Some of the December 2010 events that caught our attention...

On a cosmic note, for the first time since 1638, a total lunar eclipse occurred on the same date as the winter solstice, December 21st...

NASA: Solstice Lunar Eclipse

"Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 DEC 21,"* says Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory.

This was visible to all 50 of the United States of America. The very next day, the U.S. Congress passed what is arguably the most egregious piece of legislation in its history...

OpenCongress: H.R.2751 - FDA Food Safety Modernization Act

This came as something of a surprise, since the Senate version of the bill (S 510) contained a "glitch" that betrayed the ignorance of our elected Senators, who apparently would be hard pressed to pass a high school civics exam (only the House of Representatives may pass bills raising revenue - see U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 7). So the bill had been declared all but dead, until by stealth the villains got it through.

+

Another BP oil spill update: perhaps the best documentary on the subject thus far is the Dec. 10 episode of Conspiracy Theory. There are several scoops herein...

TruTV: Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura Season 2 Episode 7 – Gulf Oil Spill

+

The Washington Post regains some credulity by emulating PrisonPlanet.com...

Top Secret America: Monitoring America

+

There has been a good deal of suspicion of the WikiLeaks phenomenon among the skeptically inclined in the conspiracy research press (including this outlet). A representative example of this...

Global Research (Michael Chossudovsky): Who is Behind Wikileaks?

Yet there comes a time when one must set aside the healthy skepticism and get down to examining what is being leaked. But don't bother with the New York Times coverage, since these lap-dogs have admitted that they go to their masters in the U.S. government to get final approval before publishing. And it should come as no surprise that the Times along with the network news have focused on those leaks that confirm the U.S. foreign policy, or that make it look as if its policy makers are exercising restraint (the cables that had Saudi Arabia pushing for war with Iran for instance). The cable-grams are a mixed bag, and so one may find things that can confirm ones weltanshauung or not. Of course there is likely disinfo in there, as John Young of Cryptome and even Zbig Brzezinski have suggested. And perhaps Assange has cut deals with certain countries to not release cables relating to them (as Wayne Madsen suggests is the case with Israel). But yet there is a good deal of juicy material in there. Overall, among the major media, the UK Guardian has done a good job of covering the leaks, and many lesser known outlets have done a fine job elaborating on these. So, among the under-reported wikileaks of note...

Guardian: Shell's grip on Nigerian state revealed

Natural News: Wikileaks cable reveals U.S. conspired to retaliate against European nations if they resisted GMOs

Asia Times (Pepe Escobar): What is al-Qaeda really up to?

SibelLeaks as a test: Digging Deeper in Years into Wikileaks Treasure Chest

Eringer confirms: Russia: A Virtual Mafia State

LaRouche waxes incomprehensibly poetic: Some Things Just Leak Out!

+

Some things get leaked surreptitiously, and others by acts of Congress. While Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders did not get everything they wanted with their Audit the Fed legislation, they did get a one time release of data related to the bail out programs of the financial crisis, with some startling revelations. Not only were the big U.S. banks bailed out, but a sizable proportion of foreign entities as well...

Bloomberg: Federal Reserve 'May Be Central Bank of the World' After UBS, Barclays Aid

But it didn't stop there, recipients of low-interest loans in the Commercial Paper Funding Facility included such firms as General Electric, Chrysler, Caterpillar, Harley Davidson, McDonalds, Mitzubishi, Toyota and the Republic of Korea! Also, going down the spread sheet, we see quite a few purchases from the insidious Inter-Alpha banks (implicated in the current sovereign debt woes of Europe).

So much for economic Darwinism (aka "free-market capitalism").

More monetary oddities...

Cryptogon: A Billion New $100 Bills Quarantined in Huge Vaults in Fort Worth, Texas and Washington, DC

But wait, the People strike back...!

ZeroHedge: Max Keiser's Plan to Destroy JP Morgan Goes Mainstream

+

Now that more and more numbers of the American voting public are finally beginning to realize that their "representatives" are corporate whores pantomiming political discourse as mere side show attractions to obscure the true power-plays, the entrenched interests are getting a bit nervous that their old tricks aren't working the way they used to... And so...

American Free Press: Rothschild-Sponsored Third Party Effort Unveiled

For a good laugh, take a look at this call in program with "no labelers" David Frum and William Galston facing a barrage of verbal abuse from that most insightful species of cable news punditry, the C-Span caller: Congressional Bipartisanship - the calls begin at around 10 mins... eventually Frum starts pounding the table, on the verge of carpet-chewing.

+

Addenda

* We would add to the significance of this date in history: the solstice of 1638 came on the eve of a tumultuous period of British history, beginning with the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and '40, then the English Civil Wars through 1651, climaxing with the execution of King Charles in '49 - an event that was also curiously referenced this month...

Independent: 'Off with their heads!' shouted the crowd as Charles and Camilla met rage in Regent Street

And just two days after the eclipse and solstice would come, as Webster Tarpley notes, the 700th anniversary of the conception of the modern nation state...

December 23, 1310: Emperor Henry VII of Luxemburg, Supported by Dante, Arrived in Milan and Started the Process Leading to the Modern State

...something that is becoming perilous in our time...

The Clandestine Nativity of Barack H. Obama Jr.

Nevermind Barack H. Obama Jr.'s long-form State of Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth, which all of the "birthers" have been demanding to be released. A document that may tell us more about his nativity - in that it describes the program that made his very existence possible - is one that was disclosed long ago by L. Fletcher Prouty in his 1973 book, The Secret Team. In Appendix III, Prouty published a May 15, 1959 special presidential commission report on the conducting of clandestine recruitment programs overseas.

The proposed FY-60 Military Assistance Training Program and the Technical Assistance Program reflect substantial increases over previous years. The latter includes a first entry into the undergraduate study field. Meanwhile, the geographic emphasis of the International Educational Exchange Service shifts away from Europe. -Pg. 539

Barack H. Obama Sr. was "TAP'd" as the first African to attend the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii for the academic year 1959/60 (corresponding to FY-60). Wayne Madsen details the circumstances of his recruitment by CIA asset Tom M'Boya in the first part of his series, The Story of Obama: All in the Company (a free version of parts I through V available at LewRockwell.com). Madsen does not mention the text previously disclosed by Prouty, yet it offers much to corroborate his account. Take, for instance, this passage under the heading, "U.S. Training Environment"...

We have already alluded to the requirement for raising our sights with respect to the objectives of leadership training in the United States. Extra­curricular activities should be as carefully planned as the formal course of instruction, and the keynote should be something more than traditional American hospitality. -Pg. 559

Madsen claims that, contra the official story that Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham had first met in a Russian language class, the presence of Ann's father Stanley with Obama Sr.'s reception party indicates that the father had perhaps played an integral role in in his training... If so, the above passage suggests that Dunham had arranged for "extracurricular activities" far beyond "traditional American hospitality."

Another section of note in the report has the title, "Special Problems of Africa"...

Africa is the one area of the world where we have the leisure for forward planning, where we can lay the groundwork for the sort of comprehensive attack outlined by the Presidential Task Group, where we can begin to identify and groom the future national leaders. -Pg. 549

Of course this passage merely refers to the immediate goals of the program, which indeed Obama Sr. would fulfill as an economic minister in the Kenyan government; yet its authors could not have imagined how prescient they were of contingencies in the distant future...

