FYI from BATR

Ever since she earned a widely-expected Pulitzer Prize earlier this month for her Washington Post exclusive on CIA "secret prisons" in Europe, Dana Priest has been attacked by conservative commentators for supposedly turning classified information into a vehicle for undermining the war on terror. Bill Bennett, among others, not only said she did not deserve the Pulitzer, but should be brought up on charges and possibly sent to jail.

This article was prepared to provide a summary of the contents of a book written in 1995 which describes an entirely new class of weapons. The weapons and their effects are described in the following pages. The United States Navy and Air Force have joined with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to build a prototype for a ground based "Star Wars" weapon system located in the remote bush country of Alaska.

Charles Murray, by his own account, should not have written In Our Hands. He identifies a genuine problem; but he himself shows that his plan to solve it is either useless or inferior to a better plan.

Government programs spend billions of dollars to help the poor, but poverty continues. Given the inordinate waste of bureaucratic programs, why not abolish them altogether? Would we not do better instead to give the money that the transfer programs cost directly to the poor?

The former top economist in Bush's Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds, will speak out on the 9/11 inside job at the State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison on Saturday, May 6th. The film Loose Change will be shown, and refreshments served, starting at 1 p.m, and Reynolds will speak at 3:00 p.m.

Politicians and pundits are defending illegal immigration with worn-out myths that can easily be proven wrong.

The play takes place in an unnamed U.S. city. When the curtain rises we see what looks like the inside of a single story, tilt-up concrete industrial building with large vats of chemicals. The air is full of a red mist. We can see vapors rising from the vats and chemicals bubbling out and down their sides. Behind the vats, but visible to us, is a large truck-size open door with a very large and noisy fan partly in front of it that is slowly blowing the red mist out the door where it is picked up by the ocean breezes and carried over nearby homes. In the distance we can see the ocean.

Would you like to know the future the Rockefeller group plans for you? Check out this excerpted quote, from a 50-year old book about the family:

“Rockefeller by no means neglected their program of converting our government into a totalitarian device for looting. The basic plan was published in 1930 by his intimate friend Hoffman Nickerson in his book, the American Rich. Nickerson’s scheme is to nullify the Constitution by converting our Government into an absolute monarchy. He concludes, the only perfect form of government is hereditary absolute monarchy, but it might be wiser at the start not to violate American sentiment by undertaking to impose it openly. The conversion of President to absolute monarch merely requires the elimination of checks and balances on the power of the President that the framers of the Constitution “unwisely” incorporated into it, to convert his role to that of absolute dictator.”

Who remembers Sam Dash? If you were transfixed by the Watergate hearings, the bloodsport initiation of today’s drive-by media, you may remember him as the “highly respected Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee.” Sam Dash’s name is now iconic, celebrated as a model of a principled lawyer.

This morning on CNN, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh addressed the uproar at the highest levels of the U.S. military over plans to launch a massive strike against Iran that would include nuclear weapons:

WHEN A FOREIGN government -- a government which represents the interests of another people -- can covertly control our government, the results will be fatal for some of our citizens and tragic for us all. The foreign government will use the resources of its captive state to further the interests of the foreign people. It will not care if it spends half or all of the treasure of its captive people to advance its aims. The foreign government will not care if the sons and daughters of the captive nation are slaughtered by the thousands, as long as the interests of the foreign people are served.

In normal times one would give little attention to academic polemics unless they have important political consequences. In this case, however, Noam Chomsky is an icon for what stands for the US anti-war movements and intellectual dissent. That he has chosen to absolve the pro-Israel lobby and its affiliated groups and media auxiliaries is an important political event, especially when questions of war and peace hang in the balance, when the majority of Americans oppose the war. Giving a ‘free ride’ to the principle authors, architects and lobbyists in favor of the war, is a positive obstacle to achieving clarity about who we are fighting and why.

An Interview with Jeffrey St. Clair

Jeffrey St. Clair is the co-editor of CounterPunch (online at CounterPunch.org) and the author of numerous books, most recently Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror (Common Courage Press 2006). He recently spoke with me about his latest book.

BEYOND WORDS...LOU DOBBS REFERS TO THE ILLEGALS AS AN INVADING ARMY