New details have emerged about minders who sat in on 9/11 Commission interviews during a fact-finding trip to Canada.
One care pack, ready for addressing. That address again:
“An Australian Soldier”
Op Slipper
AFPO 13
Australian Defence Force
SYDNEY NSW 2890
On three occasions to date, the postie has failed to read the address properly, and has tried to charge me $7 postage. If that happens to you, just politely point out that it is going to an "AFPO". They should understand what that means, and they'll rapidly backtrack and take it for free.
The one thing this pack is lacking is reading material. As even a very lightweight magazine (Economist, Spectator) can weigh 250 grams, you have to be careful that you don't burn the bulk of your 2kg allowance with paper.Yeah, better to send Baby Wipes, I guess. But will they appreciate the sarcasm?
PhilNo Gravatar
May 31st, 2009 at 7:08 pm
@Hannah, well they have linked to LP and I noticed a shout out to Hoyden in their opinion from elsewhere feed.
"String theory predicts the universe is like a soap bubble that is expanding and dying," he says. Billions of years from now stars will blink out; the night sky will be dark and the oceans will freeze over. But we may have an escape route. Our soap bubble co-exists with other soap bubbles; every time a black hole forms it may be creating a baby universe. The matter being sucked in may be blown out the other side, creating a white hole in a twin universe, which will expand very rapidly, like our own Big Bang.
"Perhaps, also, a Type III civilisation, which can harness the Planck energy, will open a hole in space and tunnel through a wormhole to a parallel, warmer universe. There is no other hope. Either leave the universe or die with it. If the wormhole is microscopic in size then we may send a nanobot that can reproduce itself indefinitely and create cloning factories to recreate the dead civilisation through it."
Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that AT&T staff brought more than 80 mobile phones to Allen parties during the final performance night last week.
One fan said she voted for Allen 10,840 times on one of the free phones provided, despite American Idol rules forbid "power-voting" using "technical enhancements".
AT&T's mobile phone network is the only one on which Idol watchers can cast votes through text messages, and voting usually incurs a charge.
He noted that he remains "a free market guy."
Bush was asked what he thinks about conservative pundits who claim the Obama administration's fiscal policies are opening the door to socialism.
"I've heard talk about that," he said. "I think the verdict is out. I think people are waiting to see what all this means."
The former president earned a noisy standing ovation when asked what he wants his legacy to be.
"Well, I hope it is this: The man showed up with a set of principles, and he was unwilling to compromise his soul for the sake of popularity," he said.
Sri Lanka had a diplomatic victory this week, avoiding a United Nations probe into human rights concerns over the final stages of the war with the Tamil Tigers. Egypt and Cuba, as well as India -- and China helped deliver the outcome, which comes amid closer examination of how the victory was possible after more than a quarter of a century of war.
In April 2003, North Korea drew the obvious conclusion from the US and British aggression against Iraq. The war showed, it commented at the time, "that to allow disarmament through inspections does not help avert a war, but rather sparks it". Only "a tremendous military deterrent force", it stated with unavoidable logic, could prevent attacks on states the world's only superpower was determined to bring to heel.
The lesson could not be clearer. Of Bush's "axis" states, Iraq, which had no weapons of mass destruction, was invaded and occupied; North Korea, which already had some nuclear capacity, was left untouched and is most unlikely to be attacked in future; while Iran, which has yet to develop a nuclear capability, is still threatened with aggression by both the US and Israel.
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.
Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
"After this law passes the next logical step would be a law requiring all Arab Israeli’s to wear a bright yellow crescent moon armband."
Frank Lowy, who built Westfield Group into the world’s biggest owner of shopping malls, ranked second this year with a fortune of A$4.2 billion...
Malcolm Turnbull, 54, a former Goldman Sachs Australia Ltd. chairman and leader of the opposition Liberal Party, returned to the list in 182nd place, with a family fortune of A$178 million. His wealth was built on the sale of his stake in internet service provider OzEmail in 1999 and the sale of investment bank Turnbull & Partners to Goldman Sachs in 1997, BRW said...
Clive Palmer, chairman of coal and iron ore company Mineralogy Pty, was the only person in the top-10 whose wealth increased last year. His fortune more than doubled to A$3.4 billion to rank fifth.
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard will lead a delegation to Israel next month as part of a bid to strengthen political, business and cultural ties between Australia and Israel.
The tour, organised by pro-Israel lobby group the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange, will include in the 40-strong delegation Liberal MPs Peter Costello, Christopher Pyne, George Brandis, Guy Barnett, Labor MP Mark Dreyfus, QC, Jewish scientists, academics, businessmen and women, plus conservative News Limited columnists Greg Sheridan , Andrew Bolt and Alan Howe.
