Znewz1

'Red alert' story vanishes

2008-09-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

The bailout talks have failed. Much of the GOP is in revolt. Wall Street biggies are horrified at not being able to stay in control.

So I go to the LA Times website about five minutes ago in order to see that paper's take on the crisis. The screen says that Pentagon security has been breached and that the nation is now on red alert. Then, the screen disappears and the bailout story shows up.

I can't retrieve the "red alert" story, so I don't know what's going on. Google turns up nothing relevant. I was just at the New York Times and Washington Post sites. They had nothing.

So is that weird or what? I can't help but suspect that the administration is about to force through its bailout program via martial law imposed following a major "terrorist" attack that is on the verge of being staged.

A spook debacle?

2008-03-15T08:14:00.000-07:00

Granted, Wall Street pandemonium is going to be the top story.

Yet I notice that the House's knockout blow to the Rockefeller-Bush no-safeguards warrantless wiretap bill is getting very muted coverage. What? The invisible government can't lose. Keep it out of the papers.

What Bush hates about the bill favored by the House is that not only does it nix immunity for telecom execs, but imposes judicial review and establishes a national commission to investigate the attacks upon liberty.

Don't bother to send me that bill, says Bush. I'll veto it.

But the House, including a group of conservative Blue Dog Democrats, stood firm. So that means the old FISA bill will just have to do.

This development may do to the underground system what the credit crisis is threatening to do to Wall Street: trigger a stampede for the doors.

The fear of such a domino effect is likely what caused the CIA to leak classified information about its secret detention of an al Qaeda suspect. McConnell-Hayden wanted to top the wiretap story. In fact, the New York Times noted the al Qaeda story on page one but buried the wiretap story inside. In many papers that receive the Times service, editors would have likely chosen the less important spook story over the gigantic loss for spookdom story.

But, spookdom lost. Lost. Again: spookdom lost.

Mr Clean?

2008-03-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

Gee whiz. Google and other search engines appear to be blocking a number of web pages targeting yours truly as an anti-Semite. Now why would they do that?

Shenon's 9/11 curveball

2008-03-05T15:25:00.000-08:00

There are conspiracies, and then there are conspiracies. "Inside job" conspiracy to make 9/11 happen: Why that's been well-debunked. NORAD conspiracy to cover up military incompetence: now that's a conspiracy a journalist can sink his teeth into.

That's the impression I get after leafing through Philip Shenon's book, The Commission: the uncensored history of the 9/11 investigation (Hachette Book Group, 2008). Shenon is a veteran New York Times reporter whose beats have included the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the 9/11 commission.

The theme of the book is that the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, hindered the professional staff investigators -- including a former New Jersey attorney general -- in their attempts to get at the truth. But that reported obstructionism was done in order to run political interference for the White House and Pentagon, and not to help cover up evidence of an inside job, is what Shenon seems to be driving at.

Yet Shenon's reportorial acumen is open to challenge. Consider this passage:

"The conspiracy theories about 9/11 began long before the ashes had stopped smoldering. After an event as horrifying and -- to the public -- unexpected events of 9/11, the darkest theories about its cause did not seem beyond belief.

"But by the time the 9/11 commission opened its doors in 2003, many of the most outrageous, if well-circulated, of the theories -- that the attacks were an inside job by the Bush administration, that the Twin Towers were brought down by pre-planted explosives, that the Pentagon was hit by a missile and not a plane -- had been well debunked.

"The evidence was incontrovertible that al Qaeda was behind the Sept. 11 attacks; Osama bin Laden had been videotaped bragging to his colleagues about his role in the preparations. There was clear-cut documentation to show that bin Laden had dispatched 19 young Arab men to carry out the hijackings -- he had chosen these personally for the mission -- and that those men were aboard the four planes.

"Independent scientists and engineers had plausible explanations for the physical collapse of the Twin Towers and other buildings nearby."

It is quite surprising that a seasoned reporter of Shenon's stature would uncritically accept the credibility of a videotape passed to the Pentagon in time to give Bush a propaganda point that "debunked" 9/11 skepticism. The credibility of that video is rightly questioned. The speaker doesn't even look like other images of bin Laden.

Now the "clear-cut documentation" of which Shenon speaks was largely based on CIA interrogations of "9/11 mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (Even though it is unlikely that Shenon knew at the time of writing of his manuscript that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of Mohammed's interrogations, he would nevertheless have known that the 9/11 commission had inserted a disclaimer in its report saying that it hadn't been allowed to question Mohammed directly.)

A couple of engineers did indeed back the "no-explosives" scenario for the Twin Towers, but I don't recall any speaking up for the government about World Trade Center 7 in 2003. Anyway, FEMA's independent experts did not have a plausible explanation for the collapse of WTC7, noting that their best (non-explosives) scenario had only a "low probability" of occurrence. Importantly, Shenon only acknowledges experts who back the government. Other experts simply don't exist for Shenon.

By not even mentioning the NIST investigations, this Shenon passage nicely sidesteps all sorts of problems with the official line that he promotes. For example, the NIST debunks the previous pro-government collapse theories in an attempt to make its own theory hold up. That theory has been vigorously challenged by several experts. Shenon may be unaware that the NIST 9/11 reports leave out the kind of detail that scientists need in order to verify the government claims, such as a detailed timeline.

Maybe the reporter simply was unaware of the fact that the 9/11 commission did not even mention World Trade Center 7.

For a related article, see The worst of Hearst at http://911disinfo.blogspot.com

Krugman bars us

2008-03-05T08:05:00.000-08:00

My stuff gets published on the right and the left. And I get put stuck in the round file by left and right.

A while ago George Will blocked the Znewz1 newsletter -- which he had received patiently for a long while -- after I wrote something unflattering about his deal with Conrad Black.

Latest big league writer to bar Znewz1 -- after receiving it for years -- is Paul Krugman. I am just guessing that he or his assistant might have been offended by the It's not polite to notice... post.

I admit that far more unsubscribes show up than subscribes.

Oh, that reminds me. I suppose a Justice Dept. watchdog will look into whether some of my emails are being improperly barred for political reasons by the federal entity with responsibility for screening and deep-sixing much of my email for supposed national security or federal investigative reasons. (If that last thought sounds off the wall, it may be that you're out of the loop; ask around.)

This just in... My email accounts are periodically weeded by someone other than myself. Someone seems to have done the Times a favor. The old email I saved from the Times giving a number of email addresses of cooperative Times staff writers has vanished. That vanishing act dovetails with the Times' changed policy of not publishing reporter email addresses and permitting contact from the public only via the Times web site.

A hole in the wiretap immunity gambit

2008-03-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

Even if Congress OKs retroactive immunity for telecom execs aiding federal warrantless wiretaps, the fight ain't over.

The Senate bill immunizes telecom execs only back to Sept. 1, 2001. Hence, those execs who cooperated with NSA warrantless programs between Bush's first inaugural and 9/11 would not be immunized and lawsuits concerning privacy violations would not be vaporized by Bush and Rockefeller.

Now Mukasey and McConnell have claimed that the telecoms are balking at helping the NSA conduct warrantless wiretaps because the execs are demanding immunity. This sounds a bit like blackmail. So, if the execs can still be required to testify about shady pre-9/11 doings, does that mean they still won't cooperate anyway -- even if Congress passes the current bill?

Of course, extending immunity to the period prior to 9/11 would -- absent a Satanic media clampdown -- set off a political firestorm, and is unlikely to get far, Rockefeller notwithstanding.

It's not polite to notice...

2008-02-26T12:28:00.000-08:00

Who is shaping opinion?

White Anglo-Saxon old boys, you think?

Take another look. A check of the stables of columnists for the New York Times and the Washington Post Writers Group does indeed disclose that African Americans and women seem to be under-represented, though a proper statistical analysis would be necessary in order to verify such a claim.

The Times has one African American columnist, Bob Herbert, and the Washington Post group one African American columnist, Eugene Robinson. This represents 1 of 10 Times columnists and 1 of 17 Writers Group regulars, for 10 percent at the Times and 5.8 percent at the Writers Group. Yet, blacks constitute about 13.4 percent of the national population. A Google search left me unsure of black demographic figures for the New York metropolitan area.

Two of 10 Times columnists (20 percent) are women and four of 17 Writers Group columnists (23 percent) are women.

The Times lists five of 10 columnists whose Jewish heritage is plain. That is, 50 percent of Times columnists have a Jewish ethnicity. The U.S. population is 2 percent Jewish and the metropolitan New York population is about 10 percent Jewish.

The Writers Group's 17 includes six persons whose biographical data or names imply Jewish heritage. However, one case was uncertain enough that I will say that only five of 17 have a Jewish heritage. This represents 29 percent of Group writers versus a national Jewish population of 2 percent.

It should be noted that the Washington Post Writers Group contributors are drawn from the Post and from various newspapers across the country. The syndicate markets its columnists nationwide. The Times also markets its in-house columnists nationwide.

Does all this imply a "Jewish conspiracy"? No. But it does imply a strong degree of ethnic favoritism, of the kind often attributed to WASPs.

The 666 wing of the GOP

2008-02-23T10:48:00.000-08:00

Well yesterday I set up two brand new Yahoo accounts in order to receive the daily Bible verse and Opednews. No Bible verse nor Opednews today.

I checked to make sure the Bible verse and Opednews accounts are up and running. They are.

I realize these sorts of oppressions aren't specifically Roger Stone's fault. But, I can't help but wonder whether under his American flag lapel pin there is a "666" in fine print.

Feb 25, 2008 So today no Opednews in either account. However, the Bible verse seems to have resumed in one account but not in the other. Huffington Post halted abruptly after I made a remark about it (below).

So what we have it appears is the need to demonstrate control over the Word of God, and First Amendment protected communications in general. True, I can now -- maybe -- read the daily Bible verse, but I am still getting the message that that is at the whim of persons who can get into my accounts -- which, as I've said -- I have strong reason to believe are under Justice Department supervision.

I would hope that Michael Mukasey would direct that these doings be checked on by the Office of the Inspector General, or other such watchdog. Considering that Mukasey defends an administration that sees torture as a useful weapon in the "war on terror," I don't think it's a stretch to think that federal operatives would consider non-lethal harassment, up to the level of torment, as a legitimate weapon against those persons who "aid the terrorist cause" by pointing out that 9/11 was an inside job. (In fact Bush himself has leveled that charge against 9/11 skeptics.)

Real ID tangles with Constitution

2008-02-21T08:41:00.000-08:00

Is the guarantee of state autonomy enshrined in the states rights amendment to the Constitution anything more than a string of hollow words from a bygone era? Are states now mere administrative districts controlled by Washington bureaucrats?

Don't states have an obligation to protect the basic freedoms of citizens from being handed over to federal bureaucrats? Has Congress, by passing the Real ID act, destabilized the system of checks and balances that gives states large discretion within their own borders?

The problem with Real ID, as former lawmaker Bob Barr warns, is that freedoms taken for granted in America are now to hinge on a card controlled by federal bureaucrats. And, by the way, how hard do you think it will be to cause computer glitches that cause political "undesirables" to be improperly penalized without due process of law?

The drive to erode state authority, of course, has been under way for decades, but in the Bush years has reached new levels. An egregious example: various states had used their constitutionally guaranteed right to form interstate compacts in order to promote reductions in greenhouse emissions. But, after Congress passed a law concerning new emission standards, a federal bureaucrat simply announced that he was voiding the state compacts.

Yet, does a state compact necessarily die because Congress passes a law?

If federal bureaucrats can nix state compacts, what chance do you think a lonely dissident will have in the face of federal opposition, especially when the feds have this new citizen control tool?

Obviously the 9/11 attacks are used to justify this police state gimmick, which is likely to degenerate within a few years into an "internal passport" like those used in the old Soviet Union to keep people pinned down. And the Congress that OKd Real ID has also been on the whole highly supportive of playing dumb about the blatant treason that occurred on that fateful day.

So, there's a key. State officials who are really serious about resisting Real ID have got to make the point that Real ID will in fact be controlled by the secret federal agencies that carried out the 9/11 atrocities. This calls for real grit, especially because the major media in every state tend to be under tight control of those with a vested interest in promoting 9/11 coverup.

Random conspiracy theory

2008-02-19T10:06:00.001-08:00

Gee I must have been doing something cool lately. Hacker harassment is back. My Yahoo accounts -- which have long been compromised no matter what steps I take -- are capriciously refusing to receive daily Bible verse mailings and the daily Opednews mailing.

I checked with Rob Kall of Opednews, who said he wasn't blocking me. I then tried changing an account setting, and thereupon received one mailing, after which, nada. Back when, the White House mailings wouldn't start up, then capriciously showed up for a couple of months before spontaneously self-destructing prior to arrival. Haven't seen one in months, though I never unsubscribed.

Wait! Maybe it's not government cut-outs "showing who's boss." Maybe that's just a convenient smokescreen for Google, which would love to make Yahoo look bad by sabotaging its would-be prey. Yeah, and Google has plenty to explain concerning the episodes of censorship of one of my Google/Blogger accounts -- actions which strongly suggested that a secret national security order was being imposed.

Or, maybe it has something to do with Microsoft's hostile takeover bid...

Feb. 20, 2008 Same deal. No Opednews. No Bible verse. I guess this exercise in raw power is to last an indeterminate length of time.

Alternative conspiracy theory
See post below and you connect some dots... and consider this: some months back I was receiving Google and Yahoo news and web page alerts on the subject of "9/11." Some of those URLs came from Opednews. I then signed up with Opednews so that I might submit an article, if I wished. After that, no more Opednews url's showed up in my Yahoo or Google alerts, though plenty of stuff was still being written on Opednews about 9/11.

Quite a coincidence. Sure seemed like someone was moving to limit my impact.

Feb. 21, 2008 Still at it. But, for some reason, the Huffington Post daily alert, which was also blocked for a couple of days, is arriving handily.

I realize that it is easy to attribute such hacking to phishers, who steal private data by setting up bogus email pages. Yet, I have numerous reasons to believe that my email and other internet accounts are tightly controlled by some federal agency, which limits what I can receive. So phishers are either hackers who are "useful idiots" for a clandestine agency or who are witting assets of such an agency.

Trade center engineer backs new collapse probe

2008-02-12T10:53:00.001-08:00

An international panel of experts should re-examine the collapses of the World Trade Center towers, says a retired engineering executive whose firm was a major contractor for the World Trade Center.

"On Sept. 11, I watched a live TV broadcast of the progressive collapse of the World Trade towers with disbelief, as the mass and the strength of the structure should have survived," reads a statement by Richard F. Humenn, former vice president of Joseph R. Loring and Associates, a major trade center contractor. Humenn endorsed a petition, being circulated by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, urging formation of such an investigative group.

Humenn, who specialized in electrical engineering, was listed as an alumnus of Brooklyn Polytechnic High School on one page I located, where his background with Loring as a 40-plus-year careerist was given.

(However, Google and other search engines were highly uncooperative prior to locating that page and when I tried to call it up again I got a replacement that said that Humenn was only listed in links. The 911blogger.com search engine returned "no match" for Humenn even though a post about him appears. As I write this, a "security token" emblem shows up saying "your request could not be processed" -- almost as if to explain the computerized difficulties in verifying Humenn's background.

At any rate, Loring's web site shows that it was a major contractor for the World Trade Center complex, having been "selected for the original electrical design" of the trade center in 1964; having conducted HVAC, fire protection and telecommunications maintenance for the entire life of the buildings; and having been responsible for extensive upgrading of various building systems.

I could not verify an online claim that Humenn was the trade center's top electrical engineer with 60 people working under him before his retirement in 1998 (a date that I could not check again after pages started vanishing), but the claim doesn't seem to be exaggerated in light of his position at Loring and in light of the firm's motto encouraging ambitious young engineers to progress inside the firm.

Humenn's statement (I was unable to view it directly at AE911truth.org but found it reproduced at 911blogger.com and at opednews.com) asserts that after viewing the video presentation given by Richard Gage, a founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Humenn became convinced that "fuel and planes alone could not bring down the towers" and urged that an international group of professionals investigate all "plausible causes for the virtual free fall and almost total destruction of the WTC structures."

One blogger reported that Humenn was nevertheless wary of the idea that the U.S. government plotted the destruction of the two major trade towers and building 7 hours later.

Ship of ghouls

2008-01-31T11:32:00.000-08:00

Schwarzenegger endorses McCain.

