Accounting for IDF missing intelligence

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Eric Verlo

The results of Israel’s self-investigation of the Mavi Marmara Massacre are in: surprise, the IDF commandos did no wrong, but were set back by a deficiency of intelligence. It’s what many of us were already thinking, but there’s another punchline which Israel invites by pairing the deadly raid with IDF “intelligence” assets gone missing.

Six passengers of the humanitarian convoy are still unaccounted for. Rumors spread they may have been tossed off the ship, or languish in Israeli detention, but the trouble is, the six are also lacking for anyone missing them. Without friends or families registering concern, the convoy organizers can now deduce that the six were agents of Israel, who elected obviously to stay behind in Israel. Might this be because they were the principal provocateurs brandishing the pipes to give the IDF boarders pretext to fire upon the activists?

That would be a “pretext” in hindsight of course, because the record is emerging that the Israeli commandos were firing on the ship well in advance of attempting a boarding party. One of the objectives Israel had in detaining the activists was to prevent their account of the raid from reaching public eyes before the IDF could inundate Youtube with clips of what it planned to pretend had happened.

From the video spread round by the IDF, one gets the impression the Israeli soldiers were pummeled to within an inch of their lives. But in reality the soldiers emerged nearly unscathed. Is it possible the pipe-wielders were striking against the deck and serving also to keep the genuine activists at bay?

In fact the video footage which the activists succeeded in spiriting past their IDF jailers show the same scene devoid of what Israel described as a “lynch.” What may have looked like beatings, from Israel’s thermal camera aimed from beside the Marmara, did not register at all from up close. Curiously stealthy choreography.

While we look for the incriminating names, here are the US senators and congressmen who’ve signed on to letters drafted by AIPAC to show their support for Israel’s raid on the humanitarian convoy, and to urge President Obama to use the Security Council veto power to block any effort to investigate the killings.

Signatories to the Reid-McConnell Letter
on the Gaza Flotilla Incident

Total Number of Signatories: 85

As of June 18, 2010

Senator State Party
Alexander, Lamar TN R
Barrasso, John WY R
Baucus, Max MT D
Bayh, Evan IN D
Begich, Mark AK D
Bennet, Michael CO D
Bennett, Robert UT R
Bond, Christopher MO R
Boxer, Barbara CA D
Brown, Scott MA R
Brown, Sherrod OH D
Brownback, Sam KS R
Burr, Richard NC R
Burris, Roland W. IL D
Cantwell, Maria WA D
Cardin, Ben MD D
Carper, Tom DE D
Casey Jr., Bob PA D
Chambliss, Saxby GA R
Coburn, Tom OK R
Cochran, Thad MS R
Collins, Susan ME R
Conrad, Kent ND D
Corker, Bob TN R
Cornyn, John TX R
Crapo, Mike ID R
DeMint, Jim SC R
Dorgan, Byron ND D
Durbin, Richard IL D
Ensign, John NV R
Enzi, Mike WY R
Feinstein, Dianne CA D
Franken, Al MN D
Gillibrand, Kirsten NY D
Graham, Lindsey SC R
Grassley, Charles IA R
Hagan, Kay NC D
Hatch, Orrin UT R
Hutchinson, Kay Bailey TX R
Inhofe, Jim OK R
Inouye, Daniel HI D
Isakson, Johnny GA R
Johanns, Mike NE R
Johnson, Tim SD D
Kaufman, Ted DE D
Klobuchar, Amy MN D
Kohl, Herbert WI D
Kyl, Jon AZ R
Landrieu, Mary LA D
Lautenberg, Frank NJ D
LeMieux, George FL R
Levin, Carl MI D
Lieberman, Joseph CT I
Lincoln, Blanche AR D
Lugar, Richard IN R
McCain, John AZ R
McCaskill, Claire MO D
McConnell, Mitch KY R
Menendez, Bob NJ D
Mikulski, Barbara MD D
Murkowski, Lisa AK R
Murray, Patty WA D
Nelson, Ben NE D
Nelson, Bill FL D
Pryor, Mark AR D
Reed, Jack RI D
Reid, Harry NV D
Risch, Jim ID R
Roberts, Pat KS R
Schumer, Charles NY D
Sessions, Jeff AL R
Shaheen, Jeanne NH D
Shelby, Richard AL R
Snowe, Olympia ME R
Specter, Arlen PA D
Stabenow, Debbie MI D
Tester, John MT D
Thune, John SD R
Udall, Mark CO D
Vitter, David LA R
Voinovich, George OH R
Warner, Mark VA D
Whitehouse, Sheldon RI D
Wicker, Roger MS R
Wyden, Ron OR D

Colorado’s on board!

