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10/30/2004

Halliburton: International Criminal Investigation Underway :.

British authorities have opened a new front in the widening investigation into allegations of bribery at Halliburton, the American oil services business, while it was being run by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney.

The Guardian has learned that the Serious Fraud Office has joined the international effort at the request of the US Department of Justice in Washington. French and Nigerian officials are already involved in the inquiry.

Halliburton has become a political liability for the Bush administration as the US prepares to vote in presidential elections next week.

The company, one of the chief government contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been dogged by controversy, which includes claims of White House favouritism in awarding the firm billions of dollars of contracts without being forced to bid and Pentagon allegations that the firm has massively overcharged for its work.

It emerged late on Thursday that the FBI had launched an inquiry into how Halliburton secured contracts in Iraq, so far worth almost $9bn (£4.9bn).

The Nigerian investigation centres on $180m in payments allegedly made by a consortium led by Halliburton to secure the contract to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria.

The cash was allegedly channelled through a US-owned oil engineering firm in London called MW Kellogg and was handled by a company executive based in Berkshire. The funds were said to have been paid into a Swiss bank by a British lawyer.



Whistleblower Says Halliburton Contract Abuse Blatant :.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' top contracting official on Friday called the government's grant of multi-billion dollar contracts to oil services giant Halliburton the worst case of contracting abuse she has ever seen.

"It was misconduct, and part of that misconduct was blatant," said Bunny Greenhouse, in an interview on NBC's Nightly News program.

Greenhouse has already demanded an investigation into the contracts that last year were granted to Halliburton, the energy services firm run by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000. According to her attorney, the FBI has since asked her for an interview on the matter.

A spokesman for President George W. Bush on Friday said the president expects a full investigation into allegations of wrongdoing in how Iraq-related contracts were awarded to Halliburton.


Oh sure...

Research Credit: AM


10/29/2004

Germany: Seven Homeschooling Dads Thrown in Jail :.

Seven homeschooling fathers in Germany spent several days in jail for refusing to pay fines that were imposed on them for failing to send their children to government schools.



9/11 Black Boxes WERE Found :.

Two men who worked extensively in the wreckage of the World Trade Center claim they helped federal agents find three of the four "black boxes" from the jetliners that struck the towers on 9/11 - contradicting the official account.

Both the independent 9/11 Commission and federal authorities insist that none of the four devices - a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) from the two planes - was ever found.

But New York City Firefighter Nicholas DeMasi has written in a book self-published by Ground Zero workers that he took federal agents on an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and located three of the four. His account is backed by a well-known Ground Zero volunteer.

Their story raises the question of a cover-up at Ground Zero - although's it's not clear why the government would want to keep the discovery under wraps.

A footnote to this summer's 9/11 Commission Report states: "The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175" - the two planes that hit the Trade Center - "were not found."


10/28/2004

FBI Investigating Contracts With Halliburton :.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating whether the Army's handling of a large Iraq contract with the Halliburton Company violated procurement rules, according to lawyers for an Army official who made the charges of improprieties.

F.B.I. agents have requested an interview with the official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, the chief of contracting with the Army Corps of Engineers, on her allegations regarding a 2003 contract with Halliburton to repair Iraqi oil fields, her lawyer, Michael D. Kohn, said in an interview yesterday.

Ms. Greenhouse, in an Oct. 21 letter to the acting Army secretary, charged that officials had shown favoritism toward Halliburton, the Houston-based conglomerate formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney, in the awarding and oversight of the oil contract. She also said officials at the Army Corps of Engineers had tried to remove her as chief contract monitor after she raised persistent questions about Halliburton contracts. The Army says it has referred her letter to the Pentagon's inspector general for review.

The oil contract was awarded in early 2003 without competition to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, as the American-led invasion of Iraq began, and was initially for five years and up to $7 billion.



The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney :.

The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney
Produced and Broadcast by CBC TV in Canada 10/06/04 - 41 minutes



Latest Terror Warning

That tool Drudge is helping Cheney and the Gang set the pretext for the next Big One. You can hear it now... They hate our democracy, so we'll need to impose martial law to protect you from the terrorists...

Well, I caught a glimpse of Cheney practicing his lines before he got into costume for his latest role:

Do you get it yet?



CIVILIAN DEATH TOLL IN IRAQ EXCEEDS 100,000 :.

Apocalypse Now:

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the U.S.-led invasion last year, American public health experts have calculated in a report that estimates there were 100,000 "excess deaths" in 18 months.

The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities.

"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," said Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.

"The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," Roberts told Reuters.

The report came just days before the U.S. presidential election in which the Iraq war has been a major issue.

Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports but the researchers described what they found as shocking.

The new figures are based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq in September 2004. They compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion in March 2003 and the 17.8 months after it by conducting household surveys in randomly selected neighbourhoods.


Research Credit: AM



Want to Know the Hardware Behind Echelon? :.

Solid state memory systems---virtual drives in RAM---are being used to increase speed:

TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information.

A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.

A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second.

Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US goverment with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it. Since then it has expanded into a general listening facility, an electronic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the world's telephone conversations. Information about it's existence has been reluctantly revealed, prompted by scandals such as the recordings of Princess Diana's telephone calls by the NSA.

Recorded signals are fed into the TMS SAM systems where the DSPs filter out the noise to produce much clearer signals that software can work on to detect individual voices, perform voice recognition, and listen out for keywords, such as, for example, "Semtex". Decryption of encrypted calls is also a likely activity.

Hutsell says the SAM systems, "are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta. It's an intelligence community application involving data from various sources. This is loaded into RAM and then real-time analysis is carried out on it. Step one is to filter out the noise and our DSP chips are used for that. Then they look into patterns using other tools - images or voice. It's very high-speed."

TMS has supplied its RAMsan high-speed SSD technology to several US government agencies. Hutsell said, "We have recently sold another terabyte system to a federal agency. It's installed in the DC [District of Columbia] area via our partner Vion. There's another in a government data centre with Oracle indices that needed to be accelerated."

TMS has had 40 percent year on year growth for three years. It has no debt and is privately-owned. Hutsell said: "This year is the healthiest year ever." Half the company's revenue comes from the government sector.


10/27/2004

Eminem's New Video Highlights 9/11, Illuminati :.

Woh! This guy isn't quite maintaining appearances. But what's the message? Vote for Kerry? HA!



Bush Gives Us the Bird :.

Nice one.



American Exceptionalism :.

Many Americans, like the citizens of dominant nations of the past, believe that their way of life is superior and should be shared with other peoples—often at gunpoint. Lately, this American exceptionalism has assumed even more pernicious forms.

Whether called the Bush I administration’s “New World Order” or the Clinton administration’s “Engagement and Enlargement” or the Bush II administration’s effort to “liberate” Afghanistan, Iraq, and perhaps the entire Middle East, using military force to bring democracy and market economies to errant peoples has been a staple of both Democratic and Republican administrations since World War II. Similarly, the Roman, British, Spanish and other empires believed they were civilizing conquered lands with their ways of doing things.



Advent of the Robotic Monkeys :.

The article doesn't say this, but I would be willing to bet that the data collected from the ein vivo neuro implant will be used by the military to create software for autonomous robotic systems:

If a monkey is hungry but has his arms pinned, there's not much he can do about it. Unless that monkey can control a nearby robotic arm with his brain.

And that's exactly what the monkey in Andrew Schwartz's neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh can do, feeding himself using a prosthetic arm controlled solely by his thoughts.

The unique aspect of Schwartz's research is that he conducted what is known as "closed loop" brain experiments. In a "closed loop" experiment, the monkey is conscious of the robotic arm and is making an effort to control it. Monkeys in previous experiments did not understand that they were having an effect on the world at all. Duke University performed such prosthetic arm experiments as far back as 2000. In one case they even sent the electrode signals over the internet, allowing the monkey to move an arm 600 miles away at MIT.

"The open loop experiment was really very crude," said Schwartz. "The closed loop introduces us into a whole new field because the animal actually sees the arm and the consequence of what it is doing." For Schwartz's monkey the robotic arm is incorporated into its mental body representation, making it an extra limb.



Company to Develop Hypo-Allergenic Cats :.

Dear God, please let our decline be swift and painless:

ALLERCA Inc. today launched a project to produce the world's first hypoallergenic cats. The hypoallergenic cats produced by ALLERCA will allow consumers to enjoy the love and companionship of a pet without the cost, inconvenience, risk, and limited effectiveness of current allergy treatments. Clients will take delivery of the first ALLERCA kittens in 2007. The hypoallergenic cat is the first of a planned series of lifestyle pets that ALLERCA will develop over the next few years.

ALLERCA's hypoallergenic cats will be a significant new alternative to the traditional treatment of cat allergies given that it eliminates the allergen at its source. Researchers will use patented biotechnology to suppress the allergen-producing gene in cats.



Scientists Warn of 'Ethnic Weapons' :.

BIOLOGICAL weapons that target selected ethnic groups could become part of the terrorists' arsenal unless governments and scientists act now, the British Medical Association warns.

Such designer weapons would be based on the growing ability of scientists to unravel and compare human DNA.