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle … and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.
The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.
The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.
In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.
There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that these actions by the U.S. do not constitute war crimes. The reason for that is simple and unavoidable: such an argument does not exist -- not, that is, if one actually examines the relevant evidence. Almost all American politicians, and almost all commentators and bloggers, resolutely refuse to consider that evidence, just as they refuse to consider the conclusions it compels.
I will decline to pass moral judgment in an individual case. To make that kind of judgment, one would need certain information: the understanding of the particular individual him or herself, what information he is aware of and has access to, and similar kinds of matters.But let's call a fool a fool eh? A fool or a tool - back in the 1960s it would have been an energising protest chant.
"In armies, as one critic has noticed, where there must be unquestioning obedience, there must necessarily be passive injustice."That's also a quote from Silber's piece.
How powerful is positive thinking about the economy? Can distracting people from thinking about the tough times the economy is heading into actually reduce the extent of our troubles? As we speak, the Rudd Government is working on the hope that it can.
The four losers may have been inclined to violence, and they may have harbored a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. But it seems that the informant whipped up their violent tendencies and their hatred of Jews, cooked up the plot, incited them, arranged their purchase of weapons, and then had them busted. To ensure that it made headlines, the creepy informant claimed to be representing a Pakistani extremist group, Jaish-e Muhammad, a bona fide terrorist organization. He wasn't, of course.
It is disgusting and outrageous that the FBI is sending provocateurs into mosques.
The headlines reinforce the very fear that Dick Cheney is trying to stir up.
The homelands have given their residents pride in themselves and their culture, staving off the social disintegration that in the towns has too often generated a destructive cycle of alcoholism, violence and sexual abuse. If the Henderson and Rudd governments wish to shift support away from the homelands, they must demonstrate that the new hub communities will also be able to nourish pride and self-respect. So far, nothing they have said gives assurance that this will happen.
A new report for a leading neoconservative group which pushes a belligerent “Israel first” agenda of conquest in the Middle East suggests that in future wars the US should make censorship of media official policy and advocates “military attacks on the partisan media.”
Of the more than 4500 people to have voted on an nzherald.co.nz poll by 8am today, 20 per cent said they would also have kept the money if it happened to them.Run, Gao, Run!!!
There is also support on the Your Views pages, with comments such as "stuff the banks!" and "I do not have sympathy for the banks they rip us off anyway" being typical.
Zelikow called systemic government
torture "a collective failure." Excuse me? I don't recall having had
any say in the matter. Do you?
... If Zelikow has any hard and fast principle, it is that those in power should be above the rule of law.
His second principle might be that he himself should be protected.
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
WE ARE NOT SAYING THAT THESE DETAINEES ARE, NECESSARILY ENTITLED TO THIS STATUS. TO BE CLEAR: WE ARE GIVING THEM A TEMPORARY STATUS THEY DO NOT DESERVE. BUT WE ARE NOT DOING THIS FOR THEM. WE ARE DOING IT FOR US.
Compared to 2001, when George W. Bush first took office as president, GOP self-identification has fallen by ten points among college graduates, nine points among those 18-29 years of age, nine points in the Midwest, six in the East, five in the West, and even four points in the South. Married people identifying as Republicans have decreased by five points, and the difference is eight points among the unmarried. The list goes on and on.
THE ISLAMIST terrorist who was the key source of the false intelligence used to trigger the US and UK 2003 military invasion of Iraq has been found dead in a Libyan prison cell.
Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi allegedly commited suicide by hanging in the prison where he was being held in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. His death followed a visit by a team from Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading independent organisations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights.
The al-Libi affair opens a window on an extraordinarily close espionage link that existed between the government of the former US president, George Bush, and the authoritarian Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.
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Al-Libi was the unnamed source that Bush, his former secretary of state, Colin Powell, and other administration officials relied upon prior to the Iraq invasion to assert that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was helping a terrorist organisation run by al-Qaeda. Al-Libi was known to Powell and Bush by the codename "Curveball".
"If you look back on it, I gave him the right and the honest advice. He lost his own seat I think that is just a terrible end for a prime minister to be voted out of your own seat."
"It is a terrible way for him to have left politics. But no, our relations are very amiable."
Mr Costello said Labor had always been strongest in the inner cities, areas increasingly populated by well-off people on upper middle incomes.
"And their outlook is much more pro-Green and I think you are going to see quite a bit of this," he told ABC radio.
"I think that Labor is now in trouble in its inner city heartland."
On Friday, police in Port Moresby had to use tear gas to quell a riot near a popular market.
Allegations of a rise in Chinese organised crime and corruption involving PNG officials has also added to community anger.
Many in PNG feel squeezed out of small scale businesses and complain about working for ruthless Chinese bosses who impose tough conditions.
