Sunday, October 31, 2010

Free Showing of Fatally Flawed: The Pursuit of Justice in a Suspicious Election

From the makers of "Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World"
The movie that Arizona Attorney General and Gubernatorial candidate Terry Goddard does not want you to see!

New cut.

Colorado Democratic Party Calls for Grand Jury Investigation of 9-11

World for 9/11 Truth

Brighter news for those sick of the lack of courage among Democrats. Enjoy!

The 2010 Colorado Democratic Party platform (page 31/54), approved by the 146 member platform committee states:

“Whereas many disturbing facts were consciously ignored by the 9/11 Commission; Be it resolved, therefore, that the CDP calls for the establishment of a truly independent Grand Jury and public investigation into these and other anomalies in order to find the truth of the September 11, 2001 attacks, so that we have a greater probability of preventing attacks of this nature in the future.”

This controversial plank was added to the State Democratic Party Platform after evidence supporting the critical need for a new investigation was presented at several caucuses in 2004, 2008, and 2010.

The citizens who presented arguments for a new investigation at their precinct caucuses are signatories to the Architect and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization (www.ae911truth.org) which calls for a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.

The quality of evidence contradicting the official 9-11 story is substantiated in part by the 2010 Platform Committee Chairman Hal Bidlack’s statement: “ ….this platform represents the consensus of the 2010 Platform Committee, guided by the results of county assemblies across our state. The folks who worked tirelessly on the Committee can rightly be proud of their efforts, and deserve our special thanks.” (Bidlack’s statement can be found on page one of the 2010 platform.)

In the upcoming Colorado election, Green Party U.S. Senatorial candidate Bob Kinsey and District One U.S. Representative candidate Gary Swing have publicly stated they would support a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Election Integrity Pursuit Abandoned by Democrats Wins Appeal

PDF of Ruling

The Libertarian party, the last group continuing the pursuit of prospective relief from rigged elections in the Arizona courts won a major legal victory last Thursday. The Court of Appeals reversed Judge Charles Harrington's dismissal and remanded the case for further proceedings.

The Democratic party backed out of this RTA court case when Judge Charles Harrington denied those who were seeking prospective relief in the courts to improve election integrity. The rationale provided by the Democratic party to abandon the case was concern of the costs for litigation. Election integrity activists believe that the Goddard political machine wanted as little attention possible over his handling of the RTA investigation.

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard demonstrated how the executive branch failed to provide adequate remedy when he investigated the 2006 RTA election. Goddard refused to perform elementary auditing procedures including a check of the ballots' figures against the poll tapes from that same election. After a year of litigation, the public learned that thirty percent of the poll tapes were missing.

In Arizona, election challenges can only take place within the first five days after the election is held. Five days proves to be an impossible time frame given the complexities involved with obtaining and examining electronic data and relevant records. Barring a change in statutory law, the legislative branch fails to provide sufficient remedy in an extremely suspicious election.

For the citizens of Arizona, the courts were the last hope in providing some measure to ensure that future elections are not rigged. Unfortunately, Judge Harrington threw this case out by accepting the county's argument that criminal activity cannot be discovered in a civil case trial. Despite the absurdity of this argument, the Democratic Party dropped out of the case after Harrington's decision. However, the Libertarian party was on board from the beginning and elected to continue pursing the matter in appeal.

Below is a clip that set the tone in the previous trial with Judge Harrington admonishing Bill Risner, the attorney for the Democratic party, for suggesting to the court that it "can't just wash it's hands of this matter". This, of course, took place just before Judge Harrington washed his hands of the matter and let it go to appeal.

Friday, October 29, 2010

John Stewart's Executive Producer Arrested for Assaulting 9/11 Truth Activist

Comedy thinly masks an agenda for only so long. To me, this event makes the whole John Stewart rally lose its lustre. Here they are, apt to make fun of the 9/11 Truth movement, but they fail to make any hay when seriously confronted with their willful ignorance.

What do we get instead? Tempy tantrums. Hmm. Wha' Happened?


Flashback: Are Arizona's Political Leaders Deliberately Blocking Electronic Voting Machine Transparency?

Monday 23 August 2010

by: Denis G. Campbell, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

photo
Photo: athrasher

Why did Arizona's two main gubernatorial candidates, Gov. Jan Brewer, former secretary of state/head of elections, who contracted for highly criticized and easily-hacked Diebold and Sequoia ballot scanning systems, and Attorney General (AG) Terry Goddard, with his three-year "criminal investigation" into a 2006 Pima County (Tucson) local election allegedly hacked, according to a whistleblower, do everything in their power for years to stifle polling accountability while expensively fighting enforcement of Arizona's election laws?

"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin

Arizona voters head Tuesday 24 August to primary polling places. They will mark paper ballots that will be optically scanned by Diebold and Sequoia vote scan machines. And there is absolutely no guarantee their vote will ever be tabulated.

Six plaintiffs recently filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County (Phoenix) alleging recently relaxed ballot handling rules ensure a lax chain of control over ballot papers in direct violation of Arizona law. Coupled with unapproved software installed on multiple election department computers, and it creates what the citizen watchdog group AUDIT AZ calls an "interlock." "This makes manipulation of vote counting easy and thus leaves elections vulnerable to undetectable fraud."

Arizona public officials confidently claim their system is completely safe from hackers. Yet, Maricopa County is the USA's fourth-largest elections department handling 56-58 percent of all Arizona votes cast. Its polling places rely on 22, sole-purpose laptop computers and their phone line modems to transmit final polling data from the Sequoia machines to election headquarters over phone lines and the Internet.

If CIA and Defense Department sites are hacked thousands of times daily, what, besides desert bravado or blind arrogance, gives anyone any indication their vote is safely counted?

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As AUDIT AZ co-founder John Brakey told us, "Lax handling of ballots and decisions relieving poll-workers of audit responsibility mean, regardless of the wishes of individual voters, the entire system can be manipulated and outcomes determined on central tabulation computers with expert hackers who are then able to completely cover their tracks."

And before you take Governor Brewer's or AG Goddard's (neither of whom would answer questions posed over three years by this reporter) tack of ignoring the message and instead attacking the messenger, dismissing all charges as baseless conspiracy theory ... ask yourself why Arizona's elected and unelected leaders (who all took a forced, unpaid, furlough day Friday to save money) have spent more than $1 million tax dollars hiring high-profile law firms to fight citizen-filed lawsuits from multi-partisan groups seeking ballot handling reforms?

