Eh, I am on a Drupal kick, and might as well bookmark some nerd things. (I have been adding quite a bit to my del.icio.us bookmarks too, lately, be sure to look @ the top of the page for those).

More tech items: I was impressed to find BetaNews | Inside Information; Unreleased Products

BetaNews | Google continues to mete out privacy features
BetaNews | Google adds fuel to Canada's BitTorrent throttling fracas
BetaNews | Angry YouTube users boycott, Viacom seems to respond
BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML
Google Open Source Blog: Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format

how it works! Developer Guide - Protocol Buffers - Google Code

The Associated Press: `Public' online spaces don't carry speech, rights
As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll - NYTimes.com

Slashdot: Google Open Sources Its Data Interchange Format

Slashdot: Massive, Coordinated Patch To the DNS Released

Hmmm... MediaShift Idea Lab . Still Seeking Coders Interested in Journalism | PBS

more here, there was hax0rs in t3h DNS lulz: Dan Kaminsky Discovers Fundamental Issue In DNS: Massive Multivendor Patch Released | securosis.com!

Fixes Released for Massive Internet Security Issue

On July 8th, technology vendors from across the industry will simultaneously release patches for their products to close a major vulnerability in the underpinnings of the Internet. While most home users will be automatically updated, it’s important for all businesses to immediately update their networks. This is the largest synchronized security update in the history of the Internet, and is the result of hard work and dedication across dozens of organizations.

Earlier this year, professional security research Dan Kaminsky discovered a major issue in how Internet addresses are managed (Domain Name System, or DNS). This issue was in the design of DNS and not limited to any single product. DNS is used by every computer on the Internet to know where to find other computers. Using this issue, an attacker could easily take over portions of the Internet and redirect users to arbitrary, and malicious, locations. For example, an attacker could target an Internet Service Provider (ISP), replacing the entire web — all search engines, social networks, banks, and other sites — with their own malicious content. Against corporate environments, an attacker could disrupt or monitor operations by rerouting network traffic traffic, capturing emails and other sensitive business data.

Mr. Kaminsky immediately reported the issue to major authorities, including the United States Computer Emergency Response Team (part of the Department of Homeland Security), and began working on a coordinated fix. Engineers from major technology vendors around the world converged on the Microsoft campus in March to coordinate their response. All of the vendors began repairing their products and agreed that a synchronized release, on a single day, would minimize the risk that malicious individuals could figure out the vulnerability before all vendors were able to offer secure versions of their products. The vulnerability is a complex issue, and there is no evidence to suggest that anyone with malicious intent knows how it works.

Slashdot: Your Mashup Is Probably Legal

and Handling Flash Crowds From Your Garage which interestingly has a large section on "how to deal w your DNS when its fux0red, fulltext: Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

Drupal time now! Summer of Code 2008 Mid-term Results wherein the Big G puts up some money to get the kiddos makin totally badass modules. Mostly these won't make a lot of sense to the outsiders among you, but they look good!

We are seeing a lot of these clever youngsters realizing that the 5.x modules were too specific, and it would be much better to write plugin module frameworks so that the redundant stuff can be minimized. So now fancy feature areas like Geographic bookmarking/plotting and WYSIWYG editors, two messy areas, would be streamlined as these projects mature.

Other cool modules: Google Client Geocoder and gProximity and Geo and location (API, module). CCK Node Menu, Smartqueue Per User, Gears, Wysiwyg.

Look at this! CCK GMap Address. Would look delicious! Wysiwyg looks like a needed fork of TinyMCE, and an abstraction.

More to be seen about this fun area here: Location and Mapping | groups.drupal.

Discussion of cool things:

sun's vision for handling embedded/inline content and Wysiwyg in Drupal

Better input format support in Drupal 7

Coder is pretty sweet for developing and here's a bit on Porting Drupal Modules from 5 into 6.

When does a new version of Drupal get released?

When needed, this is nice: Drupal Modules - Search, Rate, and Review Drupal Modules.

******

Sometimes we wonder how to assemble an F35 stealth fighter. But then we find out! Via here and here and Cryptome!

On a related note, they have the official shit list of the government! US Foreign Enemies List is impressive - all the individuals in the PLO, Kahanists, the very bad al-Tikriti family in Iraq...

I think I am getting into a tangent here...

I noted all this nonsense a while ago: March 27, 2007: New GeoMap; Kremlin warns of "Operation Bite" American attack on Iran April 6? More rumors etc.

The latest twist is that apparently the Democrats agreed to give Bush as much money as they wanted in order to do the "U.S. Covert - BALUCHIS" attack detailed on this sketch here. At roughly the time of my post, actually!

April 4, 2007: Iran paranoia, covert war escalates; Tensions rise as Persian Gulf fills with carriers, media crews, tribal revolts; US Air Force buzzes infiltrated Iranian Khuzestan

At that time we had the excellent "Approximate Covert Crisis GeoMap: Shitstorm 2007:

April 8, 2007: Jundullah: Baluchi ally of the United States... And Al Qaeda... in covert Iran war.

Since those heady days, I haven't had too much to say about the Baluchi pawn situation. However, the drums of war have continued and my tasty diagrams are as accurate as last year. Both the CIA-sponsored tribal uprisings and the Mujahideen el-Khalq actions are going forth accordingly.

At least, that's what good ol Seymour Hersh has divined from his vast array of establishment sources, who generally seem quite frightened of the alternate chains of command that Dick Cheney has built up from his office.

Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Pay very close attention to this part, kiddos, because herein lies the primary potential source of a cataclysmic Iran war: the "small group" at the White House who are developing an alternate chain of command.

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

There you have it. This is huge. Bigger than the usual British-style strategy of renting local warlords like the Baluchis. Also duly noted:

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

I have zero faith in any element of America's political class to even understand what is happening, let alone get some degree of control over these covert operations, ever escalating and widening out into the aggressive galaxy of contractors and militant baby boomers, all set in motion on their own, partitioned even from the regional American military commanders.

When even the President's direct regional commander, General Fallon, couldn't find out what the fuck Special Forces are actually doing, then by definition we have a serious and insane war conspiracy unfolding.

