Ex-Defense Official Assails Colleagues Over Run-Up to War

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush's policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."

Although he acknowledges "serious errors" in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that "even the best planning" cannot avoid all problems in wartime.

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Peres says Israel Will Not Act Alone on Iran

Editor's note: Israel shrouded its nuclear program in secrecy, repeatedly misrepresented its intentions to the international community, received nuclear assistance from benefactors who should have known better and conned U.S. nuclear inspectors.The program gained steam when France agreed to export a nuclear reactor to be situated in Dimona, Israel, after the Jewish state promised to use the plant for peaceful purposes. Who's fooling who?

Israel will not consider unilateral action to stop Iran getting a nuclear bomb, President Shimon Peres was quoted as saying on Saturday.

In an interview with France's Le Figaro newspaper ahead of a trip to Paris next week, Peres said, however, if economic sanctions failed to persuade Iran to stop its contested nuclear program then "non-military options would be used up".

The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Iran to pressure it to suspend uranium enrichment.

The United States and other major powers suspect Iran is enriching uranium as part of a covert effort to develop a nuclear bomb. Iran says it is only interested in civilian nuclear energy.

"I would prefer to stop the development of the bomb without recourse to war.

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NY Times Best-Selling Author: 9/11 Was An Inside Job

Steve Alten, author of The Shell Game,  was on the Alex Jones show yesterday discussing his new book, 9/11 and tactics to defeat the NWO!

The new book is far more than a thriller, it is a MUST-READ cautionary tale that exposes the next 9/11 event a deception that will lead to a retaliatory chemical weapons strike on Iran and the terrorist elements the regime supports. Though the novel is written as fiction, it is filled with all-too-real details provided by insiders in the oil industry, military, and Middle Eastern affairs that extrapolates real events from the past and present that will lead us down a path of self-destruction. Unless we stop the insanity now!

Steve's NY publishers would not touch the book for fear of a backlash!

Mr. Alten goes on to mention that despite being black-balled at speaking events and the like he had to put his career on the line because issues like these are more important that his literary success!

How many people would have the courage to turn away from financial enrichment to help get the truth of 9/11 out to the masses?

We have the power to get Steve onto the main stream media! Between now and Tuesday, if you can, buy two copies of The Shell Game.

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Bush Vetoed Waterboarding Bill

Editor's note: The New World Order needs waterboarding and other torture techniques to get more innocent people (like KSM) to falsely confess to the 9/11 attack as well as upcoming false flag events!

President Bush said today(3-8-08) he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks.

"The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror," Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. "So today I vetoed it," Bush said. The bill provides guidelines for intelligence activities for the year and includes the interrogation requirement. It passed the House in December and the Senate last month.

"This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe," the president said.

Supporters of the legislation say it would preserve the United States' ability to collect critical intelligence and raise country's moral standing abroad.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Congress would work to override Bush's veto next week. "In the final analysis, our ability to lead the world will depend not only on our military might, but on our moral authority," said Pelosi, D-Calif.

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Operation Merlin II

By Gordon Prather / Antiwar

Well, here we go again. "Information" about Iran's alleged nuke weaponization program, turned over to the Secretariat of the International Atomic Energy Agency late last year, was presented last week to the IAEA Board of Governors by IAEA's Deputy Director-General Olli Heinonen.

Iran's Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, who was present, was reportedly enraged that the presentation had been made at all, "forcefully" warning other Board Members "not to go down this path," since most of the allegations involved activities "not directly of a nuclear nature" and, therefore, were "outside the mandate of the IAEA."

In truth, the only "information" that was perhaps directly of a nuclear nature involved "fire sets," devices capable of supplying high-voltage, high-current pulses to multiple detonators, causing them to fire at predetermined times.

Which brings us to the report this week in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, entitled "Who leaked the details of a CIA-Mossad plot against Iran?"

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9/11 and the Future of America

By Peter Dale Scott (excerpt from The Road To 9/11 chap. 15)

9/11 represents a double challenge to the American way of life: the external threat of terrorists attacks and also the internal threat of subversion of the Constitution by cabals and a deep state that are threatening to get out of control. The U.S. faces a fundamental choice of what and of whom to trust. Will we deal with the problem of terrorism primarily by working to resolve issues that provoke conflict and projecting values that the rest of the world will wish to share?