Bill Risner, Democratic Party attorney for Pima County, is no stranger to election procedure battles. In 41-years of practice, he says the central problem of the current computerized systems is they are easy to cheat. "When the fact of 'easy to cheat' is combined with the 'impossibility of challenge' and 'nobody is looking,' the seriousness of the present vulnerability of our election system is obvious," he says.

Brad Roach, unsuccessful Republican candidate for Pima County attorney and lead counsel on the voter case said, "John Brakey and I are as politically opposite as you can find and would not likely agree on anything, but we agree on this." He describes Brakey as being as passionate as any death penalty opponent crusader he's ever met. "John's devoted years to this and we should thank him. While we disagree on most things political, he's absolutely right, your vote is the most important thing any citizen has," said Roach.

Roach further said he cannot fathom why elected leaders don't understand that "when you fight, fight, fight everything, you make things worse and it serves no utility." He continued, "If you have nothing to hide, why not just be open on something this important?"

He is suing the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and others requesting "Mandamus" and Injunctive Relief. The Mandamus action is unique in that it demands the court order public officials to follow existing Arizona election laws.

Plaintiffs want to ensure the entire ballot chain of custody is secure and Arizona's mandated audit trail is returned to full compliance, no matter how inconvenient or time consuming, to ensure integrity in the voting process.

The case was recently assigned its second judge. In a Friday telephone hearing, Judge Oberbillig, County Defense Attorney Colleen Conner and Roach all agreed nothing could be done in time for the primary election on Tuesday.

However, the Mandamus action falls outside of cumbersome civil trial rules and the judge said there was time to move forward with an expedited jury trial and emergency orders issued from the bench before the November general election.

Said Roach, "How patriotically ironic is it that on a question as important as insuring everyone's individual vote is counted, a jury of one's peers will decide the merits of this case?"

But what, if anything, can stop the arrogance of Arizona's elected and unelected leaders?

When Governor Brewer was secretary of state, she wrote the rules for voting machines across the state, however, when questioned repeatedly about them, claimed she had no authority to change the rules or order new ones.

The bar in Arizona for any recount is already higher than in almost every other states, with a minuscule one-tenth of 1 percent margin and inside five days the standards to trigger a recount. Miss either milestone and no recount can ever be granted.

Indeed, during a 2004 primary election between two Republicans decided by just four votes, officials were ready to begin a hand recount of all paper ballots, at their own expense, to ensure accuracy. Secretary Brewer called the local supervisor of elections and informed them they were "breaking state law and ordered them to stop." The only way to count ballots under Arizona law was to rerun them through the same machine that had already spit out this data. Jan Brewer explained on video she stopped the recount because "an angel was on her shoulder and guided her in the right direction."

In the second machine run, 496 extra ballots magically appeared inside one machine's "count" that were not part of the first ballot. Maricopa Elections Supervisor Karen Osborne under deposition stated, "an 18 percent error rate in machine tabulations was within their acceptable margin of error." What citizen would volunteer their ballot to be one of the nearly one in five miscounted in that "acceptable margin of error"?

Across Arizona, there is a pattern of refusal to cooperate with voter groups. Elected officials refuse to return phone calls asking for comment, ignore or obfuscate Freedom of Information Act requests for information and, later, even ignore judge's orders. And there seems to be zero consequences for state workers. To date, no one has been fired, reprimanded or reassigned for incompetence for any of these bungled elections.

Even when brought into court, the rank incompetence causes judges to throw their hands up in disgust, resulting in convoluted rulings. Two years ago, Bill Risner won all of the legal argument, but lost his case when Maricopa County Judge Edward O. Burke agreed County Elections Director, Karen Osborne, did not follow election law, ensure ballot integrity and provide an unbroken custody chain.

However, he ruled against the plaintiffs saying, "in a county the size of Maricopa, perfect compliance with the statutory electoral scheme, while desirable, is not possible due to time, space, the practicalities of the electoral process and the number of persons involved" in denying their injunction for a hand recount.

So, where does the voter go to ensure the accuracy of their vote count? Well, one could try voting in the UK as an example. There, the hand vote count performed across 650 parliamentary constituencies during the recent general election was a model of efficiency and accuracy.

This reporter covered Wales' Vale of Glamorgan constituency hand count. The result was declared final at 2:23 AM, with congratulations all around. It was completely transparent. All votes were counted across the nation in exactly the same way, with party observers and even candidates sitting directly across the table from and silently observing the counting teams throughout the night. Too, there was no artificial time pressure of reporting vote results on the 11:00 PM news. They were committed to getting it right.

The sanctity of one person, one vote, unites otherwise deeply divided and polarized Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Tea and every other party. So, why won't a Republican governor and a Democratic AG, both seeking the state's highest office, demand transparent accountability by state officials?

AG Goddard has led a "Keystone Cops" criminal investigation of the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) election. Bill Risner sued Pima County, demanding a recount (and they are the party that WON!), trying to assure vote integrity as the result made no sense. How could a measure they supported suddenly win after losing so badly in every previous election?

When a whistleblower came forward saying the election result had been hacked, AUDIT AZ entered the fray. In the original UK Progressive article on this subject, they alleged and proved a Pima County election official had purchased an illegal scanner. Election Director Brad Nelson admitted in a deposition he wanted to test for himself whether ballot scanning machine memory cards could be hacked as demonstrated by Finnish scientist Harry Hursti in the HBO film "Hacking Democracy."

And boy did they test. (The question remains ... until they got it right?) Seventy plus machine memory cards were reported as "damaged." Hacking enough voting machine memory cards to affect an outcome before an election is clearly difficult. The more ingenious way is, as alleged in Risner's case documents, to break into the central tabulator using a simple and untraceable Microsoft Access table. This instantly changes results inside headquarters and leaves no trail.

And this was four years ago, imagine how sophisticated hackers have become since 2006 (placing a full PacMan game on one "sealed" machine being but one example.)

Risner asserts one can determine if the RTA ballot results were hacked by reviewing the polling summary tape totals included with the ballots from the poll site and comparing them with the actual paper ballots from each polling location. A furious legal battle, costing Pima County hundreds of thousands of dollars, ended when AG Goddard's team swooped in and removed the ballots to an undisclosed location from a storage facility in Tucson. He then did his own recount without reconciling the poll tapes and declared the result final.

The problem? Almost one-third of the poll summary tapes, supposedly stored with the ballots, were reported "missing" at the time of his count. No one knows and the AG will not answer whether they were missing when he conducted his recount or before. Too, Pima County officials as "the customer," were allowed unfettered access to the ballot storage facility despite being implicated in the criminal investigation. And the logs of who visited the facility have not been released by the AG.