In theory, experts could engineer organisms to attack genetic variations commonly found in, say, Chinese or German populations.

Genetically engineered anthrax, smallpox and polio viruses are also "approaching reality", the BMA claims in a new report, Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity II.

The report, released yesterday in London, adds that organisms designed to attack food crops and even human immune and nervous systems are serious threats.



Tom Harkin: Bush has no Choice but to Reinstate Draft :.

President Bush may or may not have a secret plan to reinstate the draft. But this is beside the point. The deteriorating facts on the ground in Iraq, plus the Bush doctrine of acting pre-emptively and unilaterally against hostile regimes, will soon leave him no choice. If President Bush is re-elected, he will have to restart the draft.

Indeed, President Bush has already imposed Stage 1 of a new draft. Many soldiers whose enlistment period is up are not being allowed to leave the service, and those who left the service years ago are being forced to put on the uniform again against their will. It is clear that we already have a backdoor draft.

President Bush has effectively ended the all-volunteer military.

And Stage 2 of a reinstated draft would be easy to implement. Draft boards are already in place in every county in America, and young men who turn 18 are already required to register with their local draft board. A major terrorist attack could easily serve as the pretext for flipping the switch and setting this apparatus in motion.



Piece of Sh*t Blogger.com Was Down Again

Updates later... If this steaming heap can stay operational until this evening.


10/26/2004

What's Another $70 Billion Among Friends? :.

I keep hearing about how much the rest of the world is supposedly against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Ok, then they should stop buying U.S. debt instruments that make it possible! This show would be down in a matter of days!

The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the invasion of Iraq early last year, Pentagon and congressional officials said yesterday.



OneNote to Rule Them All

When Microsoft OneNote came out a while ago, I thought it sounded interesting... but since I've been trying to lower my exposure to Microsoft products over the years, I never bothered to look into it further.

Well, Microsoft recently distributed free copies of OneNote at the university my girlfriend attends.

I wanted to check it out.

I'm having a hard time keeping track of all the information and research that I'm accumulating for the documentary film I'm producing. I'm sourcing information from books, magazines, websites, video and still images (that need descriptions), audio files, interviews, my own thoughts, etc. My girlfriend is working on a PhD and she has heavy information management needs as well. We decided to install OneNote on her system to check it out.

I hate to say it, but after using OneNote for a few minutes, I was convinced that this was an extremely attractive solution to my information overload mess. Right now, I take notes in Notepad (believe it or not) and a paper notebook. I have browser bookmarks on two different computers. I have all of my images and media files in directories with no descriptions. This is a bad scene.

I need to sort all of this stuff out by topic, regardless of the type of media. I need to access the underlying files from the notes. OneNote can do all of this in a really elegant way.

Fine, so why am I writing about this? If OneNote can take care of these issues, what's the problem?

This is a Microsoft Product! I've seen this before. Things look good on the surface, but then, down the road, BGates finds a way to set you up the bomb.

So I was wondering... Do you use a non-Microsoft information management system? Is there something else out there as mature and intuitive as OneNote? I'm quite happy with Firebird and OpenOffice, for example. Some kind of opensource Notezilla thing would be great! (Watch, someone will suggest notetaking and information management with vi or emacs.) By the way, I don't need any of the Office/Outlook interoperability that OneNote provides, since I don't use those apps.

Forget Chandler. I got a runtime error trying to install it under Win2000. I need this to run on 2000 and XP. That thing sounds good, but I can't be bothered with early stage apps that don't install properly. I wish those guys luck, though. This would be a nice opensource tool to have.

Thanks for any input you may have!


10/25/2004

The Yumemi Koubou Machine :.

Weird:

INVENTIONS need to be useful but they don’t always need to be serious. A company in Japan has come up with a machine that claims to help people choose their dreams, writes Julie Earle-Levine.

The Yumemi Koubou machine is being developed by Takara in conjunction with Dr Eiko Matsuda at Edogawa University. It means “dream workshop” and is pronounced “you-may-mee ko-bo”.

Before going to sleep, you look at a photo of what you want to dream about and record the storyline into the machine. For example, a person who wants to run a marathon in his dreams might choose a photo of a runner and attach it to the machine.

Yumemi Koubou then stimulates sleepers during periods of rapid eye movement (REM) using the voice recording as well as lights, music and aromas to help the person direct his dreams.



Robots on the Front Lines :.

iRobot sold 1 million robotic vacuums into homes and brought the small, unmanned PackBot robots to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, along with new partner John Deere Corporation, the company is preparing to deliver truck-size robots that can be driven into combat manned, controlled remotely, or operate autonomously.

