It begins with Katrina

[jonnygemini]

Congressman: Hurricane 'finally cleaned out public housing in New Orleans'
rawstory.com/news/2005/Congressman_Hurricane_finally_cleaned_out__public_housing_in_N_0909.html
RAW STORY

From the paid-restricted Wall Street Journal's Washington wire: "LOUISIANA LAWMAKERS aim to cope with political fallout."

Sen. Landrieu, in spotlight now, could find margins squeezed if thousands of Democratic-leaning African-Americans don't return by her 2008 re-election. Louisiana political analyst John Maginnis says state could even lose one of seven House seats in next redistricting.

Two shaky House incumbents, Democrat Melancon and Republican Boustany, hope response to hurricane rallies voters behind them. House Republican campaign chief Reynolds touts chance to market conservative social-policy solutions; Rep. Baker of Baton Rouge is overheard telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

[jonnygemini]

On New Orleans´ dark streets, patrols assume the worst

Martial law and poor communication lead to tense situation for one reporter

Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, September 9, 2005

New Orleans -- I did not actually count the number of automatic weapons pointed at me, but there were at least five, and I was certain they were all locked and loaded, or whatever that military phrase is signifying that a gun is ready to blow a hole in somebody.

"Step out!" commanded the black-helmeted man in the middle of what appeared to be a tactical formation. He was pointing a laser-like flashlight attached to his machine gun at me.

I must have been quite a sight alone out there on the darkened New Orleans street wearing a headlamp and holding a cell phone at an odd right angle, the only way I could get it to work. I had just been placed on hold.

"I´m a journalist working for The San Francisco Chronicle," I said quickly, trying to remain calm. "I´m out here because the signal ...."

"Step out here!" he interrupted, and his tone suggested that the consequences for not stepping out into the street would be dire. I stepped out.

The encounter was a sobering look into the post-hurricane reality of New Orleans. The city has been evacuated, and a 6 p.m. curfew imposed. The citizens who remain are presumed to be up to no good, especially if they are out past dark.

There are National Guard, police and Army checkpoints every few blocks. SWAT teams, soldiers and military squads from as far away as Puerto Rico patrol the downtown streets, stopping anyone they see. The units often do not appear to know what the others are doing.

It is essentially martial law in the Big Easy, and being outside without a press pass can be dangerous, if not deadly.

I was among 17 journalists from Hearst Corp.-owned newspapers staying at a house in an upscale neighborhood on 6016 St. Charles Place, an area that was spared by the flood.

Hearst Corp. hired six armed military contractors, led by former Navy SEAL Chris White, to protect the house and journalists, presumably from looters, but also from arrest by police or the military.

There is no electricity, only sparse telephone service in the city, and the water supply is assumed to be contaminated. The journalists tramp around the flooded city by day and work by flashlight on their laptops at night, slapping at mosquitoes in the heat and sleeping on the floor.

Cell phone service is sporadic, requiring writers to move from place to place on the lawn, deck and sidewalk to find a connection. That explains my location out on the sidewalk sometime after 9 p.m. Wednesday.

As I waited, headlight shining on my notes, for the person on the line to return, I saw out of the corner of my eye shadowy figures in crouching positions moving across the street toward me.

As I looked up, they seemed to be taking firing positions, men on either flank, two more behind cars and the man in the middle shining the light. They were a New Orleans police SWAT team, and their guns were pointed directly at me. I made the decision not to slap at the mosquito that was siphoning blood out of my arm.

"Do you have ID?" I was asked. I tried to explain that it was in the car and the keys were in the house. "Do you live here? What are you doing here?" The questions came rapid fire, under the threat of a bullet.

Just then, White and his compatriots rushed out of the house, without their guns. The SWAT team turned toward them, rushing down the street for the expected confrontation.

"Don´t point your f -- gun at me!" White shouted, and an already tense situation turned into a hair-raising standoff.

I slipped back into the house while the two sides worked out their differences without, thankfully, any gunfire.

"That was totally unprofessional, pointing their guns at us like that," White complained when he returned. "The Army has been patrolling this street for a week, and they know what´s going on here. All the police had to do was ask them, and they would have known everything they needed to know about this street."

Then, as we journalists prepared for another fitful night of sleep, White commanded everyone´s attention for an announcement.

"I´m asking that nobody go out in front anymore after dark," he said. "It´s just too dangerous."

E-mail Peter Fimrite at [e-mail].

[jonnygemini]

www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2005/09/blackwater_blac.html

Why is Blackwater in New Orleans to do work that many others have volunteered to do for free? Two words: Eminent Domain. Think about it.

What is Eminent Domain?
Eminent Domain is how the government takes your property for a public purpose, whether you chose to sell it to them or not, at a price they specify. In Kelo vs. New London, the supreme court vastly expanded the powers of government to take property in situations where it was arguably for a private, not a public, purpose. The American Bar Association outlines it thusly:

The exercise of eminent domain has a central role in urban redevelopment, smart growth, water quality improvements, wild land preservation and restoration, and a host of environmental and energy infrastructure projects.
The Fifth Amendment enjoins: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." This Quick Teleconference will examine the Supreme Court's recently decided 5th Amendment cases Kelo v. New London, No. 04-108 (June 23, 2005) and Lingle v. Chevron, 125 S. Ct. 2074 (May 23, 2005). In Kelo, the Court by a 5-4 majority upheld the City of New London, Connecticut's condemnation of 15 homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood for the sole purpose of furthering economic redevelopment around a planned pharmaceutical research facility. The QT will discuss the extent to which the decision allows governmental officials to condemn private property for the purpose of increasing tax revenues and promoting development.

In Lingle, the Court held in another 5-4 opinion that the 5th Amendment does not engender inquiry into whether the regulation "substantially advances" legitimate state interests, as it would with an issue under the Due Process Clause. Instead, how the amendment applies is a function of the extent and duration of the governmental action.

Translation: in situations like Katrina, Kelo vastly expands the opportunities for corporate looting.

Thursday, September 08, 2005 at 11:59 PM in Katrina, Mercenaries&PMFs | Permalink

[UniverseSeven]

everyone needs to see this:
www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=r9nmta5.b147fdut&Uy=hbb8p1&Ux=1

What was in this link?

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[UniverseSeven]

Drowning New Orleans
ScientificAmerican.com
By Mark Fischetti
From 10-1-2001

www.rense.com/general67/drown.htm


*****

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Mercenaries guard homes of the rich in New Orleans

Jamie Wilson in New Orleans
Monday September 12, 2005
The Guardian


Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city's millionaires from looters.

The heavily armed men, employed by private military companies including Blackwater and ISI, are part of the militarisation of a city which had a reputation for being one of the most relaxed and easy-going in America.

After scenes of looting and lawlessness in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state and federal law enforcement officers, as well as 70,000 national guard troops and active-duty soldiers now based in the region.

www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0%2C16441%2C1567656%2C00.html


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Witnesses Confirm
Paramedic Story Of
Cops Blocking Escape
9-11-5

www.rense.com/general67/copsd.htm


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VIDEO:

CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES


Keith Olbermann On
The 'City' Of Louisiana

media.putfile.com/OlbermannSwings


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In The Mirror Of The Water
New Orleans as a portrait
of ourselves and our future...
By John Kaminski
[e-mail]
9-7-5

The dog opened his mouth to get the other bone, and as he did, the bone he already had fell into the water.
- Aesop

All our seeming wakings are but the debris of evening waters.
- Edward Dahlberg

Still water is like glass.
- Chuang Tzu


Welcome to Bantustan, Louisiana, where the first stage of creating a large, armed, New World Order fortress, complete with gated communities and an Israeli wall against the sea and the riffraff, has begun. It is the inevitable course of human history, playing like a bad rerun of humanity's medieval nightmares.

In the meantime, the chief sephardic rabbi in Jerusalem declared that the hurricane that obliterated New Orleans was God's punishment because President Bush supported the eviction of Israeli settlers from Gaza.

