1953: The C.I.A. in Iran (New York Times)
This is old news, but I think it provides some helpful perspective when contemplating the events unfolding in Syria and Iran. In a nutshell, we got together with Britain and overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the elected prime minister of Iran, in order to replace him with leaders that would protect British/US oil profits from the Mossadegh's plan to nationalize Iran's oil industry. So, 50 years later, what's really going on now in the Middle East?

Diebold's Shocking War Against Black Box Voting.com (rense.com)
Diebold is playing hardball now... and their actions incrimate them even further. All "Black Box Voting" files have been confiscated, as well as files having nothing to do with Diebold. Bev Harris had her website taken down and her files confiscated under the DMCA, claiming that they hold a copyright on the Diebold memos admitting that their voting system is insecure and that perception of sercurity was all that mattered. So far Diebold has not proven thier copyright yet. This is a blatent move by Diebold to try to suppress the negative publicity that Harris is generating for their interestes. Get the word out.
UPDATE: It looks like Bev has gained access to the files and has since been permitted to download a copy of them.
UPDATE: Kudos to Bev Harris, who has decided to release her book on the Internet as a .PDF file available for free download. Chapters will be posted to the black box voting website starting Oct. 1.

Bush Administration Is Focus of Inquiry (washingtonpost.com)
CIA Director, George Tenet is pissed that someone in the Bush administration (Karl Rove?) purposefully leaked to journalists the identity of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, an undercover CIA agent. Wilson and his wife were victims of revenge for coming forward and revealing that the administration's Niger / yellowcake claims were based on fraudulent evidence.

Covertly recruiting kids (sunspot.net)
Bush's sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind Act, quietly snuck in provisions for forcing schools to turn over a list of students' names and phone numbers to military recruiters. The Bush administration claims it wants to leave no child behind. This stealth recruiter law makes clear what they really had in mind.

Dutch tapping room not kosher (c't)
"According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel." Verint, formerly known as Comverse-Infosys, the Israeli company involved in this story, has been under FBI investigation on suspicion of espionage for quite a while now. This is the same company that has provided our government with some of their tapping equipment... The strangest part is the amazing media blackout on the subject. Mass media seem to be going out of our way to protect the public from learning of any Israeli spy stories. Why?

New (temp?) location for blackboxvoting.org
talion.com is hosting what looks to be a mirror of current portions of blackboxvoting.org. Worth reading, there are a few bombshells today about the heavily redacted SAIC report (Scientific Applications International Corporation).

Diebold takes down blackboxvoting.org (The Inquirer)
"Diebold Election Systems has brandished lawyers' threats to take down that pesky citizens activist website blackboxvoting.org." Its too late though, as the cat has long since been out of the bag. It should be noted that the reason it was taken down surrounds copyright infringement claims for reposting portions of internal diebold communications admitting that the technology is insecure and that the perception of security is all that really matters.

Story died long time ago: "German Firm probes Final WTC Deals" (Global Free Press)
Remember those computer drives recovered from the wreckage of the WTC? Well, it seems that the company in Germany that was starting to recover the data from those disks to find out WHO had initiated millions of dollars of transfers from a major credit card company, supposedly in the knowledge that the record of the transactions was about to be destroyed forever, was purchased by a Pentagon contractor... and stopped the recovery.

Diebold insiders are dumping shares (Yahoo)

Microsoft chosen as exclusive Homeland Security contractor (Government Executive Magazine)
"The Homeland Security Department has chosen Microsoft Corp. as its preferred supplier of desktop computer and server software, according to a statement issued late Tuesday... The department has purchased a license for about 140,000 desktop computers and is consolidating other Microsoft agreements held by Homeland Security agencies into the five-year contract. The deal is worth $90 million. Homeland Security employees’ computers now will be outfitted with Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, as well as the Microsoft Office Professional version of software products... "

Israel Reels at Pilots' Refusal to Go on Missions (Wired)
"Israel sharply criticized and grounded on Thursday a group of air force pilots who refused to carry out missions against Palestinian militants in which civilians could be killed." "Everyone has the right to voice their opinion, but it is unacceptable that a group of military men interfere in such a issue, an issue decided on by the political echelon after great deliberation," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Israel TV."

Israeli pilots refuse to fly assassination missions (Guardian Unlimited)
"A group of Israeli airforce pilots declared yesterday that they would refuse to fly missions which could endanger civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip." "We, veteran pilots and active pilots alike...are opposed to carrying out illegal and immoral attacks, of the type carried out by Israel in the territories. We, who have been educated to love the state of Israel refuse to take part in airforce attacks in civilian population centres. We refuse to continue harming innocent civilians."

Charter System for Skagit County! (SkagitCharter / Home Rule Committee)
Vote YES November 4 to support the charter system of government in Skagit County!
"Skagit County has passed the threshold of 100,000 residents, yet continues to entrust its affairs to the hands of three commissioners (who, for the record, represent all of Skagit County, not just people living in more rural areas.) More precisely, the county is run by just two commissioners forming a majority. Or in some cases, it can be just one person pushing the other two into submission. Further, the three commissioners function as both the legislative branch making the rules and the executive branch operating the office. There are no checks and balances."

The Memory Hole > 9/11 main page
The Memory Hole tracks deleted or modified news articles... This is their collection of changes relating to 9/11.

Thoughts from Within (Woody Harrelson)
Wow. A very powerful and inspirational poem by Woody Harrelson. Some surprisingly honest perspectives... Requires a Flash player.

New terror laws used vs. common criminals (salon.com)
The Patriot act is being abused (surprise) again. Federal prosecutors used the act in June to file a charge of "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction" against a California man after a pipe bomb exploded in his lap, wounding him as he sat in his car. A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months. "Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens." "I don't think that those are frivolous fears," Lynch said. "We've already heard stories of local police chiefs creating files on people who have protested the (Iraq) war ... The government is constantly trying to expand its jurisdictions, and it needs to be watched very, very closely."

The New World Order elite has big plans for Arnold (Alex Jones / Infowars.com)
"While filming the documentary Pumping Iron, Arnold told reporters he admired Adolf Hitler and other dictators."
Alex Jones accuses Arnold Schwarzenegger of links to Warren Buffett, Lord Jacob Rothschild, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, nazi war criminals, Bohemian Grove, and the rest of the New World Order. Proceed with skepticism and more aluminum foil. I know this is out in deep left field, but its still a very interesting read. Some of you may recognize Alex Jones from The Waking Life as the guy driving around in the car with the bullhorns going off about humanity...

Gary Webb's allegations of CIA involvement in San Jose's crack problem (salon.com)
Old news, but news to me: "Why did top editors at the San Jose Mercury News sign off on a wildly controversial series of articles -- then denounce them as hopelessly flawed? And why is reporter Gary Webb still on the story? ... Gary Webb doesn't feel chastened and isn't apologizing. He says his story is accurate. If readers leap to the conclusion that the CIA was responsible for the crack epidemic, that's because, in his view, the agency WAS responsible. 'We certainly didn't pussyfoot around on that issue,' he says. 'You can divert people from the issue, but somebody brought coke into this country and sold it in furtherance of U.S. foreign policy ... I've got two years of research that shows I'm right.'"

David Sadler For Congress (david-sadler.org)
This fellow maintains an interesting collection of controversial stories. So far he looks good on corporate media brainwashing vs independant media, war, israel, the patriot act, judicial corruption, military spending, and homeland security. Too bad his long list will probably earn him a lot of opposition, probably enought to prevent him from ever holding any position of significant power.

