Google Shuts Down Another Conservative Blog: KSM Trial Edition
This past Sunday morning, I took to my blog, The New York Conservative, to opine on the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”) and his fellow terrorists. The full text of the post is available further below.
The New York Conservative was a blog hosted by Google Blogger. I started the blog in February of this year and had posted 17 columns prior to the KSM entry, commenting on political matters and issues affecting the Catholic Church. I would post my entries on Facebook and occasionally would email a link to friends or other interested parties. I received no complaints about the blog whatsoever.
On Monday, the pro-U.S. security group Secure American Now posted a link to my KSM piece on its website. The link received numerous hits and generated multiple comments on the Secure America Now page.
However, a few hours after Secure America Now linked to the New York Conservative, I received a form email, no reply possible, from Google Blogger informing me that the New York Conservative had been deleted. The email classified my blog as “spam” in violation of Google’s terms of service. There was no further explanation. My URL was dead; all of the content, everything I ever posted, was gone.
I made two telephone calls to Google to protest and demand a reason for the deletion of my blog. The Google representatives told me that Google does not provide “live support” for Google Blogger, meaning you cannot speak with anyone at all about the deletion. The representatives directed me to the Google Blogger website, where the company extols its commitment to free speech and its great reluctance to censor its bloggers.
Obviously, I do not know why Google deleted my blog, but it’s awfully odd that The New York Conservative was summarily executed after a post in which I called for the summary execution of KSM. Could it be that Google found the post politically incorrect and therefore offensive? Could it be that Google thought the post was dangerous because it had potential to incite Islamists?
Given the company’s self-proclaimed devotion to free speech, I think Google ought to explain why it deleted the blog. If calling for the legal execution of the confessed mastermind of the murders of 3,000 people on American soil is too controversial a topic for Google Blogger, perhaps the famously progressive company should re-think its proclamation of support for the free exchange of ideas on its platforms.
Below, you can read my near-identical reproduction of the text of the post which brought about this debacle:
After 11 years, KSM and his fellow terrorists have at last been brought to trial. The very first proceeding in the trial, the arraignments of the defendants, commenced on Saturday at 9:23 am. What should have been a simple proceeding lasted 13 hours, marred by the endless antics of the terrorists and their attorneys, including a female defense attorney who appeared in a burka and demanded that other women in the court dress likewise in order not to offend the religious sensibilities of the murders.
The military prosecutor predicted that this circus would persist for years, allowing the terrorists a platform to make a mockery of the judicial process we offer them and to heap additional suffering upon the families of the victims of terrorist attacks.
To what end? In June 2008, KSM was brought before a tribunal at Guantanamo Bay. He announced at that time that he wished to enter a guilty plea so he could be “martyred.” He expressed the same desire again in December 2008. In a criminal proceeding, the accused always has the option of entering a plea of “not guilty” and demanding a trial or entering a guilty plea and accepting his sentence. So, as is apparent, when one pleads guilty and admits his crime, there is no need for a trial. Instead of years of pointless proceedings to try issues not in dispute, the Court should simply say:
“The Court hereby deems your previously entered plea of guilty as accepted and shall now impose sentence. The sentence of the Court is that you be taken hence to the place of execution and that you there be hanged by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on your soul. Next case.”
It is ironic that this debacle of a trial begins on the heels of President Obama’s obscene self-congratulatory celebration of the anniversary of the death of Osama Bin Laden. While the president tries to pass himself off as the greatest commander since Alexander, the KSM trial reminds us that the president is a man who built his political career on decrying Gitmo and accusing his own country of “torturing” KSM and his fellow killers. Obama’s first act as president was to announce the closure of Gitmo.
It was the president who delayed the KSM trial by an additional four years. It was his Justice Department that sought to bring this outrageous circus-trial to federal district court in Manhattan and launched a witch-hunt against CIA operatives and government lawyers for their conduct of, and participation in, the enhanced interrogation program, even after these public servants had previously been cleared of any wrongdoing.
Of course, we now know that only three men were ever waterboarded, and then only briefly and under carefully controlled circumstances. We know that the intelligence gathered from these men, and other terrorists held at Gitmo, contributed mightily to the successful search for Bin Laden, ultimately enabling Obama to give his “gusty” order and parade Bin Laden’s head on a political pike.
Regardless of Obama’s image propaganda, the fact remains that, more than a decade after 9/11, the families of the terrorists’ victims, and nation at large, must endure a lengthy and absurd exercise to confer “due process” on men who scorn the very notion; men who have no interest in the “justice” we extend to them and who proudly trumpet their guilt before the Court that is charged with trying that very issue.
