http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0226/hentoff.phpYou would think this grassroots movement to secure our liberties would be of interest to the national media, but I have seen little of it on television or in the print press. To find out about these campaigns around the country, and about a range of organizing tools, you can visit the Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee's Web site, and its links: http://www.gjf.org/NBORDC

Technical Difficulties

Previous Front Pages June, 02 -- July, 02 -- August, '02 -- Sept '02 -- Oct '02 --Nov '02

Hey kid, 'c'mere...I have something for ya...yah I'm talking to you. I'll tell ya a Christmas story if you sit on my lap...From Bushwatch

The (Bush cabal) stole Christmas, screwed working families, emptied the Treasury, reversed the Clinton Miracle and sent our boys into the desert to die for (Bush's) oil, but the approval rating of the Unelected Moron remains high so the death and the thefts and the energy rapes will continue until somebody hold(s) him accountable for his crimes. Since the gelding Democrats are too afraid to speak up, look for a Republican to stand up and say, "Enough!" -Bartcop

Life After Welfare in the Here and Now of America's Jammed Shelters
The jargon of antipoverty work is as restless as the poor themselves. And here now come the "working homeless" — a post-welfare-reform category of strivers fighting to hold onto low-wage jobs the government shepherded them to, jobs that perversely afford them too little money to pay for shelter. Ending welfare as we know it has been followed by the working homeless, if we care to know them....Many serially "couch surf" with relatives and friends before patience wears thin. Some live as families in a car or a spare garage space. Chronically, they turn to the waiting lists for transient shelters that are always filled to capacity in this hard-pressed but far from atypical American city.... - FRANCIS X. CLINES ST. LOUIS, December 24, 2002

The Rich Have Reason to Rejoice by KELLY CANDAELE & PETER DREIER Posted December 23, 2002 The Nation Since the November 5 election (in which the Republicans' narrow majorities in the Senate and House were mirrored by a slim majority of the popular vote), Bush and his cronies seem to believe they have a mandate to outdo themselves in rewarding the corporate class that helped bring them to power.....It almost calls for resurrecting the phrase "ruling class," a notion once popular in left-wing circles that claims that the primary function of the highest levels of government is to protect the interests of the very rich. According to this view, big business and the ultra rich influence government at various levels through campaign contributions, personal relationships and ideological affinity. Policy-making becomes not a "mediation" of competing interests but a not so subtle capturing of policy-making institutions by the rich and powerful....It is easy to read the newspaper and be appalled by the crude class warfare being waged by the President and his Congressional allies. But the list of daily horrors can be so numbing that one can lose sight of the cumulative impact of the Bush/GOP agenda.....

§ Cut $300 million from the $1.7 billion federal
program that provides subsidies to poor families
so they can heat their homes during the winter--a
move that leaves 438,000 families in the cold.

§ Added special-interest legislation to the Homeland Security bill that protects
Eli Lilly, the giant pharmaceutical firm, from lawsuits over a preservative
(thimerosal) in vaccines--which could result in the dismissal of thousands of
suits filed by parents who claim that mercury in thimerosal has poisoned their
children, causing autism and other neurological problems. John Ashcroft's
Justice Department also asked a federal claims court to seal documents
relating to hundreds of claims that thimerosal had caused these problems in
children. (George W.'s dad sat on Lilly's board in the 1970s; White House
budget director Mitchell Daniels Jr. is a former Lilly executive; and Bush
appointed current Lilly CEO Sidney Taurel to sit on the President's Homeland
Security Advisory Council).

§ Tucked an additional rider into the Homeland Security bill that will allow
American companies to win government contracts even if they have moved
offshore to evade corporate taxes, while giving the new department a free
hand to bypass civil service rules in promoting and firing workers and allowing
the President to exempt unionized workers from collective bargaining
agreements in the name of "national security."

§ Gave annual bonuses as large as $25,000 to top political appointees (who
typically already earn $115,000 to $140,000), while cutting a pay raise,
already passed by both houses of Congress, for 1.8 million federal employees.
Bush said it would "interfere with our nation's ability to pursue the war on
terrorism."

§ Called for as many as 850,000 government jobs--nearly half the federal
civilian work force--to be outsourced to private contractors--a move designed
to reduce their pay and benefits and eliminate union protections, prompting
Bobby Harnage Sr., president of the American Federation of Government
Employees, to say that Bush had "declared all-out war on federal employees."

§ Refused to support an extension of unemployment benefits to about 750,000
American families whose benefits would run out three days after Christmas,
until pressured by Congressional Democrats a week after front-page headlines
announced that the nation's unemployment rate had reached 6 percent (an
eight-year high) and that each week an additional 95,000 workers will lose
their benefits. Bush changed his position in mid-December, but did not indicate
whether he would advocate the twenty-six-week extension supported by
Democrats or whether he would support extending benefits to jobless workers
whose original round of benefits will soon run out.

§ Proposed changes in rules covering employee pensions that will save
companies money but threaten the retirement funds of older workers.

§ Repealed a Clinton-era Labor Department rule that allows states to use
unemployment insurance money to help people who take a leave from work to
have babies or adopt children--a rule that the US Chamber of Commerce and
the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) opposed, claiming it was
essentially a tax on employers.

§ Proposed additional tax cuts--including making last year's "temporary"
ten-year cut a permanent one--that would primarily benefit the wealthiest 2
percent of Americans.

§ Pushed to privatize Social Security by diverting trillions of dollars to
stockbrokers, putting the retirement cushion for millions of Americans at risk.

