Tell-A-Vision = Why Not Try Love Again?
Alerts + Notes from ~@~
mozilla Collusion
If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. - Andrew Lewis
Collusion provides an interactive, real-time visualization of the entities that track your behavior across the web.
This page will show you a demo of what you might see if you were surfing the web with Collusion.
Click here to see what happens when you start your browser and visit the Internet Movie Database at imdb.com.
Non Working Sample of Demo
Each dot in this graph represents a website. The gray dot in the middle is imdb.com; the red dots near it are advertising sites that have created cookies in your browser and are now tracking your behavior on the IMDB.
The advertising sites are colored red because privacychoice.org has determined that they're behavioral tracking sites. Non-red sites may still track you.
Go to mozilla: Where One Can Test, and perhaps install, Collusion
"Dueling Banjos" solo on a double necked guitar by Mark Kroos
http://www.youtube.com/embed/nDiW3J7Pyc8?rel=0
Karl Cohen ~ Association International du Film d'Animation-SF Newsletter
ASIFA-SF Newsletter ~ April 2013
This issue includes 3 feature articles:
THE COLLAPSE OF RHYTHM & HUES HAS CREATED NUMEROUS DISTURBING ARTICLES ABOUT THE VFX INDUSTRY'S FUTURE IN THE US
ICING ON THE SACHERTORTE - THOUGHTS ON TRICKY WOMEN ANIMATION FESTIVAL BY CORRIE FRANCIS PARKS
KLIK GROWS UP, BUT DOESN'T OUTGROW FUN! THE KLIK AMSTERDAM ANIMATION FESTIVAL by Nancy Denney-Phelps
Our next ASIFA-SF EVENT WILL BE CAREERS IN ANIMATION with 5 guest experts on the panel.
Also included are a list of animation films that are going to be shown by the SF Film Festival, several news items, etc.
Mike Wilhelm ~ Charlatans, Flamin' Groovies, Loose Gravel, and more
Got My Mojo Workin' ~ Mike Wilhelm & Hired Guns ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/wMzvSd-OEGk?rel=0
Amestizo ~ BLOG + NEW: http://amestizo.bigcartel.com/
Timothy Leary debates Christian Ministers ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/PpT31m_6jQs?rel=0
Alerts + Notes from ~@~
Redneck Country Band Ambushes Google Street View Car!
http://www.youtube.com/embed/rphOfG52obM?rel=0
Keith Lampe ~ Co-Founder of YIPPIE and Progressive Activist Groups + YouTube Video Channel
Eastern and Western World Debut 3/17/13
http://www.youtube.com/embed/i53kpOo8D7QPublished on Mar 28, 2013: If you've enjoyed what you've heard so far, please help us spread the word about this new music. In most regions of our planet these days, there are quite a few folks adept at one or more mantras. We urgently hope they'll start getting-it-together with local musicians able to appreciate how much can be added to the presentation of Western tunes by Eastern background vocalists. Indeed, let ten thousand E&W bands bloom. Best wishes, Pondo ~ View related video on Pondo's Video Channel
If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution
by ~@~
Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15] 1869 – May 14, 1940) has always been one of my heroes.
She has been described as -- among other things -- "the most dangerous woman in America" and was given credit for the phrase, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution."
She was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the U.S. in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement in 1889. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested -- along with hundreds of others -- and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life. [Continue Reading]
Rogue Dentist May Have Exposed
7,000 Patients to HIV, Hepatitis
By SYDNEY LUPKIN, ABC News, Article Source
[Ed. Note: Always research anyone you let touch your mouth because there are a lot of mediocre folks out here, with low scholastic averages, charging lots of money, for lousy dental work, and they don't care, because of their insurance.]
ABC News - Rogue Dentist May Have Exposed 7,000 Patients to HIV, Hepatitis
The Tulsa Health Department is warning 7,000 patients of a local dentist's office that they could have contracted HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C from poor sterilization practices.
Dr. Wayne Harrington, an oral surgeon with a practice in Tulsa, Okla., is being investigated by the state dental board, the state bureau of narcotics and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency because one of his patients recently tested positive for hepatitis C and HIV without known risk factors other than receiving dental treatment.
Upon hearing of the infected patient, the Oklahoma Board of Dentistry conducted a surprise inspection of Harrington's practice on March 18, allegedly finding numerous problems, including regular use of a rusty set of instruments on patients with known infections, and the practice of pouring bleach on wounds until they "turned white."
Calls to Harrington's office were directed to an operator, who told ABC News the clinic no longer took voicemails. The operator said patients were being referred to another clinic, but did not disclose the clinic's name.
Susan Rogers, executive director of Oklahoma's Board of Dentistry, called the incident a "perfect storm." On top of his many violations in sanitary practice, the dentist was a Medicaid provider, which means he had a high proportion of patients with HIV or hepatitis, she said.
Harrington and his staff told investigators that he treated a "high population of known infectious disease carrier patients," according to a complaint filed by the Oklahoma Board of Dentistry.
He allegedly allowed unlicensed dental assistants to administer medication, according to the complaint. These assistants were left to decide which medications to administer, and how much was appropriate.
Drug cabinets were unlocked and unsupervised during the day, and Harrington did not keep an inventory log of drugs, some of which were controlled substances. One drug vial expired in 1993.
"During the inspections, Dr. Harrington referred to his staff regarding all sterilization and drug procedures in his office," the complaint read. "He advised, 'They take care of that. I don't.'"
Harrington allegedly re-used needles, contaminating drugs with potentially harmful bacteria and trace amounts of other drugs, according to the complaint. Although patient-specific drug records indicated that they were using morphine in 2012, no morphine had been ordered since 2009.
The instruments for infected patients was given an extra dip in bleach in addition to normal cleaning methods, but they had red-brown rust spots, indicating that they were "porous and cannot be properly sterilized," according to the complaint.
The Tulsa Health Department said Harrington's patients will receive letters by mail notifying them of the risk and steps to obtain free-of-charge testing.
While 7,000 patients may have been exposed, Joseph Perz, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it's "extremely rare" to see dental transmission of HIV and hepatitis B or C. In July 2012, 8,000 Coloradans were notified that their dentist had reused needles, potentially exposing them to the blood-borne viruses. But not a single case was identified, according to the CDC.
Dental transmission is not impossible, however. Perz cited a dental fair three years ago in which hepatitis B was transmitted between patients.
In July 2012, more than 1,800 veterans who received dental care at a St. Louis VA Medical Center were warned that improper cleaning of dental tools may have exposed them to HIV and hepatitis.
The Tulsa Health Department has set up a hotline at (918) 595-4500 for people with questions.
ABC News' Dr. Richard Besser and Katie Moisse contributed to this story.
Skate life on an Indian Reservation - Skate or Die ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/SYRINJZZqWU?rel=0
Wounded Knee (MP3) by Robbie Basho
You Got It Wrong...
Jesus said he did not like figs!
Supreme Court to Subpoena God?
Beautiful World by Devo ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/56u6g0POvo0?rel=0
One More Time
Gil Scott Heron "B" Movie from Reflections (1981)
http://www.youtube.com/embed/sLtRHN7fsgY?rel=0
Boptime with Even Steven + The Legends of Wilmington Jazz
BOPTIME: Saturday, 6 AM Eastern time, 3 AM Pacific time:
MP3 Stream ~ Low 24K ~ High 128K ~ Real Audio ~ Low 24K ~ High 128K ~ Windows ~ Low 24K ~ High 128K
April 6th, 2013 from 7 to 9am Eastern Time 4 to 6am Pacific Time
On April 6th from 7 to 9am Boptime will present a special program about the legendary British rock music producer Joe Meek. Meek was a sonic genius who led a troubled life and who died tragically and suddenly on February 3, 1967. During Meek's career, which began in the mid 1950s, he produced recordings by the Honeycombs, The Cryin' Shames, and many others including the Tornados who were the first British rock band to have a #1 hit in the United States with "Telstar" in 1962. Along with my co-host Christine Facciolo, our special guests for this Boptime special will be Howard S. Berger, who produced the film A Life in the Death of Joe Meek, Barry Cleveland, author of Joe Meek’s Bold Techniques, and John Covach author of What’s That Sound?: An Introduction to Rock and Its History.
Alerts + Notes from ~@~
Radical Acoustic, Saturday, April 6, 2013, 4 to 6pm
Next Performance: SATURDAY, April 6, 2013 via John Radogno ~ Click to View Page
40 Pieces of Silver, Criminal Politicians, and Google
Did 9/11 cOmmission Distort Facts or Just Plain Lie?
Criminal Politicians (Republicans, with Democrat Support) Revoke U.S. Civil Liberties1989
RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest Tuesday 11 April 1989 Volume 8 : Issue 54
FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS ACM
Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderatorDate: Tue, 11 Apr 89 08:12:04 PDT
From: cas@toad.com (Curtis Spangler)
Subject: NSA and Not Secure AgenciesSan Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle Wire Services, April 11, 1989:
"Computer Group Wary of Security Agency
A public interest group said yesterday that the National Security Agency, the nation's biggest intelligence agency, could exert excessive control over a program to strengthen the security of computer systems throughout the federal government.
The group, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility - based in Palo Alto - urged key members of Congress to focus "particularly close scrutiny" on the agency's role in helping to implement legislation aimed at safeguarding sensitive but unclassified information in federal computers.
"There is a constant risk that the federal agencies, under the guise of enhancing computer security, may find their programs - to the extent that they rely upon computer systems - increasingly under the supervision of the largest and most secretive intelligence organization in the country," it said."
NOW
SELinux Background
Researchers in the National Information Assurance Research Laboratory of the National Security Agency (NSA) worked with Secure Computing Corporation (SCC) to develop a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture based on Type Enforcement, a mechanism first developed for the LOCK system. The NSA and SCC developed two Mach-based prototypes of the architecture: DTMach and DTOS. The NSA and SCC then worked with the University of Utah's Flux research group to transfer the architecture to the Fluke research operating system. During this transfer, the architecture was enhanced to provide better support for dynamic security policies. This enhanced architecture was named Flask. The NSA integrated the Flask architecture into the Linux® operating system to transfer the technology to a larger developer and user community. The architecture has been subsequently mainstreamed into Linux and ported to several other systems, including the Solaris™ operating system, the FreeBSD® operating system, and the Darwin (Apple) kernel, spawning a wide range of related work.
http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/background.shtml
Two people trying to sleep with a big Government eye looking at themFBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying
Powers as "Top Priority" for 2013By Ryan Gallagher, Posted Tuesday, March 26, 2013, at 4:58 PM, Article Source
Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a "top priority" this year.
Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBI's efforts to address what it calls the "going dark" problem--how the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. It's no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, it's a different story.
That's because a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesn't cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games ("the chat feature in Scrabble") to Gmail and Google Voice. "Those communications are being used for criminal conversations," he said.
While it is true that CALEA can only be used to compel Internet and phone providers to build in surveillance capabilities into their networks, the feds do have some existing powers to request surveillance of other services. Authorities can use a "Title III" order under the "Wiretap Act" to ask email and online chat providers furnish the government with "technical assistance necessary to accomplish the interception." However, the FBI claims this is not sufficient because mandating that providers help with "technical assistance" is not the same thing as forcing them to "effectuate" a wiretap. In 2011, then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni--Weissmann's predecessor--stated that Title III orders did not provide the bureau with an "effective lever" to "encourage providers" to set up live surveillance quickly and efficiently. In other words, the FBI believes it doesn't have enough power under current legislation to strong-arm companies into providing real-time wiretaps of communications.
Because Gmail is sent between a user's computer and Google's servers using SSL encryption, for instance, the FBI can't intercept it as it is flowing across networks and relies on the company to provide it with access. Google spokesman Chris Gaither hinted that it is already possible for the company to set up live surveillance under some circumstances. "CALEA doesn't apply to Gmail but an order under the Wiretap Act may," Gaither told me in an email. "At some point we may expand our transparency report to cover this topic in more depth, but until then I'm not able to provide additional information."
Either way, the FBI is not happy with the current arrangement and is on a crusade for more surveillance authority. According to Weissmann, the bureau is working with "members of intelligence community" to craft a proposal for new Internet spy powers as "a top priority this year." Citing security concerns, he declined to reveal any specifics. "It's a very hard thing to talk about publicly," he said, though acknowledged that "it's something that there should be a public debate about."
Cartoon of War on Terror agents tearing up house looking for evidence.
Not finding any evidence, they then start looking for drugs and say,
"So...As Long As We're Here... Does Your Evil Kid Smoke Dope?"What About John O'Neill? ... Was He Murdered?
What about the Video tape from the gas station across from the Pentagon?
It is known a lot of (actually concerned) people would like to see that video !!!
New Product: Penta-Lawn 2000 has the ability to make plane crash debris vanish?
Voodoo Chile-Jimi Hendrix / Gayageum version by Luna
http://www.youtube.com/embed/NfOHjeI-Bns?rel=0
Equality
Flash Mob at Bucharest International Henri Coanda Airport by Bucharest Symphony Orchestra
http://www.youtube.com/embed/DWNuyUYB-jA?rel=0
Social Farter
You Can Not Say You Were Not Warned
Do to a mistake, your gene pool was compromised! Your intelligence accelerated faster than your animalistic evolution, causing you to develop atomic power before its time. This was bad because you still kill for no reason. We debated thousands of years about what to do and realized: Everything is Perfect!
Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Classified ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/5IhlNK3hEeE?rel=0
March 23, 2013 ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/jMxZMHMppHU?rel=0The Declaration of Independence establishes the supremacy of the People and the Right and Duty to defend the Rights of the People over the Acts of the Government. Our Constitution provides for as many protections as possible to ensure that the Government is subservient to the People and only exists for the purpose of serving the People.
Drop Dead ~ Telecom Crimes ~ Patriot Act ~ Denialist ~ He Said It ~ Rethinking 9/11 ~ Stupid Activists
Politicians Support Israeli Terrorism Against U.S. Military
Martin Rowson - The Glory that was RomeThe following article appeared in The Guardian:
Netanyahu reaffirms US-Israel bond on Obama visit but talks tough on Iran
which appears to be a bunch of crap[Crap = Zionist Netanyahu, NOT article, which is Not posted here, Click above link].
The Dirty Work of Zionism Is Not Finished Yet
Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there [?9/11?], I don't care. And I don't mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal… What you lot don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it. ~ Ariel Sharon, Ex Israel Prime Minister, Zionist, 1982
A Few Weeks After the Mass Murders of 9/11:
Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it. ~ Ariel Sharon, Ex Israel Prime Minister, Zionist, 3 October 2001
Nathan Mileikowsky
(Writer and Zionist activist)
|
Benzion Netanyahu
(Professor of History and Zionist activist)
|
Benjamin Netanyahu
(Current Zionist Prime Minister of Israel)Zionists will employ or apply the term: anti-semitic on anybody; including PEACE loving Israelis, who comment on continuing Zionist ATROCITIES against Humanity.
Obama and Netanyahu: up close and personal - Steve BellAssassinate Obama if he won’t attack Iran for Israel,
Jewish monthly suggestsPAUL KORING, WASHINGTON - Globe and Mail Update, Sunday, January 22, 2012 1:54 PM EST, Article Source
Musing openly about murdering President Barack Obama is certain to stir some attention.
So is publicly suggesting it’s a job for Mossad – Israel’s no-nonsense spy agency with its long record of assassinating enemies of the Jewish state.
Yet that’s just what the editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, did in a column laying out the three options Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has when faced with Mr. Obama’s unwillingness to wage war on Iran.
Option three, wrote Mr. Adler, is for the Israeli leader to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice-president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”
With a usual readership of only a few thousand, the Atlanta Jewish Times rarely reaches beyond the Georgia’s genteel suburbs. But Mr. Adler now has readers worldwide.
In Washington, Secret Service agents, already coping with record numbers of threats against America’s first black president, falsely accused by some of being a Muslim or a non-native-born citizen ineligible to be president, will “make all appropriate, investigative follow-up in regard to this matter,” the agency said.
Gawker, the news and gossip site, gave Mr. Adler’s violent musings global exposure.
Mr. Adler now insists he wasn’t seriously urging the assassination of the President.
But in his original column, he makes clear that he considers a “hit” a genuine option.
“Yes, you read “three” correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?” he wrote. Options one and two were all-out Israeli attacks on Hezbollah or Iran’s nuclear sites.
Now Mr. Adler says: “I feel really bad,” and promises an apology and a retraction in the next, monthly, issue of the Atlanta Jewish Times. There’s no mention either of the “hit” option, nor the intended apology on his website.
Mainstream Jewish groups hammered Mr. Adler.
Calling the “hit” option, “shocking beyond belief,” Dov Wilker, director of American Jewish Committee in Atlanta, added: “How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?”
But some see Mr. Adler’s musings as a rare public reminder of the usually unspoken and viciously hostile view of a President many regard as anti-Israel.
“Adler’s crazy and criminal suggestions are not the ranting of some loony-tune individual,” opined Chemi Shalev, a political analyst at the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “They were not taken out of thin air. Rather, they are the inevitable result of the inordinate volume of repugnant venom that some of Obama’s political rivals, Jews and non-Jews alike, have been spewing for the last three years.”
Others blasted Mr. Adler, although there was widespread acknowledgment that he was only saying what many others believe. “The ideas expressed in Mr. Adler’s column reflect some of the extremist rhetoric that unfortunately exists – even in some segments of our community – that maliciously labels President Obama as an enemy of the Jewish people,” said Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Hasidic = Good ~ Zionist = Evil
Hasidic Rabbis Against Zionism - Photograph: Bill Perry, VVAW/VFP/IVAW
Israeli attack on US Navy ship, USS Liberty ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/fRZSzdQuOqM?rel=0It appears Barack Obama is just another politician who looks the other way when it has been shown Israel attacked the U.S.S. Liberty, murdered 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two Marines, and one civilian), wounded 171 crew members, and was covered up by U.S. Politicians.
Like Grandfather, Father, & Son ~ Evil Is Still Evil
Baby Murderers and Torture ghouls
When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain ~ The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLgJ7pk0X-s via Joe
Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Melodians ~ Rivers of Babylon
'It was widely known before the Iraq war over 50% of the Iraqi population were children under the age of 15, and the war began with this act of sheer cowardice.'
For the record Bush said, 'Anyone who harms children is a terrorist.'
Above child was maimed by a Republican Bush Administration with Democrat support.
Cumming, Georgia Art Teacher Bonnie Flood says, "He [Bush] will go down in history as a great artist."
Baby Murderers Who Voted For Illegal Iraq War
H J RES 114 - YEA & NAY - 10 Oct 2002 - 3:05 PM
To Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against IraqHouse of Representatives
Yea = 296 Votes
Democrat Baby & Women Murderers
Gary Ackerman, Rob Andrews, Jim Barcia, Ken Bentsen, Shelley Berkley, Howard Berman, Marion Berry, Sanford Bishop, Rod Blagojevich, Bob Borski, Leonard Boswell, Rick Boucher, Allen Boyd, Brad Carson, Bob Clement, Bud Cramer, Joseph Crowley, Jim Davis, Peter Deutsch, Norm Dicks, Cal Dooley, Chet Edwards, Eliot Engel, Bob Etheridge, Harold Ford, Martin Frost, Dick Gephardt, Bart Gordon, Gene Green, Ralph Hall, Jane Harman, Baron Hill, Joe Hoeffel, Tim Holden, Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel, William Jefferson, Chris John, Paul Kanjorski, Patrick Kennedy, Ron Kind, Nicholas Lampson, Tom Lantos, Nita Lowey, Ken Lucas, Bill Luther, Stephen Lynch, Carolyn Maloney, Edward Markey, Frank Mascara, Jim Matheson, Carolyn McCarthy, Mike McIntyre, Michael McNulty, Martin Meehan, Dennis Moore, John Murtha, Bill Pascrell, Collin Peterson, David Phelps, Earl Pomeroy, Tim Roemer, Mike Ross, Steven Rothman, Max Sandlin, Adam Schiff, Brad Sherman, Ronnie Shows, Ike Skelton, Adam Smith, John Spratt, Charles Stenholm, John Tanner, Ellen Tauscher, Gene Taylor, Karen Thurman, Jim Turner, Henry Waxman, Anthony Weiner, Robert Wexler, Al Wynn
Republican Baby & Women Murderers
Robert Aderholt, Todd Akin, Dick Armey, Spencer Bachus, Richard Baker, Cass Ballenger, Bob Barr, Roscoe Bartlett, Joe Barton, Charlie Bass, Doug Bereuter, Judy Biggert, Michael Bilirakis, Roy Blunt, Sherwood Boehlert, John Boehner, Henry Bonilla, John Boozman, Kevin Brady, Henry Brown, Ed Bryant, Richard Burr, Dan Burton, Steve Buyer, Sonny Callahan, Ken Calvert, Dave Camp, Chris Cannon, Eric Cantor, Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Castle, Steve Chabot, Saxby Chambliss, Howard Coble, Mac Collins, Larry Combest, John Cooksey, Christopher Cox, Phil Crane, Ander Crenshaw, Barbara Cubin, John Culberson, Randy 'Duke' Cunningham, Jo Ann Davis, Tom Davis, Tom DeLay, Jim DeMint, Nathan Deal, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, John Doolittle, David Dreier, Jennifer Dunn, Vern Ehlers, Bob Ehrlich, Jo Ann Emerson, Phil English, Terry Everett, Mike Ferguson, Jeff Flake, Ernest Fletcher, Mark Foley, Randy Forbes, Vito Fossella, Rodney Frelinghuysen, Elton Gallegly, Greg Ganske, George Gekas, Jim Gibbons, Wayne Gilchrest, Paul Gillmor, Ben Gilman, Virgil Goode, Bob Goodlatte, Porter Goss, Lindsey Graham, Kay Granger, Sam Graves, Mark Green, Jim Greenwood, Felix Grucci, Gil Gutknecht, James Hansen, Melissa Hart, J. Dennis Hastert, Doc Hastings, Robin Hayes, J.D. Hayworth, Joel Hefley, Wally Herger, Van Hilleary, David Hobson, Peter Hoekstra, Steve Horn, Kenny Hulshof, Duncan Hunter, Henry Hyde, Johnny Isakson, Darrell Issa, Ernest Istook, William Jenkins, Nancy Johnson, Tim Johnson, Sam Johnson, Walter Jones, Ric Keller, Sue Kelly, Mark Kennedy, Brian Kerns, Peter King, Jack Kingston, Mark Kirk, Joe Knollenberg, Jim Kolbe, Ray LaHood, Steven LaTourette, Tom Latham, Jerry Lewis, Ron Lewis, John Linder, Frank LoBiondo, Frank Lucas, Mary Mack, Donald Manzullo, Jim McCrery, John McHugh, Scott McInnis, Buck McKeon, John Mica, Dan Miller, Gary Miller, Jeff Miller, Jerry Moran, Sue Myrick, George Nethercutt, Robert Ney, Anne Northup, Charles Norwood, Jim Nussle, Tom Osborne, Doug Ose, Butch Otter, Michael Oxley, Mike Pence, John Peterson, Thomas Petri, Chip Pickering, Joe Pitts, Todd Platts, Richard Pombo, Rob Portman, Deborah Pryce, Adam Putnam, Jack Quinn, George Radanovich, Jim Ramstad, Ralph Regula, Dennis Rehberg, Thomas Reynolds, Bob Riley, Hal Rogers, Mike Rogers, Dana Rohrabacher, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Edward Royce, Paul Ryan, Jim Ryun, Jim Saxton, Bob Schaffer, Ed Schrock, Jim Sensenbrenner, Pete Sessions, John Shadegg, Clay Shaw, Christopher Shays, Don Sherwood, John Shimkus, Bud Shuster, Rob Simmons, Michael Simpson, Joe Skeen, Nick Smith, Christopher Smith, Lamar Smith, Mark Souder, Cliff Stearns, John Sullivan, John Sununu, John Sweeney, Tom Tancredo, Billy Tauzin, Charles Taylor, Lee Terry, Bill Thomas, Mac Thornberry, John Thune, Todd Tiahrt, Pat Tiberi, Pat Toomey, Fred Upton, David Vitter, Greg Walden, James Walsh, Zachary Wamp, Wesley Watkins, J.C. Watts, Dave Weldon, Curt Weldon, Jerry Weller, Ed Whitfield, Roger Wicker, Heather Wilson, Joe Wilson, Frank Wolf, Don Young, Bill Young
Senate
Yea = 77 Votes
Democrat Baby & Women Murderers
Baucus (MT) Bayh (IN) Biden (DE) Breaux (LA)Cantwell (WA) Carnahan (MO) Carper (DE) Cleland (GA) Clinton (NY) Daschle (SD) Dodd (CT) Dorgan (ND) Edwards (NC) Feinstein (CA) Harkin (IA) Hollings (SC) Johnson (SD) Kerry (MA) Kohl (WI) Landrieu (LA) Lieberman (CT) Lincoln (AR) Miller (GA) Nelson (FL) Nelson (NE) Reid (NV) Rockefeller (WV) Schumer (NY) Torricelli (NJ)
Republican Baby & Women Murderers
Allard (CO) Allen (VA) Bennett (UT) Bond (MO) Brownback (KS) Bunning (KY) Burns (MT) Campbell (CO) Cochran (MS) Collins (ME) Craig (ID) Crapo (ID)) DeWine (OH) Domenici (NM) Ensign (NV) Enzi (WY) Fitzgerald (IL) Frist (TN) Gramm (TX) Grassley (IA) Gregg (NH) Hagel (NE) Hatch (UT) Helms (NC) Hutchinson (AR) Hutchison (TX) Inhofe (OK) Kyl (AZ) Lott (MS) Lugar (IN) McCain (AZ) McConnell (KY) Murkowski (AK) Nickles (OK) Roberts (KS) Santorum (PA) Sessions (AL) Shelby (AL) Smith (NH) Smith (OR) Snowe (ME) Specter (PA) Stevens (AK) Thomas (WY) Thompson (TN) Thurmond (SC) Voinovich (OH) Warner (VA)
Non Voting Democrat & Republican Baby & Women Murderers
Democrat = Solomon Ortizand **** Republicans = Margaret Roukema, Bob Stump
David Frum = Republican Lying POS & Baby Murderer
In a recent article by Glenn Greenwald, guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 March 2013 10.19 EDT, Article Source
David Frum, the Iraq war and oil
The former Bush speechwriter confirms what has long been the most ridiculed claim about a key reason the US attacked Iraq
George W. Bush A.W.O.L. 1972-1973 surrounded by the brave people who actually showed up for duty(updated below - Update II)
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, author of the infamous "Axis of Evil" claim in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, has a Newsweek column this morning announcing that "all of us who advocated for the [Iraq] war have had to do some reckoning". His column is an attempt to provide such a reckoning, and contains numerous revealing assertions.