It need not be so. In mid-June 1942, two parties of Nazi spies came ashore on Long Island and in Florida. By June 27th, all eight men who had infiltrated the country had been arrested. They were tried before a military commissioned appointed by President Roosevelt between July 8th and August 4, 1942. All were condemned to death. The president commuted the sentences of two men; the other six were executed on August 8, 1942, four days after their convictions.
President Obama fancies himself another Roosevelt. As such he ought to emulate his predecessor’s penchant for dispatching swift justice to war criminals. Prolonging a phony justice process only compounds the already unspeakable injustice KSM perpetrated. He has confessed his guilt. We should execute him without further delay.
The Worst Yet to Come? Why Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb
Experts say acknowledging the threat would call into question the safety of dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants in the U.S.
May 4, 2012
Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ Sergey150770
More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site’s current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.
But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel — 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.
Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat
The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core’s reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean — just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored — but it’s also open to the elements because a hydrogen explosion blew off the roof during the early days of the accident and sent the building into a list.
Alarmed by the precarious nature of spent fuel storage during his recent tour of the Fukushima Daiichi site, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, subsequently fired off letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko and Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Ichiro Fujisaki. He implored all parties to work together and with the international community to address this situation as swiftly as possible.
A press release issued after his visit said that Wyden, a senior member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources who is highly experienced with nuclear waste storage issues, believes the situation is “worse than reported,” with “spent fuel rods currently being stored in unsound structures immediately adjacent to the ocean.” The press release also noted the structures’ high susceptibility to earthquakes and that “the only protection from a future tsunami, Wyden observed, is a small, makeshift sea wall erected out of bags of rock.”
As opposed to units 1-3 at Fukushima Daiichi, where the meltdowns occurred, unit 4’s reactor core, like units 5 and 6, was not in operation when the earthquake struck last year. But unlike units 5 and 6, it had recently uploaded highly radioactive spent fuel into its storage pool before the disaster struck.
Robert Alvarez, a nuclear waste expert and former senior adviser to the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, has crunched the numbers pertaining to the spent fuel pool threat based on information he obtained from sources such as Tepco, the U.S. Department of Energy, Japanese academic presentations and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), the U.S. organization created by the nuclear power industry in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.
What he found, which has been corroborated by other experts interviewed by AlterNet, is an astounding amount of vulnerably stored spent fuel, also known as irradiated fuel, at the Fukushima Daiichi site. His immediate focus is on the fuel stored in the damaged unit 4’s pool, which contains the single largest inventory of highly radioactive spent fuel of any of the pools in the damaged reactors.
Alvarez warns that if there is another large earthquake or event that causes this pool to drain of water, which keeps the fuel rods from overheating and igniting, it could cause a catastrophic fire releasing 10 times more cesium-137 than was released at Chernobyl.
That scenario alone would cause an unprecedented spread of radioactivity, far greater than what occurred last year, depositing enormous amounts of radioactive materials over thousands of miles and causing the evacuation of Tokyo.
Nuclear experts noted that other lethal radioactive isotopes would also be released in such a fire, but that the focus is on cesium-137 because it easily volatilizes and spreads pervasively, as it did during the Chernobyl accident and again after the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi last year.
With a half-life of 30 years, it gives off penetrating radiation as it decays and can remain dangerous for hundreds of years. Once in the environment, it mimics potassium as it accumulates in the food chain; when it enters the human body, about 75 percent lodges in muscle tissue, including the heart.
The Threat Not Just to Japan But to the U.S. and the World
An even more catastrophic worst-case scenario follows that a fire in the pool at unit 4 could then spread, igniting the irradiated fuel throughout the nuclear site and releasing an amount of cesium-137 equaling a doomsday-like load, roughly 85 times more than the release at Chernobyl.
It’s a scenario that would literally threaten Japan’s annihilation and civilization at large, with widespread worldwide environmental radioactive contamination.
“Japan would suffer the worst, but it would be a global catastrophe,” said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste expert at the watchdog group Beyond Nuclear. “It already is, it already has been, but it would dwarf what’s already happened.”
Kamps noted that these pool fires were the beginning of the worst-case analysis envisioned by the Japanese government in the early days of the disaster, as reported by the New York Times in February.
“Not only three reactor meltdowns but seven pool fires at Fukushima Daiichi,” Kamps said. “If the site had to be abandoned by all workers, then everything would come loose. The end result of that was the evacuation of Tokyo.”
