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2/26/2005

Halliburton Could Get $1.5 Billion More Iraq Work-Army :.

Halliburton Co., under scrutiny for its contracts in Iraq, would receive an extra $1.5 billion as part of the Bush administration's additional war spending proposal for fiscal 2005, a senior U.S. Army budget official said on Friday.


2/25/2005

U.S. Bankruptcies 'To Surge' Amid Junk Bond Deluge :.

The "global economy" is a lie that is feeble at best:

THE US is heading for a surge in bankruptcies and a dramatic increase in corporate debt default as the number of companies with bonds rated at the lowest end of the junk bond scale reaches record levels.

More than 45 per cent of newly issued junk bonds are rated CCC, according to bond market analysts at Standard & Poor’s (S&P), a dramatic increase since 2003 when 30 per cent of the junk bond market was made up of companies that were a notch away from default.



Thompson 'Shot Himself on Phone' :.

The widow of US writer Hunter S Thompson has said her husband killed himself while they were speaking to one another on the telephone.

Thompson - best-known for his 1972 account of a drug-addled Nevada trip, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - shot himself on Sunday at his Colorado home.

His widow, Anita Thompson, 32, told the Aspen Daily News she heard the "clicking of the gun".

She said: "I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and did it."

Mrs Thompson said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly column, but instead of saying goodbye, he shot himself.

She added that she heard a loud, muffled noise, but did not know what had happened.

"I was waiting for him to get back on the phone," she said.


2/23/2005

Not Enough Evidence to Charge Marine in Point-Blank Fallujah Execution :.

Imagine my shock:

A US marine, captured on film killing a wounded Iraqi at point blank range during November's assault on Fallujah, will not be formally charged due to lack of evidence.

The November 13 shooting occurred during a search of a mosque in a widely broadcast incident that sparked worldwide outrage and was described by the International Committee of the Red Cross as a demonstration of "utter contempt for humanity."

In the incident, a trooper raised his rifle and shot point blank at an apparently unarmed, wounded Iraqi who was slumped against one of the mosque walls, in footage captured by an embedded cameraman working for the NBC network.

Although the insurgents were found to be unarmed, investigators said the one the Marine believed he had seen moving could have been reaching for a weapon.

The rifleman was withdrawn from combat pending the results of the investigation, but the graphic footage enraged many, months after the scandal over US troops' abuse of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison.

CBS News said Wednesday it had learned that military investigators had concluded insufficient evidence existed to formally charge the marine.



German Protesters Call Bush 'No. 1 Terrorist' :.

Can you feel the love?

About 12,000 protesters, many carrying banners reading "Bush go home," "No. 1 Terrorist" and "Warmonger," marched through the German city of Mainz on Wednesday, but were mostly kept away from the visiting U.S. president.

The official rally, which was twice as big as expected, never got within earshot of President Bush, but a small group of protestors rushed toward his car as he left to visit a U.S. base in nearby Wiesbaden. Police wrestled several demonstrators to the ground and led them away in handcuffs, a Reuters witness said.


2/22/2005

Flashback: Tsunami Bomb New Zealand's Devastating War Secret :.

Going back about five years here. Full text follows:

The New Zealand Herald

Tsunami bomb NZ's devastating war secret

30.06.2000

By Eugene Bingham

Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfect a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal.

An Auckland University professor seconded to the Army set off a series of underwater explosions triggering mini-tidal waves at Whangaparaoa in 1944 and 1945.

Professor Thomas Leech's work was considered so significant that United States defence chiefs said that if the project had been completed before the end of the war it could have played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb.

Details of the tsunami bomb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Papers stamped "top secret" show the US and British military were eager for Seal to be developed in the post-war years too. They even considered sending Professor Leech to Bikini Atoll to view the US nuclear tests and see if they had any application to his work.

He did not make the visit, although a member of the US board of assessors of atomic tests, Dr Karl Compton, was sent to New Zealand.

"Dr Compton is impressed with Professor Leech's deductions on the Seal project and is prepared to recommend to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that all technical data from the test relevant to the Seal project should be made available to the New Zealand Government for further study by Professor Leech," said a July 1946 letter from Washington to Wellington.

Professor Leech, who died in his native Australia in 1973, was the university's dean of engineering from 1940 to 1950.