He begins with this melodramatic decree, designed to make you sympathetic of the stressful and scary environment in which Bush officials were operating: "My youngest daughter was born in December 2001: a war baby." To justify this characterization, he says that "when my wife nursed little Beatrice in the middle of the night, she'd hear F-16s patrolling the Washington skies," and that "a few weeks before, a sniper had terrorized the Washington suburbs. Anthrax attacks had killed five people and infected 17 others. What would come next?" (In actuality, the anthrax attacks came from a US Army lab; the Washington sniper attacks were in 2002, not 2001, and were perpetrated by two Americans; and hearing some F-16s patrolling the sky is hardly the stuff of extreme war trauma, particularly when compared to what people in actual war zones regularly experience). Frum is right that the fear levels were extremely high in this time period, but that was due to a deliberate campaign orchestrated by the administration in which he served.
Frum's most interesting revelation comes from his discussion of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile whom many neocons intended to install as leader of that country after the US took over. Frum says that "the first time [he] met Ahmed Chalabi was a year or two before the war, in Christopher Hitchens's apartment". He then details the specific goals Chalabi and Dick Cheney discussed when planning the war:
"I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those 'others' was Vice President Cheney, it didn't matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to US dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia."
Wars rarely have one clear and singular purpose, and the Iraq War in particular was driven by different agendas prioritized by different factions. To say it was fought exclusively due to oil is an oversimplification. But the fact that oil is a major factor in every Western military action in the Middle East is so self-evident that it's astonishing that it's even considered debatable, let alone some fringe and edgy idea.
Yet few claims were more stigmatized in the run-up to the Iraq War, and after, than the view that oil was a substantial factor. In 2006, George Bush instructed us that there was a "responsible" way to criticize the US war effort in Iraq, and an "irresponsible" way to do so, and he helpfully defined the boundaries:
"Yet we must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate - and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas.
"The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right."
Prior to the invasion of Iraq, nothing produced faster or more vicious attacks on war opponents than the claim that oil was playing a substantial role in the desire to invade. On February 23, 2003, then-Cogressman Dennis Kucinich appeared on Meet the Press and argued that oil was a primary reason for the US to want to invade Iraq, and in response, Richard Perle (Frum's co-author in their 2004 "An End to Evil") replied: "It is a lie, Congressman. It is an out and out lie." That exchange led the Washington Post's liberal columnist Richard Cohen to write this:
"'Liar' is a word rarely used in Washington . . . So it was particularly shocking, not to mention refreshing, to hear Richard Perle on Sunday call Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) a liar to his face . . .
"Kucinich himself seemed only momentarily fazed by Perle's sharp right to his integrity and went on, indomitable demagogue that he seems to be, to maintain that the coming war with Iraq will be fought to control that nation's oil . . . How did this fool get on 'Meet the Press'?"
There are countless other examples of people having their reputations viciously maligned for suggesting that oil was a significant factor in the US and its allies wanting to invade Iraq.
In order to minimize the role he played in helping bring about this war, Frum writes:
"People often ask me whether I have regrets. It seems absurdly presumptuous to answer the question. I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me."
As Jonathan Schwarz replied: "Yeah, there's no way that somebody like Frum could have changed anything if he'd revealed Cheney's deep interest in Iraqi oil. Poor David was utterly powerless." At exactly the time that virtually all of official Washington was mocking and scorning anyone who suggested that oil was a significant factor in Washington's designs on Iraq, Cheney and Chalabi were spending "long hours" together, "contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq" as "an additional source of oil, an alternative to US dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia".
Ongoing deceit
In a separate post, Schwarz documents that war advocates like Frum still can't tell basic truths about Iraq even as they adopt the posture of contemplation and remorse. In particular, Frum's claim that Saddam maintained a nuclear weapons program until 1996 is indisputably false. Unfortunately, Americans are quite good at regretting their past wars but quite poor at applying the lessons to newly proposed ones.
UPDATE
Talk about self-serving revisionism: to distance himself from neocon designs on Iraq, Frum claims that he "was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration". But, as Ruben Bolling just reminded me, Frum wrote a long and angry defense of Chalabi in 2004 at National Review, hailing him as "one of the very few genuine liberal democrats to be found at the head of any substantial political organization anywhere in the Arab world", and ended with this proclamation: "Compared to anybody [sic] other possible leader of Iraq – compared to just about every other political leader in the Arab world – the imperfect Ahmed Chalabi is nonetheless a James bleeping Madison." James bleeping Madison. Whatever attributes characterized David Frum back in 2003 and 2004, a skeptic of Ahmed Chalabi was not one of them, his present-day suggestions notwithstanding.
UPDATE II:
Since some commenters, notwithstanding Frum's revelation, remain absolutely horrified by the suggestion that oil was a significant factor in attacking Iraq - perish the thought! - here is what Gen. John Abizaid, former commander of CENTCOM with responsibility for Iraq, had to say about that war:
"Of course it's about oil, it's very much about oil, and we can't really deny that. From the standpoint of a solider who's now fought in the middle east for six years – my son-in-law's fought there for four years, my daughter's been over there, my son has served the nation – my family has been fighting for a long time."
And here is what the current US Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, said about the Iraq war back in 2007 (via Dick Distardli):
"People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America's national interest. What the hell do you think they're talking about? We're not there for figs."
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan added in his 2007 book: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." What other evidence do deniers need before accepting this obvious reality?
What we Lost: Top Ten Ways the Iraq War Harmed the US
03/18/2013 by Juan Cole, Article Source
As the tenth anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War approaches, I'll be making some comments about the episode at this blog, which for the years 2003-2010 intensively covered events in Iraq. A decade is long enough for some things to become clear.
The first set of issues I want to discuss has to do with the harm the war did to the United States. Coming into 2003, the US enjoyed a great deal of sympathy and solidarity from the rest of the world (including Iran) over the al-Qaeda strikes of September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the US was widely seen as an international bully. The hard-nosed realists of Washington, of course, don't care how the country is perceived. But the poor opinion translated into an unwillingness to help out with the Iraq project, a project far too large for the United States to handle on its own. And no, El Salvador wasn't able to help that much. Moreover, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, public discourse in the US moved toward greater decency. Some of that achievement was lost because of war propaganda against Arabs and Muslims.
1. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq harmed the US in bringing into question its basic competency as a world leader. Almost everything the US did in Iraq was a disaster. It could not even get the stated reason for the invasion right, as it turned out there was no nuclear, biological or chemical weapons program. It looked dishonest, bumbling. It went into the war having no plans, and the plans the Bush administration made on the fly were mostly poorly thought-out and doomed to fail. It fell into search and destroy as a tactic for counter-insurgency, with the same results as it had had in Vietnam-- it caused resistance to swell. Billions were wasted on reconstruction projects that assumed Iraqi know-how and equipment that they did not have, and which could not therefore be maintained even if they were completed. The US tried to run in English an Arabic-speaking country that had been deliberately isolated and cut off from the world by sanctions, without any basic understanding of Iraqi culture, customs, beliefs or ways of life. The pro-Israel Neoconservatives high in the administration blackballed (as insufficiently pro-Israel) Arabists who volunteered to go help and left the Coalition Provisional Authority blind.
Basically, the world is always looking around for a team leader and a consulting group that is known for competence and for getting good results. After World War II, the US was for the most part that country. Being the world's team leader turns into respect, cooperation and, ultimately, confidence and investment. If the US came to most of the world today with a group project, it likely couldn't get the time of day from them. The United States is deeply diminished in world counsels.
2. The post-World War II generation wanted to erect an international order that would forever forestall Nazi-like aggression against neighbors on the part of world powers. The Greatest Generation therefore forged a UN charter that forbade aggressive war, allowing hostilities only if a country had been attacked or if the UN Security Council designated a country a danger to world order. Iraq did not attack the US in 2002 or early 2003. The UN Security Council declined to pass a resolution calling for war on Iraq, especially after the ridiculous circus act of then Secretary of State Colin Powell before the UN laying out a self-evidently false and propagandistic case (which provoked gales of laughter in the room). The United States has irrevocably undermined that structure of international law, and any aggressor can now appeal to Bush of 2003 as a precedent. Indian politicians of the right wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party instanced the Bush doctrine when they wanted to go to war with Pakistan. (Wiser heads prevailed, given that Pakistan has nuclear warheads). The US has loosed a demon into the world, of the war of choice.
3. The Iraq War revived al-Qaeda's fortunes and prolonged its life as an important actor. With the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and the scattering of al-Qaeda after Tora Bora, the movement was on the ropes. Internal critics lambasted Usama Bin Laden for destroying the movement by foolishly attacking the United States. But the brutal Bush occupation of Iraq and the US favoritism toward Shiites and Kurds created a Sunni Iraqi backlash. While most Sunni Iraqis were and are fairly secular-minded, a small minority gravitated to al-Qaeda as a model of resistance against the US, leading to the creation of the 'Islamic State of Iraq' and similar groups. The fringe of Libyans who attacked the US consulate in Benghazi last September included activists who had fought US troops in Iraq, and who otherwise would have lacked the training and motivation to hit the consulate. Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliates in turn have now fostered Jabhat al-Nusrah in northern Syria. Without the American occupation of Iraq, al-Qaeda would likely have dwindled into insignificance.
4. The US permanently lost its chance to achieve a two-state solution. The Clinton administration had come very close in 2000 to achieving a permanent solution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Like the Clinton economy and budget surpluses, however, the Bush administration completely undermined its predecessor's achievement. Distracted in Iraq, Washington dropped the ball on Palestine. Permanently. It allowed the Israelis vastly to increase the number of settlers on Palestinian land grabbed illegally in 1967. It undermined the elected Palestinian government of 2006 and subsequently collaborated in an evil and creepy blockade of the civilian population of Gaza. The slogan of the Neoconservatives, that the road to peace in Jerusalem lay through Baghdad, was either profoundly dishonest or profoundly stupid on their parts. It was in any case profoundly untrue. A deep gulf has opened between the US and all the other members of the UN Security Council on Israeli policy, as well as with the European Union. The US is widely hated by the rest of the world for daily getting up in the morning and screwing over millions of Palestinians. That its bizarre malice toward the displaced and oppressed Palestinians comes on top of the catastrophe it wrought on Iraq makes it look all the more monstrous to much of the globe. It is highly unlikely that Israel can survive for more than a few decades as an Apartheid state, which is what it became while the Bush team was obsessed with Baghdad.
5. The US, which once prosecuted Japanese generals for water-boarding, and which had laws against torture and against assassination, became an international symbol of torture pornography when some of the Abu Ghraib photographs of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners were released. I talked to a US embassy official charged in the middle of the last decade with upbraiding Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov for his use of torture; the diplomat knew that Abu Ghraib had pulled the rug out from under him.
6. The motives of the US in attacking Iraq were presumed by the rest of the world to be getting that country's petroleum on the world market. That the most powerful country in the world might just fall upon any victim it chose alarmed other nations and provoked their suspicions. China all of a sudden wanted an aircraft carrier group. Those already inclined to see the US as imperialist, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, were were given proof they were right. Iran's insistence on maintaining a nuclear enrichment program, even a non-military one, certainly has to do with the deterrent effect of nuclear latency (knowing how to quickly throw together a warhead). The Brazilian nuclear submarine program is aimed in part at protecting its natural resources from being summarily looted by Washington.
7. The long Iraq War did much more than the 9/11 attacks to promote Islamophobia and to make promoting hatred and fear of Muslims a common political tactic by American politicians, especially on the Right. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s had for decades succeeded in stigmatizing openly racist speech in public. TV and radio personalities have even had to resign for speaking in a prejudiced way. But after all those years fighting Muslims in Iraq, the US establishment has decided that it is all right to bring back the language of bias when speaking of Arabs and Muslims, thus debasing our American values, which proclaim that all men are created equal and all are endowed by their Creators with certain inalienable rights.
8. The Iraq War allowed Iran to rise as a regional power, so that a Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus-Beirut political axis was created. This alignment is visible in the Syria conflict, with Iran and its allies attempting to prop up Syria's ruling elite (which adheres to the Alawi sect of Shiite Islam). This Iranian geopolitical dominance exacerbated sectarian conflict throughout the region, with militant Sunnis striking back at ascendant Shiites, contributing to a destabilization of the region.
9. The financial cost of the Iraq War to the US will rise over time into the trillions. This cost derives in large part from the need to treat the thousands of Iraq War veterans who were injured by roadside bombs, and who have damaged limbs, spines and/or brains. Some 33,000 vets were injured seriously enough to go to hospital, a number seldom mentioned when the over 4,000 soldiers killed are eulogized. (Dead and wounded contractors are also seldom mentioned).
10. If the Iraqi government does ever manage to get its act together enough to produce substantially more petroleum, that will hurt green energy by lowering the cost of hydrocarbons, and so will contribute to ever more global warming. The US would have been much better off with high oil prices, encouraging consumers to move to electric vehicles powered by solar panels and wind. The oil men who plotted out the invasion of Iraq were attempting to put the price of oil back down to $14 a barrel, according to Rupert Murdoch. They failed, but whatever success they had is bad for the world.
MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that
Iraq had no active WMD
BBC's Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraqi foreign minister and spy chief
Richard Norton-Taylor, guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 March 2013 02.00 EDT, Article Source
Tony Blair's claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are challenged again in Monday's Panorama.
Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.
Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was "active", "growing" and "up and running".
A special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.
It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.
Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was "totally fabricated".
However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq's head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.
Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri's comments, and that he should have been.
Butler says of the use of intelligence: "There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages."
When it was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was the British public, Butler replied: "Yes, I think they're, they're, they got every reason think that."
The programme shows how the then chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, responded to information from Iraqi sources later acknowledged to be unreliable.
One unidentified MI6 officer has told the Chilcot inquiry that at one stage information was "being torn off the teleprinter and rushed across to Number 10".
Another said it was "wishful thinking… [that] promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow".
The programme says that MI6 stood by claims that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, though these were dismissed by other intelligence agencies, including the French.
It also shows how claims by Iraqis were treated seriously by elements in MI6 and the CIA even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball. He admitted to the Guardian in 2011 that all the information he gave to the west was fabricated.
Panorama says it asked for an interview with Blair but he said he was "too busy".
• The Spies Who Fooled the World, BBC Panorama Special, BBC1, Monday, 18 March, 10.35pm
ARPSN Seismic Heliplots ~ Seismic Activity and Cobb [Mountain] Weather
USGS, 2013 March 14 09:09:23 UTC: Magnitude 4.5 ~ The Geysers
Local Heliplots displayed for this event (201303.14) are no longer available.
PSN updates seismic heliplots every +/- 5 Minutes and ARPSN updates every +/- 24 hours.
Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Tunes Banned from Radio Airplay
Billie Holiday ~ Love For Sale ~ Banned 1956
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp6jvMgLGMQ
Harry Roy & His Orchestra. ~ I Get A Kick Out of You ~ Banned 1956
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MnLb622Irs
DIGGIN' MY POTATOES ~ 1954 ~ Chris Barber ~ Lonnie Donegan ~ Banned 1956
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utDxMtKXs3AThe Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'
[Ed. Note: Tapes show Richard, "I Am Not A Crook," Nixon sabotaging 1968 Vietnam, Paris peace talks in order to prolong an illegal Vietnam War and save his Republican presidency.
Another politician, of the same era, shortly before he died, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, admitted he could have ended the Vietnam War five years earlier; possibly saving fifty thousand (50,000) U.S. Military lives, and ... don't get me started on Agent Orange denial.
Neither of these Politicians spent a day in jail for their crimes against humanity or supporting illegal war and one could say it sounds similar to two Iraq wars started by similar Politicians?]
By David Taylor ... Video, More Photos, and Links Located at Article Source
Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh
insightinto his world. Among the revelations ~ he planned a dramatic entry into
the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught
Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but said nothing.After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations none of his successors have dared to do it. But Nixon wasn't the first.
He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency.
"They will provide history with the bark off," Johnson told his wife, Lady Bird.
The final batch of tapes released by the LBJ library covers 1968, and allows us to hear Johnson's private conversations as his Democratic Party tore itself apart over the question of Vietnam.
The 1968 convention, held in Chicago, was a complete shambles.
Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters clashed with Mayor Richard Daley's police, determined to force the party to reject Johnson's Vietnam war strategy.
As they taunted the police with cries of "The whole world is watching!" one man in particular was watching very closely.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was at his ranch in Texas, having announced five months earlier that he wouldn't seek a second term.
The president was appalled at the violence and although many of his staff sided with the students, and told the president the police were responsible for "disgusting abuse of police power," Johnson picked up the phone, ordered the dictabelt machine to start recording and congratulated Mayor Daley for his handling of the protest.
The president feared the convention delegates were about to reject his war policy and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey.
So he placed a series of calls to his staff at the convention to outline an astonishing plan. He planned to leave Texas and fly into Chicago.
He would then enter the convention and announce he was putting his name forward as a candidate for a second term.
It would have transformed the 1968 election. His advisers were sworn to secrecy and even Lady Bird did not know what her husband was considering.
On the White House tapes we learn that Johnson wanted to know from Daley how many delegates would support his candidacy. LBJ only wanted to get back into the race if Daley could guarantee the party would fall in line behind him.
They also discussed whether the president's helicopter, Marine One, could land on top of the Hilton Hotel to avoid the anti-war protesters.
Daley assured him enough delegates would support his nomination but the plan was shelved after the Secret Service warned the president they could not guarantee his safety.
The idea that Johnson might have been the candidate, and not Hubert Humphrey, is just one of the many secrets contained on the White House tapes.
They also shed light on a scandal that, if it had been known at the time, would have sunk the candidacy of Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon.
By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks - or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had "blood on his hands".
The BBC's former Washington correspondent Charles Wheeler learned of this in 1994 and conducted a series of interviews with key Johnson staff, such as defence secretary Clark Clifford, and national security adviser Walt Rostow.
But by the time the tapes were declassified in 2008 all the main protagonists had died, including Wheeler.
Now, for the first time, the whole story can be told.
It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.
He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.
At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.
In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.
Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.
So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.
He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador's phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to "just hang on through election".
Johnson was told by Defence Secretary Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace.
In a series of remarkable White House recordings we can hear Johnson's reaction to the news.
In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: "We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move."
He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.
When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.
The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.
Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.
Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.
So they decided to say nothing.
The president did let Humphrey know and gave him enough information to sink his opponent. But by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency. So Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway.
Nixon ended his campaign by suggesting the administration war policy was in shambles. They couldn't even get the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table.
He won by less than 1% of the popular vote.
Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.
The White House tapes, combined with Wheeler's interviews with key White House personnel, provide an unprecedented insight into how Johnson handled a series of crises that rocked his presidency. Sadly, we will never have that sort of insight again.
Listen to the Archive On 4 programme: Wheeler: The Final Word, on BBC Radio 4 at 20.00 GMT on Saturday or for seven days afterwards on the BBC iPlayer. [More Proof U.S. Politicians Finance Murder and Maiming of U.S. Military]
Radio Control Models ~ Aviation
Don’t look now, but something’s watching you
BeatFreakz - Somebody's Watching Me ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh8_4qqX5boBy Amy E. Feldman, National Constitution Center, Article Source
In the 1984 song "Somebody’s Watching Me," Michael Jackson sang: "I always feel like/ Somebody’s watching me/ And I have no privacy." He certainly could not have foreseen that within thirty years, the lyrics to that song could be changed to "I always feel like/ SomeTHING’s watching me/ And I have no privacy." Because as Orwellian as the year 1984 seemed, it could not have matched the potential for Big Brother-like surveillance that drones have the power to create in 2013.
Private drones. Source: Creative CommonsMuch has been written about the constitutional concerns over weaponized drones, the unmanned combat-ready flying robots, including on Constitution Daily. But even drones without weapons or the potential to injure or kill—so-called "surveillance drones" that collect information about citizens—are raising real concern among privacy advocates and constitutional scholars.
In contrast with bulky and costly police helicopters, the surveillance drones have advanced to the point that so-called microdrones, about the size of birds or even bugs, can fly silently and inconspicuously, and cost as little as a few hundred dollars. It is estimated that although there are currently relatively few drones today, according to the Congressional Research Service, the Federal Aviation Administration estimates that there will be 30,000 drones flying in U.S. airspace in the next twenty years.
There can be no doubt about the value of the treasure trove of information potentially provided by drones, including aid to emergency search and rescue operations and critical law enforcement operations for public safety. But when they can be deployed, and what information they can gather about you or about a suspect in an investigation, is still unsettled. The Fourth Amendment states:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Now, surveillance drones eliminate the need to enter a home to find evidence of criminal behavior, but can, instead, view such activity by hovering near a home’s window. So the question arises: Does law enforcement have to get a search warrant to deploy a drone to gather information? If so, when?
In Katz v. United States in 1967, the Supreme Court found that the need for the government to get a search warrant depends on whether the person had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the area to be searched. So it seems that if the police want to fly a drone to hover outside a suspect’s bedroom window in order to conduct surveillance, it would likely need a warrant. And areas outside a person’s home but still within close proximity, like the driveway, are what the court has called "curtilage" and are still afforded some Fourth Amendment protection (United States v. Hester, 1924).
That said, surveillance drones have a far broader ability to track and monitor the actions of citizens who may or may not be suspected of a crime. Through February 2013, 31 states have considered legislation to ensure privacy from surveillance drones. To date, none has become law, although both houses of the legislature of Virginia have passed a two-year moratorium on the use of drones by state and local law enforcement that awaits the governor’s signature; the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, last month passed a municipal drone resolution banning the sale or use by the municipality of surveillance drones.
Without a doubt, this issue is a thriller, as Michael Jackson would say. You can expect to see much more debate on this issue in the next year. What do you think? How do you balance a citizen’s right to be free of surveillance against the government’s need to protect citizens? Let us know!
Amy E. Feldman is the Legal Education Consultant to the National Constitution Center. She is the General Counsel of The Judge Group, Inc., a leading global professional services based in Philadelphia.
We’re not going to give up on destroying health care system for the American people.
Paul Ryan's quote on how Republicans intend to screw U.S. Citizen's (the 99%) out of Health Care
and makes one wonder why a Whore of Babylon took impeachment off the table?
US Attorney's Office accused of deliberately
withholding evidence in Aaron Swartz trial
By Jeff Blagdon, March 14, 2013 05:11 am, Article Source
Aaron Swartz's former lawyer in the JSTOR case, Elliot Peters, is accusing federal prosecutor Stephen Heymann of professional misconduct, alleging that he deliberately withheld an email that would have helped suppress illegally-acquired evidence. In a complaint filed January 28th and published by The Huffington Post, Peters accuses the Assistant US Attorney of violating his duty of candor to the court, as well as using an "extreme" plea offer to "coerce" a deal, and requests a formal investigation by the Department of Justice into the matter.
The defense moved to suppress, arguing that the delay was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment
The first part of the complaint centers around Swartz's laptop, hard drive, and USB drive, which were seized by the Cambridge Police Department on January 6th, 2011, when Swartz was first arrested. The US Secret Service was granted a search warrant on February 9th -- 34 days later, then let it expire before finally getting a second one and executing a search. The defense moved to suppress any evidence that the prosecution turned up, arguing that the delay was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment, but the prosecution argued that it didn't have the laptop until February, and that the delay was the fault of the Cambridge Police Department.
"He delayed... likely hoping that if no hearing were ordered, he would never have to disclose the evidence."