In an interview with AlterNet, Alvarez, who is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that the Japanese government, Tepco and the U.S. NRC are reluctant to say anything publicly about the spent fuel threat because “there is a tendency to want to provide reassurance that everything is fine.”
He was quick to note, “The cores are still a problem, make no mistake, and there will be some very bad things happening if they don’t maintain their temperatures at some sort of stable level and make sure this stuff doesn’t eat down through the concrete mats.”
But he said that privately “they’re probably more scared shitless about the pools than they are about the cores. They know they’re really risky and dangerous.”
AlterNet asked the NRC if it is concerned about the vulnerability of the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi and what, if anything, it had expressed to the Japanese government and Tepco on the matter.
“All the available information continues to show the situation at Fukushima Dai-ichi is stable, both for the reactors and the spent fuel pools,” NRC spokesman Scott Burnell replied via email. “The available information indicates that Spent Fuel Pool #4 has been reinforced.”
But nuclear experts, including Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president who coordinated projects at 70 U.S. nuclear power plants, and warned days after the disaster at Fukushima last year of a “Chernobyl on steroids” if the spent fuel pools were to ignite, strongly disagreed with this assessment.
“It is true that in May and June the floor of the U4 SFP [spent fuel pool] was ‘reinforced,’ but not as strong as it was originally,” Gundersen noted in an email to AlterNet. “The entire building however has not been reinforced and is damaged by the explosion in both 4 and 3. So structurally U4 is not as strong as its original design required.”
Gundersen, who is chief engineer at the consulting firm Fairewinds Associates, added that the spent fuel pool at unit 4 “remains the single biggest concern since about the second week of the accident. It can still create ‘Chernobyl on steroids.'”
Alvarez said that even if the unit 4 structure has been tentatively stabilized, it doesn’t change the fact “it sits in a structurally damaged building, is about 100 feet above the ground and is exposed to the atmosphere, in a high-consequence earthquake zone.”
He also said that the urgency of the situation is underscored by the ongoing seismic activity around northeast Japan, in which 13 earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 to 5.7 have occurred off the northeast coast of Honshu between April 14 and April 17.
“This has been the norm since 3/11/11 and larger quakes are expected closer to the power plant,” Alvarez added.
A recent study published in the journal Solid Earth, which used data from over 6,000 earthquakes, confirms the expectation of larger quakes in closer proximity to the Fukushima Daiichi site. In part, this conclusion is predicated on the discovery that the earthquake that initiated last year’s disaster caused a seismic fault close to the nuclear plant to reactivate.
“There are a few active faults in the nuclear power plant area, and our results show the existence of similar structural anomalies under both the Iwaki and the Fukushima Daiichi areas,” lead researcher Dapeng Zhao, a geophysics professor at Japan’s Tohoku University, said in a press release. “Given that a large earthquake occurred in Iwaki not long ago, we think it is possible for a similarly strong earthquake to happen in Fukushima.”
AlterNet asked Sen. Wyden if he considers the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi a national security threat.
In a statement released by his office, Wyden replied, “The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.”
Alvarez agrees, saying, “My major concern is that this effort to get that spent fuel out of there is not something you should be doing casually and taking your time on.”
Yet Tepco’s current plans are to hold the majority of this spent fuel onsite for years in the same elevated, uncontained storage pools, only transferring some of the fuel into more secure, hardened dry casks when the common pool reaches capacity.
For the moment, though, and for the foreseeable future — unless the international community substantively comes to Japan’s aid — Tepco couldn’t transfer the irradiated fuel from the damaged reactor units into dry cask storage even if it wanted to because the equipment to do so, such as the crane support infrastructure, was destroyed during the initial disaster.
“That’s kind of shocking,” said Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. “But that’s why we’re still sitting on this gamble that there won’t be another earthquake that could topple a very precarious unit 4.”
Gunter is concerned that even a minor earthquake or a subsidence in the earth under unit 4 could cause its collapse.
“I think we’re all on pins and needles every day with regard to unit 4,” he said. “I mean there’s any number of things that could happen. Nobody really knows.”
Gunter added, “Right now its seismic rating should be zero.”
Alvarez echoed Wyden’s letters to the Japanese ambassador and U.S. officials.
“It really requires a major effort,” he said. “The United States and other countries should begin to get involved and try to help the Japanese government to expedite the removal of that spent fuel and to put it into dry, hardened storage as soon as possible.”
