Peak Oil Review — June 30, 2008

While last week started quietly, Thursday and Friday turned into a frenzy, with prices surging from a low of $132 a barrel on Wednesday to touch a new high of $142.99 on Friday. The week closed with oil at $140.21, another new high closing price. The $10 a barrel increase was mostly due to financial developments—such as a weak dollar, a major drop in the equities markets, and a flight to the safety of commodities—rather than to oil industry news.

Industry news for the week was mixed. Shell started up its offshore platform that had been overrun by Nigerian militants, while Chevron in Nigeria declared force majeure due to a pipeline bombing last week. China seems to be producing more gasoline and diesel in response to the recent price increases. Iraq is on the way to a banner month producing 2.5 million b/d in comparison with the 1.5 million averaged in 2007 and Mexico’s Cantarell oil field continued its relentless decline.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Imagining peak oil - June 30

As forecasters take that possibility more seriously, they describe fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time.

The more expensive oil gets, the more Katherine Carver's life shrinks. She's given up RV trips. She stays home most weekends. She's scrapped her twice-a-month volunteer stint at a Malibu wildlife refuge -- the trek from her home in Palmdale just got too expensive.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Book review: “Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil”

We need to be prepared for the worst when it comes to peak oil, insists Zachary Nowak.

Just as homeowners pay hefty insurance premiums in exchange for a promise of help in the unlikely event of a fire, so, too, should peak oil believers be developing their own sort of insurance policy against the worst imaginable consequences of peak oil.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Nuclear & sequestration - June 30

(EnergyBulletin.net) - ITER costs give partners pause (fusion pricetag jumps), Nuclear cost estimates may put end to renaissance, Carbon sequestration: bury the idea, not the CO2

read more

Environment & water - June 30

Years of industrial and agricultural growth have left an indelible imprint on many formerly vibrant U.S. ecosystems. While nature is adept at resilience, the depletion and contamination of natural resources, especially water, may affect human health and wellbeing, a new report suggests.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Another Conservative MP on C-61

Given the widespread use of the Prentice/Verner form letter, it is always good to see MPs venture beyond talking points and actually address the substance of constituent concerns.  A reader recently passed along an exchange with MP Bev Shipley.  While I think Shipley should be commended for engaging on the issue, the letter highlights how the bill and the concerns of many Canadians are not well understood.  For example, Shipley writes that

C-61 allows you to copy your DVD to your computer in various formats. If you damage your DVD you do not lose ownership right to the material although the format in which you use it may be somewhat limited. You can view the movie on your computer or you can connect your computer to your television.

This is simply wrong.  C-61 does not give Canadians the right to copy DVDs.  In fact, under the bill most DVD copying will involve both an illegal circumvention and copyright-infringing format shift.  Moreover, depending upon your operating system, you may be unable to play the DVD on your computer.

And let's be perfectly honest about what is going on here - you know and I know the issue is not about making a back up copy of a CD or a DVD. It is about file sharing and acquiring media people do not pay for!

While I know that there are those would like to characterize the C-61 criticisms as being about a free-for-all, I think this too misses the point.  The majority of editorials and commentaries have rightly focused on the harm this bill does to Canadians who purchase digital content.  The same criticisms could be levelled at the impact on education, or libraries, or film making, or artists, or musicians.  It could also focus on the groups that are broadly supportive of copyright reform but increasingly vocal about their disappointment with C-61 including writers, artists, and copyright collectives.  The various reasons for criticims may differ, but if we're going to "perfectly honest" about the debate over C-61, let's do away with the claims that opposition to this bill is all about file sharing.

BC activists call for no new approvals after visit to Alberta tar sands

Edmonton - A group of British Columbian activists who have just completed a three-day "learning tour" of the Alberta tar sands are calling for an end to new approvals for tar sands expansion at a press conference today.

READ MORE HERE

Canada must adopt legislation to stop Bell Canada from shortchanging the public, says coalition

The Campaign for Democratic Media! is outraged at Bell Canada's recent announcement that it will begin throttling Internet service providers (ISPs) starting April 7 - a policy uncovered and made official after Canadian ISPs realized they were being shortchanged by the telecommunications giant which had begun selectively limiting the ISPs' bandwidth.

