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Italia 9/11 * CIA * Habeas * Yucca * $-down


07 December 2007

”.. all the democratic groups of both America and Europe,
including those of the Italian center-left, know very well
already that the disastrous [September 11, 2001] attack was
planned and realized by the CIA and the Mossad, with the help
of the Zionists, in order to put under trial the Arab countries and to
lure the Western powers to intervene in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”

-- Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga

Quote in Italy's popular newspaper, 30 November 2007

1) Ex-Italian President: Intel Agencies Know 9/11 An Inside Job
- - Former Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon speaks out on 9/11
- - Seven Senior Republican Appointees Challenge Official Account of 9/11
2) C.I.A. Admits It Destroyed Tapes of Harsh Interrogations
- - US intelligence report shows war drive against Iran based on lies
- - Two-Thirds of Israelis Oppose Attack on Iran: Poll
- - Habeas Corpus War for Guantanamo Prisoners
- - Legal Action by Inmates Could Close Guantanamo
3) Stop Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain
- - Poison From Depleted Uranium Munitions Site Lingers
4) Financial Crisis on the Brink of Collapse
- - US Judge Issues A Warrant For Paulson’s Arrest?
- - Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis

Editor’s Notes:

The top quote came to me by from David Ray Griffin, whom’s former student translated it from the oldest and largest newspaper in Italy. The first item begins with an article on this from PrisonPlanet.com, followed by the complete translated statement by former Italian President Francesco Cossiga. Next is an article by Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon, who in 15 minutes knew that 9/11 was an inside attack. Then comes an article by seven senior Republican Appointees, challenging the official account of 9/11.

The second item begins with a breaking news story that the CIA has admitted destroying recorded tapes of torture or so-called harsh interrogations. Since when has the CIA admitted to such a cover-up? The next article is even more startling since the CIA released a report contradicting Bush’s reasoning for attacking Iran. Something has changed! Meanwhile a new poll states that two-thirds of Israelis oppose an attack on Iran. The amazing divide between decent people and corrupt governments is becoming more obvious. Subsequent to that article is on the legal actions by inmates that could close down Guantanamo. Soon will not be soon enough, but the fallout of a criminal war by the US government is hanging on to the crimes against humanity.

Related to the above are actions to poison native land with radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain. Please check this out, and make your statement to its Environmental Impact Statement with a deadline on or before Jan. 10, 2008. You can fax questions &/or comments to: (800) 967-0739; call in to: (800) 967-3477; and you can submit your questions and comments on the Radioactive Waste Management website. But then there is still Depleted Uranium Munitions to contend with; your awareness and actions to stop the madness is critical.

Item four covers again the impending economic doom of banking systems world currencies, unless the criminals can be stopped from a campaign that should be compared to NAZI fascism. “From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.” The prior quote comes from this article in the London Guardian newspaper. Note too the latest update from World Reports, which should either be brought to court for libel or considered as relevant information. Plus, following that is an article published in the NY Times: Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis. However one may look at our current situation, big changes are in store in the near future; and from a fascist dictatorship, although dangerous, these times are also hopeful.


The Boston Tea Party and Conference
for 9/11 Truth!
Scientists & Citizens Speak Out!

December 15 & 16, 2007

Keene, NH
Thursday, December 13th, 7pm
Richard Gage AIA Architect
presents:
9/11: Re-examining the 3 WTC High-rise "Collapses"
Keene State College — Redfern Arts Center
229 Main Street Keene, New Hampshire 03431


Valley 9/11 Truth
PRESENTS
"Oil Smoke & Mirrors"
Film screening and following discussion at the
Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA

Wednesday, December 12, 2007; 7:00pm

MUSIC BENEFITS & 9/11 TRUTH
Featuring
John Heartson
Also
John Coster and Mary Serreze
at
Evolution Cafe
no cover charge
Thursday, December 20, 2007; 7:00 to 9:00 pm
&
Friday, December 21, 2007; 8:00 pm to midnight

{with additional performers TBA}
at

The Pushkin
$10 cover to benefit
Valley 9/11 Truth and Flyby News


A partial sunrise comes to mind
in half empty spaces
filling the void
to dream and yet to awaken
when time has no space
and memory listens no more.


1) Ex-Italian President: Intel Agencies Know 9/11 An Inside Job

- - Seven Senior Republican Appointees Challenge Official Account of 9/11


Ex-Italian President: Intel Agencies Know 9/11 An Inside Job
Man who set up Operation Gladio tells Italy's largest newspaper
attacks were run by CIA, Mossad

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Former Italian President and the man who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, Francesco Cossiga has gone public on 9/11, telling Italy's most respected newspaper that the attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad and that this was common knowledge amongst global intelligence agencies.

Cossiga was elected President of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide 1985 election to become President of the country in 1985.

Cossiga gained respect from opposition parties as one of a rare breed - an honest politician - and led the country for seven years until April 1992.

Cossiga's tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio - a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 60's, 70's and 80's. Gladio's specialty was to carry out what they coined "false flag operations," terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.

Cossiga's revelations contributed to an Italian parliamentary investigation of Gladio in 2000, during which evidence was unearthed that the attacks were being overseen by the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony, "You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

Cossiga's new revelations appeared last week in Italy's oldest and most widely read newspaper, Corriere della Sera. Below appears a rough translation.

"[Bin Laden supposedly confessed] to the Qaeda September [attack] to the two towers in New York [claiming to be] the author of the attack of the 11, while all the [intelligence services] of America and Europe ... now know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the CIA American and the Mossad with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic Countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part ... in Iraq [and] Afghanistan."

Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9/11 in 2001, and is quoted in Webster Tarpley's book as stating that "The mastermind of the attack must have been a “sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”

Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga's assertion that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge amongst global intelligence agencies is highly unlikely to be mentioned by any establishment media outlets, because like the hundreds of other sober ex-government, military, air force professionals, allied to hundreds more professors and intellectuals - he can't be sidelined as a crackpot conspiracy theorist.

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

Learn more about Operation Gladio and false flag terrorism by watching Alex Jones' http://prisonplanet.tv/articles/july2007/110707terror_storm.htm Terror Storm in high quality.