Signatories to the Poe-Peters Letter
on the Gaza Flotilla Incident

Total Number of Signatories: 292

As of June 21, 2010

House Member Party State
Ackerman, Gary D NY
Aderholt, Robert R AL
Adler, John D NJ
Akin, Todd R MO
Alexander, Rodney R LA
Altmire, Jason D PA
Andrews, Rob D NJ
Arcuri, Mike D NY
Austria, Steve R OH
Baca, Joe D CA
Bachmann, Michele R MN
Bachus, Spencer R AL
Barrett, Gresham R SC
Barrow, John D GA
Bartlett, Roscoe R MD
Barton, Joe R TX
Berkley, Shelley D NV
Berman, Howard D CA
Biggert, Judy R IL
Bilbray, Brian R CA
Bilirakis, Gus R FL
Bishop, Rob R UT
Bishop, Sanford D GA
Bishop, Tim D NY
Blackburn, Marsha R TN
Blunt, Roy R MO
Boccieri, John D OH
Boehner, John R OH
Bonner, Jo R AL
Bono Mack, Mary R CA
Boozman, John R AR
Boren, Dan D OK
Boswell, Leonard D IA
Boyd, Allen D FL
Brady, Kevin R TX
Brady, Robert D PA
Bright, Bobby D AL
Broun, Paul R GA
Brown, Corrine D FL
Brown, Henry R SC
Brown-Waite, Ginny R FL
Buchanan, Vern R FL
Burgess, Michael R TX
Burton, Dan R IN
Buyer, Steve R IN
Calvert, Ken R CA
Camp, Dave R MI
Campbell, John R CA
Cantor, Eric R VA
Cao, Anh “Joseph” R LA
Capito, Shelley Moore R WV
Cardoza, Dennis D CA
Carnahan, Russ D MO
Carney, Chris D PA
Carter, John R TX
Cassidy, Bill R LA
Castle, Michael R DE
Castor, Kathy D FL
Chaffetz, Jason R UT
Chandler, Ben D KY
Childers, Travis D MS
Coble, Howard R NC
Coffman, Mike R CO
Cohen, Steve D TN
Cole, Tom R OK
Conaway, Michael R TX
Cooper, Jim D TN
Costa, Jim D CA
Crenshaw, Ander R FL
Critz, Mark D PA
Crowley, Joseph D NY
Cuellar, Henry D TX
Culberson, John R TX
Davis, Artur D AL
Davis, Geoff R KY
Davis, Lincoln D TN
Davis, Susan D CA
DeLauro, Rosa D CT
Dent, Charlie R PA
Deutch, Ted D FL
Diaz-Balart, Lincoln R FL
Diaz-Balart, Mario R FL
Djou, Charles R HI
Donnelly, Joe D IN
Dreier, David R CA
Driehaus, Steve D OH
Ehlers, Vern R MI
Ellsworth, Brad D IN
Emerson, JoAnn R MO
Engel, Eliot D NY
Fallin, Mary R OK
Flake, Jeff R AZ
Fleming, John R LA
Forbes, Randy R VA
Foster, Bill D IL
Foxx, Virginia R NC
Frank, Barney D MA
Franks, Trent R AZ
Frelinghuysen, Rodney R NJ
Gallegly, Elton R CA
Garrett, Scott R NJ
Gerlach, James R PA
Giffords, Gabrielle D AZ
Gingrey, Phil R GA
Gohmert, Louie R TX
Goodlatte, Robert R VA
Gordon, Bart D TN
Granger, Kay R TX
Graves, Sam R MO
Grayson, Alan D FL
Green, Gene D TX
Griffith, Parker R AL
Guthrie, Brett R KY
Hall, John D NY
Hall, Ralph R TX
Halvorson, Debbie D IL
Hare, Phil D IL
Harman, Jane D CA
Harper, Gregg R MS
Hastings, Alcee D FL
Hastings, Doc R WA
Heinrich, Martin D NM
Heller, Dean R NV
Hensarling, Jeb R TX
Herger, Wally R CA
Herseth Sandlin, Stephanie D SD
Higgins, Brian D NY
Himes, Jim D CT
Hodes, Paul D NH
Holden, Tim D PA
Holt, Rush D NJ
Hoyer, Steny D MD
Hunter, Duncan D. R CA
Israel, Steve D NY
Jackson, Jesse, Jr. D IL
Jenkins, Lynn R KS
Johnson, Sam R TX
Johnson, Tim R IL
Jordan, Jim R OH
Kagen, Steve D WI
Kildee, Dale D MI
King, Peter R NY
King, Steve R IA
Kingston, Jack R GA
