soulofliberty

ICE COLD

2008-08-21T20:11:00.003-07:00

aul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, August 21, 2008

Man-made global warming advocates are scrambling to explain away the fact that 2008 has so far been the coolest year in five years, as climate change alarmists face embarrassment amidst a barrage of evidence that the planet has embarked on a clear and natural cooling trend.




	There has been no global warming since 1998 as temperatures leveled off and are now beginning to plummet as a result of dwindling sunspot activity.

“The first half of 2008 was the coolest for at least five years, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Wednesday,” reports Reuters, adding that it may actually be the coolest since 2000, but the rest of the article is a strained and bias effort to pin the blame solely on the periodic weather event La Nina.

In reality, there has been no global warming since 1998 as temperatures leveled off and are now beginning to plummet as a result of dwindling sunspot activity.

A dramatic cooling trend is being observed across the planet even as people like Al Gore continue to claim that the threat of global warming mandates the poor and middle class be hit with CO2 taxes in order to prevent climate change.

Both anecdotal evidence and hard data indicates that the planet is in the beginning stages of a significant downturn in global temperatures.

Following the end of the Sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting.

China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.

“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”

According to an Associated Press report, The Farmers Almanac is now also predicting “below-average temperatures for most of the U.S.” The publication boasts of an 85 per cent accuracy rate for its forecasts which are given two years in advance.

“The almanac’s 2009 edition, which goes on sale Tuesday, says at least two-thirds of the country can expect colder than average temperatures, with only the Far West and Southeast in line for near-normal readings,” states the article.

The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.

As we reported last week, the Armagh observatory, which has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years. predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next 20 years as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age.

“Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years….”Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern,” concludes David Watt.

In addition, Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Mexico states that “In about ten years the Earth will enter a “little ice age” which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity,” according to a report in the major Mexican newspaper Milenio Diario.

9/11 Chronicles Part One: Truth Rising
Get the DVD and make copies or watch the high quality streaming and download version online at Prison Planet.tv. Click here to read more about the film and view sample trailers.

2.0

2008-08-21T20:11:00.001-07:00

Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling…
August 21, 2008

The waning months of the Bush administration can be characterized by an avalanche of changes to long-standing rules governing domestic intelligence operations.




Despite posturing by leading Democrats, including the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, the FISA legislation legalized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and set the stage for further assaults on the right to privacy and dissent.

The revisions proposed by U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and other top administration officials, represent the greatest expansion of executive power since the Watergate era and should been viewed as an imminent threat to already-diminished civil liberties protections in the United States.

The slippery slope towards open police state methods of governance may have begun with the 2001 passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, but recent events signal that a qualitative acceleration of repressive measures are currently underway. These changes are slated to go into effect with the new fiscal year beginning October 1, and are subject neither to congressional oversight nor judicial review.

Bush allies in Congress kicked-off the summer with the shameful passage by the House and Senate of the FISA Amendments Act, an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that gutted Fourth Amendment protections. With broad consensus by both capitalist political parties, the FISA Act eliminates meaningful judicial oversight of state surveillance while granting virtual immunity to law-breaking telecoms.

Despite posturing by leading Democrats, including the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, the FISA legislation legalized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and set the stage for further assaults on the right to privacy and dissent.

Further attacks were not long in coming.

In the last month alone, mainstream media have reported that the FBI illegally obtained the phone records of overseas journalists allegedly as part of a 2004 "terrorism investigation."

Other reports documented how the Department of Homeland Security asserts the right to seize a traveler’s laptop and other electronic devices for an unspecified period of time and without probable cause.

Still other reports revealed that the administration has expanded the power of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to issue "overarching policies and procedures" and to coordinate "priorities" with foreign intelligence services that target American citizens and legal residents.

And on Wednesday, The Washington Post exposed how the federal government has used "its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations." Ellen Nakashima writes,

The disclosure of the database is among a series of notices, officials say, to make DHS’s data gathering more transparent. Critics say the moves exemplify efforts by the Bush administration in its final months to cement an unprecedented expansion of data gathering for national security and intelligence purposes. ("Citizens’ U.S. Border Crossings Tracked," The Washington Post, August 20, 2008)

The Post also revealed that the information will be linked to a new database, the Non-Federal Entity Data System, "which is being set up to hold personal information about all drivers in a state’s database." Posted at the Government Printing Office’s website, the notice states that the information may even be shared with federal contractors or consultants "to accomplish an agency function related to this system of records."