Unless of course if we were to take a more highly speculative conspiratorial account of the overall program, which might encompass the MK-ULTRA mind control program. As Madsen notes, particularly in Part V of his series, the University of Hawaii was one of five academic centers of this research program in the 50's and 60's. There are two episodes of The Outer Limits that may provide some insight into these issues. This was a television program that aired from the last months of the Kennedy Administration into the first year of the Johnson Administration, and whose writers had an uncanny knack for dramatizing some of the clandestine programs active around that time (e.g. "Expanding Human" on LSD research). We cite "The Special One" and "The Hundred Days of the Dragon".

Another journalist who has been delving into the murky waters of Obama's history is Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily. The articles linked below demonstrate that the newspaper record, the university records, and even the Social Security number assignment only add to the mystery...

Obama: Where have all his records gone?
Footprints of president's own history either vanish or remain covered up

Obama mama: 6 lost months
No documented record of whereabouts, activity leading up to baby's birth in '61

Obama 'mama': 15 days from birth to Seattle class
Dunham signed up for assignments just 2 weeks out of delivery room

1962 Obama articles don't mention wife, son
Newspaper features on father present more evidence president's story false

Old papers tell different tales on Obama's past
Articles from 1990 cast doubt on president's 'official' childhood story

Investigators: Obama uses Connecticut Soc. Sec. Number
3 experts insist White House answer new questions about documentation



Update: January 2011

Newly elected Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie has failed in his attempt to fulfill a campaign promise to produce the B. H. Obama Jr. COLB (Certificate of Live Birth). None could be found; there is however some sort of unspecified record of his birth.

WND: Hawaii governor can't find Obama birth certificate
Suggests controversy could hurt president's re-election chances

Meanwhile, Ulsterman's insider suggests there is much afoot on this case...

White House Insider: Proceed At Your Own Peril

An aside: the curious choice of illustration for this piece (a juxtaposition of Frank Marshall Davis & B.H.O.Jr.) suggests the persistent rumour that Davis is Obama's true father... though this is a rumour we thought we had quashed with our review of Sex Rebel: Black in October of '08.

Assange: My Name & "Rape" Go Together!

Google search results

assange rape: about 27700000

rape:...................48600000

bbc assange rape:..... 1520000

+

Update: Dec. 21

The association expands...

BBC: The Assange Interview

Two days ago I did a search on Google for my name, some 40 million web pages have my name in it. Now, searching for my name and the word "rape", there is some 30 mil web pages.

Hillary understands: DNA samples can put heads of state in the dog house

Hillary Clinton knows this from experience...

DancingMonica: Monica Lewinsky's Sperm Stained Dress

A photograph of the coat-like dress, with a belt and buckle around the waist, was in the pile of documents released in the inquiry into President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.When she took the dress out of her closet some time after what she testified was an intimate encounter with Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, she noticed stains and surmised they might be the President's ejaculatory fluid.

DNA testing proved the odds of the sperm stains not being from Bill Clinton are one in 7.87 trillion.

So does this explain her motive for the following directive..?

Guardian: US embassy cables: Washington requests biometric information for African leaders

Thursday, 16 April 2009, 14:11
S E C R E T STATE 037561
NOFORN
EO 12958 DECL: 04/16/2034
TAGS PINR, KSPR, ECON, KDEM, KHIV, ZF, XA, CF, RW, BY
SUBJECT: (S) REPORTING AND COLLECTION NEEDS: AFRICAN GREAT
LAKES (DROC, BURUNDI, RWANDA)
REF: A. 08 KIGALI 00830--05/DEC/2008 B. 08 STATE
122706--19/NOV/2008 C. 04 STATE 101403--06/MAY/2004
Classified By: SUZANNE MCCORMICK, DIRECTOR, INR/OPS,
REASON: 1.4(C).

1. (S/NF) This cable provides the full text of the new
National HUMINT Collection Directive (NHCD) on African Great
Lakes (paragraph 3-end) as well as a request for continued
DOS reporting of biographic information relating to DROC,
Burundi, and Rwanda...

...Biographic and biometric data, including health,
opinions toward the US, training history, ethnicity (tribal
and/or clan), and language skills of key and emerging
political, military, intelligence, opposition, ethnic,
religious, and business leaders. Data should include email
addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial
images, DNA, and iris scans.

But perhaps these are items of relevance...

Cryptome: Uganda Bioterrorism Target Eyeball

ACT Alliance Alert: Outbreak of Unidentified Disease in Uganda

The month of November 2010 has proven to be pregnant with implications for future developments. It is difficult in our monthly summary post to capture all of the salient stories.

We began on November 2nd with one of the more abrupt about-faces in the U.S. House of Representatives in recent history; but notwithstanding the Tea Party insurgency within the Republican party, the "right-left paradigm" will likely remain intact for at least a little while longer... Until civil war comes...

Sipsey Street Irregulars: An open letter to Andrew Traver on the occasion of his appointment to be Director of the ATF.

As if in answer to the people's rebuke, however, the very next day, Nov. 3, was greeted with the much dreaded second injection of "quantitative easing" (QE2) by Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve. One potentially positive implication of this is touched upon here...

ZeroHedge: Dallas Fed Admits "For The Next Eight Months, The Nation’s Central Bank Will Be Monetizing The Federal Debt", Opens Door To Bernanke Impeachment

+

Yet on the other side of the pond, November has given Europe the hardest blows in the enduring financial world war. Ireland is on the ropes, Portugal and Spain are soon to follow. It turns out that the Inter-Alpha banking group is at the heart of these sovereign debt crises...

Financial Times/Alphaville: Worst banking conspiracy ever

And as we are looking on the positive side of things, shall this at last usher in the end of the Rothschild/Windsor syndicate..?

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.: The Present Fall of the House of Windsor

But meanwhile, a mysterious "Foundation X" is making offers to Britain that she best not refuse...

AntiPope: Did somebody just try to buy the British government?

+

On the other side of the globe, North Korea made everyone mad by lobbing a few missiles onto South Korean islands. Never mind, we'd wager that the real action is found not in these old-fashioned warlike gestures, but in things like Chinese reconnaissance missions into the infosphere...

PBS Newshour: China's Internet 'Hijacking' Creates Worries for Security Experts

Of course, when it comes to the infosphere, the U.S. can be its own worst enemy, with net neutrality going, going...

Level3: Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning Comcast's Actions

In another infosphere happening, WikiLeaks issued another massive data-dump, to be a treasure-trove for future research (even if a disinfo mine-field)...

Secret US Embassy Cables

+

A Macondo methane update...

Yale Daily News: Human race survives methane plume, for now

+

Fetus Bush for Prez...

YahooNews: The Strange Bush Fetus Secret

Subject of a classic Lame Cherry rant...

A kinder, gentler Rapist

Millions of Americans "Pornografried" on Thanksgiving

As predicted with our headline of January 11... Undie Bomber Turns X-mas into XXX-mas ...so has it come to pass, even one holiday sooner, that the full body scanner requirement would be universally appiled, that every American must be explicitly irradiated and imaged. Hence, our new word: Pornografry.