Take a taste, a gargantuan, thirst-quenching slug of that delicious elixir brewed by humanity's most successful citizens, that Cajun cabernet of pesticide-fouled Mississippi River water curdling in the backwater blender of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, spiced by fragrances from all across the periodic table of toxic elements and spiced with a disease-bearing melange of decomposing dead animals.

Savor the bouquet. See how it tinkles on your tongue and wafts into your hairy nostrils. Close your eyes and you can envision the perfect portrait of human civilization.

They say we are 89 percent water. The quality of the water within us is directly correlative to the ingredients of the potion in the cauldron of New Orleans.

Note the bloated black man, floating face down in the brew. Boats rush past, to and fro, hoping to pry decomposing remains from dank attics, and occasionally, with luck, find some terrified child shivering in the stinking darkness, while National Guardsmen play cards at a nearby truckstop.

If there is a legitimate vision of hell in this life, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is it (although this act has also been seen recently in Fallujah, Kigali, Port-au-Prince and many other locations as well).

Where your last breath, to last you for all eternity, is the fetid stench of humanity's caustic creations, what kind of hope could there be for anyone? Why did four people last week die suddenly simply by breathing the air? Must be a new government test.

The two major conspiracy angles on the New Orleans disaster are (1) the hurricane was directed toward the city by artificial means, and (2) the rescue efforts were deliberately inept to increase the death toll among indigent African-Americans.

Culling the herd. That would be the neocon phrase, slurred out as humor by people like Barbara Bush.

But when you observe who keeps getting it in the face, without even perusing the obvious evidence all across history, you realize there is and has always been a continuing war on blacks, on the dark-skinned peoples of the world, and New Orleans is - whether deliberately contrived or not - a genuine manifestation of this nasty and pointless insanity.

Because so many ordinary people have tried to help New Orleans storm victims and been thwarted by bureaucratic officialdom, one can only draw the conclusion that the government has severely limited its rescue efforts because there is no place in corporate society for these people, and they need to be eliminated.

I thought it was very cool that so many of those like DU activist Dennis Kyne and others who went to Texas to support antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan smoothly moved their operation to New Orleans to help out.

This small remaining segment of morally decent Americans knows - much more authentically that the government could ever pretend to know - that when people are dying you don't argue about causes or rules. Perhaps that is the true test of being human.

9/11 taught us that our government will sacrifice 3,000 of its own best and brightest without blinking an eye. New Orleans is the message that the number eligible in this category, especially if they're black, is much, much higher.

And it is a confession that a real population control program is moving into high gear.

Good numbers in Indonesia, good numbers in New Orleans. Could a West Coast quake be far behind? Heck, they have already caused several of those in Iran.

And it's way past time for the government, after many decades of trying, to develop a really effective biological agent - the new flu as an expression of love in the New World Order world - and you begin to get some sense of how twisted we have become as a species.

Which leads to an examination of how twisted we have always been. Kind of like ... on the bridge at twilight, a man with a flashlight falls off a bridge, and what you can remember was the rhythmic flailing of his arms as he fell. I dunno. Maybe I'm thinking about 9/11 again ......

Now the new images are of floating, inert, face down in poison after rummaging through spoiled and flooded supermarkets looking for clean water. I found it heartwrenching that a top choice of New Orleans looters was disposable diapers.

How far? How far distant is the realization in the minds of everyone that we have created a monster, and that monster is what we do to ourselves and the planet.

Did you ever notice how the Andaman Island indigenents were not harmed by the tsunami, or how animals are never killed in these storms? I don't mean to point out faults in those who were caught in the floodtide, but as regards our fitness to survive as a society.

In our sparkling delusions, our high-minded ideals and low-flying scams, we have abandoned the planet. Soon the planet, which has gone out of its way to help us for millions of years, will abandon us.

Where will your dreams be then? Floating on the bayou, baby, with all the other dead birds.



John Kaminski is a writer who lives on a part of the Gulf Coast of Florida that for some reason Hurricane Katrina inexplicably swerved around on its way to New Orleans. He is the author of "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001." www.johnkaminski.com/


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Locals, Officials Suggest Levees were Intentionally Blown. Evidence suggests there were "cracks" in levees that were intentionally ignored, questions over how they failed.

Steve Watson/Prisonplanet | September 9 2005

www.prisonplanet.com/Pages/090905levees.htm


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Levee 'Explosives Residue'
Story Remains Unconfirmed
By Jim Moore
9-11-5

Note - This story below is racing around the net and we present it *only* as something to be so noted. 'Well placed sources' and unnamed sources 'speaking on conditions of anonymity' have essentially no credibility from a journalistic standpoint. Unless one of the principals steps out of the shadows and comes forward with proof of the allegations below, this story must be considered as just another internet rumor.

IF, in fact, the levee was initially breached with an explosive device, it would have been a very easy task to accomplish. One underwater demolition expert (a former Navy SEAL, for example) working undercover of night, or of the passing hurricane, could have slipped in and out of the area, unseen, in a matter of minutes. Interesting to contemplate how just one person could have triggered a $100 billion dollar disaster and mass murder. But such are the times in which we live. -ed


Explosive Residue Found On Failed Levee Debris
Ruptured New Orleans Levee Had Held Failing

By Hal Turner
9-9-5

NEW ORLEANS, La -- Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall!

One diver, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw the burn marks and knew immediately what caused them. He secreted a small chunk of the cement inside his diving suit and later arranged for it to be sent to trusted military friends at a The U.S. Army Forensic Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Georgia for testing.

According to well placed sources, a military forensic specialist determined the burn marks on the cement chunks did, in fact, come from high explosives. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity said "We found traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111. This would indicate at least two separate types of explosive devices."

The levee ruptures in New Orleans did not take place during Hurricane Katrina, but rather a day after the hurricane struck. Several residents of New Orleans and many Emergency Workers reported hearing what sounded like large, muffled explosions from the area of the levee, but those were initially discounted as gas explosions from homes with leaking gas lines.

If these allegations prove true, the ruptured levee which flooded New Orleans was a deliberate act of mass destruction perpetrated by someone with access to military-grade UNDERWATER high explosives.

More details as they become available . . . . .

www.halturnershow.com/DiversFind
ExplosiveResidueOnRupturedLevy.html


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Friday 9th September 2005 (01h22) :
New Orleans tragedy: The 17th street levee was bombed
Report from the Houston Astrodome...

10:23: Joel just got removed. Almost arrested. Fox News is down on the floor. I’m in dome, hiding in seats. They’re allowing some media on the floor, not others.

10:31 Just met members of the Polish press, they are being stopped from entering floor. Says this is like the former USSR.

10:57 Raw transcript of comments by NOLA evacuee : "The 17th street levee was bombed by the Army Corps of Engineers to save the more valuable real estate in the city... to keep the French Quarter protected, the ninth ward was sacrificed... people are afraid to speak out... everyone who was near there heard the bombings... they bombed seven times. That’s why they didn’t fix the levees... 20 feet of water. Gators. People dying in water. They let the parishes go, not the city center. Tourist trap was saved over human life. A six year old girl was raped in here.. 9 year old boy killed. A man in the shower beaten. No hot food. No help for elderly."

Another evacuee: "Over 20 rapes per night happening inside this place. They bring in national guard for media purposes. Bush wants us to stay here to raise his ratings. Some workers are stealing the good stuff, like shoes."

11:16: Rough transcript of comments by NOLA evacuee, male: "We are treated like prisoners here. Placed under mandatory curfew. We are citizens!"

11:22 Now I’m speaking to someone else, another woman, who says some people report having witnessed "bomb sounds," believe 17th street levee and others were blown up to manage water flow and protect more valuable portions of real estate.

