LA Times

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

“New World Order,” which premieres today on the Independent Film Channel, is a film about people battling with phantoms. They are volunteers in an “information war” who see as clearly, as John saw his four Apocalyptic horsemen and seven trumpeting angels, that 9/11 was an “inside job,” that the military-industrial complex killed Kennedy, and that an international “power elite” is plotting to enslave us all, excepting for those it will kill outright.

They are hard to pigeonhole politically, these conspiracy adepts, trusting neither the “socialist Democrats” nor the “fascist Republicans” — Ron Paul seems to be their man, if anyone is — yet sounding as often like ’60s leftist radicals as right-wing militiamen. They take the 1st Amendment as seriously as any card-carrying member of the ACLU, styling themselves muckrakers and speakers of truth to power, often through a bullhorn.

The man with the biggest bullhorn is Alex Jones, an Austin, Texas-based syndicated radio host and maker of such films as “Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement” 116 five-star reviews on Amazon.com and “Martial Law 9-11: The Rise of the Police State,” and the point through which all the strands connect in this unexpectedly affecting, nonjudgmental documentary by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel. Meyer and Neel don’t get in the way of their subjects; there are no talking heads or title cards to contradict their worldview, or even to put it in perspective, only the occasional collision of the theorists’ certain knowledge with others’ actual experience.

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Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of e-mails during the administration of President George W. Bush.

In upholding a 2008 decision by a federal judge in a lawsuit brought by a watchdog group, the appeals court found that the White House’s Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed the suit seeking to force the White House office to comply with a 2007 request for documents related to the alleged sloppy retention of e-mails between 2001 and 2005, a period that included the lead-up to and start of the Iraq war. The group was seeking the records to get a better sense of what happened to the e-mails, said Anne Weismann, the organization’s chief counsel.

The Office of Administration, which performs a variety of administrative services for the Executive Office of the President, had complied with similar requests for years. But officials changed the policy after CREW’s request, arguing that the office does not exercise enough independent authority to be subject to open-records laws.

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The Supreme Court on Monday overturned a New York federal appeals court decision stating former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller and former attorney general John Ashcroft could be held responsible for their alleged mistreatment of the Pakistani terror suspect Javaid Iqbal.

Iqbal is a Muslim who spent nearly six months in solitary confinement in New York in 2002. He had argued that while Ashcroft and Mueller did not single him out for mistreatment, they were behind the policy that led to his highly restrictive conditions.

Iqbal says his confinement was simply the result of unlawful ethnic and religious discrimination against him.

There is a heated debate in the US over prosecuting the Bush administration officials for their abuse of detainees and authorization of tortures.

President Obama has been deeply ambivalent on the subject. On the one hand, he immediately halted authorization of what Bush euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” and recently released torture memos, on the other, he has insisted that the CIA agents who employed these methods should not be prosecuted and has advised members of Congress against launching a commission to investigate the abuses.

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Reuters Laura MacInnis

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The H1N1 flu virus is likely to keep spreading rapidly between people, within countries and across the globe, the head of the World Health Organisation said Monday. Skip related content

Related photos / videos

Station staff and train conductor wear masks at Sannomiya station in Kobe Enlarge photo

Ministers and experts began a meeting in Geneva to discuss how to fight the virus with vaccines and drugs, as well as what would trigger the WHO to declare a full pandemic.

“For the first time in humanity, we are seeing, or we may be seeing, pandemic influenza evolving in front of our eyes,” WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan told her U.N. agency’s World Health Assembly.

Dr Richard Besser, head of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told a high-level meeting during the week-long assembly that the new virus had spread to nearly all 50 U.S. states and showed no signs of abating.

via Experts at WHO focus on vaccines as flu spreads  – Yahoo! News UK.

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, May 7, 2009

The Department of Homeland Security is dismantling a next-generation biological attack warning system in New York City subways because of technical problems, U.S. officials said.

Robert Hooks, a deputy assistant secretary, said the department no longer believes it is necessary to expand the pilot program, as he told Congress in July, because of resource and technology limits. Hooks said a long-planned alternative sensor system, set for initial deployment late next year, also will not be available nationwide until 2012, to allow for more testing.

The deactivation of the pilot program in late March marks a setback in U.S. efforts to detect biological weapons, and its disclosure comes as the Obama administration is unveiling new security priorities as part of its 2010 budget today.

The federal government installed air samplers in more than 30 U.S. cities in 2003 to detect the release of potential bioweapons such as anthrax spores, plague bacteria and smallpox viruses. The BioWatch program, which cost about $500 million, was meant to speed up the response before disease could spread.

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May 5, 2009

The $328,835 snapshots of an Air Force One backup plane buzzing lower Manhattan last week will not be shown to the public, the White House said yesterday.

“We have no plans to release them,” an aide to President Obama told The Post, refusing to comment further.

The sole purpose of the secret photo-op, which sent thousands of New Yorkers running for cover, was to take new publicity shots of the presidential jet over the city.