America's Chaotic Road to War (Dan Balz and Bob Woodward / Washington Post)
Did United Flight 93 crash as a result of passenger revolt or was it shot down on Cheney's order? And if it really was shot down, this would seem to disprove claims that our military stood down. So now the question is, if our government ISN'T criminally negligent as so many claim, does this not prove they are liars? Or does that fall within fair bounds of white-washing?
"The Vice President in the Bunker: 'Should We Engage?' 'Yes.': Once airborne, Bush spoke again to Cheney, who said the combat air patrol needed rules of engagement if pilots encountered an aircraft that might be under the control of hijackers. Cheney recommended that Bush authorize the military to shoot down any such civilian airliners-as momentous a decision as the president was asked to make in those first hours. 'I said, 'You bet,'' Bush recalled. 'We had a little discussion, but not much.' Louisiana Detour: Advised not to return to Washington, Bush confers with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. on Air Force One. (By Eric Draper - The White House) Bush then talked to Rumsfeld to clarify the procedures military pilots should follow in trying to force an unresponsive plane to the ground before opening fire on it. First, pilots would seek to make radio contact with the other plane and tell the pilot to land at a specific location. If that failed, the pilots were to use visual signals. These included having the fighters fly in front of the other plane. If the plane continued heading toward what was seen as a significant target with apparently hostile intent, the U.S. pilot would have the authority to shoot it down. With Bush's approval, Rumsfeld passed the order down the chain of command. In the White House bunker, a military aide approached the vice president. 'There is a plane 80 miles out,' he said. 'There is a fighter in the area. Should we engage?' 'Yes,' Cheney replied without hesitation. Around the vice president, Rice, deputy White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, tensed as the military aide repeated the question, this time with even more urgency. The plane was now 60 miles out. "Should we engage?" Cheney was asked. "Yes," he replied again. As the plane came closer, the aide repeated the question. Does the order still stand? "Of course it does," Cheney snapped. The vice president said later that it had seemed "painful, but nonetheless clear-cut. And I didn't agonize over it." It was, "obviously, a very significant action," Cheney said in an interview. "You're asking American pilots to fire on a commercial airliner full of civilians. On the other hand, you had directly in front of me what had happened to the World Trade Center, and a clear understanding that once the plane was hijacked, it was a weapon. Within minutes, there was a report that a plane had crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania-what turned out to be United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 that had been hijacked after leaving Newark International Airport. Many of those in the PEOC feared that Cheney's order had brought down a civilian aircraft. Rice demanded that someone check with the Pentagon. On Air Force One, Bush inquired, "Did we shoot it down or did it crash?" It took the Pentagon almost two hours to confirm that the plane had not been shot down, an enormous relief. "I think an act of heroism occurred on board that plane," Cheney said. Later, reports of cell phone conversations before the plane crashed indicated that some passengers had fought with the hijackers."

Israel: Licensed To Kill (BBC / Information Clearing House)
"Mohammed Al-Dura, a 12-year-old Palestinian, was killed by Israeli soldiers while he and his father begged for their lives. The father was seriously injured with five bullet wounds but managed to survive. A taxi driver had tried to save them but was also killed by Israeli soldiers. This is the kind of aggression and inhuman brutality on the part of Israeli soldiers that prompted the Second, or Al-Aqsa, intifadah." Our tax dollars hard at work for Israel... Requires RealPlayer.

Stuck in a terrible fiscal state (The Sydney Morning Herald)
A refreshing Austrailian perspective of the financial crisis at the state level, poor choices in taxation and spending policies and their impact on American society. "dismissing state troopers, closing parks and schools, dropping bus routes, eliminating college scholarships and slashing a host of other services that have long been taken for granted"

This is really a war on dissenters (www.theage.com.au)
The war on terrorism and its swiss army knife of government uses certainly seems to be key to many not-so-great changes, previously unattainable...

Diebold Demands Removal of Memos (BlackBoxVoting.org)
Diebold demands removal of memos from blackboxvoting website siting copyright reasons. (Scroll down to "Diebold Demands Removal of Memos") This is significant because this proves the memos are authentic. The same memos that show they've been using different software in elections than the versions submitted to the state and national certifiers, show they know their central count system is easy to tamper with, show they've made fraudlent claims in t heir Georgia R.F.P. sales documents and, shown that they fake their system integrity report. Diebold is desperately trying to put the cat back in the bag...

Democrats Question Cheney's Halliburton Payments (Reuters)
Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of Halliburton Co., has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company since taking office while asserting he has no financial interest in the company, Senate Democrats said on Tuesday. The Democrats demanded to know why Cheney claimed to have cut ties with the oil services company, involved in a large no-bid contract for oil reconstruction work in Iraq, when he was still receiving large deferred salary payments. "The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles the claim that he has 'no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind,' with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he receives from Halliburton," Daschle said in a statement.

Fire Rumsfeld and Change Course (Move On)
Another moveon.org petition... This one's to fire Devense Secretary, Rumsfeld.

TIN FOIL HAT: Did a Secret Military Experiment Cause the 2003 Blackout? (Anonymous / Totse.com)

On August 14, 2003, just a few minutes after the stock market closed for the day, a nine-minute 'event' had brought the entire Northeastern power grid down. It is believed that over fifty million people lost power that afternoon. Since this unprecedented event, blame games have flown back and forth, but no real answers have been provided. It is believed that the event originated in an area in the power grid where there is a bottleneck of power transmission between the eastern U.S. and the Midwest. But what has caused this mess? Outdated equipment, irresponsible power companies, and politicians have all been blamed without any solid evidence to support the accusations. What hasn't been suggested is the possibility that this was a secret government test that served the purpose of fulfilling requirements for sophisticated warfare and security response mechanisms.
Here are the facts. The power grid that was affected was the northeast grid. Not the vulnerable California grid, or the southeastern grid that Washington DC relies upon, and not that strangely isolated Texas oil grid. It was the grid that the northeast U.S. and southeast Canada rely on. A region that a large-scale outage would not have a really devastating effect on the economy or military control centers. The event conveniently began a few minutes after the closing bell on Wall Street as to not effect the days trading, but while power usage in the northeast on that hot day was still at peak. The event began in a bottleneck region where only a few percent increase in power flow could cause such a critical failure of the entire grid. The physical cause of the event such as the classic squirrel shorting out a transformer, has not been found; there were no indications of any lightning being present; nor was there any significant solar activity to cause an unexpected surge in the grid. Finally, the HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project) was turned on just after 4:00 PM EST on that fateful day.
The question is 'Could a secret HAARP experiment have caused the blackout?'
Interesting ionospheric effects occurred on 8/14/2003 that would have made the conditions for such a secret military test ideal, including a widespread, highly reflective ionospheric layer being expected (and was likely created by the electron event seen in figure 1), which would allow ideal conditions for signal propagation over long distances. Unfortunately, the ionosonde data that would help show where the effects of HAARP were directed by providing a picture of the ionosphere was not posted on the day of the blackout. The Gakona Ionosonde data is frequently not posted when classified HAARP experiments take place. What we do know is that HAARP was turned on at or just after 4:00 pm EST; it would take a few minutes for the target area to respond (say around 4:05 pm) which would allow a nine-minute event to knock the power out at 4:14 pm EST.
HAARP, Ionospheric Warfare, and Potential Applications
Those of us who work in ionospheric research, and who are concerned with environment risks associated with ionospheric warfare are familiar with HAARP. The basic concept that HAARP relies upon is based on work by N. Tesla when he was attempting to devise a method for the wireless transmission of electrical power, and subsequently picked up in the early twentieth century for the purpose of finding a way to modify the weather. It is thought that this technology was used by world leaders such as Stalin, whom during important outdoor events may have used such technology to prevent unwanted rain or fog. These claims were often associated with widespread reports of people feeling mysteriously ill. One of the leading researchers in this field is Dr. Bernard Eastlund, whom to this day accepts money from organizations such the European Space Agency to research potential weather modification applications including the possibility of stopping tornadoes with this type of technology.
(Chart Omitted) Satellite environment shows that an enhanced flux of high energy electrons which would create preferable reflection conditions for HAARP were present at the time of the event, and geomagnetic activity that could cause problems with the power-grid were non-existent.
HAARP is a phased-array ionospheric heater that is capable of focusing large quantities of electromagnetic energy into very localized regions that are very far away from the source. It is entirely possible that the HAARP heaters were directed at the power grid's bottleneck while the grid was operating near peak capacity. The sudden presence of electromagnetic energy could easily force an unexpected increase in the power flow which could in-turn cause a critical failure such as the one seen on august 14, 2003.
Despite the claims of HAARP advocates, ionospheric heaters can use the ionosphere to reflect their energy at distances several thousand miles away by using the ionosphere as a 'mirror' much the same way as AM radio signals travel over vast distances. Unlike an AM radio, HAARP can use phase interference to focus its energy on a localized area (such as the weak point on the power grid). The only requirement to achieve geographic precision is that geomagnetic activity is minimal such as it was on the day of the blackout. Also, there was a short duration test about 20 minutes before the hour. Such a test would serve the purpose of showing the researchers exactly where the beam would focus itself given the current conditions, and would be a necessary step before executing such an experiment.
So why would the government do this to us? Well, first of all, HAARP is sponsored primarily by the Air Force Weather Agency and 'other agencies', and is known to be an ionospheric warfare tool. This would be an ideal way to test possible military applications of the instrument. It would be of great military value if we could cause an entire region to lose electricity almost instantly without dropping a single bomb. Of course, this would need to be tested in a controlled environment where the effects could be thoroughly analyzed (such as on our own soil). It would be done in an area that could most easily handle such a large-scale power outage (such as the northeast US). Also, being in a new age of terrorism, this was an excellent homeland security response test. By having a blackout that covered one quarter of the county we can now see how people would respond, what the strengths and weaknesses of our emergency response systems are, and how quickly we could restore our systems to operating capacity. If this were a military experiment it would certainly have served multiple purposes. I also believe it would have been a strong temptation for anyone with the power to conduct such an experiment to do so.
Conspiracy Theories and Reality
The blame games that have gone on since the blackout have no hard evidence to back them up. Although it may sound like an episode of the X-files, the facts are clear; HAARP is an ionospheric warfare tool, it is capable of focusing it's electromagnetic energy at long distances, it was turned on right at the time the event began, and such a scenario would serve multiple national security interests simultaneously with minimal economic impact. So we must ask ourselves, is considering HAARP as a potential source of the blackout a ridiculous conspiracy theory, or is it the most reasonable explanation given the facts?
I am a concerned ionospheric physicist whom has worked with HAARP. I am concerned with the unknown environmental and military implications of this device, and the potential abuses thereof. I am not a conspiracy nut, and I do believe that HAARP is a useful tool that needs to be put into responsible hands where it is not abused and where the public has full access to it's experimental capabilities and data. It is an instrument that is paid for by taxpayer's dollars and is currently not in the hands of people who have earned or deserve our confidence and trust.
(Chart Omitted)The waterfall chart indicates HAARP was turned on just after 4:00 pm EST on 8/14/2003. The chart shows that frequencies of 5, 10, 15, and 29 Megahertz are present for nearly an hour. The 5 MHz broadcast frequency is the strongest, and the others are likely to be resulting harmonics So what really happened on August 14? I'm really not sure, but we must ask ourselves what the most likely scenario's are without ruling out any possibilities; even those that sound like they have no place other than the sci-fi channel. "The Truth is out There", so I leave it for you to decide.
Anonymous
Regretfully, because I am a research scientist, and because I face the possibility of certain repercussions in my field of work for revealing this information to the public, I cannot reveal my true identity. I believe the facts I have presented herein are sufficient to speak for themselves and should convince the public that oversight is needed when experimenting with aspects of the atmosphere that are not well known.
The data that is presented was accessed from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration website at http://www.sec.noaa.gov, and from the HAARP homepage at http://www.haarp.alaska.edu