Evacuee: "They blew the levee to save the city..." Saying a barge broke the levee. She is from St. Bernard Parish. "More expensive places were saved at the expense of the neighborhoods that aren’t as valuable... Rebuilding Bourbon Street matters more to the government... that’s what mattered to Governor Blanco..."

bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=8158


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VIDEO:

Earwitness tells ABC explosives blew Industrial Canal levee

www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2005/120905explosivesblew.htm


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ABC NEWS

Some Question Robertson's Katrina Charity
Operation Blessing Is Second on FEMA's List for Donations for Hurricane Victims
By BRIAN ROSS
Sep. 9, 2005

abcnews.go.com/WNT/print?id=1112518

[jonnygemini]

the link was to a Nicarauguan dude who lived in N.O. flickr photo acct where he had roughly 200 pics up from Sun Aug 30th-Fri of the next week...Photos showed how New Orleans survived intact for the most part after Katrina and how residents maintained law and order thruough Tues when they belw the levees

This might be the most informative, compelling, amazing thing I've seen so far about the storm. A photographer/hotel worker/Nicaraguan immigrant who lives in the city took about 200 pictures from the time before the storm struck, during -- including the eerie, beautiful calm when the eye passed through -- and after. There are some fantastic pictures of what the wind did to the city before the flooding came through, all the surreal damage (a line of cars whose back windows only were blown out), buildings completely destroyed. And then you see how things got progressively worse, how the devastation of wind was compounded by water, how the looting began, how the whole thing was destroyed. It takes a while to get through, but it's well, well worth it.

i checked again to make sure I had the link right and it is down still:
www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=14ewb3ap.b147fdut&Uy=nyvoby&Ux=1

[jonnygemini]

Excerpt from a personal diary written by a friend who's a news cameraman working in New Orleans. Name and affiliation withheld by request.

New Orleans - The Real Story

It’s September 4th in New Orleans, and unfortunately - no one is getting it right, not the Feds, the State, the Local folks or the media. I’m sure that many people are trying, but for what ever reason- it is a rotting, deteriorating mess.

I’m only writing this because of what I watched on tv last night. It was the first chance I’ve had to see some of the coverage and what I watched was pathetic. I sensed it yesterday when, amongst the chaos of the unfolding disaster, you realized some of the differences between what is happening here compared to major calamities we’ve endured recently.

There are almost no news crews in the field trying to cover the story. Hundreds, if not thousands of media people are in the region - but I have driven back and forth through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city and you don’t see them. You don’t see the National Guard…..you don’t see ANYONE, except for the poor unfortunate souls wandering the streets looking for food or water. Many of them are on their last legs; they are literally not long for this world. It is surreal; it’s like a zombie scene from Dawn of the Dead. It’s disgraceful that in our times, we are seeing the complete disintegration of our ability to care for our own.

This is a racist issue, there’s no other way to look at it. These are the poorest of the poor. The people left behind in New Orleans are there for one reason only; they had no means to remove themselves from the city. Everyone who could get out, got out.

What’s missing from the rescue is apparent to anyone. A simple plan. It’s like no one ever gave it a real thought. Simple things like storage of emergency rations, clothing, tents, etc. in strategic locations….communications that allow different entities to talk to one another, emergency plans and routing for moving large numbers of people (easily done with the hundreds of public and school transit buses available locally), and the list goes on. Everyone on the street that I have met is so grateful for anything that you can give them. You have to be careful or you could start a riot just giving away a bottle of water.

Driving or walking through the flood area, you see people in the shadows on every block. As you walk around - they come out and they are so dehydrated, carrying babies, or leading you to their father or their mother or a friend who needs help. They all say that they want to get out; they just don’t have a way. And they uniformly complain about the police not stopping to help. Over and over you hear the same thing....”They just drawin’ down on people”, meaning they are pulling their guns.

I can only judge from what I saw, but in walking through the worst areas, every looter I saw was taking food and water. They could be shot for entering supermarkets, which by the way are mostly fully stocked with food, water, juices and soda. It’s disgraceful, it’s been almost a week and yet there seems as though no one in Washington, or Baton Rouge who gets the enormity of what is unfolding.

There are dead bodies on the street. Yesterday, I watched as a man tried to flag down a cop. There was a middle aged woman who had been dead for days, and yet no authority seems concerned. We can see that there was no plan for the living, but you would think that there would be some respect for the dead. When he was finally able to get a cop to stop - not an easy thing to do since they drive through at such high speed…. the cop said that they didn’t care about removing bodies. Someone’s mother, or child, she was still there late last night as I drove out.

I have driven from one end of New Orleans to the other - a drive of over 7 miles, and repeatedly not seen one cop, guardsman, trooper…. And where is the Red Cross? Not ONE. Everyone on the street says, “Where’s the Red Cross? I gave them so much money after 9/11 and the tsunami - where’s the Red Cross”. The cops I’ve asked say they are not here because they are afraid. The Red Cross says that the authorities are not letting them in the city. I find that hard to believe. The police can’t even secure a few blocks, let alone keep the Red Cross out. Helping victims in New Orleans is exactly why the Red Cross was created.

People are dying, I’ve seen it personally, and the main organization we look to is no where to be seen. Just like the media who sit on a safe block, or hang around the Superdome or the convention center because it is safe, maybe they are shunning the poor because they are scared. If they are being truthful, then they should take a stand, and deploy their personnel. Otherwise, they are complicit in an ill conceived plot to starve survivors out.

What is particularly sad to me is that I’m no hero. I’m basically a coward, but I don’t find anyone I’ve met on the street to be threatening. They are suffering and desperate and no one has uttered a word other then “help me” or “thank you”.

I watched one of these news robots on the air last night standing at Camp and Canal Street - where it is safe - doing a national live shot saying that “everything is in place now” and “food is being distributed”, and “the National Guard is deployed in force….on the street” - it was pure fiction. This guy hasn’t left the safety of his air conditioned trailer complete with Subway sandwiches (from Baton Rouge) and Gatorade. It’s pathetic.

One can only hope that our Federal officials will get a handle on the Herculean task ahead and that the citizenry will hold them responsible for the unnecessary loss of life.

As for the media… do a little fact checking, read more than one paper. Stay away from CNN, MSNBC and Fox. NPR and Nightline do a good job of looking beyond the headlines. By the way, The Salvation Army is here and they have been able to help in some places. This is a racist/socioeconomic situation.

We all know that if it were somewhere else, like an affluent resort town or a Bush county in Florida, things would be different. Yes, there was looting and gunfire, and there are criminals out there, but they were a small minority of the population. There were tens of thousands of poor, black folk who stayed out of it, and they are still waiting today for any kind of help.

[jonnygemini]

George Galloway MP: Elements Within Government Using Terror Provocation Tactics

Steve Watson & Alex Jones / Prisonplanet | September 13 2005

On Friday 9th September Alex Jones was joined on air by member of Parliament and prominent antiwar activist George Galloway for a riveting one on one interview.

Mr Galloway discussed the rising tide of anti-Iraq war protest, the snarling Neo-Cons' plan for world war and the possibility of staged government terror attacks to justify the invasion of more countries.

Prisonplanet.tv subscribers click here to listen to the interview in its entirety

The Emerging Controlled Police State

Mr Galloway kicked things off by asserting that the recent purposeful botch job on the part of FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the heavy handed police state like crackdown in New Orleans has backfired on the political elite.

"The United States today looks like a country run by dangerous malevolent incompetants...There is a stain on the reputation of your great country and by association mine" Said Mr Galloway.

We have extensively covered the purposeful incompetence of the federal response in New Orleans and the jackbooted thuggery that is being advertised all over the nightly news, forwarding the agenda to once again normalize such repressive authoritative behaviour. Mr Galloway described the aftermath of Katrina as:

"A bizarre catalogue of incompetence and malevolence and racism and all the worst things about the US today... and now as we are beginning to pick up, there is more to it than meets the eye and it may be being seized upon as a big diversion. If it was it hasn't worked, it just compounds people's feeling that the US is run by these ghoulish, Marie Antoinette incompetents."