“The photos . . . are classified — that’s ridiculous,” Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., said.

The photos have not technically been “classified,” a White House aide said, but they are being kept from public view.

New Yorkers said they could not understand how a president who shares intimate snapshots from the White House could justify keeping these secret.

“So we’re not gonna see the fruits of this cruel joke?” said Frank Antonelli, 39, one of the Wall Street traders spooked by last week’s flyover.

“I’m not surprised. Obama . . . wouldn’t further all the bad publicity by putting out those pictures.”

via New York Post

Prison Planet.com

Monday, May 4, 2009

You Tube has once again proven itself to be a corporate gatekeeper working to destroy free speech and the alternative media after it suspended the popular ‘Alex Jones Channel’ – primarily because Alex Jones showed a print out of a news article during a live show.

The Alex Jones Channel, started by a fan but since embraced as the “official” Alex Jones micro-site on You Tube, has routinely featured in the website’s most popular ranking charts and has collectively attracted millions of views for videos painstakingly catalogued and uploaded over the past two years.

Those videos are now completely gone after You Tube bosses deleted the channel, primarily because the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette complained that Alex Jones had shown a computer print out of one of their articles about the Poplawski cop killer incident last month.

To claim that showing a print out of an article is a violation of copyright is of course completely insane – not a day goes by without TV news anchors showing newspaper stories on live television. Indeed, C-Span’s popular Washington Journal program almost entirely consists of the host showing clippings of newspaper stories every morning.

The real reason for the deletion in undoubtedly the fact that Alex Jones has been on the forefront of exposing stories that have later become major national scandals, such as the MIAC report. Our coverage of the swine flu hoax has again propelled us to the top of the video ranking charts and this no doubt had You Tube’s corporate owners Google running scared. As we have previously documented – Google has intimate ties with the CIA and the military-industrial complex.

To counter such egregious censorship, we are encouraging everyone to subscribe to and bookmark the new Infowarrior channel and alert people to the fact that this will be the new home for Alex Jones on You Tube (at least until they invent a reason to pull that one too).

Visit the channel via this link.

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Prison Planet.com

Monday, May 4, 2009

A new Homeland Security document that received little attention during last week’s swine flu coverage shockingly lists the “alternative media” with other radical extremist groups and implies that people who disagree with the mass media’s version of events are potential domestic terrorists.

The “official use only” document is entitled “Domestic Extremism Lexicon” and was released on March 26, two weeks before the infamous “right-wing extremists” report that generated so much media attention throughout April.

According to World Net Daily, the DHS document was almost immediately rescinded, but the groups listed alongside Neo-Nazis, Aryan prison gangs and black power extremists again prove that the federal government is targeting American citizens who are merely knowledgeable about their rights and up on current issues as potential domestic terrorists to be treated as a “threat” to law enforcement.

Click here for the PDF file.

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Press TV

The number of laboratory-confirmed swine flu cases in the US has increased to 160, spreading infection with the deadly virus to 21 states.

The latest report released by the World Health Organization WHO has confirmed 427 cases in 15 countries including Mexico, the origin of the flu.

The Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said on Saturday that the epidemic is ‘in a stabilization phase’ in the country with no new flu deaths overnight despite confirmed cases having reached 443.

The number of infected cases has been growing rapidly in other countries.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC reported on Saturday that about 160 Americans are infected with the new H1N1 flu virus, adding that a Mexican toddler has been the only one to have died from the virus.

Aiming to tackle the spread of the virus across the country, President Barack Obama said that US health officials are prepared to adopt ‘all necessary precautions’ in case the condition worsens.

He added that ‘it is my greatest hope and prayer that all of these precautions and preparations prove unnecessary,’ and that authorities would soon take necessary action in order to prevent possible grave consequences.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A Washington state biosurveillance firm raised the first warning about a possible outbreak of swine flu in Mexico more than two weeks before the World Health Organization offered its initial alert about a public health emergency of international concern.

Both federal and international health officials had access to the warning from Veratect Corp. Later e-mails calling attention to the company’s subsequent report that the disease was possibly spreading in Mexico were sent to 10 officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Robert Hart, the company’s chief executive.

Hart said he wasn’t sure why health officials didn’t act sooner.

“They have a lot of other responsibilities,” Hart said on Thursday. “But every day makes a difference.”

CDC officials in Atlanta said they were aware of Veratect’s claims and hadn’t been working with the company.

“We have nothing to add about their claims,” said CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant, adding that the CDC and other public health agencies had plans in place to deal with a flu pandemic and responded rapidly once they became aware of the Mexican outbreak.

Veratect, based in Kirkland, Wash., uses a technique known as “data mining” to automatically search tens of thousands of Web sites daily for early signs of looming medical problems or civil unrest anywhere in the world. Anything of interest is turned over to a team of 35 analysts to determine its significance and to post on the company’s Web site. The company markets access to its Web site to government agencies, businesses and others and has tried unsuccessfully to sell its service to the CDC, the World Health Organization and the Department of Homeland Security.

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