But it turns out that Heymann had an email proving that the US Attorney's Office did have the laptop in its possession, and that it, and not the Cambridge Police Department, was calling the shots on the search and seizure. According to the complaint, Heymann didn't disclose the email (or other, similarly implicative documents) until after a crucial meeting, hindering Swartz's ability to argue for the suppression of illegally-obtained evidence. Heymann "delayed until after Mr. Swartz's reply briefing was filed and after the parties appeared before the Court on December 14, likely hoping that if no hearing were ordered, he would never have to disclose the evidence which contradicted his representations to the Court," charged Swartz's former attorney.
The charge is serious -- Peters says Heymann's claims about the Secret Service not being responsible for the seizure or delay "could only have been an intentional misrepresentation to the Court." Coupled with allegations that prosecutors threatened Swartz with unduly long sentences to coerce a plea, it doesn't paint a very flattering picture of the prosecution, despite Attorney General Eric Holder's assertions about restraint in the case.
Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
New results indicate that particle discovered
at CERN is a Higgs bosonSource: CERN Content: Press Release Date Issued: 14 March 2013
Interactions NewsWire #15-13 14 March 2013 http://www.interactions.org
Geneva, 14 March 2013. At the Moriond Conference today, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented preliminary new results that further elucidate the particle discovered last year. Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding the answer to this question will take time.
Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles, and its quantum properties. For example, a Higgs boson is postulated to have no spin, and in the Standard Model its parity – a measure of how its mirror image behaves – should be positive. CMS and ATLAS have compared a number of options for the spin-parity of this particle, and these all prefer no spin and positive parity. This, coupled with the measured interactions of the new particle with other particles, strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson.
"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is.” said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela.
"The beautiful new results represent a huge effort by many dedicated people. They point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model. We are now well started on the measurement programme in the Higgs sector," said ATLAS spokesperson Dave Charlton.
To determine if this is the Standard Model Higgs boson, the collaborations have, for example, to measure precisely the rate at which the boson decays into other particles and compare the results to the predictions. The detection of the boson is a very rare event - it takes around 1 trillion (1012) proton-proton collisions for each observed event. To characterize all of the decay modes will require much more data from the LHC.
34 Civil Liberties Groups Speak Out Against CISPA
in Lead Up to HearingsOn Monday, EFF and over 30 other Internet rights organizations sent a letter to members of Congress demanding they vote no on the "cybersecurity" bill known as CISPA. The letter starts off a week in which Congress will hold three different hearings about CISPA and computer and network security. In addition to the letter, each hearing will provide opportunity to voice many of the bill's problems. We encourage you to join the fight and tell your Representative to say no to CISPA.
In the coalition letter, groups including Mozilla, ACLU, EFF, and the American Library Association called on representatives to oppose CISPA because of privacy and civil liberties concerns:
CISPA's information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like internet records or the content of emails, to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command. Once in government hands, this information can be used for undefined 'national security' purposes unrelated to cybersecurity.
CISPA may advance in the House at any time. EFF and other civil liberties groups are ramping up the fight against the bill. We'll be raising more awareness and urging users to speak to their representatives about CISPA's dangers.
The first hearing this week will focus on the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) role in cybersecurity. In the past couple of years there has been a turf battle over whether the National Security Agency (NSA) or DHS should run the nation's Internet and network security. Even after NSA head General Keith Alexander declared that civilian agencies should be in charge, the House didn't get the message. The letter we sent highlights a loophole in CISPA allowing companies to bypass privacy laws and share potentially personal information directly with the NSA. We agree with General Alexander. Civilian control of our domestic cybersecurity is a necessity.
The second hearing will touch on computer crime laws. There is talk of increasing the penalties in these laws every year a cybersecurity bill is introduced. Last year, President Obama and Senator Leahy introduced changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that tried—and failed—to increase the penalties to 20 years in prison.
But this year should be different. Government lawyers used the CFAA in an aggressive prosecution against social justice activist Aaron Swartz. Since Aaron's death, EFF and others have been fighting to reform the draconian computer anti-hacking law. Aaron's case proved the CFAA is ripe for abuse. You can go here to tell your representative to support reform.
The last hearing will focus on the future of the U.S. military given modern information technology. The witnesses are exclusively from the Department of Defense, and we have no doubt that the ongoing—and incorrectly named—"cyberwar" between the US and China will feature prominently. Whether the hearing will address the civil liberties issues raised by military operations in cyberspace is another matter.
The hearings provide an outlet for users to let their representatives know that CISPA must be stopped. The letter we sent highlights many of CISPA's problems. And we encourage you to tell your Congressmen about them by signing our petition to stop CISPA. We'll be live tweeting the first two hearings on Wednesday, which start at 10 am and 11:30 am EDT on our @EFFLive account.
Read the entire coalition letter here. ~ Article Source
Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Bob Dylan voted into American Academy of Arts and Letters
Songwriter becomes the first rock star to be voted into the elite academy where artists range from Philip Roth to Jasper Johns
Associated Press guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 March 2013 17.24 EDT, Article Source
Bob Dylan is to join the ranks of the century-old American Academy of Arts and Letters. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/APIf he lived in England, he'd surely be Sir Bob Dylan.
The most influential songwriter of his time has become the first rock star voted into the elite, century-old American Academy of Arts and Letters, where artists range from Philip Roth to Jasper Johns and categories include music, literature and visual arts. According to executive director Virginia Dajani, officials couldn't decide whether he belonged for his words or for his music, so they settled on making him an honorary member, joining such previous choices as Meryl Streep, Woody Allen and a filmmaker who has made a documentary about Dylan, Martin Scorsese.
"The board of directors considered the diversity of his work and acknowledged his iconic place in the American culture," Dajani said recently. "Bob Dylan is a multi-talented artist whose work so thoroughly crosses several disciplines that it defies categorisation."
Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen, had no immediate comment on Dylan's reaction – Dylan did accept membership, a condition for the vote to go through – or whether he would attend the academy's April dinner or May induction ceremony. Dylan usually tours in the spring and is already booked for much of April for shows in the East and Midwest of America, none of them in the New York City area.
"I would guess it's unlikely," Dajani said of whether Dylan would show up for either occasion.
On Monday, the academy announced three other honorary choices, all from overseas: Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, South African writer Damon Galgut and Belgian artist Luc Tuymans. Voted into the academy's core membership were the novelist Ward Just, known for his stories set in Washington, DC; the influential minimalist artist Richard Tuttle and the acclaimed painter and printmaker Terry Winters.
Excluding honorary picks, the academy consists of 250 artists, musicians and writers. Openings occur upon a member's death, with current inductees nominating and voting in new ones. Members have no real responsibilities beyond agreeing to join, although some become active in the academy, which awards prizes worth as much as $200,000.
Founded in 1898 and based in upper Manhattan, the academy once was designed to keep the likes of Dylan away, shunning everyone from jazz artists to modernist poets. Even now, the vast majority of the musicians come from the classical community, with exceptions including Stephen Sondheim and Ornette Coleman. Dajani and other officials have said that the academy is reluctant to vote in rock performers because they already have organisations, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to honour them.
The 71-year-old Dylan is already the first rock performer to receive a nomination from the National Book Critics Circle, for his memoir "Chronicles: Volume One"; and the first to receive a Pulitzer Prize, an honorary one in 2008. He's routinely mentioned as a Nobel candidate and for decades has been scrutinised obsessively by academics and popular critics.
Dylan has had fans and even friends in the academy, among them the late poet Allen Ginsberg. A Dylan admirer and 2012 inductee, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, will give the keynote address at the May ceremony. The title will be "Rock 'n' Roll."
1.6 Billion Rounds Of Ammo For Homeland Security?
ammo_1,600,000,000 / u.s. people_315,452,000 =
5.072087037013556
_or_
approximately 5.072 rounds per person
Time For Revolution or National Conversation?
Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Birdy Nam Nam ~ Defiant Order ~ http://vimeo.com/59528715
Speaking of Sequester
What's the Difference Between A Politician and A POS?
|
It is impossible to tell anymore because They both stink.Republicans Stole 2.3 Trillion Dollars from U.S. Tax Payers and Democrats Don't Shive A Git?
[Continue Reading]Shock and Awe
Why Bush Era Politicians Should Be Arrested and Thrown Into Jail
The Bush Administration strategy that opened an illegal Iraq war with Shock and Awe resulted in the death or dismemberment of hundreds of thousands, of innocent Iraqi citizens, including many children.
It was widely known before the Iraq war over 50% of the Iraqi population were children under the age of 15, and the war began with this act of sheer cowardice.
War Criminal Who Murdered and Maimed Children
Gets Praise From Cumming, Georgia Art TeacherFor the record Bush said, 'Anyone who harms children is a terrorist.'
This child was mutilated and maimed by a Republican Bush Administration with Democrat support.Bonnie Flood says, "He [Bush] will go down in history as a great artist."
Memo to the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff
by Mark A. Goldman, Article Source and References ~ Dated: 12/20/2005, Revised: 1/01/2006
Dear Staff:
First, let me commend you for the work you have done so far in creating this report. It is long overdue, and it is welcome. Regarding this report I would like to make the following observations:
You recommend that "the House should establish a bipartisan select committee with subpoena power authority to investigate the Bush Administration's abuses detailed in this Report and report to the Committee on the Judiciary on possible impeachable offenses."
It appears to me that your language can be interpreted as to suggest that the investigation to be undertaken should be limited to the abuses detailed in your report. This I find totally inadequate. This administration in the conduct of the war has, in my view, committed crimes against the people of Iraq that are not mentioned in your report which are also unmistakably impeachable offenses. They are also so egregious as to be considered unspeakable international crimes, including the crime against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Let me offer you the following list in no particular order. I offer this list as a starting point perhaps to be added to by others. It would, in my view, be unconscionable and a disgrace to have the select committee investigate the abuses detailed in your report and not have them investigate the abuses on my list at the same time. It would simply be unacceptable:
01. The strategy that opened the war, which at the time was called "Shock and Awe," resulted in the death or dismemberment of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Iraqi citizens, including many children. Remember that it was widely known before the war that over 50% of the Iraqi population were children under the age of 15. The war began with this act of sheer cowardice.
02. Under international law and as a matter of basic human decency, the United States had a fiduciary responsibility to conduct the war in such a manner as to protect and defend innocent Iraqi citizens--their lives, their homes, their records, their assets, and the infrastructure that supported them. In these matters Bush has been supremely negligent.
03. Bush allowed the destruction or theft of priceless artifacts, historical documents and irreplaceable treasures... including antiquities from the dawn of civilization.
04. Bush used Depleted Uranium weapons all across Iraq, poisoning the land, Iraqi children, and even many American soldiers-- with no offers to take responsibility for what was done. The use of these weapons are international crimes. Our returning soldiers are even denied the tests and treatment they need to detect and treat DU poisoning. And what about the needs of Iraqi children, their families, their friends?
05. Bush dropped cluster bomb weapons in populated areas that are designed to leave behind thousands of unexploded bomblets that to children look like toys or food packages. Many children were subsequently killed or dismembered when they picked one up or kicked one in the street. Sometimes children would pick these up and bring them to their parents who were then killed or injured by them. Who would use such a weapon in a populated area?
06. Bush had soldiers set up automobile checkpoints where Iraqi citizens were supposed to stop. But the instructions citizens were given were often delivered so haphazardly that many were killed when troops opened fire before these people could figure out what was expected of them. This did not happen once or twice. It happened over and over and over and over again. Entire families were killed. Sometimes the children who were in the back seat of cars were splattered with their parent's brains. How many times must the same irresponsible brutal act take place before it is reclassified from "accident" to "criminal negligence" or simply cold blooded murder?
07. What happened to Iraqi oil fields and other state assets? Who owns them now? Who gave Bush authority to do anything but keep Iraqi assets safe until a legitimate government could decide what it wanted to do with them? Who benefited from the reorganization that was carried out? Did Bush take assets that belong to the Iraqi people and distribute them to foreign corporations or otherwise change their ownership? What is his fiduciary responsibility and how responsible was Bush in administering his duties?
08. How were the contracts for rebuilding Iraq negotiated? How did $8.8 Billion become totally lost and unaccounted for? How much incompetence does it take before gross incompetence becomes a High Crime and Misdemeanor?
09. What happened in Fallujah? Is it true that some soldiers were instructed to shoot anything that moved? How many innocent people lost their lives in Fallujah, in Iraq? Did the Bush Administration have a duty to count and account for the deaths of innocent Iraqi citizens? Did he have a duty to care for the sick and wounded. The homeless and the hungry? Were Iraqi citizens the enemy of the United States? If not, why were they treated like enemies, like non-persons? How many were killed by American weapons? How can we justify even one death when the war itself was illegal? Who told Bush he had permission to incur "collateral damage" on behalf of Iraqi citizens? At what point does "collateral damage" -- the disrespect for life -- become a war crime?
10. Were hospitals bombed on purpose? Over and over again?
11. Were Ambulances fired upon? Over and over again?
12. Were hospitals denied needed supplies to treat sick and injured citizens? How many innocent people died because Bush denied hospitals the supplies and services they needed?
13. When there were not enough beds, is it true that sick and injured patients were thrown out of Iraqi hospitals so that US soldiers could be treated there instead? Is it true that in one case a father sat by his injured daughter who was removed from her bed to make room for a US soldier, and had to watch as his child slowly died there... on the ground, in the middle of the night, outside the hospital?
14. Is it true that the homes of innocent citizens were violated, their inhabitants humiliated, some beaten, robbed, some murdered on the spot by American forces? Is it true that husbands, sons and brothers were carted away and never heard from again without any reasonable suspicion that they committed a crime? Just because of their age? Is it true some were later tortured, some killed? Is it true some are still being held without cause?
15. Is it true that bombs were 'mistakenly' dropped on innocent civilians and their homes? How many times did a 'mistake' like this take place? How many times does it take for a 'mistake' to become criminal negligence or murder?
16. Is it true that adequate food and water were not provided for citizens, a clear violation of international law? Is it true that children got dysentery and other diseases for lack of clean water, and others got sick and died of malnutrition? How many are sick and dying now of cancer due to DU poisoning? What is our responsibility for this carnage?
17. Has Bush now recently increased the bombing of populated areas in order to protect US troops even though the result will be the indiscriminate deaths of innocent civilians? Would this be an impeachable offense do you think?
18. Is it true that the callous manner in which this war was conducted has resulted in Americans now having to face many more enemies than we otherwise would have had to face, putting our homeland and our children at risk for decades to come, and forcing us into what might turn out to be a perpetual war? Is it possible that such negligence and incompetence is a great threat to our nation's security and that the danger Bush has put our citizens in is an impeachable offense?
These alleged High Crimes and Misdemeanors should be investigated. Who is responsible for these crimes, this inhumanity? How much inhumanity does it take for incompetence and negligence to equate to an impeachable offense? Who was the Commander in Chief when these things were going on? Where was he when this was going on? What do the words "Commander in Chief" mean?
Do not forget these people. We will not let you forget these people. No one can sweep these crimes under the rug and then take their seat in the White House, the House of Representatives, or the Senate and pretend they do not have a responsibility in these matters... that it's not their job.
The report you put together is very good. It's just not good enough... it's incomplete; it needs to be amended.
"The truth... the whole truth... nothing but the truth." Isn't that the oath people testifying before the committee will take? Is that the oath George Bush will take when he testifies before your committee?
Democracy, whether it be in the United States, Afghanistan, or Iraq, is just another word for tyranny if in practice it denies any citizen the essential attributes of liberty and justice. Liberty and justice must be guaranteed to every person for a Democracy to offer the true blessings of freedom. Expressing the will of the majority is not enough. In freedom each citizen can tell the truth as they know it without fear. They can change their mind, their beliefs, their religion without judgment as long as they do not hurt others or deny them the right to do the same. Each citizen is protected by an equal and just application of the rule of law. Putting a ballot into a box is not freedom or true Democracy unless and until all the rights and freedoms enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is valued and acknowledged by a government elected of, by, and for, the People. The path to achieving such a Democracy depends on each citizen's intention to strive for it's attainment.
The Dirty Work of Zionism Is Not Finished Yet
Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there [?9/11?], I don't care. And I don't mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal… What you lot don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it. ~ Ariel Sharon, Ex Israel Prime Minister, Zionist, 1982
A Few Weeks After the Mass Murders of 9/11:
Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it. ~ Ariel Sharon, Ex Israel Prime Minister, Zionist, 3 October 2001
Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Tunes Banned from Radio Airplay
Hank Ballard & The Midnighters ~ Work With Me Annie ~ Banned 1954
http://www.youtube.com/embed/bvzSlCH9AsM?rel=0 ~ Original 78
Johnnie Ray ~ Such a night ~ Banned 1954
http://www.youtube.com/embed/rYZlRThaoxw?rel=0 ~ Original 78
Honey Love ~ The Drifters featuring Clyde McPhatter ~ Banned 1954
http://www.youtube.com/embed/TT5xnlbUEdc?rel=0
Keith Lampe ~ Co-Founder of YIPPIE and Progressive Activist Groups + YouTube Video Channel
Brian O'Leary Memorial Bio-Concert ~ 11 a.m./1 p.m. Sunday, March 17, 2013 ~ Ecuador
Karl Cohen ~ Association International du Film d'Animation-SF Newsletter
ASIFA-SF NEWSLETTER
Association International du Film d'Animation
(International Animated Film Association)
March 2013THIS ISSUE HAS A LOT OF ADVICE ABOUT CAREEERS IN ANIMATION BY SEVERAL WORKING PROFESSIONALS (LAST PART OF ISSUE)
I'M INCLUDING AN EXTRA ARTICLE ON THE CRISIS IN THE VFX INDUSTRY AT THE START OF THE ISSUE THAT WAS WRITTEN FOR CINESOURSE MAGAZINE
OSCAR WINNING ANIMATOR GENE DEITCH HAS CONTRIBUTED "WHAT DOES A 'BEST FILM' AWARD MEAN?"
THERE ARE LOTS OF OTHER IMPORTANT ARTICLES FROM NEWS ABOUT HENRY SELICK AND RICHARD WILLIAMS TO THE ARTICLE "THE 5TH XIAMEN CYBER SOUSA ANIMATION FESTIVAL, OCT. 26 -- 29, 2012, XIAMEN, CHINA by Nancy Denney-Phelps plus there are two links to Michael Langan's "Secret animation project" that was just viewed by 110 million people!
Mike Wilhelm ~ Charlatans, Flamin' Groovies, Loose Gravel, and more
You Don't Love Me ~ Mike Wilhelm & Hired Guns ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/NYO9yJM66I8?rel=0My Oral Cancer Adventure ~ Email from Curtis
The Flower ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/hMM_T_PJ0Rs?rel=0Reconciliation in Iraq is impossible
without US truth about its dirty warAmerica's claim to have helped Iraq to democracy is hollow until the US makes Bush era officials accountable for torture
Ben Emmerson, guardian.co.uk, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 March 2013 13.06 EST, Article Source
A guard escorts suspected terrorists at the police headquarters in Baghdad, 2008. Photograph: Karim Kadim/APThe investigation by the Guardian and the BBC into direct Pentagon involvement in the systematic torture of Sunni insurgents in Iraq is a bloody reminder of the catastrophe that the 2003 invasion wreaked on the people of Iraq. It also a key reason behind the decade of sectarian violence the war has left in its wake.
After a decade of the most extreme bloodshed on both sides, the Sunni minority is now asserting its collective muscle in an organised fashion under the leadership of figures such as the Sunni scholar Abdul-Malik al-Saadi. The immediate reason for this upsurge in confidence among the Sunnis of Iraq is not hard to find.
The rebellion in neighbouring Syria, which began as essentially secular resistance movement, has attracted Sunni extremist groups from across the globe in support of the effort to bring down President Assad. Armed by regional troika of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they are now about to be provided with military support by the west, including Britain, in an echo of the strategy under which western countries provided firepower to support the Islamist rebel forces in Libya.
This, in turn, has emboldened the Sunni minority, comprising a fifth of Iraq's population, which has been holding large-scale public demonstrations. Their attempt to mount a cross-sectarian challenge to the government in Baghdad has also attracted the support of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Meanwhile, the remnant of al-Qaida in Iraq has been attempting to use the protests as cover for a highly incendiary campaign inciting Sunnis to take up arms against the regime.
The essentially pluralist administration in Baghdad is committed to the re-intergration of the Sunni minorities into positions of responsibility in Iraq. They have set up a dedicated ministry of reconciliation, and the minister for human rights is actively pursuing an agenda for positive change. My UN mandate is to work closely with the government and civil society in Iraq, aiming to delivering cross-sectarian initiatives that will stem the flow of violence.
But who is really to blame? The government is in no doubt that the causes of the deep-seated sectarian violence in the country lie in the excessive and extreme policy of de-Ba'athification pursued by the US administration under the now discredited Paul Bremmer.
During the Saddam era, membership of the Ba'ath party was effectively a prerequisite for public employment in positions of any responsibility. Expelling all Sunni members of the Ba'ath party from the administration was as ill-judged a policy as excluding members of the Communist party from public office in the former Soviet Union following the collapse of the Berlin wall. Individuals who had no connection whatsoever with the crimes of the former regime were ignominiously put out of their jobs and often their homes.
Almost overnight, a privileged Sunni ruling class was turned into a marginalised and unemployed minority, with a deep sense of grievance against the US-backed Shia authorities. Many were men with military or paramilitary training, access to weapons, and nothing to to do except hate.
Into this political tinderbox, the Bush-era Pentagon, the CIA, and their proxies among the brutal Shia militias, threw the lighted match of systematic torture. Suspected Sunni insurgents were rounded up and subjected the most brutal forms of torture under the eyes of American agents. The Guardian/BBC investigation advances our knowledge of this criminal conspiracy, taking it right to the heart of the Bush administration. That set off a chain reaction that is still reverberating in Iraq.
On Tuesday this week, I presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva calling on the US and other states, including the UK, to secure accountability for the crimes committed by the Bush-era CIA and its allies in pursuit of the counterproductive campaign of rendition, secret detention and torture. To the list of international crimes committed by that administration must now be added the evidence uncovered by the Guardian and the BBC.
As long ago as 2006, during its last periodic review by the UN Human Rights Committee, the US was heavily criticised for adopting a policy of impunity towards the officials who committed these grave and systematic crimes. It is due for its next periodic review in the autumn of this year, and I have every confidence that the committee will expect to see the results of a full investigation into these new allegations. This would have the objective of bringing those responsible, including the politicians who authorised this conduct, to justice.
Taken with the compelling evidence that is now available concerning the crimes of torture and rendition that were committed internationally, this latest investigations presents an image of lawlessness and hypocrisy that is antithetical to building international co-operation with the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. The urgent and imperative need to develop an international consensus in favour of ethical counter-terrorism was underlined by William Hague in a recent speech on ethical to the Royal United Services Institute in London, in which he said that where allegations of this kind are made, they must be fully investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. One can only hope that he will be impressing upon the US Department of Justice the need for an investigation into the allegations against David Petraeus and others.
Failure to address the past inevitably generates the misperception that the perpetrators remain as beneficiaries of official toleration or collusion. However inaccurate some of these perceptions may be, they will endure until decisive action is taken. Holding those responsible to account is now the only way of genuinely drawing a line under the past.
Iraq is in desperate need of reconciliation initiatives. There may well be a case for an effective truth and reconciliation commission. But before reconciliation, there must be reckoning with the past.
Justice for the perpetrators of these crimes is an essential prerequisite to peace and stability in the region.
Condoleezza Rice: First to Authorize Torture in U.S.A.
Drop Dead ~ Telecom Crimes ~ Patriot Act ~ Denialist ~ He Said It ~ Rethinking 9/11 ~ Are you better off?
1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance platform
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxNyaXfJsA ~ via Joe
Capable of determining what type of smartphone you are holding from 20,000 feet above.UFOs are out there -- and Russell Crowe has the evidence
The film star has earth-shattering proof that aliens have visited the Earth, but is it all just a publicity stunt?
Posted by Marina Hyde, Friday 8 March 2013 04.17 EST, The Guardian, Article Source
One of Russell Crowe's "UFO" picturesTo Australia, a country with so few celebrities that all five of them need only be referred to by their first names for their countryfolk to have immediate cognisance of who you are on about.
Our business today is with Russell – technically a New Zealander, but you take what crumbs are thrown – who this week made a poignant debut into PR. Breaking off from retweeting praise about his new movie and griping about the way it was being publicised, Russell opted to post some time-lapse photos of a glow in the skies behind his Sydney office.
Alas, the discovery that the footage was four years old has led some to accuse Crowe of a desperate publicity stunt, but he is declining to acknowledge this in a performance critics are already calling his finest since he pinned the Baftas producer against the wall for fading out his reading of "the best actor's poem".
"UFO?" he wondered – and you must be the judge. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an explanation as to why his agent agreed to the "best actor" taking second billing to Mark Wahlberg in Broken City? The truth is out there – let's hope Rusty doesn't shy from uncovering it.
Worth A Read:
Eric Holder defends Aaron Swartz hacking prosecution
Attorney general expresses sympathy for Swartz's family but tells senators the case was a 'good use of prosecutorial discretion'
Why Not Prosecute Real Criminals?
