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POPSThe New Nostradamus worth read the whole article. as they say: there is nothing new under the sun, but there is a lot of unknown there still 2be discovered .... -))
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POPSTHE LIE OF THE CENTURY Powell also claimed to the United Nations that the photo on the left showed "Decontamination Vehicles". But when United Nations inspectors visited the site after the invasion, they located the vehicles and discovered they were just firefighting equipment. Powell claimed the Iraqis had illegal rockets and launchers hidden in the palm trees of Western Iraq. None were ever found. Powell claimed that the Iraqis had 8,500 liters (2245 gallons) of Anthrax. None was ever found. Powell claimed that Iraq had four tons of VX nerve gas. The UN had already confirmed that it was destroyed. The only VX ever found were samples the US had left as "standards" for testing. When the UN suspected that the US samples had been used to contaminate Iraqi warheads, the US moved quickly to destroy the samples before comparison tests could be carried out. If you want to know more go to the link and read it all.
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POPSBush's America: LESS Safe, LESS Free. In a new book, "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror," law professors David Cole and Jules Lobel argue that the problem lies in the aggressive "preventive paradigm" the Bush administration adopted in the wake of 9/11.
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POPSYou Have No Rights An executive order was issued by the president, on the 17th of July, and it said, basically, that if you protest or threaten what he calls “stabilization efforts in Iraq,” your property can be seized and you can be detained. Hmm... long live King George!!
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POPSThe Code Even the CIA Can't Crack and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code. Almost 20 years after its dedication, the text has yet to be fully deciphered. A bleary-eyed global community of self-styled cryptanalysts—along with some of the agency's own staffers—has seen three of its four sections solved, revealing evocative prose that only makes the puzzle more confusing. Still uncracked are the 97 characters of the fourth part (known as K4 in Kryptos-speak). And the longer the deadlock continues, the crazier people get.
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POPSTorture planning began in 2001, Senate report reveals The Bush administration has argued publicly that it got tough on detainees to prevent another al-Qaida attack. The Senate report describes another possible motive, and a sobering example of how torture can produce bad intelligence. "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
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POPSThe Four Reasons the Mainstream Media are Worthless Dan Rather said, regarding American media, "What you have is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states". Indeed, former military analyst and famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that the government has ordered the media not to cover 9/11. An expert on propaganda testified under oath during trial that the CIA employs THOUSANDS of reporters and OWNS its own media organizations. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA has already bought and paid for many successful journalists. I could only clip whole paragraphs for some reason, so the clip isn't as I would have liked it to be, but the whole article is well worth the read. Please go to the source for the full story.
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POPSThe Answer Terrifies Them Foreign terrorism against Americans would disappear along with the need for a "war on terror." Civil liberties that were suspended could be restored. A sense of balance and harmony could return to our lives. Ending interventionism would mean that the era of big government in foreign affairs could be brought to an end.
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POPSRepublicans: Crazy, Or Nuts?
Who in their right mind would argue with the observations in this article? More: "The Republican Party has become an aggregation of people who prefer to live in a world of fantasy -- and their first fantasy, the Ur-myth on which the entire conceit rests, is (classically) "we are the realists." "It degrades, into farce and Newspeak, from there. The perpetrators and defenders of the outing of a CIA agent are "patriots." Tom DeLay is a "leader" and Newt Gingrich is a "visionary." The President plays guitar while New Orleans drowns, causes a hundred thousand Americans and Iraqis to be killed or injured, and outsources torture, and it's the Democrats who, per the repellent Ramesh Ponnuru, are the "party of death." "It has gotten so that you have to muster all the compassion and understanding of which you are capable just to think of the Republicans as a party of greedy corporatists manipulating the credulous, the provincial, and the bigoted. That's the nice way of putting it.”
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POPSUS Hypocrisy Astonishes the World The exceptional “virtuous nation” does not think it is insensitive for America’s bombs to blow innocent villagers to pieces. What does the world think of the United States? The US government is like a criminal who accuses the police of his crime when he is arrested or a sociopathic abuser who blames the victim. It is a known fact that the CIA has violated US law and international law with its assassinations, kidnappings and torture. But it is not this criminal agency that will be held accountable. Instead, those who will be punished will be those moral beings who, appalled at the illegality and inhumanity of the CIA, leaked the evidence of the agency’s crimes. America uber alles! No one counts but us (and Israel). The deaths we inflict and the pain and suffering we bring to others are merely collateral damage on the bloody path to American hegemony.
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POPSSubcontracting Torture to the Terrorists You know, something occurs to me when looking at these three lovely destinations: it really does look like we are hiring the terrorists to interrogate potential terrorists. This is like Milo Minderbinder bombing his own base for the Germans!
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POPSProsecute From page 37 of the Office of Legal Counsel memo: The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.
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POPSHistory: The Revenge of 9/11 ? CIA. "It is fair to say that this $50 billion a year a intelligence organization, supposedly the most competent in the world, was amazingly unaware of the plans or derelict in delivering intelligence. It is fair to say the CIA was guilty of neglect, incompetence and/or active participation with the government and all the usual suspects in coordinating an effort to create 9/11. This in order to bring about a coup of our “democratic” government. As a result, this same cadre declared war on Afghanistan, part of their larger "War on Terror," only days later, without any further investigation to determine “whodunit,” railroading a fearful Congress into agreement."
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POPSObama grants rendition permission to CIA UPDATE - NOT EXTRAORDINARY RENDTION PROGRAM: see Dulios comment, below, including: The extraordinary renditions program involved the operation of long-term detention facilities either by the CIA or by a cooperating host government together with the CIA, in which prisoners were held outside of the criminal justice system and otherwise unaccountable under law for extended periods of time. The earlier renditions program regularly involved snatching and removing targets for purposes of bringing them to justice by delivering them to a criminal justice system. It did not involve the operation of long-term detention facilities and it did not involve torture.