And for now, that is basically all I can say.

Reuters: Impact of 9/11 terror attacks evident in dreams Feb 19, 2008 10:31am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A comparative analysis of dream images suggests how deeply the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks impacted Americans' emotions, researchers report.

Everyone experienced some sort of trauma, or at least emotional arousal by these events, Dr. Ernest Hartmann told Reuters Health. "We found, surprisingly, even dreams could pick this up," said Hartmann, of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hartmann and colleagues assessed the dreams of 11 men and 33 women living outside of Manhattan when the attacks occurred. The participants, who ranged in age from 22 to 70 years, had been recording their dreams for years, and none had relatives or friends who died in the attacks, the investigators note in the journal Sleep.

According to the results, post-9/11 dreams showed more intense images, which is "very consistent with findings in people who have experienced trauma of various kinds," Hartmann said in a statement. "The idea is that that we all experienced at least some trauma on 9/11."

The dreams after 9/11, however, did not contain more images of airplanes or tall buildings. Actually, none of the recorded dreams involved airplanes flying into towers or anything remotely close to that, even though all subjects had seen these images on TV. Hartmann suggests this is because a dream is a creation, not a replay. Dreams make new connections that integrate new material into existing memory, he said. [more on it]

I am cooped up with a cold. I have very little productive to do right now, it's Saturday and I am fidgety. Therefore it is time to listen to some techno and post links like a good little February recluse.

How the spooks took over the news: In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale, Monday, 11 February 2008

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."......

...There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I've spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.

The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.

This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.

.......Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.

But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.

I have definitely been on top of the Zarqawi PSYOPS case. K thx.

Here's a spooky tale. There are other aspects to this. In fact, Lockheed Martin is developing a kind of RFID control regime for I-35 as we speak.

An Iraq vet told me that this map reminded him of the Iraq supply line...

This story kind of appears to hinge on Peter Dale Scott, who is an old-school decoder of evil establishment conspiracies: Peter Dale Scott: Poetry and Political Writings and also Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps by PD Scott, Feb 2006

Rule by fear or rule by law? Lewis Seiler,Dan Hamburg Monday, February 4, 2008

Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."

Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.

According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."

Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?

Sect. 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and noncitizens alike.

Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure "continuity of government" in the event of what the document vaguely calls a "catastrophic emergency." Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure "continuity of government." This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51.

U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice (Los Angeles County) has come up with a new way to expand the domestic "war on terror." Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), which passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combatting it.

According to commentary in the Baltimore Sun, Rep. Harman and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle believe the country faces a native brand of terrorism, and needs a commission with sweeping investigative power to combat it.

A clue as to where Harman's commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights" as terrorists. Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, Second Amendment rights supporters ... the list goes on and on. According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.

What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?

The Constitution does not allow the executive to have unchecked power under any circumstances. The people must not allow the president to use the war on terrorism to rule by fear instead of by law......

Don't say yaz wasn't warned!! Of course Alex Jones on it: Former Congressman Warns Of Martial Law Camps In America.

Windows Vista is a terrible prospect: flag.blackened.net/ati/zine/10thingsIHateAboutVista.txt

This week in peak oil | mnblue not bad!

Economic Crash: teh Latest Lols: Gold is up around $925/ounce now. hah. Business Spectator - Twelve steps to meltdown.

The Alternative Information Center - Economy of the Occupation 10: Cheap Wars - Very important!!

Housing vs. voting.

German Banks crashing!!! Worst Financial Crisis since 1931? German State-Owned Banks on Verge of Collapse - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Buffett Sees Poetic Justice in Banks Woes - New York Times

Cloud EV for all your electric car needs!

For your daily secrets: Cryptome.org of course! Brits shaft their own spies. What's up with undersea internet cables? Spies' Battleground Turns Virtual:

The intelligence community has begun contemplating how to use Second Life and other such communities as platforms for cyber weapons that could be used against terrorists or enemies, intelligence officials said.

Because the Terrorists will get depressed when they get booted, etc. AIPAC's Overt and Covert Ops. Old news. (AIPAC on Sourcewatch)

OpenMute looks cool. And so does Mute. Cool stuff about Russian urban design conflict.

The Jericho TV series - season 2: It's trucking along, I hope the show makes it. In next week's episode, a virus epidemic crosses the Mississippi into the western martial-law fragment of the United States, and threatens to kill Jericho unless they can get the vaccine from some evil corporation. Meanwhile the Ravenwood Mercenaries have arrived to abuse the townsfolk yet again.... Watch it online, now the writers are getting paid!

Verizon tells the man to screw off and they won't sniff their customers.

Black Hat : Black Hat Briefings and Training for your hacker needs! LayerOne 2007 - Adam Laurie - RFIDiots explains RFID hacking!

Time for dirty laundry! Obama on Rezko deal: It was a mistake :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

There is some kind of thing getting floated about the Obama/Rashid Khalidi connection. This is goofy stuff, but there is some rightwing stuff along these lines, @ NRO , Commentary (the arch-retreat of grouches). More from Larry Johnson, whom I disagreed with (see comments)

Creepy Princess Di thing: Butler "Did Deal" With Queen To Hide Diana Murder Facts, secret video is located here!

Willie Nelson: I'd Rather Have an Electric Chair Named After Me Than a Toll Road. Willie Nelson Joins the 9/11 Conspiracy!! In a good way. He thought it all looked like bullshit especially WTC7. Tehlols. Willie Nelson Questions 9/11 Official Story On National TV. Willie Nelson questions Sept. 11 on local talk radio show - KVUE. FOXNews.com - Willie Nelson: I Question Official Sept. 11 Story. No More Partying For Willie Nelson : GAC. Nelson: Impeach Bush, "Throw The Bastards Out"

I got linked off this blog i thinks: looks cool: Fierce Planet

More from the life of trolls: We're in your docks, kidnapping your flightmaster - WOW Insider related to this great story: The Great Goon Squad Flightmaster Caper - wired

Welcome to free Kosovo and its American Military Masters! I got linked off a blog in Portugal run by one Antonia Maria Cerveira Pinto O António Maria. Pretty awesome. He was noting how Kosovo is dominated by the U.S., and here is teh gigantic and very geopolitically key Camp Bondsteel.

