License Plate Software Stirs Privacy Concerns

By KEN BELSON | The New York Times | February 26, 2010

THE notion of roving cameras snapping pictures of license plates conjures up television shows like Fox’s counterterrorism series, “24.”

It’s not just fantasy, though. Americans are already watched by a variety of security agencies using electronic surveillance technology, and in this post-9/11 world, there seems to be no turning back.

Privacy advocates, though, are not altogether comfortable with license plate numbers being electronically recorded by commercial operations.

While their views on the gathering this data may vary, privacy groups uniformly agree that the real issue is what happens to the photos after they are taken: how long they are stored and by whom; how secure the data is and whether it might be shared with third parties. Are the photographed license plate numbers matched against other lists, like credit scores or addresses?

“It’s a huge Pandora’s box,” Jack Gillis, a spokesman for the Consumer Federation of America, said. “There are possibilities for tremendous violations if it is used to find out where people are at a given time. Until the access to this technology can be controlled, it has scary potential.”

MVTRAC, whose database of delinquent borrowers is offered on a subscription basis to auto repossession outfits, said that it stores plate numbers recorded by users for years — and uses a high level of encryption to protect the data.

Still, with automatic license plate recognition technology now in private hands, its potential uses are magnified. As with other data streams, like records of cellphone calls or toll transponder payments, the accumulated data can be subpoenaed as evidence in court. MVTRAC and others say that repo men see personal information only when they find a wanted car, the same as they would in the faxes and e-mails they receive from auto lenders.

But invariably, technology finds other applications, said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties advocacy group. You can imagine a scenario, he said, where someone spots a car with an attractive driver, types the license plate number into a computer program and finds the owner’s name. Many companies say their data is encrypted, he said, but “you have to ask, ‘who has the key?’ ”

Israel Distributes New Gas Masks to Settlers

Al-Manar - 28/02/2010

Israel on Sunday began distributing new gas masks for settlers to use in a possible chemical or biological attack, the Israeli occupation army said.

Under the plan – drawn up by Col. Yossi Sagiv, head of the Israeli Home Front Command’s Gas Mask and Protection Kits Department – the masks will be returned to private homes by the Israel Postal Company, which beat out seven other companies in a Defense Ministry-issued tender in late 2009. Gas masks were collected from private homes starting in 2007 by a private delivery company.

The distribution is slated to take three years. Israeli officials said that after the distribution is completed in Or Yehuda, the Israeli army will review the operation, implement corrections and improvements and then start distributing the kits in other parts of the country, based on operational considerations of which area is under a more immediate threat.

The public will receive the same rubber gas mask that it had in the past with an improved filter – more effective against chemical and biological threats Israel faces – but without the syringe of Atropine that was in past kits.

Israel has long feared that chemical or biological weapons may be used against it in a future conflict involving Iran or Syria, but officials have insisted the distribution of the masks is not linked to any imminent threat.

The Zionist entity has carried out several large-scale defense exercises in recent years, and last week carried out a military-wide drill responding to a hypothetical attack from Lebanon or Syria.

In October Israel and the United States carried out their largest-ever air drill simulating the response to missile attacks.

‘NYT’ Op-Ed congratulates Obama for laying off Israel ’cause solving I/P won’t solve anything

By Jeffrey Blankfort | February 28, 2010

Has the NY Times response to the complaints about Ethan Bronner led it to be even more forceful in pushing its pro-Israel agenda including getting the US to attack Iran? Apparently so. In today’s op-eds, they’ve imported the thoughts of a British Jewish professor, Efraim Karsh, (another Bernard Lewis, and a Nakba denier) who uses his abbreviated paternalistic version of Islamic history to conclude that the Arabs countries will not object to the US attacking Iran. And, in passing, he welcomes Washington’s less “imperious” attempts at bringing Israel to the bargaining table:

So, if the Muslim bloc is just as fractious as any other group of seemingly aligned nations, what does it mean for United States policy in the Islamic world?

For one, it should give us more impetus to take a harder line with Iran. Just as the Muslim governments couldn’t muster the minimum sense of commonality for holding an all-Islamic sports tournament, so they would be unlikely to rush to Iran’s aid in the event of sanctions, or even a military strike.

