Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Library Workshop Manual study materials for library competency exam Monday Oct. 7

Sunday, September 22, 2002

Attack on America link from essay I article
telegraph.co.uk--Gulf War general says Iraq invasion 'totally unjustified': The Telegraph has learnt...of a growing unease among senior British officers. One serving officer said that Britain and the US should embark on a war only with the sanction of the UN. He said: the Army is apolitical and will do as it's told. But there is concern that an invasion of Iraq could totally destabilise the entire region. Saddam Hussein has been contained for 10 years. The question being asked is, 'Why choose war now?' - especially when there's no proof that he's linked to al-Qa'eda. As I've been saying for two years on this website (see my archives), the answer to this question lies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. No Virginia, the precipitous drop in the value of corporate stock punctuated by the intermittent bubble does not amount to a "sluggish recovery."
Rense.com--What The UN Should Have Heard: Ladies and Gentlemen of the International Community: I speak to you today of a grave threat to the international order and peace. There is a nation among us that is an immediate danger to us all, requiring immediate action by all peace-loving countries that believe in the rule of law. This country has a long history of brutality and disrespect of civil rights and international law. The list of UN resolutions that it has ignored or sabotaged is nearly endless. It is for all these reasons that I call on you today to foment regime change in the United States by any means necessary. An editorial I've been wanting to write myself for some time. He might have added a few points like this regime overturns free and fair elections, has used chemical weapons on its own people (where did that anthrax come from?), etc. It's positively spooky how every belligerent word out of the bushoilcia mouth is self-referential: the worst leaders in the world with the worst weapons.

Thursday, September 19, 2002

Wednesday, September 18, 2002

Tuesday, September 17, 2002

Philadelphia Daily News--Three-minute discrepancy in tape: A Daily News investigation has found a roughly three-minute gap between the time the tape goes silent - according to government-prepared transcripts - and the time that top scientists have pinpointed for the crash. The FBI and other agencies refused repeated requests to explain the discrepancy. But the FBI has clamped a tight lid of secrecy on the flight data recorder - which could best show how Flight 93 actually crashed - and on the cockpit voice recorder. "There is no sound of the impact," said Kenneth Nacke, whose brother, Lou Nacke Jr., is one of the passengers believed to have fought with the hijackers. Last fall, as the saga of the Flight 93 passenger uprising became widely known, several relatives of the crash victims made an unusual request: They wanted to hear the actual tape. The FBI initially issued a cold refusal. "While we empathize with the grieving families, we do not believe that the horror captured on the cockpit voice recording will console them in any way," FBI Assistant Director John Collingwood said last December. But under continuing pressure, the bureau changed its mind and agreed to the unusual April gathering at a Princeton Marriott hotel. Numerous witnesses in the Shanksville area have told the Daily News and other publications since last September that a mysterious, low-flying unmarked white jet, military in nature, circled the area at the time of the crash. Grose, the former NTSB member, said he doubts the entire story of Flight 93 will ever be told. "I don't think so," he said. "It's like David Crockett at the Alamo. We need heroes." Well, that's a relief. When they said they the family members listen to the tape, and none of the following interviews expressed any doubts, I thought "could I be wrong? Could the official story be right?" Now that it's been revealed a year later that the tape is unaccountably missing the key three minutes that would test the accuracy of the claimed cause of the crash, it's clear that the whitewash marches on. I did wonder at the time why the tape didn't seem to be as horrific as the FBI claimed as an excuse to withhold it from the families. Once again an apparent anomoly around 9/11 comes with a number of "plausible" explanations, but there is as yet no plausible explanation for there being dozens of simultaneous anomolies.

Friday, September 13, 2002

Ambush near US-owned mine in Papua suggests Indonesian army involvement: “An attack on foreign nationals and on Freeport and consequently blaming the OPM is on the one hand an effort to discredit the OPM as a terrorist organisation and on the other hand a warning to Freeport that it cannot operate without the protection of the Indonesian army.” As the article pointed out, even if Papuans or an OPM splinter group did carry out the ambush, that did not rule out the involvement of the Indonesian security forces. It noted that “over the years a number of so-called independence leaders in Papua have worked with the military”. Brigham Golden, a member of the US Council of Foreign Relations task force on Papua, told the newspaper: “The military in the past has used OPM elements as proxies.” If it can pin the attack on the OPM and brand it as “terrorist” organisation, the TNI can bolster its case in Washington for the resumption of ties with the US military. For months, under the guise of its “global war on terrorism,” the Bush administration has been pushing for the overturn of a US Congressional ban on training and support for the Indonesian military. The attack on Freeport could provide a convenient pretext for the US to provide support for Indonesian operations in Papua. In which case the CIA probably told them to do it, but they screwed it up by using M16's while the OPM uses bows and arrows, just like Hatfill making the anthrax so well, nobody but the US military could have done it. Come to think of it, outside of statements of responsibility by Hamas, we only have the word of various military spokesmen for the origin of all the terrorist bombs and shootings of the past few years.

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

TheBostonChannel.com - Helen Thomas--A Different America: We are still trying to fathom the depths of the hatred that brought this incredible catastrophe to our land and transformed our lives. Many see us as arrogant and uncaring about the rest of the world. Bush claims the terrorists are motivated by hostility to our freedom. Others see them impelled by religious zealotry. But the motivation for such virulent hatred obviously deserves more probing. since Sept. 11, we have seen a widespread acceptance of unprecedented "big brother" security measures. The corporate media is now punctuated by expressions of uncomprehending surprise at the apparently widespread resentment of US indifference to the world's suffering along with scolding admonition that "we" should really try to figure out why everybody doesn't love us as we love ourselves. Since the 1970's the corporate media has gradually and systematically removed all images of the world's suffering from the disneyland reality it constructs and delivers to the US population except where the corporate government has impending actions, at which time it delivers a biased collection of sound bites and file tapes calculated to garner popular support or acquiescence with its already decided upon intentions. The general American apathy and ignorance of the geopolitical world is a testament to the power of corporate mass media to manufacture consent in Noam Chomsky's terms. People assume that media content is dictated by an objective measure of relevance rather than the narrow interests of its owners. By ratcheting down geopolitical information gradually, the corporate media succeeded in evading a perception of suppression, and the collective American mind arrived by the 1990's at a sense of the irrelevance of the problems outside its national borders regardless of the direct culpability of its corporate government for those problems. With few exceptions, only academics and political radicals turned off CNNABCNBCCBSPBS and sought an understanding of the international context of US policies elsewhere. Not one of them shares the real surprise of the general population at the lack of enthusiasm for our power and privilege "out there," or believes the uncomprehending remorse of the corporate media that actively created it. The corporate propaganda war against socialism since WWII and especially since Vietnam commonly focused on state censored media as one of the proofs of its evils, but censorship accomplished by the corporations who control mass media is defined by themselves as "free speech" i.e. the freedom of individuals to control their own property. The result has been that, while the pluralistic political views of alternative media has been allowed to persist for those whose training has induced any interest in undergoing the effort to pursue it, the mass media that is delivered to the mass population that determines the hegemonic legitimate (i.e. not marginalized radical and therefore illigitimate) reality is more censored than Pravda ever was, and Americans of the 21 century more ignorant of geopolitics than any Soviet