Same Spent Fuel Pool Designs at Dozens of U.S. Nuclear Sites
So why isn’t the NRC and the Obama administration doing more to shed light on the extreme vulnerability of these irradiated fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, which threaten not only Japan but the U.S. and the world?
Nuclear waste experts say it would expose the fact that the same design flaw lies in wait — and has been for decades — at dozens of U.S. nuclear facilities. And that’s not something the NRC, which is routinely accused of promoting the nuclear industry rather than adequately regulating it, nor the pro-nuclear Obama administration, want to broadcast to the American public.
“The U.S. government right now is engaged in its own kabuki theatre to protect the U.S. industry from the real costs of the lessons at Fukushima,” Gunter said. “The NRC and its champions in the White House and on Capitol Hill are looking to obfuscate the real threats and the necessary policy changes to address the risk.”
There are 31 G.E. Mark I and Mark II boiling water reactors (BRWs) in the U.S., the type used at Fukushima. All of these reactors, which comprise just under a third of all nuclear reactors in the U.S., store their spent fuel in elevated pools located outside the primary, or reinforced, containment that protects the reactor core. Thus, the outside structure, the building ostensibly protecting the storage pools, is much weaker, in most cases about as sturdy, experts describe in interviews with AlterNet, as a structure one would find housing a car dealership or a Wal-Mart.
Not what Americans might expect to find safeguarding nuclear material that is more highly radioactive than what resides in the reactor core.
The outer containments surrounding these spent fuel pools in these U.S. reactors patently fail to meet the NRC’s own “defense in-depth” nuclear safety requirements.
But these reactors don’t merely suffer from the same storage design flaw as those at Fukushima Daiichi.
In the U.S., the nuclear industry has been allowed to store incredible volumes of spent fuel for decades in high-density pools that were not only originally designed to retain about one-fourth or one-fifth of what they now hold but were intended to be temporary storage facilities. No more than five years. That was before the idea of reprocessing irradiated fuel in this country failed to gain a foothold over 30 years ago. Once that happened, starting in the early 1980s, the NRC allowed high-density storage in fuel pools on the false assumption that a high-level waste repository would be opened by 1998. But subsequent efforts to gain support for storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have also been scrapped.
More recently, the NRC arbitrarily concluded these pools could store this spent fuel safely for 120 years.
“Our pools are more crammed to the gills than the unit 4 pool at Fukushima Daiichi, much more so,” noted Kamps of Beyond Nuclear. “It’s kind of like a very thick forest that’s waiting for a wildfire. It would take extraordinary measures to prevent nuclear chain reactions in our pools because the waste is so closely packed in there.”
Experts say the only near-term answer to better protect our nation’s existing spent nuclear fuel is dry cask storage. But there’s one catch: the nuclear industry doesn’t want to incur the expense, which is about $1 million per cask.
“So now they’re stuck,” said Alvarez, “The NRC has made this policy decision, which the industry is very violently opposed to changing because it saves them a ton of money. And if they have to go to dry hardened storage onsite, they’re going to have to fork over several hundred million dollars per reactor to do this.”
He also pointed out that the contents of the nine dry casks at the Fukushima Daiichi site were undamaged by the disaster.
“Nobody paid much attention to that fact,” Alvarez said. “I’ve never seen anybody at Tepco or anyone [at the NRC or in the nuclear industry] saying, ‘Well, thank god for the dry casks. They were untouched.’ They don’t say a word about it.”
The NRC declined to comment directly to accusations it’s reluctant to draw attention to the spent fuel vulnerability at Fukushima Daiichi because it would bring more awareness to the dangers of irradiated storage here in the U.S. But the agency did respond to a question about what it has done to address the vulnerability of spent nuclear fuel storage at U.S. nuclear sites with the Mark I and II designs.
“All U.S. spent nuclear fuel is stored safely and securely, regardless of reactor type,” NRC spokesman Burnell replied in an email. “Every spent fuel pool is an inherently robust combination of reinforced concrete and steel, capable of safely withstanding the same type and variety of severe events that reactors are designed for.”
He continued, “After 9/11, the NRC required U.S. nuclear power plants to obtain additional equipment for maintaining reactor and spent fuel pool safety in the event of any situation that could disable large areas of the plant. This ‘B5b’ equipment and related procedures include ensuring spent fuel pools have adequate water levels. The B5b measures are in place at every U.S. plant and have been inspected multiple times, including shortly after the accident at Fukushima.
