Associated Newspapers Ltd--A biological weapons laboratory in Iraq is said to be making a deadly strain of virus codenamed Blue Nile, which American intelligence officials believe is the Ebola virus. Washington is trying to pinpoint the location of the laboratory, revealed by defectors and Iraqi exiles. They described underground test chambers, tight security and a staff of 85 people working to equip Iraqi's military with biological agents powerful enough to inflict heavy casualities on any American invading force. The Pentagon is examining satellite images of the west bank of the Tigris river in Baghdad, the Washington Post reports today. "It sounds credible," a Pentagon intelligence analyst is quoted as saying. "But proving it is another matter." Feverishly working to engineer a plausible justification for sending thousands of Americans to their deaths in their war for global oil monopoly, and not making any headway in the polls with Sadam's stepson arriving in Florida to take flying lessons, a secret ebola factory seems to the bushoilcia perhaps threatening and credible enough. So you want to move to America and be set up in a witness protection program type retirement plan? What can you give us? Got any info on secret bioweapons programs? What do they make there? Anthrax? Botulism? Smallpox? How about Ebola? Maybe some place underground where bunker busting tactical nukes would be necessary? How many people work there? 50? 100? Let's average the contradicting tales out to 85 for the press "leak."

NZ Scoop--Investment Espionage And The White House: There is growing evidence that the FBI and other government intelligence entities are more closely linked to the documented accumulation of pre-9/11 insider trading profits than was originally thought. But thus far the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee has not publicly referred to prior knowledge of the attacks as it relates to stock transaction profits, while also failing after nine months to publicize the critical Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “control list” report tracing what in effect were stock trading profits of death. The fraud-racked Enron Corporation has had at least 20 CIA agents on the payroll in the last eight years. But while the Houston Chronicle reported the operatives as “former” CIA, a February 26, 2002 National Enquirer story quoted a top Washington insider familiar with several secret investigations into Enron, as reporting that they were given “leaves of absence without pay and put on the Enron payroll.” The source added that Enron’s CIA members used “info gleaned from a satellite project called ‘Echelon,’ which intercepted emails, phone calls and faxes with detailed business information,” adding that “pure and simple, [taxpayer-funded] U.S. intelligence agents were involved in corporate espionage.” Another Enquirer source with ties to the CIA revealed that "the cozy deal between Enron and the CIA allowed the 'on-loan' undercover operatives to return to the Agency's payroll before Enron's collapse." But no public information has been forthcoming as to whether such “detailed and unique information” or sensitive CIA software was used in conjunction with Enron’s controversial off-shore investment products, or whether their missing assets may have been employed in what former German Minister of Technology, Andreas von Bulow, estimated at $15 billion in insider trading profits. (Tagesspiegel, Berlin, 1-13-2002) Von Bulow then buttressed his astounding charges: “26 intelligence services in the U.S. with a budget of $30 billion....For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence let fighter jets stay on the ground....48 hours later, however, the FBI presented a list of suicide hijackers. But within ten days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive.” This article might qualify as a "scoop" in New Zealand if they measure it against the corporate monopoly US press who still along with multiple war crimes in Afghanistan have not found it newsworthy. Taken together with recent arrests of active duty elite Israeli border soldiers and officers for selling arms and ammo to Palestinian militants for nominal prices and the accusations of Indian complicity in the attack on their own pariliament, the revelations about the Fort Detrick origin of the anthrax and the failure to arrest the known perpetrator or to identify the source of pre 9/11 put options or explain the US military training of the alleged hijackers, etc. etc. should by now make a pattern of engineered terrorism to further war mongering imperialist agenda clear to any moron.

NYPOST--THE RAPE OF POLAROID: check out the plight of bankrupted Polaroid Corp.'s shareholders, who are about to be shorn of $1.1 billion in balance sheet assets and $175 million of shareholder equity. THE ploy? An accounting maneuver that is shifting the assets, seemingly free of charge, from Polaroid's books to the books of a Wall Street partnership that is set to take Polaroid private in a buyout for less than $24 million of actual cash money. Some of the biggest names in high finance are involved in this stunt. By doing so, they will convey 65 percent of Polaroid's reorganized common equity, including 65 percent of the value of those $1.1 billion worth of mysteriously missing assets, to the aforementioned Wall Street buyout fund. At that point, Polaroid will become a private entity and no longer required to issue public financial statements. So the company's ravaged public investors will never get to see those $1.1 billion of balance sheet assets - including a priceless corporate art collection and the stock of all Polaroid's foreign subsidiaries - magically reappear. In reality, the assets hadn't disappeared at all. They'd simply been valued at zero for the purposes of the bankruptcy proceedings, even though the company had valued them at more than $1 billion in a public financial filing only eight weeks before going bankrupt. Not surprisingly, when I asked a Polaroid official to name the individual investors in One Equity Partners, he declined, saying, "It's private. We're not divulging that." When I next asked whether the fund's investors included members of Polaroid's management, he waffled and said only, "Not that I know of." As business failures skyrocket in the weakening economy, you can look for more of this sort of thing to come out of bankruptcy courts - especially when the money that is up for grabs is so huge. As for Polaroid, expect to see stock in the company offered by One Equity Partners to investors all over again, via an initial public offering, as Wall Street's endless cycle, from IPO to Chapter 11 and back again, repeats itself once more. So they shake off a crowd of investors on the trip through the revolving door and pick up a new crowd on the way out. In addition to the president and vice president, the corporations and their accounting firms, we now have their banks and law firms not simply conveniently negligent, but conspiring to commit multi billion frauds. If nobody goes to jail, the last of their credibility will be gone and we will see a depression that places the capitalists and the working classes on opposite sides of an adversarial dispute.

NYPOST--THE RAPE OF POLAROID: check out the plight of bankrupted Polaroid Corp.'s shareholders, who are about to be shorn of $1.1 billion in balance sheet assets and $175 million of shareholder equity. THE ploy? An accounting maneuver that is shifting the assets, seemingly free of charge, from Polaroid's books to the books of a Wall Street partnership that is set to take Polaroid private in a buyout for less than $24 million of actual cash money. Some of the biggest names in high finance are involved in this stunt. By doing so, they will convey 65 percent of Polaroid's reorganized common equity, including 65 percent of the value of those $1.1 billion worth of mysteriously missing assets, to the aforementioned Wall Street buyout fund. At that point, Polaroid will become a private entity and no longer required to issue public financial statements. So the company's ravaged public investors will never get to see those $1.1 billion of balance sheet assets - including a priceless corporate art collection and the stock of all Polaroid's foreign subsidiaries - magically reappear. In reality, the assets hadn't disappeared at all. They'd simply been valued at zero for the purposes of the bankruptcy proceedings, even though the company had valued them at more than $1 billion in a public financial filing only eight weeks before going bankrupt. Not surprisingly, when I asked a Polaroid official to name the individual investors in One Equity Partners, he declined, saying, "It's private. We're not divulging that." When I next asked whether the fund's investors included members of Polaroid's management, he waffled and said only, "Not that I know of." As business failures skyrocket in the weakening economy, you can look for more of this sort of thing to come out of bankruptcy courts - especially when the money that is up for grabs is so huge. As for Polaroid, expect to see stock in the company offered by One Equity Partners to investors all over again, via an initial public offering, as Wall Street's endless cycle, from IPO to Chapter 11 and back again, repeats itself once more. So they shake off a crowd of investors on the trip through the revolving door and pick up a new crowd on the way out. In addition to the president and vice president, the corporations and their accounting firms, we now have their banks and law firms not simply conveniently negligent, but conspiring to commit multi billion frauds. If nobody goes to jail, the last of their credibility will be gone and we will see a depression that places the capitalists and the working classes on opposite sides of an adversarial dispute.

Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase said to help Enron hide debt: investigators are also expected to testify that the banks had similar arrangements with other companies and that J.P. Morgan Chase even actively sold clients on its ability to alter finances in this way. Investigators said the banks were not unwilling partners in these sham trades, which reports said carried names such as "Yosemite" and "Mahonia," but rather orchestrators who taught Enron how to fool their investors. J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup not only knew they were using questionable accounting, but "actively aided Enron in return for fees and favorable consideration in other business dealings," said Robert Roach. "The transactions we entered into with Enron were entirely appropriate at the time based on what we knew and what we were told by Enron," Citigroup said in a statement. "We were assured that Enron's auditors had approved them, and we believed they were consistent with accounting rules in place at the time." Investigators believe the deals with both banks helped Enron understate its debt by 40 percent and overstate its cash flow by up to 50 percent, according to Tuesday's Journal report. The right relationship is everything.

(Bloomberg) -- The government should consider reversing a more than a century of tradition and law to give the military authority to make arrests and fire their weapons on U.S. soil in the event of a terrorist attack, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said. Fears that terrorists might attempt a nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. territory are prompting some lawmakers to support revisions to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of the military in civilian law enforcement. Biden said he may revive a proposal he sponsored with former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn to revise the Reconstruction-era limits the Army, Navy, and later the Air Force's law enforcement authorities. That plan was prompted by the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building by a domestic terrorist. It seems clear that such measures are not designed for foreign islamic militants but for civil unrest expected if the worst case scenario for the US economy occurs. If there is no spontaneous combustion recovery of the economy, and if operation infinite warfare does not provide sufficient stimulus to production and the recovery of the value of labor to avert depression conditions in America. If a double dip unemployment spiral leads to massive defaults on the extreme level of personal debt, and an American population accustomed to binging on cheap sweat shop consumer goods from China and elsewhere paid for on ez credit find themselves standing on breadlines after losing their houses and cars along with their jobs and retirement savings, it would be customary for group behavior to lean towards the type of unrest we are witnessing in Argentina. Although highly unpredictable, rioting and looting are the traditional response to rapid drastic degradation of material conditions. The estimated four hundred members of al Qaeda before the Afghan carpet bombings who have not been heard from since (if that wasn't sufficient provocation, what's supposed to be?) don't amount to a single group of heavily armed Patriots in Idaho who already have the necessary visas to take flying lessons. Notice that this is the first time that domestic terrorism has been alluded to in government information dispatches concerning "Homeland Security." CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. are more than sufficient for a group with the known means of al Qaeda unless we go off on flights of Ashcroft/Rumsfeld driven imagination of dirty bombs. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines would only need arming on US soil for a larger mission. Terrorists armed with biological weapons have only come from Fort Detrick; never yet from Iraq. Do we believe bushoilcia about the nature of the threat these invisible, voiceless and unlocatable villains pose? They may lie about their corporate paperwork getting lost and being unable to figure out their income disclosure forms, but they must be scrupulously accurate in matters of national security. Ashcroft may have exaggerated the Padilla/al Qaeda dirty bomb plot, but we need no demonstration whatsoever of the threat that he claims to know from super secret intelligence sources justifies rearming all the soldiers in America. After all, aren't both houses of the capitalist janus faced government supporting him? Or does it matter what we need? Is this an appeal for the advice and consent of the American people or simply preparing the population for measures already decided to be worked out between the unelected officials of the bushoilcia cabinet?

washingtonpost.com--Israelis Fear Bread Shortage: Baruch Turjeman, head of three of 18 flour mills in Israel, said the they could no longer absorb the increased cost of importing wheat from the United States, where he said a poor crop this year had resulted in higher prices. Not mentioned that the cause of the "poor crop" (really no crop at all) is the two years of unprecedented (since the dust bowl days) drought in the US breadbasket midwest. How quickly is climate change becoming a serious life and death problem?

FreshAngles.com--There is more to the story here than just India and Pakistan dueling for a piece of land that seems to be insignificant. There is money and political power also serious parts of this problem. To go along with what has been happening in Asia, there are many people who would enjoy seeing India and Pakistan fight for a longer period of time. Countries such as China, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Singapore all have some sort of political or economic purpose in this problem.In all, the Unites States is doing more than just fighting terrorism. They are creating unrest in a region that could eventually be the start of the next significant war the world will have to see. Not only is the US pitting two opposing countries together, but they are also pitting two different religious groups against each other. These religious groups have been fighting each other even before the creation of the Unites States; they don’t need an excuse to attack and kill each other, their hatred runs deep into their religious pasts. The US is playing with fire, and this fire isn’t your normal fire. This type of fire can’t be extinguished very easily. You mean some parties can actually profit from big endless wars? The same site also covers the curiously timed withdrawal of Switzerland from its 150 year policy of neutrality.

ScienceDaily Magazine -- Damage From Acid Rain Pollution Is Far Worse Than Previously Believed: Amid the recent hoopla over the EPA and Bush administration's plans to make it easy for power plants, oil refineries and chemical factories (major sources of acid rain nationwide) to expand without installing new pollution controls and the Senate's consideration of Clean Power Act, there's an important new wrinkle to the story. A new study revealed that acid rain's damage to America's forests may be much more widespread than previously believed. It may actually create conditions in trees similar to compromised immune systems in humans, establishing a vulnerably with grave potential implications. I've been studying the use of passive voice in news stories. Environmental damage and capitalist malfeasance are worse "than previously believed." I teach my students never to use passive voice in expository writing. You have to say who believed it, I tell them. Yet passive voice turns up in specific journalistic contexts. One of the ironies here is that the acid rain that will fall from here to eternity as a result of head of EPA Christy Whitman's beliefs falls mainly on the plains of her own state, New Jersey.

(AP)--Palm Beach's New Voting Machines Have Problems: The voting machines that replaced butterfly ballots and hanging chads are checked by an "Enron-style of auditing" and don't provide voters any assurance that their votes are being cast, an expert testified Tuesday. "The problem with the self-auditing machines is if it's broken, how can it tell you that it's broken?" Mercuri said. The suit includes affidavits from eight voters who said they had trouble casting ballots on the ATM-style machines and says voters should be given paper receipts to confirm their vote was recorded. It also seeks to allow an independent review of the voting machines and related software and security features. Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore says such a review would void the machines' warranty and that they've been reviewed twice by labs appointed by the federal government and also by a state worker. "I'm not willing to let anyone take a machine and take it apart," LePore said. "I don't think the taxpayers would appreciate them taking apart a $3,500 machine and voiding the warranty." Yeah, yeah, and nobody pays more taxes than General Motors. I've been hearing this "I don't think the taxpayer wants" phrase a lot lately from Republicans. With rigged polls and voting machines, there's a lot of guess work involved in politics nowadays. What more could those litigious spendthrifts want than labs appointed by George Bush and a Jeb Bush employee reviewing the machines that can put them out of work?