§ Lowered product-labeling standards, allowing food makers to list health
claims on labels before they have been scientifically proven. Bush's new Food
and Drug Administration chief Mark McClellan announced in mid-December
that the FDA will no longer require claims to be based on "significant scientific
agreement," but instead on the "weight of scientific evidence"--a change that
the National Food Processors Association, the trade association of the $500
billion food processing industry, had lobbied for. Bruce Silverglade of the
Center for Science in the Public Interest told the Los Angeles Times that the
ruling would lead to a "marketplace free-for-all of false and misleading claims."

§ Loosened EPA air pollution standards for oil refineries and manufacturing
plants, which allows them to modernize their facilities without installing
pollution-control equipment--a rule change that could actually increase the
level of dangerous pollutants emitted into the air. A spokesman for the NAM,
which fought for the change, called the new rules "a refreshingly flexible
approach to regulation."

§ Allowed logging companies to cut down old-growth trees in our nation's
forests under the guise of reducing the risk of forest fires.

§ Rolled back safeguards, opposed by the American Forest and Paper
Association, that protect fish and wildlife from logging in 155 national forests
with 192 million acres of public land in forty-four states. It removed a
Clinton-era regulation requiring comprehensive environmental impact
statements whenever the Forest Service revises its forest management plans.
The Bush plan, instead, will give each forest manager discretion in deciding
whether and how to assess environmental impacts; a move that the
environmental group Defenders of Wildlife said would allow "reckless logging
by timber-industry profiteers and the destruction of habitat for many species of
wildlife."

§ Reversed a Clinton Administration rule banning snowmobiles in Yellowstone
and Grand Teton National Parks.

§ Approved the drilling of two new natural gas wells in Texas's Padre Island
National Park adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico--which lies along the nation's
longest stretch of undeveloped beach and which is home to eleven endangered
species--by BNP Petroleum, a private firm based in Corpus Christi. This is
one part of the Bush Administration's plan to promote drilling at more than fifty
new sites on federal land in the lower forty-eight states as well as in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Opined the New York Times: "Such is this
Administration's appetite for extractable resources that no area seems safe."

§ Approved construction by Calpine, a private utility company that contributed
to the Bush campaign, of a forty-eight-megawatt geothermal power plant in the
Modoc National Forest in California that had been blocked by the Clinton
Administration because of concerns by environmental groups and by Indian
tribes that consider part of the area sacred. In approving the project, the Bush
Administration rejected a recommendation by the Advisory Council on
Historical Preservation, a federal agency.

§ Replaced three ruling-class members of his economic team (SEC chairman
Harvey Pitt, a lawyer for the major accounting firms; Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa; and chief economic adviser Lawrence
Lindsey, former Federal Reserve Board governor) with three other ruling-class
members (John Snow, chief executive of CSX Corporation and former head
of the powerful Business Roundtable, to the Treasury post; investment banker
William Donaldson to the SEC job; and Stephen Friedman, former chairman
of investment banking firm Goldman Sachs and current director of unionbuster
Wal-Mart, as chief economic adviser).

§ Picked war criminal and liar Henry Kissinger to chair a task force
investigating the 9/11 events without requiring him to disclose his consulting
firm's business clients, which include some of the most powerful multinational
corporations (reportedly among them Exxon Mobil, ARCO and American
Express), which, as the New York Times noted, "depend on maintaining
cordial ties with foreign governments and Washington officials"--an obvious
conflict of interest. (Under public pressure to choose between making money
and public service, Kissinger quickly resigned from the task force.)

§ Went to court to stop Congressional watchdogs (along with the Sierra Club)
from forcing Vice President Dick Cheney--former CEO of the
scandal-plagued energy services company Halliburton--to turn over
documents detailing meetings between oil and gas industry lobbyists and
executives (including representatives of Enron) and Cheney's energy policy
task force, which called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public lands and
an easing of regulations on the building of nuclear power plants. Helping craft
the Bush legal strategy was White House counsel Alberto Gonzales (a possible
Bush nominee for the Supreme Court), who, when he served as a justice on
the Texas Supreme Court, received more than $100,000 in political
contributions from the energy industry (including Enron and Enron's law firm,
where he once worked).

Having Bush in the White House and Republicans in control of both houses of
Congress makes it difficult to open the paper every morning. But rather than
contribute to a sense of resignation and despair, the outrages of the Bush
Administration should, like Thomas Paine's list of grievances against our
eighteenth-century colonial masters, rouse us to revolt. Pass this list to your
friends, activists and colleagues and let's get started.

Peter Dreier invites readers' comments, via e-mail.

UPDATE: Very interesting. All of this apparently came about after big cheese at TIA (Total Information Awarness) surrepticiously removed their bios from the TIA website! That's right -- they want to know everything about you, but you're to know nothing about them! Fortunately, an enterprising young freedom-lover cached the bios here. (Link via Reason's Blog.)

Posted by Radley Balko on December 15, 2002:
A complete dossier on John Poindexter is available at http://www.warblogging.com/tia/poindexter.php
http://www.thememoryhole.org/policestate/iao-bios.htm

Missing Web Pages from the Information Awareness Office
(IAO) Web site http://www.computerbytesman.com/tia/index.htm

Home page info: http://www.computerbytesman.com/index.htm

Homeland security will put even more folks to work, except these will be wearing jackboots and will be searching your friendly neighborhood for the thousands of trained killers that Bush says are plotting to attack us. You know the ones - those who dare to criticize Bush
administration policies. You don't have to be a fool...to realize that Bush needs Homeland Security in a hurry - to control the dissenters who will be marching shoulder-to-shoulder across the Homeland when it dawns on them what he's up to.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/11/p/13_fool.html Don't
Be a FoolNovember 13, 2002 By Sheila Samples

http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm George Bush (Sr.): The Unauthorized Biography by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

"There ought to be limits to freedom." --G.W. Bush, Press conference, Texas State House, 1999.