READ MORE HERE

New Environics poll reveals Canadians reject SPP priorities

As Stephen Harper prepares to attend the North American leaders' summit on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in New Orleans next week, a new Environics Research poll shows that Canadians disagree with key elements of North American integration.

READ MORE HERE

Broad delegation of Canadian civil society groups to attend SPP counter-summit in New Orleans

While the Canadian, Mexican and American heads of state continue to discuss corporate priorities for North America behind closed doors at the fourth annual SPP summit in New Orleans next week, civil society from all three NAFTA countries will lay the groundwork for international cooperation of a more human kind that places the needs of communities, the environment and workers first.

READ MORE HERE

Government Trounces Democracy with Campbell’s Closure of TILMA Bill 32: Citizen’s Group Outraged

Despite significant public outcry, Bill 32 went into effect without any vote in the Legislature today. The enabling legislation sets the private courts system Trade Investment and Labour Mobility (TILMA) into motion, ceding the right to corporations to sue local governments and other entities for regulations deemed to impede profits.

READ MORE HERE

Bottled Water Losing Steam: Council of Canadians commends London and Kitchener City Councils for banning the bottle

The Council of Canadians is congratulating the Ontario cities of London and Kitchener for approving plans this week to ban the sale of bottled water on city property. The Council of Canadians welcomes these local victories as important steps toward a national water policy that would improve the public system and ensure clean drinking water standards for all communities across the country.

READ MORE HERE

Bilateral accords quietly push neo-liberal agenda

Currently Canada is pursuing bilateral accords across the planet, with countries as far afield as Colombia, Korea and Jordan.

READ MORE HERE

Is Canada cloning a lousy U.S. copyright law?

Last week Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josee Verner introduced Bill C-61, the long awaited revamped copyright reform bill. It's really a Canadian redraft of the ten-year-old U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

READ MORE HERE

The real green shift

The most obvious problem with the Green Shift proposed by Stéphane Dion is that the Liberal party plan will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly, if at all. The hidden assumption is that if the new carbon tax works, it will reduce the revenues available to the federal government.

READ MORE HERE

The Wal-Martization of our cities

Why is a proposed big box retail emporium on Eastern Avenue in Leslieville symptomatic of our urban crisis? The answer is that in this topsy-turvy world, what looks like investment is disinvestment, what looks like jobs is deskilling and what looks like sustainability is its toxic opposite.

READ MORE HERE

TILMA makes pariahs out of Alberta and B.C.

Under TILMA, provincial, local and government agency policies designed to protect the environment or the health of communities are, incredibly, not exempt from potential corporate lawsuits claiming they are veiled barriers to trade or investment.

READ MORE HERE

The Carbon Tax: A Day Late and a Dollar Short

The price of oil is going up, up, up, and while there is much speculation about the cause(s), it is wishful thinking to believe that most of the cause is speculation - or that prices will "return to normal." What does this mean for carbon taxes and for our plan of action?

READ MORE HERE

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: It Was Oil, All Along

Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus 5 million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the Earth itself.

READ MORE HERE

Rachel Maddow on Bush’s War for Oil

"If you don't want to be seen as a colonial power, you stop acting like one." Rachel Maddow says that the occupation of Iraq is all about the oil. permanent link: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/89746/

READ MORE HERE

Citing Need For Assessments, US Freezes Solar Energy Projects

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years. The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states - Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

READ MORE HERE

The ‘W.’ Stands for ‘War Criminal’

The administration lawyers, whom Conyers is also going after, designed those Guantánamo military commissions after advising Bush that the prisoners were not entitled to the protections of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions—and didn't have to be tried in our federal courts. In Beyond the Law, Paust says of these lawyers (most of them graduates of our premier law schools): "Not since the Nazi era have so many lawyers been so clearly involved in international crimes concerning the treatment and interrogation of persons detained during war. . . . Such a direct role in a process of denial of protections under the laws of war [and our Constitution] is far more serious than the loss of honor and integrity to [presidential] power. It can form the basis for a lawyer's civil and criminal responsibility. . . . "[These were lawyers] . . . directly advising how to deny protections in the future (denials of such protections are violations of the laws of war and war crimes)."