The Military R-Gator is an intelligent vehicle that's significantly larger than the all-terrain PackBots currently used by the U.S. military. It's designed to handle perimeter security and to take the load off soldiers, acting as a mule that can carry supplies into battle. It also will be able to deliver much-needed provisions from the back lines to the front, a notoriously dangerous job that company executives promise the R-Gator will be able to perform unmanned, if needed. The R-Gator is actually an upgrade of sorts to Deere's current M-Gator, a utility vehicle used in the Afghan war.



Cryptogon Reader Contributes $25!

Thanks MF!



Iraq: Hundreds of Tons of High Explosives Missing :.

You couldn't even make this up:

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.



VREELAND ARRESTED :.

I don't believe it... Days before the election!? The cauldron is definitely swirling now:

He disappeared from a ransacked Toronto apartment two years ago after claiming he was an undercover American naval officer who predicted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But that was just the latest twist in the bizarre story of Delmart Vreeland — a tale that goes back 10 years and winds its way through the United States and Canada.

Vreeland's whereabouts, however, are no longer a mystery.

Officers with an Iowa sheriff's department surrounded his car Wednesday as he was driving an Interstate highway from Denver to Minneapolis. The use of a flagged Shell gas card alerted Franklin County authorities, Chief Deputy Ken Lubkeman said in an interview.


More: It's Probably Nothing....

Flashback: FTW INTERVIEW: DELMART "MIKE" VREELAND



Dollar Has Longest Losing Streak Since December 2000 on Oil :.

The dollar fell against the euro for the ninth straight day, the longest losing streak since December 2000, on concern record oil prices will slow U.S. growth.



Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown :.

With only nine days to go and the polls showing Bush and Kerry still neck and neck, the result is once agin likely to turn on the minutiae of the voting system. But this time the whole country seems poised to descend into post-election chaos. Andrew Gumbel reports on the traumatising effects of this bitter campaign and how, as the world's most powerful democracy talks of exporting freedom to Iraq, it is at risk of becoming an object of international ridicule.

No need to wonder if this year's US presidential election is headed for another meltdown: the meltdown has already started. The voting machines have already begun to break down, accusations of systematic voter suppression and fraud are rampant, and lawyers fully armed and ready with an intimate knowledge of the nation's byzantine election laws have flocked to court to cry foul in half a dozen states.



Nikkei Down 1239.15 Points (2.20%)

Oil up. Gold WAY up. Dollar down.


10/24/2004

Cryptogon Reader Contributes $25

Excellent! Thank you! MM also offered to help with music for the documentary. I didn't know I had so many musicians reading Cryptogon.



The Daily Show: Bush "We Will Not Have an All-Volunteer Army." :.

Bush is brain dead. You don't know whether to laugh or cry after watching this!



Female Soldiers Eyed for Combat :.

The Army is negotiating with civilian leaders about eliminating a women-in-combat ban so it can place mixed-sex support companies within warfighting units, starting with a division going to Iraq in January.

Despite the legal prohibition, Army plans already have included such collocation of women-men units in blueprints for a lighter force of 10 active divisions, according to Defense Department sources.

An Army spokesman yesterday, in response to questions from The Washington Times, said the Army is now in discussions with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's staff to see whether the 10-year-old ban in this one area should be lifted. The ban prohibits the Army from putting women in units that "collocate" with ground combatants.

"When that policy was made up, there was a different threat," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. "We imagined a more linear combat environment. Now, with the nature of asymmetrical threats, we have to relook at that policy."

Col. Rodney cited the fighting in Iraq as typifying the new threat whereby all soldiers, support or combat, face attack by rockets, mortars, roadside bombs and ambushes.

"Everybody faces a similar threat," he said. "There is no front-line threat right now."



51 Iraqi Soldiers Found Executed :.

Imagine the will required to do this. These were Iraqis! There is no possible way that the U.S. and its puppet clients in Iraq are going to prevail against an enemy that is capable of doing something like this. Short of razing entire cities, the U.S. campaign in Iraq is doomed:

A group of at least 51 soldiers of the New Iraq Army were ambushed and killed while on their way home after graduating from training, Iraqi police officials said.

The soldiers appeared to have been forced to lie face down on the ground and then were shot dead at close range, Diyala province police chief Major General Waleed Khalid Abdul Salam told CNN.

They were surprised and captured Saturday on a road near the Iranian border, about 80 miles (130 km) east of Baghdad, he said.

The ambush happened between 3 and 5 p.m. Saturday and the bodies were found in groups of 12 and 13 around midnight, Maj. Gen. Salam said.

The soldiers, who were found with their army IDs, had just graduated from training, he said.




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