Source: www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2007/120407_common_knowledge.htm

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A former student of David Ray Griffin from Italy has provided the following translation of Francesco Cossiga’s recent statement:

“Groups who are well introduced into Palazzo Chigi (residence of the government), the neuralgic center of the Italian intelligence, make a point of noticing that the non-authenticity of the video [of Osama Bin-Laden] is confirmed by the fact that in such video Osama Bin Laden confesses that Al Qaeda has been the author of the 9/11 attacks to the twin towers in New York, while all the democratic groups of both America and Europe, including those of the Italian center-left, know very well already that the disastrous attack was planned and realized by the CIA and the Mossad, with the help of the Zionists, in order to put under trial the Arab countries and to lure the Western powers to intervene in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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- - Former Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon speaks out on 9/11

The First Fifteen Minutes of September 11th
Former Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon speaks out on 9/11, NORAD and what should have happened on 9/11.
Published by CommunityCurrency.org on November 24 2007
By Jeremy Baker

Within three hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Robin Hordon knew it was an inside job. He had been an Air Traffic Controller (ATC) for eleven years before Reagan fired him and hundreds of his colleagues after they went on strike in the eighties. Having handled in-flight emergencies and two actual hijackings in his career, he is well qualified to comment on what NORAD should have been able to achieve in its response to the near simultaneous hijacking of four domestic passenger carriers on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

“There had to be something huge to explain why those aircraft weren’t shot down out of the sky. We have fighters on the ready to handle these situations twenty-four-seven. We have NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) monitors monitoring our skies twenty-four-seven. We have a lot of human beings, civilian and military, who care about doing their jobs.”

I spoke to Mr. Hordon one afternoon at a coffee shop in Bremerton, Washington.

[EXCERPT]

In my fourth decade within the Peace Movement and now the first decade in the 9/11 Truth Movement, I can now clearly see that
General Eisenhower was absolutely correct and that the military-corporation-political-economical cabal has indeed gone out of control.

I believe that 9/11 was what is known as a "False Flag Operation" in which a country inflicts casualties upon itself, and then blames it on an enemy that they want to go to war against. It is one more instance in the United States’ long history of using "False Flag Operations" and blatant propaganda to ramp-up hostile emotions towards an enemy in a population otherwise resistant to going to war. The destruction of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor, which led to the Spanish-American War, allowing the attack on Pearl Harbor to occur, the declassified 1960's plan Operation Northwoods, which was going to be used as a pretext for going to war with Cuba, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which justified the war in Viet Nam, the planted story about babies being taken from incubators and killed by Iraqi soldiers to help justify the first Gulf War, and now, the attacks on 9/11/2001 being used to justify the current war in Iraq, were all used to manipulate the "warring emotions" within U.S. citizens so that they would come to support this country going to war against this "new enemy". And in all of these wars, everyone in this decadent cabal shares in the financial profits associated with war, and, of course, share in none of the pain and deaths associated with war. Bob Dylan says it best in his unheralded, yet seminal song "Masters of War".

Four decades of experiencing the John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam lies, the Watergate saga, the Iran-Contra scandals, stolen elections and the conglomerization and ensuing control of the mainstream media, instructed me that this was going to be a long battle to uncover the truth about who was behind the attacks on 9/11/2001. That I can show how Rumsfeld's Military reshaped interceptor protocols so that 9/11 could happen without the airliners being shot from the sky, is but a small bit of evidence that is flooding past the Bush regime, the U.S. Military and the mainstream media’s best efforts to continue the cover-up of their callous and deathly malfeasances.

Additional Resources, Interviews with Robin Hordon are at-

Bonnie Faulkner's interview at the Guns and Butter Radio Archives- www.gunsandbutter.net/archives.php

Video by Pilots for 9/11 Truth- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9147890225218338952

For the complete article, see: www.communitycurrency.org/robin.html
also posted at
www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20071124223238849

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- - Seven Senior Republican Appointees Challenge Official Account of 9/11

Seven Senior Republican Appointees Challenge Official Account of 9/11 –
"Not Possible", "a Whitewash", "False"
by Alan Miller
Published by OpedNews.com on December 2, 2007

The article details severe criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report by seven senior Republican appointees and their calls for a new investigation. They include:

Paul Craig Roberts, PhD, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan
Catherine Austin Fitts, Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George H.W. Bush
Morgan Reynolds, PhD, former Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under current President George W. Bush
Col. Ronald D. Ray, U.S. Marine Corps (ret), Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan
Mary Schiavo, JD, Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Transportation under Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Clinton

For this article, see:
www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alan_mil_071202_seven_senior_republi.htm



2) C.I.A. Admits It Destroyed Tapes of Harsh Interrogations

- - US intelligence report shows war drive against Iran based on lies
- - Two-Thirds of Israelis Oppose Attack on Iran: Poll
- - Habeas Corpus War for Guantanamo Prisoners
- - Legal Action by Inmates Could Close Guantanamo

C.I.A. Admits It Destroyed Tapes of Harsh Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: December 6, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 ­ The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects ­ including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody ­ to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and their destruction raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information from the courts and from the presidentially appointed Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program. It was not clear who within the C.I.A. authorized the destruction of the tapes, but current and former government officials said it had been approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The New York Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish an article in Friday’s newspaper about the destruction of the tapes. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui ­ showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.

General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk,” and that if they were to become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He said in his statement that he was informing agency employees because “the press has learned” about the destruction of the tapes.

General Hayden said in a statement that leaders of Congressional oversight committees were fully briefed on the matter, but some Congressional officials said notification to Congress had not been adequate.

“This is a matter that should have been briefed to the full Intelligence Committee at the time,” an official with the House Intelligence Committee said. “This does not appear to have been done. There may be a very logical reason for destroying records that are no longer needed; however, this requires a more complete explanation. “

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

General Hayden said the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” General Hayden said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” his statement read

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Source: www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/washington/06cnd-intel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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- - US intelligence report shows war drive against Iran based on lies

US intelligence report shows war drive against Iran based on lies
By Bill Van Auken
Published by World Socialist Web Site 5 December 2007

[EXCERPT]

President Bush used a White House press conference Tuesday to defend his administration’s policy of aggression towards Iran. He insisted that new findings by US intelligence agencies that Teheran has no active nuclear weapons program would not change his policy in the slightest.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was issued on Monday, reflecting the assessments made by 16 US spy agencies, reversed the conclusion made two years earlier that Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons and instead claimed the country had “halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.”

