Federal spending on paper shredding has increased more than 600 percent since George W. Bush took office.In 2000, the feds spent $452,807 to make unpleasant truths go away; by 2006, the "Cheney Effect" had bumped that number up to $2.9 million. And by halfway through 2007, the feds almost matched that number, with $2.7 million and counting.
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Saturday, December 15, 2007
Bush Secret Document Shredding Soars 600%
Cheney Impeachment Hearings Can Begin With Your Help
I'm so excited right now, I can hardly type!
As very few of you probably know, Dennis Kucinich introduced Articles of Impeachment against Vice-President Dick Cheney last month and they passed the House of Representatives. Yes, I typed that correctly. They passed the House of Representatives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not want to go immediately into debate, so the Articles of Impeachment moved into the House Judiciary Committee. The House Judiciary Committee is where hearings are to take place if the Chairman, John Conyers, decides to proceed.
Rep. Robert Wexler is a member of the House Judiciary Committee and he is calling for impeachment hearings to begin! But the Democratic leadership is still standing in the way. Robert Wexler and two other members of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Luis Gutierrez and Rep. Tammy Baldwin, have written an op-ed in support of starting hearings which can be found on the website Robert Wexler has set up to show public support for starting hearings. He also filmed a you-tube video that you can watch below.
In a blog post he wrote today for The Huffington Post, Wexler promised, "If we can get 50,000 or even more people to sign up in support of this effort I will report back to each and every Democratic colleague of mine the true power that exists behind this movement." I think we can easily get a million people to sign it by the end of the day.
Here's what you need to do:
1) Go to Wexler's website and sign the petition.
2) Check and see if your Congressional Representative is on the Committee (you only have one representative in the House. If you don't know who that is, go to the top right hand side of this blog, under the previous posts, and type your zip code into the "Contact Congress" box). If he or she is on the House Judiciary Committee, call them and write them emails until they agree to support starting hearings.
3) Call your mom, dad, brothers, sisters, friends, enemies, colleagues, old high school buddies, frat brothers, sorority sisters, cats, dogs - everyone you know - and tell them to sign this petition. Then get on the internet and spread the word as fast as you can type.
We can actually make a difference today, kids!
Ready... set... Go!
UPDATE: I just found out, via Raw Story, that Robert Wexler, Luis Gutierrez, and Tammy Baldwin submitted their op-ed to the largest news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Miami Herald and they were denied publication. Can you believe that? Three Congressman write a op-ed together on an issue as vital as impeachment of the Vice President and no one will publish it. Yet Bill Kristol as still has a column in Time Magazine that he used to help lie us into the Iraq occupation and he continues to use to lie us into war with Iran. And Karl Rove now has his own column in Newsweek. I wish it were unbelievable...
UPDATE II: More encouraging news! It looks like at least 9 out of the 23 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee are already willing to move forward with hearings. As we already know, Robert Wexler, Tammy Baldwin, and Luis Gutierrez want to move forward. In addition, five other members of the Judiciary Committee, Steve Cohen, Keith Ellison, Sheila Jackson Lee, Henry “Hank” Johnson, and Maxine Waters were co-sponsors of HR 333, the resolution to impeach Cheney that was introduced by Dennis Kucinich. Most encouraging is the ninth supporter, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers. As reported by The Nation, “There is no question that Conyers, who voted to keep open the impeachment debate on November 7, has been looking for a way to explore the charges against Cheney. The move by three of his key allies on the committee may provide the chairman with the opening he seeks, although it is likely he will need to hear from more committee members before making any kind of break with Pelosi”. Let’s keep those signatures coming and give John Conyers the back up that he needs...
Friday, December 14, 2007
Beating Civil Traffic Tickets - Standing - Impeaching a Witness
There is usually only one witness against you in a traffic case. I show how easy it is to impeach a police officer by asking only two questions. This requires the "judge" to strike the witness's testimony.
Remember though, traffic courts are scams ran by criminals.
Get more information at http://adventuresinlegalland.com and listen to the No State Project radio show every Saturday from 5-7 pm eastern on We the People Radio Network http://wtprn.com
Schizophrenia Is The New Ad Gimmick
Walking westward on Prince St. between Mulberry and Mott Streets, I heard a woman's voice in my head whispering, "Who's there? Who's there?" Not like I "heard" a woman's voice like when I wear flared jeans with skinny shoes and I "hear" a woman's voice in my head say, "Wait, you've got to be kidding?" but like an actual woman's voice in my head. This usually means I've had a psychotic break.