But perhaps the most controversial move towards increasing the federal government’s surveillance powers were unveiled by the Justice Department in late July. According to The Washington Post, "a new domestic spying measure…would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years."

New rules for police intelligence-gathering would apply to any of the 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive some $1.6 billion each year in federal grants. These proposed changes, as with other administration measures, were quietly published July 31 in the Federal Register.

The McClatchy Washington Bureau reported August 13, that Mukasey confirmed plans to "loosen post-Watergate restrictions on the FBI’s national security and criminal investigations," under cover of improving the Bureau’s "ability to detect terrorists." Marisa Taylor wrote,

Mukasey said he expected criticism of the new rules because "they expressly authorize the FBI to engage in intelligence collection inside the United States." However, he said the criticism would be misplaced because the bureau has long had authority to do so.

Mukasey said the new rules "remove unnecessary barriers" to cooperation between law enforcement agencies and "eliminate the artificial distinctions" in the way agents conduct surveillance in criminal and national security investigations. ("FBI to Get Freer Rein to Look for Terrorism Suspects," McClatchy Washington Bureau, August 13, 2008)

While the Justice Department’s draft proposals have been selectively leaked to the media, and DoJ is expected to release its final version of the changes within a few weeks, even then the bulk of these modifications will remain classified on grounds of "national security."

Under the new regulatory regime proposed by Mukasey, state and local police would be given free rein to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch criminal intelligence investigations based on the "suspicion" that a target is "engaged in terrorism." The results of such investigations could be shared "with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases," according to Post reporters Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson.

With probable cause tossed overboard, domestic intelligence as envisaged by the Bush Justice Department is little more than a fishing expedition intended to cast a wide driftnet over Americans’ constitutional rights, reducing guarantees of free speech and assembly to banal pieties mouthed by state propagandists.

These changes are intended to lock-in Bush regime surveillance programs such as warrantless internet and phone wiretapping, data mining, the scattershot issuance of top secret National Security Letters to seize financial and other personal records, as well as expanding a security index of individuals deemed "terrorist threats" by the corporatist state.

Simultaneous with the release of new DoJ domestic spying guidelines, the Bush administration’s "modernization" of Reagan-era Executive Order 12333, as The Washington Post delicately puts it, also calls for intensified sharing of intelligence information with local law enforcement agencies.

In addition to consolidating power within the ODNI, E.O. 12333 revisions direct the CIA "and other spy agencies," in a clear violation of the Agency’s charter, to "provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel" to state and local authorities.

The latest moves to expand executive power follow close on the heels of other orders and rule changes issued by the Bush regime. As researcher and analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported in June, the Orwellian National Security Presidential Directive 59/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 24 (NSPD 59/HSPD 24), entitled "Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security," is directed against U.S. citizens. Chossudovsky wrote,

NSPD 59 goes far beyond the issue of biometric identification, it recommends the collection and storage of "associated biographic" information, meaning information on the private lives of US citizens, in minute detail, all of which will be "accomplished within the law."

The directive uses 9/11 as an all encompassing justification to wage a witch hunt against dissenting citizens, establishing at the same time an atmosphere of fear and intimidation across the land.

It also calls for the integration of various data banks as well as inter-agency cooperation in the sharing of information, with a view to eventually centralizing the information on American citizens. ("Big Brother" Presidential Directive: "Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security," Global Research, June 11, 2008)

Indeed, NSPD 59/HSPD 24 creates the framework for expanding the definition of who is a "terrorist" to include other categories of individuals "who may pose a threat to national security."

In addition to al Qaeda and other far-right Islamist terror groups, many of whom have served as a cat’s paw for Western intelligence agencies in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Balkans, NSPD 59/HSPD 24 has identified two new categories of individuals as potential threats: "Radical groups" and "disgruntled employees."

In other words, domestic anarchist and socialist organizations as well as labor unions acting on behalf of their members’ rights, now officially fall under the panoptic lens of federal intelligence agencies and the private security contractors who staff the 16 separate agencies that comprise the U.S. "intelligence community."

These moves represent nothing less than an attempt by the Bush administration to return to the days of COINTELPRO when the Bureau, acting in concert with state and local police "red squads" targeted the left for destruction.

"After 9/11, the gloves come off"

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. national security state has ramped-up its repressive machinery, targeting millions of Americans through broad surveillance programs across a multitude of state and private intelligence agencies.