CNN Money--William the Conqueror: Honest, if brutal, CEO: Welcome to CNN Money Morning. Today we have William the Conqueror, CEO of Norman Corp., which just posted its quarterly numbers. Welcome to our show, Mr. Conqueror. "Thanks, call me Bill." Great. Those numbers looked a little flat; can you tell us about them? "Yes. The economy is down and our chain mail isn't selling. ... Our chief accountant here at Norman Corp. suggested labeling our repair bills as 'investments' so that this quarter's results will look better. ... His head now adorns my wall ... We will not use numbers to lie about the fact that we aren't selling enough chain mail." Nothing like losing your money to teach you a sense of humor. It's too bad that the Norman Conquest is a hostile takeover of a Bermuda company instead of the real analogy: Iraq.

Rumor Mill News Reading Room Forum McCain, Lieberman And Financial Deregulation--"McCain, who once, like every other politician in Washington, sought the money of Silicon Valley industrialists to finance his ambitions, today dons the mantle of Teddy Roosevelt, the populist Republican Trust Buster," the article points out. "McCain is out-Democrating Democrats in his lust for a corporate crackdown, becoming the first to publicly attack the icons of Silicon Valley. He now demands new laws that did not occur to him when his economic adviser said stocks would quadruple." n the course of a related story, the New York Times reports "In 1994, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets accounting standards in America, retreated from its proposed rule to require options to be expenses. It reacted to heavy political pressure directed by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, who had pushed through the Senate a resolution opposing the plan on a vote of 88-9. He then proposed legislation to all but put the board out of business, but dropped that proposal after the board backed down. Never mind that the guy who wrote "Dow 36000" makes ten times my salary as a "resident scholar" when my predictions about the future of the economy were accurate (see my archives). The SF Chronicle does not, as I do (see my archives) identify McCain as a right wing mole whose job it is to come in when the Republicans are suffering in the polls to coopt left wing positions before any left wingers get credit for them (only his crusades never seem to work), and the NYT does not, as I do (see my archives) identify Lieberman as a Republcan in Democrat clothing.

CNN Money (AP)--Following the Senate's lead, the House will pass a bill mandating new criminal penalties for company fraud as lawmakers act to shore up investor confidence, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay said Tuesday. The legislation to create stiff penalties and jail terms for executives who deceive investors was adopted Monday by a unified Senate but rebuffed by the House in April when it passed a bill to tighten oversight of the accounting industry. The House measure, to be voted on later Tuesday, "is tougher than the Senate bill," DeLay, R-Texas, told The Associated Press. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress Tuesday that the criminal penalties included in the Senate measure are "the most important part of the bill." America, meet the pigs who have the keys to your treasury and weapons of mass destruction. Tom Delay can personally take credit for half of the legislation making Enron et al shenanegans possible. The parade of Republicans attaching their names and faces to the crusade against runaway corporate greed is astounding: Judicial Watch, John McCain, Billy Tauzin and now Tom Delay. While McCain has successfully passed himself off as a Democrat while failing in his passionate attempts to remove the influence of big money from government (aw shucks), the assertion of the compatibility of corporate regulation with the unambiguous historical political agendas of the others raises US political perversity to a new level (of course unremarked in the corporate media). By labeling the issue a "crisis of confidence" rather than a crisis of capitalism, remedy is identified as a matter of the subjective beliefs of Americans about the nature of their economy in which PR plays the determinant role. Theoretical prison sentences for hypothetical executives (doesn't anyone remember the hypothetical fifteen year sentences similarly passed by congress in the wake of Mitsubishi/Ford-Firestone mercenary killings and cripplings never actually imposed?) therefore serves both masters. If the problem was identified as one of substance rather than perception, they would put Ralph Nader on it instead of Thompson whose Providian career reeks. That, in addition to the president, vice president, treasury secretary, attorney general, and defense secretary, the corporate capitalist government can't find someone who doesn't smell of pig to lead their PR crusade should clue us to the nature of the problem.

The poll, conducted July 12-15 of 1,109 likely voters nationwide shows voters now giving Bush a 62% positive, 38% negative job performance rating, a new low mark since the September 11th terrorist attacks. In June, Bush received a 69% positive, 28% negative job performance rating, and a 70% positive, 30% negative, rating in May. In February, voters gave Bush a 74% positive, 25% negative rating. The week before the attacks, voters gave Bush a 50% positive, 49% negative job performance rating. The usual objection to my contention that the buhsoilcia engineered the WTC attack has to do with motive. The jump in alleged Bush approval by 24% in itself might seem inadequate for a crime of this magnitude, but it must be understood that the level of unilateral right wing policy wish lists and treasury embezzlements would not have been possible with an unelected administration commanding an approval rating about to dip below half the population. The Afghan war, nor the Iraq war, nor the retention of the $1.5 tax embezzlement for their rich patrons, nor multi-billion dollar Halliburton contracts in Cuba and Central Asia, nor multi-billion dollar appropriations for their cronies in military/intelligence establishment through "homeland security" all of which halted the crash of the markets leading up to 9/2001 and produced the figures now being touted as proof of an ongoing recovery despite the resumption of the depression spiral directly impoverishing the population through portfolio devaluation, job losses and currency devaluation. After a statement universally quoted by corporate media by German intelligence BND that bin Laden lives which contained in the sixth paragraph an unambiguous denial of his responsibility for the attack which not reported by any corporate media, the direct culpability remains an unsolved crime. The principles normally directing criminal investigation are motive and opportunity. While Giulianni, who left our city with a larger sovereign debt than most nations after twenty years of unprecedented corporate profits, the pain of which deficit has yet to be "shared" out, was almost beatified despite his incompetent handling of the disaster costing many hundreds of police and firefighter lives, might make a claim for motive, opportunity as the means to coordinate and carry out the peripheral security, financing, and logistics elements limits the range of suspects. The question necessarily posed as: who "besides the US military/ intelligence allies of the bushoilcia" had such means? assumes the absence of sufficient motive on the part of the excluded party. It also assumes that any benefit to the excluded party from the crime, is rendered inadequate by the moral character of that party. The mountain of evidence drawn from the history of the bushoilcia renders such an assumption a violation of the basic principles of criminal investigation.

ArabicNews.com--Well-informed French sources disclosed on Sunday that the French
authorities asked The ruler of Qatar Sheikh Hamad Bin Khaleifa al-Thani during his recent visit to Paris to carry a message to the Iraqi leaders saying that the "count down for a large military operation in Iraq has started." In a statement to the same paper al- Sammirai said that the plan does not sound logical because it requires preparing huge number of troops and also requires logistic preparations that need a long period of time lasting for several months. He explained that if the "invasion operation" takes place, it will be costly and difficult due to reasons relating to the complications of the operation and the American lack of preparedness to accept heavy human losses. Stay tuned for corporate media indoctrination towards accepting Vietnam level body bags. Arabs seem unaware that months of preparations have already taken place with troops being surreptitiously stationed in Jordan, and who knows where else: Turkey? Israel? Kuwait? Yemen? Somalia?

Yahoo! News BERLIN (Reuters) - Bin Laden Along Afghan- Pakistan Border -- Spy Chief: Hanning said major attacks such as the September 11 suicide assaults had taken place with bin Laden's blessing, but that he had not been involved in operational planning. "He didn't prepare the attacks operationally, probably didn't even know all the details of the preparations," said Hanning. His comments follow a statement on Wednesday by a man claiming to be a spokesman for al Qaeda that bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar were alive and well. Had I not read down to the sixth paragraph, I wouldn't know by US corporate media news reports that BND in the same statement denied bin Laden's responsibility for 9/11. Am I crazy, or was his direct responsibility used several times to justify $150 billion ramp up in military spending for war on Taliban who offered to turn him over for free if evidence of his guilt was produced, which evidence could not be revealed to us owing to national security concerns? If person "claiming to be a spokesman for al Qaeda" wants to convince me for some reason that he's alive, wouldn't his own face on video be more compelling?