“The NRC continues to conclude the combination of installed safety equipment and B5b measures can protect the public if extreme events impact a U.S. nuclear power plant.”
But nuclear experts told AlterNet that the majority of Burnell’s response could’ve been made prior to the disaster at Fukushima. In fact, Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, investigated these so-called “B5b” safety measures the NRC ordered post-9/11 and published his findings in a May 2011 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article.
Directly reflecting Burnell’s response to AlterNet, Lyman wrote that after the Fukushima disaster, “the NRC and the industry invoked the mysterious requirements known as ‘B5b’ as a cure-all for the kinds of problems that led to the Fukushima crisis.
“Even though the B5b strategies were specifically developed to cope with fires and explosions, the NRC now argues that they could be used for any event that causes severe damage to equipment and infrastructure, including Fukushima-scale earthquakes and floods.”
But contrary to these NRC assurances, then and now, Lyman’s report found B5b requirements inadequate, containing flaws in safety assumptions that suggest the NRC has not applied the major lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster. Additionally, he revealed emails showing that the NRC’s own staff members questioned the plausibility of these procedures to effectively respond to extreme weather events like floods, earthquakes and concomitant blackouts.
Burnell sent a follow-up email, noting, “I also should have mentioned the NRC issued an order in March to all U.S. plants to install enhanced spent fuel pool instrumentation, so that plant operators will have a clearer understanding of SFP status during a severe event.”
This is a curiously roundabout way of saying that spent fuel pools at U.S. reactors currently have no built-in instrumentation to gauge radiation, temperature or pressure levels.
Kamps also pointed out that the NRC commissioners voted 4 to 1, with Chairman Gregory Jaczko in dissent, to not require such requested safety upgrades to U.S. reactors until the end of 2016.
He added, “Burnell’s flippant, false assurances prove that pool risks, despite being potentially catastrophic, are largely ignored by not only industry, but even NRC itself, even in the aftermath of Fukushima.”
Source: http://www.alternet.org/health/155283/the_worst_yet_to_come_why_nuclear_experts_are_calling_fukushima_a_ticking_time-bomb?page=entire
Return of Son of Underwear Bomber: The Terrible, Horrible Truth
The Guardian has revealed that Underwear Bomber II, who was about to blow up a passenger jet with an undetectable explosive codpiece when he was somehow detected, was actually a CIA agent.
Based on a number of interviews with those involved (zero is a number, right?) and my expertise as a Ph.D. Arabist and terror expert, I can tell you pretty much what happened.
Underwear Bomber II – let’s call him Kharah Ibnulkilab – was a CIA agent provocateur. His controller at Langley handed him fifty thousand dollars in cash and sent him to Yemen, with the promise of another fifty thousand if he could create a Return-of-Son-of-Underwear-Bomber incident to help keep the phony War on Terror going.
Kharah arrived in Yemen and started going to mosques and waving around fistfuls of cash. “All of this, plus a bevy of heavenly virgins, will be yours if you promise to wire some explosives to your testicles and detonate them on an airplane,” he inveighed.
After he was 86ed from seventeen mosques, beaten up eleven times, robbed twice, and laughed out of thirteen of Yemen’s eighteen provinces, Kharah finally took his third wad of CIA-furnished, US-taxpayer-supplied hundred dollar bills back to CIA headquarters. “Couldn’t you guys just build the bomb? Then I’ll turn it in and say I got it from al-Qaeda.”
“The CIA doesn’t build bombs for terrorists,” his case officer snapped.
“What about the World Trade Center demolitions?’
“What about the first World Trade Center bomb, and the Oklahoma City bombs?”
“Well, then send in the FBI!”
So thanks to the new inter-agency cooperation protocol established by the Patriot Act, an FBI terrorist-bomb-construction team was sent to Yemen to create a detection-proof exploding codpiece.
When Kharah was handed the exploding codpiece at FBI headquarters in Sana, he almost exploded. “You want me to wear THAT?”
The FBI codpiece-maker responded: “We have to scare people, right?”
“Scare them?! They’ll be laughing so hard THEY’LL explode! I mean, you call THIS undetectable?! Why did you have to make it so big? How the hell is that thing going to fit into my underwear?”
“Look, we had to include enough plastique to make a big bang. And we had to include a detonator. That was a big problem with Underwear Bomber I – we sent him with no detonator, and the conspiracy theorists figured it out. So this time we decided to do the job right.”
“But how can I possibly get through security wearing THAT?”