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." --G.W.Bush, December 18, 2000

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it." - George W. Bush, July 26, 2001

"You can fool some of the people, all of the time -- and those are the ones you have to concentrate on." -George W. Bush, 2001

"Who cares what you think?" --George W. Bush, July 4, 2001

"I do not need to explain why I say things." -George Bush, From an interview conducted by Bob Woodward, 20 November 2002

Actual front cover of the London Mirror, December, 2002

American democracy now faces its greatest menace since Joseph McCarthy, not from foreign terrorists or invaders but from cynical extremists occupying the White House. Engaging in an obsessive campaign of domestic spying, assassinating American citizens, provoking baseless wars and furiously unraveling civil protections and rights that we hold dear, George W. Bush's ersatz presidency is working hard to transform the United States from a law-abiding republic into a postmodern blend of late Soviet totalitarianism and Gold Rush-era company town.

Workers by the hundreds of thousands are stripped of their union protection. Oil drillers and
clear-cutters are set loose in our national parks. Officials refuse to tell the truth about the 9/11
attacks. In the middle of a deep recession, the deficit is run to record highs to accommodate tax cuts for a few rich individuals and corporations. Ludicrous ideas that would have been dismissed as absurdly paranoid a few years ago are floated, signed into law and fully funded: smearing liberals as disloyal, a Total Information Awareness office that lets the Pentagon track which magazines you buy, unmanned "drone" spy planes deployed over the West Coast, jailing and executing people without letting them see a lawyer, much less a judge.

Years after Bush is gone, we'll be paying off the debts he ran up and the lawsuits brought by
those whose rights he violated.

Opposing Bush isn't a question of partisan politics. Patriotic people of all political stripes,
including lifelong Republicans and war veterans, increasingly understand that this administration's antidemocratic, unconstitutional tactics, thinly disguised as part of a fake "war
on terrorism" that has yet to catch a single planner of 9/11, are a cover for dangerous, dictatorial impulses -Ted Rall

Politics and War As Entertainment by Butler Shaffer If I were to offer a seminar on the nature of war, I believe that the first class session would include a showing of the film "Wag the Dog". Those who wish to justify the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of total strangers in the name of "good" versus "evil," or "national honor," will likely find the movie discomforting. As the governments of India and Pakistan self-righteously, and in the name of "God," threaten one another with a nuclear war that could instantly kill anywhere from ten to twenty million people, it is time for decent, intelligent people to put down their flags and begin to see war for what the late General Smedley Butler rightly termed it: "a racket." This film offers a quick reality fix.

War Inc.

Published on Saturday, July 6, 2002 by CommonDreams.org War Inc. by Mike Ferner (Edited to fit on this site)…
"War is a racket. It always has been…A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many." (2)
Words of a radical peacenik? Only if a Marine Corps Major General qualifies as such. In his twilight years General Smedley Butler unburdened his soul as did other career militarists, such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, who admitted that fathering the nuclear Navy was a mistake and Robert McNamara, who almost found the words to apologize for overseeing the Viet Nam war. Unlike Rickover and McNamara, Butler named names and exposed for whom the system works....For a peek inside this game (of war profiteering) there are few better tour guides than President Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Having also served on President Reagan's Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Brzezinski is well-qualified to write The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. (7) It's one of those books that begs the question, "why would anybody actually put this stuff in writing?" Brzezinski describes the Europe-Asia landmass as the key to global dominance. He asserts that the fall of the Soviet Union cleared the way for the U.S. to become the first non-Eurasian power to dominate this critical area, "…and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained..." (8)

Wake-up call If the US and Iraq do go to war, there can only be one winner, can't there? Maybe not. This summer, in a huge rehearsal of just such a conflict - and with retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper playing Saddam - the US lost. Julian Borger asks the former marine how he did it. Friday September 6, 2002 The Guardian

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-woiraq1213,0,6728592.story
Source: U.S. Firms on List Aided Iraq Arms Development
By Mohamad Bazzi United Nations Correspondent December 13, 2002
United Nations -- Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of its weapons programs lists American companies that provided materials used by Baghdad to develop chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s, according to a senior Iraqi official.

The public release of such a list could prove embarrassing for the United States and highlight the extent to which the Reagan and first Bush administrations supported Iraq in its eight-year war with neighboring Iran in the 1980s. U.S. military and financial assistance to Iraq continued until Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

America tore out 8000 pages of Iraq dossier

By James Cusick and Felicity Arbuthnot
THE United States edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's 11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitised version to the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations security council. The full extent of Washington's complete control over who sees what in the crucial Iraqi dossier calls into question the allegations made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that 'omissions' in the document constituted a 'material breach' of the latest UN resolution on Iraq. Last week, Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan accepted that it was 'unfortunate' that his organisation had allowed the US to take the only complete dossier and edit it. He admitted 'the approach and style were wrong' and Norway, a member of the security council, says it is being treated like a 'second-class country'....Current and former UN diplomats are said to be livid at what some have called the 'theft' of the Iraqi document by the US. Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant general secretary of the UN and the UN's humanitarian co- ordinator in Iraq until 2000, said: 'This is an outrageous attempt by the US to mislead.'

Hewlett-Packard, Dupont, Eastman Kodak, Honeywell, Bechtel, American Type Culture Collection, Spectra Physics, Semetex, TI Coating, Unisys, Sperry Corp., Tektronix, Rockwell, Leybold Vacuum Systems, Finnigan-MAT-US, Alcolac International, Consarc, Carl Zeiss - U.S., Cerberus, Electronic Associates, International Computer Systems, EZ Logic Data Systems, Inc., Canberra Industries Inc., Axel Electronics Inc.