It also expressed the opinion that Iran would be unable to produce a nuclear weapon, if it were to attempt to do so, before the year 2015.

These findings constitute a damning indictment of the Bush administration’s relentless fear-mongering in relation to an alleged nuclear threat from Iran. They demonstrate that just as in the buildup to the war against Iraq five years ago, the White House has been engaged in a systematic campaign to drag the American people into another war based on lies.

Nonetheless, Bush seized upon the claims made in the document about a previous arms program to argue that Iran could revive it at any time, using its civilian program to develop fuel for atomic power plants to speed up the building of a bomb.

“What’s to say that they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?” he asked.

Based upon this pretext, he laid out—in terms that directly echoed the rhetoric preceding the unprovoked 2003 US invasion of Iraq—the case for preventive war.

In a heated response to a reporter’s question about the administration’s “credibility gap,” Bush declared at the end of his press conference: “If Iran shows up with a nuclear weapon at some point in time, the world is going to say, ‘What happened to them in 2007? How come they couldn’t see the impending danger? What caused them not to understand that a country that once had a weapons program could reconstitute the weapons program?’”

Asked specifically whether the new intelligence findings meant that Washington would refrain from utilizing a “military option” against Iran, Bush insisted that “all options are on the table.”

While Bush insisted that the NIE bolstered his case for an aggressive policy against Iran and confirmed that policy’s effectiveness, the document had the effect internationally of a political bombshell.

In the first instance, it has apparently scuttled Washington’s attempts to push another round of punishing anti-Iranian sanctions through the United Nations Security Council. “Officially, we will study the document carefully; unofficially, our efforts to build up momentum for another resolution are gone,” a European official involved in sanctions negotiations told the New York Times.

China, which had reportedly bowed to US pressure at a meeting of Security Council members in Paris, now indicated that its position had changed in light of the NIE. Asked whether sanctions were now less likely, China’s ambassador to the UN, Guangya Wang, responded, “I think the council members will have to consider that, because I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed.”

The ambassador of Russia, which has opposed stepped-up sanctions, said that the NIE vindicated Moscow’s position. “We have always been saying there is no proof they are pursuing nuclear weapons,” said Vitaly Churkin.

More significant is the way in which the document serves to discredit not only the White House, but the entire political establishment in America. Just as in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Democratic leadership and the mass media echoed the administration’s lies about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” the media and the Democrats have joined with the Bush administration in attempting to cast a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program as an imminent threat.

In presenting the NIE to the media Monday, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley acknowledged that Bush had been informed about the existence of new intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program as early as last August.


The release of the NIE was met by sanguine assertions in the media that its findings had essentially defused the danger of war. The Washington Post reported that the document’s findings could “take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his [Bush’s] presidency.” The New York Times speculated that “the zeal for another military conflict has diminished.”

But Bush’s statements Tuesday followed National Security Adviser Hadley’s reiteration Monday of the US president’s threat of World War III. “The international community has to understand that if we want to avoid a situation where we either have to accept Iran on the road to a nuclear weapon, with a path to a nuclear weapon, or the possibility of having to use force to stop it, with all the connotations of World War III, then we need to step up the diplomacy,” the national security advisor stated.

The threat of another, bloodier war remains real and present. Its source lies not in a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program, but in mounting inter-imperialist conflicts and, above all, the predatory drive by American capitalism to offset its economic decline by utilizing military force.

Washington remains determined to assert its hegemony over the vast energy resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It has launched two wars in the last six years to realize this goal, and there is every reason to believe that it is still preparing a third.

The link between a threatened US attack on Iran and the potential for a third world war is based not on the alleged spread of nuclear weapons, but rather the increasing tensions generated by the US attempts to establish a stranglehold over a region upon which its principal economic rivals—Western Europe, China and Japan—depend for energy resources.

For the complete article, see:
www.wsws.org/articles/2007/dec2007/nie-d05.shtml

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- - Two-Thirds of Israelis Oppose Attack on Iran: Poll

Published on Thursday, December 6, 2007 by Agence France Presse
Two-Thirds of Israelis Oppose Attack on Iran: Poll

JERUSALEM - Two-thirds of Israelis oppose their country launching on its own a military attack against nuclear installations in arch-foe Iran, said a poll published on Thursday.1206 01

When asked “should Israel alone attack the Iranian nuclear installations,” 67.2 percent said no, while 20.9 percent said yes and 11.9 percent had no opinion, said the survey aired on public radio.

The poll questioned people after the publication of a bombshell intelligence report in the United States earlier in the week, which said Tehran had frozen its atomic weapons programme in 2003.

Israel has vowed to keep up its diplomatic offensive against Iran’s contested nuclear programme despite the report, saying it believes Tehran has probably restarted an atomic weapons programme.

Widely thought to be the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear power, Israel considers Iran its top enemy following repeated statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map.

Thursday’s poll was carried out by Shivuk Panorama marketing group, questioning 562 people, and had a 4.5-percentage point margin of error.

Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse
Also posted at www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/06/5639/

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- - Habeas Corpus War for Guantanamo Prisoners

Gitmocourtweb
Attorneys Ask Supreme Court to Restore the Right to Habeas Corpus
for Guantanamo Prisoners
Published by Democracy Now!

On Wednesday, attorneys for prisoners at Guantanamo called on the Supreme Court to restore the Constitution and grant the prisoners habeas corpus—the right to challenge their imprisonment before a judge. “All have been confined at Guantanamo for almost six years, yet not one has had meaningful notice of the factual grounds of their detention,” said former Solicitor General Seth Waxman in his oral arguments.

Guest:
Vincent Warren,
Executive Director of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Washington, D.C., where the Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in a case challenging the Bush administration’s jailing of hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners without charge or trial. At issue is an appeals court ruling denying prisoners the writ of habeas corpus—the right to challenge their imprisonment before a judge. Lawyers for the prisoners argue the ruling is unconstitutional and the Bush administration’s military tribunal system, an inadequate alternative.

The session marked the third time since 2004 the Supreme Court took up a challenge to Guantanamo detentions. The court ruled against the Bush administration both previous times. In 2004, the court said federal courts have jurisdiction over cases filed from Guantanamo. Two years later, the court struck down the Bush administration’s initial military tribunal system for trying selected prisoners. That decision led to the establishment of a new tribunal system endorsed by Congress just over a year ago.