However, we did not anticipate the lengths to which the perv police state apparatus would go in pursuit of the "safety" of the traveling public. We knew of course that it is in the nature of this apparatus to have a voracious hunger for bodies, and to require yet more bodies to be sucked into its panopticon of awareness. Yet this hunger as presently manifest in the TSA has far outstripped anything we imagined. The scenes now taking place in airports across America are of abject surreality...

PrisonPlanet: TSA Now Putting Hands Down Fliers' Pants

Drudge Report: TSA gropes nun

MSNBC: TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine


The humiliations are not quite entirely egalitarian however; for, while on the one hand, Congressman Ron Paul's crotch is groped by TSA, soon to be Speaker of the House John Boehner's boner remains unmolested.

U.S. Senate Wants To Stick It Down Your Throat

As the lame duck U.S. Senate is scheduled to debate the S 510 food bill this week, so does it prepare to aid and abet its big agri-business sponsors in shoving more sub-lethal poisons down the throats of every man, woman and child in America (not to mention our four-legged friends).

While the bill may reduce to some extent the occasional incidents of headline-grabbing illnesses and deaths resulting from E-coli and salmonella outbreaks originating primarily from industrial food facilities, the more subtle, slow acting poisons such as can be found in genetically modified organisms, bovine growth hormones, herbicides and pesticides will become more widespread and much more difficult for the discerning and cautious consumer to avoid. These sub-lethal poisons are of the sort that you can't identify with any particular meal; rather, as they accumulate, they result in, say, the chance occasion of horizontal gene transfer from Monsanto's Bt corn to your intestinal flora, leading to episodes of putrid burp syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome, with such intestinal stresses eventually culminating in colon cancer. Or these slow poisons will gradually compromise your immune system, making you more and more susceptible to viruses, and rendering you a little more vulnerable to the grim reaper a little sooner than you would have been under historical alimentary conditions.

Indeed, this bill may be said to institute Death Panels on the cellular level.*

How is this achieved? It is achieved in the same way that any industry comes to be dominated by its largest corporations - by co-opting large government bureaucracies to set up regulatory standards which it has little trouble meeting (or the violations of which are fiscally manageable) while smaller companies must devote proportionately larger shares of resources to dealing with paperwork and inspectors (of agencies like the FDA which tend to avoid prosecutions of large corporations armed with formidable legal departments). The smaller the business is, the larger the fraction of its budget that must be devoted to satisfying regulatory regimes. The result in the case of the food bill then will be less small, locally owned, organic producers of high quality, unprocessed, non-GMO, fresh, delicious and highly nutritious food, and more factory-farmed, industrial-processed, irradiated and additive-laden GMO "food".

While many are promoting the Tester Amendment to the bill as way to exempt small farms and local food products, the amendment may be a fake out, its words trumped by a sovereignty-eviscerating passage in the main body of the bill:

COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.

For more on all this...

Yupfarming: Leaked trade agreements and hidden things inside S 510: Corporations plan to end normal farming

Food Freedom: S 510 is hissing in the grass

FarmWars: Food ‘Safety’ Bills Harmonize Agribusiness Practices in Service of Corporate Global Governance

+

* A sweeping inference, one might say; but see Unintended Horizontal Transfer of Recombinant DNA, by Kaare M Nielsen and Daniele Daffonchio.

And consider the claim, albeit anecdotal, in Jeffrey Smith's article, Doctors Warn: Avoid Genetically Modified Food...

When evidence of gene transfer is reported at medical conferences around the US, doctors often respond by citing the huge increase of gastrointestinal problems among their patients over the last decade. GM foods might be colonizing the gut flora of North Americans.

Finally, in Science News: Colorectal cancer risk linked to stomach bacterium, inflammation, we read...

Many common cancers arise in cells that line the insides of organs, such the lung and colon, [William Nelson, a medical oncologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, in Baltimore,] said. “This is the barrier from the outside world, and these areas carry huge amounts of bacterial flora. So these are sites in which the immune inflammatory response is going to try to control that flora — and there is always going to be collateral damage.” If that damage includes changes to the cells’ genes and disturbs their growth cycle, such cells can turn malignant, he said.

Monsanto: Devoured by its Monsters

It is one of the basic principles that one learns in high school biology - the tendency for species to evolve strains that adapt to environmental challenges. But this is a principle that the geniuses at Monsanto have forgotten. In designing monoculture crops to resist herbicides, the weeds it intended to kill have now evolved into superweeds, thus devouring their GMO crops, and so necessitating the increased use of herbicides that GMOs were touted to reduce...

Grist: Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides

Plus this debacle...

ISIS: Mad Soy Disease Strikes Brazil

Perhaps they should have heeded the advise of a scientist they attempted to silence...

Organic Consumers Association: Arpad Pusztai and the Risks of Genetic Engineering

Fundamentally the science of genetic engineering is crap. One gene expressing one protein is the basis of genetic engineering, but the Human Genome Project discovered 23,000 genes, and there are 200,000 proteins in every cell. With this discovery, genetic engineering should have disappeared into the dustbin, but the biotechnology industry is so strong. Genetic engineering is a product driven technology. If you have enough money to throw at it, you can do many things. But the industry won't waste money on safety assessment.

Consider this the harbinger of a paradigm shift... The "Gene" is dead.

11 09 10

The anagram date suggests that it was as good a day as any for generating mass anxiety...

In From The Cold: The Mystery Missile

Milcom Monitoring Post: Update: Missile Launch Off California Coast

Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said he is not able to concur with an official from North American Aerospace Defense Command/U.S. Northern Command who told Fox News earlier that there was "no threat to the homeland."

Petraeus Gives War a Chance

Some substantive insight is coming from analysis of the WikiLeaks Iraq war reports... Not from the New York Times of course, but from...

Antiwar: Torture Orders Were Part of US Sectarian War Strategy

Here, Gareth Porter argues that in designating Shi'a and Kurd forces to raid Sunni areas and interrogate Sunni civilians, General Petraeus was deliberately stoking an Al Qaeda led Sunni insurgency and the ethnic civil war that resulted.

Petraeus then would subscribe to the Luttwakian doctrine of non-suppresion of violent conflict. The opening paragraph of Edward Luttwak's 1999 essay in Foreign Affairs: Give War a Chance, summarizes the main points...

An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.

Essentially, the best that outside moderators can do is to create an arena in which ethnic conflicts can be contained until either a victor prevails or sheer exhaustion suspends the violence. As applied in the Iraqi theatre, however, the outside moderator is neither outside nor a moderator, but an invading force. In order to redirect insurgent violence away from itself, then, the U.S. military adopted a strategy of creating a framework or mise-en-scène in which indigineous ethnic tensions could explode.

But we're still waiting for the exhaustion...

•Sunday: 11 Iraqis Killed, 30 Wounded - November 7th, 2010
•Saturday: 2 Iraqis Killed, 52 Wounded - November 6th, 2010
•Friday: 5 Iraqis Killed, 9 Wounded – November 5th, 2010
•Thursday: 9 Iraqis Killed, 28 Wounded – November 4th, 2010
•Wednesday: 3 Iraqis Killed, 8 Wounded – November 3rd, 2010
•Tuesday: 120 Iraqis Killed, 369 Wounded – November 2nd, 2010
•Monday: 7 Iraqis Killed, 13 Wounded – November 1st, 2010

+

Luttwak is also the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook

Some more things happened in October (just to link a few)...