(AFP)-- US, British aircraft strike Iraqi anti- aircraft batteries: "Coalition strikes in the no-fly zones are executed as a self-defense measure in response to hostile Iraqi acts against coalition forces." A Central Command spokesman refused to provide any details about the location of the targeted Iraqi installations of characterize the anti-aircraft fire encountered by coalition planes. How I knew bushoilcia was going to invade Iraq a year before bin Laden invaded the world. It's perfectly plausible that there has been no other motive for such attacks than self-defense against facilities that direct attacks on "coalition" i.e. US/Brit pilots just doing their jobs. On the other hand, such attacks also always precede invasions. I guess the only way to know which motive accounts for them is the credibility of statements issued by Central Command, but Rumsfeld told us that bushoilcia will lie to us from time to time in order to throw terrorists off guard. That lets out unquestioning faith in their statements

(Bloomberg) -- Senators from both parties blocked a bid by Senator John McCain to force a vote on requiring U.S. companies to treat stock options as an expense on their balance sheets. ``Why would we not vote on it?'' McCain said on the Senate floor. ``It's because every lobbyist from the high-tech community in this town has said, don't do it, don't do it.'' The legislation is opposed by Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt, House Republicans, and by 22 corporate trade associations representing companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. Another opponent is Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat. He protested the London- based International Accounting Standards Board's plans to draft rules forcing options to be charged against earnings. `We believe that changing the expensing rules on stock options is a detriment to economic growth,'' said Lieberman spokesman Adam Kovacevich. Former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay exercised $180.3 million of options from 1998 to the end of 2000, and former chief executive officer Jeffrey Skilling got $111.7 million from options in that period, according to company filings. Those sales occurred as the company inflated earnings by hiding losses in affiliated partnerships. Lieberman supports corporate greed while McCain opposes it. I guess we don't have to vote the Republicans out of the government to get the criminal pigs off our backs.

World Socialists--Washington's phony pretext for Iraqi invasion: The aim of any attack on Iraq will be not the elimination of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons programs, but the furtherance of Washington’s hegemonic control over the oilfields of the Persian Gulf. Scott Ritter, a former US Marine, headed the Concealment Investigations Unit for the United Nations Special Commission Unit (UNSCOM) that operated in Iraq. He has testified that by the time UNSCOM was kicked out of Iraq in 1998, Iraq’s weapons program had been destroyed and the country had effectively been disarmed. He has also revealed that UNSCOM functioned as a means provocation and to provide the pretext for greater US intervention. In a column published earlier this month in the Los Angeles Times, Ritter charged that the plot to assassinate Hussein and use covert CIA and Special Forces teams inside Iraq was deliberately leaked to the media in an attempt to sabotage any revival of weapons inspections. He also confirmed Iraqi suspicions about the use of the weapons teams by US intelligence. “I recall during my time in Iraq the dozens of extremely fit ‘missile experts’ and ‘logistics specialists’ who frequented my inspection teams and others,” he wrote. These “experts,” he said, were “drawn from such US units as Delta Force or from CIA paramilitary teams such as the Special Activities Staff”; in other words, trained assassins. The contention here is that information leaked to the mass media is not the result of random leaks, but tactical in nature and should be analyzed by the public according the the hypothesis that it is calculated to produce a desired result. It is absurd to expect that a country that has been publicly identified as an imminent target of invasion by an overwhelming military superpower would allow representatives of that power to enter to inspect its weapons facilities.

(Reuters) - The head of President George W. Bush's new corporate-crime task force served as a director at a credit-card company that paid more than $400 million to settle allegations of unfair and deceptive business practices, officials said on Saturday. But they said Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson was unaware of problems at Providian Financial Corp. until they were unearthed by U.S. regulators, and he then played a lead role in pushing the company to recompense consumers. Thompson chaired the Providian board's audit and compliance committee until he took up his Justice Department post in May 2001. The previous year, the San Francisco-based company, under pressure from federal and state regulators, agreed to pay a total of $405 million to customers it allegedly bilked through hidden charges and deceptive sales practices. "As an outside director of Providian, he only became aware of the problems when the regulators began to make inquiries," Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo told Reuters. "And as soon as he was aware of the issues, he personally took the lead in making the company do the right thing." Not only have Bush's Harken shenanegans been reduced to a low interest loan from insider trading (just as his foreknowledge of the 9/11 atrocity is based only on two isolated FBI memos rather than five direct warnings from foreign governments) but the fact that Thompson's role at Providian was "outside" excuses the fact that he only stepped up to suggest that some unidentified level of compensation for bilked customers is adequate redress after the company was busted for malfeasance. Even if we give him as much benefit of the doubt as Providian's fraud depended on from their customers, if the problem is credibility, the fact that they can't find someone to fill the role who is manifestly ethically untainted is not going to help fix it.

The G-Files--[The vice president] received tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from firms awarded state contracts in Maryland, the FBI file alleges. [Spiro T.] Agnew, who died Sept. 17, 1996, at age 77, consistently denied the allegations. He eventually pleaded no contest to tax evasion and received probation, avoiding a jail term. Agnew never returned to politics, living out his final decades in relative obscurity in Ocean City, Md., and Palm Springs, Calif. He was not the first vice president to face criminal charges or resign from office -- Vice Presidents Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun beat him to that -- but Agnew was the first vice president to depart in disgrace with a criminal record. You didn't say "only vice president."