These 24 U.S. corporations all illegally helped Iraq, according to the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, which published the list today.

The report is based on top-secret portions of the Iraq weapons document received by the paper's Geneva correspondent Andreas Zumach.

Iraq's report also implicates the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture and U.S. government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia.

Zumach also revealed today that Iraq's report indicates two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Russia and China, continue to this day to arm Iraq.

The names of the companies were supposed to be top secret. Two weeks ago Iraq provided two copies of its full 12,000-page report, one to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva, and one to the United Nations in New York. Zumach said the U.S. broke an agreement of the Security Council and blackmailed Colombia, which at the time was presiding over the Council, to take possession of the UN's only copy. The U.S. then proceeded to make copies of the report for the other four permanent Security Council nations, Britain, France, Russia and China. Only Tuesday did the remaining members of the Security Council receive their copies. By then, all references to foreign companies had been removed.

http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,860269,00.html
US cash squads 'buy' Iraqi tribes
Secret operation aims to make sheikhs rise against Saddam
Jason Burke, chief reporter Sunday December 15, 2002 The Observer
Dozens of teams of elite American soldiers and intelligence specialists have been sent into Iraq with millions of dollars in cash to woo key tribal leaders away from Saddam Hussein.

The secret campaign, based on tactics used successfully in Afghanistan last year, has been under way for several weeks and is a critical part of the military and political strategy being pursued by the US and its closest ally, Britain, to strip Saddam of weapons of mass destruction and, if this is not possible, to bring about a 'regime change'…..In recent years Saddam has given the tribal sheikhs a degree of autonomy, allowing them to dispense justice among their own people. Loyal leaders are rewarded by subsidies as well as roads and other public works built for their followers. 'The logic is, if Saddam can buy them, then so can the Americans,' said one tribal leader who fled to the UK. The CIA was recently given more than $200m (£130m) to pay for covert operations in Iraq.

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag." --Huey Long

Is America Becoming Fascist?

CounterPunch October 26, 2002 by ANIS SHIVANI
The proposed Iraqi adventure, which is only the first step in a more ambitious militarist agenda, has been opposed by the most conservative warmongers of past administrations. If the test of any theory is its predictive capacity, Bush's extreme risk-taking is better explained by the fascist model. Purely economic motives are a large part of the story, but there is a deeper derivation that exceeds such mundane rationales. Several of the apparent contradictions in Bush's governance make perfect sense if the fascist prism is applied, but not with the normal perspective....Viewed in this perspective, in only the last few months America has advanced tremendously from emerging to realized fascism. Its imperialist and expansionist tendencies need to be couched less and less in Wilsonian idealist terms for mass acceptance. Unions can still be considered an oppositional, populist force, but working class cohesion has nearly been destroyed. Still, it needs to be said that instead of fascism appealing across class and geographical lines, the country remains divided between the liberal (urban, coastal) and proto-fascist (rural, Southern) factions....No doubt, fascism is a descriptor too carelessly thrown around; but Nixon and Reagan, no matter how reprehensible their politics, were not quite fascist. Bush is the most dangerous man in contemporary history: Hitler didn't have access to weapons that could blow up the world, and no American or other leader since World War II with access to such weapons has been as out of control. Perhaps a non-controversial statement may be that the fascist tendency always exists, at the very least latent and dormant. But when more and more of the latency becomes actualized, there comes a point when the nature of the problem has to be redefined. We may already have crossed that point..... Since liberals don't understand the magnitude of the crisis global capitalism faces, they don't understand the extent of the desperate, last-ditch effort to find an ideological glue ("terror") to hold together the centrifugal forces in the American population. Part of the confusion is that this is fascism but not really fascism ­ it is only its simulation, although no less horrifying for that reason ­ because all the twentieth-century ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, and socialism) are rapidly dissolving. -Anis Shivani studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu

Senators Support CIA Anti-Terror Effort Sun Dec 15, 4:18 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Bush administration policy authorizing the CIA to kill individuals on a list of accused terrorists was defended by leading senators on Sunday as appropriate at a time of war……Bush, Ashcroft and now the CIA (officially) have the legal authority to murder anyone they think might be a terrorist. Anyone they suspect is "bad," can now be legally murdered.....commission must investigate more fully, Roemer said…..

Remember that van full of knuckleheads the CIA drone smoked a month or two ago? At least one of those guys was suspected of helping bomb the USS Cole. (I guess the others should've picked their rides more carefully...)

All Bush has to say is "fighting terra" and anything he does is legal, which is why something like Wellstone's plane going down (without an investigation) is so disturbing. For all we know, President Happy Crack had "a feeling" about Wellstone and gave the order and the all-white CIA agreed.

After all, wasn't Wellstone the senate's Number One leftist? Rush says that makes him a commie pinko who wants to destroy America.

This isn't funny - it's tragic. We live in a country where the guy who stole the election has no rules, no laws, and no limits. A former ruler's son takes over, mobilizes the army against the citizens and consolidates his power with a secret "shadow government," whose members are loyal only to him. That's scary shit. -Bartcop

The Story Of A Vietnam Vet Caught In A Government/Celebrity Surveillance Crossfire

Spies among us -Would a proposed domestic spying scheme give us 'protectors' as scary as terrorists?
Update: 11/22/02
Both proposals -- for a domestic spy agency, and for a massive database -- are based on the premise that, with a few safeguards, the government can be trusted to snoop into Americans private affairs and not abuse the information. Knowledge of Americans' political affiliations, sexual preferences, purchase habits and day-to-day patterns of life are to be entrusted to agents formerly affiliated with the FBI and the CIA, who will use the data, we're told, to fight terrorism.