Beyond the customary lip service about Western imperialism and “Crusaderism,” most other Muslim countries would be quietly relieved to see the extremist regime checked. It’s worth noting that the two dominant Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been at the forefront of recent international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

As for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the idea that bringing peace between the two parties will bring about a flowering of cooperation in the region and take away one of Al Qaeda’s primary gripes against the West totally misreads history and present-day politics. Muslim states threaten Israel’s existence not so much out of concern for the Palestinians, but rather as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the House of Islam.

In these circumstances, one can only welcome the latest changes in the Obama administration’s Middle Eastern policy, which combine a tougher stance on Iran’s nuclear subterfuge with a less imperious approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Honduras Palm Oil Plantations: Sustainable Development Facade

By Tamar Sharabi | Upside Down World | February 28, 2010

Johnny Rivas is a vocal member of the Unified Movement of Aguan Farmers (MUCA), an organization that claims over 3,500 families demanding the redistribution of land in the North Coast of Honduras. For over five years Rivas has fought for land rights in Aguan, known as the ‘capital of agrarian reform.’ MUCA formed in 2001 in order to reclaim lands that Rivas says “were transferred to corrupt businessmen under fraudulent terms.” Rivas has recently been a target of constant death threats for his participation in the movement.

Palm Oil Cooperatives and Big Business

The Aguan Zone (named after its river), is located in the department of Colon and claims some of the most fertile lands in the country. It is known for its African Palm Oil plantations, which occupy over 90,000 hectares according to a Jan 2008 report by the US Embassy. Palm oil is a common ingredient in many food products and can be used as biodiesel.

In 1962 the Law of Agrarian Reform reallocated land from the hands of transnational companies back to Honduran farmers. Cooperatives formed that managed the palm oil plantations. In 1992, 1994 and 1995 many cooperatives sold their land back to wealthy business owners. In a document presented on April 30, 2009 MUCA asked for the annulment of the sale from 1994, on the grounds that the sale was illegal under the Agrarian Reform Laws. The terms of the sale stipulated that the land would remain state owned, but the farmers could continue to cultivate it. The contract expired in February 2005 and has never been renewed.

As a strategy to apply pressure on authorities to negotiate with the farmers, in May 2009 MUCA occupied a palm oil factory that belonged to Miguel Facusse, one of the largest landowners in Honduras. A new agreement was signed on June 12, 2009 with President Zelaya that guaranteed state resources to resolve the conflict. On June 23, after a follow up meeting on the same factory, a member of MUCA, Fabio Ochoa was shot 7 times.

Coup d’etat Halts Negotiations

Although President Zelaya had shown the political will to deal with the country’s agrarian problems, his term was cut short with a coup d’etat last June. Most of the farmer organizations prioritized their efforts to protesting for his constitutional return, temporarily putting their land struggle on hold. Realizing that after several months of nonviolent resistance on behalf of the nations teachers unions, workers, indigenous groups, and farmers, they were unable to reverse the coup, MUCA resumed the land recuperations in December 2009.

According to Rivas, direct land recuperation is “the only strategy farmers have to be heard.” Living in rigged plastic tents among the palm oil plantations that occupy their land, the farmers participating sometimes eat only once a day, under constant threat from the authorities.

The farmers occupied four cooperatives; La Confianza, La Aurora, San Isidro, and San Esteban Cooperative. The National Agrarian Institute

which deals with the appropriation of land has measured 9,000 hectares that are under dispute thus far.

Since December there have been dozens of confrontations between the farmers and security forces in the area. Under the de facto government

of Roberto Micheletti, military forces were used several times to illegally evict the farmers. There have been dozens of detained farmers and there are over 80 orders of arrest for people involved.

Conflict Intensifies

On the evening Feb. 11 witnesses reported that two unidentified helicopters flew over communities participating in the land recuperations. The next morning crossfire left at least four guards from the private security company dead.

Security forces also entered the community of La Concepcion, a commuinty neighboring a land recuperation. When a pastor of the local Mennonite Church saw aggressive driving almost running over children in the community, he intervened and had a firearm pointed at him.

“They came here intimidating the community, pointing out houses. If one of the farmers is killed we will know who to hold accountable,” he said.

In a formal meeting on Feb. 16 with President ‘Pepe’ Lobo, known to MUCA as ‘the son of the coup,’ Lobo promised to disarm the farmers. MUCA maintains that they are not an armed struggle, but will defend themselves against aggression from security forces. Rudy Hernandez, also a member of MUCA, maintained that “we are not a group of delinquents, we are farmers who are here to claim our land because hunger forces us to be here.”