Breakaway Role Model: Separatist Movements Seek Inspiration in Kosovo - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE. Naturally the Romanian/Hungarian separatists have torches.

Techie Drupal bits: Drupal newsletter for February - recommended for the curious! Drupal Dojo is sweet. Not bad, guys. Integrate w/ Google Apps.

The dumbing of America.

Well that's about it guys. Have a great weekend!

The pooping lawyer of Chicago: I have no idea what this blog is trying to say, but I approve!

McGovern calls for Bush impeachment. Huzzah i guess.

Lookie here: this news comes from Potomac Flacks, written by, for, about Beltway PR people. Not bad!

Potomac Flacks: Davis Named Communications Coordinator for 2008 Republican National Convention

James Davis has been hired as the Communications Coordinator for the 2008 Republican National Convention. Prior to joining the convention staff, Davis worked in strategic communications in the Public Affairs Office of the Secretary of Defense where he was involved in efforts related to the Global War on Terrorism and other critical issues. While in chilly Minnesota, Davis will be working under Matt Burns who is running the show as Director of Communications and Spokesman for the Committee on Arrangements for the 2008 Republican National Convention. (PF Tipster)

And also:

Minnesota Monitor:: Defense Department blog coordinator hired for RNC

by: Andy Birkey / Fri Jan 11, 2008
The 2008 Republican National Convention has hired James Davis as communications coordinator, a move that bodes well for bloggers, particularly those on the right.

Before the current move to the RNC, Davis' job was strategic communications in the Public Affairs Office of the Secretary of Defense where, according to Ken Silverstein of Harper's Magazine, he helped pass Iraq war and War on Terrorism talking points from the Department of Defense to hand-picked bloggers.

During almost daily conference calls, bloggers and online journalists, including prominent Minnesota bloggers Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker of Power Line and Ed Morrissey Captain's Quarters, are connected with military personnel during the Blogger's Roundtable.

"The list of bloggers who regularly participate in the conference calls is overwhelmingly conservative and friendly to the goals of the Bush Administration," wrote Silverstein. "The government is picking certain people as 'surrogates' to the exclusion of many others and feeding them news."

According to the Department of Defense, the program, once called the "Surrogates Operation," has as its mission providing "source material for stories in the blogosphere concerning the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Global War on Terrorism by bloggers and online journalists."

"A few moderates are invited to take part, but the list of participants skews far, far to the right. The Pentagon essentially feeds participants the talking points, bullet points, and stories it wants told," wrote Silverstein.

While it's not surprising that the RNC hired someone with such a close history of working with pro-Iraq war bloggers, it will certainly ensure access between convention officials and bloggers such as Powerline and Captain's Quarters.

I don't know if this is a spoof or what: Lawyer's Cache of Poop! [the site banner had a great rich dude with a monocle, but it won't load now...]

DFLers Bonoff, Madia raise sizable sums in MN CD3. Hm. Skrilla Billa...

Check out this article about the British banking system, the economic collapse and all. Cityphilia by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books. I really really double recommend this one.

The Raw Story | Report reveals Vietnam War hoaxes, faked attacks meanwhile there is fishy stuff in the notorious Strait of Hormuz. The big deal now is how the establishment trumped up some Iranian boats zipping around the carriers and some old school middle eastern radio pirate lunatic known as the "Filipino Monkey": You just can't make this shit up.

Yes this is fairly awesome. It just shows that 2008 is the kind of year where slackers with high-powered radios can flip out the chokepoints of all the damn oil in the Persian Gulf. Not bad for a jester?

I am posting the whole article because it appears the great Filipino Monkey audio was immediately seized upon by the PSYOPS guys! The military public relations people spliced the audio and video together and got it out to American TV. Everyone looks a bit dumb now...

‘Filipino Monkey’ behind threats? - Navy News - Navy Times

By Andrew Scutro and David Brown - Staff writers, Posted : Sunday Jan 13, 2008 15:38:29 EST

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”

Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it’s unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water.

“We don’t know for sure where they came from,” said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. “It could have been a shore station.”

While the threat — “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes” — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there’s no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it’s difficult to figure out who’s talking.

SEE THE PENTAGON’S VERSION OF THE VIDEO

A LINK TO THE IRANIAN VERSION (CLICK THE CAMERA ICON)

“Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.

So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.

Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.

Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Furthermore, Hoffman said radio signals have a way of traveling long distances in that area. “Under certain weather conditions I could hear Bahrain from the Strait of Hormuz.”

Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, could not say if the voice belonged to the heckler.

“It’s an international circuit and we’ve said all along there were other ships and shore stations in the area,” he said.

When asked if U.S. officials considered whether the threats came from someone besides the Iranians when releasing the video and audio, Roughead said: “The reason there is audio superimposed over the video is it gives you a better idea of what is happening.”

Similarly, Davis said the audio was part of the “totality” of the situation and helped show the “aggressive behavior.”

Another former cruiser skipper said he thought the Monkey might be behind the audio threats when he first heard them earlier this week.

“It wouldn’t have surprised me at all,” he said. “There’s all kinds of chatter on Channel 16. Anybody with a receiver and transmitter can hear something’s going on. It was entirely plausible and consistent with the radio environment to interject themselves and make a threatening comment and think they’re being funny.”

This former skipper also noted how quiet and clean the radio “threat” was, especially when radio calls from small boats in the chop are noisy and cluttered.

“It’s a tough environment, you’re bouncing around, moving fast, lots of wind, noise. It’s not a serene environment,” he said. “That sounded like somebody on the beach or a large ship going by.”

He said he and others believe that the Filipino Monkey is comprised of several people, and whoever gets on Channel 16 to heckle instantly gets the monicker.

“It was just a gut feeling, something the merchants did. Guys would get bored, one guy hears it, comes back a year later and does it for himself,” he said. “I never thought it was one, rather it was part of the woodwork.”

The former skipper noted that he warned his crew about hecklers when preparing to transit Hormuz. “I tell them they’ll hear things on there that will be insulting,” he said. “You tell your people that you’ll hear things that are strange, insulting, aggravating, but you need to maintain a professional posture.”