The issue has been stonewalled because, according to a local attorney wishing to remain anonymous, "by implication, the AG's office ends up looking either incompetent or complicit in a cover-up. With the election just 10-weeks away, the impact it could have on Goddard's election chances to the only office he has coveted since childhood, would be devastating."

Aside from immigration reform, economic loss issues around the "Paper's Please" law and an increasingly radical right-wing agenda, any further light on her otherwise anonymous tenure as secretary of state would create more problems for Governor Brewer's re-election campaign.

The irony is Democrat Goddard may end up hoisted on this petard and never know for certain his own ballot count fate since the rules change makes it easier for heavily Republican and lax-on-security Maricopa County officials to find results that favor Governor Brewer's re-election bid.

No matter what happens, democracy could be the ultimate casualty. As I wrote after the '08 general election for The Huffington Post, with the Maricopa recount case and result, was it possible Arizona's John McCain actually lost his own red state when every other state touching Arizona voted FOR President Obama?

Connecting electoral dots, Phoenix (Maricopa 56-58 percent) and Tucson (Pima 18-22 percent) account for roughly 75 percent of votes cast in any Arizona election. Evidence also exists that Pima County election department staff frequently accessed the early "vote by mail" official count database. Imagine the impact of this "Zogby poll from hell" as John Brakey calls it. "Illegally passing along actual early vote totals to party insiders allows them to conduct a series of Robocall and other campaign activities that could sway voters based not on research or polls but on actual vote counts!"

Arizona is no stranger to election controversy. Paper or machines? Most would probably now vote paper every time. To quote AUDIT AZ's motto: "Election Integrity is not about the Right or Left; it's about right, wrong, greed and corruption."

Thursday, October 28, 2010

BEHIND ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION LAW

Larry Flynt

GREG PALAST’S INVESTIGATION DISCOVERS THE REAL INTENT OF THE SHOW-ME-YOUR-PAPERS EDICT.

DON’T BE FOOLED. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are U.S. citizens. I don’t buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning. What’s new here is the politicians’ fear of a xenophobic “Teabag” uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, U.S. citizens one and all, who are daring to vote—and daring to vote Democratic by more than two to one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters… directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time, jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution? No, not one.

Which raises the question:Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, noncitizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a New Mexico federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the western mesas looking for these illegal voters. “We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, and I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case.”

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove. Iglesias told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

“They wanted some splashy preelection indictments,” Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as Prop. 200, which required proof of citizenship to register. The Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, is just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

(By the way, no one elected Brewer.Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona’s Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the governor’s office.) State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, “There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country.”

How many? Pearce’s PR flak told me 5 million. All Democrats too. Again, I asked Pearce’s office to give me their names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I’d happily make a citizen’s arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn’t have 5 million names. He didn’t have five. He didn’t have one.

The horde of 5 million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican Web site extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote; they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law. The illegal voters, “wetback” welfare moms and alien job thieves are just GOP Web site wet dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party’s electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.

But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they’re American if they want to vote and live in America? The answer: Because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.

According to a study by University of Washington professor Matt Barreto, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.

Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer’s or Pearce’s help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters—that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her U.S. birth certificate was nowhere to be found, as it never existed.

In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County Jail, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially charged and legally suspect methods.

I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors. A big sign reads: “NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL.” I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are as illegal as they come, but Arpaio’s sophisticated deportee- sniffer didn’t stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? Not to stop noncitizens from entering Arizona—after all, who else would care for the country club lawn?—but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.

Greg Palast, whom the Chicago Tribune has called “the most important investigative reporter of our time,” has covered the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for Rolling Stone (with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), Harper’s, The Nation and TruthOut.org (which first published the preceding article). Palast, whose investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television’s Newsnight, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow and the author of Armed Madhouse and the New York Times best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. For more, visit GregPalast.com.

Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law

NPR

Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.

Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.

"The gentleman that's the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger," Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."

What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.

"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."

But Nichols wasn't buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?

"They talked like they didn't have any doubt they could fill it," Nichols said.

That's because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona's immigration law.


Full Story

SIGAR AUDIT SHOWS U.S. AGENCIES UNABLE TO READILY REPORT ON NEARLY $18 BILLION IN RECONSTRUCTION CONTRACTS IN AFGHANISTAN

SIGAR News Room

An audit released today by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Arnold Fields, shows that despite the extensive use of contractors for reconstruction work in Afghanistan, the Departments of Defense (DOD) and State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are unable to readily report on how much money they spend on contracting for reconstruction activities in Afghanistan. The report shows that nearly $18 billion was obligated from FY '-07 through FY '-09 by DOD, State, and USAID to nearly 7,000 contractors. This audit is unprecedented in its scope by identifying where Afghanistan reconstruction money is being spent and which contractors are spending it.

"This audit is crucial because if we don't even know who we're giving money to, it is nearly impossible to conduct system wide oversight," said Special IG Fields.

Congress mandated the SIGAR office with the unique ability to look across U.S. government agencies at reconstruction money spent in Afghanistan. Because the U.S. has been investing in Afghanistan reconstruction since 2002, SIGAR auditors tried to analyze the scale and scope of contracting prior to FY '07, but much of the data available from the agencies prior to 2007 was too poor to be analyzed.

SIGAR identified about 7,000 contractors and other entities, including for-profit and non-profit organizations and multilateral organizations involved in reconstruction activities in Afghanistan. Among the largest was $691 million to an Afghan construction firm to build military facilities and $1.8 billion to a U.S.-based firm to provide police training for Afghanistan's National Police forces. Nearly $800 million was provided to multilateral organizations, like the United Nations or the World Bank, or transferred to other federal agencies.

"With this report we can more effectively prioritize future contract audits and more quickly identify contracts at risk of fraud, waste and abuse," said Special IG Fields. "It certainly helps to reduce the stove pipes and lend more transparency to U.S. departments and agencies so that they may learn more about what their own organizations are doing and what other departments and agencies are contracting for in support of reconstruction," said IG Fields.

The audit shows that navigating the confusing labyrinth of government contracting is difficult, at best. Within the Defense Department alone, there are four contracting organizations managing DOD funded reconstruction contracts. The audit found that not only do those four DOD contracting organizations not coordinate and share information with one another, there is minimal sharing of information across government agencies.

SIGAR has previously recommended that DOD, State, and USAID consider the creation of a centralized management information system that is integrated across all agencies and command. However, according to the audit, there is still no central U.S. government database to track reconstruction projects from the various U.S. agencies and departments, let alone, the international community.