This week Lobo presented two options to resolve the conflict: either purchase a portion of the cultivated land or farmers will be relocated to neighboring areas. Both options look for an immediate resolution to the problem but do not deal with the underlying issue of the concentration of land ownership or the illegal acquisition in the first place.

Unsustainable Investment

As the second poorest country in Central America, Honduras relies heavily on international financing.

“One of the most important things for those of us in Honduras, is the image that we give to the investor” said Facusse.

Facusse admitted to a Honduran newspaper that the World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank (BID) and an unnamed German Bank have authorized loans which are currently ‘paralyzed’ due to the situation.

“We paid for the farm and paid well for it, those of the agrarian reform had the money but did not invest and misspent the money, for that I believe that agrarian reform is not the solution,” he added.

Marco Ramiro Lobo, a legal advisor to the National Agrarian Institute (INA), previously the legal advisor to MUCA who presented the demand against Facusse in 1994, stated that Facusse’s business interests were never for the social good of the community.

“There are grand restrictions on the workers, miserable salaries, before they were associates and now they are workers. Now they have a salary less then the minimum wage. Most of the farmers live in extreme poverty, which is what is causing this situation,” said Ramiro Lobo. “I don’t think anyone is arguing that Facusse brings investment to the area, but what we are arguing is the form in which the lands were acquired. In reality there is no sustainable development, this is a business model that looks for lucrative pay, not social investment.”

MUCA has the support of dozens of other farmer organizations in the country, including international organizations such as FIAN and Via Campesina. They are also supported by the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), an organization which grew out of the resistance movement opposed to the coup d’etat against President Manuel Zelaya.

Tamar Sharabi is an environmental engineer and freelance journalist living in Central America. She is working on media empowerment with human rights organizations and on a documentary about the Honduran coup detat. To support her work visit Give Forward .

Australia censorship debate censored on Communications minister’s website

It’s all kind of ironic when you think about it

By John Ozimek • The Register • 25th February 2010

If you’re planning to censor free speech on the internet, what better approach to take than to, er, censor debate about how you’re planning to censor free speech on the internet? Brilliant.

That, according to one sharp-eyed Register reader, is the game being played by Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, whose ministerial website is currently set up so as not to show searches on embarrassing terms such as “ISP filtering”.

An increasingly common feature of interactive websites is the “search cloud”: this is a listing out of search terms on a site, often with the added feature that the most frequently appearing terms are picked out by size or weight of type.

The Minister’s official site is no exception, and visitors wishing to know what other visitors are searching on just have to take a look at the search cloud at bottom right of the landing page. Well that’s all they need to do unless they wish to find out about “ISP Filtering”, an issue that has been the cause of some controversy in Australia over the past couple of years.

Nip below the page surface and you will find a clever bit of code that sets a counter to record the frequency of any given term, ranks the most frequently occurring terms – and then sets the size of that term within the cloud according to its rank (highest ranked is largest, lower ranked are smaller).

So far so good, unless the search term happens to be “ISP Filtering”. Because the other clever thing that the code does is to exclude that particular term from the search cloud. Sorted. Or not.

In recent weeks, protests against the minister’s censor-tastic activities have reached new heights, with a DDoS attack directed both at the Australian Parliamentary website and at the site of the Communications Ministry. This action was characterised by Conroy as irresponsible – presumably on the basis that in a democracy, government attitudes should be changed by debate and there is no need for direct action.

By contrast, evidence that the debate is being skewed in this way will undoubtedly add weight to those who claim that the government is not interested in discussing issues – and the only way to make them sit up and listen is through direct action.

Meanwhile, appearing before the Environment, Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee earlier this month, representatives of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), revealed that they would not be pursuing an investigation of how Wikileaks got its hands on ACMA’s list of banned URLs.

While they intend to tighten up processes, in the hope that such a thing will not happen again, they also acknowledged that the Federal Police “considered the prospects of success under their guidelines not sufficiently strong enough to push on with the prosecution”.

In addition, there were other more pressing “operational priorities”. ®

US to spend $50 million on media in Pakistan

Pakistan Headlines Examiner | February 27, 2010

The Obama administration plans to spend nearly $50 million on Pakistani media this year to reverse anti-American sentiments and raise awareness of projects aimed at improving quality of life, confirms a Washington insider.

