toynbee, and this blog entry from Monday

Fuel relief for vulnerable 'underfunded by £1.5bn'
Article indicating that UK ministers are suppressing a report on indequate 
funding of fuel relief - 'Britain has one of the worst rates for winter 
deaths among the elderly and poor in Europe. It is estimated that between 
30,000 and 60,000 people die unnecessarily every winter because they do not 
have enough money for fuel or live in draughty homes' ( Guardian )
»
See also this Guardian report from October, this BMJ paper from last year, 
and this text of the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000 LINKS?
http://www.hullocentral.demon.co.uk/site/anfin.htm

Ernst and Young,they cook the books for RSA don't they?

Universal Health Care.

Our second goal is high quality, affordable health for all Americans.
The American system of medicine is a model of skill and innovation, with a 
pace of discovery that is adding good years to our lives. Yet for many 
people, medical care costs too much, and many have no coverage at all.
These problems will not be solved with a nationalized health care system 
that dictates coverage and rations care.
Henwood: "Instead, we have a very expensive private system that dictates 
coverage and rations care -- to maximize the profits of HMOs."
Instead, we must work toward a system in which all Americans have a good 
insurance policy, choose their own doctors, and seniors and low-income 
Americans receive the help they need.
Zuckerman argues that Bush is omitting a huge problem: "State cuts in 
Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Programs. Medicaid provides 
health care for the poorest Americans and CHIP provides health insurance 
for children whose families earn too much to be eligible for Medicaid but 
not enough to afford health insurance. According to the Kaiser Family 
Foundation study, 49 states have planned or implemented Medicaid cuts in FY 
2003, and 32 states are already on their second round of cuts. In order to 
reduce deficits, states are eliminating health care for some of the poor 
adults and children who used to be eligible for Medicaid, requiring 
patients to pay higher co-payments, or reducing the reimbursements made to 
doctors, hospitals, or nursing homes that care for the needy. When payments 
to doctors or hospitals are reduced, it becomes even harder for patients to 
find doctors or hospitals that will treat them. When payments to nursing 
homes are reduced, the quality of care is harmed, and very vulnerable 
elderly patients will die."
Instead of bureaucrats and trial lawyers and HMOs, we must put doctors and 
nurses and patients back in charge of American medicine.
Ida Hellander, executive director of Physicians for a National Health 
Program: "Bush says that we do not want a national health program that 
'rations care' and instead want one where they can 'choose their doctors,' 
but a national health insurance would allow people their free choice of 
doctors which is currently very constricted by insurance plans. Of course, 
we currently have rationing by ability to pay -- with 42 million uninsured, 
and medical bills the most frequent cause of bankruptcy after loss of job. 
We already pay more in health care taxes than any other country in the 
world except Switzerland -- this year health care costs will exceed $6,000 
per person. With our level of spending we could have the best heath care in 
the world -- for all -- if we eliminated the insurance middleman. The cost 
of paperwork exceeds $300 billion a year - at least half of which could be 
saved with a simplified national health program."
Health care reform must begin with Medicare; Medicare is the binding 
commitment of a caring society.
We must renew that commitment by giving seniors access to the preventive 
medicine and new drugs that are transforming health care in America.
Hellander: "The prescription drug coverage Bush has proposed is skimpy and 
expensive. Seniors could save at least 40 percent on drug costs if they 
were given the same discounts as the Veterans Administration negotiates."
Seniors happy with the current Medicare system should be able to keep their 
coverage just the way it is.
Hellander: "The best option is to make drugs a part of Medicare, but the 
drug companies spent over $80 million on the last election to elect Bush 
and others legislators opposed to making drugs a benefit of Medicare. Also, 
the new head of the Senate, Bill Frist, has a $26 million fortune from a 
for-profit hospital corporation (Columbia/HCA, which was recently fined 
$1.7 billion for Medicare fraud) founded by his brother. In fact, Frist 
used his HCA profits to finance his first election to the Senate. So, Bush 
and Frist are beholden to the for-profit medical industry."
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research: 
"Every other industrialized nation has universal health care coverage for 
its citizens. They also have better health care outcomes using measures 
such as life expectancy and infant mortality rates. And, on average they 
pay about half as much per person as the United States does. The president 
is apparently determined to ignore how the health care market works. Health 
insurance companies make money by not insuring people that are going to get 
sick. The insurance companies have proven themselves quite effective in 
dumping less healthy patients, which is why including HMO's in the Medicare 
system has raised costs, as numerous government studies have found. 
President Bush's plans for Medicare do not make sense as health care 
policy. However, they are likely to be quite effective in increasing the 
profits of the insurance industry."
And just like you, the members of Congress, and yo

I love Mary Kelly.

(Longish)
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=232524&group=webcast

Nosecones of military planes don't like hammers.

It is sometimes justifiable to damage property if, for example, a door
has to be forced to access a burning house to save life. In relation to
the US war effort intent on killing innocent civilians in Iraq, there is
in a similar way a
legal excuse for non-violent direct action. A legal case of this sort was
won by three women in Britain who damaged a Hawk fighter plane which was
due to kill people in East Timor in January 1996."

Pittsburgh PA.

Communique from the Anarchist Black Bloc
It is estimated by UNICEF that since sanctions were imposed on Iraq that 
Iraqi children are dying at twice the rate that they were 10 years ago. 
This statistic is also confirmed by the Middle East Research and 
Information Project, which states that the infant mortality rate has gone 
down by 160%. The same report cites the devastating bombardment of southern 
Iraq by American forces, where most of Iraq's water is taken from and 
sanitized, also having led to an increase in disease. With medical supplies 
blocked from sanctions and a devastated infrastructure, the people of Iraq 
are dying by scores.

The Bush Administration is now prepared to launch a full-scale invasion of 
the country, which will undoubtedly lead to an enormous humanitarian 
disaster and the risk of escalating the violence. The policies that brought 
the American public to horrific incidents such as the September 11th attack 
are being reinforced and expanded upon.

All of this is over oil. It is estimated that Iraq contains 115 billion 
barrels of petroleum reserves, which makes them second only to Saudi Arabia 
in the region. And only because of three decades of western intervention 
and turmoil has there not been an attempt to exploit resources in 55 
untouched oil fields.

We put forth the simple principle that we, the American and Iraqi public, 
are not cannon fodder for oil wars! We also are willing to take whatever 
means are necessary to assert our rights as human beings and remove 
ourselves from the special interests that dominate the American state and 
its policies. We are no longer willing to ignore the responsibility we have 
in the crimes against humanity that are being committed in our name.

At the J26 march in Pittsburgh, an anarchist black bloc contingent broke 
away from the rally at the Software Engineering Institute and marched to 
the Marines Recruitment Center on Meyran St. There we smashed in the door 
of the office and threw paint bombs into the inside with the intent of 
causing as much economic and infrastructure damage to the office as 
possible. Glass was shattered and paint was splattered all along the inside.

Many anarchists think that the state of affairs in the US is of such that 
if the public is to have any rights at all, we must begin to take political 
action outside of the official framework. No evidence of this analysis 
could be greater then when George W. Bush Jr. virtually bullied himself 
into office. The electoral process is run and dominated by corporate 
interests. It is failing to be democratic in any way, and that is not only 
reflected in its process but also its policies. The American socio-economic 
system has not changed much since September 11th. And, the anarchist 
approach to the system has not changed much since November 30, 1999.

There is an increasingly dominant feeling within the anti-war movement that 
if we are going to be serious about securing human rights, here and abroad, 
by stopping the invasion, we are going to have to find new ways of 
political action. It is a privilege to not act upon the most direct means 
at our disposal. Many of us in the anti-war movement feel that it is also 
time to abandon this privilege.

Many anarchists feel that the only way to stop the invasion is to raise the 
domestic costs for the state to pursue it. We can do this through various 
forms of non-participation and economic sabotage. The Marines recruitment 
center has no right to exist. That institution exists primarily for the 
purposes of recruiting politically marginalized people into the ranks of 
the Marines, who then enforce the policies of America's corporate state 
through murder and violence. Its sheer existence is an affront to human 
rights.

We encourage everyone in America to refuse to participate in the invasion 
and find how he or she can directly change the profitability of the war. It 
is also vital that there is support for those who are engaged in 
non-participation and direct action. With these two strategies put into 
practice, we can potentially avert a humanitarian disaster.

The anarchist position has never been something we have been hiding or are 
ashamed to make public. We want social revolution. We want the creation of 
direct democracy in our politics and economics and the destruction of 
authoritarian social institutions. We stand in defense of inalienable human 
rights and will struggle for these principles by any means necessary.

www.newjersey.indymedia.org

Foul Smell from the W/house.

 major stench in the area of the White House emerged from the sewer system 
and spread into the Treasury Department and the American Bar Association, 
resulting in an evacuation. It is unclear from the article whether the 
Antichrist was at home when the stench first appeared.

Evacuation at the Treasury Department, ABA Because of Chemical Spill
The Associated Press
Published: Jan 30, 2003
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA5S2TNLBD.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - Workers at the Treasury Department and at American Bar 
Association offices near the White House were evacuated Thursday due to a 
chemical spill, and the environmental crime unit of the police department 
will investigate the incident, authorities reported.

Treasury Department spokeswoman Tara Bradshaw said the evacuation shortly 
after 6 p.m. EST was a precautionary measure stemming from an odor that 
seemed to be coming from the sewer system. Traffic in the area was tied up.

Police investigated a similar situation a year ago when someone dumped a 
petroleum product at a water and sewer pumping station in the southeast 
part of the District of Columbia. That case hasn't been solved.

District of Columbia Fire Department spokesman Alan Etter said it appeared 
that a petroleum product, possibly diesel fuel, was involved in the latest 
spill.

Etter said hazardous material teams found the substance progressing through 
the sewer system and that fumes eventually got into air ducts.

Etter said the environmental crime unit will investigate to see if the 
spill was deliberate.

No one was hurt, according to Etter, although workers complained of 
headaches and nausea.

AP-ES-01-30-03 2348EST

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA5S2TNLBD.html

Your a coward BUSH!

William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of 
imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his hands" to 
describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass 
killing of ordinary people.
In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern 
political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W 
Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair.
There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death and 
suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that affirms 
his "authority".
In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes 
left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity.
The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered 
no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for 
which responsibility rested with the "highest authority".
Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied 
even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors 
have found, as one put it, "zilch".
Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover.
Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not consult parliament or the 
people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to the Gulf; 
he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.
Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now 
totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of 
"endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.
All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney 
and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the Union speech 
last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler 
called his generals together and told them: "I must have war." He then had it.
To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the killing of 
innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility.
He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known 
since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our 
times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have 
merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state 
terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of 
their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, 
to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American "interests", such 
as a voracious appetite for the world's resources, like oil.
When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about "bringing democracy to 
the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA that installed the Ba'ath 
Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein.
That was my favourite coup," said the CIA man responsible. When you next 
hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask why the US 
government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq's weapons 
declaration, saying they contained "sensitive information" which needed "a 
little editing".

Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American, British 
and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical 
and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions. In 2000 Peter 
Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a parliamentary request to 
publish the full list of lawbreaking British companies. He has never 
explained why.

As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page 
like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected 
to people's lives.

The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end result 
of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or 
would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions on ordinary 
lives: the blood on their hands.

Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the 
attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in 
the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs 
curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the 
clouds.

They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the 
"long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside 
a "box" was presumed destroyed.

When I reached a village within the "box", the street had been replaced by 
a crater.

I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch 
filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into 
the air by the blast.

The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and 
burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight 
ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the fo

Data Retentive.

Battle line
'American aerial radar surveillance systems - possibly even drones - and 
anti-terrorist patrols may be deployed to protect stretches of a £2bn 
pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean that is being 
constructed by British oil giant BP. The use of sophisticated security 
systems to guard the 1,087-mile subterranean line has alarmed the coalition 
of 60 environmental and human rights groups opposed to the scheme, which 
will deliver a million barrels a day to western markets by 2005. 
Campaigners fear that further militarisation of the Caucasus and eastern 
Turkey will reignite conflicts, damage local communities and accelerate 
global warming' ( Guardian )
»
See also the Some Common Concerns document
(2.38MB PDF), this Bankwatch background paper (PDF), this article by Anders 
Lustgarten from last month, the ECGD website, the International Finance 
Corporation website, the EBRD website, the London Rising Tide website, the 
Environmental Resource Management website, the PKK website, the Kurdish 
Human Rights Project website, the Northrop Grumman website, the FOE 
International website, these Platform webpages, and this blog entry from 
earlier this month

Afghanistan - Post Conflict Environmental Assessment
(3.46MB PDF)
UN report on environmental damage and infrastructure collapse in 
Afghanistan, caused by the two decades of conflict that followed the end of 
Soviet occupation
( PCAU )
»
See also this press release, and this BBC coverage

Companies test prototype wireless-sensor nets
Article about self-organising wireless-sensor networks, or 'smart-dust' ( 
EE Times )
»
See also this Slashdot discussion, DARPA's MEMS webpages, and this blog 
entry from July

Communications Data: Report of an Inquiry by the All Party Internet Group (PDF)
Report by a group of UK parliamentarians into government plans for the 
retention of communications data, essentially concluding that the Home 
Office doesn't really know what it's doing ( APIG )
»
See also this oral evidence and this written evidence submitted to the 
inquiry, this BBC coverage, this Statewatch analysis of the massive 
increase in communications surveillance under New Labour, this Guardian 
coverage, this text of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and this 
text of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act

Venezuelan strike falters
'Venezuela's 58-day-old strike by right-wing business groups and unions to 
remove the country's democratically elected president appears to be waning. 
Oil production has increased, the stock exchange reopened and the 
opposition infighting over how to continue their actions against President 
Hugo Chavez has become public' ( BBC )
»
See also this Reuters coverage

[ 28 January 2003 ] LINKS?

http://www.hullocentral.demon.co.uk/site/anfin.htm

Crawford Corral.