Representing the prisoners was Seth Waxman, the former Solicitor General under President Bill Clinton. In his opening statement, Waxman said Guantanamo prisoners are being denied their basic legal rights.

SETH WAXMAN: The Petitioners in these cases have three things in common. First, all have been confined at Guantanamo for almost six years, yet not one has ever had meaningful notice of the factual grounds of detention or a fair opportunity to dispute those grounds before a neutral decision-maker. Two, under the decision below, they have no prospect of getting that opportunity. And three, each maintains, as this court explained in Rasul, that he is, quote, “innocent of all wrongdoing.”

Now, the government contends that these men are detainable, and the facts of these thirty-seven cases differ, and it may well that be that an adjudicatory process that preserves the core features of common law habeas would reveal perhaps that some of these petitioners are lawfully detainable. But limited DTA review of the structurally flawed CSRT process cannot provide any reliable examination of the executive’s asserted basis for detaining these petitioners, let alone an adequate substitute for traditional habeas review.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the Supreme Court hearing, I am joined by Vincent Warren. He is executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the group representing Guantanamo prisoners. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Vince.

VINCENT WARREN: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of the case yesterday and the questioning, the line of questioning of the Supreme Court justices.

VINCENT WARREN: Well, the significance of the case is that the Supreme Court is really going to figure out whether in this country we have a king that’s not bound by the rule of law and someone who can lock people up indefinitely for the rest of their lives perhaps just on his say-so alone, or whether we have a president that is bound by the rule of law and by the Constitution.

The issue here was that the President and the Congress had said that there was no habeas corpus that extended—constitutional habeas corpus that extended to the detainees. Our argument was that the Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended, and therefore, by not extending habeas to the detainees, that that’s exactly what the President and Congress did.

The next step is, if the Supreme Court agrees with that, which we’re thinking they’re likely to do, the next question is whether the procedures that were passed by the Detainee Treatment Act are an adequate substitute for habeas corpus. And, of course, we’re saying that they’re not, because it’s essentially a sham kangaroo court and a court review that only asks the question of whether the military complied with its own procedures, and it’s not a meaningful review of the military proceedings whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: Prisoner attorney Seth Waxman also cited the case of Murat Kurnaz, who was held for more than four years, despite US acknowledgment of his innocence. Declassified documents show the military tribunal overseeing Kurnaz’s case ignored explicit evidence showing US intelligence had exonerated him. During his imprisonment, Kurnaz says he suffered severe torture. He was finally released in August 2006, nearly five years after his capture. In his closing arguments, Waxman said Kurnaz was able to go free because he was granted the rare privilege of an attorney.

SETH WAXMAN: Mr. Kurnaz is the other petitioner who is discussed in her brief. He was a petitioner in this court, but he has since been released by the government because the fact that he had what the CSRTs won’t give him, which is a lawyer. He was told, two years after he was detained—he’s a German permanent resident—he was told at his CSRT, as many of these individuals were not, that he was being held because he associated with a known terrorist. And he was told the name. He was told that he associated with somebody called Selcuk Bilgin, who, the government contended, was (a) a terrorist, who was—had blown himself up while Mr. Kurnaz was in detention—may I simply finish this account—while he was in detention and in a suicide bombing. And all that Mr. Kurnaz could say at his CSRT, where he had no lawyer and had no access to information, was, “I never had any reason to suspect he was a terrorist.”

Well, when the government, in the habeas proceedings, filed its factual return in Judge Green’s court, it filed as its factual return the CSRT record. His counsel saw that accusation. Within twenty-four hours, his counsel had affidavits not only from the German prosecutor, but from the supposedly deceased Mr. Bilgin, who is a resident of Dresden, never involved in terrorism and fully getting on with his life. That’s what—and that evidence would not have been allowed in under DTA review. It wouldn’t have been in the CSRT, and it won’t come in under DTA review. And that’s why it’s inadequate.


AMY GOODMAN: That was Seth Waxman, the former Solicitor General under President Clinton. He was making the oral arguments on behalf of the prisoners. Vince Warren, our guest, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The importance of this argument, Vince?

VINCENT WARREN: It’s critically important, because that piece of the argument shows precisely why habeas corpus—and that is a proceeding in which you have a lawyer, where you have counsel, where you can present evidence on your own behalf, where you learn the details of the evidence against you—that is why what we’re fighting for is so critically important, because besides being able to determine issues of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, when the government says that there is a terrorist that you’re known to have associated with and who is dead now, and you’re in a proceeding where you don’t have that information and you can’t follow up on it, you don’t have the ability to say, “My goodness! This person is not dead, and he’s not a terrorist,” and that person can be the basis for your release. When the government says—accuses you of something that is simply not true, the basic tenet of our justice system is for you to have an opportunity to challenge that. And that’s what’s missing from the kangaroo court proceedings that the Bush administration has put into effect.

AMY GOODMAN: Solicitor General Paul Clement argued the Bush administration’s case. In an exchange with Justice Stephen Breyer, Clement was challenged on whether current procedures give prisoners any room to challenge their imprisonment.

JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: Suppose that you are from Bosnia, and you are held for six years in Guantanamo, and the charge is that you helped al-Qaeda, and you’ve had your hearing before the CSRT. And now you go to the D.C. circuit, and here’s what you say: “The CSRT is all wrong. Their procedures are terrible. But, Judge, for purposes of argument, I concede their procedures are wonderful, and I also can conclude it reached a perfectly good result.” OK? So you concede it, for argument’s sake. But what you want to say is: “Judge, I don’t care how good those procedures are. I’m from Bosnia. I’ve been here six years. The Constitution of the United States does not give anyone the right to hold me six years in Guantanamo without either charging me or releasing me, in the absence of some special procedure in Congress for preventive detention.” That’s the argument I want to make. I don’t see anything in this CSRT provision that permits me to make that argument. So I’m asking you: Where can you make that argument?

PAUL CLEMENT: I’m not sure that he can make that argument, Justice Breyer.

JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: Exactly.

PAUL CLEMENT: I’m not sure he can make—

JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: If he cannot make that argument, how does this become an equivalent to habeas, since that happens to be the argument that a large number of these 305 people would like to make?

AMY GOODMAN: Solicitor General Paul Clement and Justice Stephen Breyer. Vince Warren, this line of argument?