A civilian mariner with experience in that region said the Filipino Monkey phenomenon is worldwide, and has been going on for years.

“They come on and say ‘Filipino Monkey’ in a strange voice. They might say it two or three times. You’re standing watch on bridge and you’re monitoring Channel 16 and all of a sudden it comes over the radio. It can happen anytime. It’s been a joke out there for years.”

While it happens all over the world, it’s more likely to occur around the Strait of Hormuz because there is so much shipping traffic, he said.

Speaking of those dem spooks making da spooky press releases: Double Agent Gadahn Threatens Bush In Neo-Con Stunt claiming that some random Jewish kid from California who's now the Al Qaeda spokesman du jour is really a fake. Either way he makes a pretty boring YouTube mastermind of doom etc. Lacks the chutzpah we expect from TV-based evildoers nowadays:

Fear Adam Gadahn!!!! Unless the TV never shows you, because you are not entertainingly scary enough!!

Another one of those attempted Ron Paul racism smear thingys: Vicious Ron Paul Hit Piece Scrapes The Barrel Of Yellow Journalism. On the other hand it confirms that Ron Paul is the kind of guy who showed up to random neo-confederate events in the old days. But what did you expect? The man was part of the great White fringe since forever... At least he's telling 'em to get against the Empire, i say... On the other hand NAACP: NAACP President: Ron Paul Is Not A Racist - "Linder says Paul being smeared because he is a threat to the establishment." Hmm....

Somewhat disconcerting. The website at my day job got garbled up, at roughly the same time as hongpong.com, both running the same version of Drupal (but with different modules & such).

Also Drupal 5.6 came out at the same time. It is a bugfix/security update, and the security patches seem to be mostly theoretical stuff. (famous last words). One hole only happens if you have PHP register_globals turned on, which is a very bad security risk from the start.

The other involves yet another weird Internet Explorer 6 security hole, wherein an odd sequence of illegal bytes allows overflows into executing JavaScript from supposedly safely scrubbed areas. Yet another IE buffer overflow-like thing.

And something about malformed RSS feeds doing a XSS cross scripting site attack.

More importantly, the newest Drupal 5.6 fixes a weird little bug that I am sure has been a problem for me. I can set a 'filter' which restricts the legal HTML tags. However, this filter gets stored in the cache_filter table of the database, and does not reset itself when you change it. Thus, all kinds of horrible and unexplained things happen (especially involving embedded image galleries / Lightbox / anything using brackets to trigger).

The solution then was to clear (truncate) the cache_ tables. This will still be the go-to Drupal solution, along with 'turn off as many modules as possible.'

In an eerie and unexplained coincidence, numerous Drupal sites I work with had memory limit errors yesterday. I fear we all got hacked and/or backdoored. Yikes.

NEW RULE: NEW YEAR: NEW PASSWORDS.

OLD RULE: Always run yr security updates, guys!

***********

Also I should put in a good word for Miro, (once known as Democracy Player), a VLC-like video player project. However it also has fantastic Bittorrent support and good RSS-video pushing abilities. Miro is the kind of tool you want to get cool video podcasting type stuff off the ground, and it is ok for OSX, Windows and Linux/BSD. Here is the announcement on that:

I am very pleased to announce Miro 1.1
http://www.getmiro.com/download/

....First, we have dramatically improved performance for torrent downloading and we offer more settings and control (thanks to libtorrent).

Torrents are still a difficult and mysterious technology for many users; however Miro makes downloading torrents easy enough for everyone. More experienced users will still get all the power of a modern torrent client; this one just happens to be elegantly packaged. Everyone wins!

On the other side of the camera, video producers have more control when they publish with bittorrent. They can push video in higher quality, to more people, using fewer resources; it puts the smaller publishers in the same game as those with corporate funding.

A second new feature is a combined search that lets you get results from all 5 search engines at once. You can still choose a specific site to search if you prefer but this will give you broader results.

***********

Finally a note from Digg that should be helpful for all:

Wee. Just in time for the Daily Show coming back. http://tinyurl.com/26dktt

This site has practically every TV show in RSS, specially formatted for Miro. You can even put the whole list inside the app. http://tvfreedom.wordpress.com/

*********

And darth_tater added this cool bit:

for those looking for a good IPTV software solution, this really is worth checking out.

i have this running on my *nix file server and in combination with RSS and torrents, i have the perfect whole-house TiVO. i can watch any TV show or listen to any podcast streamed over my LAN to any PC or via xbmc.

*********

Ok that should be enough for the hobbyists and video monsters to enjoy!

I tried putting the post below on just a few sites. After it got a strong, immediate reaction on DailyKos, the leading liberal mega-blog of our day, I decided that another, more refined post will later be needed to really get over people's bullshit filters. Or better yet, a comical video!

This was a pretty good one! My document dump on that whole Arkansas Iran Contra paper trail thingy pissed off most people who cared to notice at the Daily Kos. Pretty interesting reaction with 150+ comments: Daily Kos: Hillary's skeleton: These CIA Iran-Contra Arkansas docs reveal ugly past

Indeed the post was written pretty much off the cuff. I didn't go stuffing in links that corroborated many basic parts of Iran-Contra. In any case, many people thought that this whole area of skepticism had already been discredited (the conventional wisdom seemed to frame it as a Richard Mellon Scaife-induced Kool Aid episode.) A couple valiant souls pointed out that the broad outline of this shit is well proven, but the crowd wouldn't cop to that reality!

On the other hand, my framing of the whole thing as "rose law firm not really examined" was indeed not quite accurate. This ticked people off. But so did the idea that Hillary is "shady", which I'm surprised the DKos crowd can't handle.

The best of all was when people believed that the whole background of the Clintons in Arkansas was already off the table. And the guy who demanded about 8 times that the whole post get deleted off DailyKos because it was a 'conspiracy theory' article. Didn't have anything better to do on a Friday night.

There are a lot more double negatives to the case. It's a censored government document about a suppressed scandal the media has buried involving a presidential candidate. Therefore, um... it's too crazy to try to put into our conventional frame of reference?