While the FBI, CIA, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the federal "tip of the spear" of current intelligence operations, they certainly are not alone when it comes to domestic spying.

Outsourced contractors from communications, defense and security corporations such as AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Verizon Communications, Northrop Grumman, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), L-3 Communications, CACI International and many more, have collaborated with Bush regime war criminals in fashioning a hypermodern, high-tech police state.

That these corporations have staked-out "homeland security" as a niche market to expand their operations has been explored by Antifascist Calling in numerous articles. As I have previously reported, it is estimated that some 70% of the personnel employed by U.S. intelligence agencies are now private contractors holding top secret and above security clearances.

Unaccountable actors virtually beyond congressional scrutiny, outsourced intelligence agents first and foremost are employees answerable to corporate managers and boards of directors, not the American people or their representatives. Chiefly concerned with inflating profit margins by overselling the "terrorist threat," the incestuous relationships amongst corporate grifters and a diminished "public sector" demonstrate the precarious state of democratic norms and institutions in the U.S.

New rules governing FBI counterintelligence investigations will allow the Bureau to run informants for the purpose of infiltrating organizations deemed "subversive" by federal snoops. Many of the worst abuses under COINTELPRO, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS and the U.S. Army’s deployment of Military Intelligence Groups (MIGs) for illegal domestic operations during the 1960s, employed neofascists as infiltrators and as nascent death squads.

While the Bureau may have eschewed close collaboration with fascist gangs, will sophisticated, high-tech private security corporations now play a similar role in Bureau counterintelligence and domestic security operations?

If history is any judge, the answer inevitably will be "yes."

Currently equipping the "intelligence community" with electronic specialists, network managers, software designers and analysts, will defense and security corporations bulk-up the Bureau and related agencies with "plausibly deniable" ex-military and intelligence assets for targeted infiltration and "disruption" of domestic antiwar and anticapitalist groups?

It can’t happen here? Why its happening already! As investigative journalist James Ridgeway revealed in April, a private security firm,

organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records–donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies. ("Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups," Mother Jones, April 11, 2008)

The firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i) provided a range of services for corporate clients. According to Ridgeway, the private snoops engaged in "intelligence collection" for Allied Waste; conducted background checks and "performed due diligence" for the Carlyle Group; handled "crisis management" for the Gallo wine company and Pirelli; engaged in "information collection" for Wal-Mart. Also listed as BBI/S2i records as clients were Halliburton and Monsanto.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and whistleblower who is now the policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that once proposed changes are implemented, police may collect intelligence even when no underlying crime is suspected. This is nothing less than "preemptive policing" and a recipe for tightening the screws on dissent. The Post averred,

German, an FBI agent for 16 years, said easing established limits on intelligence-gathering would lead to abuses against peaceful political dissenters. In addition to the Maryland case [that targeted antiwar and death penalty opponents], he pointed to reports in the past six years that undercover New York police officers infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention; that California state agents eavesdropped on peace, animal rights and labor activists; and that Denver police spied on Amnesty International and others before being discovered.

"If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information," German said. "It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government." (Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson, "U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules," The Washington Post, August 16, 2008)

In a related report on Fusion Centers, that German coauthored with Jay Staley for the ACLU, they documented how so-called "counterterrorist" national collection agencies are "characterized by ambiguous lines of authority, excessive secrecy, troubling private-sector and military participation, and an apparent bent toward suspicionless information collection and data mining."

As I reported earlier this month, citing research from German and Staley’s report, U.S. Marine Corps officers, enlisted personnel and an analyst with U.S. NORTHCOM, pilfered intelligence files and shared them with private defense contractors in hope of securing future employment.

Money talks, particularly in a political culture where the business of government is, after all, business!

With little oversight from a compliant Congress, and an "opposition" party in league with their "constituents"–multinational corporate grifters out to make a buck–the final nails are being hammered into the coffin of America’s former democratic Republic.

Reds CHECKMATE Cheney GANG

2008-08-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
August 21, 2008

It appears Russia is wasting little time responding to the neocon provocation of declaring its intention of installing missiles at Redzikowo, on Poland’s Baltic coast. Russia has dispatched the aircraft carrier at Admiral Kuznetsov to the Syrian port of Tartus. Admiral Kuznetsov, along with Russia’s biggest missile cruiser Moskva and at least four nuclear submarines, left Murmansk on the Barents Sea on August 18, according to DEBKAfile.