After the Kerry-Lugar Bill debacle, the Obama administration had struggled with the idea of ‘branding’ aid and many within the State department and the USAID had argued that identifying projects may backfire.

“By announcing that a school was built and is being maintained – partly because of the aid received from America – you can alienate people,” said someone who had proposed not ‘branding’ the aid.

The US Special Representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke believes that a substantial amount of monies spent on media- especially private TV channels will reduce tension and may even bring Pakistan-US relations back on the right path.

Senator John Kerry, the main architect of Kerry-Lugar bill also supports the idea of claiming credit for all “the good work being done to improve infrastructure, energy and education,” said a source in Senator’s office.

Reuters today reported that the Obama administration has sent lawmakers a plan for funding water, energy and other projects. Report said the US intends to spend $1.45 billion of [funds] earmarked for the Kerry-Lugar bill in fiscal 2010.

The trust deficit had surged after a well intended aid package focused to uplift Pakistan’s civilian society was trashed by a section of Pakistani media. Interviews with diplomatic sources in Washington, D.C. and media coverage of the KLB debacle had demonstrated growing frustration of the Obama administration.

Although American officials publicly praise military operations in South Waziristan, in private they sing a different tune; their assessment of ”alignment” is rather pessimistic. Stories leaked to media consistently allege that al-Qaeda leadership is still enjoying safe haven in Pakistan.

Pakistan-U.S. relations have not been this tenuous before, and the Obama administration is frustrated with the outcome of the Kerry-Lugar bill. “No one had anticipated such negativity,” said an American official who did not want to be identified. “We thought Pakistanis [would] celebrate the passage of this bill. This is what we were told by representatives of the Pakistani government.”

Pakistani government representatives from President Zardari to Foreign Minister Qureshi and Ambassador Hussain Haqqani further down the chain had assured the Americans that Pakistanis would be jubilant; KLB was supposed to heal all wounds, rectify all wrongs and erase memories of the past from the consciousness of the masses.

The Obama administration has shared their plan to sponsor high impact projects and communicate the value of these projects using local media.

Voice of America, a radio and TV platform that speaks for the government of the US already has a tie-up with Geo TV and now they have aligned with Express TV as well.

The Obama administration plans to help Pakistan’s democratic government meet budget shortfalls and deliver services to a population increasingly angry about economic and security troubles. As the funding builds the capacity of the government to provide basic services, the US sponsored Pakistani media will raise awareness and build a brand for America, our sources have confirmed.

Israeli troops storm and encircle Aqsa Mosque

PIC – 28/02/2010

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) on Sunday stormed the courtyards of the Aqsa Mosque and cordoned off its premises where dozens of Palestinian worshipers are still maintaining a vigil and refusing to leave for fear of attacks by Israeli extremists. Eyewitnesses said that more than 200 Israeli policemen have encircled the Aqsa Mosque since the early morning hours and demanded the worshipers come out, while the Palestinians inside the mosque used the amplifiers of the Mosque to urge fellow citizens to head to the Old City of occupied Jerusalem to defend it against Israeli violations. Many unruly Israeli settlers were allowed by policemen to walk around in the Mosque courtyards. 12 Palestinian citizens including an elderly woman outside reportedly suffered tear gas suffocation as they were trying to reach the Aqsa Mosque. Meanwhile, the neighborhoods of the Old City of Jerusalem saw clashes between young Palestinian men and Israeli troops. Numbers of protesters were reportedly rounded up. Other Palestinian citizens living in the neighborhoods near the gates of the Aqsa Mosque complained that the IOF troops stormed and ransacked their homes, and used the roofs to observe the movement of people. For his part, Hamas spokesman Yousuf Farahat on Sunday appealed to all Muslim scholars and leaders to urgently move to defend Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque against Israeli crimes. In a press release, Farahat noted that the feeble official Arab stand is the umbrella under which the Israeli occupation is working and setting schemes to Judaize the whole city of Jerusalem. In a related context, the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) announced the launch of a 30-month project to fully change the Arab landmarks and sites in the holy city. Al-Jazeera website said that Israel claims that this project is intended for developing the infrastructure of the city, but in fact it is aimed to obliterate its Arab identity and turn it into a Jewish religious area. For its part, the Israeli Maariv newspaper warned that the winds of war are blowing from the north and castigated the Israeli premier for his failure to control the angry protests against his decision to seize the Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil city. It opined that if there had been negotiations with Syria, the Iranian president would not have visited Damascus and the danger of war would have subsided. ###

IRAN HAS BEEN CAPABLE OF HAVING A ‘NUCLEAR WEAPON WITHIN SIX MONTHS’ FOR YEARS NOW – BUT, LIKE ‘TOMORROW’, IT NEVER COMES.