But! Then I noticed that, above a billboard for some A&E show called Paranormal State were some speakers that looked like hypersonic sound beams, a device which uses your skull as a speaker—that is, it transmits soundwaves that resonate against whatever surface they hit.
So when they hit your head, it sounds like the call is coming from the inside the brain-house.
The billboard says 73% of Americans believe and I'm assuming that that means 73% of Americans believe in ghosts. So if that's true, why try to convert the skeptical/not crazy 27% by beaming voices into their heads? That's just greedy. Also it leads to a lingering sense of serious mental violation. How soon will it be until in addition to the Do Not Call list, we'll have a Do Not Beam Commercial Messages Into My Head list?
Rudy Giuliani made million$ off domestic spying
Keith Olbermann explains how Rudy Giuliani appears to have made large sums of money in the domestic spying scandal.The following video is from MSNBC’s COUNTDOWN with Keith Olbermann, broadcast on December 13, 2007
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Thursday, December 13, 2007
CIA Won’t Take the Fall For Bush’s Torture Policies
The intelligence community has been leaking stories all over Washington that points fingers right into the White House. It looks like the CIA is not willing to take the fall for the President's torture policies.
read more | digg story
CIA Torture Jet wrecks with 4 Tons of COCAINE
This Florida based Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA crash landed on September 24, 2007 after it ran out of fuel over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula it had a cargo of several tons of Cocaine on board now documents have turned up on both sides of the Atlantic that link this Cocaine Smuggling Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA that crashed in Mexico
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Wednesday, December 12, 2007
From the Programmer's Mouth: How the 2000/2004 Elections were Fixed
Clinton E. Curtis, ex-programmer tells all during a Congressional hearing on voting fraud. In October 2000, Curtis was asked by Tom Feeney (R), then Speaker of the House in Florida, to write a computer program that would render electronic voting fraud undetectable. Curtis did just that.
See Video | digg story
Marc Stevens' Thoughts on Terrorism
Terrorism is the use of force to bring about political change; is the invasion/occupation of Iraq by the American government terrorism?
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Commentary: The CIA's Gift to Conspiracy Theorists
The CIA has proved, once again, that the cover up is worse than the crime. Or at least let's hope that's the case.
CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden has admitted that in 2005 the CIA destroyed two videotapes of interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners, including a central figure in 9/11, Abu Zubaydah. Hayden said the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of the CIA interrogators from members of al-Qaeda and other terrorists who might try to retaliate. He also claims that the tapes were made to safeguard against unlawful treatment of detainees, and that they were only destroyed after it was confirmed that suspects were not being tortured.
At a time when Congressional Democrats are trying once again to pass a torture ban, it's a given that the revelation is going to further inflame the torture debate — since the tapes apparently showed harsh interrogation techniques. The assumption will be that the CIA did not want the tapes seen in public because they are too graphic and could lead to indictments.
But more to the point, the revelation will raise another question: What other evidence has the CIA destroyed? And can the CIA be trusted to tell us? The CIA had told the 9/11 Commission, when it formally requested such materials, that there was no taping of interrogations. CIA lawyers also told federal prosecutors trying the Zacarias Moussaoui terror case that the agency did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge and Moussaoui's defense lawyers. The CIA insists that the tapes destroyed were not the ones in question.
I would find it very difficult to believe the CIA would deliberately destroy evidence material to the 9/11 investigation, evidence that would cover up a core truth, such as who really was behind 9/11. On the other hand I have to wonder what space-time continuum the CIA exists in, if they weren't able to grasp what a field day the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are going to have with this — especially at a time when trust for the government is plumbing new depths.
I myself have felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists — who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, somehow pulled off by the U.S. government. For the record, I don't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.
Still, the people who think 9/11 was an inside job might easily be able to believe that Abu Zubaydah named his American accomplices in the tape that has now been destroyed by the CIA.