Our will we trust in our own military power and become increasingly a garrison state and empire, conducting more and more of our global strategies in secret and projecting our military and covert strength into further and further corners of the earth?

The cult of secrecy in government, though necessary in some areas, has become counterproductive. On an operational level it makes it easy for special interests to falsify intelligence input and not be corrected. We saw this recently with Ahmed Chalabi's disastrous advice on Iraq, with the false stories linking Iraq to uranium from Niger, and with the hijacker Mohammed Atta. We need to admit that the secret powers of our government helped to create and train this enemy, whose presence is now invoked to further augment the government's secret powers.

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Latin American Crisis "Made In The USA"

Nearly a week after Colombia's cross-border raid against an encampment of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement in neighboring Ecuador, Latin America continues to confront its worst regional diplomatic and military crisis in decades. The US government and mass media have weighed in with unsolicited judgments and advice, attributing the tense standoff between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela to the threat of terrorism to Colombia, the complicity in terrorism on the part of Venezuela and overheated animosities between the respective heads of state of these three countries.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey declared that "it's important to recognize that the events that took place were, in fact, a response to the presence of terrorists." Similarly, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino affirmed that Colombia "was defending itself against terrorism."

This official reaction extends to Colombia-Washington's principal client state in South America and the recipient of some $600 million annually in American military aid-the mantle of the Bush Doctrine, which holds that in the "global war on terrorism" such niceties as respect for sovereign borders and international law no longer apply.

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U.S. Plot to Overthrow Elected Palestinian Government Exposed

The United States plotted the armed overthrow of the Hamas government elected by the Palestinian people in January 2006, according to “The Gaza Bombshell”, an article based on leaked documents and interviews with key players in the Bush administration that was published in the latest edition of the US magazine Vanity Fair.

Vanity Fair called the affair “Iran Contra 2.0”, a reference to the Reagan administration’s funding of the Nicaraguan Contras by covertly selling arms to Iran in contravention of official policy. This latest plot was prepared not by some middle-ranking spies and military personnel, but by the State Department with approval from the very top of the political establishment, including President George W. Bush. It was implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, who has a long history in plotting coups and illegal activities on behalf of US imperialism.

The plan was being prepared and implemented at the same time as Bush publicly professed that the last great ambition of his presidency was to broker a deal that would create a viable Palestinian state, bring peace to the region and further his “freedom agenda” of engineering the election of pro-US regimes throughout the Middle East.

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Sensitive U.S. Military E-mails Sent Astray by Mistake!

A British factory worker has shut down a tourism site he owned at the request of the U.S. air force after he received thousands of e-mails sent to his domain that were meant for military personnel -- among them e-mails with flight plans for Air Force One, the U.S. presidential plane, as well as passwords and military procedures and tactics, according to the BBC.

The news reports about this, if true, leave a lot of questions unanswered -- such as why this information was even being sent over the internet, and unencrypted at that? And how is it possible that this continued for more than seven years before anyone took action?

Gary Sinnott launched a tourism web site in the late 90s to promote his tiny town of Mildenhall (www.mildenhall.com) in Suffolk. Unfortunately, the domain name was a bit too similar to the domain belonging to the Royal Air Force base at Mildenhall (www.mildenhall.af.mil), which is controlled by the U.S. Air Force and houses a number of U.S. squadrons and wings -- among them the refueling wing for U.S. and NATO aircraft traveling in and through Europe.

Almost immediately after launching his tourism site, Sinnott says he began receiving e-mails sent by military personnel that were clearly intended for the .af.mil domain name but were mistakenly sent to his .com domain instead.

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Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier!

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

"What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told THREAT LEVEL. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that."

Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

Pasdar has executed a seven-page affidavit for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, which on Tuesday began circulating the document (.pdf), along with talking points (.doc), to congressional staffers hashing out a Republican proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to phone companies who cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

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Millions of British Airline Passengers Face Mandatory Fingerprinting

For the first time at any airport, the biometric checks will apply to all domestic passengers leaving the terminal, which will handle all British Airways flights to and from Heathrow.

The controversial security measure is also set to be introduced at Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow’s Terminal 1, and many airline industry insiders believe fingerprinting could become universal at all UK airports within a few years.