Never mind that the FBI has repeatedly been linked to high-level abuses of power, including spying on political dissidents and shielding murderers, and the CIA has been implicated in human rights abuses including assassinations. Both agencies work under restrictions that are meant to reduce the threat they pose to innocent people.

If the domestic spying plan becomes a reality, Americans will likely be too busy fearing their protectors to give much mind to terrorists.

In IAO's Total Information Awareness System the goal is to detect, ID, classify and track potential anti-government targets through multi-agency OPs. The program is an ongoing research project designed to acquire data through advanced technological applications for surveillance. The All-Seeing-Eye in IAO's logo is watching, listening, and tracking the whole globe. Judging by their stated areas of research, I think the plan is to marry 'psychic spying' with Echelon technology - thus the use of a recognized occult symbol for a logo. How's that for your tax dollars at work?

IAO got its first director on February 13, 2002, the "unscrupulous" John Poindexter. The former National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan was convicted of conspiracy, lying to congress, destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal, defrauding America and has been accused of cocaine smuggling by Costa Rican government (according to the Guardian).

Poindexter had already been working for years with DARPA to develop Genoa, an intelligence mining, and information harvesting system. Basically it is designed to listen in on our electronic conversations. The Information Awareness Office employs Poindexter's Genoa and an advanced version called Genoa II.

You can be sure that he authorized the logo in order to thumb his nose at congress and give them a little reminder of just how much power Bush has really given him. Since Poindexter had his convictions overturned in 1990 (in exchange for testimony), Dubya feels the American public need not worry that such a man is at the helm of America's new surveillance behemoth. I guess he figures that conspiring against the American public (again) is above the character of Mr. Poindexter. Mr. Skull & Bones thinks you should have faith in your new Big Brother. The All-Seeing-Eye is protecting you.

Biometric signatures of humans *Face *Fingerprints *Gait *Iris *Speech recognition, More
Transactional Spying *Financial *Education, *Travel *Medical *Veterinary *County Entry *Place/Event Entry *Transportation *Housing *Critical Resources *Government Communications *Cognitive aids that allow humans and machines to "think together" in real-time about complicated problems *Cognitive amplifiers that help teams of people rapidly and fully comprehend complicated and uncertain situations

You Are a Suspect - If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend - all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database." To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you - passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance - and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen..... -WILLIAM SAFIRE WASHINGTON

MR. FLEISCHER: I understand. The President thinks that Admiral Poindexter has served our nation very well.

Q: Really?

MR. FLEISCHER: That's the President's thoughts.

Q: Do you know his record?

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm sure you will inform me.

Meet America's New Big Brother Who's John Poindexter? A retired Navy Admiral, John Poindexter lost his job as National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan, and was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal.

What a guy! JUST the person we need to head up the new Information Awareness Office -- that is, the new agency that will engage in domestic espionage by monitoring emails and phone correspondence. http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.20B.Bush.Conspirator.htm

Iran-Contra: White House e-mail In November 1986, as the Iran-Contra scandal broke, President Reagan's national security adviser, John Poindexter, and one of Poindexter's aides, Oliver North, began electronically destroying more than 5,000 e-mail messages in the memory banks of the White House computer system. What they apparently didn't know was that these messages were still retrievable from the e-mail system's backup tapes. Investigators from the FBI and the Tower Commission subsequently used these tapes to reconstruct the Iran-Contra scandal. Here are the links to those email messages...

Gotta Have Faith By PAUL KRUGMAN December 17, 2002

Last week the Bush administration made an important announcement. I'm not referring to the selection of a new economic team, which will make absolutely no difference to policy. I'm talking about the executive order removing longstanding barriers between church and state.

Of course, the administration insists that the new policy isn't intended to allow government-funded proselytizing. And it would surely deny that by explicitly permitting religious discrimination in hiring - organizations that receive federal contracts can "take faith into account in making employment decisions" - it is opening up a new source of patronage for its friends on the Christian right.

Why am I not reassured?

For one thing, we are well advised not to trust anything the administration says about the goals of its domestic policy. John J. DiIulio, who initially headed the Bush administration's faith-based initiative, told a reporter, Ron Suskind, that this White House had no interest in the substance of policy, caring only about political payoffs: "What you've got is everything - and I mean everything - being run by the political arm."

Mr. DiIulio repudiated his own carefully drafted, 3,000-word letter to Mr. Suskind after Karl Rove put a horse's head in his bed. (O.K., I'm not sure about that last part.) But the best guess about any domestic policy from this administration is that its real purpose is to cater to a part of its base. And which part of the base wants to blur the line between church and state?

George W. Bush is always careful to speak in favor of faith in general, not any faith in particular. Congressional leaders are less careful. Last spring Tom DeLay, soon to be House majority leader, told a church group that: "Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world - only Christianity." He also said he was on a mission from God to promote a "biblical worldview" in American politics.

By the way, one piece of that biblical worldview involves scientific education. After the Columbine school shootings, Mr. DeLay suggested that the tragedy had occurred "because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." Guns don't kill people; Charles Darwin kills people.

Mr. DeLay isn't an obscure crank; he's the most powerful man in Congress. Still, is he an outlier? No. Don Nickles, now challenging the wounded Mr. Lott for Senate leadership, is less given to colorful statements, but is as closely aligned with the religious right as Mr. DeLay.