By Damian Lataan | February 28, 2010

Other periods of time have been mentioned over the three decades since the Iranian people kicked out the Shah as to how long it would take the Iranians to build a nuclear weapon, but six months seems to a very popular nominal figure. Never mind, of course, that there has not been a skerrick of evidence to even suggest that the Iranians are doing anything more than building nuclear reactors for generating electricity or creating medical isotopes for medical purposes. But that hasn’t stopped the propagandists who seem to insist that Iran is still only six months away from having a nuclear weapon.

If I started the list of claims that Iran would have a weapon within six months from back in 1980 when the Shah went, you’d still be reading it in, well… six months time! So, I’ll cut short the list and start it off with some of the earlier claims of this century.

Back in August 2003, the LA Times reported that Iran could have a ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. More than two years later in September 2005, Israel claimed Iran would have ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. Then, nearly three years later in June 2008 we were told again that Iran would have a ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. A year later, in July 2009, Ha’aretz reported that ‘Germany believes Iran could have a nuclear bomb in six months’.

Now, in the very latest statement dated 23 February 2010, made by so-called ‘Iran weapons expert’, David Albright, Iran, in his expert opinion, is now only… wait for it; six months away from having a nuclear weapon. This is the very same David Albright that was telling us more than a year ago in February 2009; “In as quickly as a few months, Iran would be able to have enough weapons-grade uranium for nuclear weapons”. It’s also the very same David Albright who told the CBS ’60 Minutes’ show way, way back in January 1999 that Saddam Hussein was “within a few months to a year of having a nuclear weapon”.

Albright? Not very! He’s the original boy that cried ‘Wolf!’ Unfortunately, the media will continue to echo his and similar cries and there will be those that believe them. Eventually the West, led by Israel and the US, will attack Iran based on these lies, but the worst of it is; hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dead later, the rest of world will go along with it without a murmur.

Honduran newspaper discovers murder after 3 days

By Belen Fernandez |Pulse Media | February 27, 2010

A headline in this morning’s edition of the Honduran daily La Tribuna, fervent defender of last year’s coup d’état against President Mel Zelaya, announces the search for the “gang member” that killed the daughter of veteran union organizer and anti-coup resistance figure Pedro Brizuela. The murder of Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodríguez, which took place on February 24 in the Céleo González neighborhood in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, had not prompted any prior coverage in the mainstream Honduran press despite the papers’ usual predilection for homicide photographs.

Honduran journalistic traditions had also been disrupted in July 2009 by the murder during a demonstration at the Tegucigalpa airport of anti-coup teenager Isis Obed Murillo, whose picture appeared in the daily La Prensa only after his blood had been removed via the Photoshop program. La Tribuna refrains from erasing the pool of blood surrounding Brizuela Rodríguez’ body on her living room floor, or from explaining how it is that members of the National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) are “hot on the trail” of the alleged gang member when the only identifying information provided by witnesses is that he is short.

During a conversation in San Pedro Sula last August, Pedro Brizuela dismissed his daughter’s concern regarding his potential martyrdom on behalf of the resistance and reasoned that he was already old, anyway. As it turns out, Brizuela Rodríguez’ concern was only slightly misplaced, and she was shot at age 36 upon answering the door at her home—a scene witnessed by her two sons, ages 2 and 8. La Tribuna concludes:

The femicide [of Brizuela Rodríguez] has caused consternation among civil and trade union organizations, due to her father’s decades-long involvement in these sorts of activities.”

El Heraldo had demonstrated similar consternation over popular activity in a July 31 article explaining that anti-coup Honduran teacher Roger Vallejo Soriano had “ended up with a head wound”—which promptly killed him—due to the fact that he had “abandoned his classroom in order to go out and protest in the streets.” Brizuela Rodríguez receives more lenient treatment at the hands of La Tribuna, and instead of being blamed for her own demise is cast as the victim of her father’s past, with any other blame for the crime absorbed by the term “femicide,” as gender-related targeting by gangs is less easy to pin on the current administration of Pepe Lobo.