A quality experiment. The people at the Agonist thought it was funny.

For some reason, it got bumped into the Ron Paul forum on the Alex Jones Prison Planet forum. Hillary's skeleton: These CIA Iran-Contra Arkansas docs reveal ugly past

*******

Here is a perfect example of why the Agonist is a good site: The Index of Suspicion: CIA plane and drugs in Mexico | The Agonist. This is the more recent September detainee plane with cocaine in Mexico thing. Usually they are run from Homeland Security contractors nowadays (as opposed to the CIA old days alluded to in my glorious Hillary post).

As long as we are on this, I stopped by to say hi to the biggest damn conspiracy forum on the Interwebs, Above Top Secret, about the same planes:

CIA Torture Jet wrecks with 4 Tons of COCAINE.

And: NarcoNews | Cocaine Jet That Crashed in Mexico Part of Cowboy Government Operation, DEA Sources Claim

Looks like an ICE DEA cutout kind of thing. Way to go federal bureaucracies!

******

In case you have not yet discerned my new pattern, I have decided to step back from being a partisan crusader for a limited set of issues, and instead try to hit a wider target by putting out weird government documents that totally cut against the grain of conventional wisdom, in an effort to rattle the frames of lame ordinary political perceptions.

This is merely the first step in a larger process of action!

(And also there will be a healthy proportion of weird spoofs, like the Telepathy SRI thing. Hell yeah!)

It has been quite a while since I rattled at the shimmering electrons which might or might not care about what I have to say. Things are definitely going to shit:

• Turkey is invading Iraq, which will generate internal war #4 apparently. Pakistan is also disintegrating with generous jabs at the hornet's nest from freaggin Obama.
• Evidently our infrastructure is crumbling. I spent quality time at work reading all the wretched MnDOT reports on the I-35W bridge; they were nightmares - more on that later
• The national credit market LSD-fueled HedgeFundMortgageCrackPalooza seems to be crumbling as well. There is a systemic shock or crash emerging which is going to damage the housing/sprawl market for a long time. Literally our urban structures might stop sprawling & generating all that fabulous paper wealth. At least the last couple weeks a sign that the economy might suddenly abandon 'good faith & credit' soon, just in time for...
• The exploding oil market which will finally kill the American Dream of fetid suburban development once and for all. Even Mexican oil production is crashing. Demand is going to rise in these producer countries and they'll quit exporting. Supplies will fall and we're gonna hit that fucked-up time where all these complicated Cheap Oil systems will fail (Wal-Mart's 11,000 mile supply chain is a prime example).

That is enough to keep anyone away from writing. Yet here I am back again, against my better judgment.

No harm; the summer is a terrible time for blogging. I still have to update some Drupal modules, but at least the core is safely up to 5.2. After watching The Bourne Ultimatum and TNT's nifty docudrama miniseries The Company, I had a good whomping of the paranoia and knew it was time to tighten up all the digital angles best I can, so I took the site offline for a couple days to patch it up.

The first week back in town (last week) really rattled me. I haven't quite found my feet yet, I guess.

To top it off some little bastard stole my bottle of French wine from the kitchen over the weekend. It is a lucky stroke of good fortune I saved a backup. It's airport duty-free wine anyway, but fuckall shit I hauled it around the world spewing 90 pounds of carbon to get it here. FUCK. And then they left a filthy, half-full glass in the fridge.

Now back in town, I am at my parents' house in Hudson, Great Wisco, while I ponder getting a new apartment and the absurd amount of gas you gotta burn to live out here.

Tonight I finally gave in and plugged my desktop Mac G5 back together. It likes to scare the shit out of me once in a while and refuses to come back on. The monitor just sits there, glum & dark. I dimly recalled beating this problem before. [Nice thing about Macs: these kinds of shitstorms have a pretty limited complexity. It's about something easier than device drivers and Windows insanity...]

Here I'm making a note to myself: When initially setting up, I need to unplug all external drives and the external speakers (harman/kardon makes a nice speaker, but these old dogs are getting rough - and they tend to cause USB fuckups). Then I had to hit the Mac's special internal reset button, known as the PMU switch, which gives a mega-zap to the PRAM. (these were called CUDA switches back in the day) IMPORTANT: Only press the PMU for One Second While It's NOT plugged in. Otherwise you'll fry it. Too bad I definitely pressed it for way too long.

Then is step 2: plug the computer back in; hit the power button and immediately hold down Command-Option-P-R . This is also a PRAM zap which works at a lesser level than PMU. The G5 first issues its normal startup chime, then you gotta wait, still holding the keys. It chimes again. Wait. And again.

Then finally you let go, and for whatever mysterious reason it comes right back to life, no problem. I really think it's because the USB speakers and maybe the external hard drive hork it somehow.

In any case OS X 10.4.10 has been kinda dodgy in the USB department: my brother's Intel MacBook can't connect to his external music hard drive for shit since the upgrade. Someone discovered that running 'USB Prober' from the OS X Developer Tools gets it to rediscover the drives. I am way too tired to look up links right now.

That is all for now. I promise we'll be back on the gravy train of at least 3 posts a week for a while.

Well here is something improbable. I don't have the time to follow up on any of this (I'm on vacation in Brittany!!!!) but I am happy to share it with our meager audience. I suspect this was posted because of our prominent (but sadly not recently-updated) Sibel Edmonds material. Oddly it was posted to the comment thread of one of the random sidebar images three days ago. So I will promote it here in full.

I wish the best to Ms. Jones, a former White House employee who claims to have been silenced regarding "politically embarassing (and job-threatening) security breaches, even if those lapses pose a threat to the life of the president." It seems that the White House mailroom is really close to the Oval Office, and air leaks from the former to the latter. Hence if anyone sent anthrax-like poisons to the White House, it could contaminate the hubs of power far more easily than you'd assume.

It appears to parallel the Sibel Edmonds case in at least one dimension: while the outer layer of the Edmonds onion begins with a Turkish spy ring covering up drug trafficking by penetrating the FBI translation office unit, a major and embarassing breach, which Edmonds promptly brought to her superiors and got stuffed (and gagged) for, the whole thing was so embarassing they had to bury it for political reasons. Even though if you're even the slightest patriot it should piss you off that Turkish spies have penetrated the inner rings. etc... Embarassing security breaches have to be covered up. Surprise!!!