It isn't going to help that the Abu Zubaydah investigation has a lot of problems even without destroyed evidence. When Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, two ATM cards were found on him. One was issued by a bank in Saudi Arabia (a bank close to the Saudi royal family) and the other to a bank in Kuwait. As I understand it, neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia has been able to tell us who fed the accounts. Also, apparently, when Abu Zubaydah was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in. The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16. There's nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed.
If this sounds like paranoia, it is. But the CIA certainly is not helping by destroying evidence. And they should know better than to destroy evidence in the biggest criminal case in American history. More than anything what we need right now is complete and total transparency on 9/11.
Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down
Monday, December 10, 2007
Destroyed tapes revealed the Royal Saudi/ Pakistan 911 link (9/11 LIHOP theory gains creedence)
The destroy torture tapes :He stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King's nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11.It would be nice to further investigate the men named by Zubaydah, but that is not possible. All four identified by Zubaydah are now dead
read more | digg story
Sunday, December 9, 2007
The CIA's Destroyed Interrogation Tapes and the Saudi-Pakistani 9/11 Connection
On December 5, the CIA's director, General Michael V. Hayden, issued a statement disclosing that in 2005 at least two videotapes of interrogations with al Qaeda prisoners were destroyed. The tapes, which the CIA did not provide to either the 9/11 Commission, nor to a federal court in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, were destroyed, claimed Hayden, to protect the safety of undercover operatives.
Hayden did not disclose one of the al Qaeda suspects whose tapes were destroyed. But he did identify the other. It was Abu Zubaydah, the top ranking terror suspect when he was tracked and captured in Pakistan in 2003. In September 2006, at a press conference in which he defended American interrogation techniques, President Bush also mentioned Abu Zubaydah by name. Bush acknowledged that Zubaydah, who was wounded when captured, did not initially cooperate with his interrogators, but that eventually when he did talk, his information was, according to Bush, "quite important."
In my 2003 New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, I discussed Abu Zubaydah at length in Chapter 19, "The Interrogation." There I set forth how Zubaydah initially refused to help his American captors. Also, disclosed was how U.S. intelligence established a so-called "fake flag" operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers.
Instead, when confronted by his "Saudi" interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah assured them
That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.
American interrogators used painkillers to induce Zubaydah to talk -- they gave him the meds when he cooperated, and withdrew them when he was quiet. They also utilized a thiopental sodium drip (a so-called truth serum). Several hours after he first fingered Prince Ahmed, his captors challenged the information, and said that since he had disparaged the Saudi royal family, he would be executed. It was at that point that some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue, that one investigator told me was the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.
He named two other Saudi princes, and also the chief of Pakistan's air force, as his major contacts. Moreover, he stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King's nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11.
It would be nice to further investigate the men named by Zubaydah, but that is not possible. All four identified by Zubaydah are now dead. As for the three Saudi princes, the King's 43-year-old nephew, Prince Ahmed, died of either a heart attack or blood clot, depending on which report you believe, after having liposuction in Riyadh's top hospital; the second, 41-year-old Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, died the following day in a one car accident, on his way to the funeral of Prince Ahmed; and one week later, the third Saudi prince named by Zubaydah, 25-year-old Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, died, according to the Saudi Royal Court, "of thirst." The head of Pakistan's Air Force, Mushaf Ali Mir, was the last to go. He died, together with his wife and fifteen of his top aides, when his plane blew up -- suspected as sabotage -- in February 2003. Pakistan's investigation of the explosion -- if one was even done -- has never been made public.
Zubaydah is the only top al Queda operative who has secretly linked two of America's closest allies in the war on terror -- Saudi Arabia and Pakistan -- to the 9/11 attacks. Why does Bush, and the CIA, continue to protect the Saudi Royal family and the Pakistani military, from the implications of Zubaydah's confessions? It is, or course, because the Bush administration desperately needs Pakistani and Saudi help, not only to keep Afghanistan from spinning completely out of control, but also as counterweights to the growing power of Iran. The Sunni governments in Riyadh and Islamabad have as much to fear from a resurgent Iran as does the Bush administration. But does this mean that leads about the origins of 9/11 should not be aggressively pursued? Of course not. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is doing. And now the cover-up is enhanced by the CIA's destruction of Zubaydah's interrogation tapes.
The American public deserves no less than the complete truth about 9/11. And those CIA officials now complicit in hiding the truth by destroying key evidence should be held responsible.
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