add this to the litany of SHAME that is “the united states”

“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” — John F. Kennedy

The corporate media (with their unerring eye for the obvious point) is fixated on the narrative that, for the first time ever, Americans will likely end this year with either a woman or a black man headed for the White House. Bloggers are telling stories from the front lines of primaries and caucuses that look like something from the early 60s — people lining up before dawn to vote in Manoa, Hawaii yesterday; a thousand black college students in Prairie View, Texas marching 10 miles to cast their early votes in the face of a county that tried to disenfranchise them. In recent months, we’ve also been gobstopped by the sheer passion of the insurgent campaigns of both Barack Obama and Ron Paul, both of whom brought millions of new voters into the conversation — and with them, a sharp critique of the status quo and a new energy that’s agitating toward deep structural change.

There’s something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air. And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who’ve been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years. Can it be — at long last — that Americans have, simply, had enough? Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government — and with it, control of our own future? Is this simply a shifting political season — the kind we get every 20 to 30 years — or is there something deeper going on here? Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we’re going to finally win a few? Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change?

Recently, I came across a pocket of sociological research that suggested a tantalizing answer to these questions — and also that America may be far more ready for far more change than anyone really believes is possible at this moment. In fact, according to some sociologists, we’ve already lined up all the preconditions that have historically set the stage for full-fledged violent revolution.

It turns out that the energy of this moment is not about Hillary or Ron or Barack. It’s about who we are, and where we are, and what happens to people’s minds when they’re left hanging just a little too far past the moment when they’re ready for transformative change.

Way back in 1962, Caltech sociologist James C. Davies published an article in the American Sociological Review that summarized the conditions that determine how and when modern political revolutions occur. Intriguingly, Davies cited another scholar, Crane Brinton, who laid out seven “tentative uniformities” that he argued were the common precursors that set the stage for the Puritan, American, French, and Russian revolutions. As I read Davies’ argument, it struck me that the same seven stars Brinton named are now precisely lined up at midheaven over America in 2008. Taken together, it’s a convergence that creates the perfect social, economic, and political conditions for the biggest revolution since the shot heard ’round the world.

And even more interestingly: in every case, we got here as a direct result of either intended or unintended consequences of the conservatives’ war against liberal government, and their attempt to take over our democracy and replace it with a one-party plutocracy. It turns out that, historically, liberal nations make very poor grounds for revolution — but deeply conservative ones very reliably create the conditions that eventually make violent overthrow necessary. And our own Republicans, it turns out, have done a hell of a job.

Here are the seven criteria, along with the reasons why we’re fulfilling each of them now, and how conservative policies conspired to put us on the road to possible revolution.

1. Soaring, Then Crashing

Davies notes that revolutions don’t happen in traditional societies that are stable and static — where people have their place, things are as they’ve always been, and nobody expects any of that to change. Rather, modern revolutions — particularly the progressive-minded ones in which people emerge from the fray with greater rights and equality — happen in economically advancing societies, always at the point where a long period of rising living standards and high, hopeful expectations comes to a crashing end, leaving the citizens in an ugly and disgruntled mood. As Davies put it:

“Revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal. The all-important effect on the minds of people in a particular society is to produce, during the former period, an expectation of continued ability to satisfy needs — which continue to rise — and, during the latter, a mental state of anxiety and frustration when manifest reality breaks away from anticipated reality …

“Political stability and instability are ultimately dependent on a state of mind, a mood, in society…it is the dissatisfied state of mind rather than the tangible provision of ‘adequate’ or ‘inadequate’ supplies of food, equality, or liberty which produces the revolution.”

The American middle class was built on New Deal investments in education, housing, infrastructure, and health care, which produced a very “prolonged period of objective economic and social development.” People were optimistic; generations of growing prosperity raised their expectations that their children would do even better. That era instilled in Americans exactly the kind of hopeful belief in their own agency that primes them to become likely revolutionaries in an era of decline.

And now, thanks to 28 years of conservative misrule, we are now at the point where “manifest reality breaks away from anticipated reality;” and the breach is creating political turbulence. The average American has seen his or her standard of living contract by fits and starts since about 1972. This fall-off that was relieved somewhat by the transition to two-earner households and the economic sunshine of the Clinton years — but then accelerated with the dot-com crash, followed by seven years of Bush’s overt hostility toward the lower 98 percent of Americans who aren’t part of his base. Working-class America is reeling from the mass exodus of manufacturing jobs and the scourge of predatory lending; middle-class America is being hollowed out by health-care bankruptcies, higher college costs, and a tax load far heavier than that of the richest 2 percent. These people expected to do better than their parents. Now, they’re screwed every direction they turn.

In the face of this reversal, Davies tells us, it’s not at all surprising that the national mood is turning ominous, from one end of the political spectrum to the other. However, he warns us: this may not be just a passing political storm. In other times and places, this kind of quick decline in a prosperous nation has been a reliable sign of a full-on revolution brewing just ahead.

2. They Call It A Class War

Marx called this one true, says Davies. Progressive modern democracies run on mutual trust between classes and a shared vision of the common good that binds widely disparate groups together. Now, we’re also about to re-learn the historical lesson that liberals like flat hierarchies, racial and religious tolerance, and easy class mobility not because we’re soft-headed and soft-hearted — but because, unlike short-sighted conservatives, we understand that tight social cohesion is our most reliable and powerful bulwark against the kinds of revolutions that bring down great economies, nations and cultures.

In all the historical examples Davies and Brinton cite, the stage for revolution was set when the upper classes broke faith with society’s other groups, and began to openly prey on them in ways that threatened their very future. Not surprisingly, the other groups soon united, took up arms, and rebelled.

And here we are again: Conservative policies have opened the wealth gap to Depression levels; put workers at the total mercy of their employers; and deprived the working and middle classes of access to education, home ownership, health care, capital, legal redress, and their expectations of a better future for their kids. You can only get away with blaming this on gays and Mexicans for so long before people get wise to the game. And as the primaries are making clear: Americans are getting wise.

Our current plutocratic nobility may soon face the same stark choice its English, French, and Russian predecessors did. They can keep their heads and take proactive steps to close the gap between themselves and the common folk (choosing evolution over revolution, as JFK counsels above). Or they can keep insisting stubbornly on their elite prerogatives, until that gap widens to the point where the revolution comes — and they will lose their heads entirely.

Right now, all we’re asking of our modern-day corporate courtiers is that they accept a tax cut repeal on people making over $200K a year, raise the minimum wage, give us decent health care and the right to unionize, and call a halt to their ridiculous “death tax” boondoggle. In retrospect, their historic forebears might have counseled them to take this deal: their headless ghosts bear testimony to the idea that’s it’s better to give in and lose a little skin early than dig in and lose your whole hide later on.

3. Deserted Intellectuals

Mere unrest among the working and middle classes, all by itself, isn’t enough. Revolutions require leaders — and those always come from the professional and intellectual classes. In most times and places, these groups (which also include military officers) usually enjoy comfortable ties to the upper classes, and access to a certain level of power. But if those connections become frayed and weak, and the disaffected intellectuals make common cause with the lower classes, revolution becomes almost inevitable.

Davies notes that, compared to both the upper and lower classes, the members of America’s upper-middle class were relatively untouched by Great Depression. Because of this, their allegiances to the existing social structure largely remained intact; and he argues that their continued engagement was probably the main factor that allowed America to avert an all-out revolution in the 1930s.

But 2008 is a different story. Both the Boomers (now in their late 40s to early 60s) and Generation X (now in their late 20s to late 40s) were raised in an economically advancing nation that was rich with opportunity and expectation. We spent our childhoods in what were then still the world’s best schools; and A students of every class worked hard to position ourselves for what we (and our parents and teachers) expected would be very successful adult careers. We had every reason to believe that, no matter where we started, important leadership roles awaited us in education, government, the media, business, research, and other institutions.

And yet, when we finally graduated and went to work, we found those institutions being sold out from under us to a newly-emerging group of social and economic conservatives who didn’t share our broad vision of common decency and the common good (which we’d inherited from the GI and Silent adults who raised us and taught us); and who were often so corrupted or so sociopathic that the working environments they created were simply unendurable. If wealth, prestige, and power came at the price of our principles, we often chose instead to take lower-paying work, live small, and stay true to ourselves.

For too many of us, these thwarted expectations have been the driving arc of our adult lives. But we’ve never lost the sense that it was a choice that the America we grew up in would never have asked us to make. In Davies’ terms, we are “deserted intellectuals” — a class that is always at extremely high risk for fomenting revolution whenever it appears in history.

Davies says that revolutions catalyze when these deserted intellectuals make common cause with the lower classes. And much of the energy of this election is coming right out of that emerging alliance. The same drive toward corporatization that savaged our dreams also hammered at other class wedges throughout American society, creating conditions that savaged the middle class and ground the working class toward something resembling serfdom. Between our galvanizing frustration with George Bush, our shared fury at the war, and the new connections forged by bloggers and organizers, that alliance has now congealed into the determinedly change-minded movements we’re seeing this election cycle.

4. Incompetent Government

As this blog has long argued, conservatives invariably govern badly because they don’t really believe that government should exist at all — except, perhaps, as a way to funnel the peoples’ tax money into the pockets of party insiders. This conflicted (if not outright hostile) attitude toward government can’t possibly lead to any outcome other than bad management, bad policy, and eventually such horrendously bad social and economic outcomes that people are forced into the streets to hold their leaders to account.

It turns out there’s never been a modern revolution that didn’t start against a backdrop of atrocious government malfeasance in the face of precipitously declining fortunes. From George III’s onerous taxes to Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake,” revolutions begin when stubborn aristocrats heap fuel on the fire by blithely disregarding the falling fortunes of their once-prosperous citizens. And America is getting dangerously close to that point now. Between our corporate-owned Congress and the spectacularly bad judgment of Bush’s executive branch, there’s never been a government in American history more inept, corrupt, and criminally negligent than this one — or more shockingly out of touch with what the average American is going through. Just ask anyone from New Orleans — or anyone who has a relative in the military.

Liberal democracy avoids this by building in a fail-safe: if the bastards ignore us, we can always vote them out. But if we’ve learned anything over the last eight years, it’s that our votes don’t always count — especially not when conservatives are doing the counting. If this year’s election further confirms the growing conviction that change via the ballot box is futile, we may find a large and disgruntled group of Americans looking to restore government accountability by more direct means.

5. Gutless Wonders in the Ruling Class

Revolution becomes necessary when the ruling classes fail in their duty to lead. Most of the major modern political revolutions occurred at moments when the world was changing rapidly — and the country’s leaders dealt with it by dropping back into denial and clinging defiantly to the old, profitable, and familiar status quo. New technologies, new ideas, and new economic opportunities were emerging; and there came a time when ignoring them was no longer an option. When the leaders failed to step forward boldly to lead their people through the looming and necessary transformations, the people rebelled.

We’re hard up against some huge transformative changes now. Global warming and overwhelming pollution are forcing us to reconsider the way we occupy the world, altering our relationship to food, water, air, soil, energy, and each other. The transition off carbon-based fuels and away from non-recyclable goods is going to re-structure our entire economy. Computers are still creating social and business transformations; biotech and nanotech will only accelerate that. More and more people in the industrialized world are feeling a spiritual void, and coming to believe that moving away from consumerism and toward community may be an important step in recovering that nameless thing they’ve lost.

And, in the teeth of this restless drift toward inevitable change, America has been governed by a bunch of conservative dinosaurs who can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge that the 20th century is over. (Some of them, in fact, are still trying to turn back the Enlightenment.) Liberal governments manage this kind of shift by training and subsidizing scientists and planners, funding research, and setting policies that help their nations navigate these transitions with some grace. Conservative ones — being conservative — will reflexively try to deny that change is occurring at all, and then brutally suppress anyone with evidence to the contrary.

Which is why, every time our current crop of so-called leaders open their mouths to propose a policy or Explain It All To Us, it’s embarrassingly obvious that they don’t have the vision, the intelligence, or the courage to face the future that everyone can clearly see bearing down on us, whether we’re ready or not. Their persistent cluelessness infuriates us — and terrifies us. It’s all too clear that these people are a waste of our tax money: they will never take us where we need to go. Much of the energy we’re seeing in this year’s election is due to the fact that a majority of Americans have figured out that our government is leaving us hung out here, completely on our own, to manage huge and inevitable changes with no support or guidance whatsoever.

Historically, this same seething fury at incompetent, unimaginative, cowardly leaders — and the dawning realization that our survival depends on seizing the lead for ourselves — has been the spark that’s ignited many a violent uprising.

6. Fiscal Irresponsibility

As we’ve seen, revolutions follow in the wake of national economic reversals. Almost always, these reversals occur when inept and corrupt governments mismanage the national economy to the point of indebtedness, bankruptcy, and currency collapse.

There’s a growing consensus on both the left and right that America is now heading into the biggest financial contraction since the Great Depression. And it’s one that liberal critics have seen coming for years, as conservatives systematically dismantled the economic foundations of the entire country. Good-paying jobs went offshore. Domestic investments in infrastructure and education were diverted to the war machine. Government oversight of banks and securities was blinded. Vast sections of the economy were sold off to the Saudis for oil, or to the Chinese for cheap consumer goods and money to finance tax cuts for the wealthy.

This is no way to run an economy, unless you’re a borrow-and-spend conservative determined to starve the government beast to the point where you can, as Grover Norquist proposed, drag it into the bathtub and drown it entirely. The current recession is the bill come due for 28 years of Republican financial malfeasance. It’s also another way in which conservatives themselves have unwittingly set up the historical preconditions for revolution.

7. Inept and Inconsistent Use of Force

The final criterion for revolution is this: The government no longer exercises force in a way that people find fair or consistent. And this can happen in all kinds of ways.

Domestically, there’s uneven sentencing, where some people get the maximum and others get cut loose without penalty — and neither outcome has any connection to the actual circumstances of the crime (though it often correlates all too closely with race, class, and the ability to afford a good lawyer). Unchecked police brutality (tasers, for example) that hardens public perception against the constabulary. Unwarranted police surveillance and legal harassment of law-abiding citizens going about their business. Different kinds of law enforcement for different neighborhoods. The use of government force to silence critics. And let’s not forget the unconstitutional restriction of free speech and free assembly rights.

Abroad, there’s the misuse of military force, which forces the country to pour its blood and treasure into misadventures that offer no clear advantage for the nation. These misadventures not only reduce the country’s international prestige and contribute to economic declines; they often create a class of displaced soldiers who return home with both the skills and the motivation to turn political unrest into a full-fledged shooting war.

This kind of capricious, irrational ineptitude in deploying government force leads to public contempt for the power of the state, and leads the governed to withdraw their consent. And, eventually, it also raises people’s determination to stand together to oppose state power. That growing solidarity and fearlessness — along with the resigned knowledge that equal-opportunity goons will brutalize loyalists and rebels alike, so you might as well be a dead lion rather than a live lamb — is the final factor that catalyzes ordinary citizens into ready and willing revolutionaries.

“A revolutionary state of mind requires the continued, even habitual but dynamic expectation of greater opportunity to satisfy basic needs…but the necessary additional ingredient is a persistent, unrelenting threat to the satisfaction of those needs: not a threat which actually returns people to a state of sheer survival but which put them in the mental state where they believe they will not be able to satisfy one or more basic needs … The crucial factor is the vague or specific fear that ground gained over a long period of time will be quickly lost … [This fear] generates when the existing government suppresses or is blamed for suppressing such opportunity.”

When Davies wrote that paragraph in 1962, he probably couldn’t have imagined how closely it would describe America in 2008. Thirty years of Republican corporatist government have failed us in ways that are not just inept or corrupt, but also have brought us to the same dangerous brink where so many other empires have erupted into violent revolution. The ground we have gained steadily over the course of the entire 20th Century is eroding under our feet. Movement conservatism has destroyed our economic base, declared open war on the middle and working classes, thwarted the aspirations of the intellectual and professional elites, dismantled the basic processes and functions of democracy, failed to prepare us for the future, overseen the collapse of our economy, and misused police and military force so inconsistently that Americans are losing respect for government.

It’s not always the case that revolution inevitably emerges wherever these seven conditions occur together, just as not everybody infected with a virus gets sick. But over the past 350 years, almost every major revolution in a modern industrialized country has been preceded by this pattern of seven preconditions. It’s fair to say that all those who get sick start out by being exposed to this virus.

Hillary Clinton is failing because this is a revolutionary moment — and she, regrettably, has the misfortune to be too closely identified with the mounting failures of the past that we’re now seeking to move beyond. On the other hand, Ron Paul’s otherwise inexplicable success has been built on his pointed and very specific critique of the kinds of government leadership failures I’ve described.

And Barack Obama is walking away with the moment because he talks of “hope” — which, as Davies makes clear, is the very first thing any would-be revolutionary needs. And then he talks of “change,” which many of his followers are clearly hearing as a soft word for “revolution.” And then he describes — not in too much detail — a different future, and what it means to be a transformative president, and in doing so answers our deep frustration at 30 years of leaders who faced the looming future by turning their heads instead of facing it.

Will he deliver on this promise of change? That remains to be seen. But the success of his presidency, if there is to be one, will likely be measured on how well his policies confront and deal with these seven criteria for revolution. If those preconditions are all still in place in 2012, the fury will have had another four years to rise. And at that point, if history rhymes, mere talk of hope and change will no longer be enough.

“a model for future US operations”

HITLER..STALIN..POL POT among others would be proud.

this article has since been “scrubbed” from MSNBCs website
it may be available at the Washington Posts site(if you are a subscriber)…this is noteworthy because although this event is nearly a month old..
news of Britney Spears legal entanglements from TWO MONTHS ago is STILL on MSNBC.

i guess blatant unilateral aggression became “sensitive” somewhere in between?

poached from The Washington Post..(before it “dissappeared”)

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone’s operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Model for the future

Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan’s national borders: It acts with assistance from well-paid sympathizers inside the country, but without getting the government’s formal permission beforehand.

It is an approach that some U.S. officials say could be used more frequently this year, particularly if a power vacuum results from yesterday’s election and associated political tumult. The administration also feels an increased sense of urgency about undermining al-Qaeda before President Bush leaves office, making it less hesitant, said one official familiar with the incident.

Independent actions by U.S. military forces on another country’s sovereign territory are always controversial, and both U.S. and Pakistani officials have repeatedly sought to obscure operational details that would reveal that key decisions are sometimes made in the United States, not in Islamabad. Some Pentagon operations have been undertaken only after intense disputes with the State Department, which has worried that they might inflame Pakistani public resentment; the CIA itself has sometimes sought to put the brakes on because of anxieties about the consequences for its relationship with Pakistani intelligence officials.

Pakistan considered unreliable

U.S. military officials say, however, that the uneven performance of their Pakistani counterparts increasingly requires that Washington pursue the fight however it can, sometimes following an unorthodox path that leaves in the dark Pakistani military and intelligence officials who at best lack commitment and resolve and at worst lack sympathy for U.S. interests.

Top Bush administration policy officials — who are increasingly worried about al-Qaeda’s use of its sanctuary in remote, tribally ruled areas in northern Pakistan to dispatch trained terrorists to the West — have quietly begun to accept the military’s point of view, according to several sources familiar with the context of the Libi strike.

“In the past it required getting approval from the highest levels,” said one former intelligence official involved in planning for previous strikes. “You may have information that is valid for only 30 minutes. If you wait, the information is no longer valid.”

But when the autonomous U.S. military operations in Pakistan succeed, support for them grows in Washington in probably the same proportion as Pakistani resentments increase. Even as U.S. officials ramp up the pressure on Musharraf to do more, Pakistan’s embattled president has taken a harder line in public against cooperation in recent months, the sources said. “The posture that was evident two years ago is not evident,” said a senior U.S. official who frequently visits the region.

A U.S. military official familiar with operations in the tribal areas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the operations, said: “We’ll get these one-off flukes once every eight months or so, but that’s still not a strategy — it’s not a plan. Every now and then something will come together. What that serves to do [is] it tamps down discussion about whether there is a better way to do it.”

The target is identified

During seven years of searching for Osama bin Laden and his followers, the U.S. government has deployed billions of dollars’ worth of surveillance hardware to South Asia, from top-secret spy satellites to sophisticated eavesdropping gear for intercepting text messages and cellphone conversations.

Yet some of the initial clues that led to the Libi strike were decidedly low-tech, according to an account supplied by four officials briefed on the operation. The CIA declined to comment about the strike and neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.

Hours before the attack, multiple sources said, the CIA was alerted to a convoy of vehicles that bore all the signatures of al-Qaeda officers on the move. Local residents — who two sources said were not connected to the Pakistani army or intelligence service — began monitoring the cluster of vehicles as it passed through North Waziristan, a rugged, largely lawless province that borders Afghanistan.

Eventually the local sources determined that the convoy carried up to seven al-Qaeda operatives and one individual who appeared to be of high rank. Asked how the local support had been arranged, a U.S. official familiar with the episode said, “All it takes is bags of cash.”

Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis for Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence group, said the informants could have been recruits from the Afghanistan side of the border, where the U.S. military operates freely.

“People in this region don’t recognize the border, which is very porous,” Bokhari said. “It is very likely that our people were in contact with intelligence sources who frequent both sides and could provide some kind of targeting information.”

Precisely what U.S. officials knew about the “high-value target” in the al-Qaeda convoy is unclear. Libi, a 41-year-old al-Qaeda commander who had slowly climbed to the No. 5 spot on the CIA’s most wanted list, was a hulking figure who stood 6 feet 4 inches tall. He spoke Libyan-accented Arabic and learned to be cautious after narrowly escaping a previous CIA strike. U.S. intelligence officials say he directed several deadly attacks, including a bombing at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan last year that killed 23 people.

Observing their prey

Alerted to the suspicious convoy, the CIA used a variety of surveillance techniques to follow its progression through Mir Ali, North Waziristan’s second-largest town, and to a walled compound in a village on the town’s outskirts.

The stopping place itself was an indication that these were important men: The compound was the home of Abdus Sattar, 45, a local Taliban commander and an associate of Baitullah Mehsud, the man accused by both the CIA and Pakistan of plotting the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27.

With all signs pointing to a unique target, CIA officials ordered the launch of a pilotless MQ-1B Predator aircraft, one of three kept at a secret base that the Pakistani government has allowed to be stationed inside the country. Launches from that base do not require government permission, officials said.

During the early hours of Jan. 29, the slow-moving, 27-foot-long plane circled the village before vectoring in to lock its camera sights on Sattar’s compound. Watching intently were CIA and Air Force operators who controlled the aircraft’s movements from an operations center at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

On orders from CIA officials in McLean, the operators in Nevada released the Predator’s two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, 100-pound, rocket-propelled munitions each tipped with a high-explosive warhead. The missiles tore into the compound’s main building and an adjoining guesthouse where the al-Qaeda officers were believed to be staying.

Even when viewed from computer monitors thousands of miles away, the missiles’ impact was stunning. The buildings were completely destroyed, and as many as 13 inhabitants were killed, U.S. officials said. The pictures captured after the attack were “not pretty,” said one knowledgeable source.

Libi’s death was confirmed by al-Qaeda, which announced his “martyrdom” on Feb. 1 in messages posted on the Web sites of sympathetic groups. One message hailed Libi as “the father of many lions who now own the land and mountains of jihadi Afghanistan” and said al-Qaeda’s struggle “would not be defeated by the death of one person, no matter how important he may be.”

A temporary impact

Publicly, reaction to the strike among U.S. and Pakistani leaders has been muted, with neither side appearing eager to call attention to an awkward, albeit successful, unilateral U.S. military operation. Some Pakistani government spokesmen have even questioned whether the terrorist leader was killed.

“It’s not going to overwhelm their network or break anything up definitively,” acknowledged a military official briefed on details of the Libi strike. He added: “We’re now in a sit-and-wait mode until someone else pops up.”

Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to the Clinton and Bush administrations, said he has been told by those involved that the counterterror effort requires constant pressure on the Pakistani government.

“The United States has gotten into a pattern where it sends a high-level delegation over to beat Musharraf up, and then you find that within a week or two a high-value target has been identified. Then he ignores us for a while until we send over another high-level delegation,” Clarke said.

Some officials also emphasized that such airstrikes have a marginal and temporary impact. And they do not yield the kind of intelligence dividends often associated with the live capture of terrorists — documents, computers, equipment and diaries that could lead to further unraveling the network.

The officials stressed that despite the occasional tactical success against it, such as the Libi strike, the threat posed by al-Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan has been growing. As a senior U.S. official briefed on the strike said: “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. But overall, we’re in worse shape than we were 18 months ago.”

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

GARDINER & WEST YELLOWSTONE, MT: Wild bison advocates, including Buffalo Field Campaign, plan a Week of Action from February 14 through February 21. The Week of Action will draw national attention to the role of Yellowstone National Park and Montana in the harassment, capture, and slaughter of the last wild population of American bison remaining in the United States. There are fewer than 4,500 wild, genetically intact American bison living in the United States. Wild bison are ecologically extinct everywhere outside of Yellowstone National Park.

Since Friday, February 8, 169 American bison (or buffalo) have been captured from within Yellowstone National Park. The National Park Service, under pressure from Montana’s livestock industry, has been running the capture operations at the Stephens Creek bison trap located inside Yellowstone’s boundaries.

View video of Yellowstone bison in the Stephens Creek Capture Facility: http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/media/videoaudio/Gardiner2004.mov

Wild bison advocates are organizing a series of national call-in days to various federal and state decision-makers involved with the Interagency Bison Management Plan.

A public rally will take place at the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park in West Yellowstone, MT on Saturday, February 16, from 8:30-5:00.

“Yellowstone National Park is doing the bidding of Montana’s livestock industry at the expense of the bison,” said Stephany Seay of Buffalo Field Campaign. “These bison are our national heritage, a keystone species critical to the ecological health of native grasslands and sacred to First Nations. The American people want the slaughter to stop now.”

On Friday, the Park Service captured 54 bison; on Sunday, 41 bison; on Tuesday 44 bison; and on Wednesday, they captured 30 bison. All will be shipped to slaughterhouses. According to Yellowstone officials, the 17 calves that were originally going to be sent to the Corwin Springs research facility are now instead being sent to slaughter. 44 bison were shipped to slaughter facilities from Yellowstone this morning.

These actions are being taken to appease Montana’s cattle interests, who claim they fear the spread of brucellosis from wild bison to cattle. There has never been a documented case of wild bison transmitting the livestock disease brucellosis to cattle.

“Originally the U.S. Calvary was sent here to protect the last remaining bison found in Yellowstone,” said Mike Mease, co-founder of Buffalo Field Campaign. “How sadly ironic that millions of U.S. tax dollars are now being spent to kill them.”

The bison were captured for following their natural migratory instincts and walking onto or near habitat that is privately owned by the Church Universal & Triumphant (CUT). CUT land hosts fewer than 250 head of cattle. Wild bison are also denied access to publicly owned Gallatin National Forest lands adjacent to Yellowstone National Park and CUT property. Gallatin National Forest lands were originally set aside by Congress in the early 20th century as wildlife winter habitat, as legislators realized Yellowstone did not provide the winter forage needed by ungulates such as bison and elk. In the winter months, grasslands in the Park are obscured by deep snow and bison and other wild ungulates venture to lower-elevation habitat where they find critical forage necessary for survival. Wild bison are the only wildlife confined to Yellowstone’s boundaries.

“The Park Service needs to realize that they are responsible for protecting wildlife, not cattle,” said Mike Mease, co-founder of Buffalo Field Campaign.

Federal and State actions serving Montana’s cattle interests are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of wild bison this year and the death toll is likely to rise significantly.

Bison killed or otherwise removed from the last wild population during the winter of 2007-2008:
Montana and Treaty Bison Hunts: 112
NPS Captured (to be slaughtered/quarantined): 169
NPS Sent to Slaughter (Yellowstone North Boundary): 127
Highway mortalities (West Yellowstone): 5

This season’s harsh winter is starting to take a toll on wild bison, who are finding it more difficult and sometimes impossible to crater through the snow to get to critical forage for survival. Snowbanks from highway plowing in the West Yellowstone area are making the bison’s migration extremely difficult. Bison are getting trapped along highway 191 and are being hit and killed by vehicles.

2,299 wild American bison have been killed or otherwise removed from the remaining wild population since 2000 under actions carried out by the Interagency Bison Management Plan (IBMP), as well as state and treaty hunts. The IBMP is a joint state-federal plan that prohibits wild bison from migrating to lands outside of Yellowstone’s boundaries. Wild American bison are a migratory species native to vast expanses of North America and are ecologically extinct everywhere in the United States outside of Yellowstone National Park.

Buffalo Field Campaign strongly opposes the Interagency Bison Management Plan and maintains that wild bison should be allowed to naturally and fully recover throughout their historic native range, especially on public lands.

http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does — and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law. InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”

The ACLU is not so sanguine.

“There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations — some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers — into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” the ACLU warned in its August 2004 report The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.

InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the “trade secrets” exemption, its website says. And any conversation with the public or the media is supposed to be carefully rehearsed.

“The interests of InfraGard must be protected whenever presented to non-InfraGard members,” the website states. “During interviews with members of the press, controlling the image of InfraGard being presented can be difficult. Proper preparation for the interview will minimize the risk of embarrassment. . . . The InfraGard leadership and the local FBI representative should review the submitted questions, agree on the predilection of the answers, and identify the appropriate interviewee. . . . Tailor answers to the expected audience. . . . Questions concerning sensitive information should be avoided.”

One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.

The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”

InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.

“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”

On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.

“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”

Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”

In return for being in the know, InfraGard members cooperate with the FBI and Homeland Security. “InfraGard members have contributed to about 100 FBI cases,” Schneck says. “What InfraGard brings you is reach into the regional and local communities. We are a 22,000-member vetted body of subject-matter experts that reaches across seventeen matrixes. All the different stovepipes can connect with InfraGard.”

Schneck is proud of the relationships the InfraGard Members Alliance has built with the FBI. “If you had to call 1-800-FBI, you probably wouldn’t bother,” she says. “But if you knew Joe from a local meeting you had with him over a donut, you might call them. Either to give or to get. We want everyone to have a little black book.”

This black book may come in handy in times of an emergency. “On the back of each membership card,” Schneck says, “we have all the numbers you’d need: for Homeland Security, for the FBI, for the cyber center. And by calling up as an InfraGard member, you will be listened to.” She also says that members would have an easier time obtaining a “special telecommunications card that will enable your call to go through when others will not.”

This special status concerns the ACLU.

“The FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans who get special treatment,” says Jay Stanley, public education director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program. “There’s no ‘business class’ in law enforcement. If there’s information the FBI can share with 22,000 corporate bigwigs, why don’t they just share it with the public? That’s who their real ’special relationship’ is supposed to be with. Secrecy is not a party favor to be given out to friends. . . . This bears a disturbing resemblance to the FBI’s handing out ‘goodies’ to corporations in return for folding them into its domestic surveillance machinery.”

When the government raises its alert levels, InfraGard is in the loop. For instance, in a press release on February 7, 2003, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General announced that the national alert level was being raised from yellow to orange. They then listed “additional steps” that agencies were taking to “increase their protective measures.” One of those steps was to “provide alert information to InfraGard program.”

“They’re very much looped into our readiness capability,” says Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. “We provide speakers, as well as do joint presentations [with the FBI]. We also train alongside them, and they have participated in readiness exercises.”

On May 9, 2007, George Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 entitled “National Continuity Policy.” In it, he instructed the Secretary of Homeland Security to coordinate with “private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency.”

Asked if the InfraGard National Members Alliance was involved with these plans, Schneck said it was “not directly participating at this point.” Hershman, chairman of the group’s advisory board, however, said that it was.

nfraGard members, sometimes hundreds at a time, have been used in “national emergency preparation drills,” Schneck acknowledges.

“In case something happens, everybody is ready,” says Norm Arendt, the head of the Madison, Wisconsin, chapter of InfraGard, and the safety director for the consulting firm Short Elliott Hendrickson, Inc. “There’s been lots of discussions about what happens under an emergency.”

One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation — and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out. But that’s not all.

“Then they said when — not if — martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.

I was able to confirm that the meeting took place where he said it had, and that the FBI and Homeland Security did make presentations there. One InfraGard member who attended that meeting denies that the subject of lethal force came up. But the whistleblower is 100 percent certain of it. “I have nothing to gain by telling you this, and everything to lose,” he adds. “I’m so nervous about this, and I’m not someone who gets nervous.”

Though Schneck says that FBI and Homeland Security agents do make presentations to InfraGard, she denies that InfraGard members would have any civil patrol or law enforcement functions. “I have never heard of InfraGard members being told to use lethal force anywhere,” Schneck says.

The FBI adamantly denies it, also. “That’s ridiculous,” says Catherine Milhoan, an FBI spokesperson. “If you want to quote a businessperson saying that, knock yourself out. If that’s what you want to print, fine.”

But one other InfraGard member corroborated the whistleblower’s account, and another would not deny it.

Christine Moerke is a business continuity consultant for Alliant Energy in Madison, Wisconsin. She says she’s an InfraGard member, and she confirms that she has attended InfraGard meetings that went into the details about what kind of civil patrol function — including engaging in lethal force — that InfraGard members may be called upon to perform.

“There have been discussions like that, that I’ve heard of and participated in,” she says.

Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”

He says InfraGard “absolutely” does emergency preparedness exercises. When I ask about discussions the FBI and Homeland Security have had with InfraGard members about their use of lethal force, he says: “That much I cannot comment on. But as a private citizen, you have the right to use force if you feel threatened.”

“We were assured that if we were forced to kill someone to protect our infrastructure, there would be no repercussions,” the whistleblower says. “It gave me goose bumps. It chilled me to the bone.”

Remember..this man is considered “family” by the bush junta..cementing their designation as terrorists..

Saudi Arabia’s rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced “another 7/7″ and the loss of “British lives on British streets” if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

He was accused in yesterday’s high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.

The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.

Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have “rolled over” after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was “just as if a gun had been held to the head” of the government.

The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massive secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals.

Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved into blackmail.

The judge said he was surprised the government had not tried to persuade the Saudis to withdraw their threats. He said: “If that happened in our jurisdiction [the UK], they would have been guilty of a criminal offence”. Counsel for the claimants said it would amount to perverting the course of justice.

Wardle told the court in a witness statement: “The idea of discontinuing the investigation went against my every instinct as a prosecutor. I wanted to see where the evidence led.”

But a paper trail set out in court showed that days after Bandar flew to London to lobby the government, Blair had written to the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and the SFO was pressed to halt its investigation.

The case officer on the inquiry, Matthew Cowie, was described by the judge as “a complete hero” for standing up to pressure from BAE’s lawyers, who went behind his back and tried to secretly lobby the attorney general to step in at an early stage and halt the investigations.

The campaigners argued yesterday that when BAE failed at its first attempt to stop the case, it changed tactics. Having argued it should not be investigated in order to promote arms sales, it then recruited ministers and their Saudi associates to make the case that “national security” demanded the case be covered up.

Moses said that after BAE’s commercial arguments failed, “Lo and behold, the next thing there is a threat to national security!” Dinah Rose, counsel for the Corner House and the Campaign against the Arms Trade, said: “Yes, they start to think of a different way of putting it.” Moses responded: “That’s very unkind!”

Documents seen yesterday also show the SFO warned the attorney general that if he dropped the case, it was likely it would be taken up by the Swiss and the US. These predictions proved accurate.

Bandar’s payments were published in the Guardian and Switzerland subsequently launched a money-laundering inquiry into the Saudi arms deal. The US department of justice has launched its own investigation under the foreign corrupt practices act into the British money received in the US by Bandar while he was ambassador to Washington.

Prince Bandar yesterday did not contest a US court order preventing him from taking the proceeds of property sales out of the country. The order will stay in place until a lawsuit brought by a group of BAE shareholders is decided. The group alleges that BAE made £1bn of “illegal bribe payments” to Bandar while claiming to be a “highly ethical, law-abiding corporation”.

LOOK FOR: Journalistic malpractice — Watch for the media to announce who “wins” instead of stating “We predict (name of candidate) will win.” News channels are supposed to report the news, not create the news. Results as reported by the news never match the actual results, by the way. What to do: Object and reject premature “calls.” Get the facts, however long it takes, and report them, wherever you can.

Also watch for: “The gray pie slice” — In New Hampshire, CNN used a gray pie slice without a name to represent Ron Paul. Other candidates, even when pie slices were smaller, were colored and had candidate names affixed. What to do: Record coverage start to finish to gather evidence of any journalistic malpractice.

Also watch for: Eroding vote totals. You may see candidate totals go DOWN during the count. What to do: Record coverage start to finish.

Also watch for: Unusual fluctuations or insufficient variations with minor candidates. In one Minnesota district in 2004, for example, ALL MINOR CANDIDATES received the same percentages of votes, until screen shots were posted and questioned by Internet watchdogs. Then the vote totals were spread more normally. In Florida in 2000, at one point the Socialist Worker Party candidate had more votes dumped into his totals in a single county than he received statewide. One strategy for electronic vote manipulation involves use of minor candidate vote bins to store votes temporarily. What to do: Record television coverage start to finish to retain and examine later, and take screen shots of incoming AP totals from sites like http://www.politico.com.

WATCH FOR AND DOCUMENT VOTING RIGHTS PROBLEMS IN THREE AREAS:

- Access to voting (voter rolls)
- Fairness (deceptive practices)
- Counting the votes

ACCESS TO VOTING

Watch for:
- Registrations hijacked to a different party
- Omissions and improper additions to the voter rolls

The new “electronic pollbooks” help to block citizen oversight and also introduce sophisticated attack vectors.

What to do: Gather evidence: Documents, records, video, audio and photographs. Persevere – keep gathering proof, even after the election is over.

Example: When voter registration is hijacked to a different party, there should be a paper trail. Find out your state’s regulations for the paperwork needed to change a voter’s party preference. Use public records requests to request the backup documents. If they can’t produce them, expose the fraud by propagating the evidence, to blogs, legislators, citizens groups. Get your evidence to at least five different entities.

Find out if your local jurisdiction is now using electronic voter sign-in instead of observable paper pollbooks.

DECEPTIVE PRACTICES

Watch for: Omission of candidate names on the ballot or screen; misdirection about where/when/how to vote; misleading ballot design; confusing or misleading instructions; intimidation tactics

What to do: Gather evidence and propagate it.

If it happens in the polling place: call an elections worker over and show them; then ask that they write the incident down to document it, and watch to see that they do so. Then submit a formal public records request for a copy of the incident report and any other incident reports throughout the jurisdiction.

If it happens outside the polling place: Video, photograph, get documents, and if you obtain evidence, propagate it to at least five entities, including Internet sites, mainstream news, legislators, elections officials and citizens groups.

VOTE COUNTING

Watch for: Whether you can see the chain of custody; whether you can see the votes themselves being counted.

CHAIN OF CUSTODY: The greatest risk for manipulation of the count is from inside access. The best way to prevent vote-counting fraud by insiders is to require a fully public chain of custody. If chain of custody is not public, even spot checks, audits and recounts will fail to ensure integrity in the election.

Your ability to review chain of custody varies depending on your jurisdiction. Most locations nowadays have removed chain of custody from public view – which means citizens must go to extraordinary lengths to learn the simplest information, if they can get it at all.

Look for: Weak links in the chain, or “narrow spots in the pipe” where just a few people, or just one person, has access to the votes before (or shortly after) the vote count is announced.

JUST ONE BROKEN LINK means the vote count cannot be trusted.

What to do: Get evidence of broken links, narrow spots in the pipeline, or inside-only access/oversight. Evidence means documents and videotape.

Persevere – it may take time to evaluate even one link in the chain. When you get evidence that the chain has been broken or left public view, propagate the evidence to at least five entities, like blogs, voting rights groups, open government groups, the media, and public officials.

Prepare a report with a local group of citizens, submit it to those with authority in your jurisdiction, request remediation of individual issues before the next election.

ACCURACY OF THE VOTE COUNT

Except in hand count locations, you will be unable to see your votes being counted. The counting is now controlled by government insiders and voting machine programmers.

Your right to citizen sovereignty over your own government is at stake, and you have been placed in the position of trying to get circumstantial evidence to authenticate the count. This places an extraordinary and unsustainable burden on the citizenry. You can surrender the voting process to government insiders now, or you can put up a fight.

Look for: On DRE (touch-screen, dial-a-vote) systems – observe screens carefully, watch for vote-hopping to selections you did not choose. The vote may hop to another choice immediately or after a delay, or even after you have page to a new screen. What to do: stop the process immediately, call an elections worker over, see if you can replicate it, request that they write the incident down, stay and watch while they do so, make a formal request for the public record of their incident reports and all other incident reports in your jurisdiction. Double and triple check before casting votes, and document all anomalies. (If you witness vote-hopping on a dial-a-vote system like the Hart eSlate, document it using every means necessary and contact Black Box Voting, BradBlog, and VotersUnite.)

After polls close, videotape poll closing activities and videotape the results tape and any other reconciliation forms filled out by poll workers. If they won’t let you videotape, then videotape them telling you that you cannot watch, or that you can’t capture evidence of the poll closing and counting procedures.

On optical scan systems (fill in bubble, draw arrow): Observe whether the vote count increments when you deposit your ballot. After polls close, videotape poll closing activities and videotape the results tape from the optical scan machine and also videotape any other reconciliation forms filled out by poll workers. These should include number of ballots provided, cast, unused and spoiled, along with number of voters checked in to vote.

If you live in New York: Most New Yorkers are voting on lever machines, which — unlike the scanners and DREs — are extremely difficult to tamper with in a wholesale, nontransparent way. However, many New Yorkers do not realize that customized Sequoia scanners are used to count tens of thousands of absentee votes. Start asking questions about those votes (chain of custody, counting). Ascertain your rights to observe and examine your computerized absentee counting system. Also: New York public records laws include the VENDORS in freedom of information requirements. Consider submitting public records requests directly to Sequoia Voting Systems. Ask for things like correspondence, incident reports, invoices, contracts. These vendor-directed records requests are especially important because it looks like New York’s Nov. 2008 elections will be run on Sequoia computerized systems, or something similar.

IF YOU LIVE IN GEORGIA, KENTUCKY, CONNECTICUT: You, too, can request public records DIRECTLY FROM THE VENDOR. Let’s get to work on opening them up.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE ABOUT ACCURACY OF THE VOTE COUNT

Compare number of voters checked in to vote with number of votes. Note any arithmetic that doesn’t add up.

You may also want to visit the main elections division for your jurisdiction to observe and record procedures and activities. If you cannot view and record the computer screen, you are being blocked from viewing even circumstantial evidence of the count. Check your state election law as to whether counting votes in secret has ever been authorized.

Persevere. Take as much time as it takes to gather real evidence, including evidence of efforts to obstruct your right to oversee chain of custody and counting. Evidence means: Documents, video, audio and photos.

SURRENDER NOW OR DIG IN FOR THE LONG HAUL

The Government is currently displacing citizen sovereignty over election processes. Assert your right to sovereignty via documentation and oversight to authenticate election procedures and results, and when your rights are obstructed, gather evidence of this and propagate it.

All evidence you acquire during the primary election cycle should be applied towards regaining citizen sovereignty over elections in the Nov. 2008 election.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed. Yet, if many different citizens simply welcome the awakening of their own civic duty, trust to their own common sense and innate creativity, and take just one step, the next will become clear.

A third undersea cable has been cut, effectively eliminating the Internet in the Middle East.   But according to CNN that cable outage does not extend to Israel, Lebanon and Iraq. 

Is it a coincidence that these three countries, who represent the next phase of the war on terrorism, were spared in the communications blackout that is affecting the rest of the Middle East? With the reemergence of the shadowy Fatah Al Islam organization, which has been linked to Saudi Prince Bandar, Saad Al-Hariri, the Mossad and neocon Elliot Abrams,  it becomes clear that the pre-invasion of Lebanon scenario from last summer has nearly been reset. Bush laid claim to Lebanon with his recent executive order criminalizing criticism of US/Israeli actions in Lebanon, just as he did with the previous one on Iraq. These two orders claimed that the entire war of terror hinged on these sideshows, declaring that failure in either represents “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”   

It is obvious to the casual observer that things are really starting to heat-up in Lebanon, with the recent attack upon a US Embassy vehicle, the car-bombing of the Hariri investigator, even another fake Osama bin Laden video about Lebanon. The assassination of Lebanese investigator Capt. Wissam Eid, who reportedly suspected Israeli involvement in recent assassinations blamed on Syria, such as Rafik Hariri, is very likely another Mossad false flag attack, carried-out to entertain the gullible sheep of the United States.   

The news of the multiple acts of cable sabotage are a chilling indication that “someone” is doing thier best to isolate the greater Middle East region (all the way to India) from the rest of the world. With the Internet down, it will be impossible for anyone to transmit video evidence out of the visually-embargoed zone, except for those who have satellite uplinks, like the major news networks. The depth of these cables means that they can only be reached by submarine or deep submersibles.

This sabotage Friday followed on the heels of another attack on two other submarine cables, which took place Wednesday, 5 miles off the Mediterranean coast of Alexandria, Egypt. The cable cut at 05:59 GMT Friday, 34.8 miles off the coast of Dubai,belonged to the same British FLAG network (FALCON), whose main line connecting Europe to Asia was severed Wednesday along with SEA-ME-WE 4, a competitor’s cable which served as systems back-up. Both went through the Suez Canal on their way to India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, as well as across Egypt (land segment), where it cut across North Africa to Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. The FALCON circuit that was taken down Friday, circled around the Persian Gulf, picking-up the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf States. Here is an interactive map from the FLAG home site, detailing the route of the FALCON line.   Here is the map provided by the 16 nation SEA-ME-WE 4 consortium.   Egypt reports no ships in the region..despite earlier reports of a “dragging anchor”

Saudi Arabia claims to have had another separate cut, which it says it has already repaired, using a submarine, accounting for Internet rumors of a fourth cut cable and the otherwise unexplainable restoration of their service and no one else, except for their Gulf State buddies.  The Saudi newspaper article is obvious disinformation. Once again the Saudis are trying to distance themselves from the results of their collusion with the Israeli and US designs upon their Muslim brothers. The FLAG site explains that the Saudi service was restored by FLAG, using terrestrial routes.   

FLAG has arranged part of the Restoration capacity via terrestrial route between the landing stations in Al Khobar and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. This was executed with excellent cooperation by Integrated Telecom Company which is the Landing Party of FALCON system in Saudi Arabia. 

Some of the circuits of Qatar Telecom (Q-Tel), Ministry of Communications Kuwait and Du, UAE that were severely affected have been restored. 

Since Israel still has Internet, wouldn’t the editors of the major newspapers there normally do their best to get such a news scoop? Neither the Jerusalem Post nor Haaretz has anything at all to say about the sabotaged cables on their sites. A search for undersea cables on both sites reveals nothing. Something very bad is in the air. Normally the Israeli press is the favored medium for taunting the Arabs’ misfortune. Both papers, which were used to disseminate the disinformation about the recent air attack upon Syria, are eerily silent about what is now going down. 

In addition to the escalating psyops operation that is being directed at Lebanon and Syria, Israeli leaders have stepped-up their unending war of words being directed at Iran. PM Olmert used the celebration of “Holocaust Day” to announce to the world (in an off-hand manner) that Israel was ready to act against Iran on its own (forcing the US to honor Bush’s commitments to defend Israel, no matter what). 

“Israel could not afford to stand by while other nations called for its annihilation… the Jewish state must defend itself against calls premised on zealous, murderous ideology, a tyrannical terror-supporting regime that recklessly aspires for regional hegemony, and a malicious program for developing weapons of mass destruction.” - Jerusalem Post  

According to a Washington Post interview with Defense Minister Barak, Iran has already “gone beyond the Manhattan Project,” 

“We suspect they are probably already working on warheads for ground-to-ground missiles,”  - PressTV  

As if Barak’s charges (if they were true) of Iran attempting to fit existing nuclear warheads to its long-range missiles wasn’t sufficient grounds for a pre-emptive strike, Israel has recently opened another line of attempted justification for its coming aggression, by announcing that they have evidence that Iranian rockets have been launched from Gaza into Israel.   

The campaign to pump-up war fever on the home front started building to a crescendo in the Jerusalem Post, on Jan 29, when they ran this article, “IDF beefs up forces to thwart terror cells which left Gaza.”   The article brought into the cold light of day the ancient Zionist plan to violently colonize all of “Greater Israel”, intending to justify an assault into the Sinai, where, it is claimed: 

“as many as 20 cells may be trying to organize in the Sinai to use it as what one officer in the security services described as a platform to launch significant attacks on targets in Israel…In recent days the IDF has reinforced its troops along the Egyptian border. Last Thursday, Route 10, which runs along the border from Ovda to Kerem Shalom, was closed to civilian traffic and Israelis were warned to return immediately from resorts in the Sinai Peninsula. One day later the IDF decided to temporarily close tourist areas near the border.” 

This article was an offhand admission that Israel has an immediate intention is to finish Gaza, under the continuing ruse of “fighting terrorism,” setting the stage for another messianic rabbi to speak-out, showing the world the only acceptable “final solution” to Israel’s “Palestinian problem.”

“Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger has been quoted as calling for Gazans to be transferred to the Sinai Peninsula, to a Palestinian state which he said could be constructed for them in the desert.” - Haaretz 

The final solution – here we go again.