So without further ado I will share this message, which apparently was posted here by the whistleblower herself. I believe most of this was from NarcoNews.com:

**********

NARCO NEWS, WHITE HOUSE EMPLOYEE FIRED, WBAI RADIO, NYC

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2007-07-20 12:44.
PLEASE READ......THANKS.......LAURA C. JONES

White House employee fired for trying to protect president's life
By Bill Conroy,
Posted on Sun May 6th, 2007 at 04:48:59 PM EST
Sometimes, the truth is right in front of us, even if it comes in the form of a seemingly misspoken sentence.
During the political storm that erupted in early 2006 over the Bush administration’s plans to turn over port security to a United Arab Emirates-based company, the president was quoted on Fox News saying the following on March 12 of that year:

"People don't need to worry about security. This deal wouldn't go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America."

Apparently, if we are willing to heed the story of a former West Wing lead mailroom assistant, Laura C. Jones, the president’s gaff underscores another truth: that his staff isn’t concerned about White House security either.

Rather, the Bush inner circle seems more concerned with silencing individuals who threaten to expose politically embarrassing (and job-threatening) security breaches, even if those lapses pose a threat to the life of the president.

With friends like those, you have to wonder why Bush remains so focused on frightening the American people about foreign boogiemen. Based on Jones’ documented experiences inside the White House, it seems the president should be more focused on protecting himself from security threats brought about by the dysfunction of his own staff.
Jones began working at the White House mailroom in 1995 as part the Office of Administration, which is under the Executive Office of the President. In 2003, after receiving a number of awards for her dedicated service over the years, she was promoted to lead mail assistant to the West Wing, and was among a very few people within the Office of Administration who had top security clearance that allowed her access to the president and his staff.

Jones told Narco News that the West Wing mailroom is very close to the Oval Office. In fact, Jones recalled that one day someone from the president’s staff complained that the odor of burned micro-waved popcorn in the mailroom was disrupting a meeting in the Oval Office.

The mailroom’s proximity to the office where the president conducts business is a key fact to keep in mind given what happened in the West Wing mailroom on March 24, 2004.

Less than two months prior to that date, three U.S. Senate office buildings were closed temporarily after highly poisonous ricin powder was discovered in the mailroom of the office of then U.S. Sen. Bill Frist. As a result of the ricin incident, on March 24, 2004, Jones and her co-workers in the West Wing were still taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin as a precaution.

It was in that context, then, that Shane Chambers, special assistant to then White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, brought a package to the West Wing mailroom. Chambers had been handling appointments at the White House that day and Jones says it is likely the package was given to Chambers by someone who had come to visit the president.

However, Jones stresses, to this day she isn’t certain where the package came from originally, only that it was clear at the time that the package had not gone through the rigorous off-site security clearance required for all mail delivered to the White House.

“I told him (Chambers) that the package had to be sent to another location to be X-rayed, opened and checked for powder before it comes to us,” Jones says. “… I told him that I could give the package to a driver who could take it to the location where it would be checked.”

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Jones says, her supervisor in the mailroom that day overruled her and allowed the package through, “and [despite the ricin threat] they opened it up right there in the mailroom of the West Wing,” Jones says.

Inside the package, Jones says, were a series of smaller packages, each with a label bearing a name. The names on those labels included President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff Andy Card, according to Jones.

“I do not know what was inside the little packages,” Jones says. But she adds that the packages were sent forward to the president and his staff, despite the reckless disregard for their security in this case.

In the wake of the incident, Jones contacted a higher-level manager in her department to express her concern about how the package had been handled due to the threat it posed to the president and his staff.

After that act of internal whistleblowing, however, Jones’ life would never be the same, she claims.

Jones alleges her managers ignored her warning about the security breach and began to retaliated against her by increasing her workload, writing her up on bogus charges related to her workplace behavior, and eventually transferring her out of the White House, stripping her of her high-level security clearance and subjecting her to harassment by the Secret Service.

Jones filed an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) discrimination complaint as result of her treatment. That case is still in the appeal process. She also filed a whistleblower complaint with the government watchdog agency the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which declined to act on her complaint.

(The OSC itself is mired in controversy because its director, Scott Bloch, in 2005 allegedly improperly dismissed hundreds of whistleblower cases and re-assigned a dozen OSC personnel without warning to other offices around the country. Bloch is now himself the subject of a retaliation complaint filed by a group that includes current and former OSC employees. For more information, read the recent expose on Bloch in Mother Jones, which also references the House of Death case that has been the subject of extensive coverage by Narco News.)

Calling Card

Jones’ story has even more twists that expose the dysfunction within the White House. After Jones was informed by her manager in mid-July 2004 that she was being transferred from the White House to another mailroom located several blocks from the White House — which included a change in work hours and a reassignment of her parking spot — she put a call into Andy Card’s office.

From Jones’ EEO pleadings:

Mr. Card specifically directed [Jones] and three other co-workers during a personal lunch outing shortly after 9/11 that he had an open door policy and expected [Jones] to come directly to him if there were ever any issues that were un-resolvable. He stated that if he could, he would help them.
When [Jones] called Mr. Card, Ms. Harriet Miers … the deputy chief staff to Mr. Card [and later Counsel to the President] answered the phone. Ms. Miers immediately recognized [Jones’] voice and inquired of [Jones] if she could assist her with any issues. [Jones] then proceeded to explain to Ms. Miers specifically her EEO concerns and that she had gone through her chain of command but retaliation was only becoming progressively worse and that no one was talking to her about her career demise and severe changes in her work environment.

Ms. Miers told [Jones] that she would advise Mr. Card and further see what she could do to find out about [Jones’] EEO situation. Both parties then ended the phone conversation.

About an hour after her conversation with Miers, Jones received a phone call from the director of Human Resources for the Office of Administration – Executive Office of the President (OA-EOP).

