"...According to journalists close to the Vatican, the Pope and his closest advisers are also concerned that the ultimate acts of evil - the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon - were known in advance by senior Bush administration officials.
By permitting the attacks to take their course, there is a perception within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy that a coup d'etat was implemented, one that gave Bush and his leadership near-dictatorial powers to carry out their agenda."
"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" -- Project for a New American Century (2000)
Never mind the Pope, he's a pinko commie "hate-America-first" conspiracy wack-job.
The term "brainstorming" has become the latest target of political correctness, according to a charity.
Trainee teachers are being told to avoid the word for fear of offending pupils with epilepsy. Instead they are being advised to use "word storm" or "thought shower".
The Bush administration has reacted angrily to suggestions that the commander of the Gulf war operation, General Tommy Franks, might be charged with war crimes in Belgium.
Two weeks ago I experienced a very small taste of what hundreds of South Asian immigrants and U.S. citizens of South Asian descent have gone through since 9/11, and what thousands of others have come to fear. I was held, against my will and without warrant or cause, under the USA PATRIOT Act.
While I understand the need for some measure of security and precaution in times such as these, the manner in which this detention and interrogation took place raises serious questions about police tactics and the safeguarding of civil liberties in times of war.
The history of warfare and weapons is very complicated. To make sense of it all, you need a PhD from a prestigious university, an engineering background, and years of experience working in the military, not to mention actual combat experience. The problem is, all that would take me about twenty years and I only have an hour to write this. So here is my "History of Warfare for Dummies."
In her introduction titled "Forbidden Topics, Forbidden Words," Diane Ravitch, the nationally renowned educator and historian, describes how she "stumbled upon an elaborate, well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly implemented by test publishers, textbook publishers, states and the federal government." What she next writes should send a shiver down the backs of parents with school children:
"What I did not realize was that educational materials are now governed by an intricate set of rules to screen out language and topics that might be considered controversial or offensive. Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous, and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school."
American forces in Iraq have signed a ceasefire agreement with an Iranian opposition group that the United States lists as a terrorist organisation, a surprise move that has greatly concerned officials in Britain and Tehran.
The decision to cease hostilities with the Peoples Mujahidin (MKO), an armed group of secular Iranian dissidents that has been fighting Tehrans fundamentalist regime from inside Iraq for more than 20 years, is the first accord between the US and a listed terrorist organisation.
America's announcement of its intention to withdraw its military bases from Saudi Arabia answers Osama bin Laden's most persistent demand.
More than any other cause it was the presence of "crusader" forces in the land of Islam's holiest sites - Mecca and Medina - that turned bin Laden from Afghan jihadi into an international terrorist.
Of course, Tim Osman has been an "international terrorist" for some time now.
The news last week, to quote Walter Cronkite, was "filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times". And seldom have times more badly needed alteringalthough I'm not sure how much more illumination I can stand.
One item being discussed wherever those concerned with the Bill of Rights congregate, was a White House statement that the President supports renewal of unconstitutional gun laws passed by the Clinton Administrationalthough it couldn't have happened without the enthusiastic assistance of Republicans like "Brady Bill Bob" Dole that were otherwise supposed to "sunset" sometime in 2004.
A May 31, 2002 internal memo from the Education Department, "Criterion and Process for Removing Old Content from www.ed.gov," the department's Web site, is strangely akin to what occurs in 1984.
Cisco Systems has created a more efficient and targeted way for police and intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on people whose Internet service provider uses their company's routers.
Re "Bush's Aides Plan Late Sprint in '04" (news article, April 22):
Since the worst terrorist attack in American history, which took the life of my brother, occurred in New York on Sept. 11, it seems appropriate that President Bush will be making his re-election bid from that city at that time in 2004.
Perhaps the millions of unemployed Americans, veterans whose benefits have been threatened, families of dead civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, working people who lost their pensions to corporate fraud, and 41 million Americans without health insurance can come to town and join him in celebrating the other achievements of his first term. DAVID POTORTI Cary, N.C., April 23, 2003
Tehran, April 28, IRNA -- Instead of snaring the terrorists and proving to the world community that it is sincere in its anti-terrorism campaign, Washington has struck a deal with the most hated Iraq-based terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) to remain stationed in Baghdad and continue their terrorist activities, hit out `Tehran Times' on Monday.