Mr. Bush, no individual and no nation is invincible forever. Unless you 
stop creating enemies where none exist, and fuelling the flames of 
anti-Americanism around the world, then the day will come when you too will 
be challenged by a merciless opponent... and another... and another.
Defenders of truth and justice
My heroes in this murky mess are those who boarded a London bus en route 
for Baghdad, led by Kenneth Nicholls O'Keefe, a former marine, where they 
will willingly serve as human shields. Keefe said on BBC World's Hard Talk 
that he wanted to look an Iraqi in the eye and tell him that there are 
Westerners who care and he's one of them.
The incredibly honest and authentic O'Keefe reminds me of Lawrence of 
Arabia who in the movie attempts to explain how he is very different from 
the 'fat' people in England. Lawrence succeeded and garnered the trust of 
the Arab tribes only to be stabbed in the back by the British 
establishment. O'Keefe will, no doubt, share a similar fate.
In the same way that Lawrence turned his back on his own and went into 
obscurity, the former marine already has. He took the step of relinquishing 
his American citizenship because, as he says, he could no longer swear 
allegiance or pay taxes to the country of his birth.
The Greenpeace guys and girls on the Rainbow Warrior, presently anchored in 
the Solent blocking Britain's warships from sailing off get my vote, along 
with those protestors who marched to Fairford RAF base in Gloucestershire 
demanding inspection of Britain's weapons of mass destruction. I wish I had 
half their courage and commitment. I can only glue my fingers to the keys 
and hope that someone out there is listening.
Come on Americans and Britons. Let's see your mettle. Our grandfathers and 
great-grandfathers who swallowed mud in the World War I trenches have been 
designated 'the finest generation'. Let's show the world that we are just 
as fine and we will not allow egomaniacal greedy leaders to endanger the 
very existence of humanity in our name.
Linda Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She can be 
reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

This is the president that was.

One has to go back to the lesser Roman emperors of the second century to 
find an imperial suzerain as dismal as Bush. Tuesday's was surely the worst 
State of the Union address to Congress in the past thirty years, as the 
commander-in-chief stumbled through a thicket of brazen fictions towards 
the proposed rendez-vous with destiny of February 5, the day Secretary of 
State Colin Powell is scheduled to make his way to the United Nations to 
present the administration's latest "intelligence" confection on the topic 
of Saddam's deceits.

If you want to get a taste of how these ramshackle "intelligence" reports 
are assembled, take a look at "Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation 
and Propaganda, 1990-2003", recently issued by the White House and invoked 
Tuesday night by the 43rd President.

By a way of illustrating the all-round deviousness of Saddam's propaganda 
machine, the White House document cites on page 23 the Pakistani news 
outlet Inqilab as having reported on January 27, 1991, that "The American 
pop star Madonna was in Saudi Arabia, entertaining US troops." The White 
House comments triumphantly: "Madonna never went to Saudi Arabia." Moral: 
if Saddam can lie about Madonna, he can certainly bring the Big One out of 
some bunker in Tikrit and drop it on Jerusalem.

Bush's speech, if one can dignify same with a word intended to designate 
ordered rhetoric, was a backhanded compliment to David Frum, the former 
White House speech writer who was fired last year after his wife proudly 
disclosed that he had invented the phrase "Axis of Evil". No such exciting 
phrases adorned Bush's second State of the Union address. In the first half 
of the address Bush stumbled through his prescriptions to make the rich 
richer with the timbre of an inexperienced waiter reciting the Daily 
Specials. He even blew the opening and most outrageous lie of all, that "We 
will not pass along problems" to future generations, a pledge launched amid 
a vista of red ink as far as the eye can see, as those future generations 
pick up the tab for Bush's hand-outs to the super-rich today, to the arms 
companies, the drug industry and other prime contributors.

The assembled hacks and pundits of the Fourth Estate made haste to praise 
Bush for his impassioned resolve, but across the country and around the 
world the speech was a bust. Next morning CNN went searching for Hails to 
the Chief in a diner somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, but the 
increasingly frayed reporter could only elicit grumbles about Bush's 
unconvincing performance on the economy and on why exactly the US had to go 
to war with Iraq. In Tokyo the Nikkei sank abruptly, followed by falls on 
exchanges as they came on line in every time zone.

On the likelihood of a US attack on Iraq I've tended to be a maybe-not type 
of guy. But now, after all the hoopla and the build-up, how can G. Bush not 
launch his attack in Baghdad? He's got no Exit strategy, even as he and the 
mad Rumsfeld shove their feet ever deeper into their mouths. Suppose the 
troops all come home with not a missile or a bullet fired? Won't there be 
pressing questions to the effect of: What was all that about? Then people 
will look around and start noticing the mess the homeland is getting itself 
into on the economic front.

But is it really feasible to imagine the War Party flouting the opinions of 
the UN, of NATO, of much of the Congress and the huge slice of the American 
public opposed to unilateral action without clear evidence that Iraq is a 
clear and present threat? Only 29 per cent support the What-the-Hell, 
Let's-Go-It-Alone path.

The coverage of anti-war protests round the world on January 18 has been 
scandalously bad. Many reporters and editors opted for demure phrases such 
as "tens of thousands", which scarcely does justice to turn-outs in excess 
of quarter of a million. Friends of mine at the demonstration in Washington 
DC said the one last October was double that of the first, in the spring of 
2002, and that the January 18 demo had doubled the crowd in October, giving 
a rough Jan 18 total of 300,000 (the estimate of a cop who'd been at all 
three). There were anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 people in San Francisco, 
and 20,000 in downtown Portland. There were big demonstrations in Montreal, 
Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Halifax and others in France, Japan, 
Pakistan, Britain, Sweden, Syria, Belgium, Egypt, Lebanon, New Zealand.

Footnote: At the December meeting in London of Iraqi exiles one Iraqi 
opponent of the war listened in amazement as some Iraqis deeply involved in 
Washington's plans calmly agreed that a casualty rate of around 250,000 to 
500,000 Iraqis was acceptable.

Patton: Fury Mounts

Spending last weekend with friends in Landrum, right on the North/South 
Carolina line, I found the death of the Smoaks' dog was still very much on 
folks' minds, and not just because Saluda, where the Smoaks live, was just 
up Interstate 25 from Landrum,

Godwins Triumph.

Wednesday, January 29, 2003 â?? Page A15 Globe & Mail


Three score and 10 years -- the traditional reckoning of a lifetime -- 
that's how long it has been since Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor 
of Germany on Jan. 30, 1933.

Hitler took the helm with an extremely clear idea of how he would mobilize 
the nation to achieve the program he had in mind. His goal was to enable 
Germany to throw off the shackles imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles 
at the end of the First World War and to achieve German domination of 
Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.

In the wreckage of Germany in the years after the 1918 armistice, Hitler 
cobbled together the political philosophy he clung to for the rest of his 
life. Force mattered most in deciding things, Hitler believed. To him, 
notions of overcoming the injustices suffered by some peoples at the hands 
of others through negotiation, reason and internationalism were nothing but 
sophistry. Worse, such ideas were fetters whose purpose was to keep those 
who ruled the Earth in their positions of power. Germany would realize its 
rightful place in the sun only when Germans hardened their hearts against 
other peoples and forged an implacable unity under the direction of an 
uncompromising leader.

Race was at the heart of Hitler's distinctly unoriginal world-view. The 
world's races, he held, were locked in a struggle for survival, one against 
another. The Germans constituted a master race, superior to those around 
them, particularly the Slavs. Only the Jews, Hitler thought, could thwart 
the German march to supremacy. The Jews -- Hitler and the Nazi racial 
theorists believed -- constituted a bacillus that had to be excised from 
the bloodstream of Germany and Europe. This idea, for decades the subject 
of the ranting of the politically demented in flophouses and beer halls, 
ultimately became the basis for the murder of six million Jews.

There was nothing inevitable about Hitler's rise to power. He became 
chancellor for the very good reason that his party won the largest number 
of votes in free elections. But without the active scheming of members of 
Germany's ruling elite, he never would have been sworn in on that fateful 
January day.

Hitler's electoral support was actually slipping on the eve of his 
accession to power. While the Nazis won 37.4 per cent of the vote in the 
parliamentary election in July of 1932 -- their highest total in a free 
election -- this fell to 33.1 per cent in November of 1932 in Germany's 
last free parliamentary election.

It took Hitler just over a year and a half to acquire absolute power after 
becoming chancellor. One would like to be able to record that -- as Hitler 
built concentration camps, set in train the highly visible and ferocious 
persecution of Jews, and created a military force with the clear goal of 
assaulting neighbouring countries -- Germans soured on their leader. The 
reverse was true.

Hitler's rearmament put unemployed Germans back to work. He sailed from 
triumph to triumph in foreign policy, swallowing Austria and Czechoslovakia 
without war. On the eve of the Second World War, historians agree that 
Hitler's popularity with the German people was immense, that he was the 
most idolized leader in the world with his own people.

Germany's early victories in the Second World War convinced Hitler's 
adoring public that he was a military as well as a political genius. It was 
his inability to accept that he and Germany were subject to any limits that 
brought him down. Invading the Soviet Union in June of 1941 and recklessly 
declaring war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor in December 
of 1941 sealed his fate.

On Jan. 30, 1943, 10 years to the day after Hitler was sworn in as 
chancellor, Hermann Goering, the Nazi air force chief, broadcast to the 
German people a "funeral oration" for the doomed German Sixth Army at 
Stalingrad. Twenty-seven months later, the Soviet army was in Berlin, the 
Allies were closing in, and Hitler had shot himself in his bunker.

If Hitler's totalitarianism and his maniacal drive to remake the world in 
his own image have a distinctly 20th-century feel about them, they also 
remain a stark warning in our new century. A lifetime after he took power, 
exclusionism, ethnic cleansing, genocide and the idolization of leaders who 
seem to be able to solve problems through force are very much a part of our 
world. And the weapons Hitler deployed were mere toys in comparison to the 
weapons today's great states possess.

James Laxer is a professor of political science at York University.

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleN...

Green peace or pukeyellow war?

Mon 27 January 2003
UNITED KINGDOM/Southhampton

http://www.greenpeace.org/news/details?item_id=121583

Greenpeace flag ship, the Rainbow Warrior, entered Marchwood Military port 
in Southampton and blocked the departure of UK military supply vessels 
heading for the Iraqi conflict in the Gulf.

Speaking from the bridge of the Rainbow Warrior, Stephen Tindale, Director 
of Greenpeace in the UK said,

"We are determined to stop the headlong rush to a war which places a higher 
price on oil than on blood. War with Iraq would not make the world a safer 
place: it would increase support for terrorism and could lead to the use of 
weapons of mass detruction. The human and environmental impacts would be 
appalling and no one would benefit other than George Bush and oil companies 
like Esso."


latest

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/contentlookup.cfm?ucidparam=20030128095001&Menupoint=D-J 


As night fell, the remaining volunteers on board the Magdelana Green were 
removed from the site by police climbers and later released. The Rainbow 
Warrior remained in position and continued to prevent vessels from being 
able to load their cargo or to set sail.

During the night a strong squall started up and the Rainbow Warrior began 
to drag its anchor. It was impossible to remain in position, even with the 
engines on, so the decision was made to move the ship out of the port. The 
ship has taken up safer anchorage in open water and is holding its postion 
in the Solent. The Rainbow Warrior will remain there until it is safe to 
continue with our campaign.

We are continuing with our global campaign to prevent a military attack on 
Iraq that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and increase the 
chances of weapons of mass destruction being used.

Greenpeace is opposed to war in Iraq, whether or not an attack is 
sanctioned by the United Nations, because it would have devastating human 
and environmental consequences. According to military and health experts a 
conventional war could kill over 200,000 people, mainly civilians, and a 
further quarter of a million could die from famine and disease (MEDACT). If 
war escalates to involve chemical or nuclear weapons the death toll could 
even run into millions.
more at

http://www.ccmep.org/2003_articles/Iraq/012703_greenpeace_activists_block_milit.htm

www.greenpeace.org/homepage/

Curates Egg.

I would rather eat my keyboard than watch the State of the Union speech, so 
consider this article an act of sacrificial public service.
The most irritating thing about the State of the Union is that we are a 
captive audience  in every way. This guy taxes us, spends our money on 
stuff he likes, sends our kids to war on his decision, lies to us, dares to 
believe that his personal will is somehow more important than yours or mine 
or anyone else's solely because he managed to eke out a few more electoral 
votes than Gore two years ago, and to top it off, expects that we will 
watch for more than an hour as he prattles, while his minions interrupt him 
only to stand and applaud.
Where to begin to criticize? George Bush is the biggest spender since 
Lyndon Johnson, increasing federal spending at a rate twice that of 
Clinton, and yet he stands up and demands spending restraint, seeming to 
blame everyone but himself.
He talks about freedom and opportunity and then brags about his new 
bureaucracies, spending programs, mandates, comprehensive plans, 
regulations, and goals concerning all our lives, from how our kids are 
educated to the cars we drive to the way we care for those in need.
He claims to care for life, decries partial-birth abortion, but refuses to 
rule out the use of nuclear weapons in the war he is plotting. He calls on 
America to feed the entire world, liberate all its women, educate all its 
children, and cure all its sick, even as ghettos rife with every social 
pathology languish miles from the White House.
Hypocrisy? He denounces bureaucrats and praises innovation only to demand a 
huge new boondoggle program to put researchers on the dole. Indeed, the 
underlying assumption behind the entire speech was that Americas 
commitment is identical to his own commitment, which is reflected in his 
plans for your money.
Dont write me to say that he wants to cut taxes, and so we should like 
him. Every few minutes, we heard spending numbers: tens and hundreds of 
millions, tens and hundreds of billions! It is never too much, and nothing 
is outside his purview. Indeed, he calls for the federal government, under 
his leadership, to "transform" our "souls." He went further: he says he is 
defending the "hopes of all mankind."
His entire foreign policy seems like a massive effort to incite every 
terrorist in the world against this country, and otherwise encourage every 
small country to arm to the teeth against the US threat. From the 
governments point of view, such would only increase the power of D.C., so 
one has to wonder whether this is the point after all. And not to nitpick, 
but how can he at once say that Iraq is despotic for ignoring the UN even 
as he brags that he will ignore the UN if he chooses?
"The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others I 
will defend the freedom and security of the American people."
Are these not the words of a dictator?
It's too much! There should be a break at the midway point, in which we 
could broadcast messages like: You are our servant, not our master! 
Everything you do, you do with our money! There are three branches of 
government, and you only represent one! The powers not granted to you are 
reserved to the states and the people! You are not king of the world! The 
founders envisioned frequent impeachments!
Instead, we must sit and sit and watch a despotic display that seems like 
an import from the times of Pharaohs and Caesars, or the modern world of 
dictators and commissars. What does this one fellow, holed up in the White 
House, living off other people's money, surrounded by sycophants and 
pollsters, know about the state of the union?
The speech was particularly bad this year because we are dealing with a man 
who has clearly lost perspective. He speaks about his desire for peace even 
as he ignores the whole world's plea for him not to bomb and kill. He talks 
about a war on terror but the words Osama Bin Laden never pass his lips. He 
speaks of all the things the government will do to make us prosperous even 
as a two-year track record has failed to put a dent in the worsening 
recession.
Indeed, his language seems to reflect a very dangerous state of mind. He 
habitually speaks about America as identical to the central state, and 
seems to regard that state as incarnated in himself  the entire apparatus 
of government embodied in his person. His will is the people's will, the 
perfect realization of Rousseau's fantasy. But rather than the language of 
the French Revolution, he uses the cadences of his evangelical 
constituents, invoking God and quoting old-time hymns.
Americans have a hard time recognizing just how fascistically scary all 
this is because we are surrounded by it all the time, and we read and watch 
a media that rarely draws attention to it. But foreigners see it.
Hardly a day goes by when I don't receive a call from abroad, usually from 
some classical liberal scholar or supporter, who asks wi

Flock of black seagulls.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi has condemned an allegation by US 
President George W Bush that Iran is developing weapons of mass destruction.
"Whatever comments Bush made on Iran's pursuing weapons of mass destruction 
are totally baseless, superficial and wrong," he told reporters in Tehran.