From Jones EEO pleadings:

[The Human Resources director) told the [Jones] that she had “stepped on toes” and that [Jones] had “put employees jobs on the line.” [The director] told [Jones] that not only was she being transferred on Monday, July 19, 2004, [to the mailroom at 1800 G St.] but they were taking away her navy blue badge (allows top security West Wing access) and giving [Jones] a green badge (lesser access and nowhere near the White House). [The director] also stated that [Jones’ manager] could sue [her] for slander for stating that a box came into the West Wing that was not radiated and properly secured.
Jones contends the retaliation continued while she was at the 1800 G St. mailroom. Her desk was put in a corner, she claims, to humiliate her. While at the G Street mailroom, Jones was suspended from work twice, once in August 2004 and again in January 2005, allegedly for “insolent” behavior toward management and for using “insolent language toward … co-workers,” according to a July 8, 2005, OA-EOP memo outlining the rational for her termination from federal employment.

That’s right, Jones was fired after some 16 years of recognized outstanding performance as a federal employee.

Jones’ EEO representative, Matthew Fogg, who is an executive director with the Federally Employed Women’s Legal and Education Fund, claims the suspensions that led to Jones' firing were based on bogus charges and were part of the pattern of retaliation against her.

Fogg puts it this way:

She tried to protect the president’s life, and yet she has been relegated to a zero. She is a hero who has been relegated to a zero.
Jones’ EEO pleadings allege that her whistleblowing and eventual firing are directly related:

From the time [Jones] reported the March 24, 2004 [package] incident to the Equal Employment Opportunity director on April 6, 2004, and through July 19, 2004, [when she was reassigned to the G Street mailroom] and beyond, [Jones] experienced a documented career first litany of extreme harassment and hostile working conditions, which included heavy workloads in work assignments, change of work location, change in parking location, loss of computer privileges, loss of high-level security clearance, change of work hours, being prevented from returning to the Old Executive Office Building to gather personal belongings, placed under surveillance by United States Secret Service (USSS) Officers who displayed her photograph in “roll call” and around to other USSS officers….
Fogg also points out that Jones’ version of events is given credibility by the fact that an administrative judge with the Office of Administrative Hearings upheld her claim for unemployment compensation in the wake of her termination from the OA-EOP.

“It validates her story and says there is culpability on the part of the government in her case,” Fogg adds.

More of the same

The March 24, 2004, security breach reported by Jones is not an isolated incident. While Jones was working at the G Street mailroom, she again had to deal with another security breach that she reported to her managers — which, Fogg says, also resulted in no action to correct the problem other than retaliation against Jones.

The following is from a Sept. 3, 2004, email Jones sent to her supervisors in the wake of the G Street incident:

… When I started unloading the car in the mailroom, the phone rang and Paul was telling me that the Pelican case was outside sitting on the sidewalk, and that I had better get it. I asked him what he was talking about and he said that he wasn’t kidding. I went outside and there were at least seven guys standing there and said that Paul had just taken it off the truck and set it on the sidewalk and left it there.”
Jones told Narco News that the “Pelican” was one of eight or so highly secured briefcases (with combination locks) that come to the White House each day. They contain highly sensitive documents and it is a priority that the briefcases are handled securely and delivered to the appropriate person.

“In this case, someone just set the Pelican by the mailroom door, outside, on the curb,” Jones says.

Fogg says the handling of the Pelican briefcase, as well as the March 24, 2004, package incident, go the heart of concerns raised recently by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Waxman sent a letter to former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card on April 23 of this year outlining those concerns.

From that letter:

Since I first wrote you on March 30, 2007, I have received new information that suggests there may have been a systemic failure to safeguard classified information at the White House during and after your tenure [Card resigned in March 2006] as White House Chief of Staff. Multiple current and former White House security personnel have informed my staff that White House practices have been dangerously inadequate with respect to investigating security violations, taking corrective action following breaches, and physically securing classified information.
… On March 16, 2007, the Oversight Committee held a hearing to examine the disclosure by White House officials of the covert status of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. At this hearing, the current Chief Security Officer at the White House, James Knodell, testified that the White House Security Office (1) did not conduct any internal investigation to identify the source of the leak (2) did not initiate corrective actions to prevent further security breaches, and (3) did not consider administrative sanctions or reprimands for the officials involved.

… Following the hearing, my staff heard from multiple current and former security officials who work or worked at the White House Security Office. These security officials described a systemic breakdown in security procedures at the White House. The statements of these officials, if true, indicate that the security lapses that characterized the White House response to the leak of Ms. Wilson’s identity were not an isolated occurrence, but part of a pattern of disregard for the basic requirements for protecting our national security secrets.

… According to the security officers who spoke with my staff, they were prohibited from investigating multiple White House security breaches that were reported to the White House Security Office by concerned officials, such as Secret Service agents. In fact, they said that the practice within the White House Security Office was not to document or investigate violations or take corrective action.

It would seem that ignoring security procedures for mail to be delivered to the president is a national security threat given that such a practice could place the president’s life in danger. Jones’ efforts to report the incident on March 24, 2004, and the alleged retaliation brought against her as a result, fits the pattern outlined in Waxman’s letter — as does the Pelican briefcase incident.

Narco News contacted Waxman’s office for a comment on Jones’ case. Karen Auchman, a press spokeswoman for Waxman, said she was not familiar with Jones’ case, but promised “to pass it along to the people in the Congressman’s office who are handling [the White House security] matter … to see if they can provide a comment.”

Waxman’s office never got back to Narco News.

Narco News also contacted the White House press office for a comment on the Jones case. An individual named “Andy” (who refused to provide his last name) promised to pass along Narco News’ question to someone who could respond. No one from the White House press office has yet called Narco News back to provide a comment.

Jones, to date, is still trying to find another job. She said this whole affair has turned her life upside down.

“I almost lost my house [due to the expense],” she says.

Jones also alleges that one of her co-workers who provided a favorable affidavit in her EEO case has since been fired — after being suspended and followed around by the Secret Service.

Jones’ EEO case might well make its way into federal court in the near future, Fogg says, if the EEO Commission declines to reverse a recent ruling against her. Jones’ appeal to the EEOC is still pending — as is Jones’ future.