Lobo, an impending beneficiary of the “greater engagement with the countries of the Western Hemisphere” promised by the U.S. State Department, will rendezvous in Guatemala with Hillary Clinton at the beginning of March. As for why Clinton’s Latin America tour includes both Guatemala and Costa Rica but not Honduras, this question was posed by an attendee at yesterday’s press briefing by Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela, who confirmed the geographical proximity between Central American nations:

QUESTION: And the flight time between Costa Rica and Guatemala and Honduras –

ANSWER: Yeah. Right. Right. Guatemala.

Valenzuela’s discourse does not become any less enigmatic as the briefing progresses, and he proclaims with the regard to the U.S. position on the recent Honduran crisis:

So we see the outcome in Honduras is a very successful case of standing for a very fundamental principle and that is that you cannot tolerate a coup d’état in a country. This sets a terrible precedent. And in that sense, we join the unanimity of the hemisphere in this regard. But at the same time, a solution had to be found to Honduras.”

As is clear from the lack of a U.S. response to the slew of politically-motivated murders that have occurred in the first month of Lobo’s presidential term, these are to be considered part of the Honduran solution and compatible with Clinton’s call for “principled pragmatism” in condemnation of human rights abuses.

Mainstream Media Questions Inaccuracies in 9/11 Story

The Washington Times publishes story questioning official account.

By Tim King* | Salem-News.com | February 24, 2010

The mainstream press is showing interest in a taboo, however glaring subject; the inconsistencies in the Bush White House 9/11 account.

As The Washington Post reports today, “A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.”

The problems with the official federal stories are endless and according to some of the world’s top minds, the suggested account is impossible^[1].

When we first began to write about these seemingly pressing questions, our Web Designer Matt Lintz caught the U.S. Air Force attempting to hack into Salem-News.com^[2].

One person who has never let the matter fade away is Richard Gage. He’s a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Gage told The Washington Times, “In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards.”

The federal government wants you to believe that fires brought the buildings to the ground, yet in all recorded history, no fire has ever toppled a skyscraper. They burn to the framework but they don’t fall down.
Even if it was possible, the World Trade Towers were the least likely candidates. The steel core design of these buildings would not have come down, even if the building collapsed.

Even when you get past that, perhaps finding ways to justify the impossible “official” circumstances, how on earth could any logical explanation account for Building 7?

This is curious, I would suggest that half of all living Americans still don’t realize that a third building also came down that day, and it wasn’t hit by an airplane. But it did contain a lot of records that certain members of the financial industry didn’t miss. Then there are the billions of dollars in missing gold evacuated just before Building 7 pancaked to the ground.

The words of Gage are reflected all over the nation in universities and engineering firms. The Trade Tower buildings were specifically designed to withstand the impact of a jet liner, specifically. Jet fuel is similar to diesel and it doesn’t burn very hot. Firefighters, talking on radios, talked about how the aircraft crash fire in one building were going to easily be extinguisher by a few firefighters.

One of our writers, Jeff Gates, suggested that the only country that benefited from the ensuing wars is Israel.

“For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, “the mark” (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq-not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel^[3].

Enforcing that thought, our writer Maidhc Ó Cathail wrote, “The day after 9/11, Benjamin Netanyahu let slip that the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans was ‘very good’ for Israel. In particular, the mass murder was very good for an emerging sector of the Israeli economy. In Laboratory for a Fortressed World, Naomi Klein detailed the post-9/11 “explosion of Israel’s homeland security sector.”^[4]

Another Salem-News.com writer, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, wrote about the connection between 9/11 and Israel in the article, Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond, “Second, only two intelligence agencies had the expertise, assets, access and political protection to execute 9/11 in the air and on the ground: our CIA and Israel’s Mossad. Only one had the incentive, using the ‘who benefits’ principle: Mossad.”^[5]

The answers remain tangled up. Many Americans believe questioning the government over this is unpatriotic, then they turn around and burn effigies of Obama at tea bagger parties. I say it is highly unpatriotic and even disingenuous, to not question facts about the integrity of this nation.

I won’t even start on Shanksville and the Pentagon; those stories are packed with more holes and in your face inconsistencies than there is time for in this report, but I have written about the Pentagon in particular, at great length^[6].

The tragedy of September 11th 2001 is so far reaching that we could never truly describe it. The event was the reasoning to launch two very costly, ongoing wars. The very notion of Arab terrorists selecting the day that is synonymous with emergency response in the U.S. is as hard to believe as the “terrorists” passports recovered so conveniently on the sidewalks in New York that day.

