The TSA has been lying to the American people about full-body scanners. The agency has insisted that these “digital strip search” machines are incapable of saving, storing or transmitting the images they take. This, we are told, makes it okay for people to be digitally strip-searched.
But secret documents uncovered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.EPIC.org) have revealed that these machines do indeed posses precisely such capabilities. According to TSA specification requirement documents that have been uncovered by the EPIC, all full-body scanners purchased by the TSA must have the ability to both save and transmit the scanned images of air passengers.
The documents were obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They have also been shared with CNN, which has viewed the documents and published a story about what they reveal.
These documents contradict the claims of the TSA, which include the statement that “the system has no way to save, transmit or print the image.”
TSA misleads the public
The TSA’s own “imaging technology” page (http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/im…) claims, “This state-of-the-art technology cannot store, print, transmit or save the image. In fact, all machines are delivered to airports with these functions disabled.”
That in itself is an interesting statement because by stating those functions are “disabled,” it also admits that the machines inherently have these functions. And just because the machines are delivered with the functions disabled doesn’t mean those functions can’t be re-enabled at the flick of a switch.
In other words, these machines are designed and constructed with the ability to save, store and transmit the images.
“I don’t think the TSA has been forthcoming with the American public about the true capability of these devices,” said the Executive Director of EPIC, Marc Rotenberg in a CNN interview. “They’ve done a bunch of very slick promotions where they show people — including journalists — going through the devices. And then they reassure people, based on the images that have been produced, that there’s not any privacy concerns. But if you look at the actual technical specifications and you read the vendor contracts, you come to understand that these machines are capable of doing far more than the TSA has let on.” (http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/…)
In other words, the TSA is telling the public and the press one thing, but the machines they’re buying are capable of something far more insidious, these documents reveal. Is the TSA intentionally lying to the public in order to mislead people over the real capabilities of these machines?
If these full-body scanners can save, store and transmit images, then it’s only a matter of time before some rogue TSA employee finds a way to copy off the images or display them on the screen so that they can take snapshots with their own portable cameras.
The TSA says it’s protecting your privacy. But its own scanner specification documents tell a different story: The TSA won’t even buy these machines unless they can save, store and transmit revealing images of air passengers.
The health care debate and the Copenhagen Climate Summit were some of the high profile activities that occurred during the month of December. But secretly signed by President Obama on December 16th was an amendment to an executive order that gives police officers and international agencies exemption from laws and regulations that U.S. officers must comply. The secrecy of this is disturbing, but more so is the ability for foreign police officers to operate in America without following our laws.
Foreign cops will not be subject to comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which poses a threat to any American that might be investigated. INTERPOL, as taken from NewsWithViews.com, has already enjoyed the same privileges given to foreign diplomats. Some INTERPOL countries include Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, Bolivia, Cuba, Iran and Somalia – all of which are anti-American in some form.
The previous executive order was amended by President Reagan in 1983 during the Cold War, but had limitations requiring that INTERPOL operations be subject to U.S. laws, including FOIA. But President Obama has removed these limitations, essentially giving foreign police agencies more power than American police officers. Here is the amendment:
Amending Executive Order 12425 designating INTERPOL as a public international organization entitled to enjoy certain privileges, exemptions and immunities
“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words “except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act” and the semicolon that immediately precedes them,” Obama wrote.
Obama has granted an international police authority to overrule the U.S. government. The intentions of this secret amendment are unknown, but it did occur before the Christmas day terrorist attack, proving this wasn’t in response to the radical Muslim Abdulmutallab.
The sections amended by President Obama also address federal and property taxes and Social Security. The law prohibits U.S. law enforcement from searching and seizing INTERPOL records, but Obama officials say this can be waived by the president. INTERPOL is a forum for cooperation of law enforcement agencies of its member states that helps coordinate police efforts, but this amendment brings an entirely new meaning to the Secret Police.
As if Obama didn’t have his Brown Shirts doing enough reporting neighbors to flag@whitehouse.gov This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , it now looks like they have a secret force operating within U.S. boundaries without adhering to American laws. Obama has said before that he sees a strong need for a civilian national security force. And here we thought the SEIU Purple Shirt union thugs were bad.
The EPA declares itself the regulator of CO2 emissions, allowing itself to cut CO2 emissions without the approval of Congress, bypassing legislation that is currently stalled in the Senate.
Obama’s administration formally declared that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant and will “endanger the public health and welfare of the American people” empowering the EPA to regulate across the country under the law of the Clean Air Act that seeks emissions cut by roughly 17 percent by 2020.
The ruling was welcomed at the opening day of the talk in the Danish capital; “This is very significant in the sense that if…the Senate fails to adopt legislation (on emissions), then the administration will have the authority to regulate,” Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters in Copenhagen.
But top congressional republican James Inhofe warned that EPA’s new “endangerment finding” will “lead to a wave of new regulations, new bureaucracy that will wreak havoc on the American economy and destroy millions of jobs and of course consumers to pay more for electricity and gasoline”. Many republicans are calling for the EPA to rebuke its claims that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant.
Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator said the move to declare CO2 a toxic pollutant “relied on decades of sound, peer-reviewed, extensively evaluated scientific data”. Jackson denied any manipulation was carried out by the ClimateGate scientists saying that there’s “nothing in the hacked emails that undermines the science upon which this decision is based”.
President Barack Obama and Al Gore will be attending the Copenhagen conference late next week to further push the illusion that CO2 is a toxic gas. On the same day of the EPA’s announcement, Al Gore visited the White House.
The Copenhagen globalists including the EPA base their entire argument on the back of the UNIPCC’s CRU scientists which are involved in one of the greatest scandals in modern science, ClimateGate which consists of; Manipulation, Deception, Suppression of Evidence, including having AGW-skeptics fired and removed from the peer-reviewed process and of course breaking FOIA requests by deleting emails and urging other scientists to do so as well. [Source]
With that in mind, EPA’s decision to call CO2 a dangerous pollutant falls flat on its face. The entire Copenhagen summit is all about creating another bubble by the same crooks that gave us the dot-com bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis; Enron and Goldman Sachs.
From a massive cap-and-trade derivatives scheme, to a global carbon tax, this is all about plummeting what’s left of the U.S. economy and shutting down life on the planet by reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.
WITHOUT CO2 THERE IS NO LIFE!