Don't we get it? The truth doesn't matter. (Check the essay Worst of Hearst at http://911disinfo.blogspot.com.)

McCain's enthusiastic backing of 9/11 cover-up of treason is mere politics to Arnold.

We're surrounded by fools and ghouls.

Justice Dept. concealing 9/11 reports

2008-01-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

The Justice Dept. has spirited into a bureaucratic black hole hundreds of pages of reports and data concerning the movements of the purported hijackers before 9/11, according to FOI expert Michael Ravnitzky (you can google him).

Those parts of the media that are interested are getting the stone wall treatment.

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed as Democratic and GOP nominees Clinton, who turns a blind eye to 9/11 treason, and McCain, who has gone on the offensive against 9/11 skeptics. And people wonder why the newspaper business is dying.

Both candidates are safe to the militant wing of the Israel lobby, of course, indicating who really holds the reins at the Times, despite its liberal facade.

Dems huddle on impeachment

2008-01-25T08:57:00.001-08:00

A campaign to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney crossed a major hurdle when a powerful group of Democrats wound up with a compromise now seriously under study: abuse-of-power hearings that could transform into impeachment hearings.

David Swanson, a Democratic Party activist, reported that on Wednesday House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers met with an aide to Jerold Nadler on abuse-of-power hearings. The aide, Perry Appelbaum, outlined a plan to hold a series of abuse-of-power hearings in the face of pressure for impeachment. Nadler, who heads the House constitution panel, opposes impeachment hearings.

Also involved in the off-the-record parley were Robert Wexler, a Judiciary Committee member who favors opening hearings on the impeachment of Cheney. Others mentioned by Swanson were Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, who urged leaving the door open to transforming the abuse-of-power hearings into impeachment hearings, and Daniel Ellsberg, a severe skeptic of the official 9/11 narrative, who spoke out for impeachment.

Recently, George McGovern, a former Democratic presidential contender, urged the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, saying the Bush administration was far worse than the Nixon administration had been.

In September 2007, a Zogby poll disclosed that more than 30 percent of Americans favored immediate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney and that 51 percent wanted Congress to investigate Bush and Cheney regarding the 9/11 attacks. The poll found that 67 percent of those polled were upset that the 9/11 commission didn't investigate the collapse of World Trade Center 7.

The abuse-of-power hearings, however, are likely to focus on the firings of U.S. attorneys and the pattern of distortions and falsehoods issued by Bush, Cheney and their aides between 9/11 and the launching of the Iraq war. Of course, one can't rule out that the focus on administration deception could point to 9/11 coverup.

Swanson, a co-founder of the activist group After Downing Street, is a member of the board of Progressive Democrats and of the executive council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. He served as Dennis Kucinich's press spokesman during Kucinich's 2004 presidential bid. Kucinich backs Cheney impeachment hearings.

Swanson's article may be found at http://opednews.com

Modern network theory and 'improbable' conspiracies

2008-01-15T08:13:00.000-08:00

Many who have a difficult time accepting that a major conspiracy could operate "undetected" in government might benefit from a course in social network theory. Or even, just consider how the internet operates. MySpace isn't the only social network possibility, of course.

Many people who are far afield in many respects join in with a group that shares a particular interest. Think of teams of internet gamers. They often coordinate actions over a wide area with little or no perception by people outside their clique.

The point is that modern electronic communications provide a means of multi-node (multi-person) communication that is fast and efficient. Though data-mining might detect a network's activity, that fact does not diminish the point that large-scale collective action can occur in our midst without our knowledge. In fact, we've become accustomed to this and tend to tune out awareness of such networks.

In a country with 300 million people, there is no way to avoid overlapping networks, whereby you may be part of a particular group that your friends or neighbors or even your relatives know nothing about. As long as the group's aim is not terribly anti-social, we don't call it a conspiracy. It's a network. But certainly malevolent social networks can and do exist -- as those who defend the government's 9/11 theory so often tell us! Wicked networks can exist outside the government but not inside, is what they are really saying.

Another point even some academics have trouble with is the potency of television in shaping mass opinion. People may say they are somewhat skeptical of TV news, but the reality is that TV is the most powerful propaganda weapon in human history. TV tends to affect emotional perception far more efficiently than print media. Additionally, people reading news reports may go back and read a previous paragraph to check points as they read at least somewhat analytically. How many people play back a news report (though that pattern is changing a bit with sites like YouTube)? But the impressionism of TV works on minds schooled to passively accept TV input. Even if one is trying to be analytical, the emotional impact and seductiveness of the message is often far greater than the script would imply.

People who desire control have studied this phenomenon to death and are well aware that, by control of TV news, information and entertainment, they have a strong upper hand on public awareness and opinion, no matter how damning the real facts are. That's how modern "hide in plain sight" conspiracies can continue.

A useful book on 9/11 treason

2008-01-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

I recommend Ian Henshall's book 9/11 Revealed: the new evidence (Carroll and Graf, 2007). Henshall does an effective job of surveying the main problems with the official 9/11 story. The book is an updated version of a previous book, containing "startling new facts."

Henshall is a Brit with a very good knowledge of how things work in America. One Britishism that may perplex U.S. readers is the term "special forces," which he means in the British sense of para-military covert operatives, but which U.S. readers usually take to mean the U.S. Army's Green Berets.

Beyond that triviality, readers who don't have much awareness of what 9/11 skeptics are talking about will get a good introduction here. Henshall doesn't seek an exhaustive survey. He's hitting the high points, which he does rather well.

Clearly, there will always be disagreements among skeptics as to the value of certain points, and so he may face questions in that regard.

Anyway, I enjoyed the way he shot down the Popular Mechanics article "debunking" 9/11 myths and how he used one or two adroit examples to show the strong likelihood that dishonest people were masquerading as experts in order to foster the government case.

Worth the 16 bucks.

Ellsberg debunks media myth about secrecy

2008-01-11T09:26:00.000-08:00

I am now reading Ian Henshall's book, 9/11 revealed: the new evidence (Carroll and Graf, 2007) and find it quite useful. The writer's acuity is especially good in the area of political chicanery. I will discuss this book more fully later on.

But for now, here is a useful quote that Henshall found. I verified that it's in Ellsberg's book Secrets: a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon papers (Viking, 2002, page 43):

It is commonplace that "you can't keep secrets in Washington" or "in a democracy," that "no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in The New York Times." These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course, eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep a secret for a given amount of time diminishes with the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are
dead." But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.

Henshall's point in quoting Ellsberg is that the machinery is in place for the "elaborate conspiracies" that some presume are impossible in America.

Another point is that an "elaborate conspiracy" can occur when the press is essentially silent on ugly facts "hiding in plain sight."

Our primary purpose: 9/11 truth and justice

2008-01-09T08:48:00.000-08:00

The American democratic process is being strangled by unholy alliances of the super-rich and super-powerful. They operate through the national security control system in such a way that anyone who is too threatening to their applecart is swindled out of participation.

This is well known, which is why our gabby and canny elected representatives are these days reduced to the status of glorified slaves of the super-elite. That is, politicians "know" they can't cross certain boundaries set by the control freaks.

This is why people like McCain and Thompson and a number of Republicans defend the government's fantastic lies about 9/11. This is why Democrats such as Clinton and Obama avoid the issue of TREASON and MASS MURDER by our government. The press has been brought to heel. Everybody's afraid. Powerful elements of the Israel lobby apply pressure to avoid the subject, and everyone knows that virtually all currently active U.S. politicians are scared stiff of the Israel lobby.

Recall that when Bush was defeated in 2004, the press kept quiet about the statistical impossibility of the result. A defeat for the war agenda was forbidden. Once the Democrats gained power in Congress, they kept funding the Iraq war and passing obnoxious soviet-style surveillance laws. Why? The Israel lobby, dominated by powerful pro-Israel militants who are at odds with most American Jews, is a big part of the answer to that question.

So should we be disappointed that 9/11 denier McCain and near-9/11 denier Clinton were said to have won? We should realize that we can't expect very much from an easily rigged system. On the other hand, remember that Obama was no great shakes on 9/11 truthfulness. The campaigners foresee a very rough, costly fight.

What we can hope for in such a situation is that the embroglio gets so rough that one campaign pushes 9/11 treason and then the others jump all over it. Obviously, there will be tremendous pressure to keep the intimidation level high so that no candidate will feel safe if he brings it up. He'll know to expect ridicule, dehumanization and, if that doesn't work, assassination in a plane crash or some such.

Yet, our young people face risks of that level every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must ourselves aspire to such courage and expect nothing less from those who would represent us.

Hillary's cry for help
How to explain the last-second switch from Obama to Clinton? Hillary cried, and women all over New Hampshire rushed to the polling stations in order to console her. Well, that's the story we're being given. Maybe... anything is possible, as they say.

FBI wary of Osama 'confession'

2008-01-08T08:19:00.000-08:00

Though Bush indignantly defended the authenticity of a videotape released in December 2001 in which someone who resembled bin Laden confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the FBI apparently doesn't think much of the tape. Neither does it give much credence to "confessions" made by al Qaeda operatives to CIA interrogators, it would seem, and hence gives the 9/11 commission narrative little support.

These points are the more disturbing in light of the recent disclosure by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton that the White House had signed off on a decision to prevent the 9/11 commission from questioning al Qaeda captives. That disclosure came in a statement by the former commission co-chairmen, who assailed the CIA for obstructing the 9/11 probe by hiding and then destroying videotapes of al Qaeda captives being interrogated.

In 2006, the Muckraker Report stirred up a little tempest when it disclosed that the FBI's "Most Wanted" website failed to list bin Laden as a suspect in the 9/11 attacks and quoted FBI spokesman Rex Tomb as explaining there is no hard evidence linking bin Laden to the attacks.

The Washington Post's Dan Eggen responded with a story saying that the omission was "fodder for conspiracy theorists" and quoting Tomb as saying the FBI had "no need" to add the 9/11 attacks. A lawyer was then quoted to the effect that since bin Laden hadn't been indicted [the administration wanted "enemy combatants" kept away from U.S. juries] that perhaps the FBI was uncomfortable with listing him as a suspect.

If you'll go to the FBI "Most Wanted Terrorists" site today, you'll see that the situation hasn't changed. The FBI refuses to list bin Laden as a suspect in 9/11. He's a suspect in the bombing of two American embassies in Africa prior to 9/11 and generally in terrorist attacks around the world.

Not one word about 9/11.

http://fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/

Assuming Tomb was initially quoted accurately -- and the Post does not say otherwise -- one is left to the conclusion that the FBI does not consider the Pentagon's videotape as "hard evidence."

Bush played up this tape thus: "For those who see this tape, they'll realize that not only is he guilty of incredible murder, he has no conscience and no soul, that he represents the worst of civilization."

Questioned about the tape's authenticity, Bush responded, "It is preposterous for anybody to think that this tape is doctored. That's a weak excuse to provide a weak support for an incredibly evil man."

U.S. forces allegedly stumbled across the tape in the city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

Yet, the FBI seems not to regard this Pentagon intelligence find as "hard evidence" of bin Laden's connection to the 9/11 attacks.

Knowing how Bush and Cheney were eager to override objections of intelligence professionals and use rigged Pentagon intelligence linking Saddam to WMDs and 9/11, it seems quite likely that the White House and Pentagon steamrollered the FBI into playing along with a false 9/11 narrative but that the bureau is letting anyone with eyes to see know that it really doesn't buy that story.

The Muckraker links are http://teamliberty.net/id267.html and http://teamliberty.net/id293.html

A useful roundup of tape facts and observations can be found at http://whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html

Similarly, if the FBI believes there is a lack of hard evidence linking Osama to 9/11, then the bureau does not accept CIA reports of the confessions of Osama lieutenant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives. It has been reported that the FBI pulled its agents from CIA interrogation sessions over concerns about the value of statements obtained under duress.

On the other hand, it should be noted that the FBI "played the game" by not throwing cold water on what was obviously planted evidence to identify the purported 9/11 hijackers.

I haven't read The Da Vinci Code but...

2008-01-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

. . . I have scanned a book by the painter David Hockney, whose internet-driven survey of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art makes a strong case for a trade secret: use of a camera obscura technique for creating precision realism in paintings.

Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost legacy of the old masters, 2001, uses numerous paintings to show that European art guilds possessed this technical ability, which was a closely guarded and prized secret. Eventually the technique, along with the related magic lantern projector, evolved into photography. It's possible the technique also included the use of lenses and mirrors, a topic familiar to Leonardo da Vinci.

Apparently the first European mention of a camera obscura is in Codex Atlanticus.

I didn't know about this when first mulling over the Shroud of Turin controversy and so was quite perplexed as to how such an image could have been formed in the 14th century, when the shroud's existence was first reported. I was mistrustful of the carbon dating, realizing that the Kremlin had a strong motive for deploying its agents to discredit the purported relic.
(See my old page Science, superstition and the Shroud of Turin http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nuzone/shroud.html)

But Hockney's book helps to bolster a theory by fellow Brits Lynn Picknell and Clive Prince that the shroud was faked by none other than Leonardo, a scientist, "magician" and intriguer. Their book The Turin Shroud was a major source of inspiration for The Da Vinci Code, it has been reported.

The two are not professional scientists but, in the time-honored tradition of English amateurs, did an interesting sleuthing job.

As they point out, the frontal head image is way out of proportion with the image of the scourged and crucified body. They suggest the face is quite reminiscent of a self-portrait by Leonardo. Yet, two Catholic scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab who used a computer method in the 1980s to analyze the image had supposedly demonstrated that it was "three-dimensional." But a much more recent analysis, commissioned by Picknell and Prince, found that the "three-dimensionalism" did not hold up. From what I can tell, the Jet Propulsion pair proved that the image was not made by conventional brushwork but that further analysis indicates some type of projection.

Picknell and Prince suggest that Leonardo used projected images of a face and of a body -- perhaps a cadaver that had been inflicted with various crucifixion wounds -- to create a death mask type of impression. But the image collation was imperfect, leaving the head size wrong and the body that of, by Mideast standards, a giant. This is interesting, in that Hockney discovered that the camera obscura art often failed at proportion and depth of field between spliced images, just as when a collage piece is pasted onto a background.

Still the shroud's official history begins in 1358, about a hundred years prior to the presumed Da Vinci hoax. It seems plausible that either some shroud-like relic had passed to a powerful family and that its condition was poor, either because of its age or because it wasn't that convincing upon close inspection. The family then secretly enlisted Leonardo, the theory goes, in order to obtain a really top-notch relic. Remember, relics were big business in those days, being used to generate revenues and political leverage.

For if Leonardo was the forger, we must account for the fact that the highly distinctive "Vignon marks" on the shroud face have been found in Byzantine art dating to the 7th century. I can't help but wonder whether Leonardo only had the Mandylion (the face) to work with, and added the body as a bonus (I've tried scanning the internet for reports of exact descriptions of the shroud prior to da Vinci's time but haven't succeeded).

The Mandylion refers to an image not made by hands. This "image of Edessa" must have been very impressive, considering the esteem in which it was held by Byzantium. Byzantium also was rife with relics and with secret arts -- which included what we'd call technology along with mumbo-jumbo. The Byzantine tradition of iconography may have stemmed from display of the Mandylion.

Ian Wilson, a credentialed historian who seems to favor shroud authenticity, made a good case for the Mandylion having been passed to the Knights Templar -- perhaps when the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. The shroud then showed up in the hands of a descendant of one of the Templars after the order was ruthlessly suppressed. His idea was that the shroud and the Mandylion were the same, but that in the earlier centuries it had been kept folded in four, like a map, with the head on top and had always been displayed that way.

The other possibility is that a convincing relic of only the head was held by the Templars. A discovery at Templecombe, England, in 1951 showed that regional Templar centers kept paintings of a bearded Jesus face, which may well have been copies of a relic that Templar enemies tried to find but couldn't. The Templars had been accused of worshiping a bearded idol.

Well, what made the Mandylion so convincing? A possibility: when the Templars obtained the relic they also obtained a secret book of magical arts that told how to form such an image. This of course implies that Leonardo discovered the technique when examining this manuscript, which may have contained diagrams. Or, it implies that the image was not counterfeited by Leonardo but was a much, much older counterfeit.

Obviously all this is pure speculation. But one cannot deny that the shroud images have a photographic quality but are out of kilter with each other and that the secret of camera obscura projection in Western art seems to stem from Leonardo's studios.