READ MORE HERE

Another Inventor of the Internet Wants To Gag It

MojoKid writes "Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the Internet' in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer file sharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US To Get EU Private Citizen Data

An anonymous reader writes "In a case of 'all your data are belong to us,' the US government is close to coming to an agreement with the EU that allows it to get private citizen data on EU citizens to 'look for suspicious activity.' So, now we know what step three is: setup a security agency in US to resell otherwise unavailable data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SHOCK CLAIM: NO ICE AT NORTH POLE THIS SUMMER !!!

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year. The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

READ MORE HERE

Welcome Home, Soldier: Now Shut Up

Massey has just participated in a checkpoint massacre of civilians. His sense of decency, his sanity, is still in tact. Like any normal human being, he is distraught. The carnage of the war, the imbalance of power between the biggest war machine in history and a suffering people devoid of tanks and air power — the sheer injustice of it all — begins to take its toll on Massey’s conscience. In the wake of the horrific events of the day, his captain is cool. He walks up to Massey and asks; “Are you doing all right, Staff Sergeant?” Massey responds: “No, sir. I am not doing O.K. Today was a bad day. We killed a lot of innocent civilians.” Fully of aware of the civilian carnage, his captain asserts: “No, today was a good day.” Relatives wailing, cars destroyed, blood all over the ground, Marines celebrating, civilians dead, and “it was good day”! The Massey incident goes beyond the mendacity of military life. It concerns the control, the dehumanization of the psyches of our troops. As one Vietnam veteran put it years ago: “They kept fucking with my mind.”

READ MORE HERE

Why the Oil Industry Benefits from Bottled Water Sales

The process of producing PET plastic bottles involves a number of different stages using multiple producers in the supply chain. Some of the corporations are widely recognizable, while others are more obscure. The important point in this analysis, however, is that the bottled water manufacturers are the end point of a supply chain that contains some of the biggest polluters on the planet.

READ MORE HERE

NYC losing global influence to other cities overseas

Although New York City's global ties are "part of its DNA," the study warned that the city is losing the competition for global influence to other money centers. Tokyo, which is home to 50 of Fortune Magazine's Global 500 companies, ranked first in global influence among cities, according to the report commissioned by the Partnership for New York City, a pro-business group. Paris ranked second with 26 corporate headquarters. New York City tied for third with London, with 22 corporate headquarters each, and Beijing was fourth with 18. Around the U.S., nearly half of the foreign employers plan to cut their stakes or shun new investments because they say they see better opportunities in other countries, according to the study authored by London-based consultants DTZ.

READ MORE HERE

Extra water, wind strain Northwest power grid

The Northwest is awash in electric power this spring. Rivers are swollen. Columbia River dams are running full bore. Wind farm blades are spinning. That should be good news for the Northwest, where hydropower is cheap and wind is a leader in renewable energy. And it should be good news for California, a huge electricity consumer that often sucks up Oregon's springtime surplus. But a doubling of wind-power supplies and an unusually concentrated surge in water levels have challenged this season's power operations like never before. The result: wasted power generation, excessive spill through the dams and a sometimes frenzied juggling of dam and transmission schedules. Oregon and Washington can't use all the electricity that's available. And southbound transmission lines that are at capacity can't take the extra power California consumers otherwise would eagerly devour.

READ MORE HERE

Prices & speculators - June 28

Although some policy-makers have blamed producing countries for steadily rising oil prices, many experts say more fundamental factors are a growing demand-supply imbalance, a weak dollar, and market speculation.

"Most members of OPEC are already producing at peak capacity, and Saudi Arabia, which has the greatest spare capacity, has been incrementally increasing its production --with the result that its spare capacity has been plunging to relatively low levels," Dariush Zahedi, a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies in at UC Berkeley, told IPS.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

Bush Fulfills His Grandfather’s Dream

(Originally published in July 2007, and to be published every summer until the right to do so is gone.) "Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

READ MORE HERE

McCain Is Way Behind Online-trails Obama in Web fundraising and vote-getting

The polls aren't the only place John McCain is trailing Barack Obama [by 12 to 15 points]. Republicans also lag Democrats when it comes to using social media, such as blogs and social networks. While the Republicans have focused on more traditional avenues, such as TV ads, to reach voters, the Democrats have aggressively used social networks and other audience-participation sites to build support among younger voters and small donors. Obama has grabbed almost 1.5 million "friends" on leading social networks Facebook and MySpace (NWS), and 850,000 on his own social network MyBarackObama.com. In a widely publicized interview with politics blog Politico, McCain revealed that he doesn't use a Mac or PC. "I am an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get," McCain said, referring to his lack of computing knowledge.