“CO2 is not a pollutant. In simple terms, CO2 is plant food,” notes John R. Christy, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alabama. “The green world we see around us would disappear if not for atmospheric CO2. These plants largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today. Indeed, numerous studies indicate the present biosphere is being invigorated by the human-induced rise of CO2. In and of itself, therefore, the increasing concentration of CO2 does not pose a toxic risk to the planet.”
In fact, as S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia has noted, an increase in CO2 would raise GNP and therefore average income. “It’s axiomatic that bureaucracies always want to expand their scope of operations. This is especially true of EPA, which is primarily a regulatory agency,” writes Singer.
The EPA is may soon be tasked with regulating life in the United States at the behest of a coterie of globalists who are keen to limit economic and industrial activity and check the growth of the herd which they despise and want to scale back to 500 million, as they have proudly announced on the Georgia Guidestones. [Source]
Fox News Analysis: ClimateGate, EPA Ruling, Copenhagen
The Climatic Research Unit at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal sought funds from Shell Oil in the year 2000.
Other e-mail messages obtained from the University of East Anglia’s computers also showed officials at the school’s CRU solicited support from ExxonMobil and BP Amoco, although the nature of this support was not identified.
As climate alarmists and their media minions love to claim that global warming skeptics are all paid shills of Big Oil, it makes one wonder how the press will report these startling revelations discovered by Anthony Watts Friday:
Mick Kelley to Mike Hulme
Mike Had a very good meeting with Shell yesterday. Only a minor part of the
agenda, but I expect they will accept an invitation to act as a strategic
partner and will contribute to a studentship fund though under certain
conditions. I now have to wait for the top-level soundings at their end
after the meeting to result in a response. We, however, have to discuss
asap what a strategic partnership means, what a studentship fund is, etc,
etc. By email? In person?
I hear that Shell’s name came up at the TC meeting. I’m ccing this to Tim
who I think was involved in that discussion so all concerned know not to
make an independent approach at this stage without consulting me!
I’m talking to Shell International’s climate change team but this approach
will do equally for the new foundation as it’s only one step or so off
Shell’s equivalent of a board level. I do know a little about the Fdn and
what kind of projects they are looking for. It could be relevant for the
new building, incidentally, though opinions are mixed as to whether it’s
within the remit.
Regards
Mick
Earlier that same year, the recipient of this e-mail message, Mike Hulme, sent a message of his own concerning getting “support” from a number of entities (emphasis added):
Mike Hulme to Simon Shackley
Simon,
I have talked with Tim O’Riordan and others here today and Tim has a wealth of contacts he is prepared to help with. Four specific ones from Tim are:
– Charlotte Grezo, BP Fuel Options (possibly on the Assessment Panel. She is also on the ESRC Research Priorities Board), but someone Tim can easily talk with. There are others in BP Tim knows too.
– Richard Sykes, Head of Environment Division at Shell International
– Chris Laing, Managing Director, Laing Construction (also maybe someone at Bovis)
– ??, someone high-up in Unilever whose name escapes me.
[…]
>SPRU has offered to elicit support from their energy programme
>sponsors which will help beef things up. (Frans: is the Alsthom
>contact the same as Nick Jenkin’s below? Also, do you have a BP
>Amoco contact? The name I’ve come up with is Paul Rutter, chief
>engineer, but he is not a personal contact]
>
>We could probably do with some more names from the financial sector.
>Does anyone know any investment bankers?
>
>Please send additional names as quickly as possible so we can
>finalise the list.
>
>I am sending a draft of the generic version of the letter eliciting
>support and the 2 page summary to Mike to look over. Then this can be
>used as a basis for letter writing by the Tyndall contact (the person
>in brackets).
>
>Mr Alan Wood CEO Siemens plc [Nick Jenkins]
>Mr Mike Hughes CE Midlands Electricity (Visiting Prof at UMIST) [Nick
>Jenkins]
>Mr Keith Taylor, Chairman and CEO of Esso UK (John
>Shepherd]
>Mr Brian Duckworth, Managing Director, Severn-Trent Water
>[Mike Hulme]
>Dr Jeremy Leggett, Director, Solar Century [Mike Hulme]
>Mr Brian Ford, Director of Quality, United Utilities plc [Simon
>Shackley]
>Dr Andrew Dlugolecki, CGU [Jean Palutikof]
>Dr Ted Ellis, VP Building Products, Pilkington plc [Simon Shackley]
>Mr Mervyn Pedalty, CEO, Cooperative Bank plc [Simon Shackley]
>
>
>Possibles:
>Mr John Loughhead, Technology Director ALSTOM [Nick Jenkins]
>Mr Edward Hyams, Managing Director Eastern Generation [Nick
>Jenkins]
>Dr David Parry, Director Power Technology Centre, Powergen
>[Nick Jenkins]
>Mike Townsend, Director, The Woodland Trust [Melvin
>Cannell]
>Mr Paul Rutter, BP Amoco [via Terry Lazenby, UMIST]
>
>With kind regards
>
>Simon Shackley
Now who is the shill for Big Oil again? Next time somebody brings up that ridiculous argument about skeptics, show them this.
The Climategate conspiracists are now blaming each other, with Michael Mann clouting his former friend Phil Jones with his hockey stick:
One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: “I can’t put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email.”
Prof Mann also said he could not “justify” a request from Prof Jones that he should delete some of his own emails to prevent them from being seen by outsiders.
“I can’t justify the action, I can only speculate that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that’s clear.”
Prof Mann then argued however that there was “absolutely no evidence” that he too had manipulated data, while he also said “I don’t believe that any of my colleagues have done that”.
It’s not just the scientists at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University who may have criminally violated the Freedom of Information Act (some profesors in the UK and some in the USA), NASA has been stonewalling a FOIA request as well… for years.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.
“I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” Mr. Horner said. “These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is saying they’re “working on” the FOIA request.
Right. For two years?!
The public affairs guy at GISS is using the Sgt. Schultz defense (”I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!”)
He said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn’t say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data. The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.
What we are seeing is in total contradiction to the scientific method. Honest scientists don’t delete their data or use tricks to hide data they don’t like. They don’t insist the science is settled and that anyone who questions them is a nut. They gladly release their data to other scientists so their results can be replicated or errors can be corrected.