SIGAR is the first organization to provide this "snapshot" of the reconstruction contracting environment in Afghanistan. Other offices of Inspectors General at the various U.S. departments are not able to provide this view of the entire contracting landscape, as they are not charged with looking across U.S. government agencies.

"Prior to this audit report there was no comprehensive study on contractors and the money the U.S. is spending through contractors on Afghan reconstruction," said IG Fields. "The concluding observations in this audit are crucial to helping U.S. departments and agencies and SIGAR continue to conduct aggressive, system wide oversight," he said.

Alaska's untapped oil reserves estimate lowered by about 90 percent

CNN

QUESTION: Who paid for the pipeline?


The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is a fraction of a previous estimate.

The group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels.

The new estimate is mainly due to the incorporation of new data from recent exploration drilling revealing gas occurrence rather than oil in much of the area, the geological survey said.

"These new findings underscore the challenge of predicting whether oil or gas will be found in frontier areas," USGS Director Dr. Marcia McNutt said in a statement. "It is important to re-evaluate the petroleum potential of an area as new data becomes available."

The organization also estimates 8 trillion cubic feet less gas than a 2002 estimate of 61 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, conventional, non-associated gas -- meaning gas found in discrete accumulations with little to no crude oil in the reservoir.

"Recent activity in the NPRA, including 3-D seismic surveys, federal lease sales administered by the Bureau of Land Management and drilling of more than 30 exploration wells in the area provides geological information that is more indicative of gas than oil," the geological survey said.

The petroleum reserve in Alaska has been the focus of significant oil exploration during the past decade, stimulated by the mid-1990s discovery of the largest onshore oil discovery in the U.S. during the past 25 years, the organization said.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Students Protest IDF Soldiers Campus Visit

Tony Blair 'to be called back' to Iraq war inquiry to answer questions about 'gaps' in his evidence


Mail Online
Tony Blair is to be recalled by the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War to answer new questions about 'gaps' in the evidence he gave earlier this year.

The former Prime Minister is likely to be asked to clarify the political build-up to the 2003 American-led invasion.

He is also expected to further explain the legality of Britain's participation in the controversial war.

Sir John Chilcot will write to Mr Blair next month to ask him to attend a public hearing in early 2011, reported The Times.

During his six-hour testimony earlier this year, Mr Blair mounted a vigorous defence of the invasion and insisted he had no regrets over removing Saddam Hussein.

He denied he took the country to war on the basis of a 'lie' over the dictator's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

At the end of his session one member of the audience shouted: 'What, no regrets? Come on' while others heckled 'You are a liar', 'And a murderer'.

Sir John has previously explained that as his team pores through thousands of secret government documents relating to the Iraq invasion, should they find 'conflicts or gaps within the evidence' then they will recall witnesses.

Liam Fox, the current Defence Secretary, asked Sir John to recall Gordon Brown to the inquiry earlier this year after he was forced into an humiliating admission that he had slashed defence spending while British troops were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The then-PM told MPs he had been wrong to tell the inquiry that defence spending under Labour was 'rising in real terms every year'.

In January, an unrepentant Mr Blair was heckled and jeered by families of Britain's war dead as he declared he had 'not a regret' about invading Iraq.

He made it clear he would do the same again and warned world leaders they may soon have to take similar decisions over Iran.

Despite the deaths of up to 700,000 Iraqis and 179 British troops, Mr Blair said he felt 'responsibility but not a regret' at the end of his six hours of evidence. There was no hint of remorse.

Saddam had been a 'monster' and it had been right to remove him even to prevent the 'possibility' that he could acquire weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair said.

He warned that Iran's nuclear weapons programme now poses an even greater threat.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Lobbyists Working on Behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Kill Jobs Bill

American Free Press

A SERIES OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA reports have revealed how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently mobilized its army of lobbyists to fight Senate legislation that would bring once-outsourced jobs back home to the U.S.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a nonprofit 501(c)(6) that purportedly works to promote businesses and jobs in America. Today, however, the organization is increasingly coming under fire for backing multinational corporations and the outsourcing of American jobs to third world countries. The bill in question was the Creating American Jobs and End Offshoring Act (S. 3816), sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

According to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of the bill’s cosponsors, the measure would put an end to the assistance Washington has been giving Big Business to move American jobs overseas.

Among other things, it gives companies a two-year payroll tax break when they hire new employees to perform services in the United States that had previously been done abroad.

It also eliminates the tax break—a corporate subsidy—that companies get for closing down factories and moving them abroad. Says Sanders: “The bill prohibits a firm from taking any deduction, loss or credit for amounts paid in connection with reducing or ending the operation of a trade or business in the U.S. and starting or expanding a similar trade or business overseas.”

Finally, the bill closes down a federal tax subsidy that has been rewarding U.S. companies that move their factories to foreign lands. “Under current law,” says Sanders, “U.S. companies can defer paying U.S. tax on income earned by their foreign subsidiaries until that income is brought back to the United States.”

This is known as “deferral” and puts American companies at a distinct disadvantage because they are responsible for taxes no matter whether they sell their wares or not. At a time when unemployment is at a record high, the bill should have been a no-brainer for legislators when it came up for a vote. But only eight senators sponsored it—all Democrats except for Sanders, a Vermont independent.

But even worse, neither Democrats nor Republicans could get the 60 votes necessary to pass a cloture bill to get it to the floor for a vote.

That’s because the Chamber of Commerce, which donates heavily to Republicans and Democrats, came down hard against it. This should not come as a surprise, considering it has been revealed that the Chamber of Commerce has been receiving significant funding from companies in foreign countries. According to the left-wing populist organization, Think Progress, the chamber has been accepting millions of dollars tax-free from companies in China, India, Bahrain, Egypt and Russia, among other countries, and then funneling that money into U.S. political campaigns in violation of federal election law. In return, the chamber has become a vocal proponent of globalism, which includes sending U.S. jobs abroad and hiring cheap labor.

In a letter to Congress, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Bruce Josten displayed his complete incompetence, his disdain for American workers and his utter lack of patriotism by claiming that bringing much needed jobs back to the United States would not really help the U.S. economy.

“Replacing a job that is based in another country with a domestic job does not stimulate economic growth or enhance the competitiveness of American worldwide companies,” Josten scribbled. So what does Josten suggest Congress do to help Main Street America and boost the economy? He says Congress should make permanent the tax breaks for the two-percent of the American population that earns more than $250,000 a year.