+

A British paper informs us that Obama colluded with British Petroleum in its assault on the Gulf Coast...

Guardian: Gulf oil spill - White House blocked and put spin on scientists warnings

...as the chemical warfare continues...

OpEdNews: Corexit Use Still Appears to Be Prevalent in the Gulf, Despite Official Statements

To list just a few of the casualties, as compiled on Florida Oil Spill Law:

Boat captain “bleeding from her vagina” — “I’m bleeding from my anus, too… This thing is killing me”

Chemist: Women more at risk — “Bleeding from their vagina and anus. Small kids are bleeding from their ears. This stuff is busting red blood cells”

“Constant health issues” after repeatedly going to beach — “Bloody, mucus-filled diarrhea” for 4 days with “blood running out of my ear”

Toxicologist now dealing with at least three autopsies in Gulf and “people who’s esophaguses are dissolving… these people have oil in their bodies” (VIDEO)

Valdez Toxicologist: “People are dropping dead now” — “I don’t think we’ll have to wait years to see the effects like we did in Alaska”

+

Sibel Edmonds makes note of Lee Hamilton's sponsor: BAE Systems

Boiling Frogs Post: 9/11 Commisioner's Turkey Baste

As we added in comments, this isn't the first time BAE has been connected to the event that brought it so much business (ref: EIR). As for the comments relating to HAARP, see BAE's June 2007 press release: BAE SYSTEMS COMPLETES WORLD’S PREMIERE FACILITY FOR IONOSPHERIC PHYSICS RESEARCH

Incidentally, last Friday, TruTV aired former governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theory episode on HAARP, covering its purported weather control applications. Then four days later, a near category one land-locked hurricane came barreling down the jet stream...

KSAX: Minnesota Wind Storm - Barometric Pressure Hits Record Low

+

WikiLeaks takes another massive data-dump, but it does so in the style of a social networking site, where you can create your own personal account, rate and analyse documents, with the assurance that WikiLeaks will not save your personalized information! Yes it's looking more and more like a NSA front...

War Logs

+

Another recent data-dump: previously unreleased 9/11 videos...

9/11Blogger: International Center for 9/11 Studies - NIST Cumulus Video Database Released

Curious that of all the mainstream news outlets, FOX News is the one that gives 9/11 truth the most leads...

EXCLUSIVE: Witnesses in Defense Dept. Report Suggest Cover-Up of 9/11 Findings

EXCLUSIVE: Al Qaeda Leader Dined at the Pentagon Just Months After 9/11

+

So long as we are perusing new revelations on old news...

Democracy Now: FBI Documents on Senator Paul Wellstone Raise Questions about His Death 8 Years Ago

ProPublica reporting on U.S. ties to Mumbai attacks (though rather timidly - just another dot-connecting problem)...

Feds Confirm Mumbai Plotter Trained With Terrorists While Working for DEA

FBI Was Warned Years in Advance of Mumbai Attacker’s Terror Ties

With so many trades crammed in the space of milliseconds, it took nearly 6 months to extricate what happened on May 6....

Nanex: May 6'th 2010 Flash Crash Analysis Final Conclusion

+

Much fear and loathing on coming quantitative easing actions of Fed...

ZeroHedge: A Paralyzed Fed Defers Decision On Monetary Policy To Primary Dealers In An Act That Can Only Be Classified As Treason

+

Institutionalized molestation...

Atlantic: For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance

"I'm going to run my hands up your thighs, and then feel your buttocks, then I'm going to reach under you until I meet --"

"Resistance?" I interrupted.

"Yes, resistance. Do you want to go into a private room?"

Indeed, airports are becoming more and more like Abu Ghraib...

Guardian: Humiliate, strip, threaten: UK military interrogation manuals discovered

More on that subject...

MI5 and MI6 Exposed: British Intelligence Torture Techniques

+

And finally...

PlasticPals: The Uncanny Valley Is Strong With this One

The vultures are circling

Obama knows what he is doing. His strategy to save the United States consists in this... Take a bad but "salvageable" economic situation and deliberately make it worse. The scare-quotes indicate that while the system as it stands could have been salvaged for yet another round of bubble economics, such salvation would be temporary, and the next bubble-pop could be severe enough to induce the end of the United States of America. So, then, now is the time to induce a severe depression, while the federal government still has the resources with which to hold the nation together through the times of civil unrest that are coming. Such extreme conditions then will become the spark of real and lasting change.

The above might be said to be the extreme confabulation of a die-hard Obama supporter, exhausting herself in his defence. But it comes with some supporting evidence...

Ulsterman: Economist on Obama - The Most Destructive Force Against The American Economy Today

"It is so bad as to seem intentional."

+

Obama has always projected ambiguity concerning his identity - is he an insider or an outsider? a Wall St. lackey or a deep cover communist insurgent? Christian or Muslim? Natural born U.S. citizen or a patrilineal British subject? Indeed, he seems to thrive on keeping everyone guessing, and this goes not for not just the "birthers" and the like, but also for the puppet-masters who made him their vehicle. Can his handlers always be certain that he is on their team?

Now he is, after all, a child of the "Secret Team" - as Wayne Madsen has exposed, Obama's father came to the University of Hawaii as part of a covert CIA sponsored foreign exchange program. The rational of this program we can read of in portions of a May 15, 1959 Presidential committee report detailing the expansion of military assistance programs (MAPs) overseas to include civil service recruits. As L. Fletcher Prouty describes it in The Secret Team:

Early in this thirty-three page report the committee made a key point. It stated that the new training programs... included a first entry into the undergraduate study field. Meanwhile, the geographic emphasis of the International Educational Exchange Service shifted away from Europe to the underdeveloped countries... The Agency and the military had established their positions in and around the recipient countries, and now they were going to exploit these positions at will. - Pg. 435

And so came Barack Hussein Obama Sr. to the U.S. where he met Stanley Ann Dunham in a Russian language class, the two subsequently conceiving future POTUS 44 B.H.O. Jr. on the occasion of the election of John F. Kennedy as POTUS 35. B.H.O. Sr. however became an absent father, leaving the child searching for father-figures to replace him (as recounted in his Dreams From My Father); one of whom, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist - just the sort of insurgent that the IEES was intended to counter (or just the sort of "insurgent" the CIA could employ).

It often does seem that Obama is solidly in the CIA/Wall St. insider camp (Alex Jones's The Obama Deception being the piece de resistance for this thesis), even as Glenn Beck can make a somewhat convincing case for his covert allegiance to the Chicago commie crowd. Perhaps Barack Obama is simply schizophrenic on this score. Or perhaps (we can hope) he has epiphanied, rejecting his "birth-right" and is carefully plotting the downfall of the Secret Team, while not doing so in such a flagrant way that will get him physically assassinated (as with JFK).

In any case, it is becoming increasingly evident that the vultures are now circling around Obama, as they craft controlled aversive environments with which to carry out a psychological assassination...

Obama Mad?

And we're not just talking about LaRouchePAC anymore. On the one hand we have have a "White House Insider" - evidently a Clinton loyalist - who has been feeding us little tidbits about Obama's mental state...