The FBI codpiece expert groaned. “You’re not SUPPOSED to get through security. Do you think we’d let our own agent get on a plane with a bomb that could actually explode? I mean, what if you scratched your nuts or something and it went off?”
“So I’m supposed to be apprehended at the airport before I get on the plane?”
“Got a problem with that?”
“As long as I’m outa here with my fifty Gs five minutes later…no problemo.”
So on the appointed day, Kharah strode through the Sana Airport wearing his exploding codpiece. Heads turned, then turned away. Scowls formed behind beards, titters behind niqabs.
At the security checkpoint, Kharah loudly announced: “I do not wish to be irradiated by the naked body scanner. I demand a full body patdown, complete with gropes and pinches.”
Embarrassed, the security guy waved him through, saying “Go ahead, just take it easy on the viagra next time you fly.”
Kharah stood his ground. “I demand that you search me!” The explosive codpiece swelled menacingly.
The security guy waved his boss over.
Kharah decided it was time to let it all hang out.
“I am wearing a brand-new special-model undetectable al-Qaeda™ exploding codpiece! Death to the infidels!” he screamed.
Three ordinary-looking Americans standing in the security checkpoint line suddenly jumped on Kharah, wrestled him to the ground, and started stripping off his pants yelling “Freeze! We’re the CIA!” and whispering into Kharah’s ear “pretend to fight back so we can beat you up!”
“No way!” screamed Kharah as CIA guy #1 ripped his pants to his knees, exposing the enormous FBI-crafted plastique organ of mass destruction.
Four passengers fainted, and one elderly woman suffered a minor heart attack. Five more casualties of the war that won’t end in our lifetimes.
After the CIA had dragged Kharah off to an undisclosed location, recovered the codpiece, apologized for breaking his arm, paid him his $50,000, and sent him on his way, they were faced with a problem: How to write the press release.
“We have a beautifully-crafted codpiece. We have an attempted crime. We have plenty of witnesses. But we don’t have a perp!” fumed the Sana Station Chief.
“Couldn’t we just bring in some retarded guy and waterboard him until he’s internalized our script?” asked Agent #1.
“We already used that one on Abu Zubeyda and KSM,” the Station Chief snarled. “If we try it again, and get caught, it could blow the 9/11 cover story. After all, the witnesses might…”
“I’ve got it!” said Agent #2 brightly. “We admit that our guy was CIA, but we’ll say he infiltrated an al-Qaeda cell and THEY built the codpiece!”
“But what if the true story gets out? We’ll end up getting that codpiece returned to us, right up the –”
“The story will never get out,” said the Station Chief.
“What are we going to do, terminate Kharah?”
“Won’t be necessary. We’ll just give the whole story, exactly as it really happened, to a professional conspiracy theorist. He publishes it. His audience more or less believes it. The gatekeepers write it off as paranoid fiction. That way everybody’s happy.”
And there you have it.
The truth – more or less – behind Crotch Bomber II.
Economic Alert: If You’re Not Worried Yet…You Should Be
Brandon Smith ~ ALT-Market.com
For the past four years I have been covering the progression of the global economic crisis with an emphasis on the debilitating effects it has had on the American financial system. Only once before have I ever issued an economic alert, and this was at the onset of the very first credit downgrade in U.S. history by S&P. I do not take the word “alert” lightly. Since 2008 we have seen a cycle of events that have severely weakened our country’s foundation, but each event has then been followed by a lull, sometimes 4 to 6 months at a stretch, which seems to disarm the public, drawing them back into apathy and complacency. The calm moments before each passing storm give Americans a false sense of hope that our capsized fiscal vessel will somehow right itself if we just hold on a little longer…
I don’t have to tell most people within the Liberty Movement that this is not going to happen. Unfortunately, there are many out there who do not share our awareness of the situation. Debt implosions and currency devaluation NEVER simply “fade away”; they are always followed by extreme social and political strife that tends to sully the doorsteps of almost every individual and family. The notion that we can coast through such a tempest unscathed is an insane idea, filled with a dangerous potential for sour regrets.
There are some people who also believe that the private Federal Reserve with the Treasury in tow has the ability to prolong the worst symptoms of the collapse indefinitely, or at least, until they have long since kicked the bucket and don’t have to worry about it anymore (the ‘pay-it forward to our grandkids’ crowd) . I can say with 100% certainty that most of us will live to see the climax of the breakdown, and that this breakdown is about to enter a more precarious state before the end of this year. You can only stretch a sun-boiled rubber band so far before it snaps completely, and America’s financial elasticity has long been melted away.