"Bush won't criticize Trent Lott for making racist remarks. He wouldn't criticize the bigotry of his buddies at Bob Jones University, and he won't criticize the racist symbol on the Georgia flag. Now what happened to straight talk from the guy who said he was a uniter, not a divider?" --Paul Begala, Crossfire, 12/11/02
That's easy - Bush was never a uniter. He's always been a racist drunk who never worked a day in his Richie Rich life of leisure. His good puppy press crew wet themselves with self-importance when Smirk gave them all cute lil' nicknames on the jet Ken Lay provided. Candy Crowley was particularly under this Dumbass's spell that summer. Her nickname was "Sugar." "Ohhhh, Mr. Pres, ...I mean Governor, ...say it again - pleeeease?" -Bartcop

WHY ISN'T ASHCROFT IN LOTTS OF TROUBLE? HE FOUGHT INTEGRATION OF ST. LOUIS SCHOOLS; HE PRAISED CONFEDERATE LEADERS WHO FOUGHT TO PRESERVE SLAVERY; HE INTERVENED ON BEHALF OF A SUPPORTER OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSERVATIVE CITIZENS (THE 'UPTOWN KLAN') WHO WAS INDICTED FOR TRYING TO KILL AN FBI AGENT: He persistently attempted to block school desegregation in his state; a federal court threatened to hold the state in contempt for his failure to comply with a court order.

He gave a lengthy interview to the Neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, in
which he praised Confederate leaders who fought to preserve slavery, including
Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.

He distorted the record of a highly qualified African American state Supreme Court
Judge and misled his colleagues in the Senate, successfully sabotaging the judge's
nomination to a federal district court.

He received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University and spoke there just
three years ago; the Christian university has a segregationist history and until
recently banned interracial dating and marriage.

No, this is not the resume of the embattled Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott. It is
the resume of the man who has already been entrusted to enforce the nation's civil
rights laws. We're talking about Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Secretary of State General Colin Powell yesterday said he is disappointed in Senator
Lott and he deplores the sentiments behind Lott's statement. Two weeks ago, Lott
said America would be better off today if Strom Thurmond had won the 1948
presidency on his "Segregation Forever" platform. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island
became the first Republican Senator to call unambiguously for Lott to step down,
and Florida Governor Jeb Bush also criticized the Senator.

As the criticism and calls for Lott's resignation increase, we thought it's time to take another look at Attorney General John Ashcroft. Democrats repeatedly denounced Ashcroft during the dramatic confirmation hearings of January, 2001. But then eightDemocrats voted for him, and Senator Edward Kennedy declined to filibuster the nomination, even though he had the votes he needed. Then-Majority Leader Trent Lott had promised to deliver all fifty Republican votes to Ashcroft before the confirmation hearings even began, and he did it.

Dept of Justice, John Ashcroft (Atty General). Opposes abortion, hates gays, supports the death penalty, opposes a moratorium on executions, wants tougher sentences for drug crimes, opposes any and all gun control laws. Scuttled the appointment of Ronnie White (the first African-American on the Missouri Supreme Court) to a federal district court bench. In a 1998 interview he lauded the cause of pro-slavery Confederate secessionists; in 1999, Ashcroft got an honorary degree from Bob Jones University. Lobbyists reportedly consider him an advocate for drug companies and the automotive industry, and for preventing consumers from suing HMOs.

The last job Ashcroft should be given is attorney general

THE CASE AGAINST ASHCROFT BEING ATTORNEY GENERAL

ASHCROFT PRAISES RACIST MAG AS "SETTING RECORD STRAIGHT"

Ashcroft's nephew got probation after major pot bust

" American non-Christians told pollsters that evangelical Christians are better than prostitutes but worse than lawyers or lesbians. " --Harper's Weekly Review, 12.17.02

http://www.openthebooks.com/petition/index.asp http://www.buzzflash.com/perspectives/2002/Bush_Knew.html

Bin Laden Is Back in Saudi Arabia - Is Working Closely with Baghdad DEBKA Exclusive - Based on summary of latest DEBKA-Net-Weekly Revelations October 19, 2002, 1:58 PM (GMT+02:00) DEBKAfile reveals that the long-lost al Qaeda leader, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, is alive and in Saudi Arabia. He is believed to have landed secretly at the end of September, shortly before the latest upsurge of international terrorist attacks against the French oil tanker Limburg, the shooting of American Marines in Kuwait, the Bali bomb disaster. This exclusive information reached DEBKA-Net-Weekly (October 18, Issue 81) from its most credible intelligence and counter-intelligence sources. His re-appearance in Saudi Arabia, which withdrew his citizenship and sent him into exile, brings to a close the debate and speculation rife since the Tora Bora battle in Afghanistan 11 months ago over Bin Laden's fate and whereabouts.

If the U.S. boosts defense spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: Mr. bin Laden's family. By DANIEL GOLDEN, JAMES BANDLER and MARCUS WALKER Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL September 27, 2001

Senators Fault 9/11 Inquiry as Superficial Wed December 18, 2002 05:46 PM ET By Tabassum Zakaria WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks did not delve deeply into the causes of intelligence failures and left key avenues unexplored, some lawmakers involved in the investigation said on Wednesday….they complained that most panel members had little input into the way the bipartisan inquiry was conducted or into the final report. It was overseen by the senior Republican and Democrat members on the two intelligence committees.

"While the report should be a useful historical document on which to base further inquiries, we cannot vouch for its contents," their statement said. The report "falls well short of addressing the core problems that led to 9/11" that were rooted in poor policy and inadequate leadership, they said.