CNN--The September 11 hijackers were able to open several U.S. bank accounts using illegitimate Social Security numbers, FBI officials said Wednesday. Officials said the hijackers appeared to have relied most heavily upon SunTrust Banks for the movement of funds through accounts opened in Florida. Investigators have traced the transfer of a total of $325,000 through SunTrust accounts held by the hijackers in the year leading up to the attacks. The Atlanta, Georgia-based SunTrust is cooperating with FBI investigators looking into the accounts. Officials said the false Social Security numbers used to open the accounts appeared to have been randomly selected and were not legitimate or stolen Social Security numbers. "This shows how the hijackers worked the system. They knew where the vulnerabilities were and exploited them to their advantage," an FBI official said. Why I believe the bushoilcia planned, fiinanced and perpetrated the WTC disaster, shot down the Pennsylvania plane, and faked the attack on the Pentagon using a drone and diverting a 757 full of coconspirators into hiding Part XXIV. Each new piece of information can plausibly be explained according to the official story that Osama bin Laden, coordinating a highly complex and sophisticated network of dedicated Islamic fundamentalists from a Taliban protected base (al Qaeda in Arabic) of operation in Afghanistan, financed by his own $300 million inheritance and contributions from sympathetic Moslems primarily in the Saudi, UAE, and Egyptian elites (but not ruling families or his own), having turned against his former allies in the CIA with whom he waged war against the Soviet Union in that country, owing to US military occupation of Saudi Arabia, etc. after the Gulf War, whereupon he was immediately cut off from his family, prominent super rich partners in many US businesses including Carlyle Group, a joint venture of the leaders of the right wing military/intelligence establishment of the Reagan/Buh era, including the current president's father, with the help of two or three al Qaeda leaders, planned the operation for at least two years, sending five dedicated martyrs to learn to steer jumbo jets in the US, along with fifteen patsies who thought they were engaging in an ordinary hijacking. These al Qaeda leaders arranged for all travel and wiring of expense funds from Afghanistan as well as the multiple departures and reentries of some of the terrorists from the US until all arrangements were in place. Then Osama gave the go ahead, and four jumbo jets were simultaneously hijacked. None of them being intercepted by the Air Force, two hit the WTC with full gas tanks in such a way as to collapse both buildings straight down, destroying a third WTC building in the process, a third was forced to crash when the passengers bravely attacked the hijackers, one of them having time to make a cell phone call describing the events on the plane. The fourth crashed into the ground level outer wall of a section of the Pentagon that fortunately was under renovation at the time and empty of people (also fortunately right next to the only fire hydrant on the huge grounds of the building), one of the passengers, the Republican employee wife of a prominent Republican legal official, also being able to cell phone collect her husband to inform him of events transpiring on the plane. The almost immediate identification of the hijackers was facilitated by the discovery of one of their passports in the rubble five blocks from the WTC. Secret information in the possession of Donald Rumsfeld and shared by him with Tony Blair and two or three other leaders of the free world left no doubt as to the identity of the mastermind. Beginning with an assumption of the accuracy of this account, each new piece of evidence is largely (although not altogether) plausible. Even the fortuitous survival of the WTC conflagration of a hijacker's passport (though no other passenger's) having been blown with sufficient force from the exploding plane does not defy the laws of physics. Nor is the ability to generate undetectably fake social security numbers that did not already belong to anyone from Afghanistan necessarily impossible to a long time asset of the CIA and student of American security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, not a single piece of information that has emerged since 9/11 disqualifies my original suspect, the bushoilcia (Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush Sr. certainly among the cognoscienti) by either means, motive, or opportunity. Occupying the Executive of both federal and state governments and familiar with American methods and capabilities of detecting wire fraud, identity fraud, and money laundering, as well as with practice of funding covert operatives abroad, they are among the few parties in the world capable of generating bank accounts under undetectably fake social security numbers through which could be wired hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single year undetected. Not mentioned in this CNN piece is the fact that the hundred grand wired to Atta came from the former chief of ISI Pakistani intelligence, also long time allies of the CIA in the covert war of attrition against the Soviets, who on the morning of 9/11 was meeting in Washington with the heads of US FBI and CIA, an extraordinary meeting attracting much attention in Pakistan, and while plausibly innocently explicable, consistent with a planned invasion of Afghanistan for which Us armed forces were already in place.

The Miami Herald--Let gays, lesbians adopt, Reno says: ''If you can be a perfectly wonderful parent, and take an unadoptable child and make them adoptable, you should be able to do that,'' Reno told about 250 people at the Gay Lauderdale networking luncheon at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Fort Lauderdale. Oh good. Is she going to vote for Jeb Bush herself? Can she be oblivious to the fact that the Republicans are losing their Christian right wing moron support base owing to the blatancy of their hypocrisy, and she can only remind them why they voted Republican in the first place? Is she going to start advocating that atheism be taught in elemetary schools and that poor single women be given tax breaks to have abortions? Maybe now would be a good time to suggest that a percussion bomb should have been dropped on Waco like it was on Move in Philadelphia. Florida has become an important state as it is the direct route of the bushoilcia around the obstacles of the democratic process where they control the executive from top to bottom, where terrorist pilots unaccountably are trained unmolested, people mysteriously drop dead from anthrax otherwise only targeted at major media power icons, democrat voter rolls are inadvertantly limited and chad punchers inadvertantly malfunction. It's also al qaeda of the crusade for enduring freedom to wreak infinite justice on the weapons of mass destruction of the axis of terrorist evil. A Bush in the governor's mansion is worth a thousand in the booth.

World Socialists--US preparing full-scale invasion of Iraq: Such a war would rank as one of the great imperialist crimes of the century—an unprovoked attack by the world’s biggest military power against a nation that has been ravaged by more than a decade of sanctions and subjected to unceasing military and political provocations. Washington’s basic war aims, behind the rhetoric about “weapons of mass destruction” and the “war on terrorism,” are entirely predatory. The US wants to seize control of Iraq’s oilfields and turn the country into an American protectorate. Last October, at my sister's birthday party, I had a chance to talk to some of my family members who are relatively informed on political issues. Finding informed people to converse with is increasingly difficult and I enjoy the opportunity. These people disagreed, however, with my main contentions: that the World Trade Center attack had been engineered by a Bush loyalist faction in the deep intelligence establishment; that the anthrax was certainly domestic in origin and probably also engineered by the same faction; and that war on Iraq was imminent. Since then, an increasing number of voices on the internet have proclaimed agreement with the first two contentions, and now the third (of which I had been convinced for some months before 9/11) is more generally acknowledged. Their argument against an Iraq invasion was based on an apparent factional dispute among the Republican executive which, they claimed, the dovish faction was winning. My argument was that war on Iraq must happen because the global capitalist economy, despite propaganda and engineered appearances, was crashing without the help of Islamic terrorists, and would continue to do so after the terrorist panic justified government spending ran up to its feasible debt limits, and that imperialist war is and always was the only way out of the depression cycle endemic to the capitalist system. Despite all objections and all principles of reason, capitalism needs this war, designed to usurp monopolistic control over the world's energy supplies, and therefore, this war will happen. This World Socialist article makes many important points, all valid, but does not mention the biggest issue currently determining the unfolding of events. There are only two realistic alternatives: nuclear destruction of the most ancient seat of human civilization, amounting to an unjustifiable genocide of an impoverished peasant population along with all its archeological and historical wealth; or a war of attrition killing thousands of American soldiers. After years of conditioning by the corporate ideological aparatus to a two week attention span, the shock of 9/11 is fading as quickly as Chandra Levy and George Pataki's anthrax attack, and a single shooting at LAX together with a constant refrain of terrorism threats impending is not sufficient to reawaken it. The hamfisted attempt to pin anthrax on Saddam and the growing suspicion of bushoilcia complicity in 9/11 make another fake terrorist incident extremely risky. True, Americans are so conditioned to apathy towards the miseries of the world beyond their borders that they will probably sit quietly while the invasion is launched, but it is a big question mark as to how long a train of coffins returning from Baghdad it might take to generate any organized resistance. Hence: Homeland Security overhaul is on the fast track.

Cheney, Halliburton, face suit over accounting: "Whether it is the Enron, Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing, or now the Halliburton and Harken scandals, there is a dangerous intersection between politicians of all stripes, Democrat and Republican, attempting to feed at the trough of business greed," said Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman. A couple of weeks ago, I wondered aloud (see below) why a right wing legal group like Judicial Watch was representing postal workers suing the government for covering up military/ intelligence involvement in the anthrax attacks. I speculated that, because the attempt to implicate Islamic terrorists (probably sponsored by Iraq which was identified as the only ones who could have weapons grade spores) was so incompetent that it quickly fell apart revealing the US secret bioweapons program source, the only option was to suppress media coverage as far as possible. Since the families of the dead victims were not likely to go away quietly, the best option for damage control was to have the right wing legal arm take the case to demonstrate that it's not necessary to vote the Republicans out in November because the right wing is no more complicit in the "terrorist" coverups than the left. Now Judicial watch is being touted all over the media as leading the attack on Cheney's corporte criminality. I now must look into their record to see if, as I suspect, this kind of case is inconsistent with their ordinary practice. I was under the impression that what they normally "watch" is the bias of liberal judges (mostly relics of the Carter administaration). If so, their highly public role in the fight for "corporate responsibility" (who gets paid for coming up with the nifty wallpaper behind Bush's Wall Street speech?) similarly attempts damage control designed to limit the inevitable perception of the Republicans as the party of white collar crime before the November elections. Cheney's malfeasance could not be kept from the media forever, so the best option is to usurp its prosecution from the left wing (who raised the issue when it mattered, during the campaign), demonstrate that, like John McCain and his astoundingly significant campaign finance reform, Republicans also protect the citizenry from the abuses of the rich and powerful. This would explain Klayman's emphasis on "politicians of all stripes, Democrats and Republicans" feeding at the trough of capitalist greed, ignoring the 20/80 disparity in political contributions from the criminal corporations he names to the respective parties.