A pummeling hailstorm of news items and international developments have made the first half of 2012 almost impossible to track and analyze. The frequency at which negative information has surfaced is almost dizzying. However, a pattern and a recognizable motion are beginning to take shape, and, I believe, a loose timeline is beginning to form.
At the end of January, I covered the incredible nosedive of the Baltic Dry Index (a measure of global shipping rates that signals a fall in global demand) to historic lows. I pointed out the tendency of stocks and the general economy to crash around 8 months (sometimes a little longer) after the BDI makes such a dramatic downturn. Mainstream analysts, of course, attributed the fall to an “overproduction of ships”, which is the same exact excuse they used when the BDI collapsed back in 2008 just before the derivatives bubble burst. It would seem that the cable TV talking heads were wrong yet again, as the international market facade quickly evaporates right in line with the BDI’s almost prophetic knack for calling an economic derailment in advance.
Here are some of the most important reasons why every American should be prepared for much harder days, especially before the end of 2012:
The European Union Is Officially Dead In The Water
Stick a fork in er’, the EU is done! We are talking about full scale dismantlement, likely followed by a reformation of core nations and multiple collapse scenarios of peripheral countries. The writing is all over the wall in the wake of the latest election results in Greece and France, where, as alternative researchers have been predicting for some time, the battle between the government spending crowd and proponents of austerity has reached a fever pitch.
The Greeks and the French are royally pissed over draconian cuts in public programs and the destruction of pensions which have been a mainstay of their economies for quite some time. They are also furious over being sold off like collateral to the IMF and World Bank. Rightly so. Like the American taxpayer, the taxpayers of floundering EU nations are wrongly being held responsible for the financial mismanagement and fraud of their governments and global banks which have remained untouched and unpunished for their trespasses. The problem is, the voters of both countries are signing on to the socialist/quasi-communist bandwagon in response. In Greece, the Left Coalition Party, a splinter group of the traditional communist party, has now taken a primary position of power:
www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/us-greece-idUSBRE8440DG20120507
In France, voters have elected socialist Francois Hollande (a Bilderberg attendee), whose latest promise is to spend France into recovery through his “pro-growth agenda”
:news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/french-president-elect-hollande-won-t-difficult-obama-195617064.html
I have no doubt that the elections of the EU are as manipulated by elitists as they are here in the U.S., and I’m sure false paradigms abound. Have Europeans forgotten that it was overt government spending that set them on the path to calamity in the first place? Or, are they like Americans; just desperate for any change in the ranks of leadership? One would think that they would take note of the problems here in our country and realize that electing a socialist to replace another socialist is no way out of economic hardship.
Former officials like Nicolas Sarkozy may have claimed to be distanced from the socialist ideal, but, as with all globalist puppets, their actions did not match their rhetoric, and they have always supported policies of centralization and big government. The French and the Greeks have essentially replaced closet collectivists with outspoken collectivists, and will see NO relief from the crisis in the Euro-zone as a result of the political reordering. In fact, the stage has now been set for a volatile chain of dominos. Germany, which is the only economy left holding the EU together, has been unyielding on austerity cuts. A conflict between France and Germany is now inevitable. Neither will compromise their position, and I can see no other eventual result than a reexamination and perhaps abandonment of the EU charter.
How does this affect America? Being that international banks and corporations have forced our countries into interdependency through the engineered chicanery of globalization, any collapse in Europe is going to strike hard around the world, but the worst will hit the U.S. and China. Which is probably why China is disengaging trade away from the U.S. and the EU and focusing on other developing nations:
www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/08/us-china-economy-trade-idUSBRE84702N20120508
If you thought the Greek rollercoaster was a pain in the neck for investment markets, just wait until the whole of the EU is in a shambles!
Spain is next in line, with a 25% official unemployment rate and a massive black market economy forming. As I have been saying for years now, when governments disrupt the financial survival of the people, they WILL form their own alternatives, including black markets and barter markets. It is about survival. The Spanish government does not care much for these alternatives, though, and has now banned cash transaction over 2500 euros in a futile attempt to squeeze taxes out of the populace through digitally tracked payment methods:
thedailybell.com/3814/Spain-Bans-Cash
Another major concern for Americans is the fact that Europeans are inching towards an abandonment of the dollar. Francois Hollande has openly called for an end to the dollar’s world reserve status, and with a majority backing of the French people, he could easily make this happen, at least where France is concerned. All it takes is for a few key countries to publicly and completely drop the Greenback and the dollar’s reputation as a safe haven investment will be quashed. This could very well happen before 2012 is over.