Ulsterman: White House Insider - "They were in shock at the president's behavior"

Not long ago, the president took a meeting. He’s late, which apparently is becoming more and more common with him. The meeting was almost cancelled. In strolls the president, joking with an aide. He plops down on a sofa, leans over and claps another guy on the back asking how he’s been. Apologizes for being late, says he was “held up”. He laughs some more. The meeting begins. After just ten minutes, during which time the president appears to almost totally withdraw into himself, an aide walks in and whispers something to the president, who then nods and quickly stands up, shakes a few hands and tells another aide to update him later on the rest of the meeting. As the president is walking out he is laughing at something yet again. He asked no questions of those at the meeting – not one. He left after just ten minutes, coming in laughing and leaving laughing. His behavior during that brief time he was there was described as “borderline manic”...

[This] was told to me... by someone who was... there. First hand. They were also left to apologize to the ones left in the room after the president left. Some of these were military. They were not happy. No…that is not accurate. They were pissed. They didn’t say much at the time, but word got back. They were in shock at the president’s behavior.

And indeed it would appear the Military brass/Secret Team are working to sabotage his policies, as becomes evident with the kind of selective leaking found in Obama's Wars, the latest blockbuster of Bob Woodward, the Secret Team's perennial operative "journalist"...

Washington Post (Jack Goldsmith): Our nation's secrets, stuck in a broken system

President Obama sat for an interview with Woodward for the book. He comes across in the book as circumspect, and he expressly refuses, when asked, to discuss classified information. The White House has said recently that the president did not authorize his aides to disclose classified information to Woodward. Still, because the White House clearly gave the green light to cooperate with Woodward, we should not expect a leak investigation anytime soon.

We can even wonder about the loyalty of Obama's Justice Department, whose actions have set-up a race war stoking scandal, as we read again from Ulsterman...

Justice Department Scandal Set to Rock Obama Administration?

During the 2008 presidential election, two members of the New Black Panthers were filmed outside a polling place dressed in Panther garb, with one gentleman brandishing a billy club. A complaint was filed, and an initial investigation showed the Black Panthers as having violated federal voting rights laws. Witnesses testified to the men threatening physical harm and calling a Black Republican poll watcher as being a “traitor” and warning him to not step outside or “there would be hell to pay.” Both men claimed they were “security” for the polling place.

That is when things became a bit more convoluted, and potentially damaging to the Obama administration.

In what appeared to be a simple open and shut case that had already received a default judgement against the New Black Panthers members, who themselves did not contest the charges, the Obama Justice Department dropped the case, citing “lack of evidence.” Then Department of Justice member J Christian Adams was so disgusted by the dismissal he resigned his position from the department, claiming he was told that the department only wished to pursue cases against minorities, not by minorities...

+

Brace yourselves... Civil unrest is coming, and the Secret Team knows that civil unrest can be most easily exploited by playing the race-card... So don't fall for the race-card ruse, America.

Dear Internet, Dear NSA

The heading of this post is something of a simplification, for it is not merely the NSA that is a doppelgänger to your every electronic communication, nor is it limited to the contracted companies that have sprouted around the "Fort" in Maryland, but a cornucopia of other government agencies and private companies sift through your communications of all types; these poly-gängers gather your voice sailing, your text flowing, your legs and wheels moving and even your light-switch turning through the infosphere. From ad agencies running psychological profiles on Facebook users...

EFF: Facebook's Broken Promises: Facebook Apps Leaking Private Data to Advertisers and Trackers

...not to mention, your so-called "friends" doing the same...

FOXNews: Federal Agents Urged to 'Friend' People on Social Networks, Memo Reveals

...to police running warrantless checks on your cell-phone GPS data...

Physorg: US Attorney OK'd GPS to track cell phones

...or through surreptitious GPS tagging of your vehicle...

Time: The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves

...to the Smart Grid accessibility of your "highly detailed or 'granular' energy-consumption data"...

DOE (via Cryptome): DATA ACCESS AND PRIVACY ISSUES RELATED TO SMART GRID TECHNOLOGIES

...your letters are translucent and your movements are broadcast as your houses turn to glass.

We've come a long way from Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson's comment in 1929 upon his discovery of the "Black Chamber" - the post-WWI predecessor of the NSA...

"Gentlemen do not read other people's mail"

Free Speech Provocateurs

Add Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church to the pantheon of free speech warriors. From George Lincoln Rockwell who, in his own words, sent "My ex-beatnik... onto the floor of Congress on opening day in blackface, with top hat, loin cloth and cigar, shouting. 'I'ze de Mississippi delegation, and ah demands mah seat!'" (Pg. 19 of pdf), to Abbie Hoffman's threat to levitate the Pentagon by urinating on it, to Larry Flynt calling the Supreme Court Justices "eight assholes and a token cunt" in their very presence... These merry pranksters are fighting the good fight for the First Amendment. That is, so long as they win... And they have won so far...

But if not...

First Amendment Ruling Destined to Kill Internet Free Speech

The pessimists at Infowars should take comfort however that the Phelps clan seems to know what they are doing, as is evident in the 5 minute summary of the defense before SCOTUS (or the 75 page brief at SCOTUSblog). The patriarch of the family is, surprisingly enough, a celebrated civil rights attorney who admirably represented Kansas minorities (barring one minority of course) in discrimination cases in the 70's and 80's. Moreover, he argued against Reagan's appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican on the grounds of separation of church and state.

While the logic of celebrating dead soldiers because "god hates fags" may be twisted alright (we would imagine God to be more justified in celebrating dead soldiers on account of the use of depleted uranium), these protests seem to be designed to incite the maximum public outrage while remaining strictly within the letter of the law... It might almost seem as if they are provoking the general public to demand the evisceration of its First Amendment.

Let us hope SCOTUS will not take the bait this time, and will again remind the plaintiffs, lest all our speech is held hostage by the most thin skinned among us:

THIS IS AMERICA. DEAL WITH IT.

Some headlines you might have missed in September:


Basel III lights a long fuse...

Zerohedge: Basel III Summary, And The Fed's Endorsement of 20x+ Leverage

...as the Fed flirts with hyperinflation...

Telegraph (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard): Shut Down the Fed (Part II)

+

The war with Iran to be waged on the information battlefield...

DEBKAfile: An alarmed Iran asks for outside help to stop rampaging Stuxnet malworm

...and by proxies...

WSJ: Saudi Arms Deal Moves Ahead

+

War fun and games...

Guardian: US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'

The cure for that problem...

Technofascism: DARPA develops Helmet of Obedience

+

With this and the Koran burning media hype circa 9/11, shades of Operation Ajax come to Ground Zero (in that the stoking of religious outrage was a psy-op tactic used in the overthrow of Mossadeq)...

N.Y.Observer: Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque

+

Mexico is not quite a failed state just yet, but in celebrating its bicentenial it nearly lost its head...

NarcoNewsTV: Mexico's Monument to the Decapitated?

+

Chemical warfare continues on Gulf Coast...

Examiner (Deborah Dupré): Censored Gulf alert - Entire La. communities where vomiting blood

...as questions about the Macondo rupture continue to be raised...

Phoenix Rising from the Gulf: BP Bottom Kills the Well from Hell; But Which Well Did They Really Kill, And Is It Really Dead?

+

Food, the ultimate weapon...

IPS: Land Grabs in Poor Countries Set to Increase

Rense: S-510 - The Most Dangerous Bill In American History

+

Police State news...

