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Dear friends,
Below are one-paragraph excerpts of important news articles you may have missed. These news articles include revealing information on gas price manipulations, disaster scenarios, military censorship, and more. Each excerpt is taken verbatim from the major media website listed at the link provided. If any link fails to function, click here. Key sentences are highlighted for those with limited time. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.
With best wishes,
Fred Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team
Former language interpreter for Presidents Bush and Clinton
Big Oil buys Sacramento
May 16, 2007, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-court14may14,1,7287489.story
Who's afraid of Big Oil? Apparently, California's elected officials. Gasoline prices are stuck well above last year's record highs and about 50 cents above the national average. Yet state politicians are not saying or doing a thing, except for raking in political cash from the oil companies and flying around the world on their dime. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ... once claimed that he was so rich he did not need anyone else's money. Yet as gasoline prices were breaking last year's record of $3.38 a gallon, Schwarzenegger collected a $100,000 check May 1 from Chevron, the West's largest refiner. Just three days earlier, it reported a $4.7-billion first-quarter profit, up 18% over the same period last year. The contribution brought Schwarzenegger's take from Chevron to $665,000 (making it his 15th largest donor) since 2003, and his total political tribute from the energy industry is now $4 million. According to a recent Schwarzenegger fundraising solicitation, Chevron's $100,000 buys the company special briefings with the governor. Refiners such as Chevron have discovered that they can make more money by producing less gasoline. So they do. They have, over more than 20 years, deliberately reduced their capacity. Chevron refined 22% less oil in the U.S. during the first quarter of this year than in the same quarter of 2006. Yet its total profit on U.S. refining increased 66%. Making less gasoline, it made much more money. Oil companies poured $90 million into California political campaigns during the 2006 election cycle. This display of sheer political muscle deters even well-meaning politicians from clashing with Big Oil. Democrats take Big Oil's millions too. The state Democratic Party accepted $50,000 from Chevron just last week.
Note: If above link fails, click here. So is it one person equals one vote in elections or one dollar one vote?
AAA wants gas-price inquiry
May 16, 2007, The San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/16/BUGVAPRFRQ1.DTL
AAA asked the U.S. Senate Tuesday to investigate why oil companies are making huge profits at a time when glitches at gas refineries have caused pump prices to soar. "We are concerned about the number and frequency of refinery outages this year in light of the large profits the industry has been reporting," AAA Public Affairs Director Geoff Sundstrom told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. "AAA doesn't know why refiners appear to be failing at this task, but we do think it would be worth the committee's time and trouble to find out." Sundstrom spoke at a Senate hearing at which lawmakers asked energy experts to explain the spell of unplanned refinery shutdowns that have thrown gas supplies into disarray from coast to coast, boosting average pump prices to a record $3.09 per gallon in the United States. California Energy Commission spokesman Bob Aldrich said his agency does not investigate the industry but does track its practices. This year the big story was a series of glitches in the annual switchover from winter gas to a differently formulated summer gas. Tom Kloza, publisher of the Oil Price Information Service ... said the surprise this year was that refineries outside California also had unplanned problems with their normal spring maintenance. "I did not think we'd see the same downtime elsewhere in the country," he said. Sean Comey, spokesman for AAA of Northern California, said the gas refining business is unusual because it seems that even when production goes down, prices and profits go up. "When most industries have production problems, profits suffer as a result," he said.
Popular Web sites now off-limits to troops
May 15, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/15/MNG2NPQUQ41.DTL
Most of the 131 people Pfc. Amber Thill lists as friends on her MySpace.com page serve in the military. Some, like Thill's husband, are deployed to Iraq; others are serving in Afghanistan. MySpace, the 20-year-old Thill says, "is how most of us communicate." This online link between troops serving overseas and their friends and families was interrupted Monday when the Defense Department announced that it had cut off access to MySpace, YouTube and 11 other popular file-sharing and networking Web sites on the Pentagon's 5 million computers and 15,000 networks. The new policy, which military officials say is intended to reduce the amount of traffic snagging the Defense Department's overburdened worldwide network, comes on the heels of an Army regulation last month enforcing new, strict rules on soldier bloggers. The new regulation for the first time created a blanket ban on sites many troops use to share news, photos, video and audio with their family and friends. Military officials said they blocked the Web sites because they took up too much bandwidth. Military bloggers say the new rules are part of a concerted effort to suppress online publications by troops in the field. On many bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Department computers and networks are the only ones available to the troops. "These blogs, these posts on MySpace were the last tenuous connection that an everyday American ... has to what the American military is, who the troops are," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, who runs the military blog www.blackfive.net. "This last tenuous connection will get severed by those regulations." It will definitely decrease the amount of communications back home," said Burden.
Contingencies for nuclear terrorist attack
May 11, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/11/MNG2OPP22R1.DTL
Senior government and military officials and other experts, organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program called the Preventive Defense Project, met behind closed doors in Washington for a day-long workshop called "The Day After." The organizers of the nonpartisan project, Stanford's William Perry, a secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, and Harvard's Ashton Carter, a senior Defense Department official during the Clinton years, assumed the detonation of a bomb similar in size to the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. A paper [they] are writing ... urges local governments and individuals to build underground bomb shelters; encourages authorities who survive to prevent evacuation of at least some of the areas attacked for three days ... and proposes suspending regulations on radiation exposure so that first responders would be able to act, even if that caused higher cancer rates. "The public at large will expect that their government had thought through this possibility and to have planned for it," Carter said in an interview. "This kind of an event would be unprecedented. We have had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 and with Katrina. But those are only glimpses. If one bomb goes off, there are likely to be more to follow," Carter said. "This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than a single episode, has major consequences." It would, he added, require powerful government intervention to force people to do something many may resist -- staying put.
Note: Ashton Carter was co-author, with Philip Zelikow (later Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission) and John Deutch (former CIA Director), of a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warned of a possible catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and accurately described the governmental aftermath of 9/11.
Bush Changes Continuity Plan
May 10, 2007, The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050902719.html
President Bush issued a formal national security directive yesterday ordering agencies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, "decapitating" attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to the White House. The prospect of a nuclear bomb being detonated in Washington without warning ... has been cited by many security analysts as a rising concern since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The order makes explicit that the focus of federal worst-case planning involves a covert nuclear attack against the nation's capital. "Adequate warning of potential emergencies that could pose a significant risk to the homeland might not be available, and therefore all continuity planning shall be based on the assumption that no such warning will be received," states the 72-paragraph order. The statement added, "Emphasis will be placed upon geographic dispersion of leadership, staff, and infrastructure in order to increase survivability and maintain uninterrupted Government Functions." After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time [forming] a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans." Since then, other agencies including the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA have taken steps to relocate facilities or key functions outside of Washington for their own reasons, citing factors such as economics or the importance of avoiding Beltway "group-think."
Note: Why isn't Congress making these absolutely vital decisions? What gives these organizations authority to determine what will happen in the case of a major attack?
Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger
Nov. - Dec. 1998, Foreign Affairs, (the journal of the Council on Foreign Affairs)
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19981101faessay1434...
A successful attack with weapons of mass destruction could certainly take thousands, or tens of thousands, of lives. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.
Note: Is this not a remarkable statement? This 1998 article was written by Philip Zelikow (who later was Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission!!!), John Deutch (former CIA Director), and Ashton Carter (former deputy secretary of defense). Dr. David Ray Griffin, an esteemed WTK team member, asks in his new book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, "Would it not be interesting if we were to learn that those who orchestrated the attacks of 9/11 were able to put one of their own -- someone who at least had foreknowledge of the attacks -- in charge of carrying out the official investigation into these attacks?" To view the full article, click here.
Mar 22 Mai - 21:49 par mihou