Kirk, Mark R IL
Kirkpatrick, Ann D AZ
Kissell, Larry D NC
Klein, Ron D FL
Kline, John R MN
Kosmas, Suzanne D FL
Kratovil, Frank D MD
Lamborn, Doug R CO
Lance, Leonard R NJ
Langevin, Jim D RI
Larsen, Rick D WA
Larson, John D CT
Latham, Tom R IA
LaTourette, Steven R OH
Latta, Bob R OH
Lee, Christopher R NY
Levin, Sander D MI
Lewis, Jerry R CA
Linder, John R GA
Lipinski, Daniel D IL
LoBiondo, Frank R NJ
Lowey, Nita D NY
Lucas, Frank R OK
Luetkemeyer, Blaine R MO
Lummis, Cynthia R WY
Lungren, Dan R CA
Mack, Connie R FL
Maffei, Dan D NY
Maloney, Carolyn D NY
Manzullo, Donald R IL
Marchant, Kenny R TX
Marshall, Jim D GA
Matheson, Jim D UT
McCarthy, Carolyn D NY
McCarthy, Kevin R CA
McCaul, Michael R TX
McClintock, Tom R CA
McCotter, Thaddeus R MI
McHenry, Patrick R NC
McIntyre, Mike D NC
McKeon, Howard “Buck” R CA
McMahon, Michael D NY
McMorris Rodgers, Cathy R WA
McNerney, Jerry D CA
Meek, Kendrick D FL
Mica, John R FL
Miller, Candice R MI
Miller, Gary R CA
Miller, Jeff R FL
Minnick, Walt D ID
Mitchell, Harry D AZ
Moore, Dennis D KS
Moran, Jerry R KS
Murphy, Patrick D PA
Myrick, Sue R NC
Nadler, Jerrold D NY
Neal, Richard D MA
Neugebauer, Randy R TX
Nunes, Devin R CA
Nye, Glenn D VA
Olson, Pete R TX
Ortiz, Solomon D TX
Owens, Bill D NY
Pallone, Frank D NJ
Paulsen, Erik R MN
Pence, Mike R IN
Perlmutter, Ed D CO
Peters, Gary D MI
Peterson, Collin D MN
Pitts, Joseph R PA
Platts, Todd R PA
Poe, Ted R TX
Polis, Jared D CO
Posey, Bill R FL
Price, Tom R GA
Putnam, Adam R FL
Quigley, Mike D IL
Radanovich, George R CA
Rehberg, Dennis R MT
Reichert, Dave R WA
Reyes, Silvestre D TX
Roe, Phil R TN
Rogers, Harold R KY
Rogers, Mike R MI
Rogers, Mike R AL
Rohrabacher, Dana R CA
Rooney, Tom R FL
Roskam, Peter R IL
Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana R FL
Ross, Mike D AR
Rothman, Steve D NJ
Royce, Ed R CA
Ruppersberger, C.A. Dutch D MD
Ryan, Paul R WI
Salazar, John D CO
Sanchez, Linda D CA
Sarbanes, John D MD
Scalise, Steve R LA
Schakowsky, Jan D IL
Schauer, Mark D MI
Schiff, Adam D CA
Schmidt, Jean R OH
Schock, Aaron R IL
Schwartz, Allyson D PA
Sensenbrenner, James R WI
Sessions, Pete R TX
Sestak, Joe D PA
Shadegg, John R AZ
Sherman, Brad D CA
Shimkus, John R IL
Shuler, Heath D NC
Shuster, William R PA
Simpson, Mike R ID
Sires, Albio D NJ
Skelton, Ike D MO
Slaughter, Louise D NY
Smith, Adrian R NE
Smith, Christopher R NJ
Smith, Lamar R TX
Space, Zack D OH
Spratt, John D SC
Stearns, Cliff R FL
Sullivan, John R OK
Sutton, Betty D OH
Teague, Harry D NM
Terry, Lee R NE
Terry, Lee R TX
Thompson, Glenn R PA
Thornberry, William R TX
Tiahrt, Todd R KS
Tiberi, Pat R OH
Titus, Dina D NV
Tonko, Paul D NY
Turner, Mike R OH
Upton, Fred R MI
Walden, Greg R OR
Wamp, Zach R TN
Wasserman Schultz, Debbie D FL
Waxman, Henry D CA
Weiner, Anthony D NY
Westmoreland, Lynn R GA
Whitfield, Edward R KY
Wilson, Joe R SC
Wittman, Rob R VA
Wolf, Frank R VA
Yarmuth, John D KY
Young, C.W. Bill R FL
Young, Don R AK