Once upon a time the “science was settled” that the world was flat. The “science was settled” that the world was the center of the universe. Whoops.
Much of the data used for the “consensus” that manmade global warming is real came from the CRU and NASA’s GISS. If that data is not accurate and/or has been manipulated it undermines everything. When you consider the trillions of dollars at risk here by policy pushed by this “science,” it’s understandable that Christopher Booker is calling it The Worst Scientific Scandal of Our Generation.
CRU’s Phil Jones will step down from his position as director of the unit that cooked climate change data to hide global cooling. Britain’s East Anglia University says Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review.
The CRU scandal emerged after anonymous persons gained access to 160 MB of emails and source code. It is uncertain if the evidence implicating Jones and the CRU came from hackers or whistle-blowers.
Lord Monckton, the third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and adviser to Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit in the 1980s, went on the Alex Jones Show last week and called from criminal prosecution of Jones and his crew of climate change fraudsters.
In a blog entry posted prior to talking with Alex Jones, Monckton noted how Phil Jones and his co-conspirators “have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings.”
On Sunday, the Times Online reported that scientists at the University of East Anglia admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. The CRU was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
On Saturday, the University of East Anglia said that 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been made available to the public for “several years” and that all data will be released as soon as they are clear of non-publication agreements.
Phil Jones told the science journal Nature that he was working to make the data publicly available with the agreement of its owners but this was expected to take some months.
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.
He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
A UN scientist is declaring that his three fellow UN climate panel colleagues “should be barred from the IPCC process.” In a November 26, 2009 message on his website, UN IPCC contributing author Dr. Eduardo Zorita writes: “CRU files: Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process.”
Zorita writes that the short answer to that question is: Short answer: “Because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.”
Zorita indicates that he is aware that he is putting his career in jeopardy by going after the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists. “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication,” Zorita candidly admits, a reference to the ClimateGate emails discussing how to suppress data and scientific studies that do not agree with the UN IPCC views.
Zorita was a UN IPCC Contributing Author of Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Since 2003, Zorita as headed the Department of Paleoclimate and has been a senior scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre in Germany. Zorita has published more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Zorita’s stunning candor continued, noting that scientists who disagreed with the UN IPCC climate view were “bullied and subtly blackmailed.”
“In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the ‘politically correct picture’. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the ‘pleasure’ to experience all this in my area of research,” Zorita explained. [Zorita’s full statement is reprinted below.]
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.-Phil Jones
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate. -Kevin Trenberth
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted. -Ben Santer
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….” -Michael E. Mann
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority..:
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?” -Michael E. Mann
“ I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.” -Phil Jones
“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !” -Phil Jones
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.
I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.
“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” – Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” – Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” – Christine Stewart, fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.” – emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
“We require a central organizing principle – one agreed to voluntarily. Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvement in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change – these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.” – Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” – Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” – Maurice Strong, Environmental Defense Fund
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.” – Professor Maurice King
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.” – Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” – Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” – Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.” –Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” –Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” – Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.” – Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” – Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” – John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.” – Christopher Manes, Earth First!
“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” – David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
A prominent scientist has called for criminal prosecutions to be brought against the UN affiliated scientists involved in what has been termed “ClimateGate”.
Australian geologist and long time opponent of anthropogenic global warming theory, Ian Plimer, has condemned what he describes as “alarmism underpinned by fraud”.
“This behavior is that of criminals and all the data from the UK Hadley Centre and the US GISS must now be rejected. These crooks perpetrated these crimes at the expense of the British and U.S. taxpayers.” Plimer writes in a commentary piece.
“The same crooks control the IPCC and the fraudulent data in IPCC reports. The same crooks meet in Copenhagen next week and want 0.7% of the Western world’s GDP to pass through an unelected UN government, and then on to sticky fingers in the developing world.” Plimer continues.
He points out that the emails intimate that figures were manipulated to cover up the medieval warming period, and continued global cooling, in addition to artificially inflated data to emphasize warming during the 20th century.
Plimer, author of the best selling book on the global warming debate, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science, has long been a vocal critic of what he describes as the hijacked environmental movement.
Plimer has stated many times that he feels vast swathes of the scientific community have been co-opted to manipulate data in return for millions in continued research funding.
The leaked emails from the Hadley centre reveal that CRU chief P.D. Jones has received 55 endowments since 1990 from agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to NATO, worth a total of £13,718,547, or approximately $22.6 million.
Another document titled (potential-funding.doc) lists sources of potential funding and shows that the scientists considered pressing “energy agencies” that specifically deal in new technology to reduce carbon emissions.
Three agencies listed as potential sources of funding are UK based Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative, and the Energy Saving Trust. Renewables North West, an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind, and geothermal energy, is listed as a fourth potential benefactor.
Of course, all these potential financial backers have a vested interest in maintaining the conception that human-induced global warming is a reality backed by science.
Anthropogenic global warming theorists have long attacked skeptical scientists, claiming they are bought and paid for by oil companies, yet here we have the most influential group of climate scientists acknowledging that they are a shoe-in to receive funding from energy companies with vested interests.
Ian Plimer joins another prominent figure in the debate, Lord Christopher Monckton, who called for a full investigation and criminal prosecutions earlier this week.
Climate Expert: “Compromised” UN Scientists should be excluded from IPCC, Peer-Review Process
Says “Gatekeepers” have been exposed, should be barred
A prominent German scientist who was attacked in the leaked CRU emails by UN affiliated climate scientists has stated that the group should be barred from taking part in the peer-review process and excluded from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Hans von Storch, who is referred to in very unflattering terms several times in the leaked emails, points out that the CRU scientists acted as “gatekeepers”.
“Mike Mann [climate scientist at Penn State University] was successful to exclude me from a review-type meeting on historical reconstructions in Wengen,” von Storch comments on his blog.
“I found the style of communication revealing, speaking about other people and their ideas, joining forces to “kill” papers, exchanges of “improving” presentations without explaining.”
“Interesting exchanges, and evidences, are contained about efforts to destroy Climate Research’” von Storch writes.
“… scientists like Mike Mann, Phil Jones and others should no longer participate in the peer-review process or in assessment activities like IPCC. […]” the professor concludes.
Yesterday we reported on the fact that the leaked emails revealed the warming alarmist scientists effectively hijacked the peer-review process as they alluded several times to efforts to shut down evidence they did not agree with, regardless of its scientific merit.