The insanity of Josten’s claims is revealed in the fact that consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy. In plain English, that means, if there are no jobs for working-class Americans, there is no more United States.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Zionist Patsy Adam Gadahn Calls For Terror Attacks In Multiple Cities

Intel Hub

Editors Note (Intel Hub): Adam Gadahn, the grandson of former Anti-Defamation League board member Carl K. Pearlman, is a complete patsy, trained by rogue elements of the Mossad to help further the fraudulent war on terror. The ADL was caught spying on the United States in 1993 and openly works for the interests of Zionist Israel.

Sadly, most people refuse to do the little research that it takes to realize that this is no conspiracy theory. Our government funded/created Al Qaeda. This is open knowledge that cannot be debunked.

CAIRO — A U.S.-born spokesman for al-Qaida on Saturday urged Muslims living in the United States and Europe to carry out attacks there, calling it a duty and an obligation.

In a 48-minute video posted on militant websites, Adam Gadahn directed his appeal to Muslim immigrants in what he called the “miserable suburbs” of Paris, London and Detroit, as well as those traveling to the West to study or work.

“It is the duty of everyone who is sincere in his desire to defend Islam and Muslims today, to take the initiative to perform the individual obligation of jihad … by striking the Zio-Crusader interests,” he said, referring to Western and Jewish interests.

Gadahn, who has been hunted by the FBI since 2004, also sought to discredit attempts by moderate Muslim leaders to suppress the “jihadi awakening.”

Source story refusing to reveal Adam Gadahn's background.

11-Year-Old Brings Parents' Weed To School and Turns Them In

Oct. 24, 2010

Black Homeschoolers Magazine

Two parents are facing drug charges after their child took their drugs to school and told a school officer his parents were breaking the law.
WBTV is not releasing the names of the parents or the name of the school to protect the child’s identity.

Matthews Police say he reported his parents after a lesson about marijuana was delivered by a police officer who is part of the D.A.R.E. program, which teaches kids about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.The 11-year-old student is in 5th grade at a an elementary school in Matthews.  Police say he brought his parents’ marijuana cigarettes to school when he reported them.

“Even if it’s happening in their own home with their own parents, they understand that’s a dangerous situation because of what we’re teaching them,” said Matthews Officer Stason Tyrrell.  That’s what they’re told to do, to make us aware.”

Tyrrell says the town’s D.A.R.E. officer spends time at each of the three elementary schools in Matthews teaching kids to make the right choice when it comes to drugs.

Police arrested the child’s 40-year-old father and 38-year-old mother on Thursday. Both were charged with two misdemeanor counts each of marijuana possession and possession of drug paraphernalia.

They were not jailed and were released on a written promise to appear in court. “I don’t give drugs to my kids,” the father told us when we went to his house.

When we asked him how his kid got ahold of his drugs, he replied, “That’s no one’s business.”

Police say both the 11-year old and a sibling have been removed from the parents’ house by social services.  Police say they are staying with relatives.

Flashback: Prevous Attempt by the U.S. to Plant VX Gas in Iraq

BBC

World: Middle East

VX gas destroyed in Iraq

(July 28th, 1999) A United Nations team of independent experts has left Baghdad after destroying samples of deadly VX nerve gas.

After several days of wrangling, the UN Security Council agreed to the destruction of the VX gas left behind by UN weapons inspectors (Unscom) when they withdrew from Baghdad last year.

The UN secretary-general's envoy to Iraq, Prakash Shah, said: "The team completed its task late last evening and left this morning for Amman on its way to The Hague.

"The remaining task of destroying seven vials of VX standards was completed yesterday after instructions were received to that effect from (the UN Security Council in) New York," he said.


[ image: Mr Shah said the nerve agent had been sealed off in the laboratory]
Mr Shah said the nerve agent had been sealed off in the laboratory
The presence of the samples in a UN laboratory had sparked a controversy, with Iraq and Russia suggesting that Unscom inspectors might have used the nerve gas to contaminate Iraqi warheads in order to justify American and British air strikes last December.

Unscom denied the contamination charge, saying the diluted VX was used exclusively to test against Iraqi chemicals.

The Security Council finally ordered the destruction of the vials after Russia dropped its demand for an analysis of the gas found in the Unscom laboratory.

Reports said the US and Britain had opposed the Russian demand, considering it an effort to discredit Unscom.

The disarmament experts had delayed their departure from Iraq for a few days until the Security Council gave them the go-ahead to destroy the nerve gas.

Mr Shah said the waste of the destroyed agents had been "put into concrete and left in the laboratory which has been sealed off".

'Erasing evidence'

Iraq's Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan said on Wednesday that he was sure the VX was brought to Iraq to contaminate Iraqi warheads and make it look as though Iraq possessed prohibited weapons.


[ image: VX can cause death by suffocation]
VX can cause death by suffocation
"America's blackmail, robbery and accusations (against Iraq) in order to prolong the unjust embargo on Iraq are well known," he said.

The official Iraqi News Agency said that the VX was destroyed under US pressure "to erase evidence" that UN inspectors were "involved in contaminating a number of scrapped (Iraqi) missile warheads."

The team of independent experts last week discovered seven vials of diluted samples of VX, three of them opened. Each vial contained less than 0.1 milligrams of concentrated VX.

The team, recruited for the UN by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, found other toxic materials including mustard gas. These were destroyed and packed in concrete and sand to render them harmless last week.

Lethal agent

VX is a nerve agent involving organic phosphorous compounds and sulphur. It works essentially by penetrating the skin and disrupting the transmission of nerve impulses.

At a high concentration, symptoms progress through coughing, increased perspiration, vomiting and death by suffocation.

The agent attacks both the muscles around the lungs and the respiratory part of the central nervous system. In liquid form, a drop the size of a pinhead is lethal.

When the UN's weapons inspection and destruction process began in Iraq after the Gulf War, the Iraqis initially denied that they had been working on VX.

Subsequently, they admitted to having carried out research, and finally conceded that nearly four tonnes of the agent had been produced.

But Baghdad has consistently denied having deployed VX in missile warheads - what the Americans call "weaponisation".

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Wikileaks under doubt as “classified” documents substantiate bogus U.S. claims

Islam Times

The war between Wikileaks and the Pentagon supposedly continued on Friday as the famous “whistleblower” website released 400,000 “classified” documents. The Pentagon has reportedly assigned 120 personnel to pore over the documents to determine the potential damage they could cause to U.S. security.

However, like many news reports in this day and age, the real story may be buried under the hype surrounding the release of these supposedly “classified” documents and the “outrage” they are causing.