News of his being awarded a CBE in 1947 for research on a weapon led to speculation in newspapers around the world about what was being developed.

Though high-ranking New Zealand and US officers spoke out in support of the research, no details of it were released because the work was on-going.

A former colleague of Professor Leech, Neil Kirton, told the Weekend Herald that the experiments involved laying a pattern of explosives underwater to create a tsunami.

Small-scale explosions were carried out in the Pacific and off Whangaparaoa, which at the time was controlled by the Army.

It is unclear what happened to Project Seal once the final report was forwarded to Wellington Defence Headquarters late in the 1940s.

The bomb was never tested on a full scale, and Mr Kirton doubts that Aucklanders would have noticed the trials.

"Whether it could ever be resurrected ... Under some circumstances I think it could be devastating."



Surveillance Hell in Los Angeles :.

Spotting suspects without ever leaving the station has become a reality for the Los Angeles Police Department.

New technology is helping officers make more arrests with less manpower.

“The software will actually bring the number of suspects down from several thousand to just a few,” said Steven Safari, vice president for sales for Neven Vision, a California-based company that specializes in comprehensive facial biometric analysis technology.

With cameras placed in parks and on city streets, Los Angeles police identify what may be suspicious activity and zoom in on the faces of the people involved.

Officers on the beat get to use handheld personal digital assistants with cameras that can access a complete set of mug shots. Police are able to take a picture of anybody on the street and then can match up the digital photograph to the faces in a database of gang and felony suspects.

“We're going to be able to identify who's wanted, not wanted, we’ll be able to eliminate people that are possibly wanted, identify gang members that weren't being able to be identified before,” said Matt Zeigler, an L.A. police officer.



Rigorous Intuition :.

Jeff is doing excellent work on MK related subjects, and much more. Consider adding Rigorous Intuition to your daily-read list.



South Korea Dumps Dollar, Oil Surges :.

U.S. stocks sank on Tuesday as oil prices jumped above $51 a barrel and the dollar slid on concerns that other central banks would follow South Korea's lead in diversifying reserves out of U.S. assets.


2/21/2005

Gannon/Guckert Web Pages on Archive.org :.

These might be useful to researchers.



Crazy, Yes. But Crazy Enough to Be True? :.

Is Gannon/Guckert an Aquino MK asset? Most of the limousine liberals who are banging the drums on this issue have no idea of what this MIGHT be... Key word, might.

If you're not already, start watching this closely. It MUST go away:

What if "John Gannon" isn't really "James D Guckert"? (And why should he be, since he's lied about everything else?) What if he proves to be Johnny D Gosch?

In 1982, Gosch was a 12-year old Des Moines paperboy abducted into a paedophile ring which practiced ritual, Satanic abuse and enjoyed covert sanction. Paul Bonacci, himself a child victim to Omaha's Lawrence King of Franklin Credit Union notoriety, testified that he had helped lure Gosch from his paper route. "Evidence links this same porno/paedophile ring to the 80's 'congressional call boy scandal', money laundering, drug running, illegal arms deals and more," says The Johnny Gosch Foundation...



Human Tracking: Big Brother Goes Mainstream :.

Once viewed as a futuristic nightmare, human tracking is now affordable and available without restriction. For $200 plus a monthly service fee of $20, anyone can purchase an electronic device that puts George Orwell's 1984 surveillance technology to shame. They're marketed as "kid-tracking" devices, though some ads also mention pets and senior citizens. In vivid shades of doublespeak, one company offers service plans named "Liberty, Independence, and Freedom," but surveillance and control are their purpose.

At the very least, human-tracking devices will alter relationships between some parents and children, husbands and wives, employers and employees more dramatically than any other product emerging from the information revolution. Ultimately, they offer a new form of human slavery based on location control. They pose the greatest threat to personal freedom ever faced in human history.

Whatever legitimate uses there may be - to safeguard a child or incapacitated adult, for example - abuses will occur. Even full-blown geoslavery is inevitable: the uncertainty is how many people will suffer from it - hundreds, thousands or millions.



Half of Russia's Nuclear Materials Unaccounted for - U.S. Senator :.

Half of Russia’s nuclear materials are unaccounted for, a U.S. senator has said, citing classified intelligence and warning that the weapons could be used by terrorists plotting new attacks against the United States.



'Minutemen' to Patrol Arizona Border :.