War Criminals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales are Ex-Attorney General, Ghouls responsible for torturing people, murdering babies & women & children & innocent civilians & our troops: by not supplying them with tools to protect themselves, spying on U.S. citizens, etc.
There was also this:
Ashcroft's campaign and leadership PAC broke the law by giving and receiving a contribution that exceeded the federal contribution limit by at least 10 times and possibly by more than 200 times, and by failing to disclose the contribution in the first place.
Mr. Ashcroft's leadership PAC, "Spirit of America," illegally contributed a fundraising list of 100,000 donors to his 2000 Senate campaign in Missouri. Neither the PAC nor the campaign committee reported the contribution.
Spirit of America developed the list of donors between 1997 and 1999 at a cost of more than $2 million, according to a press report. Upon receiving the list at no charge, the Ashcroft campaign allegedly rented the list out and made over $100,000.
_or_
Are you a bias person, Mr. Eric Holder, A.G.,
who favors War Criminal Ex-Attorney Generals,
that belong in jail for breaking real laws?
Ashcroft tapped U.S. citizens phones and committed real crimes
This Torture Rat belongs in Prison!Then there are criminal politicians?
Over $8B of the Money You Spent Rebuilding Iraq
Was Wasted Outright [by Politicians]By Spencer Ackerman, 03.06.13, 6:30 AM, Article Source
[Ed. Note: There is also 6 to 9 Billion dollars, in cash, or more, missing from Iraq during the Republican Bush Administration =&= Maybe it is time to confiscate War Criminal (Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Black Water, etc.) fortunes to pay for an illegal war that murdered women, children, innocent civilians, our troops: who were not properly supplied with tools needed to protect themselves, while driving, what appeared to be, a prospering economy into debt ? ~ Republicans were also, mostly, responsible for Sequester and supported the Rich 1%, while 99% of U.S. citizens continue to struggle financially?]
The never-completed Khan Bani Sa'ad Prison in Diyala, Iraq. Ultimately, the U.S. spent $40 million
on the aborted project. Photo courtesy of the Special Inspector General for Iraq ReconstructionThe legacy of all the money the U.S. wasted in Iraq might be summed up with a single quote. "$55 billion could have brought great change in Iraq," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently told the U.S.'s Iraq auditor. In fact, the U.S. spent $60 billion in its botched and often fraudulent efforts to rebuild the country it invaded, occupied and recast in its image.
With the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion looming, Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, considers $8 billion of that money wasted outright. And that's a "conservative" estimate, Bowen tells Danger Room.
"We couldn't look at every project -- that's impossible -- but our audits show a lack of accountability," Bowen says. "We are not well structured to carry out stability and reconstruction operations."
That isn't nearly the whole story of the Iraq War's expense. Bowen is only looking at reconstruction money, not the cost of military operations in Iraq, which totaled over $800 billion. But on Wednesday, Bowen's office released a mammoth, final report into the botched reconstruction, which cost the U.S. taxpayers, on average, $15 million every day from 2003 to 2012 -- all for dubious gain.
It turns out there wasn't just one way to waste all that money. Some projects got started and never finished, like a prison in Diyala province, shown above, that languishes unbuilt nearly nine years after the government spent $40 million to build it. Other contracts went to cronies: the top contracting officer in Hilla awarded $8.6 million to a contractor, Philip Bloom, in exchange for "bribes and kickbacks, expensive vehicles, business-class airline tickets, computers, jewelry, and other items." Still others got needless cash infusions: one unspecified school requested $10,000 for refurbishments and got $70,000. Government contracting databases didn't even have "an information management system that keeps track of everything built," Bowen recounts.
"You can fly in a helicopter around Baghdad or other cities," Iraq's acting interior minister told Bowen, "but you cannot point a finger at a single project that was built and completed by the United States." Shoveling money into a chaotic warzone created a "triangle of political patronage" that ensured corruption would be an "institution unto itself in Iraq," in the view of the acting governor of the Iraqi central bank. (Iraq consistently ranks at the bottom of Transparency International's index on corruption.) By contrast, David Petraeus, the U.S. general who led the 2007-2008 troop surge, told Bowen that reconstruction provided "colossal benefits to Iraq."
Even projects that seemed like success stories ultimately under-delivered. Nine major reconstruction projects for Iraq's energy infrastructure cost around $1.19 billion. By and large, they were each completed within two years of their original schedule, and are a major reason why Iraq's energy supply stands at over 8,000 megawatts, compared to around 3,000 megawatts at the time of the invasion. The problem is, Bowen's report finds, the estimated demand for electricity in the new Iraq is around 14,000 megawatts.
Lots of factors contributed to the misspent or missing cash. Rarely was it clear which of the alphabet soup of government agencies was in charge of the disbursement. The U.S. was overeager to hand over construction projects to Iraqis that lacked the capacity to finish them. Contractors flooded Iraq -- there were nearly 174,000 contract personnel in Iraq in 2009, a larger force than the U.S. military ever fielded -- but a persistent "lack of sufficient contracting personnel in Iraq weakened acquisition support, hampering project outcomes," Bowen's report concludes. The report considers the 2003 purge of Sunnis from the Iraqi government to be the bureaucratic equivalent of the Baghdad looting that occurred in the occupation's early days.
Some U.S. reconstruction cash ended up being wasted during attempts to mitigate waste. A case in point was an effort the military loved, called the Commanders Emergency Response Program. As the name indicates, the program was basically walking-around-money, distributed at the discretion of military commanders, to hire Iraqis to work on short-term, high-value projects, thereby bringing economic dynamism -- and an alternative to insurgency -- to impoverished Iraqis.
To this day, Bowen finds, it's impossible to say what the $4 billion program actually bought. Commanders' record-keeping was inexact and incomplete. "This renders suspect commander narratives, academic studies, and other analyses that claim success based on that data," the report concludes. (That includes $370 million that commanders famously used in 2007 and 2008 to pay Sunni insurgents not to fight.) Yet the program was exported to Afghanistan.
The legacy of the Iraq War, and the reconstruction effort, will be debated endlessly. One argument holds the U.S. should not attempt to destroy and then rebuild a foreign country it doesn't understand. Bowen doesn't go that far -- "unrealistic," he says. Agnostic on the wisdom of open-ended nation-building missions, Bowen contends that the U.S. can't afford to do them in ad hoc ways, as experience teaches they require much greater structural oversight over the dumptrucks full of cash that they require.
But that hasn't happened. "The U.S. government is not much better prepared for the next stabilization operation than it was in 2003," his report laments. A bureaucratic reform Bowen pushed earlier in the Obama administration to consolidate reconstruction efforts went nowhere.
"If we don't reform our approach to stability and reconstruction operations," Bowen warns, "we can expect to confront once again the very significant challenges we saw in Iraq, albeit on a smaller scale."
Almost Half of Americans Have
More Credit Card Debt Than SavingsA recent Bankrate survey found that it doesn’t matter how much you make – most of us are just terrible at saving.
55 percent of the 1,003 people they surveyed said an emergency fund was more important than paying off a credit card balance. That doesn’t tell us how many have those, or in what amount, but it’s a slim majority. 24 percent said they had more debt than savings, and 16 percent said they have no savings.
Those who make more are slightly better at saving. Two-thirds of those making $75,000 a year or more have more savings than credit debt, but just two-fifths of those making under $30,000 a year do. The latter group is much less likely to have the credit score to get a card, or to have much to put into savings.
Men are slightly better savers or better liars; 60 percent said they had more savings than credit card debt, while 49 percent of women did.
But even wealth and a high score don’t mean you’re good at managing money. The story mentions a guy with $400,000 in credit debt, who was complaining because he couldn’t fuel up his jet with a credit card until he paid down his balance. Sounds like a nice problem to have.
Ready to tackle debt and learn to save? [Continue Reading?]
Wealth Inequality in America ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsMScroll of Hosea
Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself because you have broken my commandment of love.
You were given a honorable place within my kingdom and in my wrath I take it away.
Behold my locusts have risen from the smoke of the bottomless pit and will destroy those who have ignored my teachings and angered me.
Britain and US asked to release secret torture reports
Allies accused by human rights lawyer of covering up the truth on kidnapping and torture of terrorist suspects
Peter Walker, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 March 2013 06.46 EST, Article Source
Ben Emmerson: failure to release intelligence reports shows seeming unwillingness by
UK and US to face up to international crimes. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianA UN human rights advocate has called on Britain and the US to release confidential reports into the countries' involvement in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects, accusing them of "years of official denials, sophistry and prevarication" to cover up the truth.
In a speech to the UN human rights council in Geneva introducing a report on the issue, Ben Emmerson, a British barrister who is the UN's special rapporteur on protecting human rights within efforts to combat terrorism, demanded that Britain publish the interim findings of a report by a retired judge, Sir Peter Gibson, into the involvement of MI5 and MI6 in the removal and mistreatment of terrorist suspects.
Emmerson also asked the US to release a similar report by the Senate's select committee on intelligence into the CIA's secret detention and interrogation programme.
Failure to do so showed a seeming unwillingness by both governments to face up to serious international crimes and "a policy of de facto immunity for public officials who engaged in acts of torture, rendition and secret detention, and their superiors and political masters who authorised these acts", Emmerson said.
"Words are not enough. Platitudinous repetition of statements affirming opposition to torture ring hollow to many in those parts of the Middle East and North Africa that have undergone, or are undergoing, major upheaval, since they have first-hand experience of living under repressive regimes that used torture in private whilst making similar statements in public," he added.
"The scepticism of these communities can only be reinforced if western governments continue to demonstrate resolute indifference to the crimes committed by their predecessor administrations."
Britain and the US have come under increasing pressure as details emerge of the so-called secret rendition programme, in which terrorism suspects – some wrongly identified – were often snatched off the streets and flown to either secret CIA prisons or detention centres operated by other countries, for example Egypt, where many complained of torture and other mistreatment.
On Monday, a Libyan politician suing the former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and the British government for damages after being kidnapped at Bangkok airport and sent to jail in Tripoli, where he was tortured and also interrogated by UK intelligence officers, offered to settle the case for £3, so long as he receives an unreserved apology.
Despite government efforts to keep such acts secret, Emmerson said, more and more details had emerged, "and calls for accountability are fast approaching a critical mass".
He makes a series of specific recommendations in the associated report, including that 35 countries that had failed to respond to questions from a UN study on secret detention do so, and that the UK and US release their reports.
Shortly before the speech, Emmerson told the Guardian it was time for "a reckoning with the past".
He said: "In South America it took up to 30 years before the officials responsible for crimes like these were held fully accountable. With the conspiracy organised by ther Bush-era CIA it has taken a decade, but the campaign for securing the right to truth has now reached a critical point.
"The British and American governments are sitting on reports that reveal the extent of the involvement of former governments in these crimes. If William Hague is serious about pursuing a policy of ethical counter-terrorism, as he says he is, then the first thing the British government needs to do is to release the interim report of the Gibson Inquiry immediately."
The Gibson report was announced by David Cameron in July 2010. However, rights groups and victims' lawyers decided not to take part when it emerged the inquiry would have no power to compel official cooperation or evidence. In January 2012, the government said the inquiry was being scrapped due to police investigations into alleged crimes. However, Emmerson said, there were no prosecutions pending and the government should publish an interim version of the report handed to them by Gibson in July last year.
Emmerson's report into the issue goes into greater details about what has so far been uncovered about the US network of secret detention facilities for terrorism suspects and other countries' complicity in the process.
It says: "There is now credible evidence to show that CIA 'black sites' were located on the territory of Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania and Thailand and that the officials of at least 49 other states allowed their airspace or airports to be used for rendition flights."
Despite the scale of this, the report notes, just one criminal case has been brought, when an Italian court in 2009 convicted 22 CIA agents in absentia along with Italian intelligence service officials over the case of an Egyptian-Italian national kidnapped in Milan and sent to Cairo, where he was tortured.
Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Van Cliburn obituary
American pianist who was hailed as a hero after scooping a major Russian prize in 1958 at the height of the cold war ~ [Continue Reading]
Hellzapoppin' ~ Slim Gaillard & Slam Stewart ~ The Harlem Congeroos ~ 1941
http://www.youtube.com/embed/qrcZqnICYbs?rel=0
Vanita Smythe ~ They Raided the Joint ~ 1946
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Qu84tD5UhiM?rel=0
Tom Jones and Janis Joplin ~ Raise your hand ~ 1969
http://www.youtube.com/embed/jXlP7PyaHdA?rel=0John 13:34-35
Out Demons, OutINVOCATION, as delivered by Ed Sanders
"In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, god of the dead, in the name of all those killed because they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma, in the name of sea-born Aphrodite, in the name of Magna Mater, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnamable, the quintessent finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the Beak of Sok, in the name of scarab, in the name, in the name, in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the Sky, in the name of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nepta, Isis, in the name of the flowing living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit…to raise the Pentagon from its destiny and preserve it."
"In the name, and all the names, it is you."
"Out, demons out--back to darkness, ye servants of Satan--out, demons, out! Out, demons, out!" ~ [Continue Reading]
U.S. Politicians Pay Foreign Governments
to MURDER U.S. CITIZENS?Remembering Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 ~ March 16, 2003)
Rachel Corrie was an American peace activist and member of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) from Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death [Murdered] by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) armored bulldozer in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. [Click to view related flyingsnail.com Rachel Corrie links and articles]
Nick Hayes cartoon on the Rachel Corrie court verdict, Cartoon Source
Rachel Corrie, U.S. Citizen Murdered By Israel Military,
Just like USS Liberty Naval Personnel, and covered up by U.S. Politicians
Rachel Corrie ~ Interview ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/O3JI-axaRF4?rel=0Steven Leech ~ Writer/Poet/D.J.
A Visit With Uncle Richard
by Patrice F. Gibbs
Click to View a Sample of: "A Visit with Uncle Richard" at AmazonA Visit with Uncle Richard is a compilation of the popular series written by Spectator columnist and Editor Pat Gibbs. Uncle Richard, who is purported to be well over a hundred years old, is filled with the orneriness of his years, Unc’s outwardly cantankerous appearance masks a very funny, warm, kindly gentleman of the Old School. You can enjoy the fruits of Unc’s vast experiences and his profound profundity right here in these pages. Join Bubby (Uncle Richard’s ‘favorite’ nephew) on our monthly Visits with Uncle Richard as he imparts wit and wisdom on the issues of today, yesterday and tomorrow.
Amestizo ~ BLOG + NEW: http://amestizo.bigcartel.com/
Cannabis Science ~ How Marijuana Affects Health ~ Full Documentary
http://www.youtube.com/embed/B4xejnsLwKE?rel=0
'Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Marijuana': The Push To Legalize, Regulate Pot Gains Traction
http://www.youtube.com/embed/wyCgkUZ2-a0?rel=02 Corinthians 11:15
15. It is not surprising Satan's servants also masquerade as servants of God and their end will be what their actions have sewn.
In case you haven't noticed,
THEY RETURNED
THEY Took Your Jobs
THEY Took Your Homes
THEY Took Your Money
THEY Started Illegal Wars
THEY Destroyed the Economy
THEY Murdered Women & Children
THEY Put Martha Stewart & Tommy Chong In Jail
and... THEY
Held the Teachers Accountable!
This EVIL Good Ol' Boy Network Brought Disgrace to the United States
& Walk Free Today with Supreme Court help and Politician Approval !
God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them. ~ George W. Bush, HAARETZ.COM
Nobody Listens the First Time Around
None of the Above
Should Be On Voter Ballots
Aaron Swartz's partner accuses US
of delaying investigation into prosecutionTaren Stinebrickner-Kauffman says she's been told an out-of-date manifesto was a key element in the case against him
Karen McVeigh, guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 March 2013 09.05 EST, Article Source
Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman speaks to reporters during a protest in
Washington, DC in February. Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty ImagesThe partner of late internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz has accused the US Department of Justice of "dragging its heels" over an investigation into his prosecution after it emerged that his political beliefs played a role in its case against him.
Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said she was "angry and really upset" when she learned from congressional staffers from the government oversight committee that a document written by Swartz five years ago was a key element in his prosecution.
"I was surprised that the Department of Justice would be so bold, that their motivation was so political," Stinebrickner-Kauffman said. "That it wasn't just one prosecutor run amok, that it was about Aaron's political views."
Speaking to the Guardian from Sydney, Australia, where she is on compassionate leave from her job as executive director of corporate watchdog, SumOfUs, Stinebrickner-Kauffman said she learned of the document's role in the prosecution after a friend posted the story, first reported by the Huffington Post, on Facebook.
The news made her more angry than she had been since Swartz died, she said. "This is not the Department of Justice, it's the Department of Vengeance. If you look at the Department of Justice they are not interested in admitting their mistakes, they are interested in covering their asses."
Since Swartz took his own life, on 11 January, months ahead of a trial in which he faced 13 felony charges and a prison sentence, Stinebrickner-Kauffman and Swartz's family have accused prosecutors of overreach for an alleged crime with no victims and of being complicit in his death.
Swartz was accused of using the MIT computer system to access too many academic articles from a digital library called JSTOR, with the intention of making them freely available. JSTOR chose not to pursue charges against him, after the activist returned all content to them and ensured it would not be used or distributed. But prosecutors indicted him on 13 felony charges. If found guilty, he faced up to 35 years in jail, and although lawyers said plea bargain negotiations were under way before his death, his request for a solution which did not involve a prison term was denied.
Last month, representatives Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings, respectively the leading Republican and Democrat on the House oversight committee, announced they would investigate prosecutors handling of the Swartz case.
A congressional aide told the Guardian that, in a recent meeting for staffers on the House oversight committee, representatives from the Justice Department said the Swartz document – which Swartz called the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto – was a factor in establishing "malicious intent" to download documents on a large scale. The aide also confirmed that some of the staffers got the impression at the meeting that prosecutors believed they needed to convict Swartz for a felony in order to justify bringing the charges in the first place.
The aide said: "We felt the briefing for the committee was quite thorough". However, it is understood the committee has asked the Justice Department to speak to the US attorney in Boston, Carmen Ortiz. Ortiz has said she believed the prosecution was "appropriate" but her standing has already suffered from a backlash to what is seen by lawyers, internet activists and supporters of Swartz as a disproportionate and overzealous prosecution.
A White House petition demanding the removal of Ortiz garnered well over 25,000 signatures, reaching the level which guarantees a response from the Obama administration.
The Manifesto, which Swartz wrote five years ago, argued that the world's scientific literature was being "locked up" by a handful of corporations motivated by "greed". There was a "moral imperative" to sharing information on the internet, he said, and urged "civil disobedience" in order to achieve it.
"It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture," he wrote.
"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access."
Stinebrickner-Kauffman, who began dating Swartz in 2011, said that the five-year-old Manifesto could no longer be relied upon as an accurate portrayal of his political beliefs years later.
"When you are a voracious active reader in your mid-twenties, your political views change a lot" she said. "My views have. Copyright issues and internet freedom issues were central to his political life many years ago, but when I knew him they weren't. It wasn't that he wasn't interested in them but he was no longer a single issue activist. He was into lots of things, from healthcare, to climate change to money in politics."
She accused the DOJ of ignorance over new technology and of failing to draw a distinction between a "researcher like Aaron and "and someone who is trying to steal credit cards and hack into a database".
"They have decided that the best they can do it have a law that charges anyone with a federal felony, [rather] than have a law that defines crimes in a reasonable way."
Swartz was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that has attracted widespread criticism for being too broad. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from Silicon Valley, has drafted an amendment to the Act, called "Aaron's law", to prevent similar prosecutions.
"To them, somebody like Aaron was viewed in the same way as they viewed a suicide bomber." said Stinebrickner-Kauffman. "They want to be able to do anything. The Department of Justice has a long history of trying to suppress civil liberties and it has gotten worse since the war on terror started."
In a blog post written the day she discovered the revelation, she said: "the terrifying fact I'm trying to highlight in this particular blog post is this: according to the DOJ's testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn't like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making 'an example' out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime. Talk about a chilling effect on freedom of speech."
In a footnote on the post, she wrote that the DOJ had complained her characterisation of the prosecution as "political" was inaccurate, adding: "No argument as to why or how, so colour me unconvinced.
Stinebrickner-Kauffman said that she did not know what Swartz planned to do with the articles and neither did anyone else. The couple did not talk about issues surrounding the charges he faced, partly because he was afraid she would be subpoenaed and partly because "he thought I was a safe haven".
"You want to be able to have part of your life where you don't have to talk about the most terrifying part of your life."
She said that part of the reason it has made her so angry is that she worked to get President Barack Obama elected in 2008. She wrote: "I helped these people get in power. And then they drove the man I loved to suicide because they didn't like something he said once."
Stinebrickner-Kauffman said that she is anxious for the investigation to be completed, so that she will learn the truth and urged the DOJ to disclose all they knew.
"I want them to do it in a way that's designed to find justice, to find the truth. Everything we've seen so far is for them to cover their asses.
"It's definitely changed my attitude towards the Department of Justice, but we don't know enough yet. The Department of Justice has been dragging its heels on the investigation. I don't know who to blame yet and I really, really want to know."
Steve Bell on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war
Tony Blair says, "I've long since given up trying to persuade people that it was the right decision to invade IraqPoliticians Have Sex With Their Mothers ???
Yeah Yeah Yeahs ~ Sacrilege ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/6_dw3TZNIGE?rel=0Republicans Stole 2.3 Trillion Dollars
... or More ... From U.S. Tax Payers?and Democrats Don't Shive A GiT
Permalink ~ Local Report ~ Yahoo Links ~ Bing Links
How convenient, ... the day before 9/11 Neocon, Republican, War Criminal Donald Rumsfeld admitted 2.3 Trillion U.S. Tax Dollars was missing and to the best of recollections over 9 Billion U.S. tax payer dollars spent on an illegal Iraq war are also missing, while
Republicans Hold U.S. Tax Payers Hostage
Over Budget sequestrationIs War Criminal Condoleezza Rice
A Pedophile Pervert?Condoleezza Rice was the First to Authorize Torture
http://www.youtube.com/embed/PSnLZm27nj0?rel=0Local Report ~ Yahoo Links ~ Bing Links
Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib
By Geraldine Sealey, Salon, Article Source
After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon’s custody more horrific than anything made public so far. "If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse," Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse.
Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it. The speech was first reported in a New York Sun story last week, which was in turn posted on Jim Romenesko’s media blog, and now EdCone.com and other blogs are linking to the video. We transcribed the critical section here (it starts at about 1:31:00 into the ACLU video.) At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:
"Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out."
"It’s impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we’re dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will. You know there’s enough out there, they can’t (Applause). …. So it’s going to be an interesting election year."
Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong’s blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: "[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, ‘You haven’t begun to see evil…’ then trailed off. He said, ‘horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.’ He looked frightened."
So, there are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn’t he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists — will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? — and what is being done about it?
(Update: A reader brought to our attention that the rape of boys at Abu Ghraib has been mentioned in some news accounts of the prisoner abuse evidence. The Telegraph and other news organizations described "a videotape, apparently made by US personnel, is said to show Iraqi guards raping young boys." The Guardian reported "formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator.")
Sweet Condi & the Asspirate Neocon Band
According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Memo, George Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was the first person to verbally approve torture during July 2002 ... and then there was this:
BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 [2001] PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States [using planes]."
Is Neocon Republican War Criminal
John Bolton In Prison, Yet?Arrest of Pentagon Official May Help Unravel Neo-Conservative Cabal
This article appears in the May 13, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
by Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive Intelligence Review, Article Source
Pentagon Iran desk officer and neo-con patsy Larry Franklin was arrested on May 4, on charges that he passed classified information based upon secret Pentagon documents to two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) officials in June 2003, at a restaurant in Arlington, Va. The two AIPAC officials, who were not named in the complaint, were Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were both fired by AIPAC in recent weeks.
A number of senior intelligence sources, reached for comment on the Franklin charges, all had the same essential reading: The FBI has a prima facie case against Franklin. In FBI raids on his home, Federal agents confiscated 83 classified documents, which he was not authorized to have there. The case is cut and dried, and a charge of mishandling classified documents carries a ten-year Federal jail sentence. Franklin is being squeezed to provide prosecutors with a complete picture on the AIPAC/Israel espionage operation, including Pentagon officials who were part of the effort. These include, but are not limited to: Doug Feith, William Luti, Harold Rhode, and Abram Shulsky.
In addition, one source emphasized the importance of Franklin's December 2001 trip to Rome, accompanied by Rhode and Michael Ledeen. The trip centered around a meeting with former Iran-Contra swindler Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom Ledeen sought to reactivate as a Pentagon channel to the Iranian government, and as a source on activities inside Iraq and Afghanistan. The Rome trip coincided with the surfacing of the forged Niger government documents, falsely charging that Saddam Hussein was seeking large quantities of yellow cake uranium from the African nation.
Franklin was arrested on a criminal complaint, even as a grand jury continues to consider his case. He is widely considered to be providing information to prosecutors. A closer look at his associations with the neo-con crowd shows that by targetting him, FBI officials might be able to unravel a whole skein of wrongdoing, which could help bring down the inner circle linked to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Preparing To Hit Iran?