QE3 Is The End
Here is the bottom line; U.S. growth is a theater of shadows. There has been no progress, no recovery, only the misrepresentation of statistics. Millions of Americans have fallen off unemployment rolls because they have been jobless for too long, which lowers the unemployment rate, but does not change the fact that they are still without work. Durable goods orders are dropping like an avalanche. U.S. credit has been lowered yet again by rating agency Egan-Jones. With China making bilateral trade deals in numerous countries on the condition that the dollar be dropped as the primary purchasing mechanism, and with the EU turning to economic mulch, the currency’s safety is nonexistent. Traditional investors who cling to the idea that a falling Euro spells dollar strength will be sorely disappointed when the currency is suddenly being rejected in international currency markets.
The Federal Reserve has already stated that any signs of “relapse” into recession (the recession that we never left) will be met with all options on the table, including QE3:
www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/12/us-usa-fed-idUSBRE83B1KD20120412
I believe that QE3 will probably be announced this year (due in large part to trauma from Europe), and, that this will trigger a mass movement by foreign nations to drop the dollar as the world reserve. QE3 will be the straw that broke the camel. How exactly this will play out socially and politically, I do not know (I could take a good guess though). But, the technical results are predictable. The Fed will respond to the lack of treasury purchases by ramping up fiat printing in order to cover the ever increasing costs of the government machine. The Greenback will immediately lose a large portion of its value, at least in terms of imported goods, causing inflation in prices. Oil and energy prices will skyrocket if OPEC follows suit (which they will, though the Saudis may still honor dollars for a time). Doing any traditional business will become nearly impossible, and price inflation will dominate the lives and the minds of average unprepared citizens.
The amount of time that it will take for these difficulties to unfold is also not clear. We are operating in uncharted territory, and dealing with a collapse scenario on a truly planetary scale. My best advice is to assume that the avalanche will move fast.
While markets in our country have seen only mild disruptions so far this year, their solidity is predicated on a host of props and costume pieces, any one of which could pull the rug out from under America’s suspension of disbelief if it strays but a little from the illusion. As long as the dollar holds, stocks can be infused with bailout juice through major banks. So can major companies and even desperate state governments on the verge of bankruptcy. The Dow will remain relatively friendly, and day traders and the public will remain happy. As soon as the dollar comes into question, all bets are off…
Does This Mean Doom, Or Just Another Bad Day?
The real beginning of today’s collapse is tied to the events of 2008. The pace of it has been deceptive, but also, in a way, it is a gift. Over the past four years, I have personally seen the awakening of thousands of people that may have never had the chance if the system had gone into full spectrum breakdown right away. The question now is, how much longer can the U.S. wobble along on one wheel? In my view, and from the evidence I see in markets at the moment, not much longer.
It is hard to set aside any expectations that the next leg down will be easy to digest for the populace. The reality of our predicament is starting to hit home. All the tax return checks have been spent. The credit cards have been maxed. The new cars have been sold off and traded in for ghetto-mobiles. The good jobs have been replaced with Taco Bell slavery. A trip to see The Avengers is now the family vacation. And, the distractions of reality TV just aren’t buttering our bread anymore. It’s the little things at first that really signal the financial mood of a society, as well as reveal the more vital and looming issues just over the horizon.
All indicators suggest that this year will be unlike any other before. In 2008, we saw the first trigger events for the collapse. In 2008/2009, we saw the creation of the bailout culture, setting the stage for inflation and dollar disintegration. In 2010, we saw the first bilateral trade deal cutting out the dollar between China and Russia, which is now the template for trade deals all over the globe. In 2011, we saw the first downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the crisis in the EU become epidemic. In 2012, I see not just another difficulty to add to the mountain, but a culmination of all these detriments to produce something entirely new; a vast and subversive realignment forcing many of us to take a more aggressive stance in the fight for an economically and socially free America.
Financial disasters have always been a convenient catalyst for a host of even more frightening obstacles, including civil unrest, and blatant totalitarianism. This is the cusp. It is one of those moments that people of later generations read about in awe, and sometimes horror. The “doom” is not in the event, but in the response. What we make of the days approaching determines the darkness that they cast upon the future. It is a test. It is not something to be dreaded. It is something to be seized upon, and dealt with, as great men and women before us have done. At the very least, we know that it is coming. That, in itself, could well seal our success…
You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com Alt-Market is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.
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