The other point is that the 1988 carbon analysis dated the shroud to the century before Leonardo. If one discounts possible political control of the result, then one is left to wonder how such a relic could have been so skillfully wrought in that era. Leonardo was one of those once-in-a-thousand-year geniuses who had the requisite combination of skills, talents, knowledge and impiety to pull off such a stunt.

Of course, the radiocarbon dating might easily have been off by a hundred years (but, if fairly done, is not likely to have been off by 1300 years).

All in all, I can't be sure exactly what happened, but I am strongly inclined to agree that the shroud was counterfeited by Leonardo based on a previous relic. The previous relic must have been at least "pretty good" or why all the fuss in previous centuries? But, it is hard not to suspect Leonardo's masterful hand in the Shroud of Turin.

Of course, the thing about the shroud is that there is always more to it. More mystery. I know perfectly well that, no matter how good the scientific and historical analysis, trying to nail down a proof one way or the other is a wil o' the wisp.

Forefathers foresaw elaborate conspiracies

2008-01-04T08:47:00.000-08:00

Why did the founding fathers warn against permitting a standing army in America?

Because they were keenly aware that such an army can become an army of occupation, rather than an army of defense, that such a concentration of military power could easily be used for elaborate conspiracies against free men.

A caption

2008-01-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

Cartoon showing the Trojan horse soon after being dragged into the city. A Trojan who has crept out of the horse but wears city garb is addressing a few skeptical inhabitants: "Surely you don't believe in some elaborate conspiracy do you? Are you another one of those foil-hat conspiracy theorists?"

Striking parallels

2007-11-29T16:37:00.000-08:00

What is the standard procedure for explosive demolition of high-rises? Implosion, according to experts speaking on the History Channel feature Modern Marvels.

"The building implodes when the vertical support columns are removed," as the feature story says. One expert noted that an imploded building generally falls in eight or nine seconds.

Both main World Trade Center towers and a third high-rise collapsed in a manner indistinguishable from implosion. The NIST specifically said that the walls of the main towers fell inward because core columns were "shortened" (allegedly by fire heat and buckling). Though trade center collapse times are difficult to ascertain precisely, very rapid falls are seen in videos and collapse times seem to be not much faster than free fall time.

Typically, RDX explosive charges are placed at two points on a column to snap it and a third "kicker" charge blows the piece out horizontally in order to initiate rapid collapse, according to History Channel experts. The two RDX charges are placed in notches burned out of the column by a worker.

RDX is used not only by demolition firms but also by the Pentagon. It packs a detonating velocity of 26,000 feet per second and a pressure of 3 million pounds per square inch.

In some cases, the charges are timed to go off at intervals of fractions of a second. A hotel at Clearwater Beach, Fla., had charges spaced a half second apart, and some of these blasts were visible from the street. Each of the twin towers collapsed after bright, tightly timed blasts went off, but the NIST dismissed these as coincidental jet fuel blasts (jet fuel doesn't pack enough punch to sever a column, the NIST admitted).

If one looks at videos of the trade tower collapses and the various controlled implosions shown on the History Channel, one finds little if any difference, except for scale.

The segment may be purchased online from the History Channel.

Who warned Israelis on 9/11?

2007-11-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

Two Israel-based employees of the now-defunct Odigo instant messaging service received a message warning of a big attack in lower Manhattan about two hours before the first plane struck. Stories appeared in Haaretz and the Washington Post (the stories survive on the web but may have been purged from the newspaper web sites).

That's on the public record. After that, the picture gets murky.

Of 4,000 Israeli nationals in New York that day (source: Anti-Defamation League) few were killed in the attacks. Specifically, three died in the twin towers and two were among those listed as plane casualties (let's be clear: military drone planes struck the towers).

So there is at least some ground to believe that the two Odigo employees alerted the Odigo office near the World Trade Center and that those employees messaged Israelis in Manhattan.

Odigo refused to disclose the content of the message but said that Israeli security and the FBI had been notified, apparently after the attacks began, though this point is fuzzy. I don't recall anything on Odigo in the 9/11 commission report, which lacks an index. If you know of some closely held method of searching the report and its appendixes online, let me know.

Now here's a question for New Yorkers Rudolph Giuliani and Hillary Clinton: who tipped off Israelis that an attack was imminent? What does the Israeli government have to say about that?

One later report implied that some terrorist group had sent the message to the Israelis, but this smells like disinformation. It seems more likely that Israeli intelligence knew the attack was coming and that some Israeli spook leaked the information to his or her countrymen. One can't help but wonder whether Israeli intelligence had been monitoring the plotting and that an insider had signaled the plot was a "go" about two hours in advance.

Mere speculation, you object. Yes, and why so? Because U.S. and Israeli authorities have been extremely tight-lipped on a matter that many Americans might wish to know more about, especially in light of the fact that the 9/11 attacks were used to implement the militarist Israel lobby's war agenda.

9/11 coverage and obstruction of justice

2007-11-18T08:13:00.000-08:00

Is it possible that media professionals could face obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges for failing to do their civic duty by passing along information they had on suspicious activity, whether federal or otherwise, regarding the 9/11 attacks?

The First Amendment covers a lot of ground, including the right not to publish information in one's possession. If a news organization or media professional publishes something that could affect a criminal inquiry, the duty to inform law enforcement agencies has probably been fulfilled (unless one chooses a form of publication that cannot reasonably be expected to be seen by the police).

But, if a reporter, editor, publisher or other media person vetoes such a story, then there may be an obligation to report this material directly to some law enforcement agency.

So, reporters and others who are sitting on such material might wish to consider putting together a report with supporting materials and making copies available to investigative authorities. In fact, why not send copies to a number of places: The FBI, the Justice Department, New York City Police, Port Authority Police, Pennsylvania State Police, Washington, D.C., police and the criminal investigation divisions of military services?

Also, we need a responsible historian or two to set up a 9/11 documents archive that makes available online all declassified 9/11 documents. The archive would also be a repository for video, photos, tapes and authenticated reproductions of physical evidence. Reporters would make their notes and amplified reports available.

The archive should get no federal funding and make every effort to stay free of political control.

News story blockades

2007-11-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, the "email to a friend" function repeatedly failed on a Herald of Scotland story about the U.S. refurbishing its Diego Garcia facilities for an Iran air strike.

Today, I'm having the same problem with Yahoo's "email to a friend" function about an AP story concerning congressional testimony about "suitcase nukes." The story provides very good background on the improbability of such a weapon.

I know not whether the block is meant to "cover" for the previous block, or is meant to send a message that "we are in control of communication" or is simply another instance of internet censorship that appears to reflect Israeli militarist propaganda and other needs.

Is America under Israeli military censorship?

2007-11-04T10:53:00.001-08:00

If so, a lot of things would make sense.

Waterboarding and 9/11: connecting the dots

2007-10-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

Democratic senators are aggravated by Michael Mukasey's refusal to declare whether he considers waterboarding to be torture and hence unconstitutional and illegal.

And, as the Washington Post and others point out, waterboarding was used by the CIA to force Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk. The Post properly calls Mohammed the "alleged 9/11 mastermind."

Yes, and Mohammed's "confessions" seem highly reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition or Stalin's show trial methods. Mohammed's "confessions," as recounted by the 9/11 commission, read like a long cover story for a U.S. covert operation that occurred on 9/11.

So shouldn't lawmakers be connecting the dots here: If waterboarding is reprehensible and can be used to elicit false confessions, doesn't that mean the congressional and "independent" probes of 9/11 are resting on very thin ice? If lawmakers know that waterboarding is wrong and liable to elicit bad "intelligence," shouldn't they be demanding a thorough re-examination of the events of 9/11?

And lest we forget, several of these Democratic senators are presidential candidates who keep trying to avoid the issue of 9/11 treason.

Kremlin weakens its neocon alliance

2007-10-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

The attacks of 9/11 spurred Putin to make common cause with U.S. neocons taking aim at Islamic radicals (and others). Putin wanted a free hand to suppress the Chechnyan separatists without constant carping by the United States.

So the Kremlin was in no mood to play up the ludicrousness of U.S. claims about the attacks or to upbraid Washington for staging a deliberate deception on U.S. soil.

But things are different now. Putin administered a stinging rebuke to U.S. neocons by arranging a Caspian nation bloc opposed to a U.S. war against Iran. This means that the U.S. will find those nations balky about permitting their soil to be used for staging areas. Essentially, as one analyst points out, neocon war aims against Iran have been effectively blocked.

Does this mean that Putin and the cheka are now less supportive of 9/11 coverup? Politically, they have little choice but to distance themselves from the 9/11 coverup propaganda put out by the neocons. The political problem is so large that a broad brush technique is necessary. The Kremlin playing a nuanced game concerning 9/11 coverup by the neocons would send a mixed signal concerning its resolute opposition to the continuing "war on Islam," which is how much of the Muslim world sees the "war on terror."

The Russian press, if it continues to be too timid or neutral about Washington's complicity in 9/11, will tend to confuse the Muslim world and hence weaken Putin's Caspian diplomacy.

Such "left gatekeepers" (to borrow a phrase from John McMurtry) as Noam Chomsky will suddenly feel quite isolated concerning their attacks on 9/11 skepticism. However, useful as Chomsky may have been to the Kremlin on certain issues in the past, Russia's political needs will take precedence over a cheka desire not to humiliate those considered friends, or, if not friends, then useful persons.

George Soros, who has chastised AIPAC and the Israel lobby for suppression of dissent in America in its furtherance of a neocon agenda, may find that his adversaries are not quite as strong as previously and that their blunderbusses, such as the Murdoch press, are not quite so sure of themselves. Will the Holocaust survivor extend his criticisms to include the neocon suppression of valid dissent concerning the official tall tales about 9/11?

The billionaire whose philanthropy helped tilt the Warsaw pact into oblivion has thus far feared to tackle that issue, no doubt worrying that he will be marginalized. Yet, avoiding marginalization isn't always productive. Look at the 2004 election, which statisticians believe, with a high level of confidence, was won across the board by Kerry. Interestingly, despite all his donations and his best efforts to block Bush's "re-election" in 2004, Bush "won." Who was it who suppressed the many serious questions about that election's integrity before Bush's second inauguration? Had the questions had sufficient publicity, Congress might have been forced to examine the election and Bush's claim to the throne could have been forestalled. Was it not the Israel lobby, using its powerful influence in the media that blocked the proper exercise of democracy, no doubt because of a desire not to impede the Israel lobby/neocon agenda in the Mideast?

NSA shocker fans 9/11 suspicion

2007-10-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

Powerful Democratic lawmaker John Conyers is headed for a direct clash with Bush and his security chiefs over highly questionable secret activities that seem to have been authorized well in advance of 9/11.

Conyers sent a letter to National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and the Justice Dept. demanding details of secret eavesdropping arrangements made seven months before 9/11 that were disclosed in court documents concerning the former CEO of Qwest. Conyers said details were needed in light of Bush's desire to apply retroactive protection from lawsuits to those telecoms that cooperated with the NSA and because of suspicion that Qwest and its CEO were targeted for payback for refusing to comply with the covert demands.

A respected Georgetown University professor of constitutional law told a television audience that 9/11 was amazingly "convenient" for Bush and his associates in that the secretive domestic spying operation showed an intention to seize excessive central power, according to David Edwards and Nick Juliano at Rawstory.

Jonathan Turley told Countdown Monday: "This administration was seeking a massive expansion of presidential power and national security powers before 9/11. 9/11 was highly convenient, in that case."

Turley denied necessarily implying that Bush and his aides welcomed 9/11, "but when it happened, it was a great opportunity to seize powers that they had long wanted at the FBI."

However, a number of professors, some with science degrees, have openly challenged the truthfulness of the official U.S. narrative of the events of 9/11. Additionally, a number of professional statisticians, some of them professors, have expressed strong skepticism concerning the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

Polls have shown that doubts about 9/11 are widespread among Americans, though the presidential candidates avoid the topic, apparently in part because the Israel lobby doesn't welcome such debate, as is evidenced by the Murdoch press, which is considered one of the biggest cannons of that lobby.

Pre-9/11 machinations of the Bush administration will be taken by many as further evidence of a conspiracy to commit perfidious treason.

Richard French, an RNN television commentator, said that if the surveillance power grab charges are true, Bush is a liar who claimed he had been motivated to authorize warrantless wiretaps by the events of 9/11.

Secret wiretap grab 7 months before 9/11

2007-10-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

Seven months before 9/11, shortly after Bush was inaugurated for his first term, the NSA was arranging for wiretap powers that went beyond lawful authority, according to court documents obtained by the Rocky Mountain News.

It appears that Bush may have secretly seized wartime surveillance power -- as soon as he got into office!

Joseph P. Nacchio, former chief of Qwest, a telecom company, tried to use this information in his fight with the U.S. attorney over purported insider trading. He was convicted after the judge agreed to a novel interpretation of insider trading law.

Nacchio said he had been invited to NSA headquarters in February 2001 to discuss a defense contract for improving internet security. During the discussion, the NSA official proposed an arrangement that Nacchio rejected, on advice of Qwest's counsel, as illegal. NSA has suppressed details, but it is apparent that a warrantless wiretap operation was the subject.

Qwest did not get the defense contract, but Nacchio did get prosecuted after he revealed that the feds had asked Qwest to do something illegal. The court papers are the first indication that this wiretap ower was obtained by the NSA long before 9/11 or any sign of war.

Other telecom firms, which obtained contracts, apparently did go along with the NSA program. Bush is demanding that they be retroactively protected by Act of Congress from lawsuits regarding breach of duty to protect privacy.

So I'd like to know: did Cheney go over to Capitol Hill and quietly brief eight members of Congress on this clandestine program in February 2001?

Aside from the Rocky, the New York Times carried a piece on the matter on Sunday.

Mukasey, Podhoretz and Pipes

2007-10-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

Mukasey, Podhoretz and Pipes. What do they have in common? For one thing, they all are advisers to the Giuliani campaign.

Norman Podhoretz, who is still with Commentary, formerly published by the American Jewish Committee, is a neocon hawk who favors bombing Iran and who sees questions about 9/11 as obviously nothing but the work of an anti-Semitic conspiracy.

Daniel Pipes, an influential U.S. professor who promotes a Zionist view of Israel, strongly backed the Iraq war, even though he was well aware of the potential for a fratricidal mess. He sees Israel as besieged on all sides, charging that Syria is developing chemical weapons and that Iran is aiming to become a nuclear power. He is worried that too many Muslims in America may prove dangerous to American Jews.

Mukasey, as New York described him, is a graduate of an Upper East Side yeshiva who believes that national security courts should try terrorism cases in secret. Mukasey lived for some time under 24-hour guard stemming from his role as a judge in terrorism cases. He is known as a law-and-order judge.

The fact that Mukasey teams up with two of the most notable voices of the hard-right Israel lobby is quite revealing.

By supporting Giuliani, one must conclude that Mukasey is a hawk who believes that there is a war against terrorism that the United States must wage at full throttle. By joining with Podhoretz and Pipes, Mukasey indicates that he does not wish to face the overwhelming and irrefutable evidence of treason on 9/11 -- a standard position of the Israel lobby. Hence, we can expect that, as attorney general, Mukasey will find ways to rationalize all sorts of "war" measures that vitiate basic American freedoms.

Oh goodness! A veto threat...

2007-10-10T19:28:00.000-07:00

Heaven forfend! Bush says he will veto a wiretap bill that doesn't give telecoms retroactive immunity from lawsuits filed on behalf of Americans whose privacy was compromised without benefit of warrants.

And, oh horrors, the Democrats might not be able to muster enough votes to override a veto!!!

Just one point: if Bush vetoes the bill, Congress doesn't have to do anything. OK, maybe the Dems don't have enough moxie to stand up to Bush after the veto, when he screams that the Democrats are jeopardizing national security by not passing a bill. But here's the answer: pass the same bill again. Then they can say Bush keeps vetoing a an important national security bill because he wants telecom firms to be above the law.

The great divide

2007-10-10T07:31:00.000-07:00

Much of AIPAC backs the Netanyahu hawks. The Netanyahu-Cheney axis is reflected in the U.S. agreement to play the dummy up game on behalf of Israel's attack on Syria. It's OK to silence everybody, as long as the Israeli hawks are allowed to say what they will.

So we see that the majority of American Judaism is at odds with AIPAC, but, the gag orders everywhere may prevent many Jews from realizing how much they disagree with the Netanyahu crowd, AIPAC and the Israel lobby.