Mr Galloway went on to describe the state that the Neo-Con greed and war machine has got itself into:

"On the surface they appear to be gliding serenely like a swan but underneath they are paddling like hell just to stay afloat because they run the risk of being thrown out."

But Mr Galloway was also quick to point out that you cannot slip a cigarette paper between the two opposition parties both in the United States and Great Britain. There is no opposition, both countries operate under a duopoly, both parties run along parallel lines. We have to constructively approach how we vote and who we empower.

Mr Galloway's Respect Party, whom he represents in the London Constituency of Bethnal Green is an example of such a constructive movement. Respect knows it is never going to win a majority vote but is there simply to keep the powers that be in line, bringing them to book so to speak on important and far reaching issues that may otherwise go relatively unchallenged.

"The danger is that when the state begins to be such a miserable abysmal failure that people turn not to progressive forces of leadership but to the kind of brown shirted aggressive forces...".Galloway comments.

Government Engineered Terrorism

Previously Mr Galloway has suggested that there is a very real danger of the government engineering a situation where terror attacks can be manufactured and seized upon to forward the pre-planned agenda abroad and at home. On Friday Mr Galloway elaborated on these comments:

"There is a very real danger because you have elements within the state, you have the Richard Pearle 'axis of evil' snarling 'you're next' at this country or that country and yet the circumstance on the ground, the political collapse of the Bushites in the United States, the resistance in Iraq having taken such a terrible toll...is making the idea of another war simply ridiculous...and yet there are those in this Neo-Con, Zionist, Christian Fundamentalist axis that really are itching to get as much of this agenda pushed on whilst they still have the reins of power. So you cannot discount some kind of provocation being staged by those elements who want to propel the US into an even more disastrous invasion"

Mr Galloway suggests that it is not beyond the realms of imagination for a situation to arise where the power hungry elite in the US uses staged provocation to drag Iran into a geopolitical set-to, using Israel as the hammer. If this were to happen, the consequences could be as far reaching as to start a third world war which would be devastating for humanity.

This would provide the authorities with the perfect excuse to set up a police state domestically to regulate the activities of everyone and have complete control.

"...That's right, it's Orwellian, it's 1984, the permanent division of the world into warring blocs, for the profit of a few at the cost of the misery of the many, and we have to refuse this in every way we can." Galloway states.

Of course, the past masters of government sponsored terrorism were the Zionists, who created the condition in the Arab countries, and in some European countries to stampede the Jewish populations out of the countries they had been living in for many hundreds years and get them into a Zionist state. Galloway comments:

"Suddenly Jewish people who had been the victims of Christian persecution suddenly saw their Synagogues being blown up, their countries being attacked and all kinds of provocations being staged so packed their bags and moved to occupied Palestine, then to be called Israel."

The Neo-Con War mentality

It's well documented that the United States has adopted such provocation "dirty tricks" before and during the Vietnam war and ever since.

"It's always the case that in a big and complex State machine, there are all sorts of elements, they don't have to be endorsed by all of the political leadership, they can be people representing a trend in the political leadership." Galloway states. He went on to once again lambaste the disgusting Neo-Conservative war crazed movement that had recently attempted to falsify documents to implicate Mr Galloway in the very corruption that they consistently revel in:

"I 've already mentioned this hideous character Richard Pearle. I saw him the other day actually snarling 'you're next', threatening people with American military power, a man who couldn't punch his own way out of a wet paper bag, but ready to fight to the last with other people's last drop of blood. These people make my blood boil and they ought to make every right thinking person feel that way. We deserve better than to be governed by these gangsters."

Mr Galloway went on to describe how it is always the elite draft dodging spoon-fed weaklings that strive for this kind of dominance over all, sacrificing the lives of others whilst swaggering around in their own bomber jackets playing up to the act.

Returning to staged terrorism and Zionism Mr Galloway pointed out that Zionism has nothing to do with Jewishness. The Zionist movement, as it is well documented, funded Hitler before World War Two and many of the figurehead of Zionism were not and are not Jews.

"The reality is these people have used Jewish people, and they have used them with this ideology of Zionism, to create this little Hitler State on the Mediterranean, to act as an advance guard for their own interests in the Arab world, and we're all paying for it, the Palestinians have paid for it, the Arabs have paid for it, and now the American people are paying for it, and why should we? We don't want to live our lives in a permanent state of warfare and division."

The danger in the Arab world is that the people their know we are not evil and corrupt like our governments are, but they also know that we democratically elect our governments, Galloway goes on to decree. They are supposed to act on our behalf and that's why this corrupt version of "democracy" is being flatly rejected across the Arab world.

Mr Galloway concluded by asserting that we do have the power to change things, we are in the majority:

"The United States was a country built out of nothing and a country that went to the stars. The people of the United States are great 'can-do' people and they ought to be able to use the Constitution which the founding fathers gave them to organise their political power to change things."

[jonnygemini]

Mystery surrounds floodwall breaches
Could a structural flaw be to blame?

By John McQuaid
Staff writer

One of the central mysteries emerging in the Hurricane Katrina disaster is why concrete floodwalls in three canals breached during the storm, causing much of the catastrophic flooding, while earthen hurricane levees surrounding the city remained intact.

It probably will take months to investigate and make a conclusive determination about what happened, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. But two Louisiana State University scientists who have examined the breaches suggest that a structural flaw in the floodwalls might be to blame.

"Why did we have no hurricane levee failures but five separate places with floodwall failures?" asked Joseph Suhayda, a retired LSU coastal engineer who examined the breaches last week. "That suggests there may be something about floodwalls that makes them more susceptible to failure. Did (the storm) exceed design conditions? What were the conditions? What about the construction?"

Ivor Van Heerden, who uses computer models to study storm-surge dynamics for the LSU Hurricane Center, has said that fragmentary initial data indicate that Katrina's storm-surge heights in Lake Pontchartrain would not have been high enough to top the canal walls and that a "catastrophic structural failure" occurred in the floodwalls.

Corps project manager Al Naomi said that the Corps' working theory is that the floodwalls were well-constructed, but once topped they gave way after water scoured their interior sides, wearing away their earth-packed bases. But he said some other problem could have caused the breaches.

"They could have been overtopped. There could have been some structural failure. They could have been impacted by some type of debris," Naomi said. "I don't think it's right to make some type of judgment now. It's like presuming the reason for a plane crash without recovering the black box."

Officials long had warned about the danger of levees being topped by high water from a storm surge. Absent topping, floodwalls are supposed to remain intact.

The floodwalls lining New Orleans canals consist of concrete sections attached to steel sheet pile drilled deep into the earth, fortified by a concrete and earthen base. The sections are joined with a flexible, waterproof substance.

Floodwalls were breached in the 17th Street Canal, at two places in the London Avenue Canal, and at two places in the Industrial Canal, Suhayda said. Naomi said last week that one of the Industrial Canal breaches likely was caused by a loose barge that broke through it.

Suhayda said that his inspection of the debris from the 17th Street Canal breach suggests the wall simply gave way. "It looks to have been laterally pushed, not scoured in back with dirt being removed in pieces," he said. "You can see levee material, some distance pushed inside the floodwall area, like a bulldozer pushed it."

He suggested that because the walls failed in a few spots, the flaw may not be in the design but in the construction or materials.

"Those sections in the rest of the wall should have been subjected to the same forces as that section that failed," he said. "Why did one side fail, not the other side?"

Drainage canals typically are lined with floodwalls instead of the wider earthen levees that protect the lakefront because of a lack of space, engineers say.

"It's a right-of-way issue," Naomi said. "Usually, there are homes right up against the canal. You have to relocate five miles of homes (to build a levee), or you can build a floodwall."

Constructing a more expensive earthen levee also would require building farther out into the canal itself, reducing the size of the canal - and the volume of water it could handle.

Naomi said that an earthen levee also could have been breached if the surge had pushed water over the top. "A levee failure might be more gradual than with a floodwall," he said. "It means you may have flooded a little slower."