(A response from a Mr. Livingstone)
Dear Concerned Ionospheric Physicist
By Zuerrnnovahh-Starr Livingstone
http://educate-yourself.org/zsl/dearionosphericphysicist07sep03.shtml
Sept. 7, 2003
Re: Did a Secret Military Experiment Cause the 2003 Blackout?
Dear Concerned Ionospheric Physicist,
Thank you for the research you did regarding HAARP. There are reasons for concern. The use of phased-array broadcasts as ionospheric heaters against people and property is a crime and your letter shows how incensed you are. I do not know if a billion watts at 5 megahertz will induce an electromagnetic pulse in electrical transmission lines. I have a difficult time believing that HAARP could generate a 800 megawatt current reversal as that would mean 80% efficency of conversion of EM pulse into A/C electricity...a technical miracle of the highest order. I suspect 5 mHz would heat metals including the transformers and power lines increasing electrical resistance and decreasing current loads. In such situations circuit breakers would trip in a well understood way. This type of shutdown was not reported.
There are indications that anomalous events happened at many locations of the New York/Ohio/Ontario electrical grid. This means that HAARP had to be re-targeted many times in a period of a few minutes in order to shut down the transmission system and the generators. Phased-array radars are very flexible systems as proven by the Aegis Class of Missile Destroyers which use such solid state systems. Is phased-array HAARP just as flexible? The fly in the ointment on this argument is the ionosphere itself. You wrote that a weaker acquisition signal was broadcast minutes before the outage to test the "firmness" of the ionosphere. Once it was determined that the signal was going where it was intended then someone hit the "maximum-fry-switch". The complexity of sending a high energy signal from Alaska to Ohio and targeting a nexus of powerlines is mind boggling. The signal would bounce from the ground to the ionosphere three to six times depending on the initial angle of broadcast. The ionosphere is not a perfect mirror, neither is the ground. It would be amazing if one/one hundredth of the signal reached Ohio. HAARP has proven that it can heat clouds because pilots can accurately lay chemtrails but a laser-like targeting of a small part of Ohio less than a square mile in area would be another technical miracle. It would be easier to aim masers at the powerlines from a mile away.
As you have written, HAARP has proven itself, especially this year in preventing tornados. There have been few tornados in the places that normally get them.
There are three components to the creation of a tornado: A cold wet low pressure cyclonic system; a hot high pressure front; and the jet stream. When all three come together a tornado results. HAARP has been steering the jet stream remarkably well. Chemtrail spraying of 5 micron aluminum particles at 15 to 20,000 feet below a jet stream (33,000 feet) and then zapping the cloud with HAARP causes an updraft which can push the jet stream in desired directions. Also by steering the jet stream, weather fronts can be moved. The computer programs regarding HAARP and tornados must be accurate and detailed. As an ionospheric physicist you must be proud of this achievement...but at what cost?
Virtually unreported during this success over tornados, the west coast of Canada has seen no rain since May. 2002 was a horrible year for forest fires in Montana. 2003 has been the worst year for forest fires in British Columbia. British Columbia is where the effort to steer the jet streams starts. BC has had over 2000 fires this year. At this moment there are over 700 still burning. The town of Louis Creek has been totally destroyed. The nearby town of Barriere lost 80 homes. 15,000 were evacuated for two weeks. At the end of August Kelowna a town of 100,000 had one/third of its citizens evacuated. Over 250 homes were destroyed. These fires are not measured in acres but in square kilometers. The Kelowna fire is over 200 square kilometers and still burning. Cranbrook faced a major fire. Chase, Kamloops, Williams Lake, Oliver, and many more towns are threatened and are still threatened. I am not blaming HAARP for the lack of rain as weather is a complex subject but someone high up in the command structure of HAARP thinks that BC's problems are caused by HAARP! How do I determined this?
Among other reasons, THERE HAS BEEN NO REPORTAGE OF THIS IN THE US MEDIA! NADA!
It has been reported in Europe and Asia but not in America. Odd? Pecular? Fodder for conspiracy theories? YES! Some people who are bouncing billions of watts of power off the ionosphere do not want Americans to know about a problem north of the border.
If a chunk of Antarctic ice the size of Rhode Island or Delaware has set sail for Argentina and the whole world knows. Sections of BC forest covering an area about the size of Los Angeles Basin have burnt and it is not reported? Very Strange! You may believe that stopping tornados is a marvelous achievement, I do not think it is. Especially when there are hundred foot walls of flame destroying houses. HAARP may have prevented $100 million of tornado damage in the midwest this year but the damage to BC is over $2 billion and counting. HAARP is an abomination.
Continue this messing with the weather and you may lose Oregon or Washington to one massive forest fire. The loss of Seattle could be counted in the tens of trillions of dollars.
What do you know about the mind control aspect of HAARP? What about chemtrails? Chemtrails are a big part of HAARP weather control.
You wrote that the ionosphere is an unsteady mirror for HAARP radiation...what is the radiation doing to the ionosphere? Are we going to suffer more holes in the ozone because of certain frequencies and their harmonic overtones? New Yorkers should sue HAARP, they had a miserable summer.
Zuerrnnovahh-Starr Livingstone.