The investigation of Franklin, and his dealings with the AIPAC officials, first was made public in August 2004, in the immediate wake of a major propaganda barrage promoting pre-emptive military action against Iran. As head of the Iran desk at the Pentagon, Franklin had access to classified documents related to that area; according to the criminal complaint, he allegedly disclosed Top Secret information related to potential attacks upon U.S. forces in Iraq, to the two individuals, neither of whom had the security clearance to receive that information. At the time, Lyndon LaRouche estimated that patriotic sections of the U.S. intelligence community were acting to defuse a potential Israeli "breakaway ally" hit against Iran.
It was not only AIPAC officials with whom Franklin was in touch. He is reported to have also had meetings with Naor Gilan, until recently an Iran specialist at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. And, according to both the New York Times and Associated Press on May 5, FBI officials recently questioned a former senior Mossad official about his ties to Franklin. The official was Uzi Arad, a former senior official with the Israeli intelligence agency. Arad is reported to have told the FBI that he had met Franklin twice, and received an academic paper from him.
Arad is no garden variety Mossad agent. He held senior posts from 1975 to 1999, and served as the Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After the FBI probe of Franklin was announced Aug. 29, 2004, Azad was one of the Israelis who jumped to defend Israel against the allegations that Franklin had passed them classified documents, saying that at worst the analyst (Franklin) "crossed the line" by inappropriately disseminating sensitive material. "That is not espionage," he said.
Azad is also notable for the fact that, in a speech at the Jerusalem Institute for Contemporary Affairs on March 26, 2003 (five days into the Iraq War), he called on the United States and Israel to take military action against Iran as well. The luncheon meeting which Franklin had with the AIPAC officials, at which he allegedly passed them classified information, occurred on June 26, 2003.
Who Is Larry Franklin?
Sources in the military and intelligence community have provided this news service with a profile of the suspected Israeli mole: Larry Franklin is a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst, who shifted from Cold War Soviet studies, to a specialty in Iran-Iraq. A protégé of DIA Sovietologist Winnifred Joshua, Franklin also studied at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he was reportedly picked up by Paul Wolfowitz, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, and an individual who has been probed for passing U.S. secrets to Israel since 1978, according to a February 2004 study by Stephen Green, which catalogued long-standing espionage allegations against, and investigations into Wolfowitz, Feith, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Bryen, and Richard Perle.
In the Summer of 2001, Franklin was transferred from DIA to the Pentagon's policy office under Feith, where he took charge of the Iran desk in the Near East South Asia (NESA) section, and later worked for the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the Iraq war-planning unit under Feith and NESA head William Luti. Luti had been a military aide to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and had been in the Office of Vice President Cheney at the start of the "Bush 43" Administration. According to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF, ret.), who served in NESA from June 2002 to March 2003, Luti bragged at staff meetings, that he was reporting directly to "Scooter," which, she learned, was a reference to Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
As an Air Force Reserve officer, Franklin had served several tours of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, where, according to one military source, he had gotten in trouble for unauthorized contacts with Israeli intelligence officials. According to one news account, the current FBI probe into Franklin's activities was triggered by a June 2002 leak in the New York Times, which detailed American war plans against Iraq. While on the NESA Iran desk, Franklin was also reportedly the subject of a probe into his mishandling of classified documents; however, a serious probe into that incident was blocked by the intervention of Luti and Feith, according to a confidential Pentagon source.
Franklin, according to an eyewitness, was part of a neo-con inner circle that met frequently, behind closed doors, in the office of Doug Feith. The group included Feith, Luti, OSP official Abram Shulsky, Office of Net Assessment Mideast specialist Harold Rhode, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Michael Maloof. As a group, they worked closely with Wolfowitz and with Libby, whose own ties to the Israeli Mafiya and Israeli intelligence run deep: Libby was the former attorney for Israeli "Mafia" boss Marc Rich.
Franklin, Rhode, and Ledeen
In the Summer of 2003, it was revealed that Larry Franklin had been part of a Pentagon team, composed also of Rhode and self-professed "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen, which had travelled to Rome, in December 2001, to open unauthorized channels to the Iranian government, through a widely discredited Iran-Contra figure, Manucher Ghorbanifar. According to one news account of the trip, the troika sabotaged talks then under way between the State Department and the Iranian government, involving the turning over to the United States of five top al-Qaeda figures, who were in custody in Iran.
Virtually every member of the neo-con grouping has been under investigation for espionage, fabrication of intelligence, and other treachery against the United States. Sources, for example, have identified Rhode, a longtime protégé of British intelligence's Dr. Bernard Lewis, and a close collaborator of Ledeen, as the target of a separate espionage probe, involving his passing of U.S. national security secrets to Israel, while he was in Baghdad as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). While in Baghdad, Rhode practically lived out of the home and office of Iraqi National Congress (INC) head Ahmed Chalabi.
Ledeen is also, according to law enforcement sources, a target of inquiry, concerning his suspected role in passing forged Niger government documents to the Italian intelligence service, SISMI. The forged documents purported to "prove" that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, to build a nuclear bomb. Vice President Cheney and other Bush Administration officials used the threat of Iraq's alleged imminent possession of a nuclear bomb, as a bludgeon to force Congressional approval of the Iraq War. When President Bush cited alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium "yellow cake" from an African state in his Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address, the whole issue blew up, leading to the ongoing Federal criminal probe.
Although both the State Department and CIA had cautioned that the Niger yellow cake story was dubious, Bush and Cheney went ahead with their shrill allegations. Then-International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei revealed in early March 2003, that the Niger documents were shoddy forgeries. According to several former U.S. intelligence officials, one prime suspect in the document forgeries scam was Chalabi's INC. Ledeen, a longtime Chalabi booster, has also long been a paid "consultant" to SISMI. A September 2004 Washington Monthly article reports that when Ledeen, Franklin, and Rhode met in December 2001 with Iranian government officials in Rome, the head of SISMI and Italy's Minister of Defense also attended the meetings.
A Bolton Angle?
While the issue of Pentagon illegal activity with Israel, in order to provoke a war against Iran, or Syria, is still a live one, so is the matter of the Niger "yellow cake" concoction, a story which has never been solved, and which is intimately connected with the still live investigation of what is known as the Plame leak.
It was December 2001, after the Ledeen, Franklin, Rhode trip to Rome, that fraudulent documents surfaced, alleging that Iraq was negotiating for yellow cake from Niger. In the Spring of 2002, reportedly on the recommendation of Vice President Cheney, former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson was sent to investigate the charges, and returned a report saying that the claim was false. In the Summer of 2003, Wilson was subjected to an attempt to discredit him in the media, including through the disclosure of the identity of his wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. The disclosure of Plame's identity was a violation of Federal law, but, as yet, the Administration has not "solved" the case. A Federal Special Prosecutor is still pursuing the case of the leak, which many sources report to have originated from the vicinity of Cheney's office.
On the strength of Wilson's report, and other analysis, the CIA and the State Department removed the Niger report from their intelligence estimates of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Yet, in December 2002, Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton played a key role in putting this false information in a widely circulated State Department Fact Sheet on "Omissions From the Iraqi Declaration of the United Nations Security Council."
In a March 1, 2005 letter to the chairman of the National Security Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) asked for a committee investigation into State Department efforts to conceal the role of Bolton in the creation of the Fact Sheet, and in insisting that the Niger reference be kept in the Fact Sheet, despite objections from both State Department intelligence and CIA officials.
This inquiry has relevance not only to Bolton's potential connection to an espionage network, but to his persistent role in "fixing" intelligence which he and his neo-con friends did not like. It was this cooking of intelligence which provided the justification for pushing the United States into war against Iraq, in pursuit of WMD which were not there, and which the neo-con circles around Dick Cheney continue to carry out in pursuit of the new wars they have on their agenda.
+++ More on John Bolton Here and Here.
Why does Stanford University Continue to Protect Rice and Rumsfeld?
Why Supreme Court
Will Not Stand By U.S. Citizens?List of United States Supreme Court Justices appointed by War Criminal Ronald Reagan
Antonin Scalia & Anthony Kennedy
List of United States Supreme Court Justices appointed by War Criminal George H. W. Bush
David Souter & Clarence Thomas
List of United States Supreme Court Justices appointed by War Criminal George W. Bush
John G. Roberts & Samuel Alito
Supreme Court to democracy: Drop dead
With a single rash, partisan act, the high court has tainted the Bush presidency, besmirched its own reputation and soiled our nation's proudest legacy.
By Gary Kamiya, Salon's executive editor
Dec. 14, 2000 | Tuesday, Dec. 12, is a day that will live in American infamy long after the tainted election of George W. Bush has faded from memory.With their rash, divisive decision to dispense with the risky and inconvenient workings of democracy and simply award the presidency to their fellow Republican, five right-wing justices dragged the Supreme Court down to perhaps its most ignominious point since the Dred Scott decision.
The court was the last American civic institution to have preserved an aura of impartiality, to be regarded as above the gutter of partisanship and self-interest. The reality, of course, is that no court, no judge, no human being, is completely free of those entanglements. Yet the court has generally acted wisely in avoiding judgments that would inevitably and utterly besmirch it. With one reckless and partisan ruling, it squandered its most precious possession: its reputation. It may take years, even decades, to repair the damage done by the Scalia-Rehnquist court's decision to cancel the election and crown the winner.
It's hard not to conclude, now that this whole sorry saga is over, that the fix was in from the beginning. Not the crude, "vast right-wing conspiracy" fix of Hillary Clinton's imagination, but a de facto fix. Why shouldn't one think the game was rigged, when five Republican-appointed justices -- one of whose son works for the law firm of the lawyer representing Bush, another of whose wife is recruiting staff for the Bush admininstration and two of whom have made clear their desire to retire under a Republican administration -- trashed their entire judicial philosophy to ram through, with only the most cramped of legal justifications, a last-second victory for a Republican who lost the national popular vote and, when the votes in Florida are actually counted, is likely to have lost the Florida one as well?
Perfect justice does not exist. But this was judicial folly, politically explosive and judicially threadbare. This was the court stepping in and awarding victory to one side before the game was over. Even those of us who don't often agree with the court's conservative majority expected better.
As Justice Stevens wrote in his savage dissent, "The position by the majority of this court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land ... Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." [Continue Reading]
Call for: CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
To Remove Traitors and Politicians
Who Would Abolish United States Liberty and Freedoms
P-r-i-m-e-t-i-m-e p-r-e-s-e-n-t-s:
Peace Keeper by Michael Stickrod
135 Huntington St., Brooklyn, New York ~ March 1, 2013, 6-10pmKeith Lampe ~ Co-Founder of YIPPIE and Progressive Activist Groups
An Eastern & Western Band 2/27/13 ~ One More Cup of Coffee
http://www.youtube.com/embed/0LPIVSsM4l4?rel=0
An Eastern & Western Band 2/27/13 ~ Chant -> Ripple -> Country Roads
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Brx0vrfGUVA?rel=0 ~ Video ChannelPublished on Feb 28, 2013 ~ Okay, here's step two in an effort to establish a new musical genre known as Eastern & Western. Our players are (from left to right at the beginning of this video) Nate, James, Pondo, Cedar and Linnea--and our dancer is Hitomi. Emma Goldman: It's not the revolution if you can't dance to it. Yeah, and it's not the revolution if we don't have effective ways to sustain relatively elated moods. Please let us know how you feel about our music. If you like it, please share it with your friends. ~ Very best, Pondo
Paul Krassner ~ The Realist/Writer/Comic/Investigative Satirist
Paul Krassner's Contributions to the Counterculture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D1pSDTMTqA&feature=player_embeddedNotes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Grieg In the Hall of the Mountain King (arr. Ginzburg)
http://www.youtube.com/embed/AkANtM_3f_o?rel=0October 21, 1967: The Exorcism/Levitation of the Pentagon
Published in Arthur No. 13 (Nov. 2004). Artwork by John Coulthart, design by W.T. Nelson, Article Source
OUT, DEMONS, OUT!
On October 21, 1967, the Pentagon came under a most unconventional assault.
An oral history by Larry "Ratso" Sloman, Michael Simmons and Jay Babcock
PROLOGUE/INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL SIMMONS
By Autumn of 1967, the "police action" in Vietnam had escalated. The United States of America waged War - that hideous manifestation of the human race's worst instincts - against the small, distant, sovereign land. 485,600 American troops were then stationed in Nam; 9,353 would die in '67 alone. We were there under false pretenses (the "attack" at the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened), operating under a paranoid doctrine (the Domino Theory, fretting that Vietnamese Communists fighting a civil war in their own country with popular support would envelop all of Southeast Asia and end up invading Dubuque, Iowa). Seven million tons of bombs would eventually be dropped, as opposed to two million during World War II. Indiscriminate use of gruesome weaponry was deployed, most infamously napalm, a jelly that sticks to--and burns through--human skin. Saturation bombings, free-fire zones, massive defoliation with the carcinogen Agent Orange. "Destroying the village to save it," as one American military man put it.
For a generation that remembered the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals after WW II, something had to be done. Genocidal fugitive Adolf Eichmann's "I was just following orders" excuse would not fly. The draft was sending eighteen-year-olds off to die. A domestic anti-war movement emerged, as had a counterculture of hairy young people who rejected the militarism, greed, sexual repression, and stunted consciousness of their parents and leaders to pursue Joy and Sharing as well as Dope, Rock and Roll, and Fucking in the Streets. Pundits spoke of The Generation Gap. A quaking chasm had split the nation.
San Francisco painter Michael Bowen had a dream of people coming together to celebrate his ccity's burgeoning hippie subculture, and so he and his wife Martine initiated the Great Human Be-In on January 14, 1967. Sub-billed as A Gathering of the Tribes, 10,000 hippies, radicals and free spirits convened in Golden Gate Park. Beat poets emceed (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel), rock bands rocked (Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Charlatans), Hell's Angels returned lost kids to their mommies - and the cops busted no one, despite rampant open marijuana use. For many, the realization that there were other Martians was transcendental. Berkeley anti-war activist Jerry Rubin gave a speech, but his narrow political rap was dubbed "too histrionic" by Ginsberg and many in the crowd. It fortuitously forked Rubin's direction. "It was the first time I did see a new society," he said later. "I saw there was no need for a political statement. I didn't understand that until then, either."
Events ending with the suffix "In" became the rage. Bob Fass hosted the hippest radio show in the country, "Radio Unnameable" on New York's WBAI. The all-night gab-and-music fest was Freak Centra, functioning as a pre-internet audio website. Regular guests included Realist editor Paul Krassner (dubbed "Father of the Underground Press"), underground film director Robert Downey Sr. (father and namesake of…), actor/writer Marshall Efron (arguably the funniest man on the planet), and a manic activist-gone-psychedelic named Abbie Hoffman - all rapping madly, verbally riffing and improvising like musicians. One night after participating in a UsCo avant-garde multi-media show of projections, movies, music, etc., at an airplane hangar, Fass stopped by nearby JFK International Airport and noticed a group of three dozen young people--clearly ripped to the tits--communally entranced by a giant mobile centerpiecing a terminal. The vast open spaces of an airport, with jet planes and stars in the sky, were the stage for dreams to come to life. Fass flashed on the infinite possibilities.
He conceived a Fly-In at JFK and announced it on Radio Unnameable. Though Saturday night, February 11th, was freezing cold, 3,000 of the underground's finest came to sing Beatles songs, torch reefers, dance the body electric, and groove with their sisters and brothers. "One of the things that happened," Fass observed, "was that there was such a colossal amount of human connection that there was something akin to feedback that happened, and people really began to experience not ‘happiness,' but Ecstasy and Joy. We're planning another one at your house."
New York responded to San Francisco's Be-In with its own. Key to its success was Jim Fouratt, a young actor who'd become one of the most effective hippie organizers on the Lower East Side. Promotion for the event cost $250, which paid for posters and leaflets. On Easter Sunday, March 27th, 10,000 full and part-time hippies came together - some in the carnal definition - at Central Park's Sheep Meadow. It was a glistening, no bad vibes, lysergic day. Fouratt was central to virtually every NYC hip community event, including the infamous Soot-In at Consolidated Edison, where he, Abbie Hoffman, and others dumped bags of nasty black soot at the coal burning, energy company's offices, in a protest that prefigured and influenced the birth of the environmental movement.
Emmett Grogan was a brilliant and enigmatic prankster/con man at the heart of San Francisco's do-goodnik anarcho-rogues The Diggers. He suggested to his friend Bob Fass that a Sweep-In would strengthen the momentum the Fly-In had sparked. The idea was to "clean up the Lower East Side" area of NYC where the hippies dwelled. Fass conspired with Krassner and Abbie and listeners on his radio show, and they chose 7th Street, where Krassner lived. The buzz grew louder and one day an inquiring bureaucrat from the Sanitation Department called Radio Unnameable. The potentates of garbage at City Hall were nervous about these beatniks with brooms taking their gig. While appearing cooperative on the phone and in a later meeting, the city pranked the pranksters on the day of the Sweep-In, April 8. When thousands of mop-wielding longhairs appeared at 11 a.m., they beheld a garbage-free, sparkling fresh, squeaky clean street of slums--courtesy of the Sanitation Department. Fass and Krassner were amused that they'd actually forced the city to do its job. Unfazed, they moved the Sweep-In to 3rd Street. When a city garbage truck turned the corner, the street peeps leaped on it and cleaned it as well.
No single human--other than Tribal Elder Allen Ginsberg--was as influential on this emerging culture than Ed Sanders. He led the satirical-protest-smut-folk-rock band The Fugs with East Village legend Tuli Kupferberg, ran the Peace Eye Bookstore (and community center) on 10th Street, published Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, made films like Mongolian Clusterfuck, wrote poetry, rabble roused for myriad peacenik causes and cannabis legalization. Sanders--one of the first public figures to live seamlessly within realms of Politics, Art, and Fun--was a first cousin to Che Guevara's paradigmatic New Man - albeit thoroughly American and anti-authoritarian.
But the Life Actor who embodies the Revolutionary Prankster in 20th-century history books is Abbie Hoffman. And he is where our story begins…
JOHN ESKOW: I met Abbie Hoffman through Marty Carey in 1967. I was only like 17. One of the first conversations I ever had with him, he said the hippies were fucked. And proof to him of the corrupt nature of what he kept calling hippie capitalism was that the Jefferson Airplane at that time had a radio commercial for Levi's. And Abbie said "Don't they know that the Levi's workers are on strike in North Carolina?" And he had completely, at that point, written off the whole hippie world as being a diversion of energy from more traditional leftist directions. Literally the next time I saw him, which was about a month later, he was stoned on acid, his hair was up to the ceiling, he was listening to the Grateful Dead and completely had gone the other way. He had, in fact, seen something in this culture that both attracted him and seduced him and which he saw as political. He saw it as a culture that he could move in and use in some way as a power base.
ANITA HOFFMAN: When we are Liberty House still, Abbie used to see these kids parading through the Village in these costumes or with face paint and all weirdness. And he said, "I think there's something there." I can remember him actually saying he wanted to combine the hippie with the political.
RUDI STERN: The Lower East Side felt like an eternal spring. Felt like the flowers would never stop opening and becoming more magnificent all the time, in every field. Everything was fresh, everything was exciting, everything felt like the first time. People trusted each other, there was great kindness among people, great sharing, violence felt unknown, it was not a factor. Paranoia, if it existed, was an ego-related thing but was not a street or violence-related thing. Everything was possible, no boundaries, just how early you got up in the morning and how late you worked and what ideas you had and if you had an idea Monday you could make it happen by Wednesday. It was a time of collaboration of people, and fusion of idea and cultures and wonderful experiences with LSD that just seemed to open up more and more channels.
ALLEN GINSBERG: In an odd way, Timothy Leary and acid actually played a very important role in the alteration of the American psyche, in catalyzing a lot of the anti-war movement in the sense of altering the basic social conditioning and the semiotics and the terminology and the take. Gary Snyder and I both think that acid was one of the main catalysts of the anti-war movement, to the activation of it on a grand scale, not only of Abbie but the whole college generation. It was the deconditioning agent that got people into another world, into the flower power, the psychedelic thing that was connected with the anti-war movement.
JOHN ESKOW: We would be sitting there in Marty Carey's apartment tripping on acid. Somewhere in the back Moby Grape would be playing. Maybe I was saying "dig what the bass is doing" but Abbie was ignoring me because he was talking about Mao and Che and whether violence should or shouldn't be used in the revolution. He could be at the absolute end of the known world, seeing mandalas and hands coming out of the walls, but it never distracted him from talking about what he wanted to talk about. His focus was so intense that he could maintain it in the face of any chemical, political, police action, it didn't matter what was happening around him when he was pursuing an angle of insight.
ABBIE HOFFMAN: Everyone should try acid once, I guess. Did it change my life? Yeah. It's the whole chicken and the egg thing. The whole thing is overcoming all that fear. In other words, the acid taking is more important than the experience itself. The whole secret is to overcome the fear of death. All the rest is easy.
DANNY SCHECTER: Blacks were saying to white organizers, go organize for social change in your own communities. That white America was the problem, not black America. You're the ones who can reach white America-go do it. And Abbie took the injunction seriously. But what he began to see was that the community was not bounded by a few blocks, even though in the East Village at that time, you could feel like that was a liberated zone--but that the community was all young Americans; that the conflict in America was not just a class conflict but a generational conflict, and that the contradictions in America caused by the war was that young people didn't want to go fight in Vietnam. The baby boom was bursting and there was a tremendous number of young kids who, because of the relative affluence of America, had some money in their pockets and could afford to leave home, or were dropping out of colleges, dissatisfied by the educational system. We had read books like Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman, and were identifying with each other. And rock and roll became the soundtrack for that identification, that sense of generational solidarity, that sense of America is in trouble, war is wrong. Abbie saw that there was potential constituency for change among the white youth culture. And so he made it his mission. Don't forget Abbie was in Berkeley in 1960, he had experienced the first sort of spasm of student power and student demonstrations way before it had begun. Now it's 1967, Abbie's years older than most of these kids, and knew a lot more and had more experiences and was still operating in the kind of the mode of the full-time political activist.
ABBIE HOFFMAN: We consciously played fads and fashion. It has to do with action and analysis. Let's say I come to New York, I'm down in the Lower East Side. I'm letting my hair grow long. I'd already taken acid before. I feel like a hippie now. Part of a new nation. As you are engaged in the action, you almost have no theory. But on the one hand, there is a part of you that is aware that if you can run an end-around… The country politically is very locked. Having tried loads and loads of ways and having developed an understanding of the political process in America, it's very hard to create a revolution, in the classical political sense. But certain things can be used to communicate ideas and then you get into the whole cultural level. So you notice this thing, like people growing their hair long. What if I attach political significance to that? Then at the same time you're doing that, it happens. Your reality is made up of myths and that's what it is when you do propaganda.
I'd say letting my hair grow long was a very radical act. That started when I moved to New York. There was no way of going back to my hometown, getting the same job that I had. It was like you had jumped a class barrier. So defining myself as a hippie, defined me as a radical. Ideas were always something you could pull out or pull back. For me, moving to New York, letting my hair grow long, that meant [I was] full-time.
MARTY CAREY: Being in the Be-In at Central Park must have done something to impress Abbie because it sure as hell impressed me. Being a political activist I'm sure he sensed there was a formless thing out there. And being an actor it provided a good cast and a good scene. So he got more and more into it. Everything Abbie did was because he was really concerned with people and he had to use himself as the scapegoat or the target or the martyr.
PAUL KRASSNER: More and more people on the New Left started to do drugs, and more and more the hippies started to go to demonstrations. It wasn't a total coalition, "everybody must get stoned." But to have the smoke-in was a political act--to just go with a bunch of other people and smoke pot in the park as a demonstration of their right to do it. Abbie saw that was definitely political. He saw that people who could be organized to go to a smoke-in, could be organized to go to an anti-war rally.
ALLEN GINSBERG: Abbie was an action poet in a way that many people would like to claim to be but he actually was in the sense that some of his political gestures were very similar to happenings. Happenings were a form that started in the late ‘50s, though it comes all the way from Dada. It descends from the protests against World War I in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire when an international group of artists got together and put on happenings that were of a humorous and absurdist and aesthetically penetrant and from a hyper-rational point of view, irrational, but were signals in the middle of the chaos created by the "rational" governments of another plane of understanding and awareness that was beyond the mass murder of the war and the carnage and the breakdown of western civilization. So by the late ‘50s, people like Red Grooms and Allen Kaprow were doing happenings on Delancey Street.
ED SANDERS: Happenings were these Apollonian stitched-together vignettes conducted in a climate of cool. So they were very much up for grabs, the components of a happening. The happening movement was kicked off by Alfred Jarry, the guy that wrote "Ubu Roi," by lettering the word "shit" in 1896 and shocking the French…caused a riot, basically. And you've got progressions of futurists and then Dadaists in Zurich and then the Surrealists, and you have John Cage and Merce Cunningham and others doing Black Mountain College, keeping the happening movement alive through the ‘50s, and then you have Oldenberg's store in '61, you have Kaprow in the early-mid'60s doing that series of happenings and many others. Charlotte Moorman. And so the tradition was kept alive from 1896 through 1965 or '66, when it met with the concept of guerilla theatre and Chinese direct action political street theatre, and more importantly, the Bread and Puppet Theatre and the Living Theatre. All that percolated around, all those images were up for grabs, and Abbie was very smart, a quick reader, read voraciously and had a very retentive memory, and he sucked it all in.