The documents seem to paint a picture that very much favours official U.S. positions on the Iraq war. For example, the American media, which has a well documented history of shilling for the U.S. government highlighted two stories that it supposedly extrapolated from these documents. The first was the fact that the majority of civilian casualties in the Iraq war were caused by Iraqis. This directly contradicts a comprehensive study conducted by John Hopkins University in 2004. It found that “coalition” forces killed over 600,000 Iraqis, the majority of them killed in airstrikes. The leaked documents conveniently contradict this information. The second major story emanating from the “leaks” is that Iran was actively destabilizing Iraq by funding militants who were assassinating Iraqi officials. One AFP story even highlights the accusation that Iran tried to launch a poison gas attack on the “green zone,” an area where Iraqi and American officials are based. Another factor that makes this “leak” highly suspect is that the Times, a newspaper that played a leading role in validating the illegal invasion of Iraq and is well known for its pro Zionist policy, was one of “few” media outlets that was given “early” access to these “leaked” documents. This meant that the Times was able to weave a narrative around the leaked documents that was then picked up by all the major networks.

The fact that the supposedly damaging leaks are in fact bolstering American accusations against Iran while minimizing American complicity in Iraqi deaths leads some to believe that the leaks are in fact engineered by the Pentagon to either discredit Wikileaks, or are in conjunction with Wikileaks which is a U.S. government outfit.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Chicago sheriff says no to enforcing foreclosures

CNBC

CHICAGO - Two of the largest U.S. mortgage servicers have said they will resume home foreclosures, but a big-city sheriff has news for them: he won't enforce their foreclosure evictions.

The sheriff for Cook County, Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago, said on Tuesday he will not enforce foreclosure evictions for Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase and Co. and GMAC Mortgage/Ally Financial until they prove those foreclosures were handled "properly and legally."

Bank of America, the largest U.S. mortgage servicer, and GMAC, on Monday both announced rollbacks from their foreclosure moratoriums.

The announcement by Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart comes after weeks of damaging accusations of shoddy paperwork that may have caused some people to be illegally evicted from their homes.

"I can't possibly be expected to evict people from their homes when the banks themselves can't say for sure everything was done properly," Dart said in the statement.

"I need some kind of assurance that we aren't evicting families based on fraudulent behavior by the banks. Until that happens, I can't in good conscience keep carrying out evictions involving these banks," he added.

Bank of America, GMAC and JPMorgan Chase along with their subsidiaries, make up around a third of the roughly 3,700 eviction orders filed at the Cook County sheriff's office, the statement said.

The foreclosure controversy, which has drawn public outrage and sparked government probes, has threatened bank earnings and the health of the fragile housing market.

Two years ago Dart refused to carry out foreclosure evictions in cases where renters apparently had not been informed that they were about to be evicted from buildings in which their landlords had fallen into foreclosure.

Some 20 Cook County sheriff's deputies execute around 14,000 foreclosure and rental eviction notices every year.

Trades Hall president Kevin Bracken stands by his 9/11 conspiracy

Herald Sun

VICTORIAN Trades Hall president Kevin Bracken remains unrepentant after his controversial comments about the 9/11 attacks made news around the world.

Mr Bracken sparked outrage yesterday when he told Jon Faine's ABC talk-back program the attacks were not the result of terrorist activity.

He said the story was a conspiracy that "didn't stand up" to scientific scrutiny.

This morning Mr Bracken phoned into Faine's program again for a right of reply.

He said he wasn't phoning as the president of the Trades Hall council or as secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia.

Mr Bracken stood by his comments and said he had the support of 50 per cent of the community.

He also attacked Faine, claiming he was ridiculed on yesterday's program.

"Unfortunately cowards like yourself have set the political agenda in this country for too long," said Kevin Bracken.

"I won't be cowered down to bullies like yourself."

Yesterday, Julia Gillard has dismissed as "stupid and wrong" Mr Bracken's belief.

The Federal Opposition seized on the comments in Parliament, with Victorian MP Josh Frydenberg asking Ms Gillard what action she would take against Mr Bracken “to send a message that such remarks are unacceptable”, The Australian reported.

“Obviously I don’t agree with the remarks, obviously they are stupid and wrong,” Ms Gillard said.

“The Labor Party is a large organisation, people join it as individuals – we don’t dictate what people think.”

After being accused by Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne of not answering the question on discipline, Ms Gillard said: “If it is the intention of the Leader of the Opposition to expel every member who says something stupid, I’ll start sending him a weekly list.”

In Victoria, Shadow Attorney General Robert Clarke said Mr Bracken's comments were a direct insult to Australian soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

"It strikes at the very heart of the West's struggle against terrorism and it is a disgrace that while Australian soldiers are serving and dying in Afghanistan that Mr Bracken make these wild claims that undermine the very reason for their presence in Afghanistan," he said.

Mr Clarke called on Premier John Brumby to condemn these comments in the strongest possible terms and for the outspoken union leader to be disciplined.

"The Trades Hall Council needs to consider Mr Bracken's future as its president and the MUA needs to consider his future as their secretary,'' he said.

"These comments can't stand they need to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.''

Trades Hall secretary Brian Boyd said Mr Bracken did not speak on behalf of the organisation.

"The official Trades Hall position is not to entertain that theory," Mr Boyd said.

"We had almost 3000 working people killed in that terrorist attack. It was a terrorist attack, and we condemn it."

Mr Boyd said Mr Bracken's views had caused many debates behind the walls of Trade Hall.

"He is welcome to his views and we've discussed his theories," he said.

"But I totally disagree."

Mr Boyd said he stood by his colleague despite his extremist views.

"99 per cent of the time Kevin's a very good president," he said.

MUA national secretary Paddy Crumlin distanced the union from the comment, releasing a statement saying its position on the attack was "unambiguous".

"The 9/11 tragedy was a result of a terrorist attack by international terrorists who claimed responsibility," he said.

"It is the MUA's position - one that I passionately support as national secretary - that this attack is one of the greatest affronts and abuses of human and civil rights in contemporary history."

This is not the first time Mr Bracken has voiced his controversial opinions on the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon.

In 2006 he told The Australian he believed the attacks only worked because the US Government was in some way involved.

"If they want to stop terrorism they've got to look at who was really behind September 11," Mr Bracken said at the time.

"It couldn't have happened unless there was participation from key elements of the American military and government and security services. I am not saying the whole lot were involved. But I believe the official story for September 11 doesn't stack up."

Mr Bracken said in 2006 his views on the terror laws and September 11 were his own, and he was not speaking on behalf of the union.

VIVA PALESTINA CONVOY BREAKS SIEGE AND ENTERS GAZA

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Every email and website to be stored by government

Telegraph

Every email, phone call and website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived controversial Big Brother snooping plans.