Iran is fending off charges levelled at Iraq
He also rejected comments about democracy in Iran, saying the Islamic 
Republic did not need outside advice.

However, Mr Bush's references to Iran, made during his State of the Union 
speech, were milder than in his "axis of evil" speech in 2002 and he only 
referred to Iran's neighbour Iraq as "evil".

"In Iran, we continue to see a government that represses its people, 
pursues weapons of mass destruction and supports terror," Mr Bush said.

Mr Kharrazi replied that: "The Iranian nation does not need to get advice 
from outside."

Bush 'losing support'

Referring directly to Iraq, the minister said: "We are neutral but that 
does not mean we are indifferent.

Washington broke diplomatic ties after students stormed its embassy in 
Tehran in 1979 and took 52 people hostage for 444 days.

Mr Kharrazi accused the US of seeking to create "an atmosphere of security 
tension, inside [the US] and outside, especially in the Middle East".

A commentary on Iranian radio on Wednesday accused President Bush of 
seeking to distract attention from America's domestic troubles by going to 
war with Iraq, but failing to enlist support.

"When he speaks today about Iraq and Saddam Hussein missing the opportunity 
to disarm, he still cannot speak directly about his plan to attack Iraq," 
the commentary said.

"This is because he knows that the current mood in the world is no longer 
prepared to put up with America's unilateral policies

"George Bush is facing a greater challenge to keep hot the furnace of his 
warmongering propaganda."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2706751.stm

3 amigo's.

Three anarchist still in prison in Valencia since 10-15-2002 (english)
cna-abc palma de mallorca 7:03pm Wed Jan 29 '03
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  article#232252

3 anarchist remain in prison since the last october. This 2nd of february 
will be an international struggle day in solidarity with them

www.chentolos.com

Unarrested.

 Arresting Disobedience
by Jessica Azulay

ZNet Sustainer Program

January 23, 2003

Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Washington, DC and San Francisco 
last weekend, yet it looks like the U.S. is probably going to war anyway. 
The large, peaceful protests illustrated the size of our antiwar movement 
and certainly sent a powerful message to America that this war will not go 
unchallenged. But as coverage of the demonstrations dies down, it becomes 
increasingly obvious that hundreds of thousands taking to the streets, 
chanting, drumming, and propagandizing will not be enough to halt the war 
machine. And while outrage that Bush and company seem to be ignoring the 
will of the dissenting American majority is justified, we should not be 
surprised by elites decisions to ignore our protest.

As we consider more confrontational forms of protest, we need to keep our 
main goal of raising social costs always in mind. If we are to send a 
strong message to those in power, we must make it clear to them that waging 
war will cause more and more people to engage in activities that challenge 
their authority. In a society built on the obedient participation of its 
members, nothing is scarier than the threat of massive insubordination and 
noncompliance. Elites do not listen to moral reasoning or argument, but 
defiance is a language they will respond to because it threatens the very 
basis of their power, something they hold dear.

There are many ways that activists can escalate their antiwar commitment, 
such as direct action, strikes, boycotts, etc. So far, however, the most 
popular method seems to be civil disobedience. The term civil 
disobedience aptly describes a form of protest aimed at nonviolently 
defying the laws and status quo imposed on our society by the institutions 
that make war. It is activists willingness to disobey, even at great risks 
to their health and freedom, that challenges those laws and institutions. 
Since civil disobedience brings activists in direct confrontation with the 
law, it is often associated with mass arrests. It is important, however, 
that participants in civil disobedience tactics maintain a commitment to 
the defiance that scares elites so much.

Though arrests and jail time will sometimes be the inevitable consequences 
of disobedience, it is critical that arrest never becomes the main 
objective. Surrendering yourself to the U.S. justice system can be an 
extremely disempowering and horrible experience. Many of us try to avoid it 
if possible and for good reason. Why should we enter into actions with the 
intention of giving up our rights? We neednt assume or accept that the 
result of expressing our dissent will be arrest or incarceration. We must 
be prepared for it, but we should not willingly consent to or seek it.

In the last several months, some groups have done a great job of defining 
their targets of civil disobedience and confronting those targets with 
incredible determination and rebelliousness. They have used language, 
propaganda, and symbols that are easy to understand. All of this is 
important because in order for defiance to spread it must be empowering and 
accessible. When activists use their bodies and voices to try to shut down 
or impede the function of institutions that facilitate war, they have the 
potential to draw negative public attention to those institutions. When 
protestors expression of disobedience and non-compliance help them achieve 
their antiwar goals and allow them to forcefully express their dissent, it 
can inspire and uplift them and other activists.

On the other hand, I have witnessed several scenarios in which activists 
orchestrated and/or facilitated their own arrests. They walked into action 
with the intention of getting arrested, though most did not actually engage 
in activity confrontational enough to immediately provoke such an outcome. 
Some examples of this are: activists standing in front of buildings without 
actually blocking entrances, activists blockading entrances that were not 
actually being used, activists sitting down in intersections that were not 
open to traffic. In many of these situations, the determination to get 
arrested was so strong that it became the focus of the activity. In one 
case, for instance, when police asked what the activists demands were they 
said, Arrest us. In many situations, trying to negotiate against arrest 
was not considered. No one questioned whether or not there was actual legal 
basis for the arrests and no one demanded that the police respect the first 
amendment rights of the activists.

As a witness, I came away feeling extremely disempowered, alienated, and 
even angry. In situations where the goal or intended message of an action 
is arrest, the idea of disobedience gets subverted. There is not much 
defiant or threatening about activists who freely submit themselves to the 
mercy of the system. For these demonstrations, it seemed as if a vital

How to damage the nosecone of a US warplane.

US military plane damaged on runway
RTE online is reporting the arrest of a women at Shannon who is "being 
questioned about damage to an American military plane there."

They claim the women has been staying at the peace camp and that "It is 
understood the nose of a US Navy cargo aircraft was damaged in an incident 
on the tarmac early this morning."

If the story is true then this is the sixth succesful Direct Action at 
Shannon in the last year and the second in which a US military plane was 
damaged. The largest of these actions back in October saw 150 people take 
part in breaking down part of the perimeter fence and then entering the 
airfield itself. A detailed report on this with photos is at 
http://struggle.ws/wsm/news/2002/shannonOCT.html and more reports on 
protests in general at Shannon are at http://struggle.ws/wsm/shannon.html

These direct actions in Ireland are part of a growing international 
anti-war movement that says protesting the war is not enough, we must take 
action against the war machine. Recent actions have seen blockades of 
military bases in Britain while in San Francisco up to 2,000 people 
attacked the INS office. More reports on these and background information 
on the war online at http://struggle.ws/stopthewar.html

related link: http://struggle.ws/wsm/shannon.html

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/29/3870711
500,000 euro's has been mentioned.Good one!

Animal Liberation Front.

The following essay appears in the current issue of "The 'A' Word", a 
little magazine out of Seattle. It is currently on it's third issue, and I 
plan on doing it at least on a bi-monthly basis.
This is the first version of the essay, "Speciesism and its Discontents", 
and I would happily and thankfully take constructive criticism, in the 
hopes of developing the ideas further.

We are interested in expanding our distribution (currently on Seattle), so, 
if you are interesting in carrying "The 'A' Word" at your local anarchist 
bookshop, please contact us at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

To preview the magazine, please see: http://explode.to/theaword/

 Speciesism and it's Discontents by darby 
carrgym 

I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of 
convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other... 
-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our 
equals. -Charles Darwin, Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind

All the arguments to prove human superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: 
in suffering, the animals are our equals. -Peter Singer, Animal Liberation 
- Introduction

The constant and ignorant claim that "animal issues" are not "human issues" 
is as idiotic as saying that "feminism" is exclusively a "women's issue". 
Similiarly, we see the marginalization of the Animal Right's (AR) movement 
from the mainstream anti-corporate globalization movement just as often. 
The consistent isolation of the AR movement from the anti-corporate 
globalization and the ideology that maintains that isolation, speciesism, 
is just as detrimental to the our struggle as sexism or racism. The goal of 
this essay is not to convince you to be against speciesism per se, but 
instead to show how speciesism has blinded us from applying useful models 
from the AR struggle to our own, and, to suggest tactics and strategies for 
the future.

It should be explicitly understood that the author of this essay agrees 
with the common criticism of the AR movement, that most of those involved 
are privileged middle class white people who don't get involved in other 
issues, simply because they are naive to them. It should also be understood 
that the AR movement is entrenched in racism and sexism, and needs to 
address these issues if it hopes to ultimately advance. Furthermore, to 
simply fight for the freedom of animals and the earth, and not for the 
abolition of capitalism and the state, is an ultimately futile attempt. 
Now, this being said, you cannot fall back on silly arguments like "they 
are just animals!" or "animals and humans are different" that usually come 
up when reading about these issues.

The marginalization of certain "issues" in the anti-corporate globalization 
movement is obvious and apparent. We see it everyday, whether this be at a 
meeting, or at a demonstration. It can be the annoying white male on the 
megaphone, "leading" the march, or the activist in the meeting who declares 
that "identity politics aren't revolutionary". We see many issues being 
dismissed as being either "irrelevant" or "divisive". This line of thought, 
of course, has most visibly emerged from labor based, white male activists, 
who don't want to address their relative privilege in this society.

Shallow Ecology

Anthropocentrism (human centered thought) is the legacy of 10,000 years of 
European and "white" conquest of the earth and its dwellers (human and 
non-human!). In contrast to the savages who conquered the earth with 
massive violence, some of their victims, Native Americans, believed the 
polar opposite. They believed that the earth, including everything on it, 
was "sacred" . As Chief Seal'th (Seattle) said, "The earth does not belong 
to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected, like the blood 
that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is but a strand 
in it; whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." This view of the 
earth is known as Deep Ecology. It is the antithesis of human centered 
thought. Anthropocentrism (speciesism) plays out in our daily activist 
lives just as much as racism or sexism does. Just as often as men will get 
to do "flashy" work, while women do the "shit work", activists of all 
stripes will consider ONLY human consequences, while dismissing others as 
"silly". Striking examples of speciesism are everywhere. Most mainstream 
environmental groups (such as the Sierra Club) will only work on 
"legitimate" campaigns, shrugging off animal protections. This is also 
apparent in some of the animal welfare groups, who only work on issues that 
relate to "cute" animals, such as cats and dogs.

Actions Speak Louder than Words

As mentioned above, we cannot bring down the system simply trying to defeat 
it's symptoms. We have to conceptualize the struggle in terms of 
e

Hoosier uprising.

Indianapolis, Indiana
January 23, Offices of the Coast Guard and Army Recruitment were trashed. 
The walls were spray-painted with "Fuck Your War" and close to ten large 
office windows were broken. Two government vehicles were spray-painted and 
the windows broken.
The political, military, and economic rulers of the US continue a "war on 
terrorism" which is nothing more or less than the capitalist war against 
the poor and working people of the world.Oil companies and weapon 
manufacturers capitalize on more starving and dead Iraqi people just as 
they have in Afghanistan, Columbia, Phillipines, and many other parts of 
the word where disaffected people are resisting the brutal capitalist regime.
We will not ask or beg the politicians and generals in Washington, D.C. for 
justice and peace.We know the peace and justice of capitalism and state 
power is based upon the misery and death of many.We fight the march to war 
as we fight a world run against us.
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/29/8474739

20 million dead cops.

EL PASO, Texas (AP) - A protest by about 1,000 high school students over a 
change in class schedules turned into a rock- and bottle-throwing melee 
Wednesday. About 10 people were arrested and nearly 30 injured. Students at 
Montwood High School walked out of school in protest in the morning and 
refused to return.
``Students began attacking security personnel with rocks and glass 
bottles,'' police spokesman Javier Sambrano said.
Police used tear gas to control the crowd and about 20 students who were 
exposed were treated at the scene, Sambrano said. Seven police officers 
were treated for cuts and bruises.
About 10 people were arrested, including at least one adult, Sambrano said. 
The school was closed and students sent home.
The students were protesting a switch to block scheduling, which means 
longer classes, said spokeswoman Minerva Baumann.
01/29/03 18:01
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030129%2F180146620.htm&sc=1110

The President accused Saddam Hussein of being an evil threat to the American people. Then he said the same thing about "Kangaroo Jack.

JOHANNESBURG -- Former South African President Nelson Mandela lashed out at 
U.S. President George Bush's stance on Iraq on Thursday, saying the Texan 
had no foresight and could not think properly.

Mandela, a towering statesman respected the world over for his fight 
against Apartheid-era discrimination, said the U.S. leader and British 
Prime Minister Tony Blair were undermining the United Nations, and 
suggested they would not be doing so if the organization had a white leader.

"It is a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing in Iraq," Mandela 
told an audience in Johannesburg.

"What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no 
foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world 
into a holocaust," he added, to loud applause.

"Both Bush as well as Tony Blair are undermining an idea (the United 
Nations) which was sponsored by their predecessors," Mandela said. "Is this 
because the secretary general of the United Nations (Ghanaian Kofi Annan) 
is now a black man? They never did that when secretary generals were white."

Mandela said he would support without reservation any action agreed upon by 
the United Nations against Iraq. Mandela however said action without U.N. 
support was unacceptable and set a bad precedent for world politics.

"Are they saying this is a lesson that you should follow, or are they 
saying we are special, what we do should not be done by anyone," he said in 
his speech to the International Women's Forum on the theme of Courageous 
Leadership for Global Transformation.