Scriptmatix “penny auctions” such as Quibids are less scams than pure fraud

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Eric Verlo

101

Shell games tempt only the gullible, don’t they? So long as YOU don’t fall for them, what’s a little income redistribution among wretches? That’s an attitude shared only by the uninitiated. So-called internet “penny auctions” exploit human vulnerability like trust and avarice, leaving victims to blame their own stupidity or greed. You may shrug off getting burned as a lesson learned, but all confidence tricks count on that. Websites like Quibids and Scriptmatix’s PennyAuction are neither novel discount methods, adventure shopping, gambling scenarios or lotteries. They are con games that lead you to believe you are getting something for your money, until you don’t.

Just because YOU can figure it out -from an objective distance- doesn’t mean Quibids is not patently dishonest. US laws governing fraud are enforced by local statutes, but common law is enough to define this internet scam as representation of falsehood with the intent to profit. Whether or not the auctions use shill bidders, or fail to honor unprofitable outcomes, as have been accused by disgruntled victims, the websites are misrepresentations. The former are obvious illegal practices. The latter is fraud. Or are we so cynical that we accept this kind of scam as merely “predatory capitalism?”

Wikipedia defines fraud in layman’s terms:

1. a representation of an existing fact;
2. its materiality;
3. its falsity;
4. the speaker’s knowledge of its falsity;
5. the speaker’s intent that it shall be acted upon by the plaintiff;
6. plaintiff’s ignorance of its falsity;
7. plaintiff’s reliance on the truth of the representation;
8. plaintiff’s right to rely upon it; and
9. consequent damages suffered by plaintiff.

In particular this scam begin with what’s known as the advance-fee fraud except this buy-in is ongoing and lasts until a mark is tapped-out.

Quibids and ilk call themselves “penny auctions” as if there is such a thing. Onlooker suspicions are assuaged by the inherent implication that if a business scam has a name, it must not be a crime.

Are penny auctions a veritable thing, besides the self-defined new crook on the block? Well, yes, but. The “penny auctions” of yesteryear had nothing to do with these pay-to-play auction schemes where bidders buy vouchers for the privilege to ante into a bidding pool. Penny auction refers to the Depression era strategy of sabotaging farm liquidation auctions by forcing the auctioneer to accept bids in increments of one penny. Aided by cooperative neighbors, bankruptcy victims were able to grind their creditor’s actions to a halt, for a time, because collusion was itself unlawful. Obviously this is a far cry from the neo penny auctions which require customers to buy “bids” with which to place dibs on a desired item, increasing its auction price by a penny each time and prolonging the bidding for another fixed period.

On Quibids, price and time increments can vary between auction items to confuse watchers trying to do the math. As an average, a bidder might pay 60 cents each time he wants to put his name on the desired item, raise its price a penny, and extend the auction expiration by another ten seconds. The last person to cease paying money to keep the auction up in the air gets the item for the final price. But the final cost includes of course what he paid to play.

Imagine musical chairs except you pay 60 cents for every successive measure, an unlimited number of party-goers circling a solitary chair. So long as somebody pays the piper, everyone gets to stay in. Except they’re not “in” are they? Only the last person who put money in gets to take the chair.

The music stops when the next to last person refuses to ante up.

On the internet, the victory or loss is experienced alone. Your embarrassment is “shared,” but anonymous. Now imagine a convention hall, full of sidelined bidders who dropped out as they realized the insanity of paying into a potentially endless kitty whose real value to them represented a diminishing return. Imagine dozens or scores of former adversaries looking on as the last man standing gets the chair, everyone else leaves empty handed and empty pocketed, while the house rakes in the pot worth many times the value of the chair. Think that scam would fly in a non-virtual world?

In the real world, marks who’ve fallen victim quickly learn that there’s a racket of onlookers quick to step in and silence any complaints. Try to warn off the next bystander who looks like they’re about to fall prey and you’ll see exactly what criminal muscle lurks behind the charm of the charlatan.

Oh, it’s a silly, silly hook this penny bidding scheme, and online it’s hard to tell how many dupes are actually taken in. We have only the Quibids customer relations departments to assure us that none of the other bidders are phantom bots or paid shills. It would be so easy of course for the javascript to be otherwise. The same voices explain that Quibids can afford to offer its auction items at these unbelievable discounts due to the income derived from its inventive bid-selling process.