READ MORE HERE

MPAA Scores First P2P Jury Conviction

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA must be celebrating. According to the BitTorrent news site Slyck.com, the Department of Justice is proclaiming their first P2P criminal copyright conviction against an Elite Torrents administrator. The press release notes, 'The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as "Uploaders," who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. At sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 9, 2008, Dove faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Consumer confidence hits a new 28-year low

Consumer confidence fell more than expected in June, hitting another 28-year low as surging prices and mounting job losses contributed to a bleak outlook, according to the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers survey released on Friday.The Surveys of Consumers said the final June reading for its index of confidence fell to 56.4 from May's 59.8. The report said the pace of consumer spending is likely to sink at least through the start of 2009. "Moreover, gas prices have risen to an all-time peak, food prices posted the largest increases in decades, home prices have fallen faster than any time since the Great Depression, and there has been widespread distress associated with foreclosures," the report added. Also weighing on consumers, data earlier this month showed U.S. employers shed jobs for a fifth straight month in May and the unemployment rate jumped to 5.5 percent, its highest in more than 3-1/2 years.

READ MORE HERE

Japan: Guilty of doing good

"Here in Tokyo, Japan, 3 peace activists, Toshiyuki Obora, Nobuhiro Onishi and Sachimi Takada were found guilty on April 11, 2008 by the Supreme Court for putting anti-war fliers into the mail boxes of the families of the Japanese soldiers who were dispatched to Iraq on the orders of Uncle Sam to assist the shameful U.S.-led coalition in its illegal invasion and occupation of Irak to free it of its oil."

READ MORE HERE

Kucinich won’t rally for Obama until he gets answers

"Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has yet to officially endorse Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president and indicated he will not rally his liberal supporters this fall until he knows 'what the party stands for.' ... He is not shy in criticizing his party, having consistently lambasted Democratic leaders in Congress for continuing to fund the Iraq war. More recently, he publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the compromise bill on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Kucinich refused to comment on Obama’s stance toward the FISA bill. Obama recently announced he would be supporting the measure but would try to remove its controversial provisions that offer immunity to telecommunications companies who had assisted in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program."

READ MORE HERE

Telecom Immunity Flip-Floppers Got More Telecom Money

ya really notes a nice analysis by Maplight.org indicating that those Democratic representatives who changed their vote on telecom immunity between March and June received on average 40% more in contributions from telecom interests than those Democrats who held firm. Maplight asks, "Why did these ninety-four House members have a change of heart? Their constituents deserve answers." Across both parties, representatives who voted for immunity in June had received almost twice as much telecom money as those who voted against. Wired's coverage includes a quote from Larry Lessig, who is on the Maplight board: "Money corrupts the process of reasoning. [Lawmakers] get a sixth sense of how what they do might affect how they raise money."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ecstasy Is the Key to Treating PTSD

At last the incurably traumatized may be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And controversially, ecstasy may be key to taming their demons.

An Ecstasy tablet. That's what it took to make Donna Kilgore feel alive again that and the doctor who prescribed it. As the pill began to take effect, she giggled for the first time in ages. She felt warm and fuzzy, as if she was floating. The anxiety melted away. Gradually, it all became clear: the guilt, the anger, the shame.

READ MORE HERE

Supreme Court Holds Right to Bear Arms Applies to Individuals

Now.Imperfect writes "In its last day of session, the Supreme Court has definitively clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment. The confusion is whether the Second Amendment allows merely for the existence of a state militia, or the private ownership of guns. This ruling is in response to a case regarding the 32-year-old Washington DC ban on guns." This is one of the most-watched Supreme Court cases in a long time, and Wikipedia's page on the case gives a good overview; the actual text of the decision (PDF) runs to 157 pages, but the holding is summarized in the first three. There are certainly other aspects of the Second Amendment left unaddressed, however, so you can't go straight to the store for a recently made automatic rifle.

Read more of this story at Slashdot

Net Neutrality and Education

Jeff Rybak makes the case for network neutrality from an education perspective:

Net Neutrality protects the availability and the independence of free education. Without principles of Net Neutrality, education available on-line may either be crippled at the whim of those controlling the infrastructure of the ‘net, or else be forced to partner with huge corporations in order to survive. Even if we believe, for a moment, in the benevolence of large corporations and assume that they’ll give a break to do-gooder efforts, this still requires educators to get in bed with corporations. And no one should ever be comfortable with that – certainly not as a requirement to simply function.

Read Jeff's full post: http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2008/06/25/net-neutrality-and-educ...

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Russia’s foreign minister strongly warns against use of force on Iran

By Vladimir Isachenkov
ASSOCIATED PRESS
5:23 a.m. June 20, 2008

MOSCOW – Russia’s foreign minister on Friday warned against the use of force on Iran, saying there is no proof it is trying to build nuclear weapons.

Sergey Lavrov said Iran should be engaged in dialogue and encouraged to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency.

Lavrov made the statement when asked to comment on an Israeli Cabinet member’s statement earlier this month that Israel could attack Iran if it does not halt its nuclear program.

READ MORE HERE

Environmental ‘reality check’ aims to clear the air on B.C. carbon tax

VANCOUVER – B.C.’s carbon tax, which takes effect July 1, has many British Columbians talking, but the debate has also stirred up a lot of confusion. To help clear the air, a coalition of environmental groups today released a “Reality Check” fact sheet on the top five misconceptions about the tax.

“We want all British Columbians to work together to solve the problem of global warming, and we believe a carbon tax can provide the signal for all of us to shift to cleaner energy and greener practices,” said Ian Bruce, a climate change specialist with the David Suzuki Foundation.

“It’s great that there’s so much debate about the carbon tax and its role in reducing global warming, but we want to make sure the debate is based on fact and not misinformation,” said Andrea Reimer, executive director of the Wilderness Committee.

“Reality Check” addresses the top five misconceptions about the B.C. carbon tax, including:

Myth 1 - The B.C. carbon tax won’t reduce emissions. Myth 2 - Big industry is left off the hook. Myth 3 - B.C.’s carbon tax is a “tax grab” or additional tax. Myth 4 - B.C.’s carbon tax will hit consumers who are already reeling from high international oil prices. Myth 5 - B.C. has introduced a “gas tax”.

READ MORE HERE

Advanced Imperialism: A Phase of Capitalism

On April 26, 1917, V.I. Lenin published a major piece on imperialism titled “Imperialism – Highest Stage of Capitalism“. Lenin was able to draw from J.A. Hobson, Imperialism, and Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital. Lenin conducted extensive research on imperialism from wide array of writers, but he was very critical of many writers including Hobson and Hilferding. Lenin’s work on imperialism remained a premier until Harry Magdoff published The Age of Imperialism in 1969 and Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism-The Last Stage of Imperialism, in 1965.

 

Since 1990, the world has changed and considerably more so since the inter-imperialists rivalry of the classical imperialism period of 1870-1945. There have been changes in the development of capitalism, finance, resource control and international investments. Along with the changes in capitalism there have been a series of world wide financial and economic crises. In other words, we are in the period of advanced imperialism. It is not fundamentally ideological, military, or social but principally socio-economic – a new phase of capitalism.

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Sandvine calls net neutrality “laughable,” defends filtering

David Caputo, CEO of Sandvine Deep Packet Inspection ("DPI") technology, insists,"it's going to be laughable in the next two or three years that people used to say all packets should be treated equally."

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What to do with the Spectrum surplus?

It was recently pointed out by Michael Geist that the Federal Government's spectrum auction will rake in an extra $2.5 billion over the $1.5 billion expected to be generated.

Three options were offered by Geist: fund education programs for the upcoming anti-spam and data-breach legislative initiatives; stimulate municipal wifi access projects; and/or commit to a national broadband strategy to ensure all Canadians have access to high-speed networks.

A fourth option is to spend a fraction of the $2.5 on a public consultation focused on the issues of network neutrality...

READ MORE HERE

Russia prepares for future combat in the Arctic

24/06/2008 16:38 MOSCOW, June 24 (RIA Novosti) - Russia must be ready to fight wars in the Arctic to protect its national interests in a region that contains large and untapped deposits of natural resources, a high-ranking military official said in an interview published Tuesday.

“After several countries contested Russia’s rights for the resource-rich continental shelf in the Arctic, we have immediately started the revision of our combat training programs for military units that may be deployed in the Arctic in case of a potential conflict,” Lt. Gen. Vladimir Shamanov, who heads the Defense Ministry’s combat training directorate, told the Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) newspaper.

Under the Law of the Sea, coastal states can declare an Exclusive Economic Zone stretching 200 nautical miles (370 km) from the shore, but this area can be extended if it is a part of the country’s continental shelf or shallower waters. Some Arctic shelves extend for hundreds of miles, creating the possibility of overlapping territorial claims.

READ MORE HERE

State-Sponsored Terror: British and American Black Ops in Iraq

Shining Light on the “Black World”

In January of 2002, the Washington Post ran a story detailing a CIA plan put forward to President Bush shortly after 9/11 by CIA Director George Tenet titled, “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” which was “outlining a clandestine anti-terror campaign in 80 countries around the world. What he was ready to propose represented a striking and risky departure for U.S. policy and would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history.” The plan entailed CIA and Special Forces “covert operations across the globe,” and at “the heart of the proposal was a recommendation that the president give the CIA what Tenet labeled “exceptional authorities” to attack and destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rest of the world.” Tenet cited the need for such authority “to allow the agency to operate without restraint — and he wanted encouragement from the president to take risks.” Among the many authorities recommended was the use of “deadly force.”

Further, “Another proposal was that the CIA increase liaison work with key foreign intelligence services,” as “Using such intelligence services as surrogates could triple or quadruple the CIA’s effectiveness.” The Worldwide Attack Matrix “described covert operations in 80 countries that were either underway or that he was now recommending. The actions ranged from routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks,” as well as “In some countries, CIA teams would break into facilities to obtain information.”[1]

READ MORE HERE [ Source: GlobalResearch.ca ]

Senate Hearing On Laptop Seizures At US Border

suitablegirl writes "As we have discussed, Customs and Border Patrol is allowed to seize and download data from laptops or electronic devices of Americans returning from abroad. At a Senate hearing tomorrow, privacy advocates and industry groups will urge the lawmakers to take action to protect the data and privacy of Americans not guilty of anything besides wanting to go home."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

McCain Campaign: “Another terrorist attack on the U.S. would be a ‘big advantage’ for the Republican presidential candidate”

McCain aide explains how America could benefit from a Second 9/11. a terrorist attack would benefit the McCain campaign. 

McCain disavows aide’s comment about terrorism

By GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

FRESNO, Calif. - A top adviser to John McCain said another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be a “big advantage” for the Republican presidential candidate, drawing a sharp rebuke Monday from both the presumed GOP nominee and Democrat Barack Obama.

READ MORE HERE

Airport Tyranny: The Introduction of “behavior detection” technology at major US airports

It’s been at least five years since I’ve flown commercial, and for good reason: I don’t wish to be arrested for questioning actions by often arrogant, rude Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers. Two years ago, my decision was reinforced by my daughter’s experience when going through airport security with her two lovebirds. Having shown her ticket and ID to security personnel, and walking toward the metal detector, they started shouting to her, “Miss, you’re going to have to take them birds out of the cage.’ I watched with incredulity as she approached the metal detectors. Fortunately, a TSA worker took the cages and my daughter followed without further incident. Had it been I traveling with the birds, I might have told the TSA workers something that would have gotten me arrested.

James Bovard has an article titled “Federal Attitude Policy” that appears in Freedom Daily (June 2008), a publication of the Fairfax, Va.-based Future of Freedom Foundation. According to the February 2002 Federal Register, people can be arrested if they act in a way that “might distract or inhibit a screener from effectively performing his or her duties … A screener encountering such a situation must turn away from his or her normal duties to deal with the disruptive individual, which may affect the screening of other individuals.’ That means it is a federal offense, and a fine of up to $1,500, for any alleged “nonphysical interference” that makes a TSA screener “turn away” from whatever he was doing.

READ MORE HERE

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