In response to the astounding revelations arising out of the hacked CRU emails, Senator Jim Inhofe has stated that unless something is done within the next seven days, he will lead the call for a rigorous investigation into mounting evidence that top climate scientists conspired to manipulate data to hide evidence of global cooling while engaging in academic witch hunts to eliminate scientists skeptical of man-made climate change.
Speaking on the Americas Morning Show earlier today, Inhofe, Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the new revelations proved what he has been warning about for over four years, that politicians and bias-driven climate scientists affiliated with the UN IPCC have been fraudulently “cooking the science” to conform to their agenda.
“If nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation,” said Inhofe. “Cause this thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with.”
Asked what he would call for an investigation of, Inhofe responded, “On the IPCC and on the United Nations on the way that they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”
Meanwhile, even some pro-man made global warming advocates have conceded that an investigation is necessary.
Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, told the London Guardian that only a rigorous investigation could clear the names of those accused of manipulating the data, admitting that the emails “created the impression of impropriety,” which is a lot further than most have gone in accepting the damning nature of the hacked data.
Indeed, the British Met Office performed the equivalent of a child sticking his fingers in his ears by merely attempting to dismiss the emails altogether, without even explaining what was meant when scientists at CRU talked about pulling “tricks” to “hide the decline” in temperatures.
A spokesman at the Met Office, which jointly produces global temperature datasets with the Climate Research Unit, said there was no need for an inquiry. “If you look at the emails, there isn’t any evidence that the data was falsified and there’s no evidence that climate change is a hoax. It’s a shame that some of the sceptics have had to take this rather shallow attempt to discredit robust science undertaken by some of the world’s most respected scientists. The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be. It’s no surprise, with the Copenhagen talks just days away, that this has happened now.”
As James Delingpole of the Telegraph highlights, alarmists are not going to be effected by the scandal, because they will allow nothing whatsoever to corrupt their religious belief system. “They’ve made up their minds and no quantity of contrary evidence, however devastating, is going to shake their considered position of “Nyah nyah nyah. Got my fingers in my ears. Not listening. The world IS warming and it’s man’s fault. Must tax carbon now….”
A hacker has leaked thousands of emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University that appear to show how climate change data was fudged and the peer review process skewed to favor the manmade climate change hypothesis.
The link to the data appears to have been posted to a number of climate science websites yesterday by an anonymous hacker or insider going by the name “FOIA,” an apparent allusion to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States. One of the first sites where the 62 MB file was posted was The Air Vent. It was soon picked up by Watts Up With That, Climate Audit and other climate science sites.
The information contained in the leaked emails and documents are as shocking as they are damning of the scientists who have been most vocal about the manmade global warming scare. Some of the excerpts include this email, from one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Phil Jones writing to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist Michael Mann of “Mann’s hockey stick” fame to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. The recent global temperatures show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but Jones ADMITS in this excerpt that he replaced the real global temperatures with Mann’s “hockey-stick” up-slope to fit their climate change viewpoints.:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
In another email from Phil Jones to climate scientist Michael Mann about ousting academics that question the link between human activities and global warming out of any peer-reviewed IPCC reports.:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
More evidence of the ousting of global warming skeptics is found in this excerpt in which researchers appear to discuss ways to discredit James Saiers of the Geophysical Research Letters journal because he seems to be sympathetic to global warming skeptics.:
“Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.< Even this would be difficult."
The scientists at the CRU have been waging a running battle against releasing any information under the Freedom of Information Act. A number of people had been making requests for the release of their data and correspondence – a legitimate target for an FoI, particularly given the large amounts of taxpayers’ money flowing into the CRU, the controversy of the topic and the sizeable impact on public policy that the Unit seeks to have.
These emails reveal the horrendous attitude of the CRU towards these requests behind the scenes, and their furious efforts to defy and even break the FoI Act.
“I have been of the opinion right from the start of these FOI requests, that our private ,
inter-collegial discussion is just that – PRIVATE. Your communication with individual
colleagues was on the same basis as that for any other person and it discredits the IPCC
process not one iota not to reveal the details. On the contrary, submitting to these
“demands” undermines the wider scientific expectation of personal confidentiality . It is
for this reason, and not because we have or have not got anything to hide, that I believe none of us should submit to these “requests”.”
This is of course absolutely disgraceful behaviour on the part of these academics and their institution. They might have felt this was an imposition or an invasion, and they may have felt that their research should have been out of the grubby grasp of the general public, but the law is clear.
This is a rare insight into the attitude within many public bodies towards transparency, and the refusal to accept the principle of the FoIA is undoubtedly all too common. While the people and the media love FoI for the power it disseminates, those who have lost their privileged status still resent it deeply.
Even more serious than their appalling attitude is the instruction by Prof Jones to his colleagues to delete emails that are apparently subject to an FoI request! Which is illegal. . .
In a January 2nd, 2005 Prof Phil Jones tells colleague Michael Mann in an email that he should delete CRU station data before climate skeptics can get a hold of it via Freedom of Information Act.:
don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it!
Jones just admitted he was warned by his own university against deleting data subjected to an FOI request from McIntyre (MM), but that’s not the only evidence of ‘cooking the books’. On May 29th 2008, Prof Jones instructs colleagues to delete emails in a message helpfully titled “IPCC & FOI”:
“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
AR4 is an IPCC report that Keith Briffa and others at the CRU worked on together, and at least one FoI request on exactly this correspondence had apparently been submitted by a David Holland on May 5th 2008.
The Freedom of Information Act 2000 expressly forbids – on pain of criminal conviction – destroying information that has been requested under FoI. As the Information Commissioner puts it:
If information is held when a FOIA request is received, destroying it outside of your normal records management policies will result in a breach of the Act. You must confirm that you hold the information and consider disclosure, subject to any exemption. It will also be a criminal offence to conceal or destroy information if this is done with the intention of preventing disclosure under either FOIA or EIR.
This offence is punishable with a fine of up to £5,000.
Tellingly, another email from Prof Jones later that year shows that UEA’s internal FoI team had evidently become concerned about his secretive actions:
“I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails”
If the FoI team were concerned that Prof Jones might be breaking the law – and even committing a criminal offence – on an area that they are legally responsible for, they should have reported him to the Information Commissioner. Perhaps his flowering relationship with the FoI officer and the Chief Librarian precluded this.
Happily, he’s never tried to become matey with us, so we’re reporting him and his colleagues to the Information Commissioner this afternoon.
Irrespective of how important your subject area is, what your views on the topic might be, or how much you dislike the person making the request, Freedom of Information is too valuable and too important to just be ridden over roughshod like this. [Source]
Unsurprisingly, there has so far been deafening silence on this issue in the controlled corporate media, but in light of the upcoming Copenhagen Treaty talks, it is imperative that we have a true and open debate about climate change before we make potentially world-changing decisions based on this science. It is up to all of us to push this story and its staggering implications into the mainstream.
Globalist minion Al Gore and the United Nations climate change shysters led by Phil Jones are in trouble. Last week hackers uncovered a pile of email and documents revealing what many of us already knew — the climate change agenda is based not only on easily debunked junk science, but outright lies and deception.
In the wake of the damning revelations exposed by these anonymous hackers, the climate change snake oil salesmen Gore and his complaisant entourage of now discredited scientists are in full retreat. Even the corporate media — guilty of peddling the fabrication of man-made climate change for years with the best propaganda money can buy — are desperately scrambling to put the best spin possible on the emerging travesty.
In the above video, Alex Jones examines the startling revelations of the CRU files and spells out what it means for the global elite who have planned to use the ruse to impose crippling carbon taxes and put the finishing touches on their global totalitarian super-state and its accompanying control and slave grid.
Infowars and Prison Planet are now feverishly going through the documents and will post the result in the hours and days ahead. In the meantime, here are a few quotes from the perpetrators:
Kevin Trenberth The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Phil Jones I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where’s the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.
Your final sentence though about improvements in reviewing and traceability is a bit of a hostage to fortune. The skeptics will try to hang on to something, but I don’t want to give them something clearly tangible.
Mike MacCracken In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability–that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.
Tim Johns Ironically, the E1-IMAGE scenario runs, although much cooler in the long term of course, are considerably warmer than A1B-AR4 for several decades! Also – relevant to your statement – A1B-AR4 runs show potential for a distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C, which I’m sure skeptics would love to see replicated in the real world… (See the attached plot for illustration but please don’t circulate this any further as these are results in progress, not yet shared with other ENSEMBLES partners let alone published).
Christoph Kull Looks pretty good to me. Only one issue. In our discussion of possible participants in Bern, I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) we concluded that the last two on the list (w/ question marks) would be unwise choices because they are likely to cause conflict than to contribute to concensus [sic] and progress.
Keith Briffa Mike, I agree very much with the above sentiment. My concern was motivated by the possibility of expressing an impression of more concensus than might actually exist . I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me. IPCC is supposed to represent concensus but also areas of uncertainty in the evidence. Of course where there are good reasons for the differences in series (such as different seasonal responses or geographic bias) it is equally important not to overstress the discrepancies or suggest contradiction where it does not exist.
Michael E. Mann The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the 20th century w/ the corresponding mean values of the other series, due to the late 20th century decline. So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates.
Ben Santer I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Key US lawmakers passed legislation Thursday extending three key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the sweeping intelligence bill enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Backing a White House request, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the measure 11 votes to 8 to extend until 2013 three clauses that would have expired by 31 December. The bill now heads to the full Senate for a vote.
The provisions include the “roving wiretap” clause, used to monitor mobile communications of individuals using multiple telephone lines, and the “lone-wolf” provision, which enables spying on individuals suspected of terrorist activity but with no obvious connection to extremist groups.
Lawmakers also extended the life of controversial section 215, known as the “library records provision” that allows government agencies to access individual’s library history.
The committee had earlier met in a closed-door meeting with members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the intelligence community on ensuring their actions would not impede investigations already underway.
The senators also debated freeing up law enforcement actions that have been hampered by legislation and court rulings since the first program was launched by former president George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, which enabled collecting sensitive information for years without a court order.
Republicans senators have remained critical of placing restrictions on the intelligence community, saying they should more of a free hand in the early stages of investigations.
But their Democratic counterparts have decried the fact that the provisions still do not in their view adequately respect the privacy of ordinary Americans.
Democratic Senator Russ Feingold said he feared handing a “blank check” to law enforcement agencies and criticized the Democrat-controlled committee for not passing safeguards that even Republicans supported during the Bush administration.
“Among the most significant problems is the failure to include an improved standard for Section 215 orders, even though a Republican controlled Judiciary Committee unanimously supported including the same standard in 2005,” he said in a media advisory.
“But what was most upsetting was the apparent willingness of too many members to defer completely to behind the scenes complaints from the FBI and the Justice Department, even though the administration has yet to take a public position on any of the improvements that I and other senators have proposed. … [While] I am left scratching my head trying to understand how a committee controlled by a wide Democratic margin could support the bill it approved today, I will continue to work with my colleagues to try to make improvements to this bill.”
Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office said the rights group was “disappointed” that further moves were not made to protect civil liberties.
“This truly was a missed opportunity for the Senate Judiciary Committee to right the wrongs of the PATRIOT Act,” he said.
“We urge the Senate to adopt amendments on the floor that will bring this bill in line with the Constitution.”
AT&T was the first of many telcos sued for helping the NSA spy on Americans without warrants
The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: the nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.
Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to squash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.
The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records:
“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because the government and the companies have a common interest in the defense of the pending litigation and the communications regarding the immunity provisions concerned that common interest.”
U.S. District Court Judge Jeffery White disagreed and ruled on September 24 that the feds had to release the names of the telecom employees that contacted the Justice Department and the White House to lobby for a get-out-of-court-free card.
“Here, the telecommunications companies communicated with the government to ensure that Congress would pass legislation to grant them immunity from legal liability for their participation in the surveillance,” White wrote. “Those documents are not protected from disclosure because the companies communicated with the government agencies “with their own … interests in mind,” rather than the agency’s interests.”
The feds were supposed to make the documents available Friday, but in a motion late Thursday, the Obama administration is asking for a 30-day emergency stay (.pdf) so it can file a further appeal.
A key senior figure in a Bush administration covert Pentagon program, which used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage, remains in his same position today as a chief Obama Defense Department spokesman and the agency’s head of all media operations.
In an examination of Pentagon documents the New York Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — which reporter David Barstow leveraged for his April 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning expose on the program – Raw Story has found that Bryan Whitman surfaces in over 500 emails and transcripts, revealing the deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations was both one of the program’s senior participants and an active member.
Whitman’s conspicuous presence in these records is notwithstanding thousands of documented communications the Bush Pentagon released but for which names were redacted and an untold number the prior administration successfully withheld after its two-year legal battle with the Times.
Barstow’s Times expose revealed a comprehensive, covert Pentagon campaign — beginning during the lead-up to the Iraq War and continuing through 2008 — that shaped network military analysts into what internal documents referred to as “message force multipliers” and “surrogates” who could be trusted to parrot Bush administration talking points “in the form of their own opinions.” Barstow’s reporting also detailed how most of the military analysts, traditionally viewed as authoritative and independent, had ties to defense contractors with a stake in the same war policies they were interpreting daily to the American public.
The program, ostensibly, was run out of the Pentagon’s public affairs office for community relations as part of its outreach and attended to by political appointees, most visibly in these records by then community relations chief Allison Barber and director Dallas Lawrence.
In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called “Military Advantage in History”. Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s “futurist in chief,” the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or “pivotal hegemonic powers in history,” to draw lessons about how the United States “should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century.” Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history’s most powerful empires.
The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires sustained their military might across continents and even centuries. The study posits that the historical examples offer “insights into what drives U.S. military advantage,” as well as “where U.S. vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about maintaining its military advantage in the future.” There is no one secret to world domination, however. The Mongols’ military advantage was rooted in their “tactical and operational superiority”; the Macedonians’ in the “exceptional leadership” of and “cult of personality” surrounding Alexander the Great; Napoleon’s in “innovative operational concepts” and “information superiority”; and the Romans’ in “robust tactical doctrine” and “strong domestic institutions” which were “designed to incorporate conquered peoples as the empire grew.” In an extraordinary passage, the study cites the Roman experience—from over a millennium ago—as a precedent for America’s long-term dominance: “The Roman model suggests that it is possible for the United States to maintain its military advantage for centuries if it remains capable of transforming its forces before an opponent can develop counter-capabilities. Transformation coupled with strong strategic institutions is a powerful combination for an adversary to overcome.”
In Iraq, some prisoners/detainees are kept in wooden crates known as “prisoner boxes,” so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Central Command asking for the following:
“Vanity Fair (Feb 2005 issue) has reported the existence of wood “prisoner boxes” being used by the US military in facilities in and around Baghdad. They are used to hold individual prisoners and detainees.
“I hereby request all photographs of these boxes, including empty boxes as well as boxes holding prisoners and detainees.”
Around nine and a half months later, CentCom responded by sending the three photographs on this page.
The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the “War on Terror,” and recent revelations in TIME — based on disclosures by a “senior American official,” who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” after the 9/11 attacks, and who reported that “a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island” — will come as no surprise to those who have been studying the story closely.
The news will, however, be an embarrassment to the US government, which has persistently denied claims that it operated a secret “War on Terror” prison on Diego Garcia, and will be a source of even more consternation to the British government, which is more closely bound than its law-shredding Transatlantic neighbor to international laws and treaties preventing any kind of involvement whatsoever in kidnapping, “extraordinary rendition” and the practice of torture.
These are the state-by-state groupings of various law enforcement agencies working together at all levels, from local police to the FBI, NSA, and CIA, ostensibly to share terrorism threat information. But, as we saw in the Maryland case, they may sometimes just be sharing information about lawful, peaceful First Amendment-protected speech.
There is “mission creep from watching out for terrorism to watching out for peace activists,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, in a press conference July 29. She called the fusion centers an incipient “domestic intelligence apparatus.” And she warned that the kind of spying that occurred in Maryland was “very dangerous to our democracy.”
It noted that there are more than 40 fusion centers already created. And it cited several problems with them, including the participation of military personnel in law enforcement, as well as “private sector participation.” “Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm’s length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies.”
The fusion centers represent an attempt to create a “total surveillance society,” the update says.
It notes that the LAPD fed into its fusion center an array of ““suspicious activity reports” that included such innocuous activities as “taking notes” or “drawing diagrams” or “using binoculars.” (Since one out of six Americans is a birdwatcher, this last item could really swell the files.)
The “suspicious activity” criteria of the LAPD “gives law enforcement officers justification to harass practically anyone they choose, to collect personal information, and to pass such information along to the intelligence community,” the update says.
Frighteningly, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has called the LAPD program “a national model.”
The Director of National Intelligence urges state and local law enforcement to “report non-criminal suspicious activities,” the update says. According to the standards of the Director of National Intelligence, these activities are defined as “observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence gathering or pre-operational planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention.”
The ACLU notes that “other illicit intention” is not defined, and that fusion centers are fed intelligence before “reasonable suspicion” is established.
Fusion centers also engage in data mining, as they rely not only on FBI and CIA records. They also often “have subscriptions with private data brokers such as Accurint, ChoicePoint, Lexis-Nexus, and LocatePlus, a database containing cell phone numbers and unpublished telephone records,” the ACLU notes, referring to a Washington Post article from April 2.
The ACLU calls fusion centers “out-of-control data-gathering monsters.”
While the government is gathering more and more information about us citizens, it’s trying to shield itself from telling us what it’s doing. “There appears to be an effort by the federal government to coerce states into exempting their fusion centers from state open government laws,” the ACLU notes. “For those living in Virginia, it’s already too late: The Virginia General Assembly passed a law in April 2008 exempting the state’s fusion center from the Freedom of Information Act.”
As I noted in “The New Snoops: Terrorism Liaison Officers, Some from the Private Sector”, the Department of Justice has come up with “Fusion Center Guidelines” that flat-out recommend that “fusion centers and their leadership encourage appropriate policymakers to legislate the protection of private sector data provided to fusion centers.”
The ACLU is absolutely right: Congress must investigate these fusion centers and exercise appropriate oversight before law enforcement agencies and their private sector partners violate the rights of more Americans and usher us all into the total surveillance society.
Bush turning intelligence agencies on Americans Raw Story July 31, 2008
President Bush seems to be slowly turning the nation’s massive surveillance apparatus upon its citizens, and some worry that administration assurances to protect civil liberties are nothing but empty promises.
With his update to a decades-old executive order governing the Intelligence Community, Bush is giving the Director of National Intelligence and the 16 agencies of the US Intelligence Community more power to access and share sensitive information on Americans with little to no independent oversight. The update to Executive Order 12333, first issued by former President Ronald Reagan, introduces a more prominent role for the Attorney General in approving intelligence gathering methods, calls for collaboration with local law enforcement agencies, eases limits on how information can be shared and urges cooperation between the IC and private companies.
“This Intelligence Community that was built to deal with foreign threats is now being slowly and incrementally turned inward,” says Mike German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, in an interview with RAW STORY.
Bush’s latest update of a decades old executive order governing intelligence activities is a “lit fuse” that could end with the Constitution’s immolation, another ACLU official says.
“This kind of concentrated power, exercised in secret, is a lit fuse with our Constitution likely in danger of being burned,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington legislative office.
The White House insists that the update to Executive Order 12333 maintains protections for Americans’ civil liberties, but senior administration officials who briefed reporters Thursday provided little reassurance that the new order would correct some of the Bush administration’s most egregious abuses.
Undercover Maryland state troopers infiltrated three groups advocating peace and protesting the death penalty — attending meetings and sending reports on their activities to U.S. intelligence and military agencies, according to documents released Thursday.
The documents show the activities occurred from at least March 2005 to May 2006 and that officers used false names, which the documents referred to as “covert identities” – to open e-mail accounts to receive messages from the groups.
Also included in the 46 pages of documents, obtained by the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is an account of an activist’s name being entered into a federally funded database designed to share information among state, local and federal law-enforcement agencies on terrorist and drug trafficking suspects.
ACLU attorney David Rocah said state police violated federal laws prohibiting departments that receive federal funds from maintaining databases with information about political activities and affiliations.
The activist was identified as Max Obuszewski. His “primary crime” was entered into the database as “terrorism – anti govern(ment).” His “secondary crime” was listed as “terrorism – anti-war protestors.” The database is known as the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA.
“This is not supposed to happen in America,” said Mr. Rocah. “In a free society, which relies on the engagement of citizens in debate and protest and political activity to maintain that freedom … you should be able to attend a meeting about an issue you care about without having to worry that government spies are entering your name into a database used to track alleged terrorists and drug traffickers.”
Mr. Rocah called the surveillance “Kafka-esque insanity.”
State police Chief Col. Terrence B. Sheridan said the agency “does not inappropriately curtail the expression or demonstration of the civil liberties of protesters or organizations acting lawfully.”
The surveillance of Mr. Obuszewski, of Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, and another person came to light during his trial for trespassing and disorderly conduct in a 2004 protest outside the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.
Documents released by the prosecution revealed that the protesters had been under surveillance by an entity called the Baltimore Intelligence Unit.
The Maryland ACLU sued last month, claiming the state police refused to release public documents about the surveillance of peace activists.
The documents, which include intelligence reports and printouts from the database, show that several undercover officers from the state police’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division attended meetings of three groups: Mr. Obuszewski’s group; the Coalition to End the Death Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a convicted murderer who was slated for execution.
The documents show at least 288 hours of surveillance over the 14-month period. The undercover officers attended at least 20 organizing meetings at community halls and churches and a dozen rallies against the death penalty, including several at the state’s SuperMax jail in Baltimore.
Included in the documents are references to a proposed sit-in at the offices of Baltimore County State’s Attorney SandraA. O’Connor. However, they show no trooper reports of violence or threats of violence. Organizers repeatedly stressed the importance of peaceful and orderly demonstrations, the documents show.
“There were about 75-80 protestors at the rally and none participated in any type of civil disobedience or illegal acts,” said one report of a demonstration against the death penalty at the SuperMax jail. “Protesters were even careful to move out of the way for Division of Correction employees who were going into the parking lot for work.”
Still, information about the protesters and their activities was sent to seven agencies, including the National Security Agency and an unnamed military intelligence official.
“Americans have the right to peaceably assemble with others of a like mind and speak out about what they believe in,” Mr. Rocah said. “For state agencies to spend hundreds of hours entering information about lawful and peaceful political activities into a criminal database is beyond unconscionable. It is a waste of taxpayer dollars, which does nothing to make us safer from actual terrorists or drug dealers.”
Kucinich to investigate police surveillance of protest groups
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has figured prominently in recent political news for his attempts to begin impeachment hearings against President George W. Bush, today announced that the congressional subcommittee he chairs will look into reports of peace groups being surveilled by police and private investigators.
“[M]ost people would be upset to know that police were spying on lawful citizens and infiltrating peaceful organizations, rather than chasing down real criminals,” said Kucinich in a press release delivered to RAW STORY. “At a minimum, such police spying is clearly a waste of taxpayer dollars and a diversion from the mission of protecting and serving the people.
“I want the subcommittee to determine how widespread these activities are and who ordered them,” the Ohio Democrat and former presidential candidate said.
Kucinich chairs the House Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Such surveillance is apparently not limited to law enforcement and private investigators. In January 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report showing “widespread Pentagon surveillance of peace activists.
The U.S. military bankrolled early development of a non-lethal microwave weapon that creates sound inside your head. But in the end, the gadget may be just as likely to wind up in shopping malls as on battlefields, as I report in New Scientist.
The project is known as MEDUSA – a contrived acronym for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio. And it should not be confused with the Long Range Acoustic Device and similar gadgets which simply project sound. This one uses the so-called “microwave auditory effect”: a beam of microwaves is turned into sound by the interaction with your head. Nobody else can hear it unless they are in the beam as well.
The effect has long been a laboratory curiosity, with no application. But, over the years, the military has been intrigued. The idea (dubbed “the telepathic ray gun”) was mentioned in a 1998 US Army study, which turned up in a recent Freedom of Information Act document dump. Five years later, the Navy decided to put some R&D dollars into the project. Now, as I note on the New Scientist website, Dr. Lev Sadovnik of the Sierra Nevada Corporation has provided more details.
There are health risks, he notes. But the biggest issue from the microwave weapon is not the radiation. It’s the risk of brain damage from the high-intensity shockwave created by the microwave pulse. Clearly, much more research is needed on this effect at the sort of power levels that Dr. Sadovnik is proposing. But if it does prove hazardous, that does not mean an end to weapons research in this area: a device that delivered a lethal shockwave inside the target’s skull might make an effective death ray.
Dr. Sadovnik also makes the intriguing suggestion that, instead of being used at high power to create an intolerable noise, it might be used at low power to produce a whisper that was too quiet to perceive consciously but might be able to subconsciously influence someone. The directional beam could be used for targeted messages, such as in-store promotions. Sadovnik even suggests subliminal advertising, beaming information that is not consciously heard (a notion also spotted on the US Army’s voice-to-skull page). While the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion is dubious, I can see there might be some organizations interested in this capability. And if that doesn’t work, you could always point the thing at birds. They seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, so it might be used to scare flocks away from wind farms — or shoo pigeons from city streets.
KILLER robots which can change their shape to squeeze under doors and through cracks in walls to track their prey are moving from the realms of science fiction to the front line in the fight against terrorism.
The US military has signed a £1.6m deal with a technology firm to design robots which are intelligent enough to work out how to wiggle through small spaces to reach their target.
The action film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, featured a seemingly unstoppable killer
robot played by Robert Patrick. The machine was made from liquid metal and could change its form to slide under doors and walk through iron bars.
America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and the Army Research Office has awarded the contract to iRobot, which has developed other robots for the military.
They want scientists to come up with a design for a tiny robot able to move under its own power and change shape so it can get through gaps less than half an inch wide.
The US administration has not said what it wants the robot to do but its specification says: “Often the only available points of entry are small openings in buildings, walls, under doors, etc. In these cases, a robot must be soft enough to squeeze or traverse through small openings, yet large enough to carry an operationally meaningful payload.”
In an effort to inspire creative ideas, the US military has pointed to examples in nature of creatures which are able to squeeze through narrow gaps and change their form.
Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairwoman of iRobot, said: “Through this programme, robots that reconstitute size, shape and functionality after traversal through complex environments will transcend the pages of science fiction to become real tools for soldiers in theatre.”
But Scottish-based experts believe the challenge may be too much even for the US military’s budgets and technology.
Mike Cates, professor of physics at Edinburgh University, said: “There are materials which can change their shapes and then regain them. There are alloys, known as memory metals, which are used in glasses and which can regain their shape. The difficulty in this case is all the other elements which need to be added to a device such as this, such as the circuitry and some form of system to propel it.”
Brian Baglow, of technology firm Indoctrimat, said: “As well as designing the materials for this, the sensor systems will be a problem. It’s not easy for them to work out where the gaps are which they can get through.”
Shocking excerpts of confidential recordings recently released under the Freedom of Information Act feature former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking with top military analysts about how a flagging Neo-Con political agenda could be successfully restored with the aid of another terrorist attack on America.
The tape also includes a conversation where Rumsfeld and the military analysts agree on the possible necessity of installing a brutal dictator in Iraq to oversee U.S. interests.
The tapes were released as part of the investigation into the Pentagon’s “message force multipliers” program in which top military analysts were hired to propagandize for the Iraq war in the corporate media.
In attendance at the valedictory luncheon Rumsfeld hosted on December 12, 2006 were David L. Grange, Donald W. Sheppard, James Marks, Rick Francona, Wayne Downing, and Robert H. Scales, Jr. among others.
The most extraordinary exchange takes place when Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans shrinking political support for Neo-Con war plans on Capitol Hill and suggests that sympathy for the Bush administration’s agenda will only be achieved after a new terror attack.
Rumsfeld agrees that the psychological impact of 9/11 is wearing off and the “behavior pattern” of citizens in both the U.S. and Europe suggests that they are unconcerned about the threat of terror.
DELONG: Politically, what are the challenges because you’re not going to have a lot of sympathetic ears up there until it [a terror attack] happens.
RUMSFELD: That’s what I was just going to say. This President’s pretty much a victim of success. We haven’t had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it’s not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing’s in Europe, there’s a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it’s a shame we don’t have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats…the lethality, the carnage, that can be imposed on our society is so real and so present and so serious that you’d think we’d be able to understand it, but as a society, the longer you get away from 9/11, the less…the less…
In another exchange, after assuring that comments are “off the record,” Rumsfeld and one of the military analysts agree that Iraq could use a “Syngman Rhee” to take control of Iraq. Syngman Rhee was the ruthless authoritarian dictator of South Korea from after World War II through the Korean War to 1960. If the invasion of Iraq was about liberating the Iraqis from a tyrant in the form of Saddam Hussein why is Rumsfeld talking about installing an even more brutal dictator?
Rumsfeld’s admission that the correction for dwindling support of the Neo-Con imperial crusade is another terror attack is perhaps the most startling and blatant indication that 9/11 was an inside job.
The health care debate and the Copenhagen Climate Summit were some of the high profile activities that occurred during the month of December. But secretly signed by President Obama on December 16th was an amendment to an executive order that gives police officers and international agencies exemption from laws and regulations that U.S. officers must comply. The secrecy of this is disturbing, but more so is the ability for foreign police officers to operate in America without following our laws.
The Climatic Research Unit at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal sought funds from Shell Oil in the year 2000.
It’s not just the scientists at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University who may have criminally violated the Freedom of Information Act (some profesors in the UK and some in the USA), NASA has been stonewalling a FOIA request as well… for years.
A UN scientist is declaring that his three fellow UN climate panel colleagues “should be barred from the IPCC process.” In a November 26, 2009 message on his website, UN IPCC contributing author Dr. Eduardo Zorita writes: “CRU files: Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process.”
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after 
Leaked documents prove alarmists planned to seek funding from “energy agencies”
A prominent German scientist who was attacked in the leaked CRU emails by UN affiliated climate scientists has stated that the group should be barred from taking part in the peer-review process and excluded from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Key US lawmakers passed legislation Thursday extending three key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the sweeping intelligence bill enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In Iraq, some prisoners/detainees are kept in wooden crates known as “prisoner boxes,” so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Central Command asking for the following:
On the heels of the 
President Bush seems to be slowly turning the nation’s massive surveillance apparatus upon its citizens, and some worry that administration assurances to protect civil liberties are nothing but empty promises. 
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has figured prominently in 
The U.S. military bankrolled early development of a non-lethal microwave weapon that creates sound inside your head. But in the end, the gadget may be just as likely to wind up in shopping malls as on battlefields, as I 
noworldsystem.com 