Weather Modification Summary of Ongoing Cloud-Seeding Projects in Texas - the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation: All of the cloud-seeding projects, in progress and proposed, benefit from a substantial amount of State funding made available by the 77th Texas Legislature. The funds, available through the TDA, help those political subdivisions (water districts, water authorities, county commission, municipalities) sponsoring the cloud seeding to pay for their projects. In fiscal year 2002, over 2 million dollars in TDA funds have been obligated to help pay for the rain-enhancement projects currently permitted for operation in Texas. Record flooding not natural?

Guardian UK--Bye bye American pie: Behind the crisis in corporate America is a combination of pernicious Southern conservatism and unadulterated greed. The integrity of the entire system for channelling savings into investment is now in question as is that of corporate America, just as America's debts to foreigners and its own consumers indebtedness have reached unsustainable levels. The country has been living beyond its means and inventing value when none existed. No one can predict with certainty how this will unravel... This is not just a case of companies fudging a billion here or there, as President Bush said in his folksy statement on Friday, and hoping nobody notices, a problem, as he characterises it, of individual ethics rather than systemic deformation. Rather, this is where America's business culture has led, legitimised by the conservative ideological barrage now a generation old which has transformed American public discourse. Everything should and must be pro-market, pro-business and pro-shareholder, a policy platform lubricated by colossal infusions of corporate cash into America's money-dominated political system. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, for example, described the abysmally lax 1996 Telecoms Act, deregulating the telecoms industry and the precondition for the current scandals in the industry, lobbied for ferociously by WorldCom in order to unleash market forces, as 'living proof of what unlimited money can do to buy influence in the Congress of the United States'. The truth is that American business has bought the American executive and legislature alike. The US will find its way back, as it has done before, but only when its conservative hegemony and its compromised ideas have been broken. This will be a Herculean task, for the rise in conservatism has deep roots. It is no accident that WorldCom, whose accounting fraud cost $3.8 billion, was based in Mississippi and was a generous contributor to its hard-line conservative senator, Trent Lott, minority leader in the Senate, as Ed Vulliamy reports today. Nor that Enron, whose profits were vastly overstated by accounting fiddles, was based in Texas and whose relationship with George Bush was so close. The rise of American conservatism has closely followed the rise in the economic fortunes of the Confederacy, together with its belief in a take-no-prisoners form of capitalism. The new Right thinkers provided the intellectual cover, providing populist slogans calling for 'freedom', accusing all forms of government of being 'coercive' and deriding the social contract as a cause of 'dependency'. It didn't take long before Wall Street joined in, insisting that the companies should serve the interests of their owners first and foremost - the doctrine of maximising 'shareholder value' - and that regulation inhibited 'enterprise'. Bit by bit, the edifice of Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society programme have been dismantled... Perhaps one of the revelations to come is that there is and have always been legitimate political positions to the left of "liberal." One of the victories of the "new Right thinkers" has been to cast socialism, present in every parliament in Europe, into the outer darkness of irrational extremism, so that even capitalist only ever blame all ills on "liberals." Socialists, however, are not the ones surprised by these developments. And while it was easy during the booming bubble of the past decades to proclaim the end of cold war, capitalism having proven itself once and for all the better man, in the end, the forecasts of socialism have been vindicated (and will continue to be). It is not hard to predict "how this will unravel." As the capitalist system teeters on the brink of total collapse, having run out of third world to exploit and worker resources to sap, it fortunately still has plenty of weapons systems. The optimism of this editorial is hard to understand when predicated on the breaking of the "conservative hegemony" and its "compromised ideas." This is not the direction they are moving. The conglomeration of all media under the telcom act cited as an example and facilitator of the corrupt and unsustainable corporate capitalist system, pushed by the Clinton "new Democrats," the party that was supposed to protect the working classes interests from corporate influence peddling is even now being maximized by Colin Powel's son in charge of the FCC. The war on Iraq which jumped from why to how without discussion or resistence by the "new Democrats," will ensure that the current power structure will not be vulnerable to opposition, and they will not voluntarily relinquish their power agenda. Even the best intentioned capitalists will fail to "reform" the system effectively owing to their rampant stupidity and greed. War is the only way out, and a little Desert Storm or Crusade for Enduring Infinite Freedom from Evil-Doing Terrorists, won't do.

AP-- Despite assertions they knew little, Enron directors ignored repeated warnings about problems, Senate report says: claims by former directors that they were kept in the dark are untrue, a Senate report concludes. But Washington attorney Robert Bennett, who is representing Enron, said the report is setting the responsibility of boards of directors far beyond what is commonly understood to be the case. "I only wish the Congress would apply the same standards to their own conduct," Bennett said. He said the report was "grossly unfair" and that it "leaps to unfounded conclusions." "When we would ask them, even in executive session, about, OK, how do you feel about these" accounting practices "the usual expression was one of comfort," Jaedicke, dean emeritus of the Stanford Business School, told the subcommittee. Did not bother until late last year to press for information about the outside compensation of Fastow, who took tens of millions of dollars from Enron in exchange for keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in Enron debt off the company's books. Enron's former chief executive officer, Kenneth Lay, "used his credit line to withdraw $77 million in cash from the company in one year, replaced the cash with company stock, and never mentioned his borrowings or stock sales to the board or the public," Board members indicated that they had been unaware the company paid cash bonuses of $750 million to Enron executives in a year when the company's entire net income was $975 million. Asked why Enron executives misled the board and cheated the company, one board member told Senate investigators he assumed "they did it for the money." IQ test: if the president, vice president, treasury secretary, attorney general and defense secretary, and the entire republican congress and half the democrats are insider traders and "commonly understand" the same responsibilities for boards of directors as enron's lawyers, and the dean "emeritus" of the stanford business school thinks it "grossly unfair" to persecute them for their $750 million compensation package (a bonus I guess for working the largest bankruptcy in the history of capitalism), while the employees are shoved aside so the capitalist investors can try to recupe their losses out of what's left of the federal treasury, will the crisis of confidence in US corporate capitalism be repaired?

Guardian UK--Earth 'will expire by 2050': Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week. more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades. seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. sharp fall in the planet's ecosystems between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking by about 12 per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per cent. The UK's birdsong population has also seen a drastic fall with the corn bunting population declining by 92 per cent between 1970 and 2000, the tree sparrow by 90 per cent and the spotted flycatcher by 70 per cent. Experts, however, say it is difficult to ascertain how many species have vanished for ever because a species has to disappear for 50 years before it can be declared extinct. Attention is now focused on next month's Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the most important environmental negotiations for a decade. However, the talks remain bedevilled with claims that no agreements will be reached and that US President George W. Bush will fail to attend. Greenpeace, said: 'There will have to be concessions from the richer nations to the poorer ones or there will be fireworks.' America, which sent 300 delegates to the conference, is accused of blocking many of the key initiatives on energy use, biodiversity and corporate responsibility. The WWF report shames the US for placing the greatest pressure on the environment. It found the average US resident consumes almost double the resources as that of a UK citizen and more than 24 times that of some Africans. a) we will not colonize other planets b) bushoilcia will not make concessions to poorer countries c) prepare for fireworks. Corporate capitalists, nor Christian fundamentalists, nor Jewish Zionists care about sustainability. The impending war will empower all these parties to further do as they choose.