BuffaloNews: Technology identifies troubled individuals

Salon (Glenn Greenwald): Obama argues his assassination program is a "state secret"

Update on an item in last month's police state news...

Christian Science Monitor: 'Feds radiating Americans'? Mobile X-ray vans hit US streets

"Feds radiating americans" was an Alex Jones directed search term -an infowar tactic he's been deploying lately: get his listeners to repeatedly search the terms of infowars.com & prisonplanet.com headlines and hence move these up the charts on Google-trends.

For reference, the hazards claims in these articles can be found in an August 2003 article in the...

Idaho Observer: Security to Die for - How Americans Will Be Nuked to Naked

+

The word on the street is that the telecoms squandered their tax breaks (intended for the development of larger bandwidth) and now have come crying to their congressional whores that they've got to kill net-neutrality in order to keep up with Internet traffic...

Congressional whore #1:

Seminal/FDL: Anti-Net Neutrality Bill Gets Leaked From Waxman's Office

+

In the recent history category...

Peter B. Collins and Sibel Edmonds interview Los Alamos whistleblower Glenn Walp, concerning how loose an environment the nuclear and DEW research facility was (and remains) - about midway though is where Sibel discusses her own information (culled from wiretap translating) about the site...

The Boiling Frogs Presents Glenn Walp

Yet another breach at Los Alamos, where the would-be recipient of intelligence is Venezuela. Curiously enough, pro bono attorney for the defendent is former CIA-director James Woolsey...

Secrecy News: Former Los Alamos Physicist Charged with Selling Nuke Info

Also on Secrecy News, Steven Aftergood's review of Operation Dark Heart (apparently he has read the pyre-bound first printing), wherein Anthony Shaffer of Able Danger fame recounts his special ops experiences in Afghanistan...

Pentagon Delays Publication of New Book

Warm Dent in Arctic

In the illustration linked below, notice that the hottest spot on the planet last September (relative to average temp.) corresponded to an area that is roughly downwind of HAARP (located about 7 miles NW of Gakona AK) - or to be more precise: an area downwind of the summer-months' angle of incidence of solar radiation passing through HAARP-created ionospheric disturbances...

Science News: Seeing Red

Likewise, in the GRID-Arendal maps linked below, there is a noticeable dent in the polar ice cap in an area roughly corresponding to the summer-months' angle of incidence of solar radiation passing though the HAARP-disturbed ionosphere and on to the Arctic Sea...

Satellite observations in Arctic sea ice, 1979 and 2003

Arctic sea ice minimum extent in September 1982 and 2008


This of course raises the question: if anthropogenic global warming is taking place, then is all of the emphasis on carbon emissions misplaced? This may not be the only, or even the primary cause of global warming (which seems to be more acute in the higher latitudes). Rather, a significant factor may be found with HAARP, EISCAT and other ionospheric heaters poking holes in Earth's protective layer against solar radiation.


Some reference maps...

Ocean currents and sea ice extent

Arctic atmospheric circulation

Current ionospheric map

Stevie Nicks and Tyson Chickens

We've all heard the rumour about Stevie Nicks blowing cocaine up her rectum. While a few have apparently tried this method of administration, she denies it:

Q Magazine: Queen of the Stoned Age

"But of course that never, ever happened. That is an absurd statement. It's not true. Maybe that nasty rumour came from the fact that people knew I had such a big hole in my nose, which of course didn't stop me from doing cocaine one little bit..."

Well, perhaps the rumour can also be traced in a convoluted way to an allegation made in The Secret Life of Bill Clinton by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. We know Clinton was a Fleetwood Mac fan. He was also very tight with Don Tyson of Arkansas based Tyson Foods, whose operations were a front - or really, a "back" - for cocaine smuggling and distribution. According to Beverly Weaver, an undercover narc for the Arkansas State Police...

"There were loads going out with the chickens," she explained. "They'd put the coke in the rectums of the chickens, live chickens. That's how they'd move it." - Pg. 278

+

But on a more serious note, we should perhaps be less concerned with illicit substances being transported in poultry, and more about what is being inserted into the very DNA of salmon, creating monsters of the sort that is rumoured of a more current pop star...

La Vida Locavore: AquAdvantage GE Salmon Gender Benders

Hubpages: Lady Gaga hermaphrodite proof

Disinfo watch

Not that we are so pollyanna as to disbelieve such a thing were possible:

Western Intelligence services (CIA, MI6, MOSSAD) behind Recent Killing of 17 Russians. Russ is Being Severely Punished for Sharing Nuclear Technology with Iran and Selling Weapons to Syria.

But the quote attributed to Russia's North Caucasus envoy Aleksander Khloponin seemed quite extraordinary:

“We will find and punish the organizers of this terrorist act even if they are beyond our borders ; London , Washington or Tel-Aviv . We will not stay indifferent to what’s happening around us. That is why we should be alert and actively resist those who think they can rule our destinies, who do not want our children to have a normal future,”

But the URL cited at rian.ru has nothing of the sort. Checking the quote's provenance, however, we found what appears to be the original, sans "London , Washington or Tel-Aviv" at RT:

Moscow steps up security measures after deadly blast in North Ossetia.

“We should find and punish the organizers of this evil deed. We should not stay indifferent to what’s happening around us. That is why we should be alert and actively resist those who think they can rule our destinies, who do not want our children to have a normal future,”

For a Moscow envoy to make an accusation of Western intelligence operations in the Caucasus is not unimaginable, as there is some precedent...

Reuters: Russia's Chechen chief blames CIA for violence

But in this instance, as the quote insertion is easily discoverable, this could be another case of "Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience..." -as previously cited from the June 2006 JSOU report: Blogs and Military Information Strategy

Some stories of note in August...

Iran prepares for war...

Asia Times: Eyes on skies over Iran's reactor

Israel prepares for war...

WND: Israeli official declares 'We're preparing for war'

We've heard these war drums before however...

+

We realize we violate sound epistemic manners in making conjectures such as this, but the dark pools of classified technology lures it in... Is the weather itself being utilized as a despoiling and destabilizing weapon of opportunity?...

Independent: Russians fear worst as fires reach Chernobyl fallout zone

AP: Insurgents, police clash amid Pakistan flooding

+

BP oil spill update - efforts to sweep it under the "rug"...

Washington's blog: Gulf Chemist - Mercenaries Hired By BP Are Now Applying Toxic Dispersant - at Night and In an Uncontrolled Manner - Which BP Says It No Longer Uses

...are a huge "success"...

Science: Tracking Hydrocarbon Plume Transport and Biodegradation at Deepwater Horizon

+

In police state news...

Forbes: Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed in Street Roving Vans

Another revelation on surveillance capabilities arises out of a legal dispute...

Narconews: Tech Firm Claims Its Software “Hacked” in CIA’s Quest for Drone Code

The lawsuit revolves around a series of claims and counterclaims related to a sophisticated, analytical software program developed by IISI that is capable of integrating at high speeds spatial data, such as maps and visual images, with non-visual data, such as names and phone numbers.

+

Net Neutrality on the ropes...

EFF: A Review of Verizon and Google's Net Neutrality Proposal

+

Wayne Madsen's bombshell: Obama literally a child of the CIA...

Prison Planet: Barack Obama conclusively outed as CIA creation

But if grandpa Dunham was with the CIA, what then was the nature of his friendship with communist Frank Marshall Davis?