Recent reports have it that the US has reached an agreement with the Iraq-based MKO allowing the armed terrorist organization to remain in Baghdad, retain their facilities, remain armed and continue their terrorist activities from there.
It must be noted that the MKO has been on the US terrorist hit list, is considered a terrorist group by Europe and has a dark record of terrorist activities, the paper pointed out.
If "protecting terrorists" is what Washington calls their campaign against terrorism, then let Washington be reminded that UN Resolution 1373 prohibits any kind of support for terrorist groups, highlighted the daily.
The similarities between American fascism and particularly the National Socialist precedent, both historical and theoretical, are remarkable. Fascism is home, it is here to stay, and it better be countered with all the intellectual resources at our disposal.
Then some real professionals get on the scene and bada-bing.
CIA gets there = nothing CIA leaves = something
I'll let reason guide this one.
One does not need to resort to wild conspiracy theories to doubt what we are being told; one need merely look for the inconsistencies in the official stories, and then apply some critical thinking skills.
Both Orwell and Aldous Huxley have written about dictatorial leaders and their methods of managing public opinion. In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote that tyrants often use propaganda techniques that rely on the following. (1) Repetition of catchwords, (2) Suppression of facts the propagandist wants the public to ignore. (3) Inflaming mass fear or other strong emotional reaction for the purpose of controlling public opinion and behavior.
Huxley talks about Adolf Hitler's propaganda efforts to appeal to the emotions of the masses instead of reason. He notes that Hitler systematically exploited the German people's hidden fears and anxieties. The Bush administration has clearly exploited the American people's fears of terrorism since September 11.
According to Huxley, Hitler said the masses run on instinct and emotion rather than facts and are easy to manipulate, while society's intellectuals and independent thinkers insist on factual evidence and logic and easily see through fallacies. Huxley says Hitler encouraged the masses to attack or shout down intellectual dissenters rather than engage them in logical debate, because the rational dissenters would likely win any argument on the basis of fact.
"When your daughter asks for a pony, don't tell her that it's too expensive; after all, if you had your last twenty years of tax money back, she could have ten ponies. Tell her the truth: that the IRS has taken her pony and given it to an evil dictator in North Korea who will probably eat it."
DARGA SHARKHAN, Iraq, April 22 The two-inch-thick manual on killing, discovered in an abandoned bomb laboratory here early this month, offers instruction in Al Qaeda's array of lethal demolition skills.
With a text in Arabic complemented by diagrams taken from American military manuals, the document offers lessons for rigging explosives, setting and concealing booby traps, and wiring an alarm clock to detonate a bomb.......
The book is a photocopy of one volume of the Jihad Encyclopedia, the technical manual that American officials have said is used by Al Qaeda in its war against the West. Other copies were found in terrorist training camps and guest houses in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001.
This copy, though, was found not in Afghanistan but in this valley in the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. It was recovered by Kurdish security officials accompanied by a reporter in a training center operated by Ansar al-Islam, a local armed party........
Ansar established itself late in 2001, as the war in Afghanistan was winding down, uniting previously splintered Islamic parties. It occupied a border region in northeastern Iraq that has been out of Saddam Hussein's control since 1991. ....
The curriculum is the product of a detailed collection and translation effort. A Special Forces officer flipped through the Ansar explosives manual found here, noting, as other American officers have, that it included page after page of instructional diagrams from United States Army publications.
He recognized almost every one. "This one is from our improvised munitions manual," he said. "That's from the booby trap manual. This is almost photocopied from our books." ......
Northern Iraq has long had a small cadre of jihad fighters, including some who Kurdish intelligence officials say trained in western Pakistan in the 1980's, when the United States was underwriting the guerrilla resistance against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan......
Kurdish officials had estimated that Ansar al-Islam had about 650 members, but American officials now say they believe it had grown to 1,000 or more. The passports collected show that many new international fighters entered on Iranian tourist or pilgrimage visas....