Simple math suggests they could award a winning lot several times over and still keep a tidy profit. Yet their FAQ explain that 50% of their transaction result in an operational loss. If indeed this is true, that percentage is factoring the auctions they offer for packages of “bids,” where customers place bids to win more bids. One can only hope that buyers are given the upper hand on these transactions. Otherwise the 50% percentage tabulates the auctions by number and not their dollar value. Quibids’ losses are phantom, worthless bids sold at a fraction of their worthless value, versus their profitable ones, where $200 consumer goods net $1000 or more.

That kind of scheme resembles a lottery where more tickets are purchased for a fixed-sum reward. Quibids deflects categorization as a gambling scheme by explaining that auction losers have the option to apply their losses toward the retail price of the item, if they elect to purchase it as consolation. How many players take them up on such an offer, only they know.

Upon losing the Christmas raffle, would having the option to buy the turkey at above retail price be reassurance enough for you to prove the affair wasn’t in reality an unregulated raffle?

First of all, the sites use very clever software, and a money-changing scheme to defy the average grasp of math. But the trap mechanism well oiled, the more duplicitous energy goes into the promotion. Quibids is using social networking and email to expand the reach of the news outlets they ensnare. Our attention was drawn when this week the Colorado Springs Gazette directed its readers to this exciting new discount website.

A scan of the various “penny auction” websites would seem to indicate they are using identical software. That opens a whole other can of worms, doesn’t it? This could be an installation one can license, just as one would WordPress or Zen Cart. In fact there is a PHP setup marketed by Scriptmatix who charge $1,250 plus for an installation. First they nail people greedy enough to want Nikon D90s for next to nothing, then they turn their dupes into willing con artists themselves.

Here’s a screen grab from the Scriptmatix brochure, where they explain what kind of return eager entrepreneurs can expect on their $1,249 investment.

It might look like a safer legal recourse to franchise the “penny auction” scheme and let client operators do the defrauding and ultimately face the authorities. Maybe selling the blueprint to a confidence trick does not constitute a crime. Unless of course you are pretending to peddle a fully legitimate business model that you know is actually against the law. We’re back to fraud.

Of course the key to convincing users that your site is not a ripoff lies with successful PR. It’s very likely that many of these multiple installations are Quibids figuring out how to outrun Google searches of Quibids+Scam. Aptly-named rival Swipe-bids for example looks more to me like a designated heavy, meant to make Quibids appear to be honest by comparison. Who knows how many websites this operation has used to elude tar and feathers.

Here’s the SWIPE-BIDS website whose main page stream a promotional video, actually for a competitor, as if it was its own. On watchdog sites, Quibids cries foul, but it’s hard to tell what argument is authentic.

Does “swipe” seem a term well chosen to inspire trust? It’s as obvious as a black hat in a wrestling match. Of course “Quibids” is the most poetic choice for truth-in-tradenames. “Qui” is French for who and doesn’t that account for the mysterious identity of who is bidding against you?

And the watchdog websites sprouting up to monitor the penny auction eruption are themselves shadow operations. Any “penny auction watch” that prefaces their posts with the concession that some auction sites are good and some are bad, is obviously shilling for someone. They may be a village idiot with no concept of the scamming afoot, or they’re innocent at all. But this is speculation.

By all appearances, these sites are reaping Keystone times six, and simply drop-shipping the goods.

A legal indictment of Quibids can precede a formal investigation based simply on their of self-promotion. Theirs may look like expertly crafted PR, and these days of diminished expectations about the objectivity of our media, it may suit many to congratulate the charlatans on their savvy, but Quibids’ self-promotion documents their intent to defraud.

Layers of press releases and paid editorial columns appear to shore up a single real news item which the Quibids outfit eked from an Oklahoma news team earlier this year.

At right are stills from KWES NEWS9 reporting about Quibids, as far as they were told, a home-grown auction website.

Quibids hasn’t chintzed on PR, but they do appear to lack for real faces to front their operation…

According to their own site, Quibids was the brainchild of Oklahoma City entrepreneur Matt Beckham, joined by Shaun Tilford, Jeff Geurts, Josh Duty, Bart Consedine, and spokeswoman Jill Farrand. The 27-year-old Beckham’s identity is confirmed by the Quibids.com domain registration.

Have a look at who NEWS9 is interviewing for the so-called customer testimonial. The kyron reads “Zach Stevens” who purports to be thrilled with the deal he’s gotten on Quibids.

Do we know whether this interview footage was pre-packaged for the NEWS9 team? The distinction is unimportant, but we might note that the cuffed sleeve does not belong to the female reporter.