Nobel Peace Laureate Mandela, 84, has spoken out many times against Bush's 
stance.

He also attacked the United States's record on human rights, criticizing 
the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and 
Nagaski in World War II.

"Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still 
suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the 
policeman of the world?..." he asked.

"lf there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is 
the United States of America...They don't care for human beings."

But he said he was happy that people, especially those in the United 
States, were opposing military action in Iraq.

"I hope that that opposition will one day make him understand that he has 
made the greatest mistake of his life," Mandela said.

e
www.utopia2000.org

Conservative as Mongo.

The Libertarian As Conservative.
By Bob Black. An unusual approach, viewing families, work, schools, and 
churches as being as coercive as government.
http://ri.xu.org/arbalest/alembic2c.html

Bob Black
The Abolition of Work Anarchism and Other Impediments to Anarchy Book 
Filled with Lies Preface to the Right to Be Greedy Primitive Affluence The 
Realization and Suppression of Situationism Smokestack Lightning 
Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder
Withered Anarchism
http://www.primitivism.com/author-index.htm
A good antidote for creeping Mongoism.

Mongo Economics.

Austrian Economics.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/austrian.html
Criticisms of Neoliberalism, Capitalism, and Free Markets.
Libertarians are unabashed promoters of capitalism and free markets, and 
generally can see no wrong with them, either historically, philosophically, 
or economically. The rest of the world can though.
Libertarian Economic Experiments.
Chile and New Zealand are often cited by libertarians as sites of 
successful libertarian economic reform. They tend to cite a few "benefits", 
but there are many downsides
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html
Left-Libertarian and Anarchist Criticism.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/leftlib.html

Drooling Retards Review.

Please circle your calendars for these international events
on transforming the mental health system, to be held
in San Francisco in mid-May:
* Saturday, May 17, 2003 -- FREEDOM FAIR on winning human
rights and alternatives in the mental health system.
* Sunday, May 18, 2003 -- FREEDOM RALLY protesting
the American Psychiatric Association Annual meeting.
For updates as they arrive see http://www.MindFreedom.org.
Right now on that site, you'll find information on:
* A Bay Area free planning meeting *this* Sunday,
February 2, 2003 (I'm flying in for it, hope you can make it!).
* How to get on the M18 planning e-mail list.