Lyndon LaRouche's psychological profile of the "failed personality" of this creation is detailed in a short film...

LaRouchePAC: Obama's Failed Personality

But of course, everyone is comparing Obama to Hitler these days, even if for opposing reasons...

Telegraph: Blackstone chief Schwarzman likens Obama to Hitler over tax rises

+

As the Fed indulges in more exercises of Gödelian monetarism...

MoneyWatch: Fed buys $2.55 billion in Treasury bonds

Ron Paul inquires into the Ft. Knox conundrum...

The Hill: Ron Paul questions whether there's gold at Ft. Knox, NY Fed

Information Is the New Battlefield 2

The JSOU paper cited in our first part demonstrates that on the information battlefield, the admonition to 'consider the source' is itself an avenue of attack. Raise ad hominem questions about an opponent's motive - even suggest that the opponent is working on your side - and you have thus neutralized the opponent's arsenal. There has never been a lack of rivalry and back-biting in the conspiracy theory world - but we can wonder to what extent such rivalry is the result of simple human frailties or of deliberate "shit-stirring" on the part of dissemblers.

A case in point: we wonder about the source of this hit piece on Sibel Edmonds...

EqualPartyUSA: Blowing the Whistle on Sibel Edmonds

We ask to what extent this site fits the bill: "information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group, or community to pass the U.S. message...[or] hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message..." The site administrator James Laffrey's urgent request for help - "More help, please. No, not money! Just leave comments on other websites and encourage people to check us out..." - would indeed reflect the JSOU paper's focus on gaining prominence in the infosphere...

We find on Mr. Laffrey's about page that he is based in Vietnam as an English language teacher - it could be interesting to determine whether he is operating a Vietnamese language blog as well and what its overall message might be.

Incidentally, Edmonds was recently in Vietnam where she shot a rather disturbing video (not at all flattering to U.S. interests)

Boiling Frogs Post: Another Sorry Episode in American History: Agent Orange

Perusing his EqualPartyUSA site, there is little in the way of "scoops" beyond this hit piece on Edmonds, though Laffrey also attacks other prominent oppositional figures like Ralph Nader and Alex Jones. Otherwise it is the usual regurgitated "conspiraciology" as can be found on thousands of other sites. The Rothschild cabal is behind everything evil in the world and whoever fails to focus on this is providing cover for the the Rothschilds. (Or perhaps Mr. Laffery providing cover for the Rockefellers?) Some curious biographical points are raised about Mrs. Edmonds and her husband; and the sexy, creepy photo on the about page of the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance - at which Edmonds volunteers - does raise eyebrows (but could this be a case of... "Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience..."?)

These biographical volleys at Edmonds do not go beyond highlighting mere curiosities, however; nothing substantial is offered to raise real doubts about Edmonds and her whistlebowing as an FBI translator. Ultimately, ye shall know them by their works, and Edmonds provides us with invaluable geopolitical analysis that is rarely matched elsewhere - her recent piece on the Kyrgyzstan situation for instance.

+

Consider another possible example of "cognitive infiltration" - to borrow Cass Sunstein's terminology - in a communication to Cryptome signed "Wikileaks Insiders," where the target would be Icelandic Parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who was instrumental in killing the "IceSlave" plan...

Birgitta Jonsdottir; a left wing Icelandic politician is being very economical with the truth; and is behaving true to her stereotype as a persistent and predicable anti American loud mouth. Many WIKILEAKS activists consider Birgitta Jonsdottir a liability to WIKILEAKS; responsible for introducing excessive political bias into our output. This was evident with her naming, editing, and commentary of the gunship video.

If this is such a case, however, the author has put less effort in establishing his/her oppositional cover, as it is delivered in the tone of a Rush Limbaugh.

+

A confounding case of source tainting revolves around the strange, and apparently heavily medicated figure of Adrian Lamo, the tipster who outed the alleged leaker to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning. The cover story of how this came about is difficult enough to swallow, as noted by Glenn Greenwald...

Salon: The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks

(To further peruse this maze, see the time-line with citations provided at Cryptome)

This case took a confusing twist however when it was "revealed" in Forbes of all places that Lamo volunteered for a shadowy semi-private Internet snoop group known as "Project Vigilant". It appears however that this of itself is a false lead, as a little bit of investigating on the part of John Young showed Project Vigilant's website to be of dubious provenance...

Cryptome: Project Vigilant is a Fraud

Of course, this does not mean that there are no Special Ops groups, very likely private contractors, or perhaps foreign services, that engage in surveillance of U.S. domestic Internet activity. "Project Vigilant" and perhaps with it the entire Lamo/Manning/WikiLeaks/Wired/Salon/Cryptome/etc. affair is but a diversion, a "dual node network"* serving to draw attention away from the central battlefield where the information war is truly being waged...

EFF: Government Uses Social Networking Sites for More than Investigations

With the amount of personal information that Internet users wittingly or unwittingly volunteer in open source mode, much can be gleaned by government agencies armed with Internet tracking algorithms, and without needing to take recourse to domestic spying as such. "Netizens" have effectively lodged themselves in glass-walled domiciles, as in the One State of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, whence the public/private distinction has been effectively subverted, and wherein the Fourth Amendment does not apply.

* The Invisibles: A Dialectic by Thibaut D'Amiens? F. Borishinski? (or some have speculated, John Harsanyi?) Horizon Press, 1976. Pgs. 42-53.


Update: Sept. 6

Our doubts about the "Wikileaks insiders" have proven accurate; or at least, John Young has come around to admit these doubts himself:

Cryptome: Wikileaks - Birgitta Jónsdóttir Clarifies Her Position

While a little bit unusual for Cryptome to dabble in the authenticity racket, wink, the "Wikileaks insiders" are likely imposters fabricated by a person or persons unknown. Jónsdóttir is correct in asking that these persons reveal identity.

Information is the New Battlefield

We're interested in information... And we believe that the whole battlefield (if there is one in the human situation) is about information. We don't think that politicians or arms have any real power, we think that's just a facade. We think the real power lies with who controls the information... - Throbbing Gristle

There is no such thing as bad information. Any piece of information can tell you something, provided that you can pose the appropriate question that the information answers. Generally the best question to ask concerns the source and his or her or its motives. There is some circularity in this, but motives can be gauged by the nature of the information that is put out... Does it always come with a particular "spin"? The veracity bar on the referent of a piece of information is likely much lower if it reinforces the ideological structure of the teller than if it threatens it. If some piece of information does threaten, then one should expect some accompanying ideological readjustment. Ideological structure comes in varying degrees of rigidity: the greater the rigidity, the more information will be rejected or arranged in conformity to it; the less rigid, the more adjustable the structure will be. Generally, reinforcing information will say more about the source - the vehicle - of the information than it does of its "currency". More often than not, a source wearing ideological bias on their sleeve will simply refrain from conveying a non-reinforcing piece of information, and forgo the vetting of reinforcing information. Such ideologically rigid "low-pass filters" then offer themselves up as unwitting vehicles for passing disinformation. These in turn can shape the ideologically less rigid who are more "open" to new and challenging "facts" and "ideas". In evaluating a piece of information, then, one should focus on establishing its provenance: its originating source and the position it subsequently occupies within varying ideological structures.