The central question for engineers investigating the breaches will be whether the floodwalls were topped - and that's still unclear.

The levee system, floodwalls included, is designed to protect against an average storm surge of 11.5 feet above sea level. The Corps adds several more feet of "freeboard" to account for waves and other dynamics.

Naomi said the Industrial Canal floodwalls were topped by water coming in from the east. But scientists don't yet know exactly whether Katrina's Lake Pontchartrain surge was high enough to go over the wall in the two other canals.

Many storm surge gauges stopped functioning during the storm, LSU climatologist Barry Keim, though initial data point to a mi-lake height of eight or nine feet. Heights typically are higher at the Lakefront area because wind pushes water higher against the levees.

Suhayda said the debris line on the lakefront levee adjacent to the canal was "several feet" below the top. The levees are 17 or 18 feet high in that area. The canal levees, however, average only 14 feet. Storm surges have waves and other dynamics that push water still higher than the average height.

"There are big implications for as little as a one-foot change in elevation" of the storm surge, Suhayda said.

If the water did not top the levees, the breaches could prove more mysterious. Typically, the pounding of wave action would be the most likely way to cause a breach, scientists say. But there isn't much wave action in canals.

"Waves constantly breaking on the structure start to erode it and make it become unstable," said LSU coastal geologist Greg Stone, who studies storm-surge dynamics. "But I don't think that was a major factor in the canals. You just don't have the (open area) to allow wave growth to occur."

[jonnygemini]

CHARITIES ARE FOR SUCKERS

By Ted RallTue Sep 13, 8:06 PM ET

Leave Katrina Relief Efforts to Government

NEW YORK--Hurricane Katrina has prompted Americans to donate more than $700 million to charity, reports the Chronicle of Philanthropy. So many suckers, so little foresight.

Government has been shirking its basic responsibilities since the '80s, when Ronald Reagan sold us his belief that the sick, poor and unlucky should no longer count on "big government" to help them, but should rather live and die at the whim of contributors to private charities. The Katrina disaster, whose total damage estimate has risen from $100 to $125 billion, marks the culmination of Reagan's privatization of despair.

The American Red Cross leads the post-Katrina sweepstakes, quickly closing in on the $534 million it took in just after 9/11. But Red Cross spokeswoman Sheila Graham told the AP it needs another half billion "to provide emergency relief over the coming weeks for thousands of evacuees who have scattered among 675 of its shelters in 23 states."

Shelley Borysiewicz of Catholic Charities USA, which has raised $7 million thus far, also continues to solicit donations: "We don't want people to lose sight of the fact that this is going to take years of recovery, and we're going to be there to help the people who fall through the cracks."

What "cracks"? Why should New Orleans' dispossessed have to live in private shelters? We live in the United States, not Mali. There's only one reason flood victims aren't getting help from the government: because the government refuses to help them. The Red Cross and its cohorts are letting lazy, incompetent and corrupt politicians off the hook, and so are their donors.

It's ridiculous, but people evidently need to be reminded that the United States is not only the world's wealthiest nation but the wealthiest society that has existed anywhere, ever. The U.S. government can easily pick up the tab for people inconvenienced by bad weather--if helping them is a priority. That goes double for Katrina, a disaster caused by the government's conscious decision to eliminate the $50 million pittance needed to improve New Orleans' levees.

For our leaders the optional war against Iraq is such a priority, which the Congressional Budget Office expects to cost $600 billion by 2010. That's four or five Katrinas right there. (That's also where the levee money went.) Because rich people are always a political priority, their taxes have been slashed by $4 trillion over a decade--the equivalent of 32 Katrinas. So worried are our public servants about the tax burden placed on the rich that they're looking out for rich dead people. This is why they've gutted the estate tax that, at a cost of $75 billion annually, will run half a Katrina a year. Trickle-down economists beginning with Milton Friedman shout "starve the beast," but while the social programs are put on a diet, the mean and powerful pig out more than ever.

Disaster relief is too important to be left to private fundraisers, with their self-sustaining fundraising expenses, administrative overhead (nine percent for the Red Cross) and their parochial, often religious, agendas. It's also way too expensive. In the final analysis, after the floodwaters have receded and the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans have been razed under eminent domain, major charities will be lucky if they've managed to raise one percent of the total cost of Katrina. Congress, recognizing the reality that only the federal government possesses the means to deal with the calamity, has already allocated $58 billion--over 70 times the amount raised by charities--to flood relief along the Gulf of Mexico. As Bush says, that's only a "down payment."

Cutting a check to the Red Cross isn't just a vote for irresponsible government. It's a drop in the bucket compared to what you'll end up paying for Katrina in increased taxes.

Granted, in terms of popularity of likelihood of success, trying to make a case against giving money to charities compares to lobbying against puppies. The impulse to donate, after all, is rooted in our best human traits. As we watched New Orleanians die of thirst, disease and anarchic violence in the face of Bush Administration disinterest and local government incompetence, millions of us did the only thing we thought we could to do to help: cut a check or click a PayPal button. Tragically, that generosity feeds into the mindset of the sinister ideologues who argue that government shouldn't help people--the very mindset that caused the levee break that turned Katrina into a holocaust and led to official unresponsiveness. And it is already setting the stage for the next avoidable disaster.

It's time to "starve the beast": private charities used by the government to justify the abdication of its duties to its citizens.

[jonnygemini]

NBC Investigative Producer Robert Windrem
Getting documents “over the transom” is an old journalist phrase. The phrase is archaic. It comes from a time when a small, hinged window, a transom, was placed above a doorway, mainly to ventilate a room… this was before air conditioning. The door might not be open, but the transom was. If a friendly source wanted to deliver an interesting document to a transom-equipped newsroom, he might throw it over the transom and into the newsroom… sight unseen.

Today, there is a “digital transom.” It’s called e-mail and over the past two weeks we have been the recipient of a lot of documents thrown over that “digital transom.” Whistle-blowers and researchers — people we know and have trusted before — have been providing us with documents laying out what they saw as the failings of relief efforts, at all levels of government, in both political parties. We promised them anonymity in return for their help —a standard practice in modern-day journalism.

The documents have taken a lot of forms. There is the Southeast Louisiana Catastrophic Hurricane Response Plan, the never completed plan put together by a FEMA contractor last summer as a framework for dealing with a major hurricane striking New Orleans. There is the exchange of letters between Louisiana’s congressional delegation and the Office of Management and Budget this January — the one on the need for emergency funding of levee repairs and maintenance; the City of New Orleans’ very limited and general evacuation plans. There is also a PowerPoint presentation on the now-famous “Hurricane Pam” FEMA exercise that predicted with Nostradamus-like accuracy what would happen to New Orleans if a Category 3 or bigger storm hit the city. And finally there are lists of upcoming FEMA and DHS exercises showing how the threat of terrorism had trumped natural disasters in the minds of emergency planners, at least at the federal level.

We have elected to post those documents, raw and unedited, on Katrina.MSNBC.comwww.msnbc.msn.com/id/9107338/ (Click in the box on the right side labeled “Katrina Resources”), because they add to the research and understanding of what has taken place since Katrina struck. They can be viewed or downloaded. We have used much of the information in these documents on Nightly News, Today, MSNBC-TV, CNBC and here on MSNBC.com.

Why do our sources do it? For a variety of reasons. Some are angry and want us to see how “everyone knew” this was coming. Others do it for political purposes, to get an advantage: Democrats and Republicans, federal and local authorities. Still others just think a document is damn interesting and should be out there for the sake of discussion.

When these documents first arrived, they could not be found by searching Google or by online sleuthing. A couple of them are labeled “For Official Use Only” (FOUO), a government classification that tries to limit distribution of materials, mainly for bureaucratic reasons. (An FOUO document can be obtained routinely under the Freedom of Information Act.)