ALLEN GINSBERG: I wrote a thing called "Demonstration as March as Spectacle as Theatre" which is more or less in the same line as Abbie.
From HOW TO MAKE A MARCH/SPECTACLE:
We have to use our imagination. A spectacle can be made, an unmistakable statement OUTSIDE the war psychology which is leading nowhere. Such statement would be heard around the world with relief.
The following are specific suggestions for organizing marches and turning marchers on to their roles in the Demonstration.
• Masses of flowers - a visual spectacle - especially concentrated in the front lines. Can be used to set up barricades, to present to Hell's Angles, police, politicians and press and spectactors whenever needed.
• Marchers should bring CROSSES, to be held in front in case of violence; like in the movies dealing with Dracula.
• Marchers who use American Flags should bring those.
• Marchers should bring harmonicas, flutes, recorders, guitars, banjoes and violins. Bongoes and tambourines.
• Marchers should bring certain children's toys which can be used for distracting attackers, such as sparklers, toy rubber swords, especially the little whirling carbon wheels which make red-white-blue sparkles.
• In case of threat of attack, marchers could intone en masse the following mantras
o The Lord's Prayer
o Three Blind Mice (sung)
o OM (AUM) long breath in unison
o Star-Spangled Banner
o Mary Had a Little Lamb (spoken in unison)
• OTHER MORE GRANDIOSE POSSIBILITIES
o Small floats or replicas in front:
• Christ with sacred Heart and cross
• Buddha in meditiation
• Thoreau behind bars
• Dixieland Band float dressed as Hitler Stalin Mussolini Napoleon & Caesar
In San Francisco, we had a Yellow Submarine march. And that was picked up in New York in '66 and '67 by Keith Lampe and the Vietnam Veterans of America who organized a Yellow Submarine march to change the tone of the march from important protest and anger to humor, theatre, communication. To communicate with the media but realizing that the whole point was what were the images broadcast of our behavior.
PAUL KRASSNER: The Beatles were in the air. ["Yellow Submarine" was released on Revolver, out Aug 5, 1966. Sgt Pepper was released on June 1, 1967.] A group called WIN-Workshop In Nonviolence--marched across New York carrying a six-foot yellow submarine and launched it in the Hudson River with balloons. A lot of young people were with that. I think that was really the initiation of a kind of joyful aspect to demonstrations instead of just the old somber "look at how terrible things are" approach.
MICHAEL SIMMONS: Fouratt and Abbie upped the ante on August 24, 1967 when a group of hippies entered the Visitors' Gallery at the New York Stock Exchange and showered the stockbrokers below with hundreds of dollar bills.The Greedheads went Grabby Ga-Ga for the Green and trading screeched to a stop. The media lapped up the story and America got its first taste of The Politics of Ecstasy. Among the psychedelic cash clowns were Abbie, Jerry, Fouratt, Albert and Lampe. Albert was "joyous". He'd found "a new way to demonstrate, a theatrical turn of politics that invaded sacrosanct places and turned them into a stage set full of props for our use." These long-haired, cannabinoided shit stirrers saw no contradick twixt Consciousness and Conscience. Same lobe, bay-bee.
JEFF NIGHTBYRD: In that period before he was famous, Abbie manifested lots and lots of hope. It was like Brigham Young creating a new world. With Abbie it was "Fuck, this isn't a crashpad, this is a new world being born."
JOHN ESKOW: I saw Abbie moving among the various political sub-groups in New York, and it seemed like he won a lot of confrontations simply by being the one who was willing to do whatever it took. He was the Vince Lombardi of leftism in that way. Winning was important to him. He was very physcial and that was such a welcome relief. If it hadn't been for the model of tough, aggressive streetfighting that Abbie presented, I for one could never have related to hippie culture. It was too weak-kneed without somebody like Abbie there to go in the face of the cops, in the face of anybody who was the oppressor at the moment. Abbie gave the hippie a sort of street dignity. And so did the San Francisco Diggers.
PETER COYOTE: The events that we [the Diggers] threw were pretty impeccable. They were wild and hairy but everything worked. People don't know that all the big free parties with the Grateful Dead and the rock bands playing in the Haight-Ashbury were all thrown by the Diggers. The trucks, the sound systems, the park permits, all the people there--and it's no accident that there was never any violence at these events. They were planned that way, to happen without violence, they were planned by being included in a frame of reference, like the solstice or the equinox, that made everyone equal. There were fabulous events that took place and they were all promulgated by somebody having a vision. And enlisting his friends to go along with it. Like truckfuls of naked belly dancers going down Montgomery Street at 5:00 in the afternoon with black conga players playing, with bottles of wine and dope, and inviting people to climb on. The invitation was there, if you had the courage to snatch it.
BILL ZIMMERMAN: Abbie and others began to figure out how to execute something that came to be called guerrilla media. How to create visual images and dramatic confrontations that became wildly interesting from a news standpoint. And that began to tell the kids in America that there wasn't just a movement against the war, there was a different way of looking at the world, there was an ability to call things absurd that they could understand and relate to and that disengaged them from the reward structure that controlled them and kept them from opposing the war and it was very critical to the development of the movement that the reward structure be debunked, [to say] that you could sacrifice your career, you could sacrifice material wealth, you could sacrifice stability and have more fun!
JOHN ESKOW: As far as I could tell, Abbie's political program was just a hastily thrown together amalgamation of some things he had read, certain life lessons that he had picked up in pool halls and on the street, all mixed together with an incredible instinctive understanding of American media. We would watch the nightly news together a lot and he would say, "See you gotta look at the news. See, like at 7:26, after they've done all the heavy stuff, they gotta have like a sign-off piece, they gotta have something cute and weird and wacky and whimsical. So I know we can't get on at 7:03. That's Johnson's time. But we can get on at 7:26." He knew enough about surrealism to know that surrealism would play well at 7:26 on the nightly news. And that it could be dismissed with a chuckle by the commentator, just sort of zany and far out. But the kids would see it and never remember what the commentator's sardonic put-down encapsulization of it was--they would always remember the vivid image of the bills cascading down the stock exchange. Nobody was that hip to the media at that time. He was the only one. He was millions of miles ahead of everybody else.
From the Open Press street handout regarding the September 7, 1967 New York Provocation at Con Edison: "When the Man advances, we retreat; when the Man digs in, we blow his mind; when the Man retreats, we follow after."
PAUL KRASSNER: Antiwar activist Dave Dellinger asked activist Jerry Rubin to be project director of the October 1967 demonstration in Washngton, DC. Jerry moved from Berkeley to New York. Keith Lampe introduced Jerry to Abbie Hoffman.
STEW ALBERT: Jerry and I became increasingly alienated from all these people in the Mobe [short for Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam]. Jerry was hanging out with Abbie and smoking dope and so forth, and the hard nuts and bolts work of being the project director of the demonstration became very unappealing.
JERRY RUBIN: The Mobe was planning to march on Congress, not on the Pentagon. I told Dave Dellinger that's a big mistake because the Pentagon would be seen as the enemy, whereas the Congress is kind of neutral. It would be the wrong message to march on Congress. That was my contribution. So that weekend we all flew to Washington to scout out the Pentagon and we all became convinced. But then what happened is I was becoming closer and closer to Abbie. It was my idea to confront the Pentagon. It was Abbie's to do the whole exorcism. I didn't even know what an exorcism was.
PAUL KRASSNER: When LSD became illegal in October 1966, the psychedelic Oracle became politicized, and the radical Berkeley Barb began to treat the drug subculture as fellow outlaws. The idea for an exorcism originated with Allen Cohen, editor of the Oracle, and painter Michael Bowen, after they read in The City in History by Lewis Mumford, about the Pentagon being a baroque symbol of evil and oppression.
ALLEN COHEN: Jerry Rubin had taken the magical idea to exorcise the Pentagon that Michael Bowen and I had suggested during our meetings before the Human Be-In and incorporated it into the official program for the March on the Pentagon.
ALLEN GINSBERG: It was Gary Snyder who had conceived the notion of the levitation of the Pentagon. [Gary Snyder's controversial poem "A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon" was published in the June, 1967 issue of the Oracle.--Ed.]
JERRY RUBIN: It could very well have been Gary Snyder's idea. I don't know. All I know is Abbie was the PR man for it. As far as I'm concerned , who created McDonald's? A guy named McDonald? Roy Kroc created McDonald's. Dave Dellinger's and the Mobe were trying to have an orderly, peaceful, middle class protest and I brought Abbie. It was a perfect partnership because Abbie added the theatre, the humor, the sparkle and I added the purpose. I directed Abbie. Abbie was just doing these wild things in the streets of New York, which was a lot of fun, but I took the Abbie windup doll, I wound him up and pointed him toward the Pentagon.
GENE ANTHONY: One afternoon a wandering holy man, Charlie Brown, came by and explained to Michael Bowen and some friends the interesting relationship of the Pentagon Building in Washington to the wartime condition of the country from the point of view of a magical diagram. A magical diagram is an occult drawing put on the floor by a magician, who steps into it or concentrates on it. A pentagon encloses the design of a five-pointed star, which is the alchemical symbol for inverted power. That symbol, said Charlie Brown, is associated with war, murder and apocalypse. It also happens to be, Bowen pointed out, the shape of the United States Army Medal of Honor, which is an inverted star. It was also noted by Charlie Brown that the Pentagon was built outside the mandala of Washington itself, on a swamp known as Hell's Bottom, and surrounded by five areas of pollution--a sewage treatment, two freeways, the polluted Potomac River, and a cemetery full of fallen war heroes. So it was decided on the spot by Michael Bowen that someone had to do something; someone had to put positive energy into his country's defense…
PAUL KRASSNER: Rubin teamed up with Abbie Hoffman and then Ed Sanders, which brought in the Fugs, and then there was the West Coast contingent that originally had the idea of using the symbolism of the Pentagon. The idea got a lot of pre-publicity. There was to be an event in the nation's capitol that would publicly cross-fertilize political protesters with hippie mystics.
ALLEN COHEN: The Oracle, along with all other underground papers, supported and announced the March and the Exorcism. The back page of Oracle #10 was the poster by Peter Legeria announcing the March. The text with it is the same text I read to Jerry Rubin at that fateful meeting in Berkeley.
JIM FOURATT: The Pentagon action showed the real brilliance of Abbie, to be able to take the hippie element and weld it together with the hard line political reality. It acknowledged where the war was being fought, where it had to be stopped, the physical space. The Pentagon was a mythic thing. Most people didn't know what the Pentagon looked like. And then you bring in Allen Ginsberg, and you bring in American Indians, and you bring in shamans, and you burn yarrow around the whole fucking place. You think Abbie believed in a lot of that stuff? I don't think so. But he's smart. He knew that anything that would disrupt the mindset of middle Americans, anything that attacked their value system, Abbie thought was good.
MARTY CAREY: We got the idea we're gonna exorcise the Pentagon, which meant that we're going to hold hands and circle the Pentagon, and chant. That's the way you exorcise it and levitate it. Traditional ritual. So Abbie and I decided we have to figure out how many people does it take to circle the Pentagon. One thing I liked about Abbie was that everything was very concrete. So we went down by train, and we had these little leaflets. We get to the parking lot of the Pentagon and we put all of these leaflets on the windshield wipers of the cars there. Then we go to one side and we just hold hands one, two, and then we switch and alternate. We were just starting to count, and some security people come out and arrest us and bring us inside the Pentagon, which was pretty eerie. There's big huge hallways and messengers are roller skating down them. It was like Dr. Strangelove. They take us down to this little room and this black security guy says we were arrested. So Abbie says, "What's the charge?" "Littering." Great. The guard starts to ask us what we're doing here and I tell him that we were a theatre group from New York and we were gonna exorcise the Pentagon. Then Abbie starts talking to this black guard. "How can you be black and work for these guys?" Now I'm scared shitless. Finally they say they're gonna let us go but Abbie doesn't want to be let go, because if we're not let go then somebody can say, "they're arrested for littering" and it becomes a drama and a story and publicity.
SAL GIANETTA: The two meetings I know of, one was in New York and one was in Washington, were probably the best example I know of Ab's brilliance. There were some Washington representatives and there were two military representatives. It started out initially that no way in the world was there gonna be any kind of activity anywhere around the Pentagon, which was the fucking basilica of Peter of the United States, there was no fucking way. Somebody made that statement and right away Ab says, "Well fuck you, we'll levitate the fucking thing high enough you won't be able to get in the fucking stairs. Then what're you gonna do with your fucking Pentagon?" And that was a serious statement the way it was presented. Somebody responded to it in some way, but they actually responded. Ab said to me later that that was the first inkling he had that he might be able to suck them into this, even though it wasn't conscious.
After that, the levitation became THE cause celebre. The other meeting I was at, it was Ab who threw it on the table, right for openers. "Okay, about the levitation." Ab was adamant that the building was gonna go up 22 feet - because somebody had told him except for fire ladders, you can't run and get a ladder that's 22 feet. So 22 feet was it and he was willing to negotiate. There was serious consideration of that because if the building went up 22 feet the foundations were gonna crack and there was discussion about foundations and cracks and how much you could levitate. It was unbelievable. That meeting was like 2 1/2 hours or so and probably 20% of that meeting was devoted to this serious talk about levitating the Pentagon. And this is our military, right? I swear to you, the military finally came around, Ab came down from 22 feet to three feet, they agreed to three feet and sealed it with a handshake. That's how bad Ab was, he could capture you in that fucking bizarreness. Oh, it was joyful!
PAUL KRASSNER: We applied for a permit, then told the media that the government would allow us to raise the Pentagon no more than three feet off the ground, and the media accurately reported that quote.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was working on the Pentagon Papers that fall in a room which happened to be right next to MacNamara's office. I'd come back from Vietnam very anxious to see the war end and to do whatever I could to help that. So I was very sympathetic to the anti-war movement, what I knew of it. The idea of levitating the Pentagon struck me as a great idea because the idea of removing deference from any of these institutions is very, very important, and this is of course the kind of thing that Abbie understood very instinctively. It was not just a matter of clowning and a way to get the attention of the media, or to make people smile. And the idea that you would jointly piss on the Pentagon as part of a pagan ceremony raises so many associations. One might think of the Pentagon as pagan in itself, but that's a slander of pagan religion. The truth is that this kind of preparation for mass murder is not particularly quote "barbarian" or pagan or primitive. It's civilized, western Judeo-Christian. And so the idea of confronting it with a witchcraft pagan ceremony, was very appropriate almost to point that out. So they have a press conference, and they're talking about their plans for this and that, in a very straight and mesaured and reserved way. And when it gets to be Abbie's turn to speak, he says, "We're gonna raise the building six feet in the air." I think that really changed the terms of discussion. In the Pentagon it became, "Can he really do that? And six feet!?!"
ED SANDERS: All through the history of the Fugs in the '60s, the war in Vietnam throbbed like an ever-seething soul sore. However much we partied, shouted our poetry and strutted around like images of Bacchus, we could never quite get it out of our mind. It was like that Dada poetry reading that Tristan Tzara gave in 1922 in Paris, with an alarm clock constantly ringing during the reading. The war was THE alarm clock of the late '60s.
I didn't really get into Abbie until they came up with the idea of the exorcism of the Pentagon, which I jumped into with both feet. I agreed to write and create the actual Exorcism. [Occultist/animator/archivist] Harry Smith had produced the first Fugs album and was an old friend of mine who used to hang out at my bookstore Peace Eye all through the ‘60s. So I went to Harry and asked him what happened in an exorcism and he gave me some advice. So he filled me in on what his view was. He told me about consecrating the four directions, surrounding it, circling it, using elements of earth, air, fire and water, alchemical symbols to purify the place, to invoke certain deities, and so on. So I sing-songed a whole retinue of deities past and present, imaginary and real, to summon the strength to exorcise this place. It was part real, part symbolic, part wolf ticket, part spiritual, part secular, part wishful thinking and part anger. And it had humor. You gotta have the universal humor. And, since I knew Indo-European languages, I learned this Hittite exorcism ritual. I actually put together a decent exorcism.
KEITH LAMPE: Michael Bowen had journeyed to northwestern Mexico to consult with shamans about levitation. Then he dropped in during one of our preparation meetings in New York. What a charming moment: all of us "radicals" there suddenly became "moderates" because Michael really expected to levitate it whereas the rest of us were into it merely as a witty media-project.
ED SANDERS: There was a tremendous amount of energy and work put in by lots of people on this. We had a press conference at the Village Theatre where we built a miniature replica of the Pentagon on strings which then levitated in the midst of chanting. And we had an American Indian shaman throwing cornmeal down.
BOB FASS: I was at the Fillmore auditorium a couple of days before the event. We made a series of tapes of improvised incantations along with songs. Ed said, "We may not be able to actually get up on the flatbed truck because they may not let us through. And we'll be swarmed if we stand on the ground and try to play. So if we can't get the truck up, we'll play the tape."
PAUL KRASSNER: In order to build up further public interest in the event, we staged preliminary pranks that were bound to get media coverage. Abbie invented an imaginary new drug, a sexual equivalent to the police tear gas, Mace. It was christened Lace--supposedly a combination of LSD and DMSO--which when appplied to the skin would be absorbed into the bloodstream and act as an instantaneous aphrodisiac. Lace was actually Shapiro's Disappear-o from Taiwan. When sprayed, it left a purple stain, then disappeared.
A press conference was called at Abbie's apartment where Lace could be observed in action. I was supposed to be there as a reporter who would get accidentally sprayed with Lace from a squirt gun. To my surprise, I would put down my notebook, take off my clothes and start making love with a beautiful redhead who had also been accidentally sprayed, along with another deliberately sprayed couple, right there on two small mattresses in the living room, while the journalists diligently took notes.
I was really looking forward to this combination media event and blind date. Even though the sexual revolution was at its height, there was something exciting about knowing in advance that I was guaranteed to get laid-although I felt slightly guilty about attempting to trick fellow reporters.
But there was a scheduling conflict. I was already committed to speak at a literary conference at the University of Iowa on that same day. So, instead of being being accidentally sprayed with Lace, I was reassigned by Abbie to purchase cornmeal in Iowa, which would be used to encircle the Pentagon as a prelevitation rite. I was supposed to be a rationalist, but it was hard to say no to Abbie.
In Iowa, novelist Robert Stone [author of Dog Soldiers, thee great Vietnam novel--Ed.] drove me to a farm.
"I'd like to buy some cornmeal to go, please."
"Coarse or fine?" the farmer asked. I glanced at Stone for guidance.
"Since it's a magic ritual," he said, "I would definitely recommend coarse."
And so I flew back to New York with a 13-pound sack of coarse cornmeal properly stored in the overhead bin.
Meanwhile, there were articles about Lace in the New York Post and Time magazine, including the promise that three gallons of Lace would be brought to Washington, along with a large supply of plastic water pistols, so that Lace could be sprayed at police and the National Guard at the Pentagon demonstration. The guy who substituted for me in that "accidental" sexual encounter at the Lace press conference ended up living with her. Somehow I felt cheated.
ANITA HOFFMAN: We used water guns to spray the Lace. Shapiro's Disappearo was a red liquid that disappeared when you sprayed it on. So we sprayed the Lace and everybody was fucking. I was very embarrassed because half of me couldn't believe this was actually happening in my own living room. I just shyly snuck away and I waited it out.
TEDDY MASTROIANNI: I was at the precinct talking to some cops and Abbie comes in. He has his bottle of Lace and he says, "Look at this stuff. If I spray it on any one of you guys, you're going to fuck each other." The lieutenant is behind his desk, and the sergeant was doing his paperwork. The sergeant had short sleeves, one of those big, hairy muscular guys. And the sergeant says, "Get out of here!" And Abbie says you're going to fuck the lieutenant and the sergeant says, " Noooo, nooooo!" They chased Abbie out of the precinct.
ED SANDERS: October of '67. October 8 and 9, they killed Che Guevara. Right after that, the Freedom Summer killers, some of them were found guilty on the 20th. Then there was a huge draft card turn-in on the 20th, which led to the famous indictment of Dr. Benjamin Spock and others. October 21 was OUT DEMONS OUT. It was right around that point that the CIA was beginning its Phoenix program where they killed or assassinated all those people in Vietnam. So it's an interesting flow of history.
ANITA HOFFMAN: The Pentagon was my favorite demonstration, because it had everything. It was the perfect sort of flower-power, hippie event. I was wearing the Sgt. Pepper jacket. And we had Mr. And Mrs. America paper Uncle Sam hats. It had all moods. The Spocks and the MacDonalds were there, the New York intellectuals, and Norman Mailer was there doing his thing.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was personally frustrated and irritated that this thing was being held on a Saturday, because as somebody who worked around the Pentagon for a decade, I knew that in those days it was really quite easy to get into the Pentagon during the week. Any slight reconaissance in the building would have revealed to them that they could just walk in. And that should have suggested right away that you could infiltrate. Put literally thousands of people in it, and then on an appropriate moment, sit down in the corridors, put stickers all over the place, and to a considerable degree really shut it down on a work day, which I thought would be very impressive. So I was kind of frustrated to realize that they would be demonstrating in front of what I knew was an essentially empty building.
BOB FASS: We got there earlier enough in the day. The buses of demonstrators hadn't arrived. We went up on a hill where we could see the Pentagon across the river and I took four or five photographs from different points of view close to each other so that later, I could create an illusion of the Pentagon actually lifting off its foundation with a slide projector. We had enough time to fool around. I was wearing a painted tie-dye one-piece painters' suits, tie dye was very fashionable at the time, after Kesey and the bus. Krassner had on a flag tie. Mountain Girl was there, she'd been on the cover of Trout Fishing in America, or one of Brautigan's other books, and had gone with Paul to buy the corn that was to be used to levitate the Pentagon. It had to be organic. The guy said, "What's it for?" And Paul said, "We're gonna levitate the Pentagon." "Oh, okay, that'll be two dollars please."
We broke off from the crowd; we had something that we had to do, but we didn't know what it was. It was an inspiration of the moment. What do we do with the corn? Why don't we try it out on the Washington Monument? There's nobody up there now. There were these two or three guards standing around, looking at the other crowd. So we went up and circled the Washington Monument, this long phallic thing sticking up in the air. We knew that Washington had grown hemp, so it had to have some good vibes there. We got about a quarter of the way around it and some guy in a Smokey Bear costume came out, stood there scratching his head and said, "Pardon me sir, what the fuck are you doing?" "We're doing a practice exorcism that will be carried out later at the Pentagon." He said, Oh. Then he pulled out a walkie-talkie and said, "I have some people here, they tell me it's a religious ceremony." "Well take ‘em inside and investigate." I said, "Are we under arrest?" "You just better come with me. Do you want me to call somebody with cuffs?" I said, "Alright we'll go with you." He took us down a winding staircase into a basement and he asked us some questions there. Finally they let us go, but they took the corn.
ANITA HOFFMAN: So I see the Careys, they're out there like hippies. They got a blanket spread, they're smoking grass, they're having a picnic. They're singing songs, playing guitar, they're having like a great time. I'm with Abbie, we gotta fucking confront the troops. Abbie is like, "Me and my girl." He's got me by the hand and he's not going where the crowds are going. He's going where they put up these temporary fences and they have these soldiers way out in these fields where if you got beat up nobody would ever know, there's no media or anything. He has me running across fields, jumping barricades. I was shitting inside. I'm not saying a word to him. I probably looked white as a sheet, and I'm putting up this good front. I thought of the Careys with such jealous hatred. Why can't we be hippies, why can't we just be like them?
STEW ALBERT: Before the march to the Pentagon, we were up on the stage where the speeches were made by Dr. Spock and the others and we could look out at the crowd and they were our base, all the people we operated with. And there was no representation of that on the stage. The stage was all a representatives of this union, a representative of that. But no one representing the people themselves.
PAUL KRASSNER: There were a lot of young people and old protesting vets. Viet Nam was much more in people's minds by then. It was also at the end of the Summer of Love. So, the march was part of an intensification and expansion of what was already going on. It was one of the first, biggest, non-linear, non-traditional, non-Old Left demonstrations. I think in that sense it was seminal.
ROZ PAYNE: After all the speeches that went on in front of the Lincoln Memorial and the music, then the people went to march on the Pentagon. The kids were at the demonstration anyway and anything that looks more interesting than listening to speakers is gonna attract people, and so a large group of people followed the march. On one of the overpasses there was this young Black guy who has a sign that said "No Vietcong Ever Called Me a Nigger." There was a river there, and there were people on boats there who had signs. It was almost like a new type of thing we had never encountered. Usually you went to a demonstration, you heard speeches and you left; this time, you followed the group. People went through this break through bushes, climbed up some rocks, cleared a pathway and you ended up at the Pentagon, which is really exciting. And here are all these…there were just thousands and thousands of people there, soldiers surrounding the Pentagon, people sitting on the ground OMMMing. The exorcism of the Pentagon was a sideshow. It was brought up that they were going to be doing this but that wasn't the main thing.