Independent UK--A highly classified document reveals America's military command is planning a three-pronged invasion of Iraq involving air, land and sea forces attacking from separate directions to create an overwhelming strike that will oust the dictator, Saddam Hussein. Up to 250,000 American soldiers and marines would be involved, with land forces invading from Kuwait. Hundreds of aircraft based in up to eight countries would launch assaults on thousands of identified targets in Iraq, including airfields, roads and fibre-optic communication sites. Sites suspected of storing or producing Iraq's much-feared chemical and biological weapons infrastructure would be targeted by special forces soldiers and CIA covert operatives. The leaking of the document in such detail to the newspaper also suggests that many in the Pentagon wish to let it be known that a massive battle group is being planned, no doubt partly to try to intimidate Saddam. If the leak is at all aimed at Saddam, its purpose is to ensure that he will refuse to admit weapons inspectors. Charges that these inspection teams were riddled with CIA were denied of course, but never disproved. No country obviously would admit enemy spies to inspect their weapons facilities after the revelation of imminent invasion plans. This refusal will then be used to justify the invasion. The UN must realize this, but continues to collaborate in Donald Rumsfeld's plot to generate a pretext for launching World War III. But the main target of the leak is the American public. While moving the nation from a peacetime population concerned with economic well being to a wartime population supporting or acquiescing to hundreds of billions of dollars of military/intelligence financing required two weeks of hysteria generated by what many are now prepared to believe was an atrocity the administration chose not to prevent, but few are willing to except was engineered by them for this purpose. After the most difficult task of getting the imperialist war machine officially rolling from an apparent dead stop, the next task was to link Baghdad with its 33 pecent control of world energy resources, the main target of the imperialist capitalist economic recovery package, to the shadowy CIA created enemy. This proved harder than anticipated as stupidity and incompetence soon exposed the domestic origin of the anthrax attack, and other revelations like last week's of Saddam's expatriot stepson being arrested for the same offense for which Mohamed Atta was never even questioned, fall on mostly deaf ears. The fall back strategy is not new: engage the corporate monopoly media in round the clock discussions of how a successful operation against Baghdad will be waged without any question as to why. This rhetorical strategy creates the illusion that the why has already been established in an earlier interview you must have missed, and enures the public to a sense of the inevitability of the imminent movement of a quarter million troops actually being sent to appropriate a controlling stake in the world's energy supply in order to save the global capitalist macroeconomy from its inevitable spiral into depression which would have generated enough instability domestically and in those regions from which its industry extracts its raw materials to shake them loose from elite power and control. The remaining question is how long public acquiescence to a perceived inevitability will continue as US casualties mount into the thousands.

NY Times--U.S. Plan for Iraq Is Said to Include Attack on 3 Sides: The existence of the document that outlined significant aspects of a "concept" for a war against Iraq as it stood about two months ago indicates an advanced state of planning in the military even though President Bush continues to state in public and to his allies that he has no fine-grain war plan on his desk for the invasion of Iraq. senior administration officials continue to say that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions. After running dangerously low on precision-guided bombs during the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has said it has stepped up production of critical munitions. The Air Force is stockpiling weapons, ammunition and spare parts, like airplane engines, at depots in the United States and in the Middle East. the "Courses of Action" document does not mention other coalition forces [or] casualty estimates... It describes the number of Marine and Army divisions, air expeditionary forces, and aircraft carriers. These and other forces add up to as many as 250,000 troops... Nor does the document contain a comprehensive analysis of the Iraqi ground forces, including the Republican Guard and various security forces that are believed to be fiercely loyal to Mr. Hussein. This again suggests that such analysis is either incomplete or is contained in another planning document. An alternative plan, championed by retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing of the Army, calls for conquering Iraq with
a combination of airstrikes and special operations attacks in coordination with indigenous fighters, similar to the
campaign in Afghanistan. Relying solely on that approach appears to have been ruled out. General Downing resigned last week as Mr. Bush's chief adviser on counterterrorism, reportedly frustrated by the administration's tough talk against Iraq but lack of action. The big lie now is that this is a newly hatched plan. I have been saying that war on Iraq is on the agenda (see next item) for close to two years (see my archives). How was I able to predict a war that is only now being planned? I saw the US and Brits bombing Iraqi anti-aircraft installations creating flight corridors from the borders to Baghdad, and it was clear to me that, although each bombing was explained as retaliation for being shot at, it was also the classic preparation for invasion. The administration lies to the people, denying that this is their agenda as long as there is no way to plausibly justify the enormous casualties involved. Now they seem to have given up trying to justify it and are simply informing us that the plan is in the works. This worked for the last Gulf War, but this war will be different. What is being described as tens of thousands of troops in the media is now up to 250,000. The Republican Guard of Iraq is made of 400,000 troops whose main task is to protect Baghdad. The bushoilcia is going to test the tolerance of the American people for multiple thousands of casualties for the first time since Vietnam on thin to nonexistent justification.

Action Report--HIGHLY informed diplomatic sources have disclosed to as-Safir that the United States of America has begun to carry out a plan of security and military operations aimed at Iraq, that American troops have entered areas in northern Iraq, and that major bases have been set up for them inside Jordan. I have been arguing (throughout these archives) since months before 9/11 that an impending global depression leaves only one recourse for the global capitalism: world war and that the central target of this war was clearly Iraq. At first I speculated about how the bushoilcia would justify an invasion of Iraq, until 9/11 made their strategy clearer. When the anthrax attack took place, which I immediately identified as domestic, I speculated about how they might try to link it or 9/11 tp Saddam Hussein. Since the weak attempts to link the anthrax first to Iraq as the only state government with the right kind of spores other than the US (sufficient proof at the time that it must be Iraq) and then Pakistan after a NJ Pakistani was arrested for sending anthrax home in the mail, I have been suggesting that another fake terrorist attack seems the only viable means of gaining enthusiastic popular support for launching an invasion of Baghdad which would expand first to Israel and India, and then to the rest of the southern hemisphere. In the wake of international outcry regarding US war crimes in Afghanistan, a stupid massacre of women in children at a wedding, and the belated revelation of Bush's corporate crime, beligerent rhetoric toward Baghdad has been muted. The markets, however, have continued to crash as the capitalist elites' bag of tricks creating an illusory recovery has begun to thin out, and world war is increasingly necessary. Although the comment claims that small scale "probes" rather than large scale invasion is implied by these proceeding military operations against Iraq, small scale war will not save the world from spiral into depression. Only a war on the scale of WWII could have rescued the world from the Great Depression, and only such another will serve now. Moving the world and especially the US public to enthusiastic support for a war that must produce hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides requires an event (or a narrowly averted event) greater than the Gulf of Tonkin or even than 9/11. Yesterday the corporate press reported that Saddam's step-son" was arrested in Florida for enrolling in a flight school without the proper visa (allowing Mohammad Atta to leave and enter the US, expressing his intention to attend the same flight school with the wrong visa is one of the more obvious evidences of the bushoilcia complicity in the attack). The mass of reports that omit the fact that he is an exile and therefore more likely to be among those recruited to oust Sadam from within than an Iraqi agent can not help but create the suspicion that he is connected with the 9/11 hijackers or at least planning something similar. This seems to me an act of desperation attempting to move public opinion towards launching invasion as the rapid decline of the stock markets makes it increasingly urgent. I believe that reports in the following months will illigitimize the arrest and that the bushoilcia will either have to launch invasion with little or no public or official international support or they will have to engineer a more credible incident they can unambiguously pin on Saddam.