So why are we doing it? It’s our belief that the public should have as much detail as they can on such a big story as Katrina. The Internet offers an opportunity unlike any other medium. It can offer the raw material of journalism as well as the finished product in a timely and comprehensive manner. (Our competitors can take a look as well if they want, but we’ve broadcast and published a lot of this, as mentioned, and are willing to take that risk that comes with sharing in the public interest).

With luck and if reason prevails, this won’t be the last time we will do this. A journalist is only as good as his sources — and resources. And a story is only as good as what a journalist can share with the public. In this case, and in others, we need to share a lot more.

[jonnygemini]

A Bridge Too Far
by Jason Cherkis and Erik Wemple
The print media get picky about a story involving police forcing evacuees back into New Orleans.

Soon after the floodwaters engulfed New Orleans, reporters chronicled the thousands trapped at the Superdome, trapped at the convention center, and trapped on rooftops. As the days passed, news consumers had to wonder: Why couldn’t citizens just hike out of the city to the nearest patch of dry land?

The Socialist Worker webzine on Sept. 6 provided an answer: You couldn’t leave without facing down a police barricade and gunfire.

Lorrie Beth Slonsky and Larry Bradshaw, Socialist Worker contributors, had traveled to New Orleans to attend a convention for emergency-medical-services personnel. Then the storm hit. They holed up inside a French Quarter hotel for several days. Once the hotel’s food and water ran out, Slonsky and Bradshaw were booted onto the street, along with other hotel guests.

The group set out for the convention center but decided to change plans after learning that it wasn’t fit for humans. So they consulted a police commander posted near Harrah’s on Canal Street. “He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge…” Slonsky and Bradshaw wrote. Buses would be stationed on the other side, the commander said.

They headed for the bridge, about 200 people, nearly all of them African-American, according to Slonsky. As they approached the structure, Slonsky and Bradshaw reported, they were met with a police barricade and the sound of bullets whizzing overhead. Soon dozens and dozens from their crowd began to peel away and scatter. Slonsky and Bradshaw wrote that they and a few others managed to approach the police line. They were told there were no buses waiting for them.

“We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway,” Slonsky and Bradshaw wrote. “They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans.” Bradshaw reports that there were about a dozen cops guarding the bridge, and only one of them was black.

In covering Katrina, journalists expertly documented the seismic fuckups of officialdom—the stifling conditions at the Superdome, the convention-center fiasco, the weak levees that gave in to floodwaters. The coverage turned Michael Brown from an obscure political appointee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into cannon fodder for Bush-administration detractors nationwide. And it told the compelling stories of people who never made it out of the Crescent City. But it largely ignored the most compelling one, in large part because a pair of lefty Web types were first on the scene.

On the Sept. 4 Nightline, ABC reporter John Donvan stumbled on the margins of the story during a sitdown with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. During the interview, Nagin brought up the barricade without prompting: “They started marching. At the parish line, the county line of Gretna, they were met with attack dogs and police officers with machine guns saying, “ ‘You have to turn back.’ ”

The next day, Nightline reran parts of the Nagin interview and broadcast comments from a blustering police official. But the segment lacked critical, eyewitness reports.

That’s where Slonsky and Bradshaw had their scoop. On Sept. 6, socialistworker.org published their account, which chronicled the events and the dim light they cast on the barricading police forces. After the initial bridge clash, Slonsky and Bradshaw organized a makeshift camp at the foot of the bridge. They wrote of scavenging for food and water, making beds out of cardboard, and turning a storm drain into a bathroom. Their encampment closed down when a cop showed up to wave his pistol and order them away.

“As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water,” they wrote.

The Gretna story provided a fresh bit of content for Socialist Worker Editor Alan Maass, who recently published a dispatch on a July socialist convention in Chicago and a column on class warfare in ancient Rome. Maass never had a doubt about the story’s integrity, either—he had known the correspondents for years, and Slonsky and Bradshaw had long been contributors. “There are so many amazing stories out there, and this is one of the most amazing out there,” Maass says, noting that his daily traffic spiked from roughly 12,500 hits to 20,000 after the bridge piece. Via links and blogs and whatnot, the piece was bouncing all over the Internet, including an appearance on alt-porn site suicidegirls.com.

But that was pretty much it. Almost in unison, newspaper editors across the country pooh-poohed the news value of cops’ firing toward black people on a bridge in the deep South. In the days following its publication in the Socialist Worker, the drama clambered onto the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle in addition to scoring a brief on UPI. The relative silence proved a maxim of print journalism: It’s painful to credit other journalists, and it’s really painful to credit a pair of part-time socialist journalists.

The New York Times, at least, had the smarts to realize that its readers weren’t surfing socialist chat rooms or grabbing their news from sfgate.com. On Sept. 10, Gardiner Harris produced an account that drew in part from the Socialist Worker’s scoop and in part from the author’s enterprise. Harris confirms that the story’s provenance gave it a radioactive glow in the office. “We were all hesitant,” he explains. “We all worry about things that bounce around the Internet. But because I heard this story directly from people in the region—I had been in Jefferson Parish; I had spoken to people who saw similar things—I wasn’t quite as worried as my editors.”

Jitters, however, kept the Times from elaborating on the racial dimension of the Socialist Worker story. “I thought it was very important, but we couldn’t confirm it.…It was an explosive enough allegation that we felt we couldn’t go with it unless we had it pinned down,” says Harris.

Even though the Times didn’t showcase the story—it landed on A13 of a Saturday edition—the paper ultimately put service to the reader ahead of journalistic pride. “I think the story was important enough that we don’t have to be first all the time,” says Harris. Slonsky says the Los Angeles Times almost made the same judgment but declined to run a piece. The Los Angeles Times refused to comment.

The Wall Street Journal passed on the bridge story, too. “When we decide we want to go along, we go along. We kill a lot of stories each day because we’re judicious about what we put in the paper,” says a Journal editor.

And what’s the Washington Post’s excuse? Those legions of news consumers who rely solely on the Post have no idea what happened to this group of evacuees. “We’re still looking at a lot of reporting targets,” says Liz Spayd, the Post’s top national editor. “We’re very focused on accountability both before Katrina landed and what happened afterward.”

Says ABC’s Donvan, “I was very surprised more people didn’t go for it.”

At some point, the Post and its competitors may have to interview the heroes of Socialist Worker. That’s because the tale is starting to make the rounds on cable TV, with CNN and MSNBC finding time to retell the bridge encounter. The trickle of coverage could trigger an official inquiry of some sort, forcing the big boys to finally write the juiciest story to date of Hurricane Katrina.

Until then, Slonsky will continue shaking her head about the mainstream media. “It feels like our story is just one of thousands upon thousands,” she says. “We just wish the thousands had the space or energy to share that. We wish the media would call for the impeachment of George Bush and call for health care and housing for everyone.”

[UniverseSeven]

Minister Nashim Nzinga on Hannity & Colmes 9/19 (VIDEO)

thepoliticalteen.net/2005/09/19/nashinnzinga/

[jonnygemini]

From Godlike PRoductions discussion board

Re: I believe all that weather modification crap is pure BS.

Yeah, it doesn´t exist so that´s why there is a UN resolution banning its use. It´s called S517. Look it up, moron.



UN-banned weapon system can trigger hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis
by PeaceFan • Saturday September 10, 2005 at 07:01 PM

The UN has banned it. It´s reported to be in the arsenal of several nations, including the U.S. It´s reported to be OPERATIONAL. What are we going to do about this weapon system? And did it play a role in creating Hurricane Katrina or in steering her along her murderous path?

+++++++++++++++++++

"The US Air Force has the capability of manipulating climate either for testing purposes or for outright military-intelligence use. These capabilities extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes." (excerpt from "Article 4" below)

+++++++++++++++++++

For almost two weeks, many have fumed, finger-pointed, and theorized about the purportedly "incompetent" or "slow" or "bungled" or "virtually nonexistent" government response to Hurricane Katrina. Sure, the response was all of that and much worse.