Top court cloud hangs over wiretap bill

2007-10-08T18:54:00.000-07:00

The warrantless wiretap bill now in Congress is viewed by many as a cave-in to White House fear-mongering. At any rate, a strong possibility is that it will be so constitutionally botched-up that it will be DOA before it reaches the Supreme Court.

After all, the Constitution doesn't give Congress the power to void the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches of a person's communications and effects. If the ACLU doesn't run that one up to the top court, another group will.

And we see Rockefeller trying slip in retroactive immunity for telecom companies who may have broken laws by improperly acceding to warrantless wiretaps.

There is only one reason for that provision: to block the lawsuits over illegal activity. The companies don't need financial protection. They'll come to terms with the plaintiffs if necessary. This is about Rockefeller and Bush trying to conceal criminal activity.

Israel lobby muzzles 9/11 truth

2007-10-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

Let's face facts: the official falsehoods about 9/11 well serve the foreign policy of the hawkish Israel lobby and its counterparts in Israel. After 9/11, Ariel Sharon repeated, word for word, Bush's speech announcing a global war against terrorists. During the run-up to the Iraq war, the Israel lobby was publicly quiet while privately promoting the invasion.

Of course, treason on 9/11 doesn't necessarily point to Israeli involvement. However, it is clear that the government of Israel and its militant U.S. backers view the 9/11 attacks as a boon which they cannot turn away.

When you read Abe Foxman's reports on 9/11 conspiracy theories, you come away with the impression that anyone who suspects treason that day is out to get the Jews. The head of the Anti-Defamation League avoids the topic of serious criticism of the official claims but lets loose with both barrels at people supposedly trying to whip up anti-Semitism, including such easy targets as David Duke. Foxman also bluntly equates suspicion of Israeli intelligence with anti-Semitism. In other words, he's running interference for conspirators, whether he knows it or not.

Commentary magazine, long headed by Norman Podhoretz, has denounced the liberal Tikkun magazine for publishing an article by David Ray Griffin, who suspects radical neocon involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Podhoretz has recommended the U.S. launch an air war against Iran. Tikkun's editor, Michael Lerner, has expressed skepticism concerning the U.S. government's possible role in 9/11, but doesn't accept the idea of a Jewish conspiracy. However, he does denounce the hawkish Israel lobby for pushing America and Israel into Mideast bloodshed.

The Israel lobby's role in muting the media and terrorizing Congress has been well documented. Do you wonder why the media is so reticent about 9/11 truth? The Israel lobby doesn't see 9/11 truth as politically useful. Do you wonder why the Democratic Congress can't force a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq? The Israel lobby doesn't want it. Do you wonder why the Democrats are wishy-washy about proposed attacks on Iran and Syria? The Israel lobby has long had Mideast control on its agenda.

Yes, sure. The Israel lobby isn't operating in a vacuum. There are deals with the oil interests and with the Russians, who want a free hand against the Chechnyans and other Muslim groups.

The Armageddon cults and the Israel lobby

2007-10-06T10:19:00.001-07:00

I enjoyed watching Bill Moyers on PBS last night probing the role of so-called Christian Zionism in the Israel lobby. The show included a thoughtful interview with Tikkun editor Rabbi Michael Lerner, a liberal who denounces the Israel lobby as a pernicious influence, and Dr. Timothy P. Weber, an evangelical skeptical of the Armageddon cults.

Now, in a sense, I am a Christian Zionist and a dispensationalist, but that doesn't mean I claim a railroad-timetable comprehension of the mysteries of biblical prophecy. (For more on my point of view, see my piece Where is Zion? found at http://www.angelfire.com/az3/newzone/zion1.html.)

Curiously, the most extreme of these "End Times" cults, led by Pastor John Hagee who favors an attack on Iran as doing a favor to the state of Israel, is endorsed as a good friend by the Israel lobby and politicians such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Sen. John McCain.

Yet, most Americans are not strict literalists concerning the Bible and most Americans who consider themselves born-again Christians are not closely aligned with these cults. Moyers and his guests were wondering why these cults have such influence and seem to penetrate the consciousness of so many people.

I think they overlooked the most obvious reason: These cults seem to have inordinate access to television broadcasts. There is big money in televangelism and those preachers who take the "Israel is always right" line may well find that their path is made easier. Worth checking, I'd say.

Lerner argued that these extremist religious views, which are in harness with Israeli's hard right, are bad for America, bad for Israel and bad for the Jews.

My estimate is that the American people have little inkling of the extent to which a very tiny group of Armageddon cultists is tilting policy in favor of the Israel lobby.

Granted extremist Islam is an evil force. But extremist solutions are likely to make matters worse, as we see now in Iraq.

Times confirms doubts about '9/11 mastermind'

2007-10-04T06:29:00.001-07:00

Confessions sweated out of al Qaeda chieftain Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are exaggerated and contradictory, intelligence sources told the New York Times.

Though some operatives claimed to have obtained "good intelligence" from Mohhamed through use of torment tactics, others are doubtful, the Times reports today.

The report by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen on a secret reauthorization of harsh interrogation methods, confirms a New Yorker claim that intelligence community professionals had serious reservations about the reliability of Mohammed's statements. The Aug. 13 New Yorker carried Jane Mayer's chilling report on the CIA's "black sites."

Though the Times report, in a clause, calls Mohammed the "chief planner" of the 9/11 attacks, the substance of the Times report raises doubts about such an unqualified assertion. The 9/11 commission relied on what Mohammed purportedly told the CIA about those attacks without being able to question him or listen to interrogation tapes.

Hillary's electability problem

2007-10-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

The Whitewater scandal was a long time ago, and anyway, Hillary was cleared, wasn't she?

The Vietnam war was even longer ago, and yet Kerry in 2004 fell victim to a slashing attack on his war record.

Sure Hillary looks like a hip, strong Democrat right now. True, she's fairly popular in her "home" state and in California. But her problem is the rest of the country.

I'd say along about next summer, the Whitewater attack ads will hit: Hillary, the fast-talking lawyer mixed up in sleazy land dealings, bank fraud and a tax problem that ended with the violent death of a close associate. Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security chief and former counsel to the Senate Whitewater inquiry, might be an adviser to the script writers.

The GOP is being very, very quiet about Hillary's scandal-tainted past, hoping she gets the nomination. She's a real target, for sure -- despite the vaunted women's sympathy vote. Women's sympathy only goes so far. Much eager support will wane once Hillary gets the Swiftboat treatment. And her record is a lot more vulnerable to strong criticism than was Kerry's.

One for Ripley's

2007-10-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

Some bolide issues: the object was luminescent and observable just before impact. Usually meteors become invisible as they approach both because their hot exteriors burn off and because their near-earth velocity is so fast that they are not visible to the naked eye.

A local report indicates that the object streaked in at midday, at 15 minutes before noon, which accounts for an ability to see a smoky tail, but not for an ability to detect something arriving at typical meteor speed.

However, Carancas is in the Andes, so perhaps the altitude was high enough so that the burn process hadn't been completed. I couldn't find the elevation, but nearby Lake Titicaca has an altitude of 3827 meters.

It is certainly true that there was once serious concern about crashes of Soviet nuclear-powered satellites. A museum in New South Wales owns fragments of a Soviet satellite. In 2003, there was worldwide alarm as fragments of the 1400-kilogram BeppoSAX research satellite rained down over equatorial regions, with a 1/200 probability of striking a human victim.

Plugging in numbers to crater expert Jay Melosh's crater calculator gives energy results of between 200 million to 300 million joules for the 13-meter wide crater in Peru. Ronald Woodman, director of the Peru Geophysics Institute, was quoted as saying the impact had a 1.5 seismic scale reading. A 1.5 Richter reading is equivalent to 320 pounds of TNT -- a typical early WW2 bomb blast -- which translates to 669 million joules.

Collectively, 400 kilograms worth of debris reached earth after the 1400-kg BeppoSAX orbiter broke up. The object that landed in Peru had a mass in the vicinity of 11 kilograms (25 pounds), according to numbers I plugged into the crater calculator. An 11-kg satellite fragment is conceivable, but I am unsure what altitude to use to try to estimate terminal velocity. That is, the ratio of the object's mass to the crater diameter will vary according to kinetic energy, and the kinetic energy of satellite debris might be quite different from that of meteor fragments.

Another question is whether the outer shell's heat combined with the impact energy was enough to bring hundreds -- probably thousands -- of liters of groundwater to a boil, releasing noxious steam, possibly tainted by hydrogen sulfide, which is fairly often found mixed with groundwater.

It seems plausible that if an aerial bomb struck subsurface water, it might release a burst of steam. However, thousands of bombs fall without triggering underground steam vents. (And of course at high altitudes it takes less heat to boil water and release steam.)

Future reports by meteor experts should prove interesting. If down the road there is a peculiar lack of interest by experts, then we'll know it was no meteor.

Stinkbomb from the sky

2007-09-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

An error that appeared in the first draft of this post has been corrected. Hydrogen sulfide was misdesignated as HS2, when it should be H2S.

Because of conflicting data, I had trouble with the energy calculations. So I have erased them from this post and will report them in the next post.

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) may be the culprit in the strange ailment that afflicted Peruvians who rushed to the meteor crash site.

Hydrogen sulfide is a poisonous gas released during flatulence and in connection with petroleum refining processes. It is found in natural gas deposits and sometimes in groundwater. In low doses, the gas, which has a "rotten egg" odor, induces eye and respiratory irritation and nausea. In higher doses, it is fatal.

The several dozen people who were sickened by the fumes emanating from the crater complained of those symptoms and reported a foul, sulfurous odor.

The bolide apparently plowed below the water table and generated enough heat to boil the water, which, in my estimate, emitted steam laden with H2S. Peruvian geophysicists recognized gray dust around the crater as pulverized meteor rock, showing the likelihood that the bolide hit with enough energy to bring a pondful of water to a boil. Witnesses reported that the meteor streaked to ground as a luminescent fireball, trailing a smoky tail, from some 1000 meters out.

Usually, meteors don't land hot, having burned off their outer layers by the time they hit. But this one may have defied the norm.

Not only was the bolide -- if that's what it was -- unusual in remaining fiery hot in the lower atmosphere, the striking of an H2S-laced water table with enough impact and heat energy to emit poison gas is also quite unusual, I'd say.

Additionally, according to experts, such a bolide event, which occurs roughly every 26 years, often leaves a field of craters from fragmentation of the meteor during descent. No crater field was reported.

So, anyway, just to add to the intrigue: Hydrogen sulfide is used to process deuterium, a neutron moderator used in nuclear reactors. Who knows? Maybe there is a classified technology for using H2S on board a satellite rather than prior to launch, which is what would be expected. And I wondered about the possibility of a reverse process, but have no clue as to whether a sudden infusion of deuterium ("heavy water") into ordinary groundwater could release clouds of H2S. Somehow I think that fairly unlikely.

Meteorite mystery deepens

2007-09-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

It seemed that a rare natural fluke may have occurred, whereby a red-hot rock from the sky plowed into an underground water supply and let off a plume of noxious, mineral-tainted smoke.

But, scientists are still wary of the determination by Peruvian experts that the event that occurred near Lake Titicaca was really the crash of a meteorite.

Physicist David L. Griscom argues that not only does the smoke plume not fit the typical meteorite profile, but that the fireball was far out of line with what would be expected of a massive object hurtling into the stratosphere at a typical meteorite speed of 10 to 20 kilometers per second. The object should have "lit up brighter than day in the stratosphere" rather than becoming visible a mere 1000 meters from the surface, as was reported.

Also, the long-duration sound heard by locals is not typical of meteorite strikes, Griscom told me. Of course, we can't be sure how bright the fireball was, nor when it initially appeared, nor how long the sound lasted. As is well known, witness recollections are highly subjective, especially when it comes to sudden, freak events.

Possibly local scientists were mistaken about a meteorite strike and that a subsurface geothermal event somehow created a boiling crater, making noise and, along with rubble, throwing fiery, molten material that was mistaken for fireballs.
But local scientists and authorities have said nothing about molten matter.
Importantly, Peruvian seismic equipment registered an impact at the site, according to a local scientist.

Investigating scientists did say that the rock they had recovered was consistent with a meteorite, being high in iron content. But, the sample was much more rocky than usual, lacking the metallic "glue" that usually helps space rocks survive descent through the atmosphere, according to Jacob Silverman, who wrote two good synopses for How stuff works that appeared today on that site. The urls are

http://howstuffworks.com/peru-meteor.htm
http://howstuffworks.com/peru-meteor1.htm

Silverman points out that scientists seem to think that meteorites don't arrive hot, but lukewarm or cold. For one thing, meteorites generally don't spark fires when they land in a forest or a house. But, there is a question as to whether the water really did boil for a while or whether villagers were too excited to give accurate details.

Please see my previous post "Pravda now a joke" and the item concerning a "war satellite" at the bottom of the post "Spooks clash..."

To recap, seismic equipment registered an impact, but details of the crash are wildly at variance with typical meteor crashes. So maybe it was a satellite. But if so, the locals who suffered from noxious inhalations seem to be fine now. So then, perhaps they weren't suffering from radiation sickness. But then, what made the water boil?

I'm sure the UFO researchers are champing at the bit. A case for The X-Files, I'm sure.

So do these oddities validate Pravda's decision to run Sorcha Faal's piece? Not in my mind. Why not run something by a journalist who doesn't also specialize in weird stuff, such as wrapping up the Israeli attack on Syria in some mythological stuff about an ancient burial ground of giants being visited by extraterrestrial vehicles?

Sept. 28 update
New Scientist has a story today that covers much of the same material as the post above.

Another weird conspiracy theory
that I don't vouch for came across my desk. Here it is:

China was incensed at Israel's bombing run that hit North Koreans at a Syrian military installation Sept 6. So Beijing paid back by using one or more of its new satellite-killer missiles to knock out either an Israeli or American spy satellite -- and then played dumb! Just like the Israelis and Bush after the Israeli strike.
The Israelis and Bush knew that if they complained openly, they'd be put in an impossible diplomatic situation, so they grimaced and played dumb too.

Correction
Somewhere along the line a wrong energy figure for the seismic recording crept in, it seems. However, the figure of 4.9 tons of TNT quoted by AP may very well be inaccurate. I'll take a further look soon.

Pravda is now a joke

2007-09-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I gave any ink at all (post below) to the possibility that a spy satellite, rather than a meteor, had fallen in Peru was that the report appeared in Pravda, which I guessed had some sympathetic sources in the Kremlin.

A few years ago Pravda published a serious article on Richard Perle that was based on a backgrounder supplied by Znewz1. So I had reason to think the Communist Party newspaper was still serious, though clearly highly political. But honestly I never read Pravda's online English version and so I guess my guard was down.

Now clearly, it is possible that a secret satellite rather than a meteorite crashed in Peru, but the source of the report, Sorcha Faal, has written some other rather weird stuff in the Chariots of the gods vein. One would think Pravda editors would be a bit more selective in publication of internet reports. Their standards are now so low as to make the political voice of communism a ridiculous joke. Unfortunately, the joke was on me to some extent, though I was cautious and my follow-up material posted below (see 'Sept. 26 update') tried to clarify things.

The BBC and others have been focusing on the "mass hysteria" aspect of the story. At first, only a couple dozen people were sickened by the fumes, but the numbers were bumped up to 200 and then to 600 within a few days. At work seems to be the natural tendency of news-hungry reporters to exaggerate and the likelihood that residents will worry that their minor ailments are related.

Another reason for the panicky reaction was an early story in the Peruvian paper Diario La Republica which reported locals sickened by radiation poisoning. That claim was not repeated by the paper, as far as I could tell.

A story today by Andrea Thompson casts doubt on the assessment of Peruvian scientists that a meteorite struck and focuses on the alternative idea that a local geothermal eruption occurred coincidentally with a fireball in the sky.

Her story is at
http://space.com/scienceastronomy/070926_meteorite_hysteria.html

Spooks clash over '9/11 mastermind'

2007-09-25T15:19:00.001-07:00

Intelligence professionals are sharply critical of testimony provided by the alleged "9/11 mastermind," Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, while in a CIA torment dungeon overseas, according to a New Yorker report.

Jane Mayer, writing for the magazine's Aug. 13 edition, painted a grim picture of the reliability of Mohammed's numerous confessions, though the 9/11 commission rested much of its narrative on the al Qaeda chieftain's purported statements. Mohammed so far has confessed to involvement in 31 criminal conspiracies, a number which Mayer found high even for a top-level terrorist.

Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, told Mayer that all his spook associates were "100 percent certain" that Mohammed did not kill Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Similarly, FBI Special Agent Randall Bennett told her that of the many people he quizzed in Pakistan, none named Mohammed as the culprit.

Pearl's wife Mariane was skeptical when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed her that Mohammed had confessed to the murder. She'd heard this allegation before, only the information was classified and no evidence was available. Gonzales offered no new evidence and Mrs. Pearl suspected the attorney general was grandstanding in order to deflect political heat from his troubles.

Alcee Hastings, a House Democrat, said that he was disturbed by the methods used to interrogate Mohammed, Mayer reported. Hastings was prevented from revealing details but what went on "ain't right."

Mayer detailed CIA methods of torment that bore the earmarks of Teutonic diligence. Breaking people down was done according to precise technical formulas, based on sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and other nasty bits of business. Survivors have reported inmates in one Afghanistan hell hole trying to commit suicide by beating their heads against the wall.

Mohammed has been moved to Guantanamo naval base, where he awaits a military tribunal.

The 9/11 commission said it was not permitted to interview Mohammed but was forced to rely on "confessions" he gave to CIA interrogators. Mohammed, of course, did not have access to a lawyer during the questioning. This may seem silly but had he had such access there would be less concern about the validity of his statements, which, on reading the 9/11 panel report, appear to have been a matter of telling interrogators what they wanted to hear.

Yet, leading federal lawmakers have said that they don't wish to investigate 9/11 anew, claiming that the 9/11 commission had wrapped everything up.

Air Force shoots down war satellite?
Pravda is circulating a report that a powerful segment of the U.S. military establishment strongly opposes war with Iran and cites Western press accounts claiming that the U.S. Air Force shot down a spy satellite that would have been used to guide cruise missiles into Iran.

David L. Griscom, a retired naval physicist, said, "I can assure you that the impact in Peru and the fact that villagers were sickened" was "the buzz" on CCNet, an email digest for scientists concerned with climate change and extraterrestrial impacts.

Pravda ruled out a meteor strike based on expert analysis of the impact energy. Evidently the villagers were sickened by radiation given off by the satellite's plutonium 238 reactor.

Pravda's Sept. 20 report says the missile strike against the satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Sept. 26 update
El Diario La Prensa of New York reports today that Peruvian officials were checking into Pravda's claim that a U.S. KH-13 spy satellite appeared to have been felled by the U.S. Air Force in order to impede Bush administration war plans against Iran.

These sites have provided some information on what seems to have occurred near the village of Carancas:

http://physicsorg.com/news109397961.html
http://livinginperu.com/news/health (scroll down)

The explanation of Peruvian scientists that a meteorite struck and perhaps unearthed some noxious ground gases doesn't seem altogether implausible. There seems to be no independent confirmation that a KH-13 satellite was downed, though there has been speculation that such a satellite's atomic reactor would sicken people. On Sept. 17, two days after the space object's fall, Peru's Diario La Republica reported that victims were suffering from radiation sickness, but the paper doesn't appear to have repeated that onetime claim.

One good story I've seen on the ET strike is by AP's Monte Hayes. That Sept. 19 story can be found at
http://www.topix.net/content/ap/2007/09/experts-confirm-meteorite-crash-in-peru-2

Without better corroboration, I can't accept the Pravda story as worth anything at this point. In fact, I checked other articles by the writer, Sorcha Faal, and found them to be highly questionable. Her? work fits in well with the Bermuda Triangle genre. It's possible that Faal got her theory from a science minded blogger who early on posted the idea that a KH-13's atomic reactor had caused crater water to boil. (Sorry, I've mislaid that url.)

Shortly after the object crashed six miles from Lake Titicaca, some experts expressed skepticism that a meteorite would have done what it purportedly did. Jose Machare of Peru's Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Geology told Agence France Presse that the meteorite's impact seemed to have caused water in the crater to boil for about 10 minutes, which contributed to a noxious gray vapor given off from the site, apparently containing traces of arsenic and sulfur. Sickened locals had complained of a sulfuric odor.

But Jay Melosh, professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, was initially skeptical, Hayes reported. Boiling water didn't fit the profile since meteorites are generally cold upon impact, having shucked the hot outer layers during descent.

A number of experts, such as Don Yeomans of NASA's Near Earth Object program, doubted the initial meteor claim, suggesting that the event was more suggestive of some geothermal disruption from below the surface. Alex Bevan, an expert on meteorites with the Western Australian Museum in Perth, wondered whether the fireball and the ground explosion were two unrelated events.

Peter Schultz, a meteor crater specialist at Brown University, was intrigued, saying the impact might be an unusual type of meteor strike. He said the crater's size indicated the original meteoroid was at least 10 feet in diameter before breaking up.

At any rate Jose Ishitsaka of Peru's Geophysics Institute confirmed that the 42-foot-wide by 15-foot-deep crater had been caused by a meteor, according to institute president Ronald Woodman, who said the impact registered on seismic equipment as having the energy equivalent of 2.49 tons of dynamite.

See http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=12002HOFJ8G

Jose Lopez, Puno public health director, reported that seven policemen were among those sickened by crater fumes and given oxygen before being taken to a hospital, al Jazeera reported. They suffered from headaches and nausea, like 200 villagers who also breathed in the fumes.

Renan Ramirez, an engineer with Peru's Nuclear Energy Institute, said testers had found no radiation at the site. The Geophysics Institute gave the same information.

Ramirez said, "It was a conventional meteorite that, when it struck, produced gases by fusing with elements of the terrain."

A writer known as xcamel, posting on freerepublic.com, seems to have been quite diligent about finding out what scientists on the scene thought.

Xcamel says scientists think the meteorite met an undergound water supply tainted with arsenic. There are numerous local arsenic deposits which contaminate local drinking water, according to Modesto Montoya, a researcher with the geology institute. Ishitsuka theorized that the red-hot meteorite, upon plowing into the underground water, gave off a column of steam.

Xcamel's post is at http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1901657/posts

In sum, what we have is an event that the experts found to be very strange, but that could have been simply a very rare natural occurrence. On the other hand, since, as everyone knows, the first casualty in wartime is truth, there are grounds for suspicion. It seems likely that U.S. authorities could easily control the flow of information from the impact zone.

Physicist Griscom questions whether the United States has a satellite-killer capability yet, though he says a self-destruct mechanism is notionally possible. The U.S. does have rocket interceptors that can knock out missiles in subspace, but it is unknown whether these could be used against high-altitude satellites.

So anyway, throw into the mix a writer with a propensity for the fantastic and we have either perhaps a best-seller in the making or some sort of psywar disinformation operation.

Data mining article yanked from net

2007-09-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

A student article on federal data-mining research on terrorist "chatter" at social networking sites vanished from the internet edition of the Rutgers student newspaper The Daily Targum today.

The Targum internet edition displayed the print front page, except that the space for the article "Students protest Busch research" was blank when I checked both Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers on a Rutgers University terminal. A check of the student paper's search function showed the article was recorded. (Let me know whether the story has become visible in the blank spot. Write me at znewz1@yahoo.com.)

The net edition is published by College Publisher Network.

Student Nasreen Hussain's story today concerns a student protest held at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Computer Sciences on the university's Busch campus.

Fred Roberts, head of the Center for Dynamic Data Analysis (DyDAn), told the reporter that his center is one of four formed by the Department of Homeland Security. The other universities involved are Princeton, Rensselaer, Texas Southern and Texas State, along with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories, the story said. Additionally, federal weapons laboratories are contributing to the research.

"The work at Rutgers the students are concerned about is not aimed at identifying anti-American sentiments, nor do I believe it can be useful for that," Roberts told Hussain. "It is aimed at picking up 'chatter' about potential terrorist plots, not at picking up opposition to the war in Iraq or opposition to government spying on private conversations. The methods for doing these two things are very different."

Yet, he conceded that "a scientist can never guarantee" that such tools won't be misused. Roberts said that Rutgers' participation in the research means privacy concerns will be addressed. (Go to www.dydan.rutgers.edu for further background.)

Roberts has said that sites such as MySpace are not especially confidential, regardless of whether the privacy option is used. He notes that the companies routinely cooperate with law enforcement agencies.

Update Sept. 25
No response was received to emails sent to Roberts or Targum editors.

Today's print Targum makes no mention of the missing item.

Today's online version shows what appears to be a "normal" blank column running down the page. However, the data mining story was the lead of yesterday's print edition but not visible on yesterday's main online page.

Simulating Osama

2007-09-21T07:11:00.000-07:00

How does the CIA identify a recorded voice as Osama's?

It uses a program that digitally compares the recording to a voiceprint taken from a sample of his voice considered to be authentic. There has been a lot of research into voiceprints, with numerous proprietary methods invented by telecommunications companies. For example, Cellmax says its voiceprint technology is so good it can discriminate between close relatives with similar voices and can identify a speaker whose voice is altered by a cold.

We must expect that the CIA's technical services division is using the latest, state-of-the-art classified voiceprint technology.

So, does that mean their identification of bin Laden's voice on various internet videos since 9/11 is reliable? Sure, it might be. But advanced voiceprint technology also implies the possibility of near-perfect voice counterfeiting. In fact, implementation of speech authentication security schemes have been slowed because crooks are becoming increasingly sophisticated at fooling such technology, according to some reports.

Another thriving industry is voice simulation. For example, AV Voice Changer Software Gold boasts that "unlike other voice changers, Voice Changer Software Gold changes your voice over the internet in real time and provides an unlimited number of new voices. You can modify your voice by changing voice pitch, voice timbre, applying effects, adjusting advanced tuner and setting equalizer."

So then, how hard would it be to create a program that inputs the voiceprint numbers into a simulator, which then makes you sound like Osama and -- since it is based on Osama's voiceprint -- fools voiceprint analyzers?

We do know that the Osama tapes all seem to have something wrong with the visuals. Either old footage or use of possible lookalikes. But the feds say they rely on the voiceprints. And the press reports that "Osama bin Laden said in his latest video..."
In one case, there was the possibility of lip-synching by a guy in a black beard.

My point is that the news media should be a bit more cognizant of the problem of authenticity. This morning's New York Times kept the Osama tape to four graphs and the headline qualified the bin Laden link with a "said to be." That's progress, maybe.

Bush jumped at the opportunity to say of the "blackbeard" tape that Iraq was mentioned and that al Qaeda's targeting of Iraq was a serious concern. But Bush's judicious phrases showed that he thought it best to avoid saying flatly that the video was an authentic bin Laden broadcast. However, he was happy to play along with those broadcast media that did flatly assert that bin Laden had spoken on the tape.

Another concern: how about the possibility of framing people with phony tapes of voices that sound just like them? The courts need to take notice.

See articles by David Jastrow, June 1, 2007, Speech Technology, Olga Kharif, April 20, 2005, Business Week, and Greg V. Hulme, Oct. 28, 2002, Information Week.

Scientist tackles 'simulated' election
The problem of high tech rigging of results for political ends is pointed up by Steven F. Freeman in his new book Was the 2004 election stolen? Freeman is on tour promoting the book and sounding the alarm over the apparent ease of election fraud and systemwide collusion in coverup.

Freeman, who has a PhD in behavioral science from MIT, charges that the weight of evidence from exit polls points to massive fraud and that claims of pollsters protecting the system are not viable. Everyone is agreed that statistically the results point to a highly improbable outcome but are not agreed on the likelihood of theft. Freeman, a former professor of management, is not a professional statistician but uses statistics as a matter of course in his lines of work.

Freeman, who wrote the book with journalist Joel Bleifuss, gives a good synopsis of his views at www.appliedresearch.us/sf/Documents/ASAP-Improbabilities051014.pdf. To subscribe to his newsletter, visit www.electionintegrity.org.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of Pace University mentions Freeman's work in a Rolling Stone article titled Was the 2004 election stolen?

John Allen Paulos, who is a professional probabilist, is also skeptical of the election result. Search for his home page and read his article.

Additionally, a group of professional statisticians signed a letter expressing skepticism over the election claims.

Rep. John Conyers wrote a foreward to Freeman's book. Conyers, who probed the situation in Ohio, wrote his own book, What went wrong in Ohio? The Conyers report on the 2004 presidential election. Author and commentator Gore Vidal, who wrote an introduction to Conyers' book, told an interviewer that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post deigned to review the book and that the Boston Globe gave it only a brief, cursory mention.

Vidal believes the 9/11 attacks were allowed to happen as part of a coup by the Bush bunch in order to transform America into a police state that is compliant with a grandiose international agenda. Conyers' views on 9/11 treason are difficult to find via Google but I would guess that he views the subject as politically intractable at this point.

Greenspan stokes controversy over 9/11

2007-09-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Adding fuel to the firestorm over Alan Greenspan's charges of a White House fraud concerning the Iraq war is another, related, observation by the former Fed chief:

If al Qaeda's 9/11 strike was really part of a plot to disrupt the U.S. economy, why was there no follow-up attack? Greenspan wonders in his memoir, The age of turbulence: adventures in a new world.

"There was no bigger question in Washington than, Why no second attack? If al Qaeda's plan was to disrupt the U.S. economy, as bin Laden had declared, the attacks had to continue."

Greenspan has no answer for this puzzle, though he mildly raises the issue of some restrictions on personal privacy immediately after the attacks. But he certainly doesn't seem to be convinced that it was a security crackdown that prevented further strikes.

(The index of Greenspan's book contains no reference to the anthrax attacks which early on were bruited as some sort of follow-up, and used by the White House and its supporters to inferentially link Saddam to the 9/11 strike.)

Greenspan, who was airborne over the Atlantic rather than in his office near the trade center at the time of the attacks, wrote, "Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violations in an area that harbors a resource indespensable for the functioning of the world economy.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Greenspan is on record as telling the White House that, if oil security was to be ensured, Saddam would have to be removed.

However, at the time he made his recommendation, there was somewhat less awareness of the strong evidence of treason within the Bush administration on 9/11. At the time he penned his memoir, the evidence had mounted. It seems likely that his wife, NBC newswoman Andrea Mitchell, would have kept him posted on the increasingly troubling questions concerning 9/11 coverups.

Greenspan avoids anything but generalizations regarding 9/11, ducking blow-by-blow accounts of meetings concerning 9/11 details, leading one to suspect that there's a lot about 9/11 that he feels it unwise to discuss out loud.

Telecom shield bill targets your liberty

2007-09-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

Supposedly there's a big wrangle going on in Washington over curtailing some of the more obnoxious elements of the NSA wiretap law that was sneaked through at the last minute before recess.

But, says the New York Times, "Democratic leaders" see a deal on a measure to hold telecom firms immune from lawsuits for cooperating with government wiretap demands when another wiretap bill replaces the current one, which expires automatically in five months. (The most likely "leader" mentioned is John D. Rockefeller, head of the Senate intelligence committee.)

McConnell said that because of court rulings, the wiretap data flow had shrunk to a tiny stream by comparison with the time when the government had free rein to eavesdrop.

At the moment, telecom firms face lawsuits over their duty to protect customers from improper invasions of privacy by government officials. In the past, before the Times bared the NSA warrantless wiretap story, major telecom firms had for years turned a blind eye to spooks and FBI wiretappers operating out of telecom facilities. No touchy questions were asked about legalities. Now, however, these corporations are on their guard against eavesdropping that isn't legally justified.

So there's the real problem that's bothering McConnell, Rockefeller and the oligarchs. Easy backdoor spying on political or economic adversaries is being thwarted. The return of this unseemly practice is the aim of the telecom shield law. If telecoms can't be held accountable for ensuring that legal responsibilities are met concerning privacy and improper searches, then neither can the government and those who misuse it be restrained and held accountable.

Quantum developments peril communications

Nearly all encrypted data that moves over the internet or via secure electronic channels, such as your debit/credit card transactions, is based on a combined public key-private key system. The public key system uses numbers composed of very large primes, which, using classical computation, are considered extremely difficult to
factor.

However, researchers say they have proved that quantum factoring is feasible and are suggesting methods of making quantum computation practical. A paper by an Australian team, with some funding from the U.S. Office of Disruptive Technologies, said its experiment provided a "proof of the use of quantum entanglement for arithmetic calculations." The team, headed by Andrew White of the University of Queensland suggested checking for ways to craft quantum factoring algorithms that take advantage of the specific computer design used.