"The investigation should have delved more deeply into conflicting interpretations of legal authorities (including presidential directives), budget allocations, institutional attitudes, and other key areas," their statement said.

Rep. Tim Roemer, an Indiana Democrat who will serve on a new Sept. 11 commission that will conduct a broader review of the government's failings, said one shortcoming of the intelligence inquiry was that the secretaries of State and Defense, the attorney general and the White House national security adviser were not directly questioned. He said the commission's investigation will not be complete without that.

The intelligence inquiry also only "scratched the surface" of investigating financial relationships between extremist groups and foreign governments and that was an issue the national commission must investigate more fully, Roemer said…..

Calif. Muslims Detained in Crowded, Cold Centers Thu December 19, 2002 06:02 PM ET By Jill Serjeant LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hundreds of Muslim men and boys are being subjected to strip searches in freezing, standing room only detention centers in southern California after being arrested for routine visa irregularities, immigration lawyers said on Thursday. They estimated that between 1,000 and 2,500 males, some as young as 16, were spending their fourth day locked up in what they called inhumane conditions after voluntarily presenting themselves at immigration offices to register under new anti-terrorism rules.

It has happened here, the USA we knew is no more. The final nail has been driven into the coffin of that great experiment in government of, by and for the people. George W. Bush has gotten his wish: This is now a dictatorship and he is the dictator. History will record that the death blows were delivered by the Democratic Party. An awful but inescapable truth...-Bev Conover Online Journal Editor & Publisher November 21, 2002

From Citizens To Customers, Losing Our Collective Voice -Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg
It would be a mistake to conclude, as many commentators do, that Americans are apathetic citizens gone AWOL. But there's no question that the fundamental relationship between citizen and government has changed. Increasingly, public officials regard us as "customers" rather than as citizens, and there are crucial differences between the two. Citizens own the government. Customers just receive services from it. Citizens belong to a political community with a collective existence and public purposes. Customers are individual purchasers seeking the best deal. Customers may receive courteous service, but they do not own the store.

Chokehold on Knowledge Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels wants to transfer control of information management from the printing office to individual Cabinet agencies. That would spell the end of the current system, in place since the Jeffersonian era, which requires executive branch agencies to send their documents and reports to neutral librarians, who then make them available to the public both online and in 1,300 public reading rooms nationwide. Daniels would replace that system with a more secretive one in which individual agencies would manage -- and possibly sanitize -- their own electronic databases. -LA Times

Get used to living in a police state where your offspring are looked upon as nothing more than cannon fodder for the Bush regime's endless wars. -Assassinations, phony wars, cooked polls, corporate crooks and stolen elections. -Bev Conover

 

Analysts claim early peak in world oil production The world is drawing down its oil reserves at an unprecedented rate, with supplies likely to be constrained by global production capacity by 2010, "even assuming no growth in demand," said analysts at Douglas-Westwood Ltd., an energy industry consulting firm based in Canterbury, England. "Oil will permanently cease to be abundant," said Douglas-Westwood analysts in the World Oil Supply Report issued earlier this month. "Supply and demand will be forced to balance - but at a price." The resulting economic shocks will rival those of the 1970s, as oil prices "could double and triple within 2 or 3 years as the world changes from oil abundance to oil scarcity. The world is facing a future of major oil price increases, which will occur sooner than many people believe," that report concluded. -OGJ editors HOUSTON, Aug. 12

 

"Democracy is more in the counting of the votes than the casting of them." - Crispin Hull, Canberra Times, Australia

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything."--- Joseph Stalin On Nov. 5

Did We Just Witness Another Illegal COUP D'ETAT in America? -Linkcrusader

Remember When We Had Elections? -Richard Heinberg New College of California (Santa Rosa)
Taken together, the Cheneys, Perles, Rumsfelds, Armitages, and Negropontes of the new administration appear to stand for a foreign policy of world domination, and a domestic policy of financial corruption and political repression. One gets the impression that these are people who do not care much about democracy; nor do they have much interest in fair play. Nor are they likely again to relinquish power peacefully, as they did in 1992....True democracy takes time and effort and requires the learning of communication and negotiation skills. The alternative, however, is authoritarianism in its myriad forms. In our lives, all of us-Americans included-have to decide whether we prefer the convenience of leaving the decisions that affect us to others, or the bother of responsibility and involvement. Democracy does not ensure that the right decisions will always be made, but it does enlist the diverse perceptions and skills of the entire populace in solving the endless variety of problems with which every society is eventually confronted.

The face of modern ballot tampering by Faun Otter You can't vote them out if.... You never voted them in.

The Stealing of America - click on "Chapters"

Vote of No Confidence - Everything you need to know about stealing elections

In a joint study issued in July, researchers found that the most high-tech voting systems in use today produced, on average, nearly as many spoiled, unmarked or uncounted ballots as the much- maligned punch-card systems. kioskcom.com

We will be hearing much about 'moral clarity' from the Bush administration in the months and years to come. What component of this is truly felt or merely cynical political posturing isn't really important - either way, we can count on it to hide great crimes against the country and humanity. 'You're all sinners, and you have no rights,' is the true mantra of the self-righteous; and when you hear Bush speak of 'moral clarity,' remember this is what he really means. --11.11.02, Kent Southard

President Bush plans to allow the private sector to compete for nearly half the nation's 1.8 million federal civilian jobs - Edwin Chen Los Angeles Times

The (Homeland Security) proposal drew a sharp dissent from the American Federation of Government Employees, the large union of federal workers. -Helen Dewar Washington Post Staff Writer