THIS FREEDOM RALLY WILL BE A NONVIOLENT PROTEST TO:
...STOP THE RISE OF FORCED PSYCHIATRY...
...CHALLENGE GLOBALIZATION OF PSYCHIATRIC INDUSTRY HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS...
... SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE TAKE-OVER OF THE MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM BY THE 
PSYCHIATRIC DRUG INDUSTRY...
...END BUSH ADMINISTRATION ATTACKS ON CIVIL USING THE MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM...
...WIN SELF-DETERMINATION AND EMPOWERMENT!
CO-SPONSORS SO FAR:
MindFreedom/Support Coalition International
California Network of Mental Health Clients
Mental Health Consumer Concerns
~~~
Please spread the word, thanks!
- David
--
David Oaks, Executive Director
MindFreedom Support Coalition International
454 Willamette, Suite 216 - POB 11284
Eugene, OR 97440-3484 USA
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] fax: (541) 345-3737
phone: (541) 345-9106 toll free in USA: 1-877-MAD-PRIDE
The mind is a terrible thing to label, forcibly drug & electroshock.
JOIN Support Coalition International and get the
winter 2003 issue of MindFreedom Journal!
http://www.mindfreedom.org

Georgetown Proffr.The Clipper Witch.

Dorothy Denning has never been shy of sounding off about society's use of 
technology. This widely quoted Georgetown University professor of computer 
science was once dubbed the "Clipper Chick" because of her vocal support of 
the controversial Clipper encryption proposal. That policy measure, which 
was ultimately scuttled, would have allowed the U.S. government access to 
keys that could decipher any message encoded by the system.

Despite her unpopular stance on encryption, Denning's dedication to 
security nonetheless earned her respect, even from her opponents. Today, 
she is considered an expert in encryption, hacktivism and emerging trends 
in cyberterrorism.




Do you think we are headed in the right direction to protect the Internet?
I generally think we are headed in the right direction. I would not myself 
want to see a heavier hand placed on it. Generally, there is a business 
case for implementing a certain level of security for risk management, and 
companies are taking reasonable precautions to protect their systems. 
That's what we want. I don't think we want a heavier hand demanding that 
more resources be put on it than are perhaps justified by the risk.


A lot of computer users are leaving themselves open to attacks because they 
have unsecured machines. How reasonable is it to believe users will be able 
to defend themselves and not become a liability to national security?
What we have to hope is that over time, products that ship from Microsoft 
and others offer a sufficiently high level of security and a simple means 
for keeping it in that state. It's got to be much simpler for people to 
deal with than it is right now.

What's the future for Internet security?
We don't have 100 percent physical security right now, which is why we had 
snipers running around Washington knocking people off. What we have to come 
to recognize is that cyberspace will be the same way. We need to learn to 
manage that risk and not fool ourselves into thinking we can eliminate it.

Do you think the onus of liability should be put on the ISPs (Internet 
service providers) to take care of security for their users?
That's a hard question, because once you start formalizing where we are 
going to put liability, the question starts coming up of who's going to pay 
for it. Almost anywhere you put it, the costs are going to end up coming 
back to the users of the technology.

If the ISPs are liable, they are going to have to get insurance to cover 
that liability, and they are going to have to increase their rates, and so 
the users are going to pay more for that service.

It's a similar kind of thing if you push the liability back onto the 
vendors. Microsoft is going to have to insure their products, and that will 
make the products a lot more costly. The liability issues are difficult 
ones that are perhaps best worked out first in the courts rather than 
trying to legislate it some way.

Do you think we will need the equivalent of a driver's license for people 
who put Web servers on the Internet?
I think it is a difficult question. Driving is a life-and-death matter. 
When you get on the road, it is not only important that you are competent 
to drive, but that other people on the road are competent to drive. And 
because of that life-and-death matter, we can all agree to driver's licenses.

On the Internet, it is still not a life-or-death thing. It is not clear 
what requirements you want to demand of people who are providing services 
on the Internet.

To some extent, if an ISP is not offering a sufficient level of security, 
it is not going to stay in business very long. It is going to get shut 
down, it is going to be hacked, and it is not going to be able to sustain 
its business. And that may be a sufficient way of dealing with it.

How do you stand on the whole idea of cyberterrorism?
I wouldn't call any of it cyberterrorism, and I don't see any of that 
happening in the very near term. We are having a lot of cyberattacks, and 
they are indeed costly and serious, but they are not terrorist attacks.

What kinds of attacks are considered terrorism?
(Their intent) would have to (be to) cause serious injury or harm to 
people, (most often) with physical consequences, but at least (with) very 
severe economic consequences. And it would have to be done for the purposes 
that terrorist acts are conducted for. This is generally political and not 
for the purpose of robbing a bank--that's not terrorism. Extortion is 
generally not terrorism; someone is trying to make money off of you.

Do you think recent anti-terrorism laws, such as the USA Patriot Act, are 
too broad?
I think that intent has to be taken into account when we paint things as 
terrorism, like we do with other kinds of acts. The snipers' actions in 
Washington don't fit the usual definitions of terrorism in that they 
weren't politically motivated. However, they certainly did terrorize people 
in this area.

The concern that the Washington sni

Use a trojan - go to jail.

TROJAN USERS CAUGHT IN CHINA Three local high school students were arrested
on Monday for allegedly running Trojan programs to steal dial-up account
passwords from compromised computer systems. Reporter speaks about SunSeven
trojan program, but it is obvious that SubSeven was used... Link:
http://www.net-security.org/cgi-bin/news.cgi?url=http://www.chinatimes.com.tw//english/esociety/89082202.htm

http://www.net-security.org/dl/newsletter/txt/issue027.txt

Securities next steps.

Encryption's quantum leap
While firewalls beef up, cryptography will get a quick lesson in physics.
Quantum cryptography, which uses principles of quantum physics to encrypt
data and track attempts to steal it, is one next-generation security
technology attracting more attention.
MagiQ Technologies' quantum-key distribution hardware box, Navajo, pushes
this technology toward business use. Designed to flip randomly generated
digital keys once a second to keep prying eyes away from data traveling
over fiber-optic lines, Navajo allows users to implement any encryption
method to guarantee a message has been securely delivered between two
parties -- and that no copy exists.
Based on the laws of quantum mechanics, the technology works on a series of
triggers: Once someone reads quantum-encrypted information, the data is
altered on a molecular level. After a correction procedure is conducted by
the sender and receiver, the high error rate found in comparing the
original and received messages will produce eavesdropper evidence and
outline the form of attack used to steal the information, explains Bob
Gelfond, CEO and founder of New York-based MagiQ.
"Quantum cryptography does not use mathematical complexity; it relies on
laws of physics to guarantee its success," Gelfond says. "You can't clone
or copy a photon in any way and don't have to worry about a message being
compromised."
Despite its benefits, quantum coding faces obstacles. In the case of
Navajo, which will be available later this year, the box can only extend
its coverage over a 30-kilometer radius between two specific devices.
Gelfond expects a range of 100 kilometers to be reachable in over a year's
time.
Further impeding its progress, the strong encryption technology's elegance
may not be applicable to most enterprises outside the U.S. government, says
Ray Wagner, research director of information security strategies at
Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner.
"The main problem with quantum-key distribution is the current method for
key distribution is good enough for most enterprises," Wagner says.
"There's not a lot of organizations that can afford to put in private fiber
optic, then protect that private optic."
MagiQ's Gelfond disagrees, countering that the existing glut of laid fiber
allows Navajo to become even easier and less costly to use. The
proliferation of quantum repeater devices is expected to boost quantum
signals much the same way optical boosters are needed for long-haul networks.
EXTRACT from...
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/01/10/030113fenextsec_1.html

Navajo beta test.

MagiQ Calls for Beta Nominations for Quantum Crypto Solution (Navajo)
Interested organizations should contact MagiQ at (617) 661-3338, or email 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
MagiQ's First Quantum Cryptography Solution (code-named Navajo)
MagiQ's first product, code-named Navajo, is a quantum cryptographic 
solution offering unbreakable encryption based on the unchanging laws of 
physics. Currently in alpha phase, beta-testing is scheduled for early 2003.
Navajo's real-time encryption key generation and quantum key distribution 
makes it the most secure cryptographic system ever, while offering very 
cost-effective key management. Navajo protects against both internal and 
external threats including corporate espionage and disgruntled employees.
The initial target market for Navajo's absolutely secure encryption will be 
classified government information, OEMs, intellectual property protection, 
and the protection of financial data.
If your organization is interested in participating in the upcoming Navajo 
beta test, please contact MagiQ at (617) 661-3338, or email 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.magiqtech.com/about/navajo.php

Great Firewalls.


Check Point Software Expands Presence In ChinaLeading Internet Security 
Vendor Establishes Subsidiary in China as Demand Grows for Secure 
CommunicationsBeijing, China - August 2, 2001 - Check Point Software 
Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP), the worldwide leader in securing the 
Internet, today announced it has opened a new office in Beijing to provide 
local marketing, sales and technical support for the growing base of 
channel partners and customers in China. The new office adds to Check 
Point's direct presence in Asia Pacific, where the company has already 
established subsidiaries in Singapore, Australia and Japan. "A secure 
communications infrastructure is essential as Chinese companies lay the 
groundwork for global eBusiness. Check Point Software solutions incorporate 
all of the critical elements for a secure Internet environment," said Limor 
Bakal, vice president for international sales and marketing at Check Point 
Software Technologies Ltd. "China is a very important market for Check 
Point. Our new office in Beijing strengthens Check Point's ability to 
deliver the industry's leading VPN, firewall and network security solutions 
to the quickly growing Chinese market."

http://www.checkpoint.com/press/2001/china080201.html

Bonfire Crypto.

MagiQ projects its Navajo to work over distances of 18 to 25 miles between 
sender and recipient. FROM...
Briefing: Digital Defenses
Cryptography
A quantum leap over short distances.
By Martin LaMonica
January 13, 2003

Scientists have long tantalized the computer industry with the unbridled 
potential of a computer based on quantum theory. But while such a machine 
is still theoretical, the quantum bit, or qubit, is ready to leave the labs 
to become an "uncrackable" security data cordon.
MagiQ Technologies, based in Somerville, Massachusetts, is one of a handful 
of companies seeking to commercialize quantum cryptography, the technique 
of securing data transmission by putting decades-old quantum theory into 
practice. Rather than send cryptographic keys that unlock scrambled 
messages in packets of data, quantum cryptographic systems distribute keys 
through a stream of polarized photons, or packets of light, over 
fiber-optic cables. The sender represents a binary number with each 
photon's polarization, or physical orientation, and the receiver uses a 
filter to read the number. What makes the technology especially attractive 
is that any attempt by a third party to view the transmission of the 
quantum key will inevitably disturb it and leave a trace.

MagiQ founder Robert Gelfond, a former Wall Street trader, saw an 
"extraordinary" business opportunity when he investigated quantum 
information processing in the late '90s. He discovered that no company was 
trying to capitalize on the quantum cryptography research being conducted 
at university, government, and corporate research labs.

"I thought this is a little early, but not 10 or 15 years early," says Mr. 
Gelfond. After recruiting a group of fellow angel investors in 1999, 
including Jeff Bezos, Mr. Gelfond hired as chief scientist quantum 
computing expert Hoi-Kwong Lo and founded the company with a total of $6.9 
million in funding. The company built a prototype quantum key distribution 
(QKD) system and started plans to commercialize it, despite the 
technological shortcomings involved in sending the quantum signals across 
long distances.

MagiQ's QKD device, code-named Navajo, is on track for beta release early 
this year, with completion expected by the end of 2003. The company is 
aiming the product, which will cost roughly $100,000 to secure a corporate 
data center, at government intelligence agencies and business customers 
with highly sensitive data stored in mainstream computing environments.

What's to motivate government agencies and businesses to embrace quantum 
cryptography, especially in these lean spending times? MagiQ officials like 
to emphasize research that suggests encryption algorithms, and even 
1,024-bit keys, won't be safe forever given the rapid growth of processing 
performance to crack these large encryption keys. What's more, academics 
maintain that a quantum computer, or a breakthrough mathematical theorem, 
could easily crack today's encryption schemes.

Even with an iron-clad guarantee of safe key distribution, however, quantum 
cryptography has serious limitations, a very notable one being distance. 
MagiQ projects its Navajo to work over distances of 18 to 25 miles between 
sender and recipient. Early last year, Id Quantique, a spin-off of the 
University of Geneva that has developed its own quantum cryptography 
products, demonstrated key distribution over distances of about 40 miles. 
Repeaters are still in development but most are impractical and have the 
potential to compromise security.

"Installing secure facilities to repeat a signal every 30 miles is a 
nonstarter in the commercial world," says Laura Koetzle, a security analyst 
at Forrester Research. "But for a short distance, like from the White House 
to the Pentagon or from the White House to Langley, Virginia, it would work 
right now."

BBN Technologies, based in Cambridge, not far from Somerville, is trying to 
make quantum cryptography as versatile as the Internet itself, which works 
across copper, fiber, and satellite networks. The company has a prototype 
system that can repeat photon signals in "trusted relay points" beyond the 
40-mile limit of competing technology. More ambitious is a quantum network 
switch under development that would ensure that the network owner didn't 
tamper with the keys. BBN is looking to test its network QKD system in the 
metropolitan Boston fiber network when work on the switch is completed in 
about a year and a half, says Chip Elliott, principal engineer at BBN.

"Most people don't understand that this stuff is real now, not five years 
from now," says Mr. Elliott. "It requires serious engineering, but not a 
miracle."

The next phase of MagiQ's product development calls for quantum 
cryptography components that would let telecom carriers offer extremely 
secure virtual private networks over their fiber cables. Eventually, MagiQ 
executives see quantum cryptography on desktop computers.

Martin LaMonica

Gold Futures.

STOP PRESS
FINANCING THE WAR
The price of gold has jumped 30% over the past year. As preparations for 
the war against Iraq reach fever pitch the price of gold continues to 
escalate. The US holds 8149 tons of gold in reserve, to support the value 
of its currency. It has by far the largest stockpile of any country or 
organisation in the world. Germany has 3445 tons while the International 
Monetary Fund has 3217 tons held in reserve. As the call and preparations 
for war gather pace, investors are dumping stocks and shares and moving 
into gold.

As the price skyrockets (it¹s expected to reach US$400 per ounce before the 
US invades Iraq), the US government will begin selling some of its gold 
reserves at these inflated prices to finance its war effort in Iraq. The 
cynical way the gold market has been manipulated to finance the war is one 
of the untold stories of the US campaign. The US government has driven the 
price of gold up by slowly escalating tensions in the Middle East. As the 
US President and his inner cabinet are the only ones who know when and if 
they will invade Iraq, their financial advisors are sitting in the box seat 
as far as making decision about when to sell and buy gold stocks.

Once the initial shock of the invasion subsides and the US government 
controls Iraq¹s oil fields, the prices of gold will drop considerably. When 
the price drops, the US Reserve Bank will once again enter the gold market 
and rebuild its supplies. Whether this scenario occurs or not will to a 
large degree depend on the amount of resistance that the US meets in Iraq. 
A long drawn out war will have a major effect on the Wall Street markets. 
If stock prices fall too low, the US will need to hold on to its gold 
reserves to prop up its economic system.

The type of campaign the US will launch in Iraq and the resultant civilian 
casualties that will occur will be determined by economic not strategic, 
military or humanitarian factors. The US needs to bomb Iraq back into the 
dark ages by using a massive deployment of firepower to ensure a rapid 
victory. The number of civilians who will die from this campaign has more 
to do with the fluctuations of the gold prices than any concern about 
freeing the Iraqi people from a dictatorship.

Q. What is the fundamental difference between anarchism and other political ideologies?

ANARCHIST QUESTION AND ANSWER
Q. What is the fundamental difference between anarchism and other political 
ideologies?
A. There are many political and social movements in the world who claim 
they want to establish an egalitarian community. Some want to do this by 
seizing State power, others believe they can do this by being elected into 
office. Anarchists are the only ones who believe you can only establish an 
egalitarian community by abolishing the State. Anarchists want to establish 
an egalitarian community because only by greeting such a community, will 
individuals have the freedom to develop to their fullest potential. Whether 
who controls the State is determined by elections or force is not the 
critical issue. The critical issue is the State itself. Who controls the 
State is not the main issue. What is important is that the State apparatus 
gives individuals and small groups the power to determine what will happen 
to millions of people. Whether people elect or don¹t elect their leaders is 
not the central issue. The central issue is what power are leaders able to 
exercise. Saddam Hussein and George Bush are two sides of the same coin. 
Both control the State apparatus and are able through their decisions to 
effect the lives of the tens of millions of people.

If they did not exercise control over the State, what they said and did 
would not have such a profound impact. What sets them apart from us mere 
mortals is their ability to use the State apparatus to further their 
individual agendas. Irrespective of who seizes power or who is elected to 
office while the State exists, the threat of having tyrants exercising 
power is a real possibility. Concentrating power in the hands of an 
individual or a group of people is a mistake. Concentrating power in the 
hands of the State gives individuals the mechanism by which they can 
implement their ideas.

Anarchists overcome their potential problems by abolishing the structures 
which give individuals power. Direct democracy leads to the initial 
weakening of the State apparatus and would in time lead to its eventual 