The Washington Times cites how Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than a thousand of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry.

“The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.”

Gage says technical issues surrounding the collapse of the towers have prompted years of debate, rebuttal and ridicule.

The article cites how he is particularly disturbed by the fall of the 47-story skyscraper, Building 7. This engineer says, like the other two buildings, tower 7 fell in “pure free-fall acceleration.”

He also talked about how more than a hundred first-responders observed flashes and explosions during the fall of the towers.

Even more disturbing evidence Gage says, are “multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft. at 60 mph”. He also talked about the “mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking.”

Firefighters and Trade Tower employees en mass reported explosions before the buildings came down. They also talked about building closures in the weeks preceding 9/11, and men carrying large amounts of equipment into the elevator shafts.

Most experts agree that the buildings could only have come down the way they did if they were imploded. Experts who perform this type of work, common in places like Las Vegas, at least before the nation’s economic downturn, place the main explosives in the elevator shafts, but also in many other strategic locations in a building’s structure.

If you watch the World Trade Towers fall in slow motion, it is easy to observe what appear to be a series of planned explosions, running essentially the length of each building.

Gage says evidence of “advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material” was found in the World Trade Center dust. Of course Rudy Gulliani, mayor of New York at the time, had all of the building evidence shipped away from the state almost immediately.

There is a long list of federal investigators who say they were not allowed to do their jobs or complete the investigation. Tie this to the revelations in 9/11 Commissioner John Farmer’s book: “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″, where the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version is almost entirely untrue, according to our writer Gordon Duff, and you just might be lifting a corner of the dirtiest rug that ever was used to suppress truth^[7].

Gage says the group’s petition at ae911truth.org is already on its way to members of Congress.

He Told The Washington Times, “Government officials will be notified that ‘Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act.”

“The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial.”

For me, the biggest story here is that a mainstream member of the press published this article, I am amazed and encouraged. It is hard to suggest that we have perhaps been had in the biggest and worst way possible, but honesty is the only thing that matters.

Israeli Espionage – Part 1 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEOecRtBU7U

Israeli Espionage – Part 2 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17SSuuZDkA

Israeli Espionage – Part 3 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VclAeKYYvBc

Israeli Espionage – Part 4 of 4

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVRsmodmCTE

Also, this video from CoreofCorruption.com which was released just over a year ago, details the information regarding four alleged “art students” who had free access to the Trade Towers, including construction passes, in the immediate weeks preceding 9/11:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA9MvV-SrCo

References:

[1] Apr-07-2006 : Huge Contradictions in Official Theories on 9/11 Crash at Pentagon – Tim King Salem-News.com

[2] Apr-16-2006: U.S. Air Force Hackers Caught in Their Tracks by Salem-News.com – Tim King Salem-News.com

[3]Oct-20-2009: How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare – Jeff Gates Salem-News.com

[4] Jan-20-2010: The Merchants of Fear: Israel’s Profiting from Homeland Insecurity – Maidhc Ó Cathail Sabbah.biz

[5] Sep-10-2009: Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: The Road to 9/11 and Beyond – Alan Sabrosky Sabbah.biz

[6] Mar-21-2006: What Really Hit The Pentagon? – Tim King Salem-News.com

[7] Sep-11-2009: The 9/11 Commission Rejects own Report as Based on Government Lies – Gordon Duff Salem-News.com

* Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com’s Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation’s only truly independent high traffic news Website. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

Source: Salem-news.com

A Trip to America’s Most Toxic Place

Inside Hanford

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR | October 17, 2008 | Richland, Washington

The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm. It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The “T” stands for tanks—huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding, the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run as the nation’s H-bomb factory.

Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth—plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path toward the Columbia River, the world’s most productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.

Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive sludge have already leaked out of at least sixty-seven different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and, according to these sources, the leaks are getting much larger.

One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as “insignificant” a decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up into a “continuous plume” of highly radioactive Cesium-137.

Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident. Even though it was reported by their own geologists.

A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call the “vadose zone,” the stratum of subsurface soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface, and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the “high levels of gamma radiation” came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”

This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be “controlled, clean and stable.”