But a few are now daring to ask: did elements within the U.S. or other governments have a role in creating, "enhancing," or steering Katrina toward her Gulf Coast target, using advanced military technology? If so, was Katrina at least in part an act of mass murder and treason, perhaps by rogue elements within the Pentagon or its private contractors--or was it, possibly, a stealthy act of war against the U.S.?

The four articles below suggest these are reasonable questions and EXACTLY the questions we--and Congress--should be asking NOW.

Please read and draw your own conclusions. Then consider what steps we, the world´s humans, can take to get answers, unearth truth, demand accountability, end military madness, and salvage what´s left of our environment.

As you read, think about last winter´s tsunami, which destabilized a highly strategic region for hydrocarbon production and, especially, hydrocarbon shipping. Think about the 2001 FEMA report that identified the THREE "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country": a terror attack on New York, a major hurricane´s direct hit on New Orleans, and a major earthquake in Northern California. Is it two down, one to go?

And think about the eerie parallel with September 11, in which another little-publicized technology may have played a starring role: technology allowing ground-based, remote-control piloting of airliners, with no hijackers even necessary. (For info on this, do a search on "Global Hawk" or on "Flight Termination System," or read Mike Ruppert´s "Crossing the Rubicon" and/or Webster Tarpley´s "9-11 Synthetic Terror.")

(You might also check out the October 10, 2004 article "Space Age Plan to Tame Might of Hurricanes" at observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1323863,00.html)

+++++++++++++++++++

ARTICLE 1:

Excerpts from a September 4, 2005 article at American Free Press, titled "HARNESSING WEATHER: ALLEGATIONS SURFACE THAT U.S. & RUSSIA HAVE TECHNOLOGY TO MANAGE HURRICANES" (http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/harnessing_weather.html)

"Is weather manipulation a means of conducting war? If not, why in 1977 did the United States, the then-Soviet Union and dozens of other countries believe it was a good idea to enact a UN treaty banning weather manipulation as a means of conducting war?"

"According to a UN pamphlet, titled Basic Facts about the United Nations, which was published in 1994, the world body negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques in 1977. This ´prohibits the use of techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and cause such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves, and changes in climate and in weather patterns.´"

+++++++++++++++++++

ARTICLE 2:

Excerpts from the January/February 1997 issue of E/The Environmental Magazine, titled "Discordant HAARP: The Air Force is Preparing to Militarize the Ionosphere-With Electrifying Results" (http://www.emagazine.com/view/?8)

"In a black spruce forest north of Alaska´s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, a bristling array of antennas rises into the air. It looks like a cable television station, but it´s something far more ominous: the military´s semi-secret High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), designed to give the Pentagon strategic control over the upper atmosphere.

HAARP, slated for final completion in 2002, sends out a focused and steerable electromagnetic (EM) beam that can superheat and actually lift sections of the ionosphere--the electrically charged upper layer of our atmosphere lying 40 to 500 miles above the Earth´s surface. The EM waves are targeted to bounce back to Earth from "virtual" mirrors and lenses, created by warming specific areas of the ionosphere until they produce a flat or curved shape, capable of strategically redirecting significant amounts of electromagnetic energy."

+++++++++++++++++++

ARTICLE 3 [also reproduced below in full]:

Excerpts from the January 4, 2002 article from the Centre for Research on Globalization, titled "Washington´s New World Order Weapons Have the Ability to Trigger Climate Change"
(http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20020104&articleId=205)

[Note that numbers in parentheses below refer to footnotes reproduced at the end of this posting I have not verified whether or not URLs provided in the footnotes are still working.]

"Marc Filterman, a former French military officer, outlines several types of "unconventional weapons" using radio frequencies. He refers to "weather war," indicating that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had already "mastered the know-how needed to unleash sudden climate changes (hurricanes, drought) in the early 1980s."(3) These technologies make it "possible to trigger atmospheric disturbances by using Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radar [waves]." (4)

A simulation study of future defense "scenarios" commissioned for the US Air Force calls for:

"US aerospace forces to ´own the weather´ by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications... From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary... In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels.(5)"

+++++++++++++++++++

ARTICLE 4:

Excerpts from a September 27, 2004 article from the Centre for Research on Globalization, titled "The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: "Owning the Weather" for Military Use" (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20040927&articleId=319)

"The US Air Force has the capability of manipulating climate either for testing purposes or for outright military-intelligence use. These capabilities extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes. In recent years, large amounts of money have been allocated by the US Department of Defense to further developing and perfecting these capabilities."

[The article then provides this quote from the above-referenced study commissioned for the US Air Force:] "Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally... It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog, and storms on earth or to modify space weather, ... and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of technologies which can provide substantial increase in US, or degraded capability in an adversary, to achieve global awareness, reach, and power."

+++++++++++++++++++

(The following is the full text of "Article 3" above.)


"Washington´s New World Order Weapons Have the Ability to Trigger Climate Change"

by Michel Chossudovsky
January 4, 2002

The important debate on global warming under UN auspices provides but a partial picture of climate change; in addition to the devastating impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the ozone layer, the World´s climate can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated "non-lethal weapons." Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World´s climate.

In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) as part of the ("Star Wars") Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction. Potentially, it constitutes an instrument of conquest capable of selectively destabilising agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions.

While there is no evidence that this deadly technology has been used, surely the United Nations should be addressing the issue of "environmental warfare" alongside the debate on the climatic impacts of greenhouse gases...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use has never been explicitly part of the UN agenda on climate change. Neither the official delegations nor the environmental action groups participating in the Hague Conference on Climate Change (CO6) (November 2000) have raised the broad issue of "weather warfare" or "environmental modification techniques (ENMOD)" as relevant to an understanding of climate change.

The clash between official negotiators, environmentalists and American business lobbies has centered on Washington´s outright refusal to abide by commitments on carbon dioxide reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto protocol.(1) The impacts of military technologies on the World´s climate are not an object of discussion or concern. Narrowly confined to greenhouse gases, the ongoing debate on climate change serves Washington´s strategic and defense objectives.

"WEATHER WARFARE"

World renowned scientist Dr. Rosalie Bertell confirms that "US military scientists ... are working on weather systems as a potential weapon. The methods include the enhancing of storms and the diverting of vapor rivers in the Earth´s atmosphere to produce targeted droughts or floods." (2) Already in the 1970s, former National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had foreseen in his book "Between Two Ages" that:

"Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised... [T]echniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm."

Marc Filterman, a former French military officer, outlines several types of "unconventional weapons" using radio frequencies. He refers to "weather war," indicating that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had already "mastered the know-how needed to unleash sudden climate changes (hurricanes, drought) in the early 1980s."(3) These technologies make it "possible to trigger atmospheric disturbances by using Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radar [waves]." (4)

A simulation study of future defense "scenarios" commissioned for the US Air Force calls for:

"US aerospace forces to ´own the weather´ by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications... From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary... In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels.(5)

HIGH-FREQUENCY ACTIVE AURORAL RESEARCH PROGRAM (HAARP)

The High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) based in Gokoma Alaska --jointly managed by the US Air Force and the US Navy-- is part of a new generation of sophisticated weaponry under the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory´s Space Vehicles Directorate, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating "controlled local modifications of the ionosphere". Scientist Dr. Nicholas Begich --actively involved in the public campaign against HAARP-- describes HAARP as:

"A super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere [upper layer of the atmosphere] by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything -- living and dead." (6)

Dr. Rosalie Bertell depicts HAARP as "a gigantic heater that can cause major disruption in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet." 7

MISLEADING PUBLIC OPINION

HAARP has been presented to public opinion as a program of scientific and academic research. US military documents seem to suggest, however, that HAARP´s main objective is to "exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes." (8) Without explicitly referring to the HAARP program, a US Air Force study points to the use of "induced ionospheric modifications" as a means of altering weather patterns as well as disrupting enemy communications and radar.9

According to Dr. Rosalie Bertell, HAARP is part of a integrated weapons´ system, which has potentially devastating environmental consequences:

"It is related to fifty years of intensive and increasingly destructive programs to understand and control the upper atmosphere. It would be rash not to associate HAARP with the space laboratory construction which is separately being planned by the United States. HAARP is an integral part of a long history of space research and development of a deliberate military nature. The military implications of combining these projects is alarming. ... The ability of the HAARP / Spacelab/ rocket combination to deliver very large amount of energy, comparable to a nuclear bomb, anywhere on earth via laser and particle beams, are frightening. The project is likely to be "sold" to the public as a space shield against incoming weapons, or, for the more gullible, a device for repairing the ozone layer. (10)

In addition to weather manipulation, HAARP has a number of related uses:

"HAARP could contribute to climate change by intensively bombarding the atmosphere with high-frequency rays... Returning low-frequency waves at high intensity could also affect people´s brains, and effects on tectonic movements cannot be ruled out. (11)

More generally, HAARP has the ability of modifying the World´s electro-magnetic field. It is part of an arsenal of "electronic weapons" which US military researchers consider a "gentler and kinder warfare". (12)

WEAPONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER

HAARP is part of the weapons arsenal of the New World Order under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). From military command points in the US, entire national economies could potentially be destabilized through climatic manipulations. More importantly, the latter can be implemented without the knowledge of the enemy, at minimal cost and without engaging military personnel and equipment as in a conventional war.

The use of HAARP -- if it were to be applied -- could have potentially devastating impacts on the World´s climate. Responding to US economic and strategic interests, it could be used to selectively modify climate in different parts of the World resulting in the destabilization of agricultural and ecological systems.

It is also worth noting that the US Department of Defense has allocated substantial resources to the development of intelligence and monitoring systems on weather changes. NASA and the Department of Defense´s National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) are working on "imagery for studies of flooding, erosion, land-slide hazards, earthquakes, ecological zones, weather forecasts, and climate change" with data relayed from satellites. (13)

POLICY INERTIA OF THE UNITED NATIONS

According to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro:

"States have... in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the (...) responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction." (14)

It is also worth recalling that an international Convention ratified by the UN General Assembly in 1997 bans "military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects." (15) Both the US and the Soviet Union were signatories to the Convention. The Convention defines "´environmental modification techniques´ as referring to any technique for changing--through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes--the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere or of outer space." (16)

Why then did the UN --disregarding the 1977 ENMOD Convention as well as its own charter-- decide to exclude from its agenda climatic changes resulting from military programs?

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ACKNOWLEDGES IMPACTS OF HAARP

In February 1998, responding to a report of Mrs. Maj Britt Theorin --Swedish MEP and longtime peace advocate--, the European Parliament´s Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy held public hearings in Brussels on the HAARP program.(17) The Committee´s "Motion for Resolution" submitted to the European Parliament:

"Considers HAARP... by virtue of its far-reaching impact on the environment to be a global concern and calls for its legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body...; [the Committee] regrets the repeated refusal of the United States Administration... to give evidence to the public hearing ...into the environmental and public risks [of] the HAARP program." (18).

The Committee´s request to draw up a "Green Paper" on "the environmental impacts of military activities", however, was casually dismissed on the grounds that the European Commission lacks the required jurisdiction to delve into "the links between environment and defense". (19) Brussels was anxious to avoid a showdown with Washington.

FULLY OPERATIONAL

While there is no concrete evidence of HAARP having been used, scientific findings suggest that it is at present fully operational. What this means is that HAARP could potentially be applied by the US military to selectively modify the climate of an "unfriendly nation" or "rogue state" with a view to destabilizing its national economy.

Agricultural systems in both developed and developing countries are already in crisis as a result of New World Order policies including market deregulation, commodity dumping, etc. Amply documented, IMF and World Bank "economic medicine" imposed on the Third World and the countries of the former Soviet block has largely contributed to the destabilization of domestic agriculture. In turn, the provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have supported the interests of a handful of Western agri-biotech conglomerates in their quest to impose genetically modified (GMO) seeds on farmers throughout the World.

It is important to understand the linkage between the economic, strategic and military processes of the New World Order. In the above context, climatic manipulations under the HAARP program (whether accidental or deliberate) would inevitably exacerbate these changes by weakening national economies, destroying infrastructure and potentially triggering the bankruptcy of farmers over vast areas. Surely national governments and the United Nations should address the possible consequences of HAARP and other "non-lethal weapons" on climate change.


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NOTES

1. The latter calls for nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent to become effective between 2008 and 2012. See Background of Kyoto Protocol at www.globalwarming.net/gw11.html .

2. The Times, London, 23 November 2000.

3. Intelligence Newsletter, December 16, 1999.

4. Ibid.

5. Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report, www.au.af.mil/au/2025/ (emphasis added).

6. Nicholas Begich and Jeane Manning, The Military´s Pandora´s Box, Earthpulse Press, www.xyz.net/~nohaarp/earthlight.html . See also the HAARP home page at www.haarp.alaska.edu/

7. See Briarpatch, January, 2000. (emphasis added).

8. Quoted in Begich and Manning, op cit.

9. Air University, op cit.

10. Rosalie Bertell, Background of the HAARP Program, 5 November, 1996, www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/envronmt/weapons.htm

11. Begich and Manning, op cit.

12. Don Herskovitz, Killing Them Softly, Journal of Electronic Defense, August 1993. (emphasis added). According to Herskovitz, "electronic warfare" is defined by the US Department of Defense as "military action involving the use of electromagnetic energy..." The Journal of Electronic Defense at www.jedefense.com/ has published a range of articles on the application of electronic and electromagnetic military technologies.

13. Military Space, 6 December, 1999.

14. UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, New York, 1992. See complete text at
www.unfccc.de/resource/conv/conv_002.html , (emphasis added).

15. See Associated Press, 18 May 1977.

16. Environmental Modification Ban Faithfully Observed, States Parties Declare, UN Chronicle, July, 1984, Vol. 21, p. 27.

17. European Report, 7 February 1998.

18. European Parliament, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy, Brussels, doc. no. A4-0005/99, 14 January 1999.

19. EU Lacks Jurisdiction to Trace Links Between Environment and Defense, European Report, 3 February 1999.

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[jonnygemini]

rigourous institution:

It doesn't take a weatherman



to know which way the wind blows.

See those red fingers on the left of the radar? Now whose might those be?

A seeming grid-pattern of five heat signatures appear out of nothing to the west of Hurricane Rita, intensify and hold their positions, and then fade to nothing. Their appearance coincided with the storm's unexpected turn away from Houston to track north before making landfall.

This is Kent Steadman's capture:



The complete radar may be viewed here. Not that a viewing alone can tell us what we're seeing. But the question - What are we seeing? - is being asked on a number of sites and forums today, including Steadman's CyberspaceOrbit, GLP, psiwars.net and the RI discussion board.

From one comment on CyberspaceOrbit:

kent, whatever those 5 spots are, they definitely are not an artifact and they are the cause of rita turning north a few miles ahead of schedule. they seem to be directed from corpus christi. my presumption is that they are ships. we have high powered microwave weapons , ship mounted, in the 90-110 GHZ range which overlaps the radar freq. used in the animation. i worked on the first ones in 1983. contract was NSG through DOD. they heat a thin surface layer of any watery target (like raindrops-though that wasnt the original intent) they are aiming UP toward top of rita. you found a definite "something"

Nearly a year ago I asked, "If the United States military is determined to 'own the weather,' what would the test of an environmental weapons system look like?" I suppose it might look something like this. But I'm not a weatherman, and despite what the song says, maybe in such an instance it would be beneficial to be one. Because to me this appears to be anomalous and artificial, but that's all I can talk about with confidence - the impression it leaves with me - and that's neither satisfying to me nor helpful to you. I can't presume to know without being a better student of extreme weather and meteorological radar. But I'm not going to become one this afternoon, and damn it, this does look strange.