	Russia plans to install Iskandar missiles in Syria and its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.

On August 21, at the Black Sea port of Sochi, Syrian president Bashar Assad told the media he is considering a Russian request to deploy missiles in his country. The Arabic language newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat, reported Bashar as saying he hopes to see Moscow cease its cooperation with NATO-allied states. “He is quoted as saying that Israeli arms sales to the Georgian army should prompt the Kremlin to strengthen the military alliance between Russia and Syria,” reports the Israeli news site, YNet News. Bashar is scheduled to meet with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. According to the BBC, fast track military and technical co-operation are at the top of the agenda.

It should be noted that prior to Russia’s defense of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and the signing of the Polish missile deal, Moscow promised the U.S. it would not provide Iran and Syria with advanced military technology.

“I want to voice support for Russia over the situation around Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Assad told Itar-Tass. “We understand the essence of the Russian position and consider its military reaction a response to provocation by the Georgian side.” Assad also said “Syria was and is striving to develop strategic relations with Russia, in the interests of security in the whole world,” an obvious reference to the neocon plan to confront Syria, Iran, and Russia.

Russia plans to install Iskandar surface missiles in Syria and its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, sources at DEBKAfile report. As widely reported over last weekend, Russian Baltic and Middle East warships, submarines and long-range bombers may be armed with nuclear warheads. “One plan on the table in Moscow, DEBKAfile’s sources report, is the establishment of big Russian military, naval and air bases in Syria and the release of advanced weapons systems withheld until now to Iran (the S-300 air-missile defense system) and Syria (the nuclear-capable 200 km-range Iskandar surface missile).”

“We have brought Syria to this situation,” Israel Likud MK Yuval Steinitz told Israel Radio on Thursday. “We must freeze talks with Syria until it stops calling on Moscow to arm Israel’s enemies, and until [Damascus itself] stops transferring arms to Hizbullah.” Several months ago, Israel and Syria announced they would resume peace talks.

Russia’s move is at least in part a response to Israel’s arming and training of the Georgian military. “Israel armed the Georgian army,” Russian Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn told a Moscow press conference last week. Jerusalem provided Tblisi with “eight types of military vehicles, explosives, landmines and special explosives for the clearing minefields.” Georgia’s Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia previously said that “Georgian corporals and sergeants train with Germans, alpine units and the navy work with French instructors, and special operations and urban warfare troops are taught by Israelis,” Noah Shachtman reported for Wired on August 18. Earlier this year, Russia shot down a number of Georgian spy drones, specifically Hermes 450 reconnaissance planes manufactured by Israel’s Elbit Systems.

As reported by Infowars and Prison Planet, Georgia’s defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli who is fluent in Hebrew. Kezerashvili contributed to military cooperation between Israel and Georgia. “Israel’s defense industries managed to sell to Georgia [drones], automatic turrets for armored vehicles, antiaircraft systems, communication systems, shells and rockets,” former Israel internal security minister Roni Milo told Ynetnews. Moreover, “Israel has reportedly helped upgrade Soviet-designed Su-25 ground attack jets assembled in Georgia. And former Israeli generals serve as advisers to the Georgian military,” according to the Jewish Week.

On Wednesday, Bush praised Georgia’s NED engineered “Rose Revolution” while addressing a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Orlando, Florida, the Washington Post reported. NED’s installation of Mikheil Saakashvili was “one of the most inspiring chapters in history,” according to Bush. “Georgia stood for freedom around the world,” he said. “Now the world must stand for freedom in Georgia.”

Bush’s “freedom in Georgia,” that is to say the imposition of a client state micromanaged by the IMF and World Bank, will become less tenable now that Russia “plans to establish a long-term presence inside Georgia and one of its breakaway republics,” as the Chicago Tribune reports. “If implemented, the plan would effectively put under Russian control the border between Georgia and South Ossetia, which is seeking independence, as well as a small chunk of Georgia proper.”

Obviously, with the Russian presence in Georgia and its renewed military relationship with Syria, the neocon plan to confront Iran and encircle Russia has encountered a speed bump. It remains to be seen how the Bush neocons, quickly approaching the apogee of their power, will react to Russia’s latest move.

Alex Jones' Blitzkrieg: JOIN THE FIGHT

2008-08-14T17:04:00.000-07:00