I think the New York Times just spilled the beans. How did the Ansar al-Islam with "instructional diagrams" from "American military manuals" and Al Qaeda operatives "trained in western Pakistan in the 1980's, when the United States was underwriting the guerrilla resistance against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan" make it into the northern Iraqi "no-fly zone" which was constantly patrolled by the US & British military forces?
These "international fighters" came on "Iranian tourist or pilgrimage visas"? Well, logistically, just by looking a map, unless they were airlifted in, the only way that that they could get from Afghanistan to that little corner in northern Iraq, would be to travel through Iran. If "Ansar established itself late in 2001," then most of them would have arrived when the US & Iran were part of a multinational coalition fighting the Taliban regime, an alliance and an operation which was in place several months before 9-11, although 9-11 was the stated rationale for massive US military intervention in Afghanistan. India in anti-Taliban military plan-- India and Iran will "facilitate" the planned US-Russia hostilities against the Taliban [note the date on this JUNE 2001]
At the same time, since the Gulf War of 1991 ended, the CIA & Iran have been jointly aiding the PUK, KDP, Iraqi National Congress, and other Kurdish and Shia [Shi'ite] groups, who were trying to get rid of Saddam's regime. Re: Iran allows Shiite group in Iraq to work with U.S.. And a KDP & PUK governing coalition is now coming to power under the US occupation in the northern Kurdish sector of Iraq. Bosnia-style body to solve Iraqi ethnic disputes . Was Ansar al-Islam also in on this "regime change" scheme, with Iran and the CIA guiding them?
United Press International has learned that the president's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, has placed several phone calls to the leadership of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an organization funded by the Iranian government, to invite senior leaders of the organization to a U.S.-sponsored conference in Baghdad scheduled for Monday....... One way to curb Iran's influence may be to bring the largest opposition group that it supports, SCIRI, into the fold of the transitional government the United States is looking to install. Washington has courted SCIRI since 1999, when the group was made eligible under the Iraqi Liberation Act for military training from the United States. But only until last June did SCIRI reach out to the United States. In August the organization sent Abdelaziz al-Hakim, brother of the group's leader Muhammed Baqr al-Hakim, to Washington where he and other Iraqi exiles met with Vice President Dick Cheney.
Well, actually this Iraqi Ayatollah Muhammed Baqr al-Hakim was brought into the US occupation's "fold" several months before the US occupation army even arrived in Iraq. This deal was cut among the US, Kuwait, Iran, and Ayatollah Muhammed Baqr al-Hakim several months ago for governing the Shia [Shi'ite] sector of southern Iraq, after the fall of Saddam. U.S. Is Wooing a Shiite Exile to Rattle Iraq -- November 22, 2002
But this Iraqi Ayatollah doesn't want to be seen as a puppet of the US occupation, and Bush doesn't want to be accused of cutting a deal with "terrorists" in the "axis of evil." Thus "special presidential envoy" Zalmay Khalilzad is warning Iran to keep a very low profile and not to blow their cover.
The real facts about the seriousness of the so-called Shia uprising in Basra in 1991 are not known. Till now, one has had only largely Western accounts, much varnished with their objectivity much in question. Independent non-Western accounts are difficult to come by. However, it would seem that the CIA and the MI-6, the British external intelligence agency, did succeed in driving a wedge between the Shias and the Sunnis in Basra and instigating a section of the Shias of that city to rise in revolt against Saddam. Reports of the revolt and prospects of Shia fundamentalists replacing the secular Baath regime set alarm bells ringing in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrein. The US and the UK, therefore, withdrew their support to the revolt, enabling Saddam to crush it without difficulty....
This did not, however, prevent the US and the UK from reviving their psy-war efforts to radicalise the Shia community in Iraq after the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act by the US Congress in 1998. Just as the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies injected fundamentalist ideas and elements into socialist and secular Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to whip up a jihad against the Soviet and Afghan troops, they tried to inject a similar poison into the Iraqi society to drive a wedge not only between the Shias and the Sunnis, but also between the religious and the secular elements in Iraqi society. In their efforts to undermine the Saddam regime, they did not hesitate to use the religious card, forgetting the lessons of the diastrous consequences of their using a similar modus operandi in Afghanistan in the 1980s.......