VINCENT WARREN: This was a very interesting line of argument. What Justice Breyer was doing was setting up a hypothetical. And this was around the CSRT process. And just to remind folks, the CSRT process is one in which the detainee does not have a lawyer, cannot present evidence on his own, cannot see the evidence against him, the classified evidence, which is troubling enough. But what Justice Breyer is saying: let’s assume that that doesn’t matter and that you are in the position of one of the petitioners in this case, someone from Bosnia who was not picked up on the battlefield, and you simply want to make the constitutional argument that under the US Constitution the President cannot detainee me for six years without giving me a trial or releasing me.

And Justice Breyer asked Mr. Clement: can a petitioner—and namely, one of the petitioners in this case—can they make that basic argument? And Mr. Clement had to say no, because the CSRT and the Detainee Treatment Act process does not have a provision to allow for release, as far as the statute goes. And that’s a tremendous problem. And what that means is, under the proceedings, all a detainee can do is determine whether the—or all the judge can do is determine whether the proceedings went according to the military’s plan, but you cannot assert broad constitutional questions about whether the President had the right to detain you in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking now at the Washington Post, since we’re in Washington, D.C., and it says Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito were the most skeptical of Waxman’s arguments. Scalia asked Waxman if he could name one single case in the nation’s history or in 500 years of English law that would extend the writ to foreigners detained outside the country. Waxman responded that the answer was a resounding yes, but nothing he produced satisfied Scalia, who repeatedly returned to the question. Vince Warren?

VINCENT WARREN: That’s exactly what happened. It was interesting. Seth Waxman listed off—and I didn’t count them, but it was very close to fifteen or twenty cases in multiple jurisdictions in different countries in which courts, going back close to 400 years, had cited the precise principle that was at issue in the case, and Justice Scalia was not at all satisfied. And I think Mr. Waxman tried three or four times to satisfy him, but it simply wasn’t happening.

But, you know, it’s a red herring, in a large sense, because the justices that were not particularly moved were justices that were in the minority of the Rasul decision in 2004, and the majority in that decision felt quite clearly that the rights at issue really did extend to the people in Guantanamo. And in fact, a number of justices, after the back-and-forth with Justice Scalia, said, “Well, it seems to me that we’ve reached that question before, and we need to move past it.”

AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Kennedy is considered a swing vote here. He was focusing on what are practical solutions.

VINCENT WARREN: Yes. Justice Kennedy is considered someone whose vote is key. Of course, as we know, we need to win this—or anybody needs to win the case by a majority, which would be a minimum of five people. He was focusing on practical considerations, as far as I could tell, in the argument.

You know, the question, I think, with Justice Kennedy is whether he’s comfortable moving forward, making a broad pronouncement about the right of habeas corpus extending to the detainees, number one; number two, determining that the CSRT process and the DTA review process is not a substitute for suspended habeas corpus. And then the question that remains is, what is the Supreme Court going to do? Are they going to return it to the lower courts with specific instructions how to move forward, which would be optimal because the right of habeas corpus is supposed to be a speedy right, and it’s been six years, or is he going—or is the court going to return it to the district court, the lower courts, to figure out what to do, which would take substantially longer than if the Supreme Court took the bull by the horns?

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Vince Warren, the Supreme Court has considered this twice before. What’s going to make three any different?

VINCENT WARREN: Well, the first case was an issue that was closer to this. The second case focused on military tribunals and not the DTA process, although they were important decisions in the second case – that’s the Hamdan case—and most notably, the Center for Constitutional Rights position that the Geneva Conventions did apply to the detainees at Guantanamo, and the court did rule that way.

This case is going to be potentially different, in large part because of the plaintiffs themselves. And there are thirty-seven plaintiffs, most of whom were not found on the battlefield. There were a number of plaintiffs that were from Afghanistan that were sold to the US through bounties. There are six detainees that were from Bosnia that actually had no connection to the battlefield at all and were turned over to the US by Bosnian governments. And so, the question here is not a question of, is the government trying to release the worst of the worst; it’s for people who have had no connection to the war on terror and who are asserting that they’re factually innocent.

Do they have an opportunity to do that under these procedures? And I think the answer is clearly no, and I think that might lead the court to push forward with a very broad pronouncement. And hopefully Congress and the President won’t continue to sidestep the Supreme Court ruling.

AMY GOODMAN: Vince Warren, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Vince Warren is executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

For transcript source, and to watch or listen to this program, see:
www.democracynow.org/2007/12/6/supreme_court_considers

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- - Legal Action by Inmates Could Close Guantanamo
Published Thursday, December 6, 2007 by The Independent/UK
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3226420.ece
also posted:
www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/06/5654/



3) Stop Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain

- - Poison From Depleted Uranium Munitions Site Lingers

Stop Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain
Comments by theWestern Shoshone National Council
on the United States Department of Energy
Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement
for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of
Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level
Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain

Las Vegas, Nevada
December 3, 2007

Western Shoshone National Council
7231 S. Eastern Avenue, Box 107
Las Vegas, NV 89119

My name is Ian Zabarte for the Western Shoshone National Council. The SEIS does not include an understanding or analysis from a culturally appropriate tribal perspective. So, I will provide one.

Many of early treaties were negotiated hastily under pressure of encroaching settlements and outbreaks of violence. Many Indian tribes accepted inadequate compensation. Many Indian tribes joined the rebel armies during the American Civil War. The Western Shoshone Nation allied itself with the Republic of the United States by in the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley allowing for the shipment of gold east to pay for the Union’s war and ultimate victory against the South. The State of Nevada was birthed under the blanket of aid and comfort that the Western Shoshone Nation provided. The treaty is in “full force and effect,” a fact confirmed in 1989 by Reno Federal District Judge, Bruce R. Thompson, in the Dann Case.