abolition. Placing power back in the hands of individuals undermines the 
need for a centralised State apparatus. The destruction of centralised 
authority will lead to the creation of decentralised structures that will 
allow people to make and carry out decisions without the need for rulers. 
Chaos is not the inevitable consequence of the destruction of the State. 
Institutions will be established which will allow people to carry out the 
functions carried out by the State, without having to face the problem that 
individuals or groups could seize centralised power and re-impose their 
will on the people.


ACTION BOX
PUBLIC MEETINGS
In these days of instant communication, very little emphasis is placed on 
the role of public meeting in the struggle for egalitarian social change. 
The internet, mobile phones, fax machines and even letters and books may be 
important as far as communication is concerned, but they run a second best 
when it comes to putting together the nuts and bolts you need to create a 
vibrant extra parliamentary movement. Public meetings can be that "je ne 
sais quoi" (pardon the mutilated French spellings) that helps to form the 
bonds that are needed to create lasting useful creative organisations. The 
Anarchist Media Institute has designated 2003 as the year when we will try 
to revive the public meeting. During this year we will attempt to host a 
series of public meetings about anarchism within metropolitan Melbourne and 
its outer envoirns. We encourage other anarchist groups to reclaim the 
public meeting as a tool for communication and organisation. The Anarchist 
Media Institute encourages readers of the Anarchist Age Weekly Review and 
people who listen to the Anarchist World This Week who live within a 100 
kilometre radius of the Melbourne G.P.O., to contact us if they want to 
organise a public meeting about anarchism in their area.

If they can organise the space, we can provide the speakers, help with the 
cost of the venue and help to advertise the meeting. Currently we are 
helping one group to hold a monthly public meeting and have the energy and 
resources to hold at least another 3, possibly 4 public meetings a month. 
If you don¹t live within a 100 kilometres of the Melbourne G.P.O., we can 
still help, although we cannot provide speakers on a regular basis, we may 
be able to send out speakers for a special meeting. We can use the 
Anarchist World This Week, our radio program that broadcasts across 
Australia on the National Community Radio Satellite and the Anarchist Age 
Weekly Review, a national anarchist newspaper to advertise public meetings 
and events.

So instead of sitting there wondering why the revolution has passed you by, 
do something about it and organise an anarchist public meeting in your neck 
of the woods. Even if the meeting is unsuccessful, you at least know that 
you

Critical facilities in a cryogenic chamber.

Anarchist Age Weekly Review

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~anarchist/

Number 531 27th January  2nd February, 2003
NO GLOBALISATION WITHOUT DIRECT DEMOCRACY  ANARCHIST MEDIA INSTITUTE
"WE SWEAR BY THE SOUTHERN CROSS TO STAND TRULY BY EACH OTHER AND FIGHT TO 
DEFEND OUR RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES"  EUREKA REBELLION OATH 1854
HIJACKED

This year's Australian Day celebrations have been hijacked by the whitewash 
brigade. The Australian Day long weekend was liberally doused with bucket 
loads of historical whitewash by a significant proportion of the corporate 
owned mass media and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It seems that 
the historical revisionism that has been the central feature of the 
ideologically driven ultra conservative Quadrant editorial group, has found 
favour in a mass media that appears to have put its critical facilities in 
a cryogenic chamber.

Since the High Court of Australia gave rights to indigenous Australian's in 
law to land on the 3rd of June 1992 (Mabo Day), those elements in society 
that had denied them justice for 204 years, formed a conservative political 
coalition to continue to deny them these rights. This denial of justice has 
been achieved through the passage of Federal legislation that destroyed 
both, the meaning and the spirit of the Mabo decision.

This strategy of denial has led to the denigration of the work of those 
historians who brought the cultural linguistic and physical dispossession 
of indigenous Australian's to the attention of a public whose opinions 
about them has been moulded by a two hundred and twenty five year denial of 
historical reality. The current attempts to whitewash this country's 
history on Australia Day reinforces the grotesque caricatures that are 
re-emerging in the international community about us as a Nation and a people.

A Nation that denies its history, especially on its National Day is a 
Nation that is destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. Allowing those 
who advocate a whitewash view of history to dominate political debate on 
this countries National day, is tantamount to accepting David Irving's 
opinions about the holocaust as historical reality.


OIL LIBERATION FRONT
I¹m proud to be a member of the Oil Liberation Front, an international 
coalition of crusaders who are willing to spill blood to liberate every 
milli-litre of oil held by the forces of darkness the axis of evil. As the 
self appointed guardians of goodness, democracy and neo-liberalism, it¹s 
our sacred duty to conduct jihad to protect our way of life from those who 
envy us.

No sacrifice is too much, as a stay at home patriot, I¹m willing to 
sacrifice the lives of our young men and women to conduct this holy war 
against the sons and daughters of the empire of evil. We must remember war 
is the lifeblood of the nation, without war there will not be economic 
recovery. Those bleeding heart fifth columnists within our midst need to 
understand that oil too has feelings. For generations, the axis of evil has 
kept billions of litres of oil imprisoned in dark dungeons deep in the desert.

It is our duty as the representatives of civilisation on this planet, to 
liberate these vast legions from the tyranny of those barbarians who refuse 
to extend even the most basic human rights to our oily brothers and 
sisters. The doors to their desert detention centres need to be broken 
down, oil must be liberated irrespective of the loss of human life.

As God is on our side, we have every right to use the weapons of mass 
destruction that God has given us, to destroy the spawn of the axis of 
evil. The oil that we liberate will be transported to our shores and be 
assimilated into our society. We need to remember that without access to 
vast quantities of foreign oil, the engines that sustain our way of life 
would soon grind to a halt.

As a member of the Oil Liberation Front, I need to ask myself, not what 
will the State and its corporate allies do for me but what sacrifices do I 
need to make to liberate those vast reserves oil that are so critical to 
maintain our way of life. A way of life that recognises that those who are 
ruled need to make sacrifices to maintain those who rule in the lifestyle 
they are accustomed to.

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=41324&group=webcast

Holocaust Denial.

INTERFERENCE
If I denied the Holocaust, I would deserve the odium that would be heaped 
on me. The Holocaust is a fact, it occurred within our living memory. When 
the Howard government through the Arts Minister Rod Kemp establishes a 
review panel, appoints its members and sets the agenda to review the 
content and relevance of the National Museum of Australia's exhibitions and 
programs, especially its indigenous exhibits and programs, there is barely 
a whisper of protest.

The Howard government has consistently through its legislation, denied this 
country's indigenous past. Its latest attempt to commit historical genocide 
and re-write history should be vigorously resisted. When governments become 
involved in the historical debate and use their considerable resources to 
support one side of an argument, it's time that questions were asked about 
their motives.

This latest attempt to re-write the history books and deny this country's 
past, will have long term ramifications for all of us. The ability of 
curators in State funded museums and art galleries to have the power 
without government interference to independently set up exhibits and 
programs is a cornerstone of the artistic freedom of expression that is 
fundamental in a society that calls itself democratic.

The establishment of an indigenous gallery in the National Museum of 
Australia is enshrined in the 1980 National Museum Act. An act, that was 
passed to redress the historical genocide that had occurred when this 
country¹s history was discussed. Governments should stay at arms length 
from the day to day workings of art galleries and museums. If they don't, 
we run the very real risk of seeing the National Museum of Australia set up 
a permanent exhibition about John Howard in Canberra, that rivals the 
exhibition of Kim il Sung, the "great and dear" leader in Pyongyang, North 
Korea.

The Nazi preppie's.

Tyler Gatewood Kent
St. Alban's and Princeton
On May 20, 1940, reports Joseph Persico's superb Random House book and New 
York Times best-seller, "Roosevelt's Secret War," Scotland Yard, MI5, and 
two other officers arrived at 47 Gloucester Place in London.
After having to break down the door, they confronted U.S. Embassy code 
clerk Tyler Kent, and began searching his flat. They found 1,929 U.S. 
Embassy documents including secret correspondence between President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
They arrested this 29-year-old member of an old Virginia family, who had 
lived all around the world with his father, a career officer in the State 
Department's Consular Service.
Mr. Kent was also a graduate of St. Alban's school in Washington, D.C., as 
well as Princeton. He attended the Sorbonne and spoke French, Greek, 
German, Russian, Italian and Spanish.
Kent, in carefully pondering all of the secret messages between FDR and 
Churchill, concluded (at a time when a Roper poll reported that less than 3 
percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to enter the war on the side of 
Britain and France) that FDR "was secretly and unconstitutionally plotting 
with Churchill to sneak the United States into the war."
There was another reason for Kent's concern that he expressed: "All wars 
are inspired, fomented and promoted by the great international bankers and 
banking companies which are largely controlled by Jews."
Earlier in 1940, Kent met a daughter of Czarist refugees whose parents ran 
a Russian tea room. Anna Wolkoff believed her parents had been the victims 
of communist Jews who incited the Russian revolution. She introduced him to 
a decorated veteran of the British army in World War I, a distant relative 
of the royal family named A.H.M. Ramsay, who had become a member of 
Parliament. Ramsay was convinced Britain was about to be taken over by a 
vast Jewish conspiracy.
So Tyler Kent, recognizing a fellow anti-Semite, took Ramsay to his flat 
and showed him all the secret correspondence he had stolen from the U.S. 
Embassy code room.
Anna gave copies of these papers to Don Francesco Maringliano, Duke of Del 
Monte  and a Lt. Col. in Mussolini's Italian army.
He delivered copies to Rome and, shortly thereafter, Hans Mackenson, German 
ambassador to Italy sent them to Berlin. Included was a May 16 message sent 
by FDR to Churchill six days after he took over as prime minister when 
France was falling. This message, about sending 50 U.S. destroyers to the 
British would have been a disaster if learned about by a strongly 
isolationist Congress.
The arresting British found in Kent's apartment duplicate keys to the U.S. 
Embassy code room, and steel cabinet plastered with stickers proclaiming: 
"THIS IS A JEW'S WAR."
The British took Kent to U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, who 
strongly denounced this traitor. Then the British took Kent to Brixton prison.
Kent was denied any diplomatic immunity. Upon recommendation by Ambassador 
Kennedy, he was fired by the State Department.
A British jury, during a secret trial, after four days of testimony, 
sentenced Kent to 7 years on the Isle of Wight, at a camp for political 
prisoners. And that led to a massive round-up of British fascists, 
including Kent's lady friend Anna and Col. Ramsay.
In December 1945, the British deported Tyler Kent to the United States. His 
former employer the Department of State showed no interest in prosecuting 
him  with one official (whom the State Department has not identified) 
commenting: "We do not give a damn what happens to him." So, this 
well-educated traitor went free for the next 43 years and died in a Texas 
trailer park, when he surely should have been in prison for the rest of his 
life.
At St. Alban's, the alumni office recalled that Tyler Kent disassociated 
himself entirely from the school and died in 1988.
Fifteen other St. Alban's alumni gave their lives in the service of this 
country during World War II, the best known being Jimmy Trimble who played 
pro baseball with the Washington Senators before he was killed in action at 
Iwo Jima.
FROM
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30721
William Kolepaugh
Admiral Farragut Academy, M.I.T.
Willy Kolepaugh came from a respected Connecticut family who were friends 
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Attorney General Frances Biddle.
He attended New Jersey's Admiral Farragut Academy, and then M.I.T., where 
he studied Marine engineering  but too much drinking and too little study 
led to his flunking out.
Willy was something of a loner. He developed a pride in the fact that his 
maternal grandparents had migrated to the United States from Germany. When 
Hitler's forces initially won so many battles, Kolepaugh took vocal pride 
even after he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. In 1943, his expressions of Nazi 
sympathies led to his being discharged "For the good of the Service."
In 1944, Kolepaugh got a job aboard the Swedish liner

The Stalinoid preppie.

Duncan Lee
Woodberry Forest, Yale, Oxford (Rhodes Scholar)
In 1944, he was 30 years old, having been born to missionary parents in 
Nanking, China.
After graduation from one of the South's best prep schools, in Orange, Va., 
he graduated from Yale, then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and returned 
to Yale Law School.
Upon graduation, he was taken into the law firm of Donovan and Leisure  
and he followed one of its heads, World War I hero "Wild Bill" Donovan to 
Washington, where Donovan became head of the CIA's predecessor, the Office 
of Strategic Services.
It is now known that the KGB's predecessor the NKVD, in 1942 made the OSS a 
priority target. Lee had received a direct commission as a captain in the 
U.S. Army. He worked as Donovan's executive assistant and whatever happened 
in the OSS was known to Duncan Lee.
Early in 1943, NKVD spy Elizabeth Bentley made contact with the 
Soviet-receptive young Capt. Lee, to whom she later testified as telling 
him, "I am the gal who is going to be your contact."
Bentley, a descendant of Mayflower passengers was a 1930 graduate of 
Vassar. During the Depression, she became disillusioned with capitalism and 
was drawn to the Communist Party.
She later testified that Lee passed to her "highly secret information on 
what the OSS was doing". Bentley's superior, and lover, Jacob Golos, 
notified Moscow concerning Lee: "Cables coming to the State Department go 
through his hands. He collects them and shows them to Donovan at his 
discretion. All the agent information from Europe and the rest of the world 
go through his hands."
When Elizabeth Bentley asked Lee about activities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., she 
testified: "He told me that he had word that something very secret was 
going on in that location. He did not know what, but said it must be 
something super secret, because it was shrouded in such mystery and so 
heavily guarded."
Lee also provided Bentley the information that OSS security staff had 
compiled a list entitled: "Persons Suspected of Being Communists on the 
Agency's Payroll."
In 1944, Lee's wife discovered he was having an affair with another 
communist courier named Mary Price. Lee feared that Donovan suspected him. 
Another NKVD agent code named "X" reported, after dealing with Lee: "He 
came so scared to both meetings that he could not hold a cup of coffee 
since his hands trembled".
Bentley described Lee to Moscow as "one of the weakest of the weak sisters 
 nervous and fearing his own shadow ... a long time ago I had to promise 
him that I would not write down data communicated by him. Therefore, I have 
to remember his data until I am elsewhere and can write it down."
After two years of reporting whatever the OSS shared with the White House, 
and vice versa to the NKVD, Lee broke off with the Soviets and never spied 
for them again.
After Lee stopped providing secrets to the Soviets, he was still not 
detected so that Gen. Donovan made him chief of the OSS Japanese section.
After the end of World War II, Elizabeth Bentley visited FBI headquarters 
on Nov. 30, 1945. Three years later Bentley appeared before the House 
Committee on Un-American Activities. She exposed Soviet spies Harry Dexter 
White, Alger Hiss and Duncan Lee, among others. But Duncan Lee was never 
prosecuted for what she revealed he had done. Lee lived until 1988.
At Woodberry Forest School, the alumni office recalled that Lee was a 
member of the Class of 1931 who died in 1988 in Toronto, where he moved 
after remarrying and living in Bermuda.
His father, a former Episcopal missionary in China, was the Rev. Edmund 
Lee, who became the beloved headmaster of Chatham Hall, Virginia's boarding 
school for girls.
And that makes Duncan Lee a distant cousin of mine, whom I never met.
Woodberry Forest produced, by contrast to this one spy, thousands of 
dedicated servicemen in the second world war  25 of whom gave their lives 
in the service of our country. EXTRACT FROM...
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30721

Dig Two Graves.

Presidency on the line
Jan 30
Peter Hartcher in Washington

US planning over the past year for the confrontation with Iraq has put 
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's survival in jeopardy, but now it also 
endangers another leader - America's George Bush.

The combination of Bush's troop deployments, diplomatic insistence and 
political rhetoric has carried him across a threshold of commitment. He 
cannot pull back and expect to win re-election.

With his Iraq venture, he has now put at stake his personal credibility, 
the viability of his presidency, the strategy of pre-emption, the 
plausibility of US commitments in the Middle East, the fate of the 
Republican Party, and the future of US conservatism.

In his State of the Union address yesterday, the US President said of the 
behaviour of the Iraqi regime: "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."

This could be subject to political paraphrase: "If Bush does not triumph 
decisively over Hussein, then Bush's America has no meaning.''

The US has 160,000 troops and four aircraft carrier battle groups 
converging on Iraq's borders, the biggest mobilisation since the 1991 Gulf 
War.

Bush has declared that he will send his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, 
to issue a demarche to the UN Security Council to support a war or get out 
of the way.

And he has presented to the biggest possible presidential audience the task 
of confronting Iraq as a national and global, security and humanitarian, 
political and moral responsibility of the highest order.

He likened the Iraqi dictator's plans for dominance of the Middle East to 
"Hitlerism, militarism and communism".

Then he said: "Once again we are called to defend the safety of our people, 
and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility."

By marshalling all the power of the US and of the presidency in this 
escalating commitment, Bush has obliged himself to forge ahead at any cost 
to defeat Hussein.

To do anything less would invite destruction at the hands of his 
conservative base. The peace vote would rejoice in a Bush backdown, but the 
Democrats' supporters would still not vote for him and he would be ruined.

So Bush's course is now set, and he is quite prepared to wreck the UN-based 
international order to fulfil it. As he said himself in his address: "Our 
war against terror is a contest of will, in which perseverance is power."

Bush will now, by the sheer weight of the commitments he has thrown into 
the task, be obliged to persevere both at home and abroad at almost any 
cost to defeat Hussein.

Unless Hussein, by some miracle, goes into early retirement, Bush and 
Hussein cannot both survive.

http://afr.com/world/2003/01/30/FFXYXWEMIBD.html

Camp Peary the Fort Benning of the CIA.

Recruiting profits
"The Recruit," the new movie exploiting former Camp Peary 