Chemtrails Over Topeka, Kansas more fotos

SW Washington Chemtrails Are Up There Again...And Again... more fotos

World Socialists--Further Evidence US Massacred Thousands Of Taliban Prisoners: From the approximately 8,000 fighters who surrendered in Konduz only 500 to 800 were taken to Qala-i-Janghi. Soon information emerged that other Taliban had been murdered. inhabitants of the region... claimed to have seen scores of bodies unloaded from container trucks and buried in the desert by bulldozers. Earlier this month, Irish documentary filmmaker Jamie Doran screened his uncompleted film Massacre in Mazar in a number of European cities. Witnesses appearing in the film gave more accounts detailing a massacre of up to 3,000 Taliban. According to these witnesses, between 200 and 300 of the prisoners from Konduz were packed into each of the containers, which were ostensibly being used to take them to the prison at Sheberghan. En route, approximately half of the captives suffocated or were killed by shots fired by soldiers into the airtight containers. Others were executed as the containers were unloaded into a mass grave in the desert. According to the witnesses, American soldiers were present during this massacre. According to the report in Die Zeit, the local population was certain that the operation took place in the presence of American soldiers: We enquired further. No one doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts on this issue. Die Zeit on the other hand speaks of 'around 5,000 Taliban' who surrendered in Konduz, without accounting for the difference between their figure and that given by Doran. The paper estimates the number of victims at Qala-i-Janghi to be around 600, and the number of prisoners whose whereabouts remain unknown to be at least 1,000. The report concludes: That a proportion of the 1,000 have disappeared, while others suffocated in the containers, is indisputable. These accounts contrast sharply with the official image projected by the Pentagon and the media, and indicate that the US military is guilty of major war crimes. My two major rants from last month about the corporate media press were first that, with all the discussion of corporate malfeasance which has suddenly been discovered as no longer only the third world, but the capitalists themselves are starting to get screwed, no US press still thinks it relevent to report on Bush's corporate career even when he pontificates about handing out jail time for the very offense from which the SEC declined to "exonerate" him when they dropped their investigation. This omission has since been corrected by the NY Times who were quoted by the Washington Post. The second issue however has not: that even at the height of Bushoilcia rhetoric about immunity for US "peace keepers" from war crimes tribunal, the documentary making the rounds of European parliaments offering apparently convincing evidence of US war crimes in Afghanistan warrants no comment in the US press.

Center for Public Integrity--State Legislators Routinely Weakening Ethics Laws: In recent years, lawmakers in at least a dozen states have dismantled the strongest provisions of ethics laws or prevented passage of new, tougher ones. They have stranded ethics-related bills in committees, driven truck-size loopholes through disclosure laws already on the books, and chipped away at the power of watchdog agencies. The Oregon Legislature passed a bill limiting the state ethics commission's authority to enforce conflict-of-interest laws. In Rhode Island, the General Assembly pushed for a state Supreme Court opinion that found that the Rhode Island Ethics Commission lacked the authority to prohibit legislators from taking government jobs with regulatory boards and commissions that the legislature helped create. In Indiana, where 23 percent of legislators have some financial tie to businesses or groups that are registered to lobby, lawmakers removed a requirement that they disclose details of business transactions with lobbyists. Delaware House members changed the chamber rules regarding conflicts of interest to raise the ownership stake that a lawmaker could hold in a company with business before the legislature. That's funny. I don't remember a single campaign ad that slung mud at an opponent for advocating ethics rules and promising to work diligently to dismantle them. Under the auspices of those models of corporate integrity Bush/ Cheney/O'Neill/Rumsfeld et al. these politicians will now restore international confidence in the US markets by handing out prison sentences to corporate criminals.

NYSE--Program Trading Averaged 44.9 Percent of NYSE Volume During June 17-21, 2002: If 44.9 % of all NYSE 'Program Trading' is attributed to the SMALLER banking firms, perhaps through some secret regulatory shield, the two LARGEST banks ARE heavily involved in program trading but are exempt from reporting requirements? Perhaps the mysterious 'Plunge Protection Team' has erected such a regulatory shield behind which they secretly operate? If so, another question can be asked: How much of the remaining 55% of NYSE trades belong to JPMorgan and CitiBank?...Would these total, aggregated trades constitute MOST of the NYSE trades?...80%-95% of the NYSE trades? If the U.S. stock market has deteriorated to such a degree that a sizable majority of all NYSE trades are so-called 'Basket' or 'Program' trades (Equivalent to Enron-style, round-trip executions (Based no-doubt on Fed repos), one could easily predict tsunami-sized shock waves. European stock markets are plunging since the second week of March 2002 and the US Dollar plunges right along with them even as gold has steadily risen 14%. The government continues to spend at record pace as it imagines no one notices and that they can somehow continue to borrow, consume and rig their way to prosperity. It has been a mystery to me how a crash into global depression can continue to be described as an underway recovery for so many months. Following the markets closely (although I have no money invested and recommended to everyone I could to get their money out of equities two years ago), I have been struck by the fact that the upward movements that have punctuated the downward spiral to be followed by an endless parade of pundits claiming that stocks have hit their "bottom" and you better get your money to your broker fast or you'll miss the turbo charged profits were almost always massive movements within an hour or two across all indexes. This meant that the upticks did not represent many individual investors simultaneously deciding that the recession was over, but some coordinated movement of huge pools of capital. Taken next to small increases in manufacturing and brief corrections in other indicators which inevitably result from spending up $600 billion dollars of public money (including no doubt social security reserves) $300 billion of which they didn't have, creates circumstantial evidence of a nascent recovery which is followed up by a propaganda campaign. Reaganomics has had its day. Its supply side theories which were always based on the self interest of capitalists rather than scientific economics have reaped their true consequences. A healthy, prosperous, economy can not be created by creating a bubble in the stock market by dismantling the real wealth of the working class to maximize corporate profits and stimulate more investment. The employees whose downsizing, removal of benefits, stagnated salaries, loss of job security, loss of secure pensions, loss of dependent education grants, etc. etc. which the geniuses of the Reagonomic 90's, still lionized by Wall Streeters who are now losing all their money, enacted as the height of macroeconomic wisdom are the "consumers" whose confidence and unbridled spending they now wait to rescue them from having to confess to their bookcooking. Instead, bubbles pop to levels far below where they started accelerating the depression cycle identified by Marx as inherent in the capitalist system.

CNN/Money--Bush said he would press Congress to pass the 10-point plan he proposed in March to improve corporate responsibility, including forcing executives to lose all money they gain by fraud and serving jail time, if found criminally negligent. "When bad accounting practices make the company appear to be more successful than it actually is, corporate executives should lose their phony profits gained at the expense of employees and stockholders," he said. Did he remember that this is precisely what he did when he recommended jail time?