In the 1863 the Western Shoshone Nation was strong. The US sought the purchase of specific rights of access and agreed to pay for damage caused to the ownership interests of the Western Shoshone Nation. In 1861 the US Congress enacted the Nevada Enabeling Act excluding jurisdiction and Indian property from inclusion in Nevada:

“That nothing in this act contained shall be construed to impair the rights of person or property now pertaining to the Indians in said Territory, so long as such rights shall remain unextinguished by treaty between the United States and such Indians, or to include any territory which, by treaty with any Indian tribe, is not, without the consent of said tribe, to be included within the territorial limits or jurisdiction of any State or Territory; but all such territory shall be excepted out of the boundaries and constitute no part of the Territory of Nevada…

The Western Shoshone Nation is not subject to US jurisdiction. In 1883 the Nevada Supreme Court in State v. M’Kenney (18 Nev. 182) stated as much:

Where one Indian belonging to a tribe which is recognized and treated with by the government, having its chief and tribal laws, kills another of the same tribe, both parties being under the authority and subjection of such, tribal laws, the courts of this state, under its general criminal laws, have no jurisdiction of the of­fense…and since our organic act provides that the rights of person or property now pertaining to the Indians shall not be impaired, so long as they remain unextinguished by treaty between the United States and such Indians, it follows that the author ties of the Tribe alone have the right to take cognizance of the crime.”

Land ownership, protected by a legal title, is a hallmark of western civilization. As it surveyed the Public Domain, the US began transferring title by right it obtained in land cessions from enabling legislation of territorial governments or treaties with Indians. The current regulatory authority for administration of public lands has no purchase power or authority to transfer ownership of property from the Western Shoshone Nation to the US.

Under 10 CFR 63 Land Ownership and Control the DOE is required to have ownership, jurisdiction and control of interest in land used as a repository (§ 63.121). The SEIS claims the Indian Claims Commission process, a quasi-judicial process and the Dann Case prove US title. If such is the process, judicial legislation, then it is suspect and the current claim of ownership by the DOE through federal land management statues is a fraud to control Yucca Mountain to achieve through force what cannot be done in fair and honorable dealings with a smaller nation. The Nazi used similar processes to pursue their goal of domination after signing treaties of peace and non-aggression with neighbors.

We are afraid of the prospect of nuclear waste in our country and fear the aggressive process deployed so forcefully that we are helpless to resist. The only role for Indian tribes is the removal of archeological resources (SEIS 11.3, Table 11-1). We live with uncertainty and fear about a process that requires removal of our cultural ties to our land.

When nuclear weapons are developed in our country our people are not protected. We find our own understanding of death and illness known to be plausible from exposure to radiation. We educate ourselves considering lifestyle differences that likely contribute to our adverse health consequences through unique exposure pathway related to our culture.

We are certainly alone in the defense of our nation against the super power of the US.

After nine years from seeking affected tribe status the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe was certified as an affected in July of this year 2007 under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. However, nearly six month later, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe is refused funding to conduct its own oversight and monitoring of the DOE activities and adequately prepare for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process. The State of Nevada is funded. Many counties are funded but, not the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe. This is another disgustingly shameful example of discrimination by the DOE.

We are a special population with unique vulnerabilities. Unlike the US, the Western Shoshone Nation does have a national ethnic identity. Our cultural identity as a people is more important than US nuclear development and profit for the nuclear industry. Our culture is our strength as a people and is the wealth of our nation. The DOE study for the identification of cultural objects attempted to address how the DOE deals with Native American holistic relationships in the Yucca Mountain region. A tribal study group was created by the DOE. Recommendation were proffered by researchers and the tribal study participants then told they should accept the recommendations. The researchers understood that the recommendation they offered violated Native American traditional religious beliefs. The researchers themselves provided the outcomes of the process they conceived and call, "cultural triage," to support the DOE Yucca Mountain project.

The work triage is of French origin. It denotes, "The action of sorting according to quality". When applied by the US for nuclear development on a living culture, “cultural triage” is genocide…A violation of the UN Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide and the Proxmire Act, the US enactments of the UN Convention.

I have a responsibility to humanity to end the use of this process in the SEIS. So do you.

A moral people with ethical scientists cannot condone the use of such practices benefit of the nuclear industry.

Transportation of waste to Yucca Mountain would place a disproportionate burden upon the Western Shoshone Nation and has not been addressed in the SEIS. It is environmental racism. Special effects or stigma related impacts to Native Americans are not addressed in the SEIS or the Transportation EIS. Tribes along all transportation corridors and especially those with tourism based economies and gaming facilities must be assessed for stigma related impacts that may cause irreparable harm to tribal economies from a transportation accidents.

These comments will be forwarded to the United Nations Human Rights Commission—Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the European Parliament, Commission on Human Rights, the Organization of American States, Human Rights Commission and the organization For Security and Cooperation in Europe for use by those entities investigating human rights abuse committed against the Western Shoshone Nation.

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Please do what you can……… Please let your voices be heard!

The Department of Energy’s website, as well as the color glossy environmental impact reports on the Nuclear Waste Repository and Transportation plan, sugar-coats this deadly proposed operation. Health and environmental impacts of this massive transportation and dumping plan will be felt across the nation and especially in the tribal and poor communities. Many concerns are not addressed, beginning with the fact that this is not U.S. land. It is Western Shoshone land, recognized by the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, which the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has recently mandated that the US must freeze, desist and stop any further destructive activities on Shoshone lands. Until the past is corrected and the present stage of land rights is settled, no licenses should be issued for future operations. Furthermore, there is no procedure nor funding specified for the inevitable "accidents" inherent in transporting this deadly material across the nation and storing it in a mountain moving on active fault lines over a major aquifer. Talking points and further information is available at: www.h-o-m-e.org/Yucca/index.htm.

To review Yucca Mountain history, read the attached copy of Cheney's "Nuclear Fuel management and Disposal Act" submitted to Bush on April 5, 2006. The legislation to construct this travesty has already been passed. We each need to contact our Congress people to insist that this be repealed. The action in question today is to stop the issuing of the license to proceed with the construction and implementation of this madness!

Also, check out www.InyoYucca.org for their excellent recent impacts assessment report and Matt Gaffney's article in E Magazine.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Fax questions &/or comments to: (800) 967-0739
Call in to: (800) 967-3477
Questions and comments may also be posted on the
Radioactive Waste Management website: www.ocrwm.doe.gov
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Submit written comments on or before Jan. 10, 2008.
Talking points, Yucca Mtn. for Dummies and contact
info are available at: www.h-o-m-e.org/Yucca/index.htm.