See http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0705/0705.1398.pdf

Another team, led by Chao-Yang Lu of China's University of Science and Technology, used four photonic qubits (units of quantum information) to factor the number 15.

Further research, the authors say, should be directed at coherent manipulations of more qubits, construction of complex multiqubit gates and quantum error correction."

See http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0709/0705.1684v2.pdf

A pay-to-read article on the topic may be found at New Scientist.

Though the number 15 is dwarfed by the primes used in electronic encryption, the race is on, and there's no telling how long it will be before someone is reading everyone else's stuff. Whoever does so first might become Emperor of Terra.

Well, what about a different encryption system? There's the rub. There doesn't seem to be a good alternative to the public key-private key method for electronic communications. It was a revolutionary development, and revolutionary developments can't be ordered up like a cup of coffee.

Market wobbles
The Fed's attempt to smooth out the market, and the economy, with a major rate cut follows classical regulatory policy. But it doesn't address current emergent problems: the fear of subprime effects; the unforeseen instabilities inherent in burgeoning quant computer trading; awareness that U.S. security officials are grasping for full access to virtually all private financial transactions; and the unsettling possibility that nearly all secure electronic communications are on the verge of being compromised; and that there is no back-up plan to uphold the modern financial communications infrastructure.

Nominee ain't too bright, or...

2007-09-18T07:03:00.001-07:00

He's just another humdrum low-life conspirator.

Mukasey's record as a federal judge was to back Bush's extremist presidential power position in the "war on terror." In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece the ex-judge chastised the crybabies who were worried about our basic American freedoms being imperiled by the sickeningly named Patriot Act.

His point is that America is fighting a dangerous, insidious enemy and must resort to very stern measures. Good point... If you're an idiot and have no idea that forces within our own government stabbed America in the back and then used the incident as a pretext to pile up central power.

No wonder people like Schumer think well of him. Schumer, who backed the Iraq war resolution, has never taken notice of the obvious and extensive evidence of treason and had little problem with the U.S. emulating Israel's brutal interrogation methods.

Mukasey will be expected to make sure the Justice Dept. does nothing about the treason, not that the FBI isn't already well in hand. He will be expected to make sure the FBI "gets the tools it needs" to wiretap and spy on "dangerous enemies of the state" who know that treason occurred and want to do something about it.

Mukasey is a New York lawyer who served the power elite before becoming a judge. Today, he's an adviser to the Giuliani campaign. Giuliani has hinted that something might be amiss when he made a point of saying that he was incredulous at how the twin towers collapsed -- but otherwise he has "played the game" of staying out of the controversy over evidence of massive treason.

Among Mukasey's clients was Roy Cohn, onetime aide to Joe McCarthy. Though Mukasey is right behind Bush-style "McCarthyism," I believe that McCarthy would have had Mukasey on his list of dupes and fellow travelers, based on the old credo: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.

In the meantime, Bush has kicked out the apparently nonpartisan lawyer slated as interim attorney general and installed a fellow whose factional credentials seem to ensure that traitors need not worry.

Scientific debate over WTC collapses heats up

2007-09-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

A scientific debate over the plausibility of the official theory of the World Trade Center collapses is gaining momentum as a Cambridge University engineering lecturer joined the fray by tackling a big hole in the National Institute for Standards and Technology investigation.

The lecturer, Keith A. Seffen, did a study on whether the collapse times -- which were close to the free fall rate -- were plausible and found that they were, according to a BBC news report. Seffen and several other scientists have worked to fill in the gap left by the NIST, which published nothing about the matter.

Seffen's paper is to be published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.

Among reasons that the sudden, rapid, symmetrical collapses have generated skepticism is that the top section of each building was lighter than the corresponding bottom section. Usually, it takes a heavier object to plow throw a lighter one in order to reduce it to shambles rapidly.

Let's spike the conspiracy theorist phrase

The phrase has been turned into a pejorative -- a cheap shot and an easy way to scornfully blow off a critic. Reporters who use it may say that, objectively, the phrase is accurate. But, the Murdoch press and others have made it into a term of derision, and reporters and editors should avoid such labeling.

Personally, I wouldn't mind being termed a treason theorist.

Bush desperately needs another '9/11'

2007-09-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

Faced with all the obstacles in his path, why does Bush continue his Mideast/Iraq policy?

Answer: he and his co-conspirators may have another "9/11" up their sleeves.

After the 2006 Democratic victory, Bush announced a troop "surge," knowing very well that once troops are overseas it becomes politically very difficult for Congress to force their return.

He now says a "gradual reduction" from the surge level is possible, which really means nothing. But Petraeus has said that a reduction will be forced by wear and tear on the troops, who are continually being recycled back to Iraq and whose tours are subject to arbitrary extension. The commander has said this level of commitment in Iraq is damaging the military's global capabilities and can't be maintained.

But consider the slew of laws and executive orders that have been emplaced that can easily be used for imposition of martial law in America and the waiving of basic American freedoms for political dissidents (see Project Censored's top 25 censored stories at projectcensored.org). Simultaneously, the U.S. is becoming increasingly bellicose toward Iran and is setting up a border conflict that might easily be used to justify escalated hostilities.

There's only one problem: The U.S. lacks enough troops to maintain the neocon policy of "pacifying" the Middle East through the soft underbelly of Iraq.

There are two ways to get more troops: set up mercenary brigades or re-institute the draft. Right now, Iraq is full of U.S.-paid mercenaries ("contract employees") but they are not easily constituted into a major fighting force -- plus they're very costly.

Yet a draft seems unthinkable. The resistance would be gigantic. Yet that resistance could well be smothered by a new wave of terrorism-inspired hysteria and propaganda sweeping the nation. For the Bush bunch, the danger of a second massive stab in the back has been that they will be targeted for doing a poor job in the "war on terror." But Bush's term is winding down and he is tending toward lame-duck status anyway. So, politically, how much does he have to lose from such an act, especially now that all the tools are at hand to impose martial law? Who would dare stop the ruling clique from also imposing a draft?

However, chances that Bush could again protect all of spookdom from accountability in a second massive terror attack aren't very high. Heads would have to roll this time. So whose heads will be sacrificed by the conspirators? Something to ponder.

Edwards, Breitweiser and 9/11

2007-09-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Jersey girl Breitweiser, one of the 9/11 widows who lobbied for an independent panel to investigate the attacks, made a political appearance with Edwards.

Though the lawyer turned activist and liberal blogger does not make explicit her concerns about conspiracy, that implication is what gets certain neocons so fired up against her and the others. Despite a dirty deal by Dems to vouchsafe the 9/11 commission coverup, Breitweiser has properly scorned the report as headed by people with sharp conflicts of interest.

Edwards is lagging, and he doesn't have much to lose in alienating the coverup media by working with 9/11 activists. Good move. At least he doesn't come off like a deer in headlights like he did a couple months back when questioned by a 9/11 truth activist.

Hopefully he can somehow work with responsible members of the 9/11 truth movement -- oh, I can hear the Murdochocracy now: Edwards consorts with wingnuts... Who cares? If you're gonna fight, then fight.

The quant menace: connecting the dots

2007-09-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

When the number of computerized quant traders was relatively small, there was little need for them to interact much. But as the potential for huge profit crowds the investment field with quants, the potential for national and global economic catastrophe increases.

As one quant manager said in a Wall Street Journal story today: last month's sudden massive plunges in quant (as in high quantity trading fund) performance was a consequence of too many players. He of course is trying to fine-tune his fund's algorithms.

But the real trouble with computerized statistical arbitrage -- which relies on statistical analysis and the law of large numbers to favor profitability -- is not that it doesn't work, but that that eventually it will be such a powerful market force that it can't work as planned.

What happened in August seems to have been triggered by some unknown quant's short-selling. But short-selling is a key component of arbitrage pricing theory, a technique for taking advantage of statistical patterns in the market. That short-selling spree evidently triggered a round of forced repurchases, with massive losses.

As these arbitrage programs proliferate and their volumes grow, the statistical nature of the market is bound to change. That is, you get a "new force" that, like the market it mirrors, is highly non-linear. Non-linear processes have a strong tendency to become erratic, unpredictable and even mathematically chaotic.

Yes, some traders will improve their algorithms and squeeze out those who are less capable. But, the competitive process will mean that optimization of algorithms will reach a limit. In fact, it's a mathematical fact that an algorithm always has some maximum efficiency. You can't improve on it forever. Optimal algorithms may vary somewhat but they'll all have about the same bang for the buck.

So as computer arbitrage techniques race toward equilibrium, the quants face the likelihood of further sudden catastrophic losses at times that aren't terribly predictable. Of course, one could design an algorithm to monitor -- statistically and via espionage -- the subset of quant traders, but eventually this tactic will also zero out in value as others follow suit.

Consider several computerized players playing poker. Once optimal poker algorithms are achieved, the most probable outcome for any player, assuming each has unlimited funds, is to break even. If each player begins with a finite stake, then the player with the largest (using statistically meaningful differences) stake is most likely to eventually take all, with all the others going bankrupt. If each player has about the same finite stake, that means that there is an equal chance that any player will eventually bankrupt all the others.

This analogue may seem excessively simple. But these "forces" work the same, whether in poker or in a crowded APC field.

However, in the computerized poker games, a cascade effect isn't considered. But sudden, catastrophic APC movements can interact with each other and cascade into the general market, wreaking havoc.

The Bush administration's Wall Street watchers have failed to connect the dots, or, if they have, the intelligence has not reached higher officials. Yet the likelihood of one or more horrific economic shocks poses a far more terrifying threat to national security than anything that occurred on 9/11.

Mob slips terror net?

2007-09-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

The mob can breathe easier... maybe. Organized crime links to terrorism showed up in a Homeland Security data mining operation, but the program, developed by national weapon lab scientists, was killed because other programs are commercially available cheaper, an HS spokesman said.

The pattern recognition program had been criticized for failing to meet privacy concerns, though the reputed misuse of data appears to have been a trivial technical foul. The data had already been vetted for privacy concerns, but just not for this specific program.

Whether we are witnessing the emergence of a row between feds and mobsters over 9/11 complicity is still a matter of conjecture. Certainly the mob's help was required in making World Trade Center steel disappear so quickly, and in quite a few other areas of the coverup.

In the JFK assassination aftermath, such a feud did break out. The mob backed New Orleans DA Jim Garrison's campaign to nail the CIA in the murder. The mob felt that the CIA, which did indeed carry out the assassination, had been trying to steer attention away from the agency by inferentially suggesting that the Mafia was behind the slaying. (Certainly organized crime at least agreed to the hit and had a major hand in the coverup.) Eventually mob boss Carlos Marcello, who had been named as an assassination suspect by a congressional inquiry, was sent to prison on federal bribery charges in what seemed to be an attempt to placate Warren commission doubters with the notion that the real killer had been locked up.

It's my thinking that Marcello was forced by mob families around the nation to take the dive in order to get the heat off the mob in general following publication of the congressional report.

So even though the mob, the CIA and top oligarchs eventually came to terms, the disagreement lasted for years and was extremely dangerous. Not only did many witnesses die but the feud could have exploded into a gigantic political firestorm at any moment.

Are we witnessing such a situation now? I'd say there's a good chance. Increasingly, serious professionals are publicly voicing severe doubts about official 9/11 claims. If you were a mobster involved -- or even not involved -- in the 9/11 coverup, wouldn't you be jittery? Wouldn't you be likely to protect your interests? Even if you believe in omerta, many of those involved aren't "stand-up guys" in that respect.

China go-between stokes Clinton warchest

2007-08-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

Check out yesterday's Wall Street Journal for a sharp piece of investigative reporting on seemingly shady contributions to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

A businessman named Hsu who is a big backer of Hillary and Democrats seems to have used a working class Chinese family in San Francisco to funnel $55,000 to Clinton's campaign and another 150k in lolly for other Dems. The businessman was an early promoter of "engagement" with the Chinese communist government, the Journal noted.
In today's edition, Hsu claims the contributions were by a man named Paw who is now working for him and that nothing illegal had occurred. Paw's father, a mail carrier, and other members of the Paw family live at an address in San Francisco previously used by Hsu.

The Journal pieces appeared during the transition from Bancroft control to Murdoch takeover. Given Murdoch's own coziness with Chinese reds and his detente with Hillary, it looks like the staff chose their publication time wisely.

Update Aug. 30
Hsu has been a fugitive from California for 15 years, reports the LA Times. He was facing three years in prison in a stockholder swindle. Rather than escaping to Hong Kong, as was assumed, he went to New York and resumed his wheeling and dealing, this time becoming a major Democratic Party contributor.

He was hiding in plain sight, often being photographed at Democratic events. Yet, Clinton's staff evidently did no check on Hsu's background to forestall questions about "Asian moneymen" that dogged her husband's campaign.

Hsu may have felt that being politically connected would protect him, as well it might have, had not the WSJ staff had the nerve to run a story that the incoming Murdoch may well have found objectionable.

I'm also wondering about the source of Hsu's wealth. Did Beijing have anything to do with his obtaining seed money for new ventures? Did a connection with Beijing have anything to do with his ability to evade arrest? These are questions for the FBI, of course -- if we could trust that bureau, which we can't.

Wiretap wobbles
Intelligence chief Mike McConnell's public admission that telecom companies are a crucial part of warrantless wiretapping may have damaged the government's claim that lawsuits against those firms must be barred based on the "state secrets" privilege.

But, even had he not said so, wouldn't introduction of the state secrets argument imply that the telecom companies were involved? So the secrets must be about specific aspects of the raft of surveillance programs authorized by Bush after 9/11. Yet it is hard to believe that judges aren't competent to winnow out those aspects that must remain classified.

Upon signing the bill into law, Bush himself said that he wants Congress to pass better (he meant retroactive) lawsuit liability protection for entities that "allegedly helped" American security. The term "allegedly" was no doubt inserted by a lawyer, but its use is logically absurd. That is, "allegedly" means "yes or no." So if telecom firms didn't help, they don't need liability protection. They only need that protection if they helped the NSA or other spook outfits. So we have Bush and McConnell both in effect lifting the states secret ban when it suits their public policies.

As I said in a Znewz1 circular, though Congress rushed through a bad provisional warrantless wiretap law, what we really see is that the control clique is scrambling to try to regain their accustomed unfettered access to anybody's communications. In the wake of the New York Times' NSA disclosures, a number of news reports pointed out that long before 9/11 feds had enjoyed special "national security" arrangements with telecom firms whereby company executives simply looked the other way and didn't inquire about warrants.

The lawsuits have forced these firms to tighten up and make sure that laws are obeyed. Their best protection against liability is a warrant issued by a court.
But even a crooked judge is not going to grant the unfettered access that spook control freaks, representing the Council of Oligarchs, want. This lack of access may not have much to do with terrorists, but it has a lot to do with the economic advantage that comes with being an insider.

Bush is right about the current law being inadequate: it's inadequate for the oligarchs. Because telecom lawyers will be watching every P and Q for the remaining five months of the interim law's time span. Telecom statisticians, who are top rank, will be, or should be, watching government activity for signs of irregularity that could imply abuse.

The "system" has always relied on the power of intimidation. We can listen in at any time. So don't cross us. But now that effect is greatly weakened. The intimidators and control freaks have to go to all the bother of sending out spook crews to monitor specific political or economic "undesirables."

But even if a pro-oligarch law eventually is passed by Rockefeller and others, the telecom firms could still face hassles. A judge might view a hold-harmless clause with jaundiced eyes if their is sufficient evidence to indicate the firm should have had reason to believe that the government order was illegal. Obeying an illegal order can itself be illegal.

Kryptograff blog back
My Kryptograff blog came back to life (coincidentally with Gonzales' ouster) and after I asked Google/Blogger whether a federal agency had ordered the blog censored.
So far they haven't replied to my email.

That account has been beset with morphing bugs. I take that as a back-handed compliment to our influence.

Fisk joins 9/11 doubters
Go to The Independent and search Fisk to read British journalist Robert Fisk's puzzlement about a number of 9/11 mysteries.

He denies being a witting part of a coverup conspiracy but says some facts are just too hard to ignore. Though his column indicates he doesn't know much about 9/11 inconsistencies, at least we are seeing a shift in attitude by a well-known journalist. And, his paper didn't kill the piece.

In the age of the internet, a British journalist can have quite an impact in America. Remember the Downing Street memos?

Tenet seen as 9/11 slacker

2007-08-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

The CIA's inspector general says George Tenet should be held accountable as the director who failed to institute proper coordination and planning that might have thwarted al Qaeda's attacks of 9/11.