This TV segment streams on the upper right corner of the auction sites, serving as a de facto suggestion of the site’s legitimacy. The footage streams in a very small window.

But enlarged in these captures, a closeup of “Zach’s” laptop and username reveals this “customer” is none other than Quibids’ owner Matt Beckham, smiling like he has no idea the perp walk that awaits him.

Wikileaks has video of Granai Massacre

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is officially a wanted man. After the arrest of whistleblower Bradley Manning for leaking the Collateral Murder video, the Pentagon announced it is hunting Assange “to talk to him” about 260,000 diplomatic cables which Army Specialist Manning is purported to have passed along as well. Appealing for fans to create Wikileak support groups worldwide, Assange confirmed possession of sensitive material to which he could only allude earlier: the US military’s own video of the “Garani Massacre” (sic), its 2009 airstrike and coverup of the killing of over 140 Afghan civilians, most of them children. Within hours, the claim and Assange’s appeal, were removed from the Wikileaks website.

Assange’s announcement has been propagated by journalists in the Wikileaks email circle, but strangely the call for creating a network of support groups, “Friends of Wikileaks is being given no traction.

The hasty typo of “Garani,” uncorrected, doesn’t serve the cause either. As a keyword, Garani brings up only Assange’s recent Tweet. All news references of the original incident are indexed under “Granai.” Or of course Julian Assange’s earlier codeword, Project G.

That the media is so casual about describing the Wikileaks founder as subject of an “international manhunt” is unfortunately disarming. Assange has had to cancel an appearance in Las Vegas, and a later keynote engagement for 2600 in NYC. Oh hw funny. Pentagon Papers whisleblower Daniel Ellsberg is warning the Assange is facing very real danger of rendition, interrogation, disappearance, even assassination by US drone. The excitement builds?

You can do more than watch Assange dodge missile strikes like Flash Osama. Contact Wikileaks about enlisting as friend or supporter, not just spectator.

Below is the original email from Julian Assange:

WikiLeaks may be under attack.

You were generous enough to write to us, but we have not had the labor resources to respond.

Your support is important to us. Please read all of this email to understand what is going on. We apologize for not getting back to you before. It is not through any lack of interest on our part, but an enforced lack of resources.

One of our alleged sources, a young US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held without trail. Mr. Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscious and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani.

The Garani massacre, which we are still working on, killed over 100 people, mostly children.

Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy’s engaging in abusive actions all over the world. We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true and we do have a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the United States government.

Mr. Manning was allegedly exposed after talking to an unrelated “journalist” who then worked with the US government to detain him.

Some background on the Manning case:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/06/11/transcript-daniel-ellsberg-says-he-fears-us-might-assasinate-wikileaks-founder/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/state-department-anxious/

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2010/06/143011.htm

[ note that there are some questions about the Wired reportage, see: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/13/video-wikileaks-foun.html#comment-809677 ]

WikiLeaks a small organization going through enormous growth and operating in an adverserial, high-security environment which can make communication time consuming and the acquisition of new staff and volunteers, also difficult since they require high levels of trust.

To try and deal with our growth and the current difficult situation, we want to get you to work together with our other supporters to set up a “Friends of WikiLeaks” group in your area. We have multiple supporters in most countries and would like to see them be a strong and independent force.

Please write to friends@sunshinepress.org if you are interested in helping with Friends of WikiLeaks in your area. You will receive further instructions.

We also have significant unexpected legal costs (for example flying a legal team to Kuwait, video production. Collateral Murder production costs were $50,000 all up).

Any financial contributions will be of IMMEDIATE assistance.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support

Please donate and tell the world that you have done so. Encourage all your friends to follow the example you set, after all, courage is contagious.

Julian Assange
Editor in Chief
WIKILEAKS

Mavi Marmara security camera footage released by Israel raises two questions

Posted on June 6, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Following their murderous raid on the Gaza Flotilla, Israel seized everyone’s photographic footage and released only a fragment which pretended to support the IDF version of the engagement. This clip from a surveillance camera on the Mavi Marmara purports to show activists preparing to batter the Israeli commandos. But the time stamp at the top edge indicates 4:31 AM, which means the sequence is actually after the flotilla reported its first casualties, a full half-hour befre Israel began its violent overtures. I chose this frame also because it depicts a convoy cameraman. Where are the media inquiries for HIS video evidence?

Flotilla video evidence escapes Israel, IDF has to conduct pantie raids now

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Norman Finkelstein mentioned anticipated photographic footage that may have escaped confiscation by Israel which has been monopolizing the narrative with their selective accounts. A released Irish activist recounts how nonviolent resistance on the Challenger allowed time for an Australian journalist to secret what she had filmed. We await the unveiling of her evidence in Istanbul. In the meantime some video has escaped from the Mavi Marmara.