instructor-turned-spy Harold Nicholson, opens everywhere Friday. Marketing 
of the film and spinoff products has been in the works for months to build 
buzz toward a blockbuster. The irony is that such publicity is anathema to 
the super-secret training base..( The Virginia Gazette, 29 Jan 03)
http://www.cicentre.com/

TTIC the new TIA.

C.I.A. Director Will Lead Terror Center
President Bush said tonight that he would create a Terrorist Threat 
Integration Center to merge units at the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies 
into a single government unit intended to strengthen the collection and 
analysis of foreign and domestic terror threats.( New York Times, 29 
Jan 03)
Terrorism Agency Planned
President Bush announced plans last night for a new center to integrate 
intelligence on terrorism collected at home and abroad, saying it was 
necessary to create the most comprehensive picture of possible threats to 
the United States and its citizens.( Washington Post, 29 Jan 03)
RR for both.

Ripping Cisco.

Cybercrime, they just don't mention it
January 30 2003
Criminals are not only stealing money on the Internet, but ideas, business 
plans and bidding strategies, writes Bob Tedeschi in New York.
Cybercrime, long a painful side effect of the innovations of Internet 
technology, is reaching new dimensions, security experts say.
Spurred by a tightening economy, the increasing riches flowing through 
cyberspace and the relative ease of such crimes, technically skilled 
thieves and rank-and-file employees are stealing millions if not billions 
of dollars a year from businesses in the United States and abroad, 
according to consultants who track cybercrime.

Thieves are not just diverting cash from company bank accounts, these 
experts say. They are pilfering valuable information like business 
development strategies, new product specifications or contract bidding 
plans and selling the data to competitors.

"Criminal activity on the Internet is growing - not steadily, but 
exponentially, both in frequency and complexity," said Larry Ponemon, 
chairman of the Ponemon Institute, an information management group and 
consultancy. "Criminals are getting smarter and figuring out ways to beat 
the system."

The number of successful, and verifiable, worldwide hacker incidents for 
the month of January is likely to surpass 20,000 - above the previous 
record of 16,000 in October, as counted by mi2g, a computer security firm 
based in London.
Others have also offered dire estimates, although the dollar amounts are 
difficult to verify or compare because the definitions of loss vary so 
broadly. Part of the challenge in quantifying the problem is that 
businesses are often reluctant to report and publicly discuss electronic 
theft for fear of attracting other cyberattacks or at the least undermining 
the confidence of their customers, suppliers and investors - or inviting 
the ridicule of their competitors.

In one survey of 500 computer security practitioners conducted last year by 
the FBI and the Computer Security Institute, a trade group, 80 per cent of 
those surveyed acknowledged financial losses to computer breaches. The 
computer professionals took part in the survey on the condition they and 
their organisations would not be identified. Of the 223 respondents who 
quantified the damage, the average loss was $US2 million ($A3.38 million). 
Those who had sustained losses of proprietary company information said each 
incident cost an average of $US6.5 million, while financial fraud averaged 
$US4.6 million an incident.

One of the best known cases of corporate computer crime involved two 
accountants at Cisco Systems, who after pleading guilty were each sentenced 
in late 2001 to 34 months in prison for breaking into parts of the 
company's computer system they were not authorised to enter and issuing 
themselves nearly $US8 million in company stock.

But it is nearly impossible to identify the companies that have lost most, 
because of corporate reluctance to discuss what anonymous surveys have 
found to be a growing problem.

Computer security experts who help protect these companies said the attacks 
were hitting major banks, telecommunications companies and other Fortune 
500 companies - and include a great variety of attacks.

"If people found out how astoundingly large this problem is, they'd be 
shocked," said James Hurley, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, a 
technology consulting firm. Hurley said one client, which he declined to 
identify, endured an electronic theft worth $US500 million last year.

Other security consultants recently recounted numerous examples of 
electronic thefts, but, like Hurley, they omitted company names because of 
confidentiality clauses in their contracts. Some examples, all provided by 
consultants who had seen the damage, include these:

Last summer, someone hacked into the treasury system of an East Coast 
financial services company, and transferred more than $US1 million to what 
investigators presume to have been personal accounts.

In November 2001, a New York brokerage house noticed an intruder in its 
network from overseas, but did not know the nature of the intrusion. When a 
security firm tracked him, they saw that he was removing trading 
information on euros and was using that data to compete with the firm while 
trading in other markets. Estimated damage was millions of dollars.

Last year, hackers broke into a publicly held bank based in the US and 
gained access to the bank accounts of wealthy customers. Millions of 
dollars were transferred overseas. The bank managed to back out of most of 
the transfers, but total losses, including a security clean-up, were more 
than $US1 million.

The weak economy is partly behind the rise in cybercrime, said Richard 
Power, global manager of security intelligence for Deloitte Touche 
Tohmatsu. "In times of economic hardship, crime always increases," he said. 
"The more that money flows into cyberspace, the more criminal a

Gone Fission.

About 200 kilograms of plutonium produced by a Japanese nuclear plant - 
enough to make 25 nuclear bombs - have technically gone "missing", Japanese 
authorities have revealed.

But Tokyo and the United Nations' nuclear watchdog maintain that the 
shortfall is the result of miscalculation and measuring errors, rather than 
the plutonium being diverted for weapons production.

The Japanese Government has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency 
that since 1977, the Tokai nuclear reprocessing plant, 100 kilometres 
north-east of Tokyo, has extracted 6890 kilograms from spent nuclear fuel - 
206 kilograms less than initial projections.

Inquiries into the "missing" plutonium began in 1987 after the agency 
pointed out that the plant's records showed discrepancies.

Japanese officials said on Tuesday the shortfall was the result of problems 
in calculating the amount of plutonium, and the dilution of it into waste 
water.
The ministry in charge of the plant denied that any plutonium had been 
diverted for weapons, but acknowledged there was a need for better 
measuring systems.

The agency said it accepted the explanations for the shortfall.

It said the Japanese were correcting the amount of plutonium they had 
declared in past reports to the agency. "The corrected amounts are expected 
to be in line with the IAEA's own independent verification data and based 
on measurement methodologies endorsed by the IAEA," the statement said.

"The IAEA has recognised for some time that the amount of nuclear material 
transferred to waste storage has not been adequately measured in the past 
and has worked with the facility operators and state authorities to 
introduce improved measurement techniques."

Agency director-general Mohamed ElBaradei said it was confident that no 
nuclear material had been diverted from the plant.

Japan has a strict policy of no nuclear weapons, although there has been a 
growing debate, especially with the emerging nuclear threat from North Korea.

This controversy is more embarrassment for Japan's nuclear industry which 
last year faced a scandal over falsified safety reports. The Tokai plant is 
part of a complex that was the site of a nuclear accident in 1999, which 
killed two workers died and forced hundreds of thousands to be evacuated.

http://theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/29/1043804405650.html

Susan I love you.


Picture: REUTERS
Susan Sarandon says she is tired of being labelled "anti-American".

Outspoken Hollywood star Susan Sarandon tonight used the gala premiere of 
her new film to criticise Prime Minister Tony Blair and his relationship 
with President Bush.
The 56-year-old actress was attending the premiere of The Banger Sisters, 
in London's Leicester Square, along with co-star Goldie Hawn.
They play former rock groupies who meet up again after 20 years.
Sarandon, wearing a red and black floral dress, purple leather jacket and 
matching boots, said: "I'm tired of being labelled anti-American because I 
ask questions."
She added that there were questions which needed asking about the prospect 
of war with Iraq.
And the star of hit film Thelma And Louise said she could not understand 
President George W Bush's relationship with the British Prime Minister.
"What's happened to Blair? I don't understand his reasoning or his logic. I 
don't understand his evolution. I can see him being seduced by (former US 
President) Clinton but don't understand what him and Bush speak about," she 
said.

http://theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/29/1043534097807.html

DVT Alert.

COMPUTER nerds are at risk of a new version of economy class syndrome - 
e-thrombosis.

Experts warn that the condition most commonly linked with long flights can 
also affect the deskbound.
The near-death of a 32-year-old man from deep vein thrombosis has prompted 
fresh warnings from doctors.
The New Zealand man formed a massive blood clot in his leg after spending 
up to 18 hours a day in front of his computer.
What began as a swollen calf developed into a potentially fatal case of DVT 
-- the clot travelled through the bloodstream and ended up in his lungs. In 
what researchers have dubbed the first case of "e-thrombosis", the man 
became increasingly breathless over 10 days before losing consciousness.
And now scientists from the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand fear 
more cases.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5909097%255E662,00.html

Privacy laws Vs Brinworld.

Qantas fingerprint plan
By SUSIE O'BRIEN
30jan03

A QANTAS move to use fingerprint scans to monitor the movements of more 
than 600 Victorian baggage handlers is expected to spark national 
industrial action.

The Victorian workers are among thousands of Qantas staff nationally whose 
fingerprints will be scanned during work hours for payroll and monitoring 
purposes.
The move, already validated by the industrial commission in other states, 
has outraged workers, who say it is a violation of human rights.

Police can obtain fingerprints only from those whom they reasonably suspect 
of an offence, or have charged or summonsed for an offence.

This is the latest example in a growing list of cases in which new 
technology is used to monitor -- and even sack -- staff.









Others include:

A TELSTRA worker dismissed after sexual material was discovered on the hard 
drive of her computer after a routine scan.

A QANTAS employee who was dismissed after sending an e-mail to a co-worker 
asking him to buy a restricted drug.

TWO Toyota workers sacked for receiving and sending pornographic material 
on the Internet.

Yesterday a spokeswoman for Qantas confirmed a trial was in progress for 
the digital scanning of fingerprints for "time and attendance purposes".

She said the union had been fully consulted.

Transport Workers Union senior organiser Wayne Mader told the Herald Sun 
there was "no need to improve the current system".

"We are just being guinea pigs for this new technology," Mr Mader said.

"What's next, vein or iris or DNA recognition?

"This process is not even being used for security purposes, but to keep 
track of workers' attendance, which is already well supervised."

Workers were considering industrial action in protest, he said.

Bob Herbert, national chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, 
said the spectre of terrorism and world war meant most companies were 
reviewing their processes.

"Companies are turning to technology for ways to secure their business and 
employees," he said.

But Australian Workers Union national secretary Bill Shorten said "some new 
devices seem to be setting workers up to fail".

"We can't condone oppressive conduct by workers, but there does need to be 
a commonsense approach to the level of monitoring that's going on," he said.

The Victorian Law Reform Commission is investigating the issue of workplace 
privacy and will advise the Government on possible legislation.

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5909665%255E2862,00.html

Women journo kneecapped by rubber bullet.

Malawi: Editor hurt in civil rights riot. Penelope Paliani-Kamanga, deputy 
chief reporter for the "Daily Times", Malawi's oldest daily, was shot in 
the knee by a rubber bullet On 27 January by Blantyre anti-riot police, who 
fired shots to disperse demonstrators. Members of civil society were 
demonstrating against the tabling of a bill in Parliament aimed at allowing 
President Bakili Muluzi to serve a third term in office.

Parliament sat on 27 January for a two-day extraordinary session to change 
the constitutional limitations of presidential terms in office. Kamanga 
told the National Media Institute of Southern Africa (Namisa), MISA's 
Malawi chapter, that she and several other journalists were covering the 
demonstrations when police fired shots at her.
"The police fired at us, and as I tried to run away a rubber bullet hit a 
wall, ricocheted, and hit me on the knee. I lay in agony and could not move 
for some minutes," Kamanga said. She told Namisa that journalists rushed 
her to a nearby office, where she was given first aid treatment before 
being rushed to her newspaper's clinic. She confirmed that she is now able 
to walk, although her leg is bruised and badly swollen.
MISA report via IFEX.
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20030127_malawi.shtml

Ethiopia going down the American road.

Ethiopia: Rejects accusations of media control. The Ethiopian government 
has hit back at claims that it is trying to push through draconian press 
laws aimed at restricting the country's fledgling media, reports IRIN.

The government said in a strongly worded statement that the private press 
often abuses its position and the new draft law will create "strong, 
responsible" media. The comments come after widespread criticism among 
international journalists' organisations and the Ethiopian Free Press 
Journalists' Association.

They claim that the new law - which could come into force later this year - 
would restrict freedom of expression and prevent journalists from doing 
their work. Their views have been backed by the International Federation of 
Journalists.

"Ethiopia is embarked upon a fictitious process of consultation and a sham 
debate about press reform while it plans to stifle the media and to gag 
independent journalists," said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary.

Human rights group Human Rights Watch has accused the Ethiopian government 
of harassing academics and students who are critical of its policies. But 
the statement, issued by the ministry of information, dismissed the claims 
as "irresponsible".
IRIN report.
Human Rights Watch report.
IFJ statement.
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20030127_ethiopia.shtml

Rochelle Rochelle.

Ukraine: Journalists probe colleague's death. Journalists from Ukraine left 
for Belarus Monday to investigate the death of a prominent news agency 
director, a top media rights group said.

The journalists want an official probe into the death of Mykhailo 
Kolomiyets, former director of the Ukrainian News Agency, said Lala 
Kemularya of the Institute for Mass Information, which represents the 
international media rights group Reporters Sans Frontieres in Ukraine.

Kolomiyets' body was found hanging from a tree outside the Belarus capital 
Minsk in October. Police called his death a suicide, but relatives and 
colleagues called for a criminal probe, fearing his death could be related 
to his agency's independent reporting.
AP report via Yahoo!
Committee to Protect Journalists report on Ukraine.
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20030127_ukraine.shtml
Slain by the evil dark lord of the Ukraine or distruaght over the departure 
of the minx from Minsk?

Net Censorship.

Uzbekistan: Online dissidents silenced. Web sites that published articles 
alleging corruption among high state officials in Uzbekistan and 
forecasting President Islam Karimov's resignation have been cut off from 
Uzbek web users.

Free expression is strictly controlled in Uzbekistan, which enjoys the 
support as the key US ally in the region. The sites are still viewable from 
outside the country and are reportedly based out of Russia and Kazakhstan. 
Since then, numerous other sites have also popped up accusing Karimov of 
failing health.
Uzbekistan at hub of regional tension. RFE commentary.
Human Rights in Tashkent, Eurasia.net commentary.
AP report via CNet.
Exploiting the "war on terrorism" to cover up human rights abuses, IWPR.
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20030127_uzbekistan.shtml

Hong Kong backdown by brutal authorities.

Hong Kong: Backpedalling on sedition law. After stirring up a huge 
political fight with a planned anti-subversion law, Hong Kong government 
leaders announced a scaled-back version on 28 January that appeared 
designed to appease the criticisms of human rights groups.

The territory's Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa told journalists earlier that 
while most Hong Kong people accept the need for the legislation, it is 
being toned down to address concerns about free press rights in the former 
British colony. Journalists had expressed concerns they could run afoul of 
the law by getting stories with information that had not been officially 
released.

Hong Kong no longer plans to outlaw possession of seditious materials, and 
authorities will limit a ban on the theft of state secrets and apply it 
only in cases where people obtain classified information by computer 
hacking, stealing or by bribing officials, Tung said.

However the territory's security chief Regina Ip told journalists that 
government was not caving in to opponents. "We are not talking about 
concessions," Ip said. "It is clarification."
AP report via NJ.com.
Human Rights Watch on the original proposals.
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20030127_hongkong.shtml

Fatwa in Jordan.

Jordan: Journalists face fatwa, charges. Editor-in-chief Nasser Qamash, 
managing editor Roman Haddad and journalist Muhannad Mbeidin of the weekly 
magazine al-Hilal have been jailed since 16 January over the publication of 
an article that religious factions have declared blasphemous.

Qamash, Haddad and Mbeidin, the author of the controversial article, were 
arrested by order of the State Security Court prosecutor, "for fifteen 
days, for investigative purposes." The article in question, entitled "Aisha 
in the Prophet's Home", reportedly described why Mohammed preferred his 
wife Aisha over his other wives.

All copies of al-Hilal have been withdrawn from circulation and the weekly 
magazine has been closed since 17 January. The three are accused of 
violating Article 150 of the Penal Code by publishing material that defames 
the Prophet, insults the dignity of the state and individuals, and leads to 
incitement, as well as publishing false information and rumours. The first 
hearing of the case is expected early next week.

The journalists' lawyers are expected to present the court with a bail 
motion. A bail request was denied by Obeidat earlier this week. The Jordan 
Times quoted the weekly's publisher Ahmad Salameh as saying that the 
article was part of a feature tackling "mythology of sex in Islam."

The half-page feature, included excerpts from various books talking about 
the Prophet's relationship with his wives, claimed Aisha boasted about her 
sexual relationship with the Prophet, which was seen as highly offensive. A 
fatwa (religious decree) against them by the self-styled Islamic Action 
Front (IAF) describes the three as "apostates" who "should burn in hell," 
says media rights group Reporters sans Frontieres.

The issue has revived calls from the state-endorsed Jordan Press 
Association to enforce a law that would give the body the right to ban 
journalists by withdrawing membership from journalists they disapproved of. 
The Association has condemned al-Hilal.

The Jordanian authorities seek to appease the country's Islamic opposition, 
claims RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard. "Not content with having 