I scanned the executive summary and found that the review team had ignored the truth: that al Qaeda was only a dupe in the attacks which were carried out by federally protected operatives. So the report is essentially worthless and simply tends to maintain the ludicrous fictional account. The IG should be held accountable for helping cover up treason.

It just dawned on me that my kryptograff blog was blacked out at about the same time the IG report was grudgingly released. The CIA hates being forced to declassify things, fearing it will look weak politically. So, maybe spookdom won't look so weak if a media critic's work is censored "coincidentally."

It should be easy enough to prove hacking by comparing my blogs with a random sample of other blogs to see whether the number of bugs on mine indicates a non-random pattern. But, why bother? Big Brother always has a Catch 22 to hide behind anyway.

Hacking: a form of hate speech

2007-08-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

Those who have been playing games with my various blogs seem to be afflicted with one-up-itis, which is part of the control-freak syndrome.

The message is always essentially the same: We detest free speech and our only way to answer is by hacking and censoring.

For example, after I sent out a Znewz1 alert about federal employees censoring and spin-doctoring Wikipedia entries, my kryptograff blog was shut down, supposedly after a spam-hunter program spotted signs of spam. This happened previously to a related blog, but in that case one could still read it. This time not. Well, at least their cover stories are inconsistent...

The blackout was particularly irritating because I was unable to send a link summarizing the NIST's 9/11 collapse scenario for review by a group of scientists, some of whom were engaged in an email discussion of the plausibility of the government's 9/11 claims.

Whenever a particularly vexing bit of censorship (via some alleged bug or other computer "glitch") occurs, it always follows something I have written that threatens media control freaks: those who believe all power has been given unto them or at least who strenuously want others to think that.

Their game is, for one thing, to control the debate in the presidential campaigns. Simple as that.

Most likely suspects: feds operating through one or more cutouts.

Surely your'e joking, Mr Conant

2007-08-12T11:15:00.001-07:00

Draft 3

The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed because of an O-ring defect, claimed super-physicist Richard Feynman. Though the shuttle commission didn't agree that the cause was definitely the O-ring, it did concede the possibility and pointed to the joint where that gasket was located as the source of the problem.

The commission also made a brief comment that sabotage was not an issue.

This comes up because I have just read John and Mary Gribbins' account of Feynman's role in the Challenger investigation in their book Richard Feynman, a life in science (Dutton, 1997). The British couple, who have co-written many popular science books, handily pieced together their account from various sources, tossing many accolades toward Feynman for his alertness and brilliance in solving that puzzle, as he had solved so many other puzzles.

But as a journalist somewhat familiar with intelligence and security agency trickery, another possibility jumps off the page: Feynman was being led around by the nose with planted evidence and a craftily helpful general. One cannot be sure whether or not the Nobel laureate was willingly being manipulated. Though a brilliant physicist, at this point Feynmann was suffering the ravages of intestinal cancer and was on his last legs.

Shortly after accepting the call to serve on the panel, Feynman went over to Morton Thiokol where he quickly discovered a report mentioning the O-ring flaw (just like that!). Once in Washington, Feynman was prevented by Chairman William Rogers from doing independent research, but with the help of the NASA chief and the exceptionally helpful general he managed to skirt that proviso, though his preparation barely counts as research.

Feynmann's now famous demonstration of how the O-ring lacked sufficient elasticity when exposed to cold was reported by the Washington Post and New York Times as some sort of breakthrough. Yet, the inquiry was still in its early stages. Whatever happened to Feynmann's vaunted love for the scientific method? Yes, he loved to play the performer. But why perform when the research had only barely begun?

Also, what about the chain of evidence? Can we really be sure that the bit of rubber provided by NASA was the real deal rather than a defective piece in some spook switcheroo? Can you imagine that a security operation wasn't monitoring every move and breath uttered by every commissioner? If you can, you don't know Washington security-politik.

Of course the propaganda value of Feynman's ploy was overwhelming, and the administration no longer had to worry about the political impact from the fears of sabotage that had been current at the time.

Certainly Feynman was terribly ill. But he was alert enough in his reports and public appearances to make it substantially likely that he realized he had done no real science but rather had misled the public and press into thinking a solution had been verified before anyone could possibly be sure.

The commission continued its "work" and eventually issued a report that included an appendix by Feynman. Obviously both the CIA and FBI would have been all over that case long before Reagan suddenly appointed the panel, apparently in response to press reports that NASA employees were in fear of their lives about what they knew. So what was the view of those agencies? The commission seems to have glided over those federal inquiries.

It's quite plausible that the Challenger commission was required to reach a conclusion ordained by the security system. Perhaps security chiefs feared looking bad or -- a darker possibility -- perhaps Soviet moles (remember the Walker spy ring and Aldrich Ames?) were being protected.

Here is one of the reasons sabotage was suspected: Challenger was set to deploy the last satellite needed for activation of a classified three-satellite military communications system. Other satellites intended for this system had been orbited during previous Challenger missions but several had become disabled. News accounts of the time said that a number of military satellite launches had gone awry, though I can now find no reference to that story on the net.

I'm not one of those who think that Gorbachev meant to rein in the KGB. The politburo chose him, I think, because he had the friendly used car-salesman persona more acceptable to the West than did his Oriental potentate predecessors, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko.

Be that as it may. I well recall a news story of the era that reported that NASA had -- before the arrival of congressional investigators -- buried under tons of concrete in deep pits nearly all the physical evidence recovered after laborious undersea operations. You probably won't find that story via Google.

On the day after the disaster (or maybe that night), NASA held a teleconference session with journalists from around the nation. One guy had the audacity to ask whether sabotage was a possibility. His connection went dead and the NASA person acted as though he hadn't heard the question -- which he may not have. That didn't happen to any other questioner, none of whom brought up that already taboo subject.

Yes all this may be so, but why Feynman?

One cannot help but wonder whether a chit was being called in for a youthful indiscretion.

Feynman was a pet of J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project. Later, the whiz kid made light of his propensity for breaking into safes, rather than bothering with red tape, in order to provide Oppenheimer with secured documents. Recent scholarship makes a strong case for Oppenheimer having been a crypto-communist before being called to lead A-bomb research.

Though liberal scientists still believe Oppenheimer got a bum rap for what they see as his principled resistance to development of the H-bomb, more jaundiced eyes wonder whether a communist conspiracy was in action to thwart development of the super. (Let it be known: I detest nukes and totally agree with James B. Conant's principled opposition to development of the super, though I see that such a program became inevitable.)

The Venona files tend to indicate that Soviet intrigue in Washington was, if anything, worse than anything Joe McCarthy could have imagined, and also tend to substantiate Whittaker Chambers' general claims, though not all his details. (Do you suppose the NSA is not still holding back much that is in those files?) George Kennan, in his memoir, averred that the communist conspiracy in Washington had, McCarthy notwithstanding, been quite bad.

At the time MIT graduate Feynman went to Los Alamos from Princeton University, communism was the "in thing" among young Jewish intellectuals as well as generally among those youths who considered themselves knowledgeable atheists. Sorry if you don't like that. True anyway. Think of physicist Theodore Hall, who changed his name from Holtzberg to avoid anti-semitic bias. The Harvard whiz kid, who joined the Manhattan Project as an 18-year-old, was identified as a Soviet agent in Venona files released in the 1990s. Before his death, Hall admitted having been a Soviet sympathizer willing to assist Stalin's A-bomb aims.

Then there was Michael Straight, who used his progressive magazine New Republic to thump McCarthy, while concealing the fact that he had been one of those reds in the State Department that McCarthy was targeting. Straight had joined the communists along with Kim Philby and others while students at Cambridge and had gone onto become an NKVD operative in the State Department -- though he served in World War II as a bomber pilot. President Nixon appointed Straight, a scion of the wealthy Whitney family, as a cultural czar at the National Endowment of the Arts, despite his having secretly confessed to having been a communist spy.

Most kids grow out of such conceits. But, once compromised, how does one escape control? An analagous situation would be that of a young drug dealer forced to do dirty work every now and then for the DEA or some other federal agency. Blackmail may easily have been at work in Feynman's case. Not that he is likely to have cared about himself. But his son, just embarking on a career in science, would have been a worry.

Of course, when assessing motives we should take into account Feynman's idiosynchratic character.

The Gribbins recount the ultimate Feynman anecdote:

In 1981, a colleague, Brian Hatfield, happened upon a van decorated with Feynman diagrams that was parked at Caltech. Hatfield noticed the indices on the symbols were down, as in x_i rather than up, as in xⁱ. Knowing Feynman's casual disregard for such conventions, Hatfield immediately suspected that Feynman was the van's owner.

Peeking in a window, Hatfield spotted a bale of hay. That clinched it! Had to be Feynman.

[A previous draft of this post misspelled Feynman.]

Less is more in some vote recounts

2007-08-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

The 2004 Florida election debacle is only one of a number of recent races in which the razor-thin result was slimmer than the margin of error.

But a vote-by-vote recount is a somewhat dubious proposition. How could one substantially lower the margin of error in the recount? The more votes that are counted, the greater the likelihood of error.

I recall that media firms hired a polling expert to redo the Florida count. Apparently he took measures to lower the error rate, but I am unsure by how much.

So a thought occurs: Why not simply do a random sample when recounting? There is always a specific number of sample elements that will do for a specific overall number of votes to get the result within a 99 percent (or greater) confidence level.

That sample number is always far lower than the population size. So -- as long as care was taken to assure true randomness in the sample -- one would expect that the error in counting votes in the sample would be much lower than in counting votes in the population. So that error, plus the error implicit in the normal curve, might well be kept lower than the error in a recount. That is, the sample result would, in these special cases, give the winner with more confidence than with a full recount.

Will states, or some election judge, authorize such a procedure in a very tight race? It would be a tough sell politically, since the public is likely to believe that a full recount would be more accurate in exceptionally tight races than a random sample result.

Most bridges lack dampers

2007-08-07T08:37:00.001-07:00

A quick review of relevant Google pages convinces me that the vast majority of highway and train bridges lack dampers for absorbing vibration induced by earthquakes, vehicles, construction activity or other causes. Also, a question arises as to whether bridge repair crews should be required to bring portable dampers to the job site.

A federally financed study found in that computerized "smart dampers" could extend the lives of the nation's decaying highway bridges by many years. But no action seems to have followed that study.

A Taiwanese study pointed out the peril of resonance effects on truss-style train bridges and suggested that dampers would eliminate the dangerous resonance vibrations. Likewise, there is little or nothing on the net about use of such safeguards on U.S. railway bridges.

However, earthquake damage has prompted authorities in California and other quake-prone regions to order the retrofitting of bridges with dampers.

One type of damper is a counterweight that moves opposite the direction of swing and tends to tame the violence of the swinging. This type is found in skyscrapers and would have been in the twin towers, for example. Another type is a viscous or hydraulic damper which works exactly like an automobile shock absorber and is sometimes attached to cables on a suspension bridge or on a stay cable between the deck and the anchorage. (See Friction factor, Bridge Design and Engineering, July 10, 2003, via Google.)

Virtually no cantilever truss bridge -- the type that collapsed in Minnesota -- appears to come with dampers.

When tuned mass dampers are used on bridges, they are generally meant to subdue vibrations of the deck, rather than the structure as a whole, it appears. Of course, such dampers would still tend to curb vibration of the remaining structure if the vibration originated principally on the deck, as presumably occurred in Minnesota.

(For a good glossary of bridge parts, see http://nireland.com/bridgeman/Dictionary.htm )

A federally financed study published in 1999 by a University of Oklahoma team found that computerized "smart dampers" reduced maximum stress on highway bridges by as much as 65 percent in their computer simulation. The authors of the report, W.N. Patten, J. Sun and Annie Zeng, argued that such dampers could extend the lives of America's highway spans by many years, offering an intermediate alternative to the immediate replacement of the many substandard structures.

A Taiwanese study reports that though "steel truss bridges possess the advantages of light weight, high strength and ease of construction," a design problem is that high-speed trains may set off dangerous "multi-resonant peaks" of vibrations. That is, the bridge shakes in tune with its natural frequency, and may collapse.

Jong-Dar Yau, a construction technologist at Tamkang University, said his computerized model showed that tuned mass dampers effectively suppress these resonances during shaking from high-speed trains.

The tuning of a mass damper means to set it to absorb vibrations at specified frequencies. So one consideration might be whether in future construction crews bring mass dampers with them to offset construction vibration.

Regarding the resonance conjecture
I had forgotten the fact that soldiers are often ordered to break cadence when crossing bridges in order to avoid setting off resonance vibrations. We also know that the Millenium Bridge, a footbridge in London, had to be retrofitted with dampers after people walking on the bridge tended to match strides, triggering a resonance wobble.

Bizarre blackout
A spot check shows no further media interest in the matter of vibration or wobble and no interest at all in the matter of the use of dampers in order to safeguard lives. Either the search engines are being jiggered while I use them -- a distinct possibility -- or the word is out to avoid issues prominently mentioned here -- also a distinct possibility.

Aug. 10 2007.Yesterday's N.Y. Times had a story on a conjecture that a truss connector plate was the culprit. The story also acknowledged that some experts viewed jackhammer effects as a potential trigger.

A shaky situation

2007-08-06T11:30:00.000-07:00

Every time a layer of concrete was removed from the I-35W bridge, it would wobble, construction workers have said.

The wobble would be a consequence of load redistribution, no doubt. The removal of the weight might cause the truss system to expand something like a spring. Now if those supports had fatigue cracks, those cracks could have expanded as the support system adjusted to the load change.

If the truss system would shift so noticeably after its load was lightened and shifted, one might expect that mechanical vibration from jackhammers and big pavement pounders would contribute to the weakening of the supports.

BTW, the word wobble appears in yesterday's stories, but not the word vibration.

Bad, bad, bad, bad vibrations...

2007-08-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

You may have first read of the vibration conjecture concerning the Minnesota bridge collapse here, though Pat Doyle of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune quoted a former National Transportation Safety Board chairman as suggesting the possibility that vibration was potentially an important issue in a story that appeared Thursday, a day before my jackhammer physics post.

Following my post was an excellent Chicago Tribune story (see below) on the opinion of structural engineers about the plausibility of the vibration conjecture. Yet, TV news has mostly ignored that issue, as have major print media outfits, other than those that ran the Doyle story. An AP reporter also quoted one expert to that effect within a larger story, but no AP feature on that issue has shown up.

I ran a search of the words 2007, bridge, vibration (or vibrations) at the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Reuters and BBC and came up with zilch in every case. Likewise for searches of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. A Google search shows little coverage.

Still, today is Sunday, so it is possible the vibration angle will appear in various newspapers. Yet, the fact that it is missing from TV news -- as if Americans can't absorb the word vibration -- suggests a general agreement to spike the story.

So why would establishment media largely shrink from covering such an obvious follow-up issue?

Paranoia is a possibility. News chiefs fear being accused of putting ideas into the heads of terrorists. What if terrorists, posing as construction workers, use jackhammers to set off a bridge collapse? The fact that for any particular bridge the possibility of success is extremely remote wouldn't enter the discussion.

Then there are those in the invisible government who are horrified at the idea that yours truly might be on the right track about a structural collapse. Does that mean -- dear God -- that there are experts who agree with this critic about the 9/11 building collapses?

Political intimidation bill clears House

2007-08-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

The House went along with the Senate's OK of a Bush demand for widened warrantless eavesdropping, reputedly as part of a "terrorist surveillance" program.

OK, so what terrorist in his or her right mind is going to make it easy for the NSA to eavesdrop? Don't you suppose they'll be using strong encryption -- provided by sympathizers in their region -- along with sophisticated measures such as digital pictures containing extra pixels that encode secret messages? True, it is possible to detect and just maybe decipher such messages, but the work involved certainly will slow down intelligence collection.

So then why pass such a bill? As one civil liberties activist noted, what this bill means is that there is a strong likelihood that politically active people will come under NSA surveillance.

The invisible government -- oligarchs, spook honchos, media potentates and a certain element of the hard left -- hopes to cow critics into silence. No? Recall the no-fly program. Many people who did not remotely fit the profile of a terrorist have nevertheless been barred from flying based on their political activism. Recall Bush's recent edict unilaterally authorizing the Treasury to freeze assets of anyone, including Americans, whose political activity was deemed to assist people who might be violent.