Dem Senate Leaders Screw Labor Movement, Give Up Fed Workers' Collective Bargaining Rights To Anti-Union Bush. When Tom Daschle, John Breaux, and the other Dem Senate centrists decided to back Bush's version of the Homeland Security bill and bring it to the Senate floor for an up or down vote, they screwed the nearly 200,000 fed workers in two dozen fed agencies that will make up the new Homeland Security Department out of a hard-fought cornerstone of the American union movement, the right of collective bargaining. Under the Bush bill, he or his representative can hire, fire, promote, or demote any worker in that department for whatever reason he sees fit without recourse. The Dem leaders hope to cover their behinds by claiming the bill is a compromise because it includes a mediation clause. But while the fired worker can talk to a mediator about his case, the mediator's decision will carry absolutely no legal weight with respect to Bush changing his decision. That's the Dem's idea of "compromise." That's an insult. That's not collective bargaining, that's slave labor. What the Senate Dems have told the American labor movement is that the Bush beatings will continue until morale improves. Next, look for Bush to try to bring the other federal departments in line with the Department of Homeland Security. After all, Bush must be thinking, why should the other fed workers have collective bargaining protections that the Senate Dems have taken away from the 200,000 unfortunate folks who will soon find themselves working in the Department of Homeland Security. One must assume that this is the first Dem response to the recent Bush takeover of government. Apparently, the Dems think if they can't defeat Bush, they'll join him. --Politex, 11.13.02

Bush Plans To Destroy Federal Unions To Further Political, Not Economic, Goals. Last week Bush's drive to destroy all unions within the federal bureaucracy went into overdrive with new, strengthened anti-union language in the Homeland Security bill. A few days later we learned that the Bush Admin will privatize nearly half all federal civilian jobs, up to as many as 850,000. Bush does not need the approval of Congress to do so. While the rationale for taking away the civil service protections of the workers within Homeland Security was Bush's need to control the department during a time of war, another rationale was given for the job privatization: to save money. Those who would benefit from such privatization, many of whom being contributors to the Bush presidential campaign, claim that privatizing fed jobs save the taxpayers up to 30%, 10% more than the Bush Admin claims. Less biased observers point out that such savings come about when health and retirement benefits are taken away from the workers, fewer workers are expected to work longer hours for lower wages, and less-qualified workers are employed. The post-9/11 airport screening scandals are just the latest example of what happens when a few large corporations earn considerable profits by privatizing jobs that should have been federalized. The poorly trained, poorly educated, poorly motivated screeners, many of whom could not even speak English, were in over their heads, but the goal of privatization was to make money for their bosses, not provide a quality product. -Politex, 11.18.02

Senate GOP Leadership Shows Party True Colors by Dave "Doctor" Gonzo
For those of you who missed the story, Kamen named names and provided occupations of a few of the rioters featured in a Reuters photo. Leading the pac is Tom Pyle, policy analyst, office of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-TX.) -- speaking of Dixie Cro-Mags (1)

Dear Congressman Delay: It has been reported by the Associated Press that you are, on behalf of the National Republican Congressional Committee, selling meetings with Bush Administration officials for $20,000 donations. If this report is correct (copy attached), your activity is illegal under the following U.S. Code statutory provisions, and we respectfully request that you immediately cease and desist. -JUDICIAL WATCH, INC. Larry Klayman Chairman and General Counsel

• T. Rex's Guide to Life: Politics: Right Wing Watch:Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas
  Cooperated with lobbyists to write legislation exempting their industries from environmental laws.
  Warned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission not to impose price caps or other controls on wholesale electricity prices.
  Opposes homosexual rights.
  Proposed to allow impeachment of federal judges whose rulings he felt did not follow the law.
  Proposed a bill that would limit the ability of federal judges to correct unconstitutional conditions in prisons. (ACLU, 5.19.98)
  Attempted to repeal the Clean Air Act.
  Fought to cut the budget for the EPA.
  Called the EPA the gestapo of governmentDemanded that the FBI investigate journalists that wrote stories that were unflattering to him.
  Urged Bush to appeal the Florida Supreme Court decision to allow hand recounts.
  Decried the Florida Supreme Court decision to allow hand recounts as "arrogant" and a "blatant and extraordinary abuse of judicial power."
  Voted against background checks at gun shows.
  Favors school prayer.
  Rejects evolution.
  Opposes free speech.
  Was hit with a RICO racketeering lawsuit, which charges DeLay and several organizations with "massive illegal conduct" and even extortion and money laundering.
  Played a major role in final passage of the Enron-supported Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. The legislation exempted energy derivative trading (Enron's main business) from government regulation. (PC, 1.25.02)
  Physically assualted another representative and called him "chickenshit."
  He supposedly has a grown daughter in Texas that is not related to his wife.
  Is being investigated over allegations he tried to raise political donations by promising meetings with Bush administration officials. (AP, 4/11/01)
  A photo supposedly exists of him locked in a sexual embrace with a Mexican prostitute.

In this country-in America-people are disappearing from their homes, being held incommunicado without specified duration, without charge, without judicial oversight, and without benefit of counsel. In this country-in America-political opponents of the officially sanctioned parties in Washington are being denied their right to travel, and are being put on "watch" lists. In this country-in America-the doors and windows of the Executive branch have been officially closed and silenced to the scrutiny of the people, the courts, and Congress. In this country-in America-the taxes paid by the majority of American citizens are being doled out to a small elite class of Americans. In this country-in America-there is an officially sanctioned news service that openly warns its employees to broadcast no news unless it is accompanied by sanctioned government propaganda. -- A primer on understanding conspiracies By James Higdon

Democracy in Deep Decay Terrence McNally, AlterNet September 17, 2002 Viewed on September 23, 2002