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- - Poison From Depleted Uranium Munitions Site Lingers

Published on Thursday, December 6, 2007 by The Albany Times-Union (New York)
Poison From Depleted Uranium Munitions Site Lingers
New study shows people who lived near or worked at former munitions factory in Colonie have depleted uranium in their bodies
by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

COLONIE, NY - Former workers at a Cold War-era munitions plant and nearby residents still carry traces of toxic depleted uranium in their bodies, a team of scientists said Wednesday.1206 03

The findings, unveiled at a news conference, seem to contradict an earlier assessment by the federal government that deemed it impossible to measure contamination because it had been so long since the emissions ended.

Contrary to that 2004 assessment by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the scientists from England and the University at Albany say they can now show that more than two decades later, people still carry the radioactive metal in their bodies.

The state shuttered the former NL Industries plant in 1984.

Because the contamination can still be detected, a study could be done to track down the thousands of people who could have been exposed, the researchers said. But additional financial resources are needed to pay for the pricey tests, they said.

“Our new work, using better methodology, shows that we can overcome this difficulty,” said Randall Parrish, a professor at the University of Leicester.

The findings will soon be published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Neighbors and former employees have demanded more detailed analysis of the cancers, immune disorders and other illnesses they say have plagued their families.

Almost three months ago, the Army Corps of Engineers completed the major phase of its $190 million cleanup at the former plant at 1130 Central Ave., originally operated by the National Lead Co.

Now, the scientists and members of an activist group, Community Concerned about NL Industries, are calling for federal funding to study the scope and effects of the contamination.

“There’s never been a careful study of a population known to be exposed to depleted uranium,” said David Carpenter of the Institute for Health and the Environment at UAlbany. “Somebody needs to step in and really answer the question, ‘What are the health effects?’ ”

A spokesman for Gov. Eliot Spitzer said the report “should prompt the federal government to do more testing and monitoring.

“We support the community’s request and urge the Army Corps of Engineers to address these serious concerns,” said the spokesman, Michael Whyland.

Previous cancer studies by the state Department of Health, activists said, were overly broad and inconclusive.

An estimated 5 to 10 metric tons of uranium dust was spewed from the plant’s smokestacks between the late 1950s and early 1980s as it manufactured armor-piercing projectiles and burned the waste in a furnace.

Parrish has also tested British soldiers believed to have been exposed on battlefields to depleted uranium weapons. The weapons produce dust on impact, leading some to believe it could be linked to illnesses known collectively as Gulf War syndrome.

In about 800 tests of soldiers, Parrish said he was hard-pressed to detect a single urine sample containing depleted uranium. In Colonie, all five former NL employees tested positive at “very high levels.” About two dozen people were tested in all.

Roughly 20 percent of the residents or nearby workers also tested positive at lesser levels, Parrish said. The scientists cautioned that the small size of their study prevents extrapolating the results to a wider population, but it provides compelling evidence that more research needs to be done.

“A lot of my co-workers died young,” said Mike Aidala, 70, who worked at the plant from 1958 to 1980, starting as a janitor and working his way up. “Whether the plant was the reason, I’ll never know.”

Aidala, who also is an Albany County legislator, was among those who tested positive for depleted uranium.

Tony Impellizzeri, 59, who grew up on Yardboro Avenue just behind the plant, said he knows about 45 people in the neighborhood stricken with cancer. Impellizzeri said he hopes the current research will prompt action, unlike previous instances “where nothing seems to happen.”

The scientists also said they found depleted uranium in dust in four buildings around the 11.2-acre site — in some cases at levels that exceed the Army Corps’ cleanup standard for soil.

The extent of the contamination in other buildings is not clear, and the danger it poses could depend on whether that dust is disturbed, said John G. Arnason, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at UAlbany.

The Army Corps has finished removing contaminated soil from the site and has submitted a plan to state environmental regulators to monitor groundwater. That plan could be ready for public comment by spring, said James Moore, the project’s manager for the Army Corps.

Moore said he had not been briefed on the research and noted that the Army Corps had not been charged with cleaning inside neighboring buildings.

In the 1980s, the Department of Energy cleaned about 53 neighboring properties, but the work was limited mostly to the exterior of the buildings and yards.

“It was like Love Canal,” Impellizzeri said. “They should have knocked down all these buildings on Yardboro Avenue and started over again.”

Carleo-Evangelist can be reached at 454-5445 or by e-mail at jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com.

© 2007 The Times Union
www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/06/5643/

For FN’s updated archives on this topic, see:
Uranium Munitions
devastation to our planet and humanity



4) Financial Crisis on the Brink of Collapse

- - US Judge Issues A Warrant For Paulson’s Arrest?
- - Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis

U.S. JUDGE ISSUES A WARRANT FOR PAULSON’S ARREST
By Christopher Story FRSA, Editor and Publisher, International Currency Review,
World Reports Limited, London and New York: WorldReports.org

[EXCERPT]

UPDATE, 4TH DECEMBER 2007

As reported below, the warrant issued for Paulson's arrest on Friday was a 'performance' warrant (subject to performance). Quick as a flash, having advised the Judge, on being served the warrant, that he (Paulson) had not been aware that President George W. Bush Jr. had authorised the Wanta payment, Paulson said he would contact the White House. However the Federal Judge preferred to hear the matter from the President himself and, according to our very best sources, the Judge duly telephoned the President who said: 'Yeah, the payment is authorised for Monday', or words, to that effect. Of course, President 43 then, on Monday, reneged on his undertaking to the Judge, as there has been no indication of payment having been made whatsoever. This was confirmed to the Editor from multiple sources. The overall situation has thus precipitated a flurry of legal and WCJ activity concerning which we currently have only partial information, which requires further confirmation; so we are not reporting it at present.

THE ‘MAIN ENEMY’ (BRITAIN AND AMERICA) FACING DISASTER
The state of affairs that will be described below, containing the latest Wantagate intelligence available to the Editor of International Currency Review, represents an outline description of the worst financial and economic crisis in world history, brought about by blackmailing traitors at the highest level of the US Government, working secretly for foreign powers, with the intention of:

1. Destroying the US and British financial economies.

2. Buying back their depressed assets with illegally stashed, untaxed stolen fiat money held offshore, at firesale prices (the Fascist control model).

The Governments involved in this operation are led by Germany (via the Nazi strategic continuum, Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD), Dachau), through DVD’s bank, Deutsche Bank, aided and abetted by France these days under Nicolas Sarkozy, a Zionazi Mossad operative, and watched from the sidelines (as far as we can tell) by the disgusted Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s ‘former’ USSR, and by the severely wronged Chinese authorities (whose position is almost impregnable, enabling them to buy up US assets with real money).