Fortunately the surveillance bill has a six-month sunset clause, but Congress nevertheless took a dangerous gamble with our liberty.

Senate endorses treason

2007-08-04T10:28:00.001-07:00

The U.S. Senate has yanked both the impeachment, treason, abuse of power, and accountability issues off the table by backing Bush's demand for an expanded warrantless eavesdropping program.

The GOP, Lieberman and 16 Democrats voted to give Bush this power, and also voted to send a signal that they agree with "the system" -- oligarchs and media potentates -- in upholding the authority of Bush and Cheney despite outrageous evidence of treason on 9/11 and repeated abuses of power. They are saying Bush and Cheney are fit to lead.

It isn't only Bush, Cheney and a group of top-level spooks who are evading accountability, as this vote shows. It is also a group of business oligarchs who don't favor their dirty laundry being aired, as it inevitably would be in a close-up on treason.

Hopefully, the House will adjourn without acting on this despicable measure, but chances are that the wire-pullers will maneuver the House into going along.

Vibration a top suspect in collapse

2007-08-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

Construction machinery vibration is high on the list of suspects in the Minnesota bridge collapse, according to a Chicago Tribune story.

Because of the bridge design, extraordinary care was called for in I-35W's concrete repaving work, experts told the Tribune's John Hilkevitch.

"Pavement pounding can damage a bridge truss member or the floor beams; precautions must be taken," said Karl Frank, a structural engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

An anonymous engineer who was on site prior to the collapse told the Tribune that there was a "lot of redecking going on and a ton of vibrations" from pavement grinders and jackhammers. "There was also a lot of equipment on the bridge -- probably more than they should have had on there."

The vibrations from the pneumatic hammers and from the 1000-pound ramming heads could cause one weakened truss to fail and set off a cascade of structural failure, experts told Hilkevitch.

The steel support structure under the roadway had shown signs of metal fatigue in a number of places, though they seemed routine and set off no alarm bells. But, small cracks can spread under persistent heavy pounding, according to Edwin Rossow, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University.

"If that is what happened -- and it's purely speculative at this point -- the newly weakened condition of the bridge would then be exposed to the heavy rush hour traffic on one side of the bridge, affecting how loads are delivered to the superstructure," Rossow said.

The physics of jackhammers and bridges

2007-08-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

Jackhammer resonance may be a plausible suspect in the Minnesota bridge failure.

We know that the Twin Cities interstate bridge was structurally deficient but not considered highly unsafe.

The National Transportation Safety Board says it will take about a year to publish its analysis of the collapse. In the meantime, here is something reporters might want to ask experts, such as engineers and physicists: Is it plausible that, in a freak confluence of circumstances, a jackhammer set off resonance vibrations in the structure that led to a sudden critical weakening of a truss?

Slow-moving bumper-to-bumper traffic was stressing the bridge to the max. The faster traffic moves, the less the load per square foot.
However, despite substandard ratings, there had been no indication that the bridge could not support such a load.

But the combination of maximum load, substandard condition and vibrations set off by the jackhammer might well have triggered breakage of a joint or truss.

A witness told MSNBC of hearing the pneumatic hammer shortly before collapse. Construction crews were on the span doing deck repaving at the time. The construction company, which was not touching structural elements, would have had no reason not to proceed with work.

When a jackhammer is used on a ground-based roadway, it sets off minor seismic waves. But the earth is so immense and dense that the waves are rapidly dissipated. However, on a bridge, the waves first have to travel through the steel structure to reach earth.
Hence an undulating motion must occur, though in most cases one would expect the waves to dissipate harmlessly. But, in a freak choice of location, the jackhammer could set off waves that set up a near resonance with the bridge span or structural part.

Additionally, the waves travel different paths through the steel support system, meaning that it is possible that most or all might recombine at some critical point, giving a laser-like energy burst. Some waves, rather than fanning out and weakening, would travel in a near linear path, preserving their strength. And there is always the possibility that, after taking different paths, they merge in phase at full strength.

In the early 1940s the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed during moderate winds. Photos showed that the bridge span twisted at a near resonant frequency. Since then, no engineer has failed to take into account the potential for wind resonance.

But, how many would think of jackhammer resonance? A jackhammer doesn't put out a great deal of energy with respect to the potential energy of the bridge. Yet, the tool is a driver: it keeps adding energy, which could possibly result in the resonance-like focusing of wave energy at a critical stress point.

The jackhammer pumping energy into the bridge from some critical point, and at just the right frequency, is equivalent to someone pushing a child on a swing, giving a shove at regular intervals. It isn't long before the child is swinging at maximum arc and, if the pusher doesn't halt the resonance, an accident will occur.

This just in: "I would be stunned if this didn't have something to do with the construction project," said David Schulz, director of the Infrastructure Technology Institute at Northwestern University. "I think it's a major factor."

Murdoch skirts anti-trust safeguards
The fact that no concerns have been voiced by U.S. antitrust regulators over Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal shows either that U.S. trust laws are flawed and need overhaul or that Justice Department enforcement is inadequate.

One consideration should be the globalization of the Murdoch media. The heft of News Corp. overseas is not unrelated to the menace of media cartelism in America, but regulators are not making that connection.

Similarly, one would think that British and Australian regulators would be concerned that the acquisition of Dow Jones poses anti-competition concerns in those countries.

Random thoughts on political polling

2007-08-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Gallup poll method is reputedly tried and true, but I am wondering whether it is really the best approach. Seems needlessly complicated to me.

However, the book I looked at is a bit outdated, so perhaps Gallup's method has changed. According to the book, Gallup's presidential campaign poll is based on a questionnaire designed to screen out people who aren't likely to vote. But the extensive questionnaire could itself introduce bias -- i.e., what type of voter is likely to have time or patience for such a session?

Here's how I would design a political poll. Gather data from several previous national elections to see the percentages of people who identify themselves as Democrat, Republican and independent who vote versus those who don't.

Take a random sample of Americans (only a few thousand are needed for a population of 300 million) and ask them how they plan to vote, and perhaps one or two other questions. Then weight the sample outcomes according to the percentages who in recent history actually vote.

This method should be highly accurate (95% confidence level) because it preserves the randomness while taking account of those who express an opinion but who end up not voting.

One can use this method nationally, for the popular vote, and state by state, for the electoral college result. What about big cities, with lots of Democrats, versus suburbs and rural areas, with lots of Republicans? As long as the sample for a state is random, these differences should tend to cancel out.

New exit poll strategy
Really, I doubt the claims that the 2004 exit polls were way off base because youthful poll takers across the nation nearly all ignored the randomization requirement and buttonholed "their type" who were more likely to be Kerry supporters.

However, a way to counter such a problem would be to change the randomization procedure, perhaps interviewing fewer people. The method used in 2004 required the interviewers to approach every 10th voter exiting a polling station. Yet, a proper random sample usually doesn't need 10 percent of the specific population. Neither is it necessary to check every precinct, though this makes the average person feel that the method is better.

Just as in pre-election polling, the key is a sufficiently large (but not huge) random sample from around the state. That is, X number of precincts are chosen at random. Interviewers are sent only to those precincts. There, Y number of exiting voters are queried. Quantities X and Y are easily determined using statistical methods.

But how do we ensure that interviewers don't bias the results?

Randomly sample the interviewers and have a monitor check for interviewer selection bias. Let the monitor assign a weight to the bias. So then a specific percentage of interviewers can be expected to have an average bias (standard deviation) in favor of one or the other candidate (assuming a two-way race).

Additionally, a panel of independent statisticians could review the exit poll results, with the option of a minority dissent.

Don't cry, fight

2007-08-01T10:49:00.001-07:00

Well, if the Ottaways and disaffected Bancrofts are really upset with Murdoch's takeover, why not compete? Or does Murdoch's takeover deal include a no-compete agreement? Even if it does, one can always find ways to silently back a competitor.

Why not gather together a group of investors, some flush with Murdoch bucks, to set up a really new media outfit, one without all the baggage of antiquated ways? Form a hybrid of the best of the new and the old media to form a concern that makes a statement: Excellence, honesty and reliability are what we sell.

I doubt whether a no-compete clause can cover a general interest concern that includes expert business coverage. In fact, one can always make a legal case that there is a key difference between business news and financial news.

Though Murdoch is planning to parlay Dow Jones into a business news network that competes with CNBC (which for the next few years has exclusive rights to Dow Jones data), there is also this: an international conspiracy to limit the presidential campaign discourse and assure an outcome acceptable to Murdoch's silent partners. Whether this ploy will work as the information age rapidly morphs is hard to say.

Anti-dictator deal needed
No one in his or her right mind should trust that Bush/Cheney won't invoke some form of martial law in order to keep control.

What is needed is a deal that if Bush lifts a pinky one more time in that direction, impeachment proceedings will begin against him and Cheney. Pelosi, who would become interim president, would need to give her word that she would not run for election to the presidency in 2008. That would placate the current Democratic presidential candidates.

Unfortunately, that assurance would immediately make her a lame duck. But, the trade-off beats the peril of dictatorship. Amid new disclosures over Bush's sweeping surveillance programs, one can hardly claim that concern over the peril of dictatorship is merely a result of a paranoid conspiracy theory.

A phrase that usually conceals disagreement

2007-07-31T08:28:00.000-07:00

U.S. news accounts yesterday and today were full of wishful thinking about Gordon Brown's purported backing of George Bush concerning Iraq and counter-terror operations.

Yet, in the words of the London Times, "Brown chose to describe their talks as full and frank, a phrase that usually conceals disagreement."

Despite press hyperbole, the fact remains that Brown announced a major counter-terror initiative that in truth challenges Bush's leadership in this arena.

That shift was made more evident in his UN appearance, when he underscored his desire for a global war on poverty via a commitment to the economic uplift of poor nations. Such a commitment is in line with Brown's desire to dilute the appeal of extremists to oppressed youths.

Another point that should not be underestimated: Brown announced that British troops would end combat operations in Iraq, being withdrawn to "overwatch" status. Such withdrawal from combat to fortified bases has a great appeal to those Democrats whom Bush regularly castigates for weakening national security. Does that sound like support for Bush?

In addition, Brown's Darfur (I guess I'll go with this spelling) initiative is important on several levels. He believes in the use of military force for humanitarian purposes and such deployment is in stark contrast to the fiasco in Iraq. He, unlike Bush, has the credibility to get such an initiative off the ground. In fact, the London Times reports that this initiative is almost a done deal.

Then there is global warming. Laborites have in the past denounced Bush's inattention on this matter as far more dangerous to international peace and prosperity than the menace of al Qaeda and the jihadists. Brown's Washington Post article indicates that his foreign policy is intended more or less as a seamless garment in contrast to Bush's Rube Goldberg arrangement.

Bush tried to make the best of the photo and broadcast ops at Camp David. But the real story is in what Brown did not say, such as a refusal to answer a question as to what he saw as the major mistakes of the Iraq war. And, though Brown's Washington Post article is unsuited for sound bite theatrics, diplomats everywhere see a new paradigm in London.

Why is so much of the media anxious to play up bogus solidarity? Perhaps there is a fear that the system of news controls is in danger of unraveling.

A chink in the system?
Of course, the idea that news controls might unravel is counterpointed by Rupert Murdoch's takeover of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.

Yet it was Murdoch's London Times that highlighted the clash between Brown and Bush. Of course the Times has a restraining order in place to shield it from Murdoch's blandishments. And Dow Jones also is to be protected by such an order of restraint. Though such restraints are imperfect, they suffice to put in doubt the continuation of monolithic top-down news controls.

Brown's new counter-terror strategy

2007-07-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

In what appears to be a major shift in emphasis, Gordon Brown is promoting a new, wide-ranging strategy to counteract the menace of Islamist terrorism, based on the Cold War model of deterrence. His article in the Washington Post used studied ambiguity with respect to the use of war to combat terrorism.

The prime minister emphasized that terrorism is a crime and urged the full resources of diplomacy (number 1 on the list), intelligence, police and military forces (last on list) be deployed against extremists. The phrase "war on terror" did not pass his lips.

Brown said that though the world owes America a debt for its leadership in the counter-terror struggle since 9/11, it is now time for a new approach: A major commitment to deterrence along Cold War lines, coupled with a cultural and ideological war (he did not use that phrase) as was done to counter Soviet propaganda.

Without saying so explicitly, Brown seems to be distancing himself from the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war based on suspicion or perceived national interest. His remarks on the Iraq and Afghanistan operations are opaque. In responses to reporter questions today, Brown seemed to setting a tone of general agreement on ultimate goals without being very specific about differences. An AP reporter's claim that there was no daylight between Bush and Brown views had little to substantiate it.

At the news session, Brown's commitment to a continuing military presence in Iraq was muted, despite his desire to appear cooperative with Washington. Brown held his cards close, saying further decisions would depend on assessments of military commanders.

In what may be a veiled rebuke to both Bush and Blair, Brown said that Britain and America share the ideal that "government should be open and accountable." Bush is known for his penchant for secrecy and lack of accountability, and Blair's government was embroiled in efforts to control media coverage of embarrassing leaks.

Brown urged international boots on the ground in Dharfur to address the humanitarian crisis there. Colin Powell, when he was secretary of state, accused the Sudanese government of genocide in Dharfur. Since then, it has been disclosed that the White House and CIA have been quietly working with the murderous regime to counteract Islamic fundamentalists.

Also, Brown said globalization shouldn't be seen "simply as a threat" but did not spell out what he had in mind. Globalized free trade is a major concern of Islamists, who fear the undermining of traditional values from foreign influences.

An unfettered free market has the systemic problem of cartelism, whereby those with the deepest pockets use lowball pricing to corner a market and then enter into a phase of low competition. This tendency is certainly an issue in Brown's Labor Party.

Though Brown did not address the issue of subversive elements triggering 9/11, he surely realized that his use of Cold War imagery obliquely raises the possibility. After all, the penetration of British intelligence by Soviet moles is a well-known sore point.

And, by emphasizing that terrorism is a crime, he leaves the door ajar for the possibility that the attacks of 9/11 are unsolved crimes.

The use of Cold War allusions is quite interesting in light of the darkened relations between Britain and Russia over the radiation terrorism used against a Putin critic living in London. Vladimir Putin and his ex-KGB comrades are well-versed in the arts of terrorism and subversion. As is well-known, prior to its collapse the Soviet Union was a chief sponsor of Arab terrorism (though the CIA also had a major hand in fomenting jihadist fervor in Afghanistan and Pakistan).

So one wonders whether a full-scale intelligence effort against extremism might imply a covert struggle against a resurgent Russia and its brand of pseudo-communism.

A slap at liberty

2007-07-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

What is Bush up to? Or, that is, what is Cheney up to? They know the American people are fed up with their shenanigans, but they shamelessly continue. Where are they going?

An executive order signed this month by Bush should give you some pause. The idea is to seize the assets of persons who help promote violent persons or who might be violent persons. That is, it's up to the Treasury Dept. to seize assets -- with no warning -- of people, including American citizens, of people deemed to be lending support to violence. You thought something like that required a court order. Wrong again. At least when you're hit with a "slap" lawsuit designed to stifle dissent, you get your day in court.

This new edict, as Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, suggests, could easily spill over into non-judicial punishment of persons who are too effective in their criticisms of Bush and Cheney.

Why word the order so broadly unless the intention was intimidation of Americans? Keep your mouth shut, or we'll bankrupt you.

Now it becomes apparent that the methods used to isolate professionally and economically individual journalists and critics such as myself are to be deployed more widely as the subversive system faces more and more danger.

After all, it's not much of a step between public discussion of cooked prewar intelligence behind the Iraq fiasco and 9/11 subversion.

Is this paranoid thinking? Well, know them by their fruits. Bush's intelligence chief is aggressively pushing Congress for wider powers never mind the administration's bad record. Bush has at his disposal a martial law measure that overrides previous safeguards. Bush protects an attorney general who has backed abuses of power widely regarded by lawyers to be beyond the pale.

The TIPS program, where neighbors tell on their neighbors, is still going strong, though under another name. The old Soviet Union had a similar program in its early decades. After a rush of public input, the comrades would scrutinize the material and haul off hundreds of thousands of "counter-revolutionaries" to their doom. The helpful public generally had no idea how they were being deceived.

And of course Halliburton is building massive detention facilities -- called in another day "concentration camps" -- able to hold hundreds of thousands of people.

It's unfortunate the Congress lacks the political will to impeach these guys. They may pull off yet another power grab.