KENNETH ANGER: There were a bunch of idiots there. I didn't consider myself an idiot, but maybe other people would. There were these hothead lefties, who, their idea was they would take over and kill the capitalists. Well, that's not very practical. Then there were Hare Krishnas, peacenik idiots, saying ‘Peace, peace' or something like that. I didn't go for anything like that. It was so annoying.
PAUL KRASSNER: I had been pissing on the Department of Justice building just at the time we were getting teargassed, so after that I was just sorta wandering around trying to get rid of the pain and discomfort from the tear gas. A fella named Jerome Washington, he was the first black Yippie, was with me. We were both pissing. I remember him helping me up the hill to the Pentagon--it was a great bonding experience. [laughs]
In the parking lot there was a flatbed truck. Ed Sanders was really the Spike Jones of that, he was leading. I think Ed and Tuli were in costumes, but it's nothing I could swear to in court. I still believe I snorted cocaine with the Pope--you tell the story enough times and it becomes real to you.
ED SANDERS: I had on a red-and-yellow coat. It was very bright and psychedelic, it was a satire on camouflage; it was a yellow coat with blobs of orange and red. It's quite vivid. I was touring a lot with it during those days. It was psychedelic garb. It was just after the end of the Summer of Love, so love was…happening.
The Fugs were playing this Ambassador theatre in DC, a psychedelic club. We had that $2,000 gig, so we had a lot of cash. Tuli and I used our share of the Fugs money to rent a flatbed truck with a sound system with Marshall Bloom of Liberation News Service. We had this big day-glo painting made at the School of Visual Arts of the back of the dollar bill stretched out, the Novus Ordo Cyclorum paranoid pyramid, which we wanted to beam at the Pentagon.
In talking it over with Harry Smith, it seemed wise to have a cow on hand, as the symbol of the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor. The cow was going to be brought in from a farm in Virginia, painted with occult emblems, but the cow got stopped by the police. At the same time, Tuli and I bought oodles of daisies with the East Village Other people, which were to be taken to a small plane in Virigina that would fly above the Pentagon and throw the daisies down. But that also got stopped, so we had all these daisies with us.
So, in the late morning, we got on our truck. There was the San Francisco Diggers, Michael Bowen and Peter Coyote and a couple others, and all the Fugs, Ken Pine, Ken Weaver, Tuli Kupferberg, myself. There was a huge march--a couple hundred thousand people that had gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, then walked across the Memorial bridge. We started out and Abbie jumped aboard. Abbie viewed this flatbed truck with the poster with the back of the dollar bill on it and the sound system and "Out demons, out" to be the vanguard of the main Mobe march. He wanted us to slow down and cut off the crowd and become the head of this march. I didn't see it like that at all. I just wanted to get across the bridge without getting arrested and get to the Pentagon early, before they shut things down. He wanted us to sort of lead people to a place where we would conduct the levitation or the exorcism. So my first discussion with Abbie was about tactics, but basically I just told the driver to get the hell over there.
We got to a Pentagon parking lot to set up. Then we noticed this right-wing minister holding a bible in a cherrypicker coming toward us. I figured he was superstitious so I raved out a chant of mumbo-jumbo at him to try to make him feel that he shouldn't actually come too close. Finally we started out our chanting…
ALLEN COHEN: We had envisioned thousands of dancing and chanting Hippies joining hands in a gigantic circle around the Pentagon invoking gods and spirits to exorcise the demons within the Pentagon, and make it rise 300 feet, vibrate and turn orange. When the General Services Administration finally granted the permit for the March, the one thing they refused to allow was the Hippies' encirclement of the Pentagon.
NORMAN MAILER (from his ‘novel,' Armies of the Night): Of course, exorcism without encirclement was like culinary art without a fire--no one could properly expect a meal. Nonetheless the exorcism would proceed, and the Fugs were to serve as a theatrical medium and would play their music on the rear bed of the truck they had driven in here at the end of the parking lot nearest to the Pentagon some hundreds of yards from the speaker's stand where the rally was to take place. Now, while an Indian triangle was repeatedly struck, and a cymbal was clanged, a mimeographed paper was passed around to the Marchers watching. It had a legend which went something like this:
October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., Planet Earth
We Freemen, of all colors of the spectrum, in the name of God, Ra, Jehovah, Anubis, Osiris, Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, Thoth, Ptah, Allah, Krishna, Chango, Chimeke, Chukwu, Olisa-Bulu-Uwa, Imales, Orisasu, Odudua, Kali, Shiva-Shakra, Great Spirit, Dionysus, Yahweh, Thor, Bacchus, Isis, Jesus Christ, Maitreya, Buddha, Rama do exorcise and cast out the EVIL which has walled and captured the pentacle of power and perverted its use to the need of the total machine and its child the hydrogen bomb and has suffered the people of the planet earth, the American people and creatures of the mountains, woods, streams and oceans grievous mental and physical torture and the constant torment of the imminent threat of utter destruction.
We are demanding that the pentacle of power once again be used to serve the interests of GOD manifest in the world as man. We are embarking on a motion which is millennial in scope. Let this day, October 21, 1967, mark the beginning of suprapolitics.
By the act of reading this paper you are engaged in the Holy Ritual of Exorcism. To further participate focus your thought on the casting out of evil through the grace of GOD which is all (ours). A billion stars in a billion galaxies of space and time is the form of your power, and limitless is your name.
THE INVOCATION, AS DELIVERED BY ED SANDERS: "In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, god of the dead, in the name of all those killed because they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma, in the name of sea-born Aphrodite, in the name of Magna Mater, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnamable, the quintessent finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the Beak of Sok, in the name of scarab, in the name, in the name, in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the Sky, in the name of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nepta, Isis, in the name of the flowing living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit…to raise the Pentagon from its destiny and preserve it."
"In the name, and all the names, it is you."
"Out, demons out--back to darkness, ye servants of Satan--out, demons, out! Out, demons, out!"
For the first time in the history of the Pentagon there will be a grope-in within a hundred feet of this place, within two hundred feet. Seminal culmination in the spirit of peace and brotherhood, a real grope for peace. All of you who want to protect this rite of love may form a circle of protection around the lovers. These are the magic eyes of victory. Victory, victory for peace. Money made the Pentagon--melt it. Money made the Pentagon, melt it for love. In the name of the generative power of Priapus, in the name of the totality, we call upon the demons of the Pentagon to rid themselves of the cancerous tumors of the war generals, all the secretaries and soldiers who don't know what they're doing, all the intrigue, bureaucracy and hatred, all the spewing, coupled with prostate cancer in the deathbed. Every Pentagon general lying alone at night with a tortured psyche and an image of death in his brain, every general, every general lying alone, every general lying alone. In the name of the most sacred of sacred names, Xabrax Phresxner. End the fire and war, and war, end the plague of death.
ALLEN GINSBERG: Ed Sanders carried the levitation out. But not in a Buddhist way but in a Western magical way which was maybe not such a good idea. While Ed was trying to un-hex the Pentagon, Kenneth Anger was underneath his wagon trying to hex him.
ED SANDERS: Kenneth Anger was burning something down there and making snake sounds at whomever should try to come near. He told me that he had been inside the Pentagon weeks ago to bury something.
KENNETH ANGER: I just walked right in. I had studied how the Pentagon staff were dressed, and I was just like them. I wore a dark blue conservative suit. I even had a small American flag on my lapel.
I was attacking Mars, the god of War. He's still our ruling god--if you think Mars is an extinct thing from the antique past that we can just laugh at now, forget it. Mars is still here. That is not my opinion, but my knowledge. Mars is a terrifying but sobering vision. I have had this vision of Mars--you have to do all the things at certain times of the year, and then he does come through. And he's about 500 feet tall, he's NOT very handsome, he's very strong, he's armored, he's bearded in a scraggly way, he's got the fiercest eyes of any of the gods. He makes Jupiter--Jove--look benign and effete in comparison. But Mars is kind of childish--that's why it's so hard to get to him. He just loves bloodbaths. This is his thing. He does it very well. And he's always thinking up new ways to do hideous things to the human race. This is his FUN. He's the god of War. And he's been alive since there were humans in tribes. War is the most consistent activity of the human animal. For whatever reason, some good, and a lot bad, we've been doing it as a race since the cave days. Of course, some wars are justified, like World War II. Fighting the Nazis--I can't think of a better cause. But Mars has nothing to do with being fair. Mars loves bloodshed, and he is a force that's still operating in the world-it's a force that according to modern thinking is irrational, but nevertheless there. Freud would have called it the unconscious or something but I believe that these are actual living entities. Not ‘living' in the way like humans living and breathing, [but] living in a way that are much beyond our capacity, because they'll never die.
In a personal sense, men more than women have a big problem with Mars. Most soldiers from the beginning of time have been men, and still are. And the Pentagon is controlled by men. The Pentagon itself is sort of an occult shape--like a five-sided collapsed star. [In the Crowley tradition, Mars' number is five and its color is red.--Ed.] I'm a pagan. Mars doesn't terrify me because I've come to understand him as a living entity. But just because Mars is so powerful doesn't mean you always have to give in to him. You have to [put him in his place]: ‘Alright buster, calm down. You're not the only star in the firmament. Enough already.' That sort of thing. And [so I attacked Mars] in an abstract way.
I had a map of the Pentagon. I went into every single men's room and left--in a place where it was bound to be discovered, usually on the seat where anyone using that stall would have to see it, not on the floor, of course! --a talisman which was written on parchment paper, drawn in india ink. Each one was drawn individually using one of Crowley's talismans as my guide. I'm sure no one in the Pentagon could figure out what this thing meant. There was nothing like "War is bad" on it. There weren't even English words. They probably could figure out it was something occult…they know about those things, and they have a reference library.
I went from one Men's Room to the next, I didn't stop until I had scattered all 93 of my talismans--because 93 is a sacred number for Crowley. Then I walked out, it was all very inconspicuous. The security guard looked at me and gave me a nice look, like we're all looking after each other. If I'd been stopped and put in handcuffs that would've been unpleasant. That isn't the way I want to spend my time in Washington--I had a ticket to the opera for later that week.
ED SANDERS: I remember after we'd done "Out, Demons, Out," I went down under the truck and there was this guy from Newsweek trying to hold a microphone close to Anger. It looked like he was burning a pentagon with a Tarot card or a picture of the devil or something in the middle of it. In other words the thing we were doing above him, he viewed that as the exoteric thing and he was doing the esoteric, serious, zero bullshit exorcism. So I went along with that.
KENNETH ANGER: I don't burn Tarot cards, I respect them too much. [What I was doing] was saying Ed Sanders and the Fugs are a bunch of crap, this isn't the way to fight a war. After all, I was there to protest the war. I knew what I was doing. It was a Crowley-type ritual.
They'd brought in a truck, decorated in flowers, making it like a float in the Rose Parade. They were just showoffs, they were putting their own agenda on this other thing. I found that offensive too because it wasn't the point. Naturally flowers are nice and peace is nice and all that, but that's not quite the point of what's happening. And they were doing their omni hare krishna chant chant, peace peace, whatever--the kind of crap that Lennon and Yoko used to chant. People could say they were harmless and meant well, well I'm sorry they may have meant well [but] it didn't do any good. In my view, there's ways to [demonstrate] that are correct and there are ways to do it that are not correct. All the singing and flowers and chanting and all that crap was not the right way.
The focus should on the objective of the march, not on Hey! Me! I'm here! Since it was close to Halloween, some people came dressed in costume, or carrying inappropriate signs, and I found that totally inappropriate, because it's saying Look at me, don't think about what we're here for. The kind of energy that can be generated by a march can be dissipated by just turning it into a sideshow. And I see this happen over and over with American marches. Like people who try to protest in the nude: this is NOT appropriate for anything. Because public nudity happens to be against the law--and it probably should be, because most people are ugly! [laughs] The few Adonises and Venuses around, I'd love if they would parade in the nude. But most people could use a little concealment.
JOHN ESKOW: Part of the action around the Pentagon, under the heading of the whole exorcism thing, was supposed to be all these couples making love. Abbie took it upon himself to be a kind of matchmaker, because people were not pairing off quite as quickly as he would've liked. So when they came to the moment, Abbie was grabbing people and saying, "No you're with her, and him and her… No you go with her, and him, he should be with her and get that other guy out of there, and lie down now. Lie down, come on, do it!" I remember it really well because he made a match with me and some girl that turned out absolutely delightfully. So I was part of that sort of communal love thing that was happening, as Ed Sanders was chanting "Out, demons, out!" There weren't really very many people making love - it was too scary for that. I remember arriving on the lawn with this young woman and Abbie, on the microphone in the distance, saying that all these couples were gonna make love and then I was tapped on the should by an extremely polite Washington policeman, and I looked up over my shoulder and he said, "Excuse me, but I have to ask you, are you planning to consummate this?" I said, "Yeah, why?" And he said, "Because if you do consummate, I'm going to have to arrest you." I said, "How will you know?" He said, "We're watching you." But he was so polite, he had a lot of couples to watch and he was doing a really good job. Then Ed Sanders was chanting the ritual invocations and I was up and the passion was over and I wasn't arrested for consummating, and suddenly we were all moving towards the Pentagon itself.
SUPERJOEL: As we approached the Pentagon the older people are kind of going whooooa, wait a second, the place is ringed by Airborne assholes, right? Me, I just thought hey great, these guys want to face off, we're here. So as we're walking up there there were these trash cans that are on the grounds of the Pentagon. And on top of this pile of trash there's this bunch of flowers, daisies, right. I grabbed them. I saw these soldiers, and they're all standing there and they were my age. So I just took the flowers and one by one, boom boom boom, put ‘em in the gun barrels. Cause we had done this flower power crap in Berkeley you know, already. One by one, in the barrel of their guns. Then that guy Rosenthal, who took the Iwo Jima picture, took that famous picture of me.
ED SANDERS: I was carrying a lot of daisies, I was handing them out to people. It was a gift to the counterculture from the Fugs. So some people put daisies into the rifle butts. I did one. There was a line of soldiers with fixed bayonets. They looked very nervous. They were young. When you put the white daisy inside the barrel, it was, ‘take it easy, it's okay, it's just a flower, let me put it in there." A few people did this. Not many. Cuz it takes guts to put a flower inside a rifle barrel, kay? Because if they'd have tried that in Chicago in August of 1968, the person with the flower would probably have been shot. So, this was a different era. It was the year of the Summer of Love. There was still enough of a climate of love to get away with putting daisies in rifle barrels. But that period ended very soon.
JOHN ESKOW: There was always those moments in these demonstrations where suddenly, as if from some underlying rhythm, what was a kind of gentle movement of people became a surge, and was met with a counter surge and suddenly like a crazy weather front, there were just all these masses of energy in conflict. I remember being scared that this was gonna get really out of control, because people were trying to get to the Pentagon and the joke was over, the love-making was over, the chanting was all over. Suddenly, it would just turn like that, from a kind of cultural carnival to a really terrifying nightmare time. And then I remember getting the first thing of teargas and groping for the hand of the girl that I was with and both of us just being too blinded and overwhelmed by both the teargas and the cops and the people running away from the Pentagon now to even hold on to each other. And just getting swept up in a real stampede.
TULI KUPFERBERG: Their policy was not to let you get anywhere near the fucking place. So we managed to sit down in the driveway for 30 seconds. I saw some of the action in front of the Pentagon, kids climbing up ropes. Really trying to get in. What amazed me was when I was being arraigned, there were people there with three-button suits getting arrested, professional people. This had gone up one scale. You could see Middle America was now against the war and that was amazing to me and I think McNamara and those "Pentagon intellectuals" must've noticed that too. This was not just a bunch of crazy kids, this was the country saying, yeah, this is it. Scared the shit out of ‘em.
BILL ZIMMERMAN: A few people tried to breach the line, get into the building and they were arrested, but everybody else sort of sat down and those were the scenes when people were putting flower stems into rifle barrels. Abbie and his people got all the press, but they didn't represent everybody that was out there. There were religious groups that were out there and labor leaders and all kinds of people. And the exorcism was put out as the purpose of the demonstration but the demonstration had much greater significance in terms of the history of the anti-war movement because it was the first time that that many people showed up someplace to do something that they weren't supposed to do. There had been demonstrations and 5th Avenue Parade Committee actions that involved people in as large a number as came to the Pentagon but the Pentagon was civil disobedience and it was the first time that such a massive number of people had experience in civil disobedience. It was a mind-blowing event to confront massive numbers of police, backed up by massive numbers of uniformed armed military. And we overran them. They tried to stop us from crossing the 14th Street Bridge, and they couldn't. Then they formed a skirmish line on the outside of the parking lot around the Pentagon and we just pushed through them, and they fell back then to the inside border of the parking lot, between the parking lot and the building, and it looked like a very firm skirmish line that they had established there. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, billy clubs, bayonets, they weren't gonna let anybody through, but people started getting through. They started climbing trees and climbing over walls and getting behind them and when a bunch of people got behind them, they'd move their line back to cover them. And we got the feeling as we kept pushing against the line that we had power. And we didn't know up until that point that we had physical power. We thought we had moral power, we thought we had righteousness on our side, but we began to see that with sufficient numbers we had a kind of physical power. It was enormously energizing and it took the movement to a different stage of development. To me, that was the significance of the Pentagon march. It wasn't the exorcism and the humor and the absurdity around that, which also played a positive role, but it was the demonstration that we could have more power than any number of police they could deploy.
ROZ PAYNE: People really got up into the Pentagon, really close. Part of the wall of the pentagon had an alcove, and there was a guy sitting there meditating inside. And there was somebody else on top of the walls. You saw people that were so close into the Pentagon that you almost thought--of course in those days we thought of a lot of things--that Something Was Going to Happen. That was the real importance of it, that there was that Possibility of something.
MICHAEL O'DONOGHUE: When I looked up and saw machine guns pointed at you from the Pentagon, there was a lovely little thought process I went through which is let's see, there's machine guns, they're pointed at the enemy, and they're pointed at me! Wheeeew! I guess I am the enemy, and it was like a little A plus B, B equals C, A equals C, sort of thing that went on there. I got teargassed pretty badly that fucking time. The government had set up medical huts, which was so wonderful. If you went to the medical huts they treated you so nicely in there. So they gassed me, and because I had hay fever plus teargas, I was near dying. Then I went to the medical hut and the nice old nurses fixed me up. I said this is a pretty hot little government.
BOB FASS: You're walking around a geography that you're not familiar with, people are pushing and shoving, people were crying, people were going through the crowd saying that we didn't know this would happen, they led us into a trap, other people were saying, This is how they are, it shouldn't have been this way. Nothing would happen. Every time they would move toward the crowd and shake their clubs, the crowd would retreat. You know that film where Chaplin goes into a neighborhood and subdues a big bully? Every time the big bully raises an eyebrow, the crowd runs back! And if he shakes his shoulders the whole street is cleaned off, everybody goes into their houses. They kept shaking their clubs at us, to move us back. Gradually people were not intimidated, or crept around them, crept through them. Then they backed off. And then there'd be some little incident on the edge where someone was separated from their friends, or someone attacked the biggest kid in the crowd, to scare all the others then. Some big unassuming bulky person would be brutalized, right? And people would be unable to retreat from seeing it.
ANITA HOFFMAN: Each hour that you stayed, as it became darker it got scarier and scarier. There was real bonding. That's the first time in my life that I ever felt the idea of being like a small part of something that's much larger and all-inclusive, and it's very beautiful. It's like being one cell in an organism. There was that kind of real unity, because we were all scared I guess, and we were sitting there because we had to, and we shared those moments and we knew we were right.
TOM NEUMANN: Ben Morea and the Motherfuckers were the only ones who said, Well, if people are talking about storming the Pentagon, we're gonna storm the Pentagon and actually managed to get into the Pentagon. They were in the corridors of the Pentagon having pitched battle with the security guards there while everybody else was out levitating the Pentagon.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Apparently they'd imported marshals from the South, the kind that they'd seen do such good work in Birmingham. Real redneck tough guys. They were beating some of the demonstrators on the ground and when you see that, it inevitably makes your blood boil, it's amazing how quickly that evokes violence to see people doing that. There wasn't counter-violence but I was very conscious of the point that that's unbearable. Up til that moment I would have said the mood was too picnic-like, it was too much of a day off, a nice Saturday, very beautiful weather. Again, I didn't think it was as powerful an effect as it could be having. But then things got serious.
So after watching that for a while, I decided to go inside and see what was happening inside. The building seemed virtually deserted although I read later that troops were down in the basement and on the roof-they had troops dispersed to various places, fearing a revolution. I went up to our office and then decided that I could get a better look at what was happening at the river entrance, from McNamara's office, which was next door, so I just went through the door, and after a minute, I realized that McNamara was actually in there. There was a secretary in for a minute, she went out, and then McNamara had his back to me and he was looking out the window. Well, the natural thing to do would be to get out since I did not have an informal relationship with him. But on the other hand, I did know him and had written speeches for him. So I decided just to go over to the window and have a look. So he was at one window and I was at another, we were looking down at this thing. Neither of us said anything. He just stood there. It's odd looking back on it. I wanted to see the expression on his face when they succeeded in levitating the building. But that didn't happen. My own actual feeling was, looking down on them, it was too much of a kind of football rally kind of crowd, too gala. I was afraid that it wasn't having the impact on McNamara that I wanted it to have. It remains an interesting question, actually, how McNamara was reacting to it. I knew, at the time, that he wanted the war to end and so I assumed that he had a basic sympathy, at least with the goals.
ROZ PAYNE: The US marshals were the scariest people I've ever seen in my life, they were worse than anybody else. They had these long sticks and they were really beating the shit out of people. They were really cracking up on the heads. But people didn't leave! We spent all the night there and all day there. People stayed there and they used their posters as little campfires. And people had draft card burnings in certain areas.
WOLFE LOWENTHAL: Getting busted was kind of a relief because I can remember nothing in my life with almost as much concentrated terror as I experienced that night, prior to that point. It was my baptism of fire.
JEFF JONES: When it got dark, later that night, that's when they started arresting people and taking them away and the arrests were quite brutal and sudden and things would quiet down again. As the situation stabilized, somebody set up a microphone to serve as a command post on the protest side. My recollection is that Abbie took over that role toward the morning of the second day and tried to keep the energy going. The revolutionary emcee.
ANITA HOFFMAN: When we were finally arrested it was peaceful. The men and women were separated. Abbie and I gave out names as Mr. and Mrs. Digger.
WOLFE LOWENTHAL: I fell in love with Abbie in that compound. Such an up spirit. There were impromptu workshops and debates. It was a real education for me. All I knew was smoking dope and feeling good. I remember at one point Abbie put this sheet over his head as if he's a Ku Klux Klan guy and he goes up to the front of the bars and says, "Hey, let me out of here. I'm in here with all these Jews and Commies."
STEW ALBERT: I remember when bail was made for him, the cop came in and just shouted "Digger!" And Abbie went out.
JERRY RUBIN: It was the perfect theatrical event because my goal was to have thousands of people sieging the Pentagon. The Pentagon had to bring troops back from Vietnam and Detroit to attack the crowd, not to have blood spilled but just to theatrically attack the crowd. We were trying to create the myth of millions of people being against the war. And by the myth create the reality of it. It happened perfectly. Abbie brought the humor and the good times, the SDS came with the militancy that you needed because you need a little militancy otherwise the police would all laugh at you and say, "Fine." It's all working out perfectly. And there's the headlines in the Washington Post the next day. Thousands arrested. Pentagon splattered with paint, 82nd airborne moved in, da da da da… Then we got that perfect picture of the hippie, who was Superjoel, putting the flower in the gun barrel. So if you say that all life's reduced to photographs, my goal was to have thousands of people beseiging the Pentagon and for the whole world to hear that the youth of America are opposed to the American war machine and they must stop. Total success. That's what happened. As a matter of fact, probably because of that event Johnson saw his power slipping and decided not to run again.
ROBIN PALMER: We drove back from the Pentagon demonstration with Abbie and Anita. He was thrilled. He had insisted that they had levitated the Pentagon. Hadn't I seen it? I said, " I don't think so, Abbie." But I began to appreciate Abbie's style and politics. Before this I couldn't get a handle on this cultural revolution that he was talking about. Revolution for the hell of it? I appreciated it, I instinctively understood what he meant. On the other hand I was straighter, more orthodox. I considered drugs to be counter-revolutionary. I hadn't opened all my pores the same way Abbie did. I was, in Tom Neumann's words, a well-intentioned politico to Abbie's eyes and Abbie was a crazed nut in my eyes and we resolved a lot of that during that trip back from Washington.
SAM LEFF: All I have is a grainy picture of the Pentagon risen maybe 36 inches off the ground…I know Abbie had one that was higher, just don't know what happened to it.