HISTORICAL AND GEOPOLITICAL BACKGROUND TO TODAY’S CRISIS
In what follows it should be specifically recalled that National Socialism (Nazism) and International Socialism (Communism) are dialectical ‘opposites’ (Thesis, Antithesis) manipulated by globalist controllers to yield the intended Synthesis (global hegemony).

• We have on several occasions illustrated this reality in our publications by displaying a Labour Day medal used by the Nazis in the early years of the last century. It depicts a bas-relief head of Karl Marx, a hammer and sickle, and a swastika, all on the same image.

ANGELA MERKEL IS A ‘FORMER’ COMMUNIST AGITPROP OPERATIVE
Therefore, the political antecedents of German Chancellor Angela Merkel DO NOT CONTRADICT the political pedigree of the Nazi strategic deception continuum, Deutsche Vertiedigungs Dienst, in the slightest, in this context. Frau Angela Merkel was an activist in the East German Communist Party, and while she was attending Karl Marx University in East Berlin, she was the Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda in the Communist Youth Wing operating in that establishment.

The East German secret police, the STASI, operated throughout the Cold War period as a foil and substitute for the pan-German Nazi Abwehr (military counterintelligence), today’s DVD. Merkel is almost certainly a ‘former’ STASI operative. Hence her recent visit to see George W. Bush Jr. in Texas, will have presented no anomalous political obstacles at all for either party.

The entire world therefore faces an imminent financial and economic catastrophe of historically unprecedented proportions, as Her Majesty The Queen feared when she told the G-8 Meeting last June that the Wanta payment should be made 'for the sake of the whole of humanity'; and we will now explain both how what the Queen feared is coming about, and why it is obvious that this is an intentional, long-planned take-down of the complacent, corrupt twin economies of the ‘Main Enemy’ perpetrated by foreign powers masquerading as ‘friends’ but which are seeking to overturn the outcome of the two World Wars, with the assistance of US traitors at the highest levels.

NAZI STRATEGIC CONTINUUM SPECIFICALLY PREDICTED THIS CRISIS
This outcome was specifically predicted by the Nazi strategists, as we have repeatedly explained – first, in the Madrid Circular Letter intercepted by the Allies en route from the German Geopolitical Centre, Madrid, in the early 1950s, which contained the telling slogan ‘Fur uns ist der Krieg niemals vorbei’ (‘For us the war never ended’); and secondly, in a strategy document seized by the Allies in 1945, which summarised pan-German long-range strategy with the slogan ‘We intend to build the Thousand-Year Reich upon the ruins of the United States’, an intention obliquely promulgated by the operating head of DVD, George H. W. Bush Sr., when he referred in 1991 to ‘a thousand points of light’ and promulgated the ‘New World Order’.

For the complete article, see: http://worldreports.org/news/103_u.s._judge_issues_a_

For extensive archives from World Reports, see: WorldReports.org/news

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- - Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published by the NYTimes on December 3, 2007

The financial crisis that began late last summer, then took a brief
vacation in September and October, is back with a vengeance.

How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.

This time, market players seem truly horrified — because they’ve suddenly realized that they don’t understand the complex financial system they created.

Before I get to that, however, let’s talk about what’s happening right now.

Credit — lending between market players — is to the financial markets what motor oil is to car engines. The ability to raise cash on short notice, which is what people mean when they talk about “liquidity,” is an essential lubricant for the markets, and for the economy as a whole.

But liquidity has been drying up. Some credit markets have effectively closed up shop. Interest rates in other markets — like the London market, in which banks lend to each other — have risen even as interest rates on U.S. government debt, which is still considered safe, have plunged.

“What we are witnessing,” says Bill Gross of the bond manager Pimco, “is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August.”

The freezing up of the financial markets will, if it goes on much longer, lead to a severe reduction in overall lending, causing business investment to go the way of home construction — and that will mean a recession, possibly a nasty one.

Behind the disappearance of liquidity lies a collapse of trust: market players don’t want to lend to each other, because they’re not sure they’ll be repaid.

In a direct sense, this collapse of trust has been caused by the bursting of the housing bubble. The run-up of home prices made even less sense than the dot-com bubble — I mean, there wasn’t even a glamorous new technology to justify claims that old rules no longer applied — but somehow financial markets accepted crazy home prices as the new normal. And when the bubble burst, a lot of investments that were labeled AAA turned out to be junk.

Thus, “super-senior” claims against subprime mortgages — that is, investments that have first dibs on whatever mortgage payments borrowers make, and were therefore supposed to pay off in full even if a sizable fraction of these borrowers defaulted on their debts — have lost a third of their market value since July.

But what has really undermined trust is the fact that nobody knows where the financial toxic waste is buried. Citigroup wasn’t supposed to have tens of billions of dollars in subprime exposure; it did. Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool, which acts as a bank for the state’s school districts, was supposed to be risk-free; it wasn’t (and now schools don’t have the money to pay teachers).

How did things get so opaque? The answer is “financial innovation” — two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investors’ hearts.

O.K., to be fair, some kinds of financial innovation are good. I don’t want to go back to the days when checking accounts didn’t pay interest and you couldn’t withdraw cash on weekends.

But the innovations of recent years — the alphabet soup of C.D.O.’s and S.I.V.’s, R.M.B.S. and A.B.C.P. — were sold on false pretenses. They were promoted as ways to spread risk, making investment safer. What they did instead — aside from making their creators a lot of money, which they didn’t have to repay when it all went bust — was to spread confusion, luring investors into taking on more risk than they realized.

Why was this allowed to happen? At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs. We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime crisis.

And free-market orthodoxy dies hard. Just a few weeks ago Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, admitted to Fortune magazine that financial innovation got ahead of regulation — but added, “I don’t think we’d want it the other way around.” Is that your final answer, Mr. Secretary?

Now, Mr. Paulson’s new proposal to help borrowers renegotiate their mortgage payments and avoid foreclosure sounds in principle like a good idea (although we have yet to hear any details). Realistically, however, it won’t make more than a small dent in the subprime problem.

The bottom line is that policy makers left the financial industry free to innovate — and what it did was to innovate itself, and the rest of us, into a big, nasty mess.

Source: www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/opinion/03krugman.html


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