(A response by the anonymous scientist to Mr. Livingstone's article:)
I wrote the letter posted on your website. I am trying to spread awareness of HAARP because as an ionospheric physicist who has worked with the instrument I believe the atmospheric sciences community needs unrestricted access to this instrument and I am trying to convince the public of this. I have read the critique of Zuerrnnavahh-Starr Livingstone and wanted to address his comments. Basically, if you have someone who is not a physicist attempt to debunk physics given by a real physicist, you will have problems. He is off base on nearly every point he has made and I would appreciate if you would forward this to him.
-First of all, HAARP doesn't operate at exactly 1GW, but can operate well over that capacity. Given the strength of the return from 8/14/03 I would guess it was operating at close to 2GW. Also, yes, HAARP can easily focus its energy with efficiency exceeding 50%. This would easily give the power needed to cause the event referred to. Also, the energy would not just be absorbed by everything in the area being heated. Rather the energy would in fact be almost entirely absorbed by the transmission line. This is because the power line would serve as an antennae to absorb the radiation as it has a wavelength greater than 1/4 the wavelength of the incident radiation generated by HAARP. This effect is much like what happens if you put a fork in a microwave... The fork acts as an antennae and results in a heavy energy sink. Also, the ability to polarize the radiation would make it easy to align with the power line and maximize efficiency. Also things would not heat up in the area because the power would go into accelerate electrons already in the power line. It would make them move faster and hence increase the current (I=n*e*v). The location of the event could be isolated by the power companies (as it has been), but no physical evidence of the cause would be seen (as it has not been).
-Also, AC current dominates DC in power transmission because it has low resistance. The reason for this is because electrons move short distances before reversing direction. This results in a low frequency of collisions within the conductive material, hence low resistance. A 10-20 percent increase in current is not going to have much effect on this. Besides the grids are designed so that the transmission lines conduct well at currents well above what would cause the breakers to trip (this is a no-brainer because it is cheaper to flip a switch than replace miles of expensive high-tension lines)
-Also, NO, you wouldn't have to move it around. Mr. Livingstone did not do any study on the problems with the California grid. One of the major issues was that a really small event somewhere in the power grid would cause a massive cascade effect and knock out huge areas. One common cause was the squirrel stealing insulation from the capacitors until his body causes a massive short. This is why there are squirrel cages at all transformers. Any electrician will tell you that it only takes something happening at one location in your system to cause the entire thing to crash.
-HAARP is not phase array radar! It is a phase array heater. The basic physics is the same, but the practical applications are totally different, so they really should not be compared from a cause/effect standpoint.
-HAARP has not been used to prevent tornadoes!!! See Eastlund Scientific Incorporated report to European Space Agency (I can forward URL if you need it). Eastlund's conclusions were that a Terawatt heater would be needed to stop even a small tornado. He refers to the ARCO NSGP heater on the north slope of Alaska as existing (although it does not officially exist) and complains that the US government will not allow access to it. That is not to say they have not tried to stop a tornado, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it has ever been tried in practice.
-HAARP is not believed to be able to cause large-scale weather modification. A couple of Giga watts simply aren't enough energy for a direct modification of macro scale weather. Stalin supposedly used similar technology to prevent light rain and fog during outdoor events, but this is only on a very small scale geographically. HAARP may be being used to cause breaking of tropospheric jet stream over Alaska. We have observed the operation of HAARP during strange unexpected breaking patterns that have resulted in anomalous weather in the northwest US, but do not have any direct physical evidence to back this up.
-Livingstone also asked about chemtrails and mind-control
Because HAARP can generate fundamental frequencies which have an integer number of wavelengths equal the circumference of the ionosphere (such as 8Hz), and because biological organisms probably evolved in accordance with such fundamental frequencies, there seems to be some aspects of the human psyche that response at the same frequencies that are generated by HAARP (such as the medulla, which is the emotion sensor, responds at 8Hz). Some conspiracy theorists believe that HAARP can generate wavelengths that can excite the medulla and result in people not wanting to engage in certain activities (like fighting an invading army). This is a pretty wild theory and is not likely.... although there are probably certain biological responses to alterations made in the ionosphere, most likely in regions within the Auroral oval where geomagnetic field lines perpendicular to the earth's surface can allow low frequency waves to propagate toward the ground.
-HAARP cannot cause chemtrails because HAARP does not have the ability to deposit material in the atmosphere. It is possible, however that HAARP can cause changes in the composition of the atmosphere near the mesopause through electromagnetic dissociation of molecules. This can have an effect on all kinds of things such as the ozone hole. These effects, however, have not been studied because the scientists using HAARP have blocked these studies. The reason for this is because any environmental implications would need to be thoroughly reviewed and this could result in the world community shutting down HAARP operations indefinitely. So the guys in charge won't allow such research to take place.
In Fairbanks, we do have chemtrails, but they are not caused by HAARP. They are military experiments and fall into two main categories. 1) Toxic plume dispersal experiments which is where dust is dropped from planes or generated by fires, and the dispersal is studied. This will tell them what might happen say during a chemical weapon attack. 2) Radar ducting experiments. The military has certain radar ducting problems (i.e.: why we don't want to station fighters in Kuwait). They drop metallic dust such as aluminum and perform radar experiments with the cloud. These can be seen regularly from the Pedro Dome radar, which is available via http://www.arh.noaa.gov
I hope this clears up some of the science. I am available for questions through this e-mail address. I am not a conspiracy theorist; I am only a scientist trying to help the world community get better access to important experimental equipment. We must refrain from making up science because this is bad practice.
Thank you for posting my paper.

CIA: Assessment of Syria's WMD exaggerated (miami.com / Knight Ridder)
HAH. CIA doesn't waste any time releasing a 35-40 page report immediately refuting Bush's claims that Syria is harboring WMD's...

Skepticism about the Official Explanation of 9-11 Spreads (Telepolis)
Because there was no adequate official investigation into the cause of the 9-11 tragedy, those interested in understanding what had happened and why, were forced to do their own research, and to link up with others, creating an independent 9-11 research community. On 9-11-2003 Some 800 to 900 people attended, "Investigative Film Exhibition and Roundtable Program", a program in NYC at the Riverside Church near Columbia University. Some big names turned out: Mindy Kleinberg and the rest of the Jersey Girls, Cynthia McKinney, John Judge, Mike Ruppert, Ray McGovern, and others. One speaker compared the U.S. in 2003 to the period in Hitler's Germany just after the Reichstag Fire. Regardless of who was responsible for the criminal act on September 11, 2001, he maintained that the Bush administration has used it as the pretext to attack the right to dissent in the U.S.

Electronic Voting: Bigger Than Watergate!
How To Rig An Election In The United States - Fantasy vs Reality - How We Discovered The Backdoor - Evidence Of Motive - Evidence Of Opportunity - Evidence Of Method - Evidence Of Prior Conduct - Consistent Unexplained Circumstantial Evidence

Diebold Confirms U.S. Vote Count Vulnerabilities (Alastair Thompson / Scoop)
Will the true implications of this story ever see American headlines?

Gaffe casts doubts on electronic voting (CNN)
Wow, CNN is running an article on Diebold and electronic voting! Granted, its full of half-truths and some misinformation and padded with lots of spin, but they DO go as far as to say, "March questioned why San Luis Obispo County's server connected to a Diebold server at all - particularly if it dialed out while polls were open. He said the "phone home" incident could have been the work of an incompetent or malicious Diebold insider, or an outside hacker. Any astute campaign manager could have profited, he said."
For more detailed information about the problems facing electronic voting, please visit: Black Box Voting, which is currently running some great emails from Diebold employees and indepentand testing authority (ITA) admitting to knowing that the database and audit log can be easily tampered with, and in fact, sites several instances (including King County) where databases were modified, concluding, the audit log is modifiable and that the real importance is the perception of security. Also of note, The research and activism arm of BlackBoxVoting.com and How To Rig An Election In The United States

Open Letters to Proposed US Biodefense Labs (Sunshine Project)
A series of open letters denouncing government secrecy in biodefense calling for full public transparency of all the proposed new biodefense labs for classified research... Secrecy is indicative of possible prohibited activity at any facility handling biological weapons agents. When biodefense experiments operate under wraps, our own citizens and other countries, some suspicious of the United States, are left guessing as to the nature of experiments conducted, potentially triggering a destructive cycle of ever more provocative biodefense experiments. In fact, this process may already be underway, further bending the already stressed lines between offensive and defensive research.

End of the credit line? (Guardian Unlimited)
America could be in for a nasty shock if foreign investors decide to stop bankrolling its massive trade deficit. Escalating US budget deficits and a falling bond market has aroused fears in financial circles about US dependence on foreign funds. As for the Asian investors, there were suggestions in yesterday's Financial Times that flows may not be so generous in the future.

Resolving Everything: VeriSign Adds Wildcards (Slashdot)
Verisign, in essence, registers all unused .com and .net domain names and uses them all to force their portal page and search engine on all who visit any nonexistant .com or .net URL.