Giusu said the main suspect was a woman who hired the others by buying them five packets of rice, two packets of noodles, one tin of fish and five bunches of bananas.
Gosh: who could possibly think that something like this could make people think that we were on a crusade against Islam?
If she requests to say goodbye to her father, I will advise her that it is not possible as it could stop her from being returned to her mother in Tehran. We will have several toys etc for distraction purposes.
THINK house prices here are going to fall? Soon you'll be able to short-sell Sydney housing, by taking out a derivative contract based on indices compiled by Rismark/RPData and quoted daily on the sharemarket.
It's a world-first for the ASX, which means institutional and retail investors can get exposure to housing-like returns - positive or negative - without owning a home.
Zelikow learned of the then-classified Justice Department legal opinions in May 2005 and wrote a memo a few months later that contended the policies violated the U.S. Constitution.I still don't understand exactly what Zelikow is doing here. Is this Rice's way of hitting back at Big Dick? Her "Bush authorized it so it's legal" argument ain't gonna stand up, she's floundering, but she sure knows some shit.
More importantly, the memo was part of the internal arguments in the Bush administration that pitted the State Department against then-Vice President Dick Cheney and the Justice Department.
At times, Rice actively joined the dissent, a position that evolved from one of support after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Cheney, to this day, contends the interrogations prevented terrorist attacks.
Rice ignited a controversy last month when she told Stanford University students, "If it was authorized by the president it did not violate our obligations under the convention against torture." But in an appearance in Washington afterward, Rice said she really meant "the president (George W. Bush) said, 'I won't authorize anything that is illegal."
Cheney should be asked whether other countries are entitled to use the same techniques against American prisoners.
"It was imposed upon us," says the source. "And not only [at CIA] headquarters, they were getting requests specifically from the White House."Of course, it's Gonzo who is fingered in this article. But we all know he was the ultimate yes man for Big Dick Cheney, who later promoted him to AG.
Each step of the Mitchell regimen failed, according to the source present at the time. Afterwards, The CIA would ask Soufan and his FBI partner to start interrogating Zubaydah again. "They asked, 'Why does the information stop?'" said the source. "We go in again and we have him re-engage again, and we start producing information." Mitchell then wanted to resume control of the interrogation, telling Soufan, "Now we can do it in a way that we really can break him."Was that the real objective - to "break" him so that he was just a blubbering idiot who would say anything you wanted? Seems to be.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has alleged that elusive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was a US operator who had tried to destabilise his late wife Benazir Bhutto's government back in 1989.
In fact, as premier Bhutto had "warned America about Osama bin Laden in 1989 with a call to then US president George H. Bush", Zardari said on NBC's Meet the Press programme Sunday.
"She rang senior Bush and asked of him: 'Are you destabilizing my government?' because he (apparently referring to bin Laden) paid the then opposition $10 million to overthrow the first woman elected (prime minister) in an Islamic country," Zardari added.
"So, we knew that he was your operator," said Zardari responding to a question about bin Laden's whereabouts.
"You'll have been there (in Afghanistan) for eight years. (So) you tell me. You lost him in Tora Bora, I didn't, I was in prison," he countered when asked where bin Laden was before hurling the allegation at Washington.
Asked if Pakistan was actively looking for bin Laden, Zardari replied: "The world is looking for him and we are part of the world look-out brigade."
Zardari also reiterated his belief that bin Laden is dead. "I have a strong feeling and I have reason to believe that because I've asked my counterparts in the American intelligence agencies and they have not heard of him since seven years."
Mr Rudd on Wednesday said the opinion of the ratings agencies should be respected.
"Can I just say look carefully at what the credit rating agencies said this morning," he told Sky News.
"They are a tough bunch of customers, Standard and Poor's...."
Readers reluctant to pay for online newsAnd here's the Murdoch version of the same story:
Miriam Steffens
May 11, 2009 - 10:23AM
Rupert Murdoch's aim to have readers pay for access to newspapers online has been called into question by a global survey that found readers are unlikely to pay for general news they can get elsewhere free.
Publishers wanting to charge for content on the internet should instead focus on niche markets, with readers of specialised sport and finance content seen as more willing to open their wallets, it said.
Readers not averse to paying for online contentWho you gonna believe, eh????
Nick Tabakoff | May 11, 2009
Article from: The Australian
A GLOBAL survey has found that readers could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas.
The study of 4900 respondents in the US and Europe by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers has found sport and business to be the areas in which consumers are most ready to pay for content.
The survey said consumers would be willing to pay 97 per cent of the purchase price of a traditional newspaper for online business content, provided there were no free online products of equal quality on the market.