It will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.

Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state.

The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive them.

It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason".

Any suggestion of a central "super database" has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time.

That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism.

The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.

The move was buried in the Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, which revealed: "We will introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework.

"This programme is required to keep up with changing technology and to maintain capabilities that are vital to the work these agencies do to protect the public.

"Communications data provides evidence in court to secure convictions of those engaged in activities that cause serious harm. It has played a role in every major Security Service counter­terrorism operation and in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations.

"We will legislate to put in place the necessary regulations and safeguards to ensure that our response to this technology challenge is compatible with the Government’s approach to information storage and civil liberties."

But Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: "One of the early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket storage of internet and email records’.

"Any move to amass more of our sensitive data and increase powers for processing would amount to a significant U-turn. The terrifying ambitions of a group of senior Whitehall technocrats must not trump the personal privacy of law abiding Britons.”

Guy Herbert, general secretary of the No2ID campaign group, said: "We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.

"It is disappointing that the new ministers seem to be continuing their predecessors' tradition of credulousness."

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Pakistan intelligence services 'aided Mumbai terror attacks'

Militant arrested last year described dozens of meetings between ISI officers and senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives

Pakistan's powerful intelligence services were heavily involved in preparations for the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008, according to classified Indian government documents obtained by the Guardian.

A 109-page report into the interrogation of key suspect David Headley, a Pakistani-American militant arrested last year and detained in the US, makes detailed claims of ISI support for the bombings.

Under questioning, Headley described dozens of meetings between officers of the main Pakistani military intelligence service, the ISI, and senior militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group responsible for the Mumbai attacks.

He claims a key motivation for the ISI in aiding the attacks was to bolster militant organisations with strong links to the Pakistani state and security establishment who were being marginalised by more extreme radical groups.

Headley, who undertook surveillance of the targets in Mumbai for the operation, claims that at least two of his missions were partly paid for by the ISI and that he regularly reported to the spy agency. However, the documents suggest that supervision of the militants by the ISI was often chaotic and that the most senior officers of the agency may have been unaware at least of the scale and ambition of the operation before it was launched.

More than 160 people were killed by militants from LeT who arrived by sea to attack luxury hotels, a Jewish centre, a café, a hospital and the main railway station in Mumbai, the Indian commercial capital. Casualties included citizens from 25 countries, including four Americans killed and seven Britons injured. The attacks dominated media for days and badly damaged already poor Indian-Pakistan relations.

European and American security services now fear that LeT, which has thousands of militants, runs dozens of training camps and has extensive logistic networks overseas, is moving from what has been a largely regional agenda – focused on the disputed Himalayan former princely state of Kashmir – to a global agenda involving strikes against the west or western interests. The documents suggest the fierce internal argument within the organisation over its strategic direction is being won by hardliners.

Headley, interviewed over 34 hours by Indian investigators in America in June, described how "a debate had begun among the terrorist outfits" and "a clash of ideology" leading to "splits".

"The aggression and commitment to jihad shown by several splinter groups in Afghanistan influenced many committed fighters to leave [LeT]," Headley said. "I understand this compelled the LeT to consider a spectacular terrorist strike in India."

Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, told the investigators that the ISI hoped the Mumbai attack would slow or stop growing "integration" between groups active in Kashmir, with whom the agency had maintained a long relationship, and "Taliban-based outfits" in Pakistan and Afghanistan which were a threat to the Pakistani state.

"The ISI … had no ambiguity in understanding the necessity to strike India," Headley is reported to have said. The aim of the agency was "controlling further split in the Kashmir-based outfits, providing them a sense of achievement and shifting … the theatre of violence from the domestic soil of Pakistan to India."

Headley describes meeting once with a "Colonel Kamran" from the military intelligence service and having a series of meetings with a "Major Iqbal" and a "Major Sameer Ali". A fellow conspirator was handled by a Colonel Shah, he claims. Headley also alleges that he was given $25,000 by his ISI handler to finance one of eight surveillance missions in India.

However, Headley describes the ISI director general, Lt General Shuja Pasha, visiting a key senior militant from LeT in prison after the attacks in a bid "to understand" the operation, implying that, as many western security agencies suspect, the top ranks of the agency were unaware of at least the scale of the planned strike.

The Pakistani government has repeatedly denied any involvement of any security official in the Mumbai attacks. Last night, an ISI spokesman told the Guardian the accusations of the agency's involvement in the Mumbai attacks were "baseless".

LeT was banned in Pakistan in 2002. Jamat-ud Dawa, the social welfare wing of LeT, has been blacklisted in the wake of the Mumbai attacks although it continues to function.

The revelations could prove embarrassing to the US government as well as to the Pakistanis. Reports in American newspapers over the weekend claimed that Headley's wife had tried to alert American authorities to her husband's activities but had been ignored.

Monday, October 18, 2010

SB 1070 Leaves Arizonans in Limbo

Border Beat

But the ambiguity of SB 1070 is also its strength. The intent is “not to arrest people,” said Chin at a lecture at the UA, “but to make people leave.” Since the law’s legality is uncertain, people do not know how to conform. The only way to be sure you will not get arrested is to leave Arizona, he says.

And it appears families are moving out of state. At Los Amigos, one of the biggest elementary schools in the Sunnyside Unified School District, enrollment hovered at 760 students the past few years. This year, however, almost 8 percent less students can be found in their classrooms. School records show that more than 50 children moved out of state, according to second-grade teacher Allison Stirling.

“You had kids last year, and now they just disappeared,” Stirling says.

However, it’s nearly impossible to document whether they left because of SB 1070.

A confusing provision that has not been suspended by Bolton states: a person “in violation of a criminal offense” – such as possibly speeding or not filing taxes – cannot transport, harbor, conceal or shield an illegal immigrant, when he or she knows or suspects the person to be illegal.

But what does this mean? According to Chin, you may be committing a crime if you are speeding to get a dying illegal immigrant to the hospital. Even an off-duty EMT, who parks his or her car and obstructs traffic in the process of helping an unconscious illegal immigrant at an accident, could be arrested for violating SB 1070.

The drafters’ central idea behind SB 1070 was, “what is wrong with a state helping the federal government carrying out its own law?” Chin said.

But SB 1070 eliminates many of the rights an immigrant would have under federal law, since Arizona is not equipped to take over the full spectrum of federal immigration laws. Bolton points out in her court order that, “Congress has created and refined a complex and detailed statutory framework regulating immigration.” This means that immigration law is a complex and multi-layered body of rules implemented by federal institutions such the Department of Homeland Security.

