A Nation Celebrates What It is Told

A Nation Celebrates What It is Told

HIGH CRIMES & LOW COMEDY IN THE AMERICAN IMPERIUM

Chris Floyd

Empire burlesque, May 3, 2011 WASHINGTON, May 5, 2004 – In a dramatic late-night appearance in the White House press room, President George W. Bush announced that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been found in a secret stronghold near the Syrian border. "We knew he had them, we knew we would find them. It was just a matter of time," said an exultant Mr. Bush, who has been subjected to constant criticism for more than a year over the failure to find the WMD that sparked the invasion of Iraq in April 2003. Bush said a covert military intelligence team discovered the arsenal in an underground fortress 10 miles west of the city of Anah. The stockpile included artillery shells and long-range missiles loaded with anthrax, nerve gas, VX, sarin and other deadly toxins. The team also found extensive laboratories where fatal poisons were being developed which could be used in smaller-scale terrorist attacks, such as in subways, airports, even city water supplies. "It was like the gates of hell had been opened," Bush said. "These weapons and toxins could have destroyed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, all around the world. Today has been a triumph of good over pure evil, and another ringing testament to America’s greatness." Bush said the weapons and the laboratories have been completely destroyed, to avoid any of the material falling into the wrong hands. "These instruments of evil have been obliterated and scattered to the four winds," the president said. "No trace of them remains. Let this be a lesson to all those who would raise their hands against the peace and security of humankind: they will be wiped from the face of the earth." Administration officials said that pictures of the operation will probably be released in the coming days, after being carefully vetted to avoid disclosure of any vital security information, including the identities of the secret military intelligence team. White House officials said the discovery was the result of painstaking intelligence work. A senior official with direct knowledge of the operation said that "much of the actionable intelligence" had been garnered from the "strenuous interrogation" of Iraqi prisoners being held in Abu Ghraib prison. The discovery comes just days after news reports on alleged prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib – allegations which threatened to become a major scandal, and perhaps an obstacle to Mr. Bush’s chances for re-election in the fall. But today’s news will likely sweep away such concerns, along with the lingering doubts over the existence of Iraq’s WMD, and the resulting discontent with a war that has proven more difficult to end than most people expected. The crowds that spontaneously appeared outside the White House and at Ground Zero in New York to cheer the news seemed to bear out this analysis. "He was right all along, he was right to invade, he was right to treat these prisoners like the animals they are," said Sandra Lucas, a day-care teacher from Baltimore who came to the White House to celebrate. "You gotta do what it takes to get the job done," said Ken Mahafalous, a stockbroker who joined the Ground Zero crowd. "If it takes a war to keep us safe, if it takes a little rough stuff now and then, that’s what you do. I admit I had my doubts – and I didn’t vote for Bush in the first place – but this is real leadership, making the tough calls. My hat’s off to him. USA! USA!" There was wide bipartisan praise for the operation and for Mr. Bush’s "gutsy" call in launching the war and persevering with the occupation despite the doubts and the criticism. The few dissenting voices were swiftly rebuked for "politicizing" a moment of national unity. Sen. Ross Feingold (D-WI) was widely denounced for his skeptical comments after Bush’s announcement. "They destroyed all evidence of the weapons as soon as they found them in a top-secret operation? That doesn’t make sense to me," Feingold said in an interview with NBC’s Tim Russert. "Now no one else can independently confirm what actually happened. We are supposed to take the administration’s word at face value – no questions asked. I’m not saying the weapons weren’t there, but force-feeding a docile public with unconfirmable statements – especially about matters which have been swathed in murk and mystery for years – this is not the way a democracy is supposed to work." Feingold’s remarks drew the ire of prominent commentators such as Parton Digby. "I expect this from a Neanderthal drunk in a bar today, but coming from a US Senator it's enough to make you sick," Digby wrote. "But I think Feingold’s motives are probably fairly prosaic. He’s up for re-election and wants to shore up his antiwar cred among the fringe left. The moonbats are in desperate need of a fresh conspiracy theory and this one has the potential to be a doozy. I mean, why else would anyone ever express the slightest skepticism about our government’s covert actions? You either have to be crazy, or else pushing some partisan agenda. Or maybe both." Although the discovery and destruction of Iraq’s WMD was the aim of the 2003 invasion, President Bush made it clear that the war will go on. "We are not yet safe from those who hate us for our freedoms and our way of life," said Mr. Bush. "We must in fact redouble our efforts to ensure the safety of our children and bring democracy and stability to these volatile swamps of extremism. And we can expect our enemies to strike back even harder in response to our triumph today. But to them, I say: bring it on. For we are America. And America can do whatever we set our mind to."