Not every passer of information readily discloses their ideological motives, however. They may even dissemble their motives... A case in point is found in some of the proposals for infiltrating the "infosphere" through blogs in a 2006 JSOU report by James Kinniburgh and Dorothy Denning, as posted on Cryptome:

Blogs and Military Information Strategy

In order to select or design a useful blog for conducting IO [information operations], developing measures of the blog’s ability to reach and activate the conventional, middle and micro layers of the entire infosphere, as well as the development of a method for measuring the change in attitudes, thinking, beliefs and ultimately actions that are directly attributable to the blog, is critical in order to fine tune military efforts. Selecting or creating a likely candidate blog is the first step, since the hard measure of effectiveness must necessarily come after an operation. -Pg. 17

Segmentary opposition and its gentler cousin, in-group/out-group dynamics, may prevent a foreign audience from taking an overtly U.S. government-run or sponsored blog seriously... In this regard, information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group, or community to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital... An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. -Pg. 20

There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. -Pg. 21

There will also be times when it is thought to be necessary, in the context of an integrated information campaign, to pass false or erroneous information through the media, on all three layers, in support of military deception activities... In these cases, extra care must be taken to ensure plausible deniability and nonattribution, as well as employing a well-thought-out deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure. Because of the potential blowback effect, information strategy should avoid planting false information as much as possible. -Pg. 22

Now the caveat:

This brings us to an even more fundamental issue. Because the U.S. military is prohibited from conducting information operations against U.S. persons, it is reluctant to engage in Internet IO operations that might be characterized as PSYOP or deception. Once information is on the Internet, it can reach anyone, including those in the U.S. Thus, while the military offers factual news on the Internet through Public Affairs, it generally stays away from commentary and IO. -ibid.

And the end-run:

Some of the possible techniques we have explored in our discussion of the military use of blogging require a certain degree of subtlety, finesse, and yes, covert action. By giving military blog-based operations to the Intelligence and Special Operations communities, these uses become less risky and more feasible. -Pg. 27

While these recommendations are directed primarily towards blog-making, certainly it must have occurred to the authors (or at least to certain of their readers) that other kinds of sites on the Internet might be similarly utilized or created. For instance, data-cache sites like Cryptome (which had been around for well over a decade) and WikiLeaks (which was just beginning in the year of this JSOU paper) would be likely places to deploy tactically shaped information. Unlike the average ax-grinding blogger, John Young and Julian Assange (founders of Cryptome and WikiLeaks repectively) simply embrace the mission of information emancipation regardless of whatever ideological framework such liberated information may help or hurt. Assange does state that he is on a mission of hurting unjust governments, corporations and institutions, but we can say that WikiLeaks appears to be somewhat ideologically neutral in that, to take a couple of examples, the IPCC email leaks were embraced by the right (and other anthropogenic global warming skeptics) while the Collateral Murder video leak was embraced by the anti-war left (but the recent Afghan War Diary leak can lend itself both to the left and right).

As ideologically neutral venues and, more importantly, as source protecting venues, WikiLeaks and Cryptome thus offer themselves as fertile information battlefields for the dissembler. John Young acknowledges this, but Assange gives the dubious assurance that WikiLeaks thoroughly vets its documents, with the exception of its most recent leak, which was forwarded to The Gaurdian, N.Y.Times, und Der Spiegel for vetting...

Questions about the provenance of the Afghan War Diary have been raised - not in the mainstream media, which, across the board, has uncharacteristically been the primary purveyor of this leak, touted as the "Pentagon Papers" of our time - but in the independent media. In interviews with Alex Jones, John Young states that these documents are not digitally authenticated, while Wayne Madsen and Webster Tarply suggest that the leak my be planted in order to garner support for expanding the war into Pakistan and even to Iran. On the other hand, we have pondered whether the leak may have been planted by the Obama administration itself in order to generate a public groundswell of anti-war sentiment in order to give Obama a way out of this inherited quagmire.


Next: Part 2

Some things that happened in July...

Korean Central News Agency (DPRK): US-S.Korea Joint Military Exercises Flailed

Christian Science Monitor: Did Iran attack Japanese oil tanker in Strait of Hormuz?

As things heat up in the Yellow Sea and Strait of Hormuz, it may be wise to revisit this affair...

Secrecy News: 1968 Senate Sessions of Foreign relations Declassified

The transcripts include an extended inquiry into the official version of 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which led to the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and which became the object of increasing skepticism, inside and outside of government.

+

Sibel Edmonds examines the back round on recent events in Kyrgyzstan...

Boiling Frogs Post: Maksim Bakiyev: A Groomed Puppet Who Never Came to Be King

+

Tyrannis Britannia

BAE Systems: Taranis Combat Aircraft Thunders into view

Other developments in aviation...

BBC: Phantom Eye hydrogen-powered spy plane unveiled

Wired: Killer Drones Get Stealthy

+

Cocoa, Gold and Heroin keep the banking system afloat...

Telegraph:

Mystery trader buys all of Europe's cocoa

Secret gold swap has spooked the market

Pravda: Large U.S. Banks Laundered Money from Drug Trafficking

+

In police state news...

Wired: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

Isn't that nifty. It is but one aspect of the only growth industry in the United States: surveil and secure....

Washington Post: A hidden world, growing beyond control

As the national security regime blossoms, meanwhile, state and local governments are hemorrhaging. A case in point: California...

Sacramento Bee: Schwarzenegger orders minimum wage for state workers

NBCBayArea: Suffer These Crimes in Oakland? Don't Call the Cops

But the cops will call on you...

East Bay Express: Oakland Police Search Without Warrants

L.A.Times: Raw-food raid highlights a hunger

+

A mostly unnoticed political scandal...

AP: Ex-Clinton fundraiser gets 12 years in prison

But one which demonstrates a certain continuity...

WhoWhatWhy: Hillary's Bush Connection

Official pervs

Boston Globe: Pentagon workers tied to child porn

The DoD investigation document, courtesy of Cryptome...

Operation Flicker

Page 30 of the PDF summarizes and explains how such activity constitutes not merely criminal, but potentially treasonous violation...

1. This project was initiated based upon information and a request from the DCIS MidAtlantic Field Office regarding information received from Project Flicker, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) national undercover investigation into commercial child pornography websites.

2. Project Flicker identified over 5,000 individuals who subscribed to the commercial child pornography websites that were targeted by ICE. The names and identifying data on the individuals who subscribed to the commercial child pornography websites were checked against the Department of Defense (DoD) databases to identify those individuals who were associated with the DoD and subscribing to child pornography.

3. Child pornography is illegal and subscribers of commercial child pornography that are associated with the DoD put the DoD, the military and national security at risk by compromising computer systems, military instillations and security clearances to name a few. Additionally, it puts the Dor;> at risk of blackmail, bribery, and threats, especially since these individuals typically have access to military instillations.

+

Then there is the banality of official perversity. For this, we need look no farther than the TSA, truly the bottom of the barrel when it comes to federal employees...

St. Petersburg Times: Airport body scanners reveal all, but what about when it's your kid?

CBS2 LA: TSA Screener At LAX Accused Of Possessing Child Porn

News4 Jax: TSA Worker Molested 12-Year-Old

And it goes for the Canadian TSA as well...

Toronto Sun: Woman allegedly mocked during airport strip search