obtained what they wanted (the paper's banning), Islamic Action Front (IAF) 
clerics issued a fatwa against the journalists. This proves that repressive 
methods limiting press freedom merely play into the hands of the most 
intolerant," Ménard added.
Jordan Times report.
RSF report via IFEX.
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20030127_jordan.shtml

Malaysian internet news site Malaysiakini evicted.

Malaysia: More grief for Malaysiakini. The Malaysian internet news site 
Malaysiakini, under investigation for publishing an allegedly seditious 
letter has been told by its landlord to clear out move out of its offices - 
in line with government efforts to silence the highly regarded news service.

The notice came after police raided Malaysiakini's office on 22 January and 
seized all 19 computers used by the internet newswire, which claims a daily 
readership of about 100,000. Malaysiakini editor Steven Gan said the 
landlord told the daily to leave by the end of February because it was 
involved in "unlawful" activities.

The landlord, PC Suria, a computer distributor, is wholly owned by the 
state-backed enterprise NASCOM. "I'm outraged by the eviction order. This 
is yet another attempt to try to shut Malaysiakini down. We believe that 
the authorities have put pressure on PC Suria to evict us," Gan told AFP.

Representatives of the youth wing of the ruling United Malays National 
Organisation (UMNO) triggered the raid by complaining to police that an 
anonymous letter published by Malaysiakini on 9 January likening the group 
to the US white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Police said the letter provoked 
'ethnic hatred' and confiscated the website's computers when Gan refused to 
reveal the author of the letter.

Free speech groups say the strategy violates a government pledge not to 
censor the internet. Malaysiakini is free of licensing requirements because 
the government pledged there would be no control of Internet content as 
part of the development of Malaysia's 'Multimedia Super Corridor' - a 
programme to develop a 'silicon valley' style technology hub in the country.

Penang-based social reform movement Aliran, the National Human Rights 
Society and the human rights group Suaram, said Malaysians have a duty to 
themselves and the country to stand by the website in light of the police 
raid and eviction notice last week.

"Don't allow ourselves to be kept ignorant, uninformed or misinformed. 
Defend Malaysiakini now," read their urgent appeal in a joint petition 
attached to the signature campaign.
Malaysiakini online. and the campaign latest.
RSF report via IFEX.

World Wide anti-War Web.

Web stokes anti-war movement. Web commentators paid tribute to the 
organising power of the internet in marshalling tens of thousands behind 
the 19 January protests against war in Iraq. They were the biggest since 
the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, drawing, say organisers, an 
estimated 850,000 people.

Sarah Sloan, an organiser with International Answer, the group that planned 
the rallies, said for many participants, told Wired News that joining the 
movement was as simple as typing "anti-war" into a search engine and being 
directed to hundreds of related websites.
Wired News report.
International Answer's website.
The results of a Google! search for "anti-war"..
http://www.indexonline.org/indexindex/20030125_unitedstates.shtml
Lets go party!
'Let's go party!' The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Mattel 
Inc. over claiming the 1997 pop hit "Barbie Girl", which it said had 
infringed on the toy maker's doll trademark.

The justices let stand a federal appeals court ruling dismissing the 
lawsuit on the ground the song by the Danish band Aqua was parody and 
social commentary covered by the US Constitution's first amendment free 
speech rights.

The song featured a doll-like female voice impersonating Barbie, calling 
herself a "blonde bimbo girl" and the line "life in plastic, it's 
fantastic." A male singer, who called himself Ken, exhorted Barbie to "go 
party."

Mattel, which has made the doll since 1959, sued MCA Records and its parent 
company Universal Music, a subsidiary of French media giant Vivendi 
Universal. Mattel argued the song, which sold more than 1.4 million copies 
in the United States, could confuse consumers and dilute the power of the 
Barbie brand.

MCA defended the song as "social commentary," saying the band's album 
Aquarium, which included the song, also featured a disclaimer noting the 
song was not sanctioned by the maker of Barbie dolls.
Reuters report.
The song lyrics.
San Francisco Examiner report on the original ruling.
Barbie's official website.

Anne Coulter looking haggard and distraught.

Sorry,Martha Stewart...
Stewart: I hate those awful photos of me in the NY Post!
New Yorker
Martha Stewart looks weary when she sits down with Jeffrey Toobin and talks 
about her troubles. "Schadenfreude?" he asks. "That's the word," she says. 
"I hear that, like, every day. Do you know how to spell it?" Toobin says 
Stewart hates the New York Post photos that show her looking haggard and 
distraught. "The ugliest pictures," she complains. "And I'm a pretty 
photogenic person, I mean, and they manage to find the doozies."

Rumsfeld makes Stormin' Norman nervous.

http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cluster:www%2enzherald%2eco%2enz%2fstorydisplay%2ecfm%3fstoryID%3d3098038%26thesection%3dnews%26thesubsection%3dworld
Schwarzkopf opposes IraqWar, is scared of Rum$feld rhetoric
Bay Area Independent Media Center, CA - 27 Jan 2003
"Candidly, I have gotten somewhat nervous at some of the pronouncements
Rumsfeld has made," says Schwarzkopf. Rumsfeld worries him. ...
STORMIN' NORMAN: DON'T INVADE IRAQ
The Mirror, UK - 6 hours ago
THE American general who led allied troops to victory in the Gulf War, 
yesterday
refused to accept that there was enough evidence to invade Iraq. ...
Stormin' Norman: Don't rush into war
BBC, UK - 3 hours ago
Former US Gulf War commander Norman Schwarzkopf has said a new war
with Iraq has not yet been justified. General Schwarzkopf, who ...

The government has put a microchip in your dental fillings!

Garofalo: Many TV anchors, reporters are WH mouthpieces
Washington Post
Standup comic and antiwar activist Janeane Garofalo claims reporters who 
cover antiwar demonstrations "always interview the guy who says, 'The 
government has put a microchip in your dental fillings.'" She tells Howard 
Kurtz that corporate America "dictates the news we are getting" and many 
anchors and reporters "are willing to be a mouthpiece for the establishment 
and for White House propaganda."
> More Garofalo: "I'm not going to go quietly into this war" (CNN "RS")

Any interest in an Ann Coulter,Susan Sarandon mudwrestle yet?

The new grazing nomad diet.

SUV-hater Huffington: "Activism is an extension of journalism" (LAT/r.r.)
Pelton: We ate up to five times a day while kidnapped
NationalGeographic.com
Robert Young Pelton, who was kidnapped by a Colombian paramilitary group on 
Jan. 14 while on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, says he and 
his two companions were passed from group to group, and being moved further 
and further into the jungle during the ten-day ordeal. "But they did seem 
to be very concerned with feeding us," he says. "They fed us up to five 
times a day. They weren't beating us, they never mistreated us or insulted 
us or threatened us. It was a very strange experience." PELTON ON DANGER: 
"I tempt fate by going to the grocery store. The reality is that there's no 
safe activity."
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45
Daniel Ellsberg says reporters on the war beat aren't getting enough real 
unauthorized disclosures. "What we call leaks, nine times out of 10, are 
authorized, within the practice of 'information management' in the 
government," he tells Greg Mitchell. "When Rumsfeld complains about leaks, 
he means only the ones he did not authorize."
Activist" Huffington booted off Oregonian's op-ed page
Oregonian
Oregonian associate editor Doug Bates says Arianna Huffington's columns 
remain "snappy and readable," but she's "dragged herself across the line 
from being a commentator to being an activist" with her anti-SUV campaign. 
Huffington disagrees, telling ombud Dan Hortsch: "It is a movement to raise 
awareness. I have never contributed to political candidates or campaigns. 
To me, that is the line." Still, Bates is pulling Huffington and adding 
David Ignatius to his line-up. (Read what Star-Telegram columnist Dave 
Lieber says about Huffington's campaign.) More ombud columns:

"Fat lady has sung, and she looks like Ashcroft"
MediaNews Memos
New Times executive editor Mike Lacey tells his employees in a memo that 
the alternative weekly chain "successfully settled" the anti-trust probe 
brought by federal and state prosecutors, and "as a result, the drone bees 
are no longer in our eyes." He continues: "Here is what our lawyer 
negotiated: All the various government prosecutors get to file complaints 
accusing us of everything up to and including serial killings. This makes 
them feel terrific. But New Times signs a consent decree with no admission 
of guilt or wrongdoing." (Read today's postings on the settlement.)

The Bakersfield Californian's 17,321-word "The Lords of Bakersfield" series 
looks at a legend that had only been whispered about in the community for 
decades, reports Gayle Pollard-Terry. For more than a generation, 
Bakersfield was run by men -- judges, politicians, and even the 
Californian's publisher -- who were part of a loose-knit, secretive 
network. "Some were homosexuals who preyed upon young men and boys, then 
used their positions of power and influence to protect one another from 
possible ramifications," write the authors. Robert Price, a reporter who 
worked on "Lords," says: "This is a murder mystery. This is an R-rated 
blockbuster."

Tina Brown says she plans to lead discussions with small groups of guests 
on a series of CNBC prime-time specials called "Topic A with Tina Brown," 
beginning March 20. "It is a modest beginning in television," writes Jim 
Rutenberg. "But the CNBC specials are another step along the way in Ms. 
Brown's slow public re-emergence." Brown says she chose CNBC because its 
upscale viewers are the kind who read Talk, New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.

Reading a few new yorkers from last dec recently I think the 'A' might 
stand for anarchy.

Help Change Bad Copyright Rules.

You Can Help Change Bad Copyright Rules
 posted by Dan Gillmor 05:16 AM
 permanent link to this item
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Web form you can fill out to help 
the Librarian of Congress come up with needed exceptions to the 1998 
Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (The law needs outright repeal, but let's 
do this one step at a time.)
Here's the page with instructions.LINKS?

http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/

Is the Rove press conference over?

"...Karl Rove has told... has said to a reporter -- Miriam Rosen of the 
Dallas Observer -- that this is the kind of candidate that a political hack 
like me dreams of..."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/jan-june03/rove_1-28.html

He's America's Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, 
Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks 
strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming 
Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush. Rove's dirty 
tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national 
stage. From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now 
directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill.
http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen1101.html

Let's examine how this creeping coup has progressed since 2000. When Dubya 
was defeated in the New Hampshire GOP primary, the Bush deceivers began to 
pile on his opponent John McCain and his family. McCain's prisoner-of-war 
record was questioned, his wife was accused of being a drug addict, and his 
adopted daughter was accused of being fathered by McCain out of wedlock. I 
have previously written about how such vicious attacks are the hallmark of 
Karl Rove - the star pupil of tricky Dick Nixon's chief trickster Donald 
Segretti. After the disinformation campaign by Dubya and company, McCain 
was trounced in South Carolina and his campaign died as a result.

Next target: Al Gore. This operation began well before the hanging chad 
ballots were counted in Florida's questionable vote counting nightmare. 
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Jeb Bush protégé and 
sometime main squeeze, contracted out to DBT, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint, 
to scrub Florida's electoral rolls of all ex-convicts. In total, over 
57,000 names were excised from the rolls and, of these, 8000 people who 
were mostly black and who either never committed a crime or were only 
guilty of past misdemeanors, were thrown off the voters' lists. Some 
Floridians with common names were accused of committing crimes in Dallas 
only because DBT owned the database for Dallas, Texas criminal histories. 
Only problem for the disenfranchised voters, many had never been to Texas, 
let alone Dallas! Since most of the barred black voters would have opted 
for Gore, the margin of victory for Dubya was guaranteed. And then there 
were the curious butterfly ballots in south Florida. The placement of names 
in Palm Beach Country was designed by an election official who quickly left 
her job after the dirty deed was done. But she supposedly was a Democrat 
said the media. But no one ever checked. As you will read on - in 
perception management campaigns, no one every checks anything. There is no 
need, just believe what someone who looks and acts official says. It is all 
so very convenient and easy.

So it was with Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan. He evened up the race to 
replace the far-out extremist Senator John Ashcroft. But days before the 
election, his plane crashed. Carnahan and his son were killed. Rather than 
fighting the fact that Carnahan was elected anyway, Ashcroft became 
Attorney General under Bush. Carnahan's wife Jean took her husband's place 
in the Senate. She voted against Ashcroft's nomination for Attorney 
General. She became an enemy of the Bushes. She would be dealt with at the 
proper time.

On May 6, 1984, a presidential election was conducted in a country across 
the Caribbean from Florida. A man named Nicolas Ardito Barletta was 
declared the winner after receiving only 1, 713 more votes than his 
opponent. This razor-thin margin was out of a total of 600,000 votes cast. 
The opposition cried foul. They said Panama's military strongman Gen. 
Manuel Noriega had rigged the election in favor of Barletta by simply 
tampering with the vote tabulation computers. The United States expressed 
concern at the time but did not do anything to sanction Panama. The reason 
was that Vice President George H. W. Bush was using Noriega and Panama to 
funnel arms to Nicragua's contras in exchange for looking the other way on 
drug shipments. Later, when he became President, H. W. Bush invaded Panama, 
arrested Noriega. He knew too much about Bush who was running for 
reelection. He had to be dealt with and he was. But that computerized vote 
counting tampering would come in handy for another Bush in the future. But 
more on that later.

Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 2001 on a Saturday that can only be 
described as one of the grayest, coldest, and most foreboding days I have 
ever experienced in Washington, DC. Call it an omen, but I had the feeling 
something terrible was in store for the country - and it was.

Although I had been writing about Bush administration officials increasing 
contacts with members of the Taliban and Pakistan's extreme Islamist 
leaders in order to gain a safe footing in Afghanistan to build a pipeline 
a

Wealthy white male crypto-fascists.


What do Limbaugh, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Cheney, Will, et al. have in common? 
(That is, besides being wealthy white male crypto-fascists?)

You all know the tale of George "AWOL" Bush II & how he sat out the Vietnam 
War in Texas while working on Republican political campaigns at the 
taxpayer's expense.

You may not know how the above hyperpatriots & many other of their NeoCon 
comrades are all draft dodgers.

Others, too young for the Vietnam draft, also managed to avoid military 
service.

This doesn't prevent these fire-breathing couchborne commandos from urging 
others to go out & kill & die for Big Oil. In many cases they get paid for 
it to boot.

Being a war pimp admittedly pays much better than advocating justice, 
reason, & peace. In our "marketplace of ideas" the best location goes to 
the junk-food restaurant called Business As Usual.

For the complete list to date of noted right-wing draft-dodgers, click on 
the link. Feel free to make your own additions - just add a reference to 
support each one. The names there now have already been verified.

www.parwoods.com/simaqian/viewtopic.php?...

http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=231700

Conspiracism.

Introduction

by Chip Berlet

Every major traumatic event in U.S. history generates a new round of 
speculation about conspiracies. The attacks on 9/11/01 are no exception.

There are real conspiracies throughout history, but history is not 
controlled by a vast timeless conspiracy. There are powerful people and 
groups in society, but they are hardly a "secret team" or a tiny club of 
"secret elites." The tendency to explain all major world events as the 
product of a conspiracy is called conspiracism.

Conspiracism can be used to critique the current regime or an excuse to 
defend the current regime against critics. David Brion Davis noted that 
"crusades against subversion have never been the monopoly of a single 
social class or ideology, but have been readily appropriated by highly 
diverse groups." When the government and its allies use conspiracism to 
justify political repression of dissidents, it is called 
"countersubversion." Frank Donner perceived an institutionalized culture of 
countersubversion in the United States "marked by a distinct pathology: 
conspiracy theory, moralism, nativism, and suppressiveness." The article 
Repression & Ideology explains how conspiracism works when it is part of a 
campaign against dissidents.

Conspiracism as part of an anti-regime populist movement works in a 
different fashion. Populist conspiracism sees secret plots by tiny cabals 
of evildoers as the major motor powering important historical events. 
Conspiracism tries to figure out how power is exercised in society, but 
ends up oversimplifying the complexites of modern society by blaming 
societal problems on manipulation by a handful of evil individuals. This is 
not an analysis that accurately evaluates the systems, structures and 
institutions of modern society. As such, conspiracism is neither 
investigative reporting, which seeks to expose actual conspiracies through 
careful research; nor is it power structure research, which seeks to 
accurately analyze the distribution of power and privilege in a society. 
Sadly, some sincere people who seek social and economic justice are 
attracted to conspiracism. Overwhelmingly, however, conspiracism in the 
U.S. is the central historic narrative of right-wing populism.

MORE ON...

http://www.publiceye.org/b_conspi.html

Fuck is this ever long overdue!

Rough projections on Carlyle Group profits for Gulf war 2.

http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=231705

Carlyle Group Profit at $1.2m per missile, and estimated gross margin
of 40% on bulk missile replacement order

$384 million


How much per civillian?

$984
The old fashioned way (english)
Meet the Carlyle Group 3:14am Tue Jan 28 '03
 comment#231728


How will President George W. Bush personally make billions from the War on 
Terror, the Iraq Chapter?Â  The old fashioned way.Â  He'll inherit it.Â

Meet the Carlyle Group

Former World Leaders and Washington Insiders Making Billions in the 
so-called War on Terrorism to capture the remaining world supply for the us 
SUV market.

King George Herbert Walker Bush, the Elder
'US Presidente'
1988-1992
Former Director of the CIA
Carlyle Senior Advisor

Frank Carlucci
Secretary of Defense
Reagan Administration
Carlyle Chairman/CEO

James Baker
Secretary of State under
Bush Sr.
Sec. of TreasuryÂ
Reagan Administration
Carlyle Senior Counselor

Richard Darman
White House Budget Advisor
Bush / Clinton Administrations
Carlyle Managing Director

Ferdinand Ramos
Former President of the Phillipines
Carlyle Asia Advisory Board

John Major
Former Prime Minister of England
Carlyle Europe Chairman


http://www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html
The Carlyle Group - Former World Leaders and Washington Insiders Make 
Billions from the War on Terrorism

www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html

Using DU against planted/hidden/non-existent WOMD."You can do that!"