It is designed this way to guarantee that a life-changing decision, like deportation, is not made in haste.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

CNBC predicts Congress will retroactively legalize foreclosure fraud

Raw Story

Congress will pass a bill to "forgive" banks the potentially criminal errors made in foreclosure proceedings, a senior CNBC editor predicts.

In a blog column Friday, John Carney argues that lawmakers in DC won't allow the country's largest issuers of mortgages to suffer financial losses following revelations of numerous mishandled foreclosure proceedings, especially when bailing them out this time "won't cost taxpayers a dime."

Here’s what is going to happen: Congress will pass a law called something like “The Financial Modernization and Stability Act of 2010” that will retroactively grant mortgage pools the rights in the underlying mortgages that people are worried about. All the screwed up paperwork, lost notes, unassigned security interests will be forgiven by a legislative act....

The [foreclosure] crisis is not driven by economics. It is driven by legal rights. And there’s simply zero probability that the politicians in Washington are going to let Bank of America or Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase fail because of a legal issue.

Carney predicts that the lame-duck session of Congress following this November's elections will pass the law. "Every member of Congress ... who has been voted out of office will cast a vote for the bill. And the President will sign it."

Major banks' stocks have suffered losses this week as an increasingly large body of evidence has emerged suggesting that banks and their contractors may not have done the most basic vetting of foreclosure paperwork, instead using "robo-signers" to rubber-stamp whatever foreclosure applications were brought forward.

The Associated Press reported this week:

In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in "foreclosure expert" jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.

In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word "affidavit." Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud.

The result has been a steady stream of allegations of wrongly foreclosed homes. In one notorious incident last month, a Florida man who had bought his home for cash and carried no mortgage was stunned to find his home in foreclosure. In another incident, a woman who was behind on payments but not in foreclosure called 911 when she heard what she thought was a burglar, but was in fact a JPMorgan contractor coming to change the locks on her home.

In many instances, those shortcuts and mistakes may have violated laws. Attorneys general in all 50 states have now launched probes into foreclosure practices. Bank of America has halted foreclosure proceedings in all states, while Ally Financial (formerly GMAC), JPMorgan and others have announced partial suspensions.

Carney admits that, with outrage growing over unscrupulous foreclosure practices, a second bailout of banks would be politically unpopular.

"Will the public be outraged?" he writes. "Probably. Financial bloggers will scream from the high heavens against another bailout of the banksters. Congress may try to create some cost for banks in exchange for the forgiveness, perhaps requiring more mortgage modifications. But the much feared [foreclosure] apocalypse will be laid to rest."

Turkish PM: Israel Must Apologize for Raid on Flotilla

Voices of America

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has again urged Israel to apologize for, and compensate the victims of, a raid earlier this year on a flotilla trying to break Israel's blockade of Gaza.

Mr. Erdogan said Saturday if Israel fails to make those gestures it will remain isolated in the Middle East. He accused Israel of committing state terrorism.

Eight Turkish activists and one Turkish-American were killed during Israel's raid in May on the ship Mavi Marmara. Israel said its troops acted in self-defense after being attacked by activists.

A few days ago, Turkish lawyers for pro-Palestinian activists filed a complaint in the International Criminal Court, accusing Israel of war crimes in its flotilla raid. That filing revived an issue that has severely strained Israel's relations with Turkey.

A delegation representing 300 activists and a Turkish organization submitted the complaint to the prosecutor's office in The Hague, seeking an investigation of the raid. The prosecutor's office offered no comment on whether it intends to pursue the case.

The court, which began work in 2002 as the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal, receives hundreds of complaints every year. So far it has filed indictments against 17 war crimes suspects, all of them involved in African conflicts.

Friday, October 15, 2010

U.S. Troops To Deal With Rioting Americans




Prison Planet

Globalists Collapsing Society To Bring In Martial Law

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, October 14, 2010

U.S. troops now being trained to boss communities and run local governments are being readied to oversee a post-collapse America in which riots and civil unrest similar to that now exploding in Europe over austerity measures and pension cuts ravage the United States and are met with the iron fist of a militarized police state.

Reaction to our earlier story about the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division being prepared for a situation where “in essence they will become the local government” by working with local officials has been strong, with some refusing to believe that the program is geared towards anything other than operations overseas.

However, as we outlined in our article, similar deployments by Northcom are admittedly focused around “homeland patrols” and training troops to deal with “civil unrest” and “crowd control”.

We have documented numerous incidents over the past several years where active duty troops or national guard have been used in domestic law enforcement operations.

The military are now being called upon to undertake roles normally designated to police as Americans are incrementally acclimated to accept the presence of troops on the streets as an everyday occurrence, in preparation for them to be used should the United States enter a post-collapse period of turmoil and unrest.

We covered a case in Kingman Arizona last September, where National Guardsmen were filmed “providing security” and directing traffic.


Another example occurred in Newport Kentucky, when military checkpoints suddenly appeared downtown on September 6 last year. Military Police from the U.S. Army National as well as Marines were purportedly conducting “traffic control” because the city was strapped for funds and did not have enough police to do the job.

The excuse that troops are stepping in to help because there is a lack of police doesn’t wash. Crime is down over the last 20 years, there are around three times more police and the state is not calling out the National Guard, they are being put on the streets as a result of the harmonization of police and military, a process that has been ongoing for decades, long before the economic recession hit. Troops also have guns and their primary function is to search people and vehicles, not direct traffic.

Members of the WeAreChange Ohio group interviewed some of the troops, who when asked if they would be prepared to “confiscate guns, shoot resisters in the back of the head, or throw people into ovens to incinerate bodies,” refused to categorically deny that they would follow such orders.

However, this was by no means the first time that troops have been used to fulfill roles normally ascribed to police in Kentucky.

During the Kentucky Derby on May 2 last year, Military Police were on patrol to deal with crowd control. An Associated Press photograph shows armed MP’s detaining a man who ran onto the track following the 135th Kentucky Derby horse race at Churchill Downs.

“The military has NO BUSINESS policing the citizens except during extraordinarily exceptional times of national emergency by an executive order. This is very disturbing and completely un-American. Maybe even more disturbing is that no one seems to care how quietly and easily we have accepted the burgeoning police state,” one respondent to the photo stated.

As we reported in 2008, U.S. troops returning from Iraq are now occupying America, running checkpoints and training to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” under the auspices of a Northcom program that by 2011 will have no less than 20,000 active duty troops deployed inside America to “help” state and local officials during times of emergency.

Full Article