Kevin MacDonald-Bin Laden’s Assassination: Wake Me When It’s Over

OCCIDENTAL OBSERVER

Bin Laden’s Assassination: Wake Me When It’s Over

Kevin MacDonald on May 3, 2011 —

I must admit to feeling a bit unpatriotic. I just can’t get into the non-stop hoopla on the bin Laden assassination. On Monday, with only a small lead time the LA Times had 8 articles on it, beginning with a monster headline screaming “U.S. KILLS BIN LADEN” in 96-point type that took up around 4 inches in two rows across the entire front page. But they were just warming up. On Tuesday, there were 24 articles, headlined by “OBAMA’S GAMBLE” in 72-point type recounting the decision process of our daringly brilliant president, much loved by the Times. (Now the Times has even more reason to ignore Donald Trump’s  request for Obama’s college grades.)





The only article that caught my eye was “Bin Laden’s sea burial fuels conspiracy theories.” Odd indeed that they would bury him at sea so quickly, but the article assures us that it “was necessary because arrangements couldn’t be made with any country to bury Bin Laden within 24 hours, as dictated by Muslim practice, administration officials said. But a senior military officer said the U.S. also wanted to avoid creating a shrine somewhere on land that would attract his followers.”
Ah yes. If there’s one central pillar of American foreign policy since 1948, it’s the principle of never offending the Muslims. And that principle far outweighs keeping the body around for a while so that there could be an independent investigation.
But the reason I don’t have much enthusiasm for the whole thing is that the patriotic emotions that this event seems to be eliciting are completely beside the point. They don’t come close to dealing with the real problems we face. For awhile, at least, the anger of a huge number of Whites, which is at least implicitly about their ongoing dispossession, will be buried by a “We’re Number 1″ mentality.
These emotions only give fuel to the War Party. Today’s Times included an op-ed by War Party stalwart Max Boot (“Bin Laden: The Day of Reckoning“) that blames the deaths of “tens of thousands” in Iraq on Al Qaeda. This is a resurrection of the lie that Saddam Hussein, the secular leader of Iraq, was allied with Al Qaeda and bin Laden. As usual, the media will be silent about bin Laden being motivated at least partly by the support that the US gives to Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians (see, e.g., James Bamford’s A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies.) And Americans are still dying in Afghanistan.
So count me out of the current celebration.

IMPORTANT-The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements

Stanford Report, 

The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements

When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics.