For online sport, consumers would be willing to fork out 77 per cent of the purchase price of a traditional paper if there were no free internet equivalents.
The findings add impetus to plans by a number of the world's major newspaper publishers to find more ways to make money from online content.
News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch said at the company's third-quarter results briefing last week that News would be charging for some mastheads' online content "within the next 12 months".
News is the owner of The Australian, which is also planning to make revenues from its internet content.
Banks wrote off an average of 5.5 percent of their credit card balances in 2008, while the average unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. By the end of the year, the rate of credit-card write-offs was 6.3 percent; more recent data was not available.
And as history slowly accepts that this man disgraced his office more profoundly than any before him, as it sinks in that this man did not merely make mistakes, as all flawed politicians do, but committed war crimes, with pre-meditation and elaborate subterfuge, he slowly realizes what's happening to him. He can feel it. And so he resists the way he always resists - by lashing out, attacking, smearing, snearing, and grabbing every inch of the limelight he can.Obviously, Cheney is playing the media nowadays in an attempt to buy sympathy in the court of public opinion, which he thinks is the only court that really matters in the USA. But two can play at that game:
But at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association late Saturday, President Barack Obama skewered Cheney's doomsday view of the world for comic effect.
"Dick Cheney was supposed to be here but he is very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled 'How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People,'" he quipped.
"It is increasingly clear that the worst is over," Mr Murdoch said.
"There are emerging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous decline are done and that revenues are beginning to look healthier."
About midday News Corp shares were up more than 9 per cent on the Australian share market to $14.50.
By the beginning of 2009, the report said, the government’s terrorist watch lists included about 400,000 people, listed as 1.1 million names and aliases, an exponential growth from the days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when it included fewer than two dozen people.
US lawmakers voted Wednesday to create a 9/11-style commission of experts to probe the causes of last year's financial meltdown and to draw lessons to prevent its recurrence.
The House of Representatives voted 367-59 to set up an independent panel modeled on the bipartisan commission that investigated the September 11 attacks of 2001.
"Would the Prime Minister be so crazy to get into a situation like that?" Mr Berlusconi said.
"Goss was totally inept and corrupt," Ray McGovern, who was a CIA analyst for 27 years, told TPMmuckraker.
Goodman, the former CIA analyst, agreed, telling TPMmuckraker that Goss was "one of the worst committee chairman and one of the worst CIA directors" in history. While he was on the committee, said Goodman, Goss made clear that supporting the Bush administration was his only priority. "Goss was extremely partisan on the committee," Goodman continued. "The agency could do no wrong."
As for whether the Goss camp could have leaked Harman's wiretapped conversation to CQ, Goodman said: "All these people have very long memories, and long knives...."
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York shaped Washington's response to the financial crisis late last year, which buoyed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms. Goldman received speedy approval to become a bank holding company in September and a $10 billion capital injection soon after.
During that time, the New York Fed's chairman, Stephen Friedman, sat on Goldman's board and had a large holding in Goldman stock, which because of Goldman's new status as a bank holding company was a violation of Federal Reserve policy.
The New York Fed asked for a waiver, which, after about 2½ months, the Fed granted. While it was weighing the request, Mr. Friedman bought 37,300 more Goldman shares in December. They've since risen $1.7 million in value.
Mr. Friedman also was overseeing the search for a new president of the New York Fed, an officer who has a critical role in setting monetary policy at the Federal Reserve. The choice was a former Goldman executive.
That contradicts what former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who led the Zubaydah capture team, told ABC News in 2007 when he first revealed publicly that waterboarding had been used.And Kiriakou's employers at the CIA are also washing their hands:
He said then, based on top secret reports he had access to, that Zubaydah had only been water boarded once and then freely talked.
Kiriakou now says he too was stunned to learn how often Zubaydah was waterboarded, in what Kiriakou says was clearly torture.
"When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded on one occasion," said Kiriakou. "It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."
A CIA spokesperson declined to comment for this report, except to note that the agency's terrorist interrogation program was guided by legal opinions from the Department of Justice.Suddenly nobody wants to know about this stuff. But fortunately the bloggers are still all over it.
Mr Latham wrote in The Australian Financial Review yesterday that "the Fitzgibbons [Eric and Joel] have not always been very smart in their dealings with businesswoman Helen Liu. During my time in public life I never encountered MPs so engaged, politically and financially, with a business benefactor". He added that "the full list of largesse received by the Fitzgibbon family is yet to be made public".
The claims are extraordinary because Joel Fitzgibbon was Mark Latham's closest friend in Labor politics, and a trusted lieutenant during Mr Latham's time as Labor leader.
Mr Fitzgibbon senior said he "didn't have a clue" why Mr Latham had turned on his son.