BuzzFlash interview: Greg Palast (Working for Change)
Greg Palast seems to have a pretty good handle on the current situation... Greg tells us his story exposing the Bush administration's odd Saudi relationships and how it "bounced off the electronic Berlin Wall of America". Detailing how FBI investigators were called off an investigation of financing of WAMY (World Assembly of Muslim Youth), a group closely connected to Osama bin Laden. In 1999 and 2000, Clinton quietly sent two delegations to Saudi Arabia with a list of royals, who are funding al-Qaeda, and told them "knock it off." George W Bush comes in and the demands on the Saudis come to a halt. Bush disbands the intelligence unit tracking the Saudi money connection to al-Qaeda. Bush's ambassador, Barbie Bodine, pulled the visas of FBI al-Quda investigation team in Yemen to force them home. Our own embassy pulled the visas of our own FBI investigators, headed by agent John O'Neill, who was in charge of al-Qaeda prosecutions for the Justice Department. In a meeting in Paris between Saudi billionaires, international arms dealers, and the al-Qaeda financial arm get together. In this meeting, the Saudis agreed to pay off al-Qaeda, a shake-down operation of the sheiks. Osama was running a protection racket. "You give me money, I don't blow up your yachts in the Mediterranean; I stay out of Saudi Arabia." Sheik Bahksh, a very rich Saudi who saved Bush's Texas oil company, Harken, was present at that meeting. Money from Arbusto Oil came from the Salim bin Laden, who died in an air crash in Texas in 1988. Not only is the Carlyle group paying senior and junior Bush, but they're also being used as an investment bank by the Saudis, even though they aren't, in order to avoid otherwise tens of millions of dollards in automatic transaction fees. So we are left with the embarrassing fact that, at that 1996 meeting, the people that the intelligence agency should have been investigating were, of course, the same people who were investing in the Bush family enterprises. Princess Haifa al-Faisal, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the US, sent a check to one of the roommates of two of the terrorists. A State Departement lawyer tells of visas being issued to "counter-terrorists" working for Osama bin Laden in the 80's when Osama was our boy. These guys then went back to Afghanistan; idea was that they were going to fight the Russians. We forgot that sometimes Frankensteins turn around and devour their creators, as we saw with Hussein. "One of my favorite lines of the war was Condoleezza Rice saying it was immoral to leave that butcher in Baghdad for the last 12 years. I'm thinking, wait a minute, lady - he's been there 24 years. The first 12 years he was our butcher, where we got our chops. In fact, Saddam was trying to build an atomic bomb when he got $7 billion from the Saudis to build an "Islamic" bomb. This was in the 1980s, before the "axis of evil," when Saddam was our butcher and he was fighting Iran, which, at that time, was the "epicenter of evil." Now he never completed his bomb program, and the money was moved over to ... Musharraf, dictator of Pakistan. And we're doing it again. We have cuddled up to Osama to get his help in Afghanistan. We cuddled up to Saddam to get his help against Iran. Now we cuddled up to Musharraf to buy his temporary affections against the Taliban, who don't forget, he put into power in Afghanistan." Amazingly WAMY, which has carried tapes for Osama Bin Laden, is still legally allowed to recruit potential terrorists, right here in Florida. However, this is probably due to the charity being a dual-use, as some of the money does go to supporting, for example, soccer leagues for young Muslim kids. In some sort of deranged publicity stunt, Saudi Foreign Minister Saudal-Faisal met with Bush in Washington and claimed the Saudi name was being besmirched, and plea to release the classified pages of the 9/11 report. Using the standard "national security" cry, Bush refused. However, The Saudis, as well as Bush, had no interest in having the papers released. let's open up the file cabinets at the Saudi embassy and let's start opening up where the money for WAMY goes, from Muwafaq and for the International Islamic Relief Organization. We also have one of the perpetrators of the Khobar Towers bombing [Saudi Arabia, 1996], rotting in a Saudi prison, who Bill Clinton, at the request of his dear friend Vernon Jordan, extradited to Saudi Arabia. He's a huge source of information on al-Qaeda operations. Let's bring him back for questioning. Let's bring over some of the characters who are sitting in Saudi Arabia that our Congressmen need for questioning. Or is it too late? Looks like a big fire killed a bunch of Saudi prisoners. Too bad Pointdexter's plan to wager on terrorism didn't pull through, cause I'd put a bet that Vernon Jordan was killed in that fire. Bob Graham is saying a some of the same things as Cynthia McKinney is really saying. Bob Graham? Fighting mad about the cover-up? The Bush administration has made decisions that ultimately are potentially to the detriment of Americ's security, for reasons having more to do with the interests of the Bush family than with the safety of America. Decisions which benefit the Bush family and protect them from political embarrassment and which help them maintain their continuing pipeline of cash into their businesses and financial coffers. The Bush family may be more worried about what the Saudis could reveal about them than what they can reveal about the Saudis. The Bush administration won't make the public aware of the Saudis' relationship to terrorism through financing and the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis or that it was an operation by Saudis, funded by Saudis. It seems that all of our official anti-terrorism vigor for Iraq should have been directed towards Saudi Arabia, but as it turns out, we can't because they control so much of our money. In the lead-up to Iraq, the Bush administration, primarily through spokespeople, went out of its way to divert attention from the Saudi relationship and to project it on Iraq by claiming Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda. The majority of Americans thought and perhaps still think that the majority of hijackers were Iraqi. Wolfowitz admitted in an interview that one of the reasons for declaring the war with Iraq a success was it would allow the U.S. to move its Air Force stations from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, which was one of the two main requests of Osama bin Laden. So Wolfowitz basically conceded that we conducted a war in part to make a concession to Osama bin Laden and take the heat off of the Saudi Arabia. One of the most stunning things is our President announcing we're pulling our troops out of Saudi Arabia. America doesn't pull its troops out of anywhere. The people of Okinawa have been asking us to leave there for a half a century. World War II is over. We never, ever leave a nation. But we'll make an exception for Saudi Arabia, I guess? Well, almost. They bombed Riyadh a week later because Bush tried to bargain with them indirectly. Bush said we're pulling out all our troops, but we're leaving 500 U.S. specialized troops in Saudi Arabia. And, in effect, these 500 troops becomes a Praetorian Guard to protect the royal family... al-Qaeda's way of saying, "No, its all out."

John Shirley: Non-Fiction
Some good essays from John Shirley. I especially liked Political and Corporate Censorship in the Land of the Free and The Mental State of the Union

Confessions of a Terrorist (Time / Johanna McGeary / Gerald Posner)
"A new book by Gerald Posner says Zubaydah has made startling revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden... according to Posner, cia men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions. Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do." The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz... to the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle... the Saudis "effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start of the decade." Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named. Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another... the author notes that these deaths occurred after cia officials passed along Zubaydah's accusations to Riyadh and Islamabad."

Exploiting the Atrocity (Paul Krugman / The New York Times)
It looks like the NY Times is finally coming around on SOME issues. "Is the public - and the news media - finally prepared to cry foul when cynicism comes wrapped in the flag? America's political future may rest on the answer. The press has become a lot less shy about pointing out the administration's exploitation of 9/11, partly because that exploitation has become so crushingly obvious... Yet it's almost certainly wrong to think that the political exploitation of 9/11 and, more broadly, the administration's campaign to label critics as unpatriotic are past their peak. It may be harder for the administration to wrap itself in the flag, but it has more incentive to do so now than ever before. Where once the administration was motivated by greed, now it's driven by fear."

RIAA Petition (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
"we are outraged by the RIAA's tactics in suing ordinary Americans for filesharing ... We condemn the RIAA's choice to force the family of a 12 year-old girl to forfeit $2,000 ... We respect reasonable copyright law, but we strongly oppose copyright enforcement that comes at the expense of privacy, due process and fair application of the law ... We oppose the recording industry's decision to attack the public, bankrupt its customers and offer false amnesty to those who would impugn themselves. We call instead for a real amnesty: the development of a legal alternative that preserves file-sharing technology while ensuring that artists are fairly compensated."

Email leaked between Exxon and White House: Exxon asks for resignation of EPA head Whitman and describes plan to sue EPA over global-warming report (GreenPeace)
"In the email, Myron Ebell of the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute writes to Phil Cooney, a senior official at the White House Council for Environmental Quality. He describes his plans to discredit an EPA study on climate change through a lawsuit. He states the need to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think that they are serving the president's interests by publishing this rubbish." He notes his group is considering a call for the then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, to resign, and openly suggests that she'd make an appropriate "fall gal" if the administration is serious about getting back into bed with conservatives opposing action on climate change."

A special speech to the nation (John Carrol/SF Gate)
HUMOR: an entertaining parody of Bush's recent speech.

Raytheon Unit Faces Formal Accounting Probe (SmartMoney.com)
The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a formal investigation into accounting questions at the company's commuter-aircraft unit.

Thousands of US troops evacuated from Iraq for unexplained medical reasons (World Socialist Web Site)
"for every soldier who has been killed in Iraq, at least another 15 have fallen so ill that they had to be flown back to the United States. The Post described the unexplained evacuations simply as the "thousands who became physically or mentally ill" ... there are fears that soldiers have already died or are falling ill due to their exposure to depleted uranium (DU) or the anthrax vaccine they have been compelled to take... inhaling large concentrations of DU-contaminated particles damages the lungs and kidneys and can cause respiratory illness."

The snoop in your coupe (Don Oldenburg/The Washington Post)
A good article about the Event Data Recorders being installed in all new cars... And a look at some prodcuts that even include GPS data. This is a data collection ripe for abuse. "...privacy advocates worry that EDRs are just another entry in the network of monitoring technology that is intruding on everyday life. Lee Tien, the senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, raises concerns that EDRs could be developed to gather driver location records or track car movement. "The EDRs will get a lot more Orwellian than they are now," Tien says. "This is not something that's 20 years off. This is very much a near-term thing.""

Airport Travelers To Get Ionizing X-Ray Radiation (Amy Worthington - The Idaho Observer)
"TSA Security Laboratory Director Susan Hallowell recently announced the agency's intent to use back-scatter X-ray machines for passenger surveillance. These hugely expensive, closet-sized zappers can find the plastic bombs hidden in grandma's underpants, while delivering a smacking dose of ionizing radiation to her breasts and thyroid gland. Snooper X-rays penetrate a few centimeters into the flesh and reflect off the skin to form a naked body image for TSA security personnel to inspect.
Hollowell asserts that ionizing radiation delivered via backscatter will be "about the same as sunshine." ... ionizing radiation in the X-ray spectrum damages and mutates both chromosomal DNA and structural proteins in human cells. If this damage is not repaired, it can lead to cancer... even very low doses of X-ray can delay or prevent cellular repair of damaged DNA.. Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, concludes that there is NO SAFE DOSE-LEVEL of ionizing radiation."