“I remember telling one federal agent that the package incident put the president’s life on the line,” Jones says. ”He said, ’What about your life?’ ”

Stay tuned …

I thought this was really a pretty good list of sources, all around. Bumped into the anonymous listing on Twin Cities Indymedia. I deleted the link to Anarchist's Cookbook because you can find it yourself and I don't feel like providing links to explosive recipes. (They say it contains mistakes designed to backfire on the would-be anarchist. Don't mess with those recipes...)

This is a really long list, that gets from everything from housing, to background checks, to activist databases, obligatory Mao quotations, thinktanks, the all-important UFO-oriented "ruling elite shadow government" and its secret detention centers, as well as 'fictitious business names', Gnostic scriptures and Polluters By Zip Code. Especially useful: search engines that "cheat". They index pages that are flagged NO-INDEX for Google and the rest.

If you went through every site on this whole list, yep, i think you would probably know everything! Hah.

Seek & Yee Shall Find! Welcome To The Best Activist's Information Source Of 2007!

Best 2007 Activist's Information Source

 read more »

"Hey now... I mean seriously WTF?" this photo seems to say...



A suppressed slice of news from the Mideast: a top member of Jordanian royalty discerns a plan to break up the Middle East into an array of new states with Israel up top. Here's a slice from Kurt Nimmo's Another Day in the Empire blog: Prince Hassan: Neocons and Israel Plan “New 100 Years of War” in the Middle East:

[Despite American media suppression] what does Bin Talal and millions of Arabs know?

“After a keynote speech at the European Policy Centre in Brussels on the ‘coexistence of civilizations’ Prince Hassan Bin Tallal, crown prince of Jordan in the final days of the late King Hussein, spoke to Today’s Zaman…. Prince Hassan made it clear that the idea of breaking Iraq into pieces, as is circulating in some US and Israeli circles, would be a fatal mistake. The Jordanian prince warned that a possible break-up would play into the hands of Israeli ‘extremists,’ making Israel the dominant minority in a region of minorities.”

Prince Hassan “is now one of the leading intellectuals and activists of the Islamic world,” and yet his comments go unreported in this country. “I want to cite the Clean Break paper of 1996 attributed to the conservatives in the US. It seems to me that the concept of pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, supra-national identity was actually taken to pieces by this paper, arguing somehow that fragmentation was taking place in that part of the world, so let us take full advantage of this. Muslims and Arabs do not need enemies as they are doing an excellent job of destroying each other. Of course this plays into the hands of Israeli extremists that believe Israel should emerge as the dominating minority in a region of minorities or a mosaic of minorities.”

The idea of taking “to pieces” Arab nationalism is hardly revelatory. “This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking,” writes Khalil Nakhleh in the publisher’s note to Israel Shahak’s transation of Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. “Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme,” going back at least to the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, former prime minister of Israel, as documented by Livia Rokach (Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A study based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary). Of course, until the Israelis hit the jackpot with the neocons, who were able to infiltrate the Bush administration and drive U.S. foreign policy, they were unable to carry out their master plan on the scale envisioned.

“End of the Westphalian system, the end of the Middle Eastern community of states, the beginning of a Balkanization that could lead, in the words of the former Iraqi Defense Minister Ali Allawi, to a new 100 years of war,” Hassan continues.

In short, a plan perfect for the Israelis and their neocon helpers.

Of course, none of this matters—as we are essentially deaf, dumb, and blind here in America, a condition facilitated by the corporate media—and it appears quite plain we are headed for what Hassan characterizes as a “new 100 years of war,” not simply in the Middle East but across the board.

Who is Oded Yinon? One of those hardcore rightwing Zionists who wanted to see the chips fall where they may in the midst of chaos, leaving Israel as the ascendant regional hegemon. I'm not claiming this is the dominant strategic view in Israel, but it's still tempting as a perceived way for Israel to escape the grim wheels of fate. More sane Israeli analysts and strategists don't favor such madcap schemes, since the ensuing chaos would leave Israel far more vulnerable to nuclear attack, as nuclear proliferation would surely accelerate, probably leaving nukes in the hands of irrational actors.

So it's a chancy scheme. What kind of map are these guys after? Something kinda retrograde, like this:

More sweet maps here.

Check out The Zionist Plan for the Middle East by Oded Yinon, translated and edited by Israel Shahak, one of those old school kinds of theoretical schemes. Here is Shahak's introduction. Shahak is a leftist dissident Zionist and Israeli professor:

The Association of Arab-American University Graduates finds it compelling to inaugurate its new publication series, Special Documents, with Oded Yinon's article which appeared in Kivunim (Directions), the journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organization. Oded Yinon is an Israeli journalist and was formerly attached to the Foreign Ministry of Israel. To our knowledge, this document is the most explicit, detailed and unambiguous statement to date of the Zionist strategy in the Middle East. Furthermore, it stands as an accurate representation of the "vision" for the entire Middle East of the presently ruling Zionist regime of Begin, Sharon and Eitan. Its importance, hence, lies not in its historical value but in the nightmare which it presents.

The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel's satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.

This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme. This theme has been documented on a very modest scale in the AAUG publication, Israel's Sacred Terrorism (1980), by Livia Rokach. Based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, former Prime Minister of Israel, Rokach's study documents, in convincing detail, the Zionist plan as it applies to Lebanon and as it was prepared in the mid-fifties.

The first massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 bore this plan out to the minutest detail. The second and more barbaric and encompassing Israeli invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, aims to effect certain parts of this plan which hopes to see not only Lebanon, but Syria and Jordan as well, in fragments. This ought to make mockery of Israeli public claims regarding their desire for a strong and independent Lebanese central government. More accurately, they want a Lebanese central government that sanctions their regional imperialist designs by signing a peace treaty with them. They also seek acquiescence in their designs by the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian and other Arab governments as well as by the Palestinian people. What they want and what they are planning for is not an Arab world, but a world of Arab fragments that is ready to succumb to Israeli hegemony. Hence, Oded Yinon in his essay, "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980's," talks about "far-reaching opportunities for the first time since 1967" that are created by the "very stormy situation [that] surrounds Israel."