If the US were intelligent, it would befriend these intellectuals, encourage and help them to re-assert their leadership in the Iraqi society and make it clear to them that its campaign was against the dictatorship of Saddam and not against the Baath ideology. If the US does not do a mid-course correction, an Islamic revolution in Iraq is quite on the cards.
"An Islamic revolution in Iraq" IS in the cards. That was the "regime change" plan, to replace Saddam's "secular" regime with a quasi-theocratic Islamic regime, which will let the Bush administration occupy, take the oil, and plunder the country. Then when these Islamic leaders send their followers into the streets of Baghdad, administration spokespersons play innocent with "But what are we going to do? The people want Islamic law."
A battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects.
The project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention from human operators.
Asked by Locsin if sneezing in public can be considered a terrorist act, Libanan replied: It depends on your intention. If you sneeze with the intent of creating common danger, terror, panic or chaos to the public or a segment thereof, then you can be charged as a terrorist.
On the chests of the men had been scrawled an Arabic phrase that translates as "Ali Baba - Thief."
A military officer states that the men are thieves, and that this technique will be used again.
No word yet from the newly liberated Iraqi people about some of them being summarily found guilty of theft, forced at gunpoint to strip, having a racist phrase written on their bodies, and then made to walk naked in public. No doubt the Arab/Muslim world is impressed by this display of "democracy," "freedom," "due process," and "no cruel or unusual punishment."
"One of my problems is that I was a friend of Tim McVeigh. Until a couple of days ago I've been living in his house near Kingman, Arizona ever since he left for Oklahoma City in April, 1995. I met certain people whom I wasn't supposed to meet - people who were influencing Tim and who the federal government says had nothing to do with the bombing. But they did...."
"American Psycho, it pretty much sums up what's going on," said Scott Matthews, a clerk at Toronto's Exile where the shirt also has sold out several times in the last two weeks. The $10-decal, which can be ironed onto an array of clothing items, officially became the shop's hottest seller when Susan Sarandon sauntered in and bought one, he said.
A top Russian Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying yesterday in Tokyo that a "catastrophic" development of events in the US-North Korean nuclear standoff was imminent and could occur within the next day.
"It is probable that, as early as tomorrow, there will be a catastrophic development of events," Itar-Tass quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov as saying.
He added that the standoff had "reached an extreme stage" but did not give a more detailed explanation about his warning.
Audio: U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials have told UPI that the CIA helped support Saddam Hussein more than 40 years in an attempt to assassinate then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.
Henry Kissenger "Terminated" an interview on a CBC national radio program called "The Current" when confronted with the possibility of his being brought before the International War Crimes Court.
The World Bank, under the direction of James Wolfensohn, is posing a problem for neocon Wolfowitz. The World Bank, though dominated by the US which has 16.2% of voting shares, has an institutional loyalty to multilateralism. As the US unilateralism advocated by US neocons gives the back of its hand to the very foundation of the UN, which is the institutional manifestation of multilateralism, there is predictable conflict between the two Wolfs. The World Bank Wolf is a neo-liberal, while the Defense Department Wolf is a neocon.
Deborah Wolfe, a Canadian citizen who was just breast-feeding her son and changing his diaper while en route between Houston and Vancouver, says her "subversive" actions led to her being threatened with detainment, RCMP involvement and legal charges for terrorist action against a U.S. citizen in international airspace while on an American flight during a time of war.
The director general said he was confused by the lack of any formal notices, and had a only a vague idea of the committee, backed by the Iraqi National Congress, the formerly exiled opposition group. "I don't honestly know who they are, who chose them, how they are being motivated. I know I am in contact with no one and no one is in contact with me."
However, he lamented the whole US approach to dealing with post-war Iraq. "We have a lot of experience with coups d'etat and this one is the worst," he said. "Any colonel in the Iraqi army will tell you that when he does a coup he goes to the broadcasting station with five announcements.
"The first one is long live this, down with that. The second one is your new government is this and that. The third is the list of the people to go on retirement. The fourth one, every other official is to report back to work tomorrow morning. The fifth is the curfew."
This is usually done within one hour, he added. "Now we are waiting more than a week and still we hear nothing from them."
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"...According to journalists close to the Vatican, the Pope and his closest advisers are also concerned that the ultimate acts of evil - the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon - were 
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