Wall Street awaits fallout of mutual fund investigation (Oakland Tribune Online)
"The fund scandal erupted when Spitzer -- the controversial crusader who used New York's far-reaching investor protection laws to force reforms on the brokerage industry -- announced a $40 million settlement Wednesday with hedge-fund group Canary Capital Partners involving "market timing" and "late trading" of mutual funds. Hedge funds, which are loosely regulated and often-secretive vehicles aimed at the wealthy, try to beat the market through various trading tactics. Late trading refers to unlawful, after-the-bell buying or selling of mutual fund shares at the old price -- a tactic that allows people to take advantage of late-breaking, market-moving news. Spitzer likened late trading to "being permitted to bet on yesterday's horse race.""

SEC accused of turning a blind eye to mutual fund malpractices (The Economic Times / India Times)
"The US Securities and Exchange Commission knew about, but failed to do enough to curb, at least one of the mutual fund trading practices under investigation by New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer. Mr Spitzer said last week that he was probing two types of trading in mutual fund shares. One is an arbitrage-style of market-timing, which is not technically illegal. The other is after-hours trading, in which shares in mutual funds are bought and sold after the market closes. That is against the law... Sources close to the SEC said it may also have known about after-hours trading and failed to take action... Asked if the SEC has been aware of after-hours trading, Douglas Scheidt, chief counsel of the SEC's fund-policing Division of Investment Management, said, "I don't think there's been any indications that that was a practice."
In Mr Spitzer's probe, Canary Capital Partners, a hedge fund, settled for $40m and did not admit or deny wrongdoing. Mr Spitzer also accused four mutual fund companies of illegal trading: Bank of America's Nations Funds, Janus Capital Group, Bank One's Banc One funds and privately held Strong Capital Management."

Free Speech Zones: As Bush spreads lies throughout the land, dissenters are corralled into "Free Speech Zones" (Mick Youther / Intervention Magazine)
The right of citizens to gather for a cause is guaranteed by the First Amendment... Apparently our first amendment isn't specific enough in declaring WHERE we can assemble, though. This is a gross violation of our first amendment rights:
"Anyone with an anti-Bush sign is relegated into ... a Free Speech or Demonstration Zone -- a swath of land usually off the main thoroughfare and chained off so as to make it virtually impossible for the targets of the protest to read the signs or hear the chants." -Robyn E. Blumner, St. Petersburg Times, 10/13/02
"We were not allowed anywhere near any kind of position where the president, or the media which follows him, would see or hear us... The effort being made to hide political opposition in this country is more than cowardly. It's un-American." --Peter Buckley, candidate for Congress in Oregon
"You may have seen the item yesterday about demonstrators against President Bush being herded inside a fence at Neville Island for his Labor Day visit. Police called this enclosure the designated free-speech area, though anyone who had signs praising the president was evidently OK to line the island's main street for the motorcade." --Brian O'Neill Pittsburgh Post-Gazette September 5, 2002
"I asked him if it was the content of my sign, and he said, 'Yes, sir, it's the content of your sign that's the problem.' And so it's just become a matter of procedure that the Secret Service is clearing the area of anybody that would have a message that would be contrary to George Bush's policies." --Brett Bursey,activist arrested for holding a "No War for Oil" sign outside a Free Speech Zone
"When I asked the officer why we were not allowed on the sidewalk like the people walking to the picnic and residents holding pro-Bush signs, he simply said, 'Orders.'" --Regis T. Sabol, New Deal Publications

Navy Coverup Alleged On Drug Side Effects (Mark Benjamin and Dan Olmsted / Rense)
Looks like the Navy is covering up the administration of Lariam to a Naval Reserve commander which made him severely ill, suicidal, and aggressive. The Navy has been caught altering his medical records to remove all refrences to Lariam. Lariam is the drug that at least two of the soldiers who killed their wives at Fort Bragg last summer took while serving in Afghanistan. "The drug's label warns of psychosis, aggression, hallucinations and reports of suicide that can occur "long after" someone stops taking it."

Thirty years later, coup still casts shadow on Chile (Taipei Times/The Guardian)
Remembering a previous US-backed regime change that toppled a democratically elected government.
"Want to know why terrorists hate the US? Because we have a long history of overthrowing governments and installing puppet regimes in their place. For all the talk about Democracy, the US has a long history of backing dictators, such as Batista, Marcos, the Shah, and so forth, who oppressed their people for the benefit of American corporations until their people rebelled and regained their freedoms. Then the US labels those freedom fighters as "terrorists" to try to regain control.
Want to stop terrorism? Stop screwing around with other people's countries and the terrorists will go home. Contrary to the corporate interests that rule this nation, terrorists don't hate us because we are free. People everywhere love freedom. Only governments hate people who are free. The terrorists hate the US because the US government is trying to take their freedom away, as happened when the US toppled democratically elected Allende and installed the dictator Pinochet in his place. Nobody likes another country to come in and mess with their country. We certainly do not like it happening here, so why should other people be any different?
Terrorism is the bastard child of US foreign policy mated with US corporate greed." - whatreallyhappened.com webmaster

Torture broke me, says Briton (Guardian Unlimited)
"Men accused of Saudi bombings tell of jail ordeal: One of the Britons released last month from a Saudi jail has said he was tortured "beyond endurance" during his imprisonment. Sandy Mitchell said he was chained, beaten and denied sleep until he confessed to a crime he did not commit. Mr Mitchell, 44, from Kirkintilloch, was one of six men from the UK arrested three years ago after a series of bomb attacks in Riyadh"

Top Story - ANTIMATTER FACTORY ON SUN YIELDS CLUES TO SOLAR EXPLOSIONS (NASA)
Sun unexpectedly producing antimatter: "Solar flares are among the most powerful explosions in the solar system; the largest can release as much energy as a billion one-megaton nuclear bombs. ... scientists discovered the July 2002 flare created a half-kilo (about one pound) of antimatter, enough to power the entire United States for two days. According to the RHESSI images and data, this antimatter was not destroyed where expected. ... it appears that this flare might have shuffled antimatter around, producing it in one location and destroying it in another. ... 'The result is as surprising as gold miners blasting a cliff face and discovering that the explosion threw all the dirt in one direction and all the gold in another direction,' said Dr. Craig DeForest, a solar researcher at the South West Research Inst."

Optical Illusions
Nothing to do with anything important, but its got some amazing optical illusions I've never seen before.

MoveOn.org: Stop the FCC
A petition to roll back the entire FCC ruling regarding media ownership rules.

2 EPA officials take jobs with firms benefiting from rule change (Knight Ridder Washington Bureau 09/03/2003)
"Two top Environmental Protection Agency officials who were deeply involved in easing an air pollution rule for old power plants just took private-sector jobs with firms that benefit from the changes. Days after the changes in the power-plant pollution rule were announced last week, John Pemberton, the chief of staff in the EPA's air and radiation office, told colleagues he would be joining Southern Co., an Atlanta-based utility that's the nation's No. 2 power-plant polluter and was a driving force in lobbying for the rule changes. Southern Co., which gave more than $3.4 million in political contributions over the past four years while it sought the changes, hired Pemberton as director of federal affairs."

This war on terrorism is bogus (Michael Meacher/Guardian Unlimited)
An extraordinarily well thought out explaination of the real agendas at work in regards to the supposed "War on Terrorism." Michael has done his homework and successfully pieces together a very convincing explaination of the underlying motives behind our current actions... a PNAC document, "Rebuilding America's Defences" served as a blueprint for plans to take military control of the Gulf Region to further discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
"The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool". (Note: there's a lot more proof than just a hint!)
It is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.
From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives.
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.
The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project."

California Supreme Court Upholds $3.6 Billion Bailout of Southern California Edison (The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights)
"The California Supreme Court today unanimously upheld a secret deal by the Davis Administration to force consumers to pay off $3.6 billion in debts, or an average $850 per Edison ratepayer, incurred by Southern California Edison as a result of the disastrous deregulation law the company sponsored in 1996.
Deregulation Bounty for Utilities, $70 Billion Blow to Consumers: As a result of the deregulation disaster, consumers first paid more than $20 billion to Edison, PG&E and San Diego Gas & Electric to subsidize the utilities' transition to deregulation. Taxpayers then funded more than $10 billion in overpriced energy purchases to stave off power company-initiated blackouts and ratepayers' electricity bills were also increased by approximately 30%. Additionally, Governor Davis signed long-term energy contracts that locked ratepayers into a decade of high priced power."