KEITH LAMPE: It was Bob Ockene who made the really important recognitions about what had happened at the Pentagon march. He said the main injustice among the demonstrators had been the way the "straight shorthaired New Left leadership" (he was referring to Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis and several others) with its bullhorns had totally controlled the rhetoric ‘till the vicious federal marshals arrived--at which time they fled, leaving the psychedelic community (referred to in the media as hippies or freaks) to take the tear gas, skull-bash and jail time. Thus, he said the psychedelic community should have a vehicle allowing its rhetoric to reach the media despite the New Left. He said the organization should be egalitarian, decentralizied, informal and above all have a sense of humor as a relief from the paranoia taking hold as a result of police brutality. (At the Pentagon the federal marshals in general acted as though they were taking orders from the Fourth Reich.)
So Bob and I made a list of 16 names and each of made eight phone calls to get a meeting on this. Kate Coleman (who at that time was working at Newsweek), Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, Paul Krassner, Tuli Kupferberg, Judy and Keith Lampe, Ann and Bob Ockene, Jerry Rubin, Ed Sanders. That was in December of '67.
PAUL KRASSNER: The birth took place at Abbie and Anita's apartment on the afternoon of December 31st, 1967. And there were a lot of people gathered there. Everybody was stoned on Columbian marijuana. We were just kind of making plans about what we were gonna do. Although I invented the name, it was just a label for a phenomenon that already existed. You could already see this organic coalition in process of the hippies and new lefties. But I knew that reporters needed a hook to get a first paragraph. I don't think there was much thinking of a name for the group, but I knew that the mythologizing process needs a name. Zeus! Something! So I went into the other room, sometimes you feel there's some kind of brainstorm coming on. I just knew, a name, a name, a name. I went through the alphabet, to see what name would be appropriate to demonstrate the radicalization of hippies. I'm going through ippy, bippy, dippy, hippy, I'm ready to give up, wippy, yippie. Yippie! It was so perfect I stopped there and didn't even get to zippie!
So I sat there, I was up in their bed! That's perfect! Then I'm working backwards. Okay. Yippies would derive organically, just as working backwards like running a film, from the intitials Y I P. It was acronym time. I thought what could the words be? And Youth, it was a youth movement, no question about that. I, international, it was an international movement, too, it was not just happening in America. And P, P, P, P. Party! It was so perfect, it was like a religious epiphany for me. I was like, "Listen to this! I got a name! We can call ourselves the Yippies!" I'm telling everybody and they're looking at me. Abbie liked it right away. Jerry didn't like it right away. … So after a little discussion they realized how appropriate it would be, because yippie is a shout of joy, it had all the elements. By the time the meeting was over we were the Yippies. We were the Youth International Party.
PONDEROSA PINE [from his memoirs a.k.a. Keith Lampe]: Judy made a strong Yippie! button for us. In January, Timothy Leary made a $500 donation and we were on our waaaaaay.
JERRY RUBIN: We were sitting in Abbie's St. Marks apartment and we said we gotta have a slogan. Ed said "Rise up and crush the creeping meatball." The following week Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom of the Liberation News Service sent out our news release all around the country. It said that the Yippies were coming.
ABE PECK: This is how the thinking goes. There's all these longhairs out there, they're a community. We had been through the civil rights movement, we'd been through a left that is increasingly estranged from how ordinary people live, we walk down the street, the evidence of our eyes is that in every large city and frankly in every small town, there are these new kinds of people, these freaks. And because we care about changing this country and also because we can see that they're the ones with the energy, and also because we don't want to be irrelevant, how can we reach these people? And they're not in one place, they're everywhere. We are everywhere. How do you reach them? Well you reach them through the artists, the rock and roll people, you reach em by having events that are McLuhan-esque, you reach ‘em by certain iconic images: smoke a joint, the love drug, dancing by the Pentagon, levitating the Pentagon. That's how you reach ‘em. But how do you let them know? The Republican Party can buy billboards. Hubert Humphrey can buy billboards. We can't afford time, we're not a political party except we called ourselves that on New Year's Day. We're not organized, we don't have the reputation, we're a fringe group. We're like the vegetarians or the Santa Claus party. How do we get publicity? And so because both Abbie and Jerry, and Paul are clever they began to really engage in this kind of media battleground of essentially forcing their way to media attention.
So, if you're a reporter in the late ‘60s, a straight reporter, what are they? They're good copy, they're those wacky hippies. You can sell the story to your editor. Actually half the time, the editor wants you to go cover the story. They're gonna do something weird, that Jerry guy, he's pretty outrageous, he's kind of clever. And that Abbie guy, he's funny and he's kind of clever and then whoever else they're bringing along. And they're gonna run a pig for president and they're gonna do this. …Someone once criticized it by saying there were ten Yippies, as if to say there's a problem. If you're a movement aesthetist that's certainly a problem. On the other hand, isn't that an accomplishment, cause there's just a handful of you?
JERRY RUBIN: We were probably more into print media. Print in a way is just as powerful because that story about burning money at the stock exchange was the feature story in every paper in the country. That's where the power was. With TV it just hits and it's gone! But the newspaper just hangs around and then it comes out a week later in Newsweek. You get a second hit.
STEW ALBERT: You can't overestimate the effect of acid on the scene. People really were in a surrealistic, absurd sort of way. And you did need a politics that catered to those moods and the outlook that acid was creating. Yippie was definitely a physical manifestation of it. Political people started taking acid and didn't think that acid was a substitute for politics, but thought that acid had something to say to politics. If you combined politics with the right combination of acid and grass and doing wild stunts and getting involved in the surrealistic edge, it was a marvelous way to live! The civil rights movement, the peace movement, they appealed to idealism and guilt. We appealed to idealism. But we also appealed to fucking off, decadence, taking dope and getting laid and doing weird drawings on your body, and the stuff that's usually identified with the decline of civilization. And yet we somehow got it all packaged into some kind of romantic, idealist, revolutionary mode. Wow, this is very appealing stuff. And we got it out there, and it had its impact.
NORMAN MAILER: I think the Yippies were correct on an abstract level. But my feeling always has been that you don't overcome real right-wing conservatism by just mocking it; you deepen it, and that you're playing a very dangerous game which can end in fascism if you go too far without knowing what you're doing. That finally what you want to do is reach conservatives with arguments rather than just try to blow ‘em out. And so that was always my fundamental argument with Abbie from the word go.
ALLEN GINSBERG: The levitation of the Pentagon was a happening that demystified the authority of the military. The Pentagon was symbolically levitated in people's minds in the sense that it lost its authority which had been unquestioned and unchallenged until then. But once that notion was circulated in the air and once the kid put his flower in the barrel of the kid looking just like himself but tense and nervous, the authority of the Pentagon psychologically was dissolved.
ROZ PAYNE: "No Game," a 17-minute film about the march on the Pentagon, is the first Newsreel film. Five camera people decided to make a film together, everybody shot whatever they shot during the entire day and then they came back and put a film together. They had 16mm cameras. This is pre-video. They got ends of stock, overdated stock. It's a short film but it really took a long time, a lot of work was done on it.
The media had covered it enough that people knew about it. It was a really big event, it went into the next day, people were getting beaten up…And the levitation of the Pentagon wasn't something that happened every day. It wasn't just another peace demonstration where you went to Washington and returned to your thing.
But the only propaganda that people saw was what was on TV. That was it. And so with Newsreel, we created our own propaganda to try to be in contrast, to support a whole other opinion. We had a real market for films in those days. We had the anti-draft groups and the Black Panthers and SDS and church groups and Another Mother for Peace and Women Against the War--every group you could imagine wanted to have a film to show to their people. Every college. We couldn't even get enough of the things made. We must have done 50 films in that period of time. The Newsreel films made you feel like you weren't alone, that there were other people that share your opinion. This was important, especially if you didn't live in a big city where these things happened.
ED SANDERS: The military was somewhat stunned by the size and the vehemence of the crowd. The concept of going right to the gates of power and holding such a demonstration was troubling to Army intelligence. It was a symbolic event. It's sort of like the first simultaneous poem at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 that the Dadaists put on in Zurich: it was a symbolic event that had more meaning than the actual event itself. It had a kind of life. And then when we put it on the Fugs record ("Exorcising the Evil Spirits From the Pentagon Oct. 21, 1967" sixth track off 1968 Fugs release "Tenderness Junction"), a lot of people heard it, it got a lot of radio play. It was a famous thing we did, and people praised us for our audacity, yet the Vietnam War went on for another seven years. So much for "Out, Demons, Out!"
KENNETH ANGER: Well, you have to put the first nail in. We were having 800 to 1,000 die every week during the Vietnam war. The human race just becomes numb to atrocity after a while. So, I think these things, crude or exhibitionistic or whatever they may be considered, maybe even bad magic, they did eventually bear fruit. The war eventually ended.
I encountered McNamara many many years later. It was just one of those things that he happened to be in the same city and was approachable. He's written a book that's like a softcore apology. I didn't say my name or anything to him. I just said, "Mr. McNamara, I think it's very noble of you to have made that concession."
ROZ PAYNE: We did so many things in those days that we never would be able to do now. You wouldn't even be able to get near the Pentagon today because there's big gates, the landscaping is all totally different and you can only get to some street where they turn you away.
ED SANDERS: To do something so symbolic today, you'd have to send 25,000 people to ring the US compound in Baghdad and chant OUT DEMONS OUT.
PAUL KRASSNER: What happened on that day could never happen now, not in an evolving police state in the guise of national security. It's never been as dangerous as it's been now. In all the elections in my lifetime…. The propaganda and the brainwashed American public are very symbiotic, and that's very scary. You know, the people STILL believe, even though it's been denied, that Saddam and Osama were lovers. And adopted a Chinese baby. How EASILY they pick up on simple soundbites. You ask people and they just mimic what they've heard over and over and over again. "flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop." It's kind of frightening. I had to fight for the swastika on Bush's nipple for my album cover. I don't understand all these people who are undecided. The only ones I know who are undecided are undecided about whether to vote at all, or if Bush wins whether they would stay in the country. I'm too old to emigrate to Canada. They have rules there. If Bush wins, I would stay just to see the guerrilla theatre that develops.
There was a lot of creative stuff at the NYC RNC. I watched four hours on C-SPAN of that first Sunday march. It was inspiring. One guy had a poster, it was my favorite, it said, "Let's Evolve Already" which seemed to cover everything. The first Sunday got a lot of media play but then, it was almost as if the media felt, Oh we've covered the demonstrations, now let's concentrate on Zell Miller.
BOB FASS: We little mammals happen to have run into some big dinosaurs. They're desperate because they know they're on their way out. So I keep optimistic, because to despair means you're not going to be as creative, and as inventive, and as resourceful, and as much of a Yippie. You gotta keep showing up, and doing what you do. How bad does it have to get before you leave? Well Brecht has a poem about that. He says There are some people who are so busy with what they're doing that even though you come in and tell them that the roof is on fire they won't even stop. He says it half in despair, because he got out.
I think we had a big influence on what happened during the Republican Convention. I'm sorry that people are feeling despair because I think just the opposite is called for right now. I think George Bush is just as stupid as he was before. I think if there's one more bad election that the world condemns then we do have a Hitlerian situation. I grew up in New York in the cast of the Threepenny Opera. And I read all about that Weimar period, so it's always in my mind. That's who the enemy is. They're fucking fascists! What do you expect? [laughs] It matters not whether you fight them on your doorstep or around the world, you have to expose them, mock them, irritate them. People are not dumb--they just don't want to know anymore, they know too much already. But that was going on in the Vietnam war too. People didn't want to know about it, it was halfway around the world. "Oh, they'll take care of it, they know more than we do." But you can't hide those bodybags forever. After a while you smell the body behind your ass, and it'll begin to stink.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some parts of this article were previously published in Steal This Dream by Larry Ratso Sloman (Doubleday), and appear courtesy of the author. For more information on obtaining signed copies of that book, email: abbiehoffmanbook@yahoo.com
The Newsreel collective's Pentagon March film No Game, and other Newsreel films, are available for purchase from the Roz Payne Archives at newsreel.us
"A Magic Rite…" appears courtesy of Ed Sanders. Ed's book, America: A History in Verse, Vol. 3, 1962-1970, features his account of the Pentagon March. It is available for $19.95 from thefugs.com
Excerpts from the San Francisco Oracle appear courtesy of Regent Press.
Special thanks to Rani Singh, Peter Relic, Susan Montford & Don Murphy, Gavin Brownrigg, John Leland, Dana Beal, Lane Sarasohn, Jennifer Ballantyne and Peter Hale at the Ginsberg Trust.
Gomma TV ~ Punk TV Italy
Salvatore Iaconesi's: My Open Source [Cancer] Cure
I have a brain cancer.
I converted my digital medical records into open, accessible formats, turning them into a very personal form of Open Data.
This data is available at http://www.artisopensource.net/cure
Artists, scientists, doctors, designers, hackers are all invited to send me their cure.
In different cultures the word CURE means different things, referring to the body, the soul or to society.
Send me your cure at: info@artisopensource.net and it will be published on the website, so that anyone (maybe someone with my same disease) will be able to benefit from it.
Have You Been Scroogled?
Think Google respects your privacy? Think again. Article Source
Google goes through every Gmail that's sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads. And there's no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy. Outlook.com is different—we don't go through your email to sell ads.
Watch the video to see how you get Scroogled:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/anFSX2WltPc?rel=0Tell Google To Stop!
Let them know they shouldn't go through your email to sell ads. Warn Your Friends!
Target: Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google
Sponsored by: Outlook.comGoogle earns money by violating your privacy. They go through every word of your personal Gmail so they can target you with ads.
Every word of every email. Even the most private ones, like messages about relationships, health care, finances, and more. Do you feel violated yet?
Even if you don't use Gmail, Google will still go through emails you send to Gmail addresses in order to sell ads -- despite you never having agreed to their terms of service. There is absolutely no way to opt out, whether you use Gmail or not.
It's time to take back your privacy. Sign this Petition and tell Google to stop going through your emails to sell ads.
[Note: ~@~ will no longer respond to email using AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Google, or Verizon domains.]
Google Moves to Destroy Online Anonymity ...
Unintentionally Helping Authoritarian GovernmentsGovernments Move to Destroy Online Anonymity
Posted on February 10, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog, Article Source, via Keith Lampe
Some of the world's leading social critics and political critics have used pen names.
As Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge points out (edited slightly for readability):
Though often maligned (typically by those frustrated by an inability to engage in ad hominem attacks), anonymous speech has a long and storied history in the United States. Used by the likes of Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens) to criticize common ignorance, and perhaps most famously by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay (aka publius) to write the Federalist Papers, we think ourselves in good company in using one or another nom de plume.
Particularly in light of an emerging trend against vocalizing public dissent in the United States, we believe in the critical importance of anonymity and its role in dissident speech.
Like the Economist magazine, we also believe that keeping authorship anonymous moves the focus of discussion to the content of speech and away from the speaker -- as it should be. We believe not only that you should be comfortable with anonymous speech in such an environment, but that you should be suspicious of any speech that isn't.
But governments -- especially authoritarian governments -- hate anonymity.
A soon-to-be-released book by Google executive Eric Schmidt - called "The New Digital Age" -- describes the desire of authoritarian governments to destroy anonymity. The Wall Street Journal provides an excerpt:
Some governments will consider it too risky to have thousands of anonymous, untraceable and unverified citizens -- "hidden people"; they'll want to know who is associated with each online account, and will require verification at a state level, in order to exert control over the virtual world.
Last December, China started requiring all web users to register using their real names.
But the U.S. is quickly moving in the same direction. As Gene Howington reported last year:
Do you have a right to anonymous political free speech?
According to the Supreme Court, you do. According to the Department of Homeland Security, you don't. They've hired General Dynamics to track U.S. citizens exercising this critical civil right.
The history of anonymous political free speech in America dates back to our founding. The seminal essays found in "The Federalist Papers" were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay under the nom de plume of "Publius" although this was not confirmed until a list of authorship complied by Hamilton was posthumously released to the public. As previously discussed on this blog, the right to anonymous political free speech has been addressed by the Supreme Court. Most notably in the cases of Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960) and McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995). In Talley, Justice Hugo Black writing for the majority said that, "Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all." In McIntyre, Justice John Paul Stevens writing for the majority said that, "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. [... ] an author's decision to remain anonymous, like other decisions concerning omissions or additions to the content of a publication, is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment." That seems clear enough in defining that citizens do have a Constitutionally protected right to anonymous political free speech.
The full DHS policy statement regarding its activities can be viewed in the DHS Privacy Compliance Review of the NOC Media Monitoring Initiative (November 15, 2011), but rt.com's summary spells out the basics:
"Under the National Operations Center (NOC)'s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms.
Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use "traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed."
According to the Department of Homeland Security's own definition of personal identifiable information, or PII, such data could consist of any intellect "that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual." Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC's write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency.
Also included in the roster of those subjected to the spying are government officials, domestic or not, who make public statements, private sector employees that do the same and "persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest," which to itself opens up the possibilities even wider.
The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn't help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses." -- rt.com
This question about the right to anonymous political free speech is also asked over the background of the Electronic Privacy Information Center filing a FOIA request against the DHS to find out the details of the agency's social network monitoring program.
***
As part of recent disclosures related to the EPIC suit, it is revealed that the DHS has hired and instructed General Dynamics to monitor political dissent and the dissenters. The range of websites listed as being monitored is quite impressive. Notably, jonathanturley.org is not on this list [Howington's essay is a guest blog on constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley's website], but equally of note is that this list is by the DHS' own admission "representative" and not "comprehensive".
***
Some of the more high profile and highly trafficked sites being monitored include the comments sections of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, Wired, and ABC News. In addition, social networking sites Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are being monitored. For the first time, the public not only has an idea who the DHS is pursuing with their surveillance and where, but what they are looking for as well. General Dynamics contract requires them to "[identify] media reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government, DHS, or prevent, protect, respond government activities." The DHS also instructed General Dynamics to generate "reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS." In other words, the DHS wants to know who you are if you say anything critical about the government.
Anybody thinking of the name "Goebbels" at this point is not out of line.
Indeed, valuing online privacy could even get you labeled as a potential terrorist.
Google Moving to Help Destroy Anonymity
Google's motto is "Do No Evil". And Google notes in a patent application:
When users reveal their identities on the internet, it leaves them more vulnerable to stalking, identity theft and harassment.
So you might assume that Google is fighting to protect anonymity on the web.
But Schmidt's new book reveals that Google will support the destruction of anonymity (via Wall Street Journal):
Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.
Search Engine Journal explains:
[Passages from Schmidt's book] confirm what many industry writers have been passionately clattering away about for months now. Google+ is an identity verification network. As the network continues to grow, content associated with a verified identity will rise to the top of Google search rankings.
(Google+ is now the world's second most popular social network.)
In other words, Schmidt acknowledges (in the first quote above) that authoritarians want to destroy anonymity ... and Google will help them do so.
We are not saying that Google likes authoritarians. (Potential ties between Google and the government are beyond the scope of this essay.) However, Google will do business with anyone ... and will cowtow to authoritarians they happen to do business with.
Google is doing this to make money. Remember, Google gathers information across all of its platforms, and personalizes search engine results based upon what you've looked for in past searches.
After all, Google is primary an advertising company ... not a search company. See this, this, this and this.
As the Daily Mail reported last year:
A former Google executive has lambasted his ex-employer ... claiming that the search company has been turned into an 'ad company' obsessed with harvesting people's private information.
James Whittaker, a current Partner Development Manager at Microsoft and ex-Engineering Director at Google, posted the 1328-word attack on Google on his Microsoft blog this week.
'Perhaps Google is right,' writes Whittaker, 'Perhaps the future lies in learning as much about people's personal lives as possible.
'The Google I was passionate about was a technology company. The Google I left was an advertising company.'
***
The move comes in the wake of Google's controversial new 'privacy policy', which allowed the search giant to 'pool' information from 60 separate services including Gmail, Google Search and Android phones, to create 'personalised' advertising.
The bottom line is that anonymity reduces Google's ability to monetize personal information and sell it to its advertisers. So Google is on a campaign to destroy anonymity ... and unintentionally helping tyrants in the process.
As INeedHits laments:
We knew a day would come when privacy was a thing of the past, but Schmidt clearly spells out that day is sooner than we had expected.
2 out of every 3 Americans lost
Fourth Amendment protections to DHSBy Darlene Storm, February 19, 2013 3:21 PM EST, Article Source
Two out of every three people reading this could have your electronic devices searched, without there being any reasonable suspicion, because the Department of Homeland Security has decided that such search and seizures do not violate your Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Border agents don't need probable cause and they don't need a stinking warrant since they don't need to prove any reasonable suspicion first. Nor, sadly, do two out of three people have First Amendment protection; it is as if DHS has voided those Constitutional amendments and protections they provide to nearly 200 million Americans.
Those numbers come from the ACLU's estimates of how many people live within 100 miles of the United States border, since Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CLCR) concluded that border searches of electronic devices do not violate the Fourth Amendment. Previously, the ACLU called this area the Constitution-Free Zone and provided a map showing how many people within states along the all our borders are affected without constitutional rights. The estimate is that nearly two out of three Americans live in the Constitution-Free Zone.
Don't be silly by thinking this means only if you are physically trying to cross the international border. As we saw when discussing the DEA using license plate readers and data-mining to track Americans movements, the U.S. "border" stretches out 100 miles beyond the true border. Godfather Politics added:
But wait, it gets even better! If you live anywhere in Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey or Rhode Island, DHS says the search zones encompass the entire state.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have a "longstanding constitutional and statutory authority permitting suspicionless and warrantless searches of merchandise at the border and its functional equivalent." This applies to electronic devices, according to the recent CLCR "Border Searches of Electronic Devices" executive summary [PDF]:
Fourth Amendment
The overall authority to conduct border searches without suspicion or warrant is clear and longstanding, and courts have not treated searches of electronic devices any differently than searches of other objects. We conclude that CBP's and ICE's current border search policies comply with the Fourth Amendment. We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits. However, we do think that recording more information about why searches are performed would help managers and leadership supervise the use of border search authority, and this is what we recommended; CBP has agreed and has implemented this change beginning in FY2012.
First Amendment
Some critics argue that a heightened level of suspicion should be required before officers search laptop computers in order to avoid chilling First Amendment rights. However, we conclude that the laptop border searches allowed under the ICE and CBP Directives do not violate travelers' First Amendment rights.
The ACLU said, Wait one darn minute! Hello, what happened to the Constitution? Where is the rest of CLCR report on the "policy of combing through and sometimes confiscating travelers' laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices--even when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing?" DHS maintains it is not violating our constitutional rights, so the ACLU said:
If it's true that our rights are safe and that DHS is doing all the things it needs to do to safeguard them, then why won't it show us the results of its assessment? And why would it be legitimate to keep a report about the impact of a policy on the public's rights hidden from the very public being affected?
The Fourth Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Just the same, as ChristainPost wrote, "Your constitutional rights have been repealed in ten states. No, this isn't a joke. It is not exaggeration or hyperbole. If you are in ten states in the United States, your some of your rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights have been made null and void."
The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the entire DHS report about suspicionless and warrantless "border" searches of electronic devices. ACLU attorney Catherine Crump said "We hope to establish that the Department of Homeland Security can't simply assert that its practices are legitimate without showing us the evidence, and to make it clear that the government's own analyses of how our fundamental rights apply to new technologies should be openly accessible to the public for review and debate."
Meanwhile, the EFF has tips to protect yourself and your devices against border searches. If you think you know all about it, then you might try testing your knowledge with a defending privacy at the U.S. border quiz.
Closing Argument
Drop Dead ~ Telecom Crimes ~ Patriot Act ~ Denialist ~ He Said It ~ Rethinking 9/11 ~ Are you better off?
Boston Legal Speech on America ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/TwDAbVqQqv0?rel=0
Another Version ~ Please Click to View Video ~ http://vimeo.com/47165357One Can Lead A Horse To Water, But...
Until there is a solution for this, where one solution has been provided, Nobody will bring Peace to Our Times, feed the hungry, care for the sick, and bake apple pie better than Mom. (otoh) If None of the Above was on voter ballots, it would be a huge step towards recovering U.S. political control, and Nobody gets it.
George Carlin, The American Dream ~ http://www.youtube.com/embed/QT0OJEFlq7A?rel=0
Oh, I hope that I see you again I never even caught your name As you looked through my window pane ~~ So I'm writing this message today I'm thinking that you'll have a way Of hearing the notes in my tune ~~ Where are you going? Where have you been? I can imagine other worlds you have seen ~~ Beautiful faces and music so serene ~~ So I do hope I see you again My universal citizen You went as quickly as you came ~~ You know the power Your love is right You have good reason To stay out of sight ~~ But break our illusions and help us Be the light ~ Listen ~ Message by Michael Pinder
Without love in the dream, it will never come true. ~ Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter
The man whispered, "God, speak to me" and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear.
So the man yelled "God, speak to me" and the thunder rolled across the sky. But the man did not listen.
The man looked around and said, "God let me see you" and a star shined brightly. But the man did not notice.
And the man shouted, "God show me a miracle" and a life was born. But the man did not know.
So the man cried out in despair, "Touch me God, and let me know you are there"
Whereupon God reached down and touched the man. But the man brushed the butterfly away and walked on.
Don't miss out on a blessing because it isn't packaged the way you expect.home