No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department’s Inspector General, which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”

Needless to say, the Reagan years didn’t augur a new forthrightness from the people who run Hanford. Seven years and several congressional hearings after the Inspector General’s report was released, bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were still the DOE’s operational reflex to any disturbing data bubbling up out of Hanford’s boreholes. By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an important lesson in the art of concealment: The easiest way to avoid bad press and public hostility is to simply stop monitoring sites that seemed the most likely to produce unpleasant information.

It is now clear that the tanks began leaking as early as 1956, only a few years after the Atomic Energy Commission began pumping the poisonous sludge into the giant subterranean containers. It is also clear that the federal government covered up evidence of those leaks since the moment it learned of them.

How many tanks are leaking? How far has the contamination spread? The DOE isn’t talking. It isn’t even looking for answers. But geologists estimated that the faster migrating contaminants, such as uranium, will move from the groundwater beneath Hanford’s central plateau to the Columbia in something like twenty-five years. That means that the first traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the Columbia in 2001.

This reckless strategy persists. In a document called “Official Characterization Plan of Hanford”—essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination at the site—the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the fact that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137 and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum, called the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford’s soils and water table.

If the DOE remains locked onto this course it will never acknowledge or even investigate the potentially lethal flow of radioactivity toward the great river of the West. That’s because the managers of Hanford say they will only research potential leaks if they detect a level of contamination several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford—a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation or publicly admit the existence of such leaks.

To help Hanford’s managers avoid ever discovering such embarrassing leaks, the site plan calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes, through which contamination is measured, only to a depth of forty feet—or two feet above the bottom of the tanks, guaranteeing that they will avoid picking up any radioactive traces from the region of the most dangerous contamination.

There’s a reason the Hanford managers want the public to believe that most of the contamination at the site is limited to the surface terrain. Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large government contracts, transferred to a more secure site or zapped into a glass-like substance through the big vitrification center now under construction. There’s no way to de-contaminate groundwater or the Columbia River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the issue politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers.

There’s no question that the subsurface leakage is serious, extensive, and dangerous. The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the surface—and sixty feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing. That report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had “reached groundwater in this area of the tank farm.”

Consider this. C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant. How far have faster moving radioactive materials, such as uranium, spread? No one knows. No one is even looking.

The DOE and Hanford’s contractors want to close down the C Quadrant of the tank farm and declare it cleaned up, even though more than 10 percent of the waste at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks. There is mounting evidence that a plume of Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently penetrated the groundwater there as well.

John Brodeur is one of the nation’s top environmental engineers and a world-class geologist. In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence that the groundwater beneath the central plateau had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O’Leary commissioned Brodeur to investigate how far the contamination had spread. It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE and its contractors had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or avoid collecting it entirely.

A decade later, Brodeur has once again been asked to assess the situation at one of the most contaminated sites on earth, this time for the environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His conclusions are disturbing.

“There remains much that we don’t know about the subsurface contamination plumes at Hanford,” says John Brodeur. “The only way to solve this dilemma is to identify what we don’t know up front and get it out on the table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the chilling work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of omission are standard practice and people lose their jobs because they disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford.”

This essay is adapted from a chapter in Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth (CounterPunch/AK Press).

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest books, Born Under a Bad Sky and Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland (co-edited with Joshua Frank) are just out from AK Press. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

Source

Michael Heart: WE WILL NOT GO DOWN (Song for Gaza)

Message from Michael

Dear friends,

I have been overwhelmed by the warmth and the friendship you have all given me in response to my song for Gaza, “We Will Not Go Down”. I am doing my best to go through your numerous messages, emails and comments, and ask you to kindly bear with me until I am able to do so. Please forgive me if I am not able to respond to each and everyone of you; but please also know that I really appreciate your messages.

My original intention to donate proceeds from the sale of the MP3 to charity has been complicated by technical matters; therefore, I have decided to make the song available free of charge (for personal, individual use only – all rights reserved). I would like to request that after downloading the song from this page, you kindly donate directly to a charity or an organization dedicated to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people. Worthy of note is UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), which has been helping Palestinian refugees since their dispossession in 1949. Please click here to donate through them: http://www.un.org/unrwa/

Thank you for your continued encouragement of my work as a musician, for your purchases of my CD (available here), and for spreading the song, the video and the message as you have been doing. I am grateful for every demonstration of support I have received from you, and for every thought and prayer that has gone to the people of Gaza.

Sincerely,

Michael Heart