All four million domestic passengers who will pass through Terminal 5 annually after it opens on March 27 will have four fingerprints taken, as well as being photographed, when they check in.

To ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person, the fingerprinting process will be repeated just before they board the aircraft and the photograph will be compared with their face.

BAA, the company which owns Heathrow, insists the biometric information will be destroyed after 24 hours and will not be passed on to the police.

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U.S. Unprepared for Ongoing Cyberwar, say Top Military & Intelligence Officials

Also see: Pentagon attack last June stole an "amazing amount" of data

The United States is in the midst of a cyberwar and is not prepared to deal with it, top Defense Department and intelligence officials acknowledged this week.

"Cyberwarfare is already here.... It's one of our major challenges," said Defense Deputy Secretary Gordon England on Monday at the annual National Community Service and Legislative Conference of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

"I think cyberattacks are probably analogous to the first time, way back when people had bows and arrows and spears," he said. "And somebody showed up with gunpowder and everybody said, 'Wow. What was that?'"

England made his comments the same day that the Pentagon released a report saying that the 2007 cyberattacks against its networks and those operated by other governments around the world "appear" to come from China.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, Sen. John Thune, D-S.D., asked National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell if the United States was prepared to deal with threats against military and civil networks and information systems.

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Vaccine Autism Case Gets U.S. Government Compensation

The parents of 9 year-old Hannah Poling spoke to the media this week about the US government's landmark decision to pay compensation following their claim that childhood vaccines caused their daughter's autism. The government's sealed decision, made last November, was recently made public on an autism advocacy group website.

The payout, the extent of which is yet to be decided, comes from a federal fund that compensates victims of vaccine-related injuries. The ruling effectively states that Hannah's pre-existing rare mitochondrial disorder had disposed her to autism and this was "significantly aggravated" by the vaccines she received as a toddler eight years ago.

Hannah's father, neurologist Dr Jon Poling who practised in Athens, Georgia, told the press on Thursday that he and his wife, Terry, a registered nurse and former trial attorney, were " very pleased" with the decision, reported CNN.

Poling said he and his wife had endured "eight difficult and heartbreaking years since our daughter's injury".

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Lack of Funding Inhibits Crucial Drug Inspections!

AT LEAST 19 people died and hundreds became ill after being given heparin, a blood-thinning drug sold by Baxter International. A belated inspection of the Chinese plant where heparin's active ingredient was processed found "objectional conditions," and recent lab tests revealed an unknown contaminant in batches of the drug. Investigations so far have not identified what precisely caused the allergic reactions. Still, they have exposed major problems with how the Food and Drug Administration runs inspections that, even if not the cause of this particular catastrophe, will certainly lead to one.

Currently, 80 percent of all active drug ingredients come from abroad, but the FDA doesn't know what percentage of foreign manufacturing facilities it has inspected. Many of these plants are in developing countries that don't have infrastructure that meets U.S. safety standards. In response to the heparin case, China said ensuring drug safety is the importing country's responsibility.

The FDA has been scolded about this yawning loophole in drug safety for over a decade but has not acted to fill it. Funding is the main problem.

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GAO Seeks to Review Finances of CIA & Other Intel Agencies!

As he leaves his post as the nation's top auditor, David M. Walker is again asking Congress to give the Government Accountability Office the power to review the finances of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Walker, whose 10-year term as comptroller general concludes Wednesday, is supporting legislation that would give the GAO access to the last major area of the federal government not subject to its audits and investigations.

With some support on Capitol Hill, Walker said he is fighting powerful legislative patrons of intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, who have resisted examinations of how taxpayer dollars are spent.

"Everybody's for accountability in Washington until they're the ones subjected to it," Walker said in an interview. "There are a lot of forces that are vested in the status quo."

The GAO, Congress's investigative arm, has the power to review the finances and management of most government agencies. But the Justice Department issued a ruling in the early 1990s that restricted oversight of the CIA to House and Senate select committees on intelligence.