Which was more awesome: power of nonviolence, or right of self-defense?

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Give praise to Allah where praise is due

As the Freedom Flotilla made its slow approach last week, a popular Huffpo article pronounced the convoy a testament to the awesome power of nonviolence. That sentiment went about as viral as activist-geeks can get. But the blockade running denouement proved something of the opposite, didn’t it? I hope the sanctimonious pacifist will be brave enough to admit it. The Muslim Brotherhood bravely charging the Israeli navy was surely the definition of martyr, if anyone has ever earned it. Without pushing the IDF to bare its authoritarian fangs, there would have been no story, no outrage, the end. An entirely compliant convoy would have been led by the nose to Ashdod and diplomatic compromise. Neither Gandhi nor King nor Mandela gained without a massacre they didn’t provoke. It’s a slander to their legacy that nonviolent movements have been co-opted by religious purists who subordinate social justice to self-fulfilment, generally in the guise of your post-earthly reward. Labor organizers used to curse the industrialists’ first line of union busters, the churches which practiced appeasement and promised “pie in the sky when you die, by and by.”

We may view and review the IDF night vision tapes which recorded the hardly nonviolent reception given Israel’s would-be swashbuckling commandos. Those convoy defenders delivering the first blows may appear to be having way too much fun for our sense of propriety. But it’s hard to begrudge men who’ve suffered under the Israeli boot, perhaps even Israeli torture, who’ve never gotten closer to their oppressors than an Israeli sniper’s range would allow. Perhaps they have loved ones to avenge, or ideals higher than secular humanists can credit. Whatever hatred or anger, the bravery it took to lift metal pipes against modern firepower is undeniable. And just like the stone-throwers of their youth, this is the indomitable spirit that buoys their survival. Without this fight, their numbers would entropy to servitude and attrition, lifeless bodies suspended on their invader’s web, to feed the occupier’s young until they are gone.

From our church pews and academic perches we can supplicate they heed the road most honorably traveled. What do Westerners know of pragmatics? At best our reality is theoretical. Really, who are we, we are always wrong. We can neither elect presidents who matter, nor pass legislation that does not agree with our corporate landlords. And we presume to advise on struggles that mean life and death.

Am I saying that there is no efficacy to nonviolent action? Not at all. But I do say, give human nature and righteous anger its due. Nonviolent passivity is for sheep. It will lead us all to an unceremonious death. Wolves count on sheep that don’t bite back. If humans can be divided between wolves and sheep, be upfront with the sheep and perhaps you’ll rouse in some of them a wolf’s courage. That is what will lift your collective humanity.

At this moment a second wave of the Freedom Flotilla is poised to make a second go at Gaza. The MV Rachel Corrie waits in mid Mediterranean for reinforcements to join it, whereupon it too will push Israel’s buttons. Rumors are already circulating that a diplomatic compromise may already have been reached to divert the aid supplies through Egypt. Of course that rumor was spread about the recent flotilla. From the horses mouth however, the Rachel Corrie crew are expressing the desire to avoid a similar disaster, they vow to sit peaceably with arms raised lest IDF interlopers mistake resistance.

This may be the false pacifist bluster that led Israel to underestimate the fighting spirit of the Mavi Marmara’s above deck. Or it may be genuine. Which Israeli game theorists will be eager to plug and play. The MV Rachel Corrie wheelhouse will be handed to the IDF just as a harbor pilot boards to guide a ship into port, IDF gunboats serving as tugboats, aid supplies unloaded at Ashdod, then transferred through an approved border crossing with as much fanfare as collaboration with occupiers will garner. Humanitarian relief delivered but no blockade breached. A Pyrrhic victory that means private interests will forever subsidize the bill which Israel owes.

I have more faith than that in the Free Gaza Movement, they’ve played their cards superbly, if of course lacking the visual aids which it would seem would greatly enliven media coverage. But I’m second guessing there too. Perhaps an imagined picture is better than the reality mundane. The public knows enough about what happened on the Mavi Marmara with just a sliver of video coverage. Even with IDF fine-tuned selective snippets, the public imagination can run with the truth. And organizers are not at liberty to praise the Marmara martyrs. So I will.