The Economic Dismantling of California
An older article from a poster to GNN, but nonetheless, some important issues of that I'm only now learning of...
"The State of California is under economic attack. Powerful lobby forces backed by out-of-state based generator companies have taken over federal policymakers and their regulatory agencies to design and defend the largest theft of state taxpayer's dollars in U.S. history. By the end of March, California will spend over $4.2 Billion of its taxpayer's dollars on the purchase of electricity. California has spent this money over the last 2 months purchasing power from out-of-state energy suppliers who manipulate electricity inventories in the state to drive up wholesale prices to rates that are %1000 percent higher than those only a few years ago.
It is a supply and demand issue! Everyone in the nation knows about the horrendous increase in demand with no adequate supply. Well, this is a complete fabrication. California has more than adequate supply in the state. The real cause of our problems is that suppliers currently have the freedom to remove supply from the market by shutting down power plants or refusing to sell into the California market."

Philippines Mutineers Point to the Neo-Cons (Executive Intelligence Review)
"The charges by the rebels are extremely serious, but not surprising to readers of EIR, which has documented the role of the Bush Administration, especially Donald Rumsfeld, in efforts to circumvent the Philippine Constitution by establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in the Philippines, part of the neo-conservative game-plan to surround and confront China.
In the videotape, which was played repeatedly on local television, the rebel spokesman, Lt. Senior Grade Antonio Trillanes, charged that Defense Minister Gen. Angelo Reyes and Military Intelligence chief Gen. Victor Corpus were guilty of providing arms to the Abu Sayyaf criminal gang and to the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Force (MILF) in the southern Province of Mindanao. Even more damning, the mutineers charged General Reyes and General Corpus with being the masterminds behind a series of deadly terrorist bombings in Mindanao, all to the purpose of gaining favor with the United States and justifying an increased U.S. military role in the country. They also charged that more terrorist bombings were being planned, with the possible added intention of justifying martial law, and the cancellation of the scheduled 2004 election."

The Ambassador Wilson Affair: The End of Karl Rove (Al Martin)
"Ambassador Joseph Wilson ... revealed on Friday August 29 in a symposium in Washington the person in the Bush administration, who had leaked it out to the Washington Post that Wilson's wife is a CIA agent of 26 years. As a consequence of this leak, her entire team of overseas assets were liquidated.
The leaker, it turns out, was none other than the notorious Karl H. Rove, Bush's so-called White House advisor. Ambassador Wilson identified him as Karl Roverer, with the umlaut over the "o."
According to reliable sources, as well as ... AlMartinRaw.com investigation, Karl Rove is, in fact, the grandson of Karl Heinz Roverer, the gauleiter of Mecklenburg, who was also a partner and senior engineer of Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo AG. They built Birchenau, the concentration camp in Nazi Germany.
Wilson has announced that he will have his private attorneys petition the Department of Justice demanding that Roverer a/k/a Karl Rove be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identity Protection Act . This law specifically supposed to prevent what has happened in this case and that is the Bush administration attempting to retaliate against a senior government official who tells the truth about that administration by revealing the identities of intelligence members within their own families."

GAO's Final Energy Task Force Report Reveals that the Vice President Made A False Statement to Congress (John W. Dean, FindLaw)
This month, the General Accounting Office (GAO) - the investigative and auditing arm of Congress - issued a report that contains some startling revelations. Though they are couched in very polite language, they are bombshells nonetheless.
The report - entitled "Energy Task Force: Process Used to Develop the National Energy Policy" - and its accompanying Chronology strongly imply that the Administration has, in effect, been paying off its heavy-hitting energy industry contributors. It also very strongly implies that Vice President Dick Cheney lied to Congress."

The Buck Never Stops: Cheney Chicanery (Ray McGovern, Former CIA analyst)
"When Vice President Dick Cheney comes out of seclusion to brand critics "irresponsible," you know the administration is in trouble.
Cheney was enlisted to do so in the spring of 2002 amid reports that warning given to President Bush before 9/11 should have prompted preventive action. Cheney branded such commentary "irresponsible," and critics in the press and elsewhere were duly intimidated. It will be interesting to see what happens this time.
Sifting through the congressional report on 9/11, I was reminded of the President's Daily Brief [PDB] item of August 6, 2001 titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.' Dana Priest of the Washington Post has learned that this PDB article stated 'bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the United States for years and that (his) group apparently maintained a support base here.'
According to Priest, the PDB went on to cite 'FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.' The president has cited executive privilege in refusing to declassify the PDB item."

The Case for Impeachment of Vice President Richard Cheney (Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review)
Some important points about who's actually pulling W's strings and points out that a successful impeachment of George W. Bush would put the chief culprit, Vice-President Dick Cheney, into the Presidency. I'm certainly agreeing that we'd be no better off with Cheney than we are with Bush.

Who Knew? The unanswered questions of 9/11 (In These Times)
Bush Knew. (duh.) But this adds some new questions like, "Why Were Hijackers Left Off the Watchlist?", "Who Was Watching? Who Was Stalling?", and "Why Did We 'Back Off' Investigating the Saudis?"

The Most Dangerous Game (Guerrilla News Network)
Wow. What an amazing story. A real bombshell. Be warned, this may turn your perception of reality on its ear. It's one of the most shocking and, potentially, politically injurious stories of abuse of power ever to be told in the public domain. Some amazing claims about some of the CIA's mind control programs, MK-Ultra and Operation Monarch. This story follows Cathy O'Brian, a victim of horrific sexual and physical abuse, and a former Intelligence operative, Mark Phillips, who rescued her from the CIA's brainwashing programs. "And while, for most, the allegations contained therein will only trigger reactions of disgust, skepticism and ridicule, for others they will offer the remote possibility of validation that we are being lied to on the most wide-reaching of scales. Even the most hard-edged skeptic is suddenly left without the sharp dagger of critical enthusiasm that they brought with them. Instead of finding a delusional, attention-seeking con artist, they discover an enlightened spirit who does not crave anything but the innate beauty of human contact." See http://www.guerrillanews.com/dangerous/ for one additional video clip related to this story. (These videos require Quicktime or Windows Media Player)

Bush and the Saudis Sitting in a Tree... (Greg Palast / Guerrilla News Network)
Greg Palast does it again with another great critique of the Bush's relationship with Saudis...
"President George was in one hell of bind this week when it turned out that Saudi Arabia funded Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Realizing we'd invaded the wrong country, Bush did the honorable thing: he's come out against gay marriages."
"In the summer of 2001, Bush disbanded the U.S. intelligence unit tracking funding of Al Qaeda. According to two separate sources speaking to BBC, the funders of Al Qaeda fronts include those who have previously funded Bush family business and political ventures."

DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (Guerrilla News Network)
GNN secretly obtained an advance copy of Bush's made-for-TV campaign adver-movie, "DC 9/11," a two-hour feel-good saga that blends news footage and fictionalized scenes made to look like news footage into a highly-effective pseudo-historical soap opera.

Wow. This revisionist propaganda should really help clear up some of the confusion.

No Time to Gloat (American Politics Journal)
Looks like its time to go crawling back to the U.N... Colin Powell made an almost apologetic but uneasy announcement that the United States had officially begun a 180-degree turn toward the United Nations for assistance with Iraq -- instead of backing the UN bashers within the Administration... Surprisingly, it was a quiet but brutal revolt at the Pentagon by military generals that changed the tide.

It is time for Mr. Perle to admit as well that he and his mob are the most prominent parties to blame for the soaring postwar rise in international terrorism and the hatred now targeting innocent and caring Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, Indonesians and Afghanis. It is Mr. Perle, along with other Cheney-led pseudointellectual gangsters, who served as key architect for this chaos now spreading in the Middle East to the four corners of the globe. It was he who snickered and shrugged off the deaths of some thirty thousand Iraqi civilians instead of laying sufficient groundwork to preempt the chaos although he was warned, time and again, by far more experienced and braver men that if he was going to go forward with this ill-conceived war, then he must do it correctly.

Yes, the buck stops at George W. Bush's desk -- but it started a dozen years ago in a neoconservative think tank filled with gutless corporate stooges eager for some payback. It is time for the President to ask Richard Cheney to take his mob of ill-prepared war gamers and hit the road.

When will anyone admit that it has been a huge fraud? (Philadelphia Inquirer)
How distressing that it turns out to be Bush, leader of the world's greatest democracy, who is the true master of denial and deception, rather than Hussein, who proved to be a paper tiger. Bush is such a master at deceiving the American public that even now he is not threatened with the prospect of impeachment or any serious congressional investigation into the possibility that he led this nation into war with lies.

This was a shell game from beginning to end in which Americans' legitimate fear of terrorism after Sept. 11 was almost immediately and cynically exploited by the neoconservative gang that runs U.S. foreign policy.

Greatest Britney Spears Quote EVAR (Yahoo! Launch)
"Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." -Britney Spears

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -Theodore Roosevelt

Gulf War Service Linked to Lou Gehrig's Disease (ABC News)
Americans who served in the Gulf War were nearly twice as likely to develop Lou Gehrig's disease as other military personnel. Those who served in the Air Force were 2.7 times as likely to contract the disease.

Petition against the California recall election (MoveOn.org)
The recall is not a just California issue -- it is an attack on American democracy. I stand with Californians who are fighting for democracy by opposing the recall. If the recall succeeds, it will set a dangerous precedent for the whole country. A far-right businessman spent 1.7 million dollars to bring us the recall campaign, and has thrown California into chaos. GOP leaders who should have condemned the recall instead cheered it on, hoping they could gain from the unraveling of our democracy. We can't stand by and let this happen. These attacks on democracy are not a California issue or a Texas issue or a Florida issue -- we all must step forward together and make it clear that elections will be honored in this country. This pledge is a national effort to mobilize one million California voters in the recall election. Please sign the pledge no matter where you live and please ask friends and family in California to sign the pledge and to remember to vote October 7.

Employees file suit against IBM for sickness and death from chemicals (New York Times)
While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely.

I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations.

Some died after contracting malignant illnesses, most of them succumbing in their 30's and 40's. Incredibly, four of them died after developing brain cancer, a rare disease in adults.

The lawsuits insists that officials at I.B.M. knew that workers were being put at risk of contracting cancer and other serious illnesses by their regular exposure to a variety of poisonous chemicals, many known to be carcinogens.

All the suits are being watched extremely closely by the semiconductor industry, which had been warned for years that chip-making and other processes requiring the use of tremendous amounts of toxic chemicals might be associated with cancers, miscarriages, birth defects and other very serious health problems

More trouble for Diebold (BlackBoxVoting.org)
Wow. The efforts to uncover digital voting fraud have reached a level of frenzy. More efforts than I could possibly sum up here... Recent news:

It looks like Diebold has been caught illegally counting votes before a San Luis Obispo County election was over. For some reason, the Diebold optical scan machines in 57 precincts at once had an E.T. moment. They "called home" with election results while the election was still in progress, summing up the votes in 57 precincts, then tagged the file to a Diebold employee and placed it on a Diebold company web site.

The tabulation was saved to a backup file labeled "ORIG" (original votes?). It was assigned a password and placed on a Diebold-owned web company web site. The password was: "Sophia." Sophia Lee was a Diebold employee.

Pardon me, but what were they doing with this file again? Did Diebold steal voting information from San Luis Obispo County, or did the San Luis Obispo County Elections Registrar produce an illegal midday tally? Who did this? Was Sophia there that day? If these were the “original” votes what votes were put into the final votes?

also...

Conflict of interest: It's worse than we thought:
[Diebold CEO Wally] O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month.

The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

In a recent fund-raising letter O'Dell wrote that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Cleveland Plain Dealer article

More: Ohio legislative Democratic leaders urged [Ohio secretary of state] Blackwell to remove Diebold from the field of voting- machine companies eligible to sell to Ohio counties.

This is the second such request in as many months. State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, asked Blackwell in July to disqualify Diebold after security concerns arose over its equipment.

George W. Bush Scorecard of Evil (The Wage Slave Journal)
A very large collection of some less than admirable actions by our "President"... Perhaps one of the most comprehensive, well sourced, lists I've ever seen.

FOX "News": Unfair & Unbalanced
A short list of misinformation reportorted by Fox "news". The Bottom Line: FOX News is not a news network. This country does not have a broadcast news network. This becomes evident if you count the number of relevant "news" stories per hour reported by any one of the so called networks. It becomes even more apparent if, when listening to a news report, you ask yourself, "how many people actually are affected by the story and why it is even being reported on a national news broadcast?"

"EPA appears increasingly divorced from science, credibility"
This month the EPA admitted that the Bush Administration forced the EPA to censor a report on air quality in New York immediately after the World Trade Center collapse. Just days after the attacks, the Bush Administration "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" to mislead the public about the thick cloud of debris that hung in the air for weeks after the attack.

The Bush Administration admits that it mislead the public about the dangers to their health, but claims that it was an issue of "National Security" and that it wanted to get Wall Street reopened as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, the EPA announced that it would exempt 17,000 of power plants, oil refineries and major industrial power producers from having to meet pollution standards when they upgrade or expand their generation facilities.

The General Accounting Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- reported that the EPA had relied on industrial "anecdotes" to determine that weakening pollution rules would have minimal health and economic impacts. Rather than base their decision on science, EPA did what power companies told it to do.

Blowing The Whistle On Hanford (Government Accountability Project)
10 minute video (Real Player required)

The plant has become a horrible and deadly threat to the people and the environment. Workers hired to clean up this nuclear burial ground encountered barrels of leaking nuclear materials, radioactive rods, etc. Workers were threatened when they brought this to the attention of the company and the government.

September 11th and The Bush Administration: Compelling Evidence for Complicity (Walter E. Davis):
A very nice collection of some excellent points To be truely objective however there are a couple portions that are a little fast and loose with the facts... and a couple of his questions do have rational explainations. However with that said, I will agree with the majority of the content in this article... Much of it is factually consistant with similar research I have done.

SpamAssassin, now available as a POP3 proxy for Windows
Finally, end users now have an option for free, yet powerful, do-it-yourself spam filtering program if their ISP does not offer the service.

This is probably your best defense against spam if you use a standard POP3 email account. It utilizes header analysis, text analysis, DNS blacklists, and signature based filtering. It used to be the holy grail of anti-spam tools, but its effectiveness has been diluted by the wide-spread proliferation of this software and spammer's subsequent defenses against it. Now, intelligent spammers are crafting their messages in a manner to avoid detection by SpamAssassin. However, its still over mostly effective, and its definately the best weapon against spam available in the public domain.

For what its worth, I've even contributed a couple of rules to SpamAssassin, RECEIVED_IDENT_SQUID and RECEIVED_IDENT_CACHEFLOW.

Stick it to em'.

Spam viruses, worms and worse (TheInquirer.net):
An excellent review of technological and organizational advances being made by malware authors in relation to spam and organized crime

"New York City's pumping stations dumped 490 million gallons of raw sewage into waterways in the recent blackout." (New York Times)
This little fact buried in a technology article...

More anti-competitive behavior and legal troubles for Microsoft (PBS)
"...lawsuit between Burst.com and Microsoft that there would be a public hearing on the case this week in Federal Court in Baltimore. ... Microsoft did not come through the hearing very well as whole new levels of anti-competitive behavior were claimed by Burst AND ACKNOWLEDGED BY MICROSOFT -- levels that will likely haunt Redmond in many legal cases to come. ... Burst claims that Microsoft negotiated in bad faith for over a year, then stole Burst's patented technology for increasing the efficiency of video and audio streaming.

The hearing came about because Burst felt Microsoft was not divulging all the documents it was supposed to as part of the discovery phase of the case. Burst asked for copies of all Microsoft e-mail messages concerning Burst during and shortly after the time when the companies were trying to negotiate a license for Microsoft to use Burst's intellectual property. Microsoft handed over the e-mail messages on a disk, and when Burst's lawyers had printed all the messages they filled 140 boxes. When Burst's lawyers put the messages in order by date and time, there were literally no messages from approximately one week before until about a month after all seven meetings between the two companies. This meant that either Microsoft completely suspended its corporate e-mail culture for an aggregate period of 35 weeks, or there were messages that had been sent and received at Microsoft, but not divulged to Burst. Presented with this charge in court, Microsoft's attorneys acknowledged that the message gaps existed. The messages had been erased by the half-dozen Microsoft employees involved, both from their PCs and from the mail servers. There were no backup copies. The reason for this mass erasure, it was explained, is that Burst technology was unimpressive and not of interest to Microsoft, and the e-mails were simply not worth keeping.

Then one of the Burst lawyers pointed out testimony from a hearing in the Sun v. Microsoft antitrust case where Microsoft representatives said all e-mails were backed-up on more than 100,000 tapes that are held off-site. Surely the lawyers representing Microsoft weren't aware of this because if they had been, they wouldn't have said there was no back-up. So the judge ordered Microsoft to produce the missing messages. The employee PCs, the servers, and the off-site backup tapes have to be searched and soon. The Microsoft lawyers complained that would be like finding a needle in a haystack. The judge reminded them that it was they who had put that needle in the hay.

What happens next with Microsoft and Burst is interesting. In a few weeks, Microsoft will either find the messages or not. If they do find the messages and produce them, whatever is in those messages becomes part of the case. If they don't find the messages and the case goes to trial, the judge will tell the jury that Microsoft deliberately withheld and destroyed evidence. Juries are generally unimpressed by such behavior. "

We Must Stop Bush From Stealing the 2004 Election
"The outsourcing of these systems, then, in essence has become a silent coup d'etat by Corporate-Government Insiders."