Take a good long look. This is what the collapse of a state looks like. Individuals pick up guns and say, "Enough." This tends to lead to a bad end... Oh well.

Any group that assumes the normal (core) duties of government might begin to appear as a legitimate authority in the eyes of the public. This subverts the power of the state in unnaceptable ways. I would expect the 'Minutemen' to be branded as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Government at any moment. Its members will probably be arrested under the Patriot Act and held without being charged with anything for some period of time.

Think about it.

The illegal immigration situation is clearly out of control. What if the 'Minutemen' were to succeed in slowing the flood of illegal immigrants into America? This would set an unthinkable precident. There are lots of situations that are clearly out of control. Income disparity. Health care. Pollution. What's the solution to these problems? Do people just show up with their weapons cocked and locked?

History shows us that the systems that result from armed coups/revolutions/civil wars are very ugly. As the U.S. devolves into open chaos, keep that in mind. I'm not saying that the state deserves to be spared from the wrath of the populace---far from it---I'm just saying that you'll want to look to films like Mad Max and books like Player Piano for glimpse into the system that will result:

Intent on securing the vulnerable Arizona border from illegal immigrant crossings, U.S. officials are bracing for what they call a potential new threat this spring: the Minutemen.

Nearly 500 volunteers have already joined the Minuteman Project, anointing themselves civilian border patrol agents determined to stop the immigration flow that routinely, and easily, seeps past federal authorities. They plan to patrol a 40-mile stretch of the southeast Arizona border throughout April when the tide of immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border peaks.

"I felt the only way to get something done was to do it yourself," said Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant and decorated Vietnam War veteran who is helping recruit Minutemen across the country.



$200 Per Hour Gay Prostitute Questions President Bush in the White House :.

I've been reading about this for the past several days. I just thought, "No way." Well, this isn't going away:

Heard about the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert muck-up in Washington? If you are an aficionado of the blogs, you've heard plenty. They're having a field day with it. But underneath all the fun lies a serious problem that hasn't got its due from the mainstream press: This White House employs a lot more kinds of fakery than just budgetary smoke and mirrors.

Here's a summary: For more than two years, a reporter named Jeff Gannon turned up at White House briefings and press conferences, where he asked softball questions with a decidedly pro-Bush bent. For example, at President Bush's Jan. 26 press conference, Gannon asked how Bush could work with lawmakers like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Hillary Clinton, "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."

Well, it turns out that "Jeff Gannon" is really Jim Guckert, and he was a reporter for an online outfit called "Talon News," which was associated with the online group GOPUSA.com, owned by Texas Republicans. It also turns out that Guckert, in addition to reporting for a phony Web site, has no real journalism training and is a $200-an-hour gay prostitute. He ran numerous Web sites like militaryescortsm4m.com. The photos of Gannon that were displayed on those Web sites left nothing to the imagination about his physical attributes.

So the question becomes, just how did this character get White House press credentials, despite supposed post-Sept. 11 security requirements? Bruce Bartlett, a conservative columnist who worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, says that "if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover." In other words, the White House wanted him at those briefings and wanted him to ask his softball questions, most likely to divert attention when legitimate reporters were getting too pushy.


2/20/2005

Hunter S. Thompson Commits Suicide :.

At first, this really hit me like a ton of bricks. After thinking about it for a few minutes, though.... how else would he go down? Some kind of cancer, organ failure, stroke, heart attack, etc. F*ck that. He'd been living on borrowed time for the last 40 years. Maybe he'd finally seen enough:

Journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, who unleashed the concept of "gonzo journalism" in books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself in the head Sunday at his home near Aspen, Colorado, police and his family said.

"On Feb. 20, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colo.," said a statement issued by Thompson's son, Juan Thompson, to the Aspen Daily News as reported by the Denver Post.

Thompson, 67, was associated with the "New Journalism" movement of the 1960s, in which writers took a more novelistic and personal approach to their subjects. His account of a drug-fueled trip to cover a district attorneys' anti-drug conference as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine was the seed of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," perhaps his best-known work.

Subtitled "A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," the 1971 book included his lament on the passing of the 1960s and its "sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil."

"There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs," he wrote. "We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."



SCOTT RITTER SAYS U.S. PLANS JUNE ATTACK ON IRAN :.

He's been right before:

Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.




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