  L.A. Cicero Peter Sturrock, professor emeritus of applied physics

BY DAN STOBER

It's a mystery that presented itself unexpectedly: The radioactive decay of some elements sitting quietly in laboratories on Earth seemed to be influenced by activities inside the sun, 93 million miles away.
Is this possible?
Researchers from Stanford and Purdue University believe it is. But their explanation of how it happens opens the door to yet another mystery.
There is even an outside chance that this unexpected effect is brought about by a previously unknown particle emitted by the sun. "That would be truly remarkable," said Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics and an expert on the inner workings of the sun.
The story begins, in a sense, in classrooms around the world, where students are taught that the rate of decay of a specific radioactive material is a constant. This concept is relied upon, for example, when anthropologists use carbon-14 to date ancient artifacts and when doctors determine the proper dose of radioactivity to treat a cancer patient.
Random numbers
But that assumption was challenged in an unexpected way by a group of researchers from Purdue University who at the time were more interested in random numbers than nuclear decay. (Scientists use long strings of random numbers for a variety of calculations, but they are difficult to produce, since the process used to produce the numbers has an influence on the outcome.)
Ephraim Fischbach, a physics professor at Purdue, was looking into the rate of radioactive decay of several isotopes as a possible source of random numbers generated without any human input. (A lump of radioactive cesium-137, for example, may decay at a steady rate overall, but individual atoms within the lump will decay in an unpredictable, random pattern. Thus the timing of the random ticks of a Geiger counter placed near the cesium might be used to generate random numbers.)
As the researchers pored through published data on specific isotopes, they found disagreement in the measured decay rates – odd for supposed physical constants.
Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer.
Was this fluctuation real, or was it merely a glitch in the equipment used to measure the decay, induced by the change of seasons, with the accompanying changes in temperature and humidity?
"Everyone thought it must be due to experimental mistakes, because we're all brought up to believe that decay rates are constant," Sturrock said.
The sun speaks
On Dec 13, 2006, the sun itself provided a crucial clue, when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.
If this apparent relationship between flares and decay rates proves true, it could lead to a method of predicting solar flares prior to their occurrence, which could help prevent damage to satellites and electric grids, as well as save the lives of astronauts in space.
The decay-rate aberrations that Jenkins noticed occurred during the middle of the night in Indiana – meaning that something produced by the sun had traveled all the way through the Earth to reach Jenkins' detectors. What could the flare send forth that could have such an effect?
Jenkins and Fischbach guessed that the culprits in this bit of decay-rate mischief were probably solar neutrinos, the almost weightless particles famous for flying at almost the speed of light through the physical world – humans, rocks, oceans or planets – with virtually no interaction with anything.
Then, in a series of papers published in Astroparticle Physics, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research and Space Science Reviews, Jenkins, Fischbach and their colleagues showed that the observed variations in decay rates were highly unlikely to have come from environmental influences on the detection systems.
Reason for suspicion
Their findings strengthened the argument that the strange swings in decay rates were caused by neutrinos from the sun. The swings seemed to be in synch with the Earth's elliptical orbit, with the decay rates oscillating as the Earth came closer to the sun (where it would be exposed to more neutrinos) and then moving away.
So there was good reason to suspect the sun, but could it be proved?
Enter Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics and an expert on the inner workings of the sun. While on a visit to the National Solar Observatory in Arizona, Sturrock was handed copies of the scientific journal articles written by the Purdue researchers.
Sturrock knew from long experience that the intensity of the barrage of neutrinos the sun continuously sends racing toward Earth varies on a regular basis as the sun itself revolves and shows a different face, like a slower version of the revolving light on a police car. His advice to Purdue: Look for evidence that the changes in radioactive decay on Earth vary with the rotation of the sun. "That's what I suggested. And that's what we have done."
A surprise 
Going back to take another look at the decay data from the Brookhaven lab, the researchers found a recurring pattern of 33 days. It was a bit of a surprise, given that most solar observations show a pattern of about 28 days – the rotation rate of the surface of the sun.
The explanation? The core of the sun – where nuclear reactions produce neutrinos – apparently spins more slowly than the surface we see. "It may seem counter-intuitive, but it looks as if the core rotates more slowly than the rest of the sun," Sturrock said.
All of the evidence points toward a conclusion that the sun is "communicating" with radioactive isotopes on Earth, said Fischbach.
But there's one rather large question left unanswered. No one knows how neutrinos could interact with radioactive materials to change their rate of decay.
"It doesn't make sense according to conventional ideas," Fischbach said. Jenkins whimsically added, "What we're suggesting is that something that doesn't really interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed."
"It's an effect that no one yet understands," agreed Sturrock. "Theorists are starting to say, 'What's going on?' But that's what the evidence points to. It's a challenge for the physicists and a challenge for the solar people too."
If the mystery particle is not a neutrino, "It would have to be something we don't know about, an unknown particle that is also emitted by the sun and has this effect, and that would be even more remarkable," Sturrock said.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html

It most certainly was not Osama bin Laden.

Who Was Osama bin Laden?

May 4, 2011
Karen Friedemann – May 3, 2011

Whoever the poor soul was, whom the US assassination team “buried at sea,” it most certainly was not Osama bin Laden. Still, now would not be a bad time to lay to rest our questions about the Grandfather of Islamic Internationalism. The FBI admits that they have no evidence that bin Laden had anything to do with the 9/11 attack. There is also no clear evidence that he was involved in earlier bombings in East Africa. He left Sudan because the US threatened to bomb if they did not expel him. Why were the Powers-That-Be so afraid of bin Laden? The US was afraid that he might unite more people around the world with his humanitarian projects and ability to internationalize causes by addressing “the Ummah.” This was an entirely new approach to fundraising at that time. Osama was owner of a construction company. He rebuilt war torn and underdeveloped countries. He was in Sudan at his own expense, building infrastructure for the poor and oppressed, with government permission.

It is important to understand this great historical figure and his jihad mission. Osama bin Laden was a close associate and student of respected Palestinian theologian, Abdullah Azzam, who coined the term “al-Qaeda.” Azzam’s work elaborated upon the ideas of Sayed Qutb, the Egyptian founder of modern Arab-Islamic political religious thought. Qutb is comparable to John Locke in Western political development. Both Azzam and Qutb were serious men of exceptional integrity and honor. Qutb predicted that the struggle between Islam and materialism would define the modern world. He embraced martyrdom in 1966 in rejection of Arab socialist politics. Drawing upon Qutb’s ideas, Azzam preached mutual responsibility for each other among all Muslims worldwide. Azzam successfully organized an international volunteer effort to defend Afghanistan from the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s under the banner of Islam and with the US as an ally. He was killed in 1989.

The 1980s and 90s were a magical time for Muslims. Invigorated by this new philosophical international unity of Islamic causes, and with America’s blessing, an international financial system of Islamic charity was created. All of us who were alive at that time remember how we cried for the Afghanis and opened our wallets, we cried for the Palestinians and opened our wallets. We cried for the Bosnians and opened our wallets. Some of our husbands even left us to become martyrs. The nationalist boundaries between Muslims were erased. Foreign Muslims and Black American Muslims were educating each other about politics and history. On an international scale, Muslims were competing with Jews over the international financial system and the outcome of world events. A true pan-Islamic internationalism was created. We were the kings and queens of the world, to quote the Titanic.

A new, multicultural Islamic culture was born in America. When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, he left behind the hope of multicultural, international Muslim unity. As long as American Blacks remained isolated, they would still think like oppressed people. But when they went to Mecca and prayed side by side with a world community, they came in contact with all of human civilization. During the 1970s, Islam took a stronghold in America. Halal meat shops were opened, Islamic schools were created. As more foreign students came to America for education they mingled with each other and with the locals. African Americans adopted the Arabian style niqab and the Pakistani shalwar kameez. Pakistanis adopted the Arab style hijab and jilbab, while others adopted the Euro-Turk skirt with blazer look. Because Islam was such a fun social unifier in college, young people brought their enthusiasm to their cousins back home, who then started to cover more and pray more. We all wanted to make huge personal sacrifices to save the world.

To a large extent it was America’s support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan that created the spiritual fire behind the Islamic Renaissance of the 1980s. In the Battle of Jaji in May 1987, Osama’s Muhajideen army of only 50 members resisted 200 Soviet and Soviet-backed Afghan troops for one week, taking 12 losses. Under the watch of the Arab media, the Mujahideen protected their complex system of tunnels and caves near the Pakistani border, named al-Masada, from Soviet capture. Osama bin Laden became an internationally respected war hero, while the Afghan freedom fighters became revered in America as “the bravest men in the world,” according to former CIA agent and author, Eric Margolis. Every Muslim in the world, it seemed, wished they too could die for the sake of Allah. Every girl wished she could marry Osama bin Laden, even if he was already quite busy.

In 2001, the US used napalm and oxygen-sucking bombs to “smoke out” Osama’s “Lion’s Nest” of tunnels. They even sprayed acid from the sky to disfigure the faces of the martyrs afterward.

Hundreds of pilgrims visit Kandahar’s Arab cemetery daily, believing that the graves of those massacred in the 2001 US bombing of Afghanistan possess miraculous healing powers.

2001 was not the end of the Muslims, but it was the end of a glorious era, where martyrs competed with one another for bravery and ordinary people competed with each other with charity. We were going to defeat evil in this world today, we thought. Now we know this is only the beginning of the struggle.
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=25623
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‘Bin Ladan was killed years ago’

Press TV – May 2, 2011

A 2007 Benazir Bhutto interview in which she says the al-Qaeda leader was ‘murdered’ years ago contributes to the uncertainty surrounding US claims about Osama bin Laden’s death.

On Monday, US President Barack Obama announced that the al-Qaeda leader was killed by US forces after he was found hiding in a compound in Pakistan.

This is while in an interview following a failed assassination attempt on Pakistan’s former premier in October 2007, Bhutto says bin Laden has already been killed.

In the interview, she identifies the man who killed the notorious al-Qaeda leader as one Omar Sheikh , excerpts of which was sent to Press TV’s UReport.

In response to a question whether any of the assassins had links with the government, Bhutto said, “Yes but one of them is a very key figure in security, he is a former military officer … and had dealings with Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden.”

Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007 in a bomb attack as she was leaving an election rally in Rawalpindi when a gunman shot her in the neck and set off a bomb.

The announcement of bin Laden’s death comes almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Meanwhile, a US official says bin Laden’s body has been buried at sea, alleging that his hasty burial was in accordance with Islamic law, which requires burial within 24 hours of death.

This is while burial at sea is not an Islamic practice and Islam does not determine a timeframe for burial.