contradiction on spy satellite shootdown explanation from usnews: When the Pentagon ordered a Navy ship to shoot down a crippled U.S. spy satellite last February, it claimed the operation was necessary to prevent a harmful fuel from being dispersed in the atmosphere. At the time, critics charged that the Bush administration was using the toxic fuel as an excuse to demonstrate missile-defense and antisatellite capabilities.
Astrophysicist Yousaf Butt obtained U.S. government documents showing that NASA's own analysis concluded that the satellite's fuel tank was expected to burn up completely during re-entry—even though NASA probably overestimated the tank's chances of survival. "Despite its optimistic oversimplifications, the released study indicates that the tank would certainly have demised high up in the atmosphere," Butt, a staff scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, writes in an article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Up to now, U.S. officials had refused to release any of the prelaunch analyses regarding the fuel tank, claiming they contained sensitive information. But Butt says that the newly released documents clearly contradict the official explanation for the shoot-down, which was seen at the time as provocative and risky.
But just in time for a new administration (and the bundles of cash always at the ready for the expanding homeland security market), comes a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform!
According to New Scientist, German electronics giant Siemens has developed software allegedly capable of integrating "...tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs 'intelligence modules'." New Scientist reports that the firm has sold the system to some 60 countries in Europe and Asia. Which countries? Well, Siemens won't say.
gore vidal: US never had democracy from press tv: American essayist Gore Vidal says that despite the US claim that it is making the world safer by perpetuating democracy, the country never had any democracy.
In an exclusive interview with Press Tv correspondent, Vidal said that the United States has never had democracy and the word never was used in the US constitution, Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence.
Vidal also said that America has fallen into the hands of a small group of people that only care about global dominance and making money from US tax payers by waging wars.
9/11 case goes to appeals court from wnyc: Today, a federal appeals court will weigh whether the government illegally usedthe material witness lawin the monthsfollowing Sept. 11. The plaintiff in this case was detained and kept under court supervision for over a year, but was never charged with a crime or asked to testify as a witness in another case.
from 9/11 blogger: In the above video, Peter Dale Scott talks about the futility of engaging with a system that offers no real choice, referencing Gore Vidal, who has said, in various ways, "We only have one political party in the U.S., and that is the property party, which essentially is corporate America, which has two right wings, one called Republican and one called Democrat. I can't say I like either of them." In his book, The Road to 9/11 (which he quotes from in the video), Scott points out that real change in this country is not going to come from the top down. In other words, substituting one representative of the Property Party for another is not going to change anything. Real change in this country will come from the bottom-up, through the networking efforts of grass-roots activists and media activism that currently has its home on the internet...
Yesterday, on DemocracyNow!, former Rep. Cynthia McKinney talked about the disenchantment of the voter who can see through the false paradigm presented to voters by the Property Party...
AMY GOODMAN: How did you go from Democratic Party to Green Party?
CYNTHIA McKINNEY: It’s a very good question, and of course, you know, I have now been to twenty-two states across our country, and I ask people who come to my events to hear me, what exactly was your tipping point? And so, I’ve learned that there ... is a community of people who have found that life is possible outside of the two-party paradigm. They have searched for resolution of issues that are of grave concern to them, and they have not found it within the two-party-system. But that has sometimes meant that they would withdraw from ... the electoral process altogether.
And so, we have a whole huge swath of the potential electorate who don’t even vote at all. And starting in 1968, many of them have said that the treatment (by) the Democratic Party of people, their children basically, who were outside of the Democratic National Convention and who wanted only to express their opposition to the Vietnam War, that was a tipping point for them. Others have ... said that 9/11 truth is a tipping point for them.
Scoop columnist Michael Collins explores the issue of the Property Party, but calls it the "Money Party" in a four-part series at Scoop:
The Money Party is a small group of enterprises and individuals who have most of the money in this country. They use that money to make more money. Controlling who gets elected to public office is the key to more money for them and less for us. As 2008 approaches, The Money Party is working hard to maintain its perfect record.
Perhaps we should call it "Stupor Tuesday", as millions of Americans will be casting votes today, convinced that it means something.
But those are the citizens lucky enough to cast a properly tallied vote. At Mark Crispin Miller's blog, you can read about the theft of the New Hampshire primary, and the perils of easily manipulated electronic voting, lots of problems today across the country on digital machines, but you'd never know it from the Property Party's Press.
Unless you are a die hard conservative voting for Ron Paul, voting Republican is akin to a chicken voting for Col. Sanders. On the other hand, voting for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is also difficult to fathom. OilEmpire.us has a good selection of articles laying bare the paucity of real difference between the two candidates.
It's too bad Willie Nelson isn't running for President.
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