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GOP Campaign Arm Missing Cash

Authorities investigating possible fraud by a longtime GOP operative have determined that the House Republican campaign committee has lost a substantial sum of money, and several GOP lawmakers believe funds were pilfered from their campaign accounts as well, law enforcement and Capitol Hill sources said yesterday.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans' campaign arm, lost a "significant amount of money," said a law enforcement official who also confirmed that the FBI has begun investigating the committee's longtime treasurer, Christopher J. Ward.

An official close to the NRCC said preliminary reviews of its bank statements and reports to the Federal Election Commission demonstrate clear discrepancies between "what [money] we have and what we should have."

"We don't know if it's a big number or a small number," the official said. "It looks like something was stolen. But we don't have an accurate number. We don't know."

Ward has served as treasurer for dozens of other campaigns and political action committees during a lengthy career as a political operative.

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Operation Merlin: The CIA-Mossad plot against Iran

The Bush administration is prolonging the hunting season against journalists. The latest victim is James Risen, The New York Times reporter for national security and intelligence affairs. About three months ago, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena against him, ordering Risen to give evidence in court. A heavy blackout has been imposed on the affair, with the only hint being that it has to do with sensitive matters of "national security."

But conversations with several sources who are familiar with the affair indicate that Risen has been asked to testify as part of an investigation aimed at revealing who leaked apparently confidential information about the planning of secret Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad missions concerning Iran's nuclear program.

Risen included this information in his book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," which was published in 2006. In the book, he discusses a number of ideas which he says were thought up jointly by CIA and Mossad operatives to sabotage Iran's nuclear capabilities.

One of these ideas was to build electromagnetic devices, smuggling them inside Iran to sabotage electricity lines leading to the country's central nuclear sites. According to the plan, the operation was supposed to cause a series of chain reactions which would damage extremely powerful short circuits in the electrical supply that would have led to failures of the super computers of Iran's nuclear sites

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U.S. Wants to Keep Iraq NIE Secret

US intelligence officials say that the National Intelligence Board -- comprised of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell -- will decide whether to publicly release the new classified estimate on Iraq or keep it secret, Washington Post reported.

The document, scheduled to be delivered to Congress before testimony in early April by Army General David H. Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, and US Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, is an update of a last summer's report, predicting an increasingly precarious political situation in the war-shattered country.

Although McConnell, in internal guidance issued in October, said that his policy was that they "should not be declassified", the intelligence board decided in November to make its assessment on Iran's nuclear program public.

The estimate that confirmed Iran's nuclear program is civilian undermined the Bush administration's position on Tehran.

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Thank You, Ron Paul!

GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul is hinting to supporters that he is ending his long-shot campaign for the presidency.

The Texas Republican congressman addressed supporters in a 7 1/2-minute video on his campaign Web site Thursday night and did not specifically say he was quitting the race.

He said that although victory in the conventional political sense is not available in the presidential race, many victories have been achieved due to the hard work and enthusiasm of his supporters.

He said that he hoped that one day he and his supporters could look back and say his campaign was a significant first step that signaled a change in direction for the country.

Paul said their job now was to plan for the next phase of their effort.

Ron Paul 2008

'Frankenfoods' Giant Monsanto Plays Bully Over Consumer Labeling

Since 1901, Monsanto has brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, Terminator seeds and recombined milk, among other infamous products. But it's currently obsessed with the milk, or, more importantly, the milk labels, particularly those that read "rBST-free" or "rBGH-free." It's not the "BST" or "BGH" that bothers them so much; after all, bovine somatrophin, also known as bovine growth hormone, isn't exactly what the company is known for. Which is to say, it's naturally occurring. No, the problem is the "r" denoting "recombined." There's nothing natural about it. In fact, the science is increasingly pointing to the possibility that recombined milk is -- surprise! -- not as good for you as the real thing.

"Consumption of dairy products from cows treated with rbGH raise a number of health issues," explained Michael Hansen, a senior scientist for Consumers Union. "That includes increased antibiotic resistance, due to use of antibiotics to treat mastitis and other health problems, as well as increased levels of IGF-1, which has been linked to a range of cancers."

For its part, Monsanto is leaning on the crutch of terminology to derail the mounting threat to its bottom line: The consumer-driven revolution against recombined food. And so the St. Louis-based agri-chem giant has launched a war of words in the form of a full-court press to suppress the "rBGH-free" label at the state level. And it's sticking to its guns by obfuscating and indulging in cheap semantics.

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