I was dismayed when heard on the Marmara’s last video stream, someone pleading with the “brotherhood” to cease their resistance because the activists were facing live ammunition. The admonition was in English, meaning most of the brotherhood would not understand it anyway. If you watched the continuous broadcast, it was almost exclusively in Turkish, suited to its main audience in Turkey. When participants wanted to testify in another language, many onscreen slunk their shoulders until the Turkish was back. Bilingual announcers who asked the hosts which language they should speak were always advised against English. So when the final plea was made to the “brotherhood,” the language seemed deliberately aimed at the Western viewer, a telltale conceit that would bolster Israel’s version of events.

For the most part, what Israel says happened is what happened, to the most significant degree. A lot of damning gunfire may have been omitted from the IDF tapes volunteered to skew public perception, but what pretext more did the brotherhood need to defend the ship against the surprise nocturnal invaders? None.

Just as Israel insists on its right to defend itself, it can hardly deny the convoy the same right.

What is utterly clear is that the Muslim brotherhood didn’t raise its arms chanting Kumbaya, neither did they lock arms to be trampled afoot. As the Israeli special-ops came down from the helicopters, the brotherhood gave them their best wallops. They had no guns, nor swords nor explosives nor booby-traps. They showed amazing restraint for the anger they carried. Yet in the face of overwhelming firepower they ran straight forward, some of them armed only with a plastic chair. I had practically to sympathize with the soldiers coming one at a time down the ropes. That brave first one certainly caught the brunt of a violent ride. Only an inhumanly ardent partisan could not feel pain for that solitary first Israeli battered like a rag doll. We are certainly never treated to videos which have shown that IDF soldiers might feel the pangs in the face of what the violence they are committing.

Flotilla not a Love Boat, it was a lynch, says Netanyahu, describing beating of IDF soldiers, not deaths of aid workers

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Eric Verlo

What’s a lynch? I find it intriguing that Israel’s spin machine can drop an American pop culture reference like Love Boat, and simultaneously flub basic usage with “a lynch.” According to Israel, that describes what befell their crack-troop Mavi Marmara party-crashers. What does “a lynch” mean? Apparently someone feels at liberty to shorten Lynch Mob, or Lynching, to coin a new threat to Israel. But doesn’t it stretch credulity to imagine the IDF has never claimed to have been baited into an “ambush?”

Every modern military with a propaganda office, when it suffers a setback, attributes it to an ambush. When the US and Israel do it, it’s an attack; when our dastardly adversaries do it, it’s an ambush. Let’s set aside that the night watch on the Mavi Marmara’s deck might have been defending themselves. For the moment the IDF version of events is the only one Israel is allowing.

Ambush, trap, beating, getting jumped, wouldn’t these be appropriate descriptions for what Israel is asserting its night-vision video depicts? To lynch someone -it’s a verb- implies a hanging, extrajudicial, usually perpetrated by a crowd against a lone victim, unarmed. So where does the IDF get “lynch?”

To my mind, the Israeli-accented tender of “lynch” is feigned bad English, stuttered -I hope in shame- as perpetrator blames victim, but stuttered conveniently, to make the accusation less preposterous. Isn’t a rape victim who is too well versed in the crime perpetrated against her, less convincing than a victim who fumbles to comprehend the outrage she suffered? Poor Israel, its soldiers stepped into a, a, a lynch.

Emitted from military spokespeople however, one projects a reflexive followup “-that’s the ticket.”

I’m guessing grasping a straws like “lynch” is played for sympathy. And while I deconstruct the false unfamiliarity of otherwise precisely crafted English: PM Netanyahu’s mention of “Love Boat” had a bumbling Bush “the internets” ring to it. Anyone old enough to know the television show about the enchanted cruise ship knows there’s not “a Love Boat” but The Love Boat.

If the newly nouned “lynch” is intended to define a hate crime unique to anti-Semites, the motive fits with Israel’s insistence that first genocide, now holocaust, can only apply to Jews. Such an implication is aided by Netanyahu’s suggestion that the lynch was “plotted.” Because common understanding of mob misbehavior precludes a premeditated plot. This may reflect a naive dismissal of the responsibility of authorities who manipulated the lynch mobs and witch hunts, but dictionaries seldom chronicle the injustice of the victors who write the history. Conventional wisdom holds that lynchings were improvisational.

Perhaps the English speaking viewers are meant to associate the implicit racism of the term. Ambush after all doesn’t conjure the slightest whiff of antisemitism. But here’s where Israel’s liberal arts wordsmiths may have outsmarted themselves. While it’s true that thousands of African Americans were lynched through our nation’s history, to the average American who dwells not very often on shameful pasts, the definition of lynching encompasses simply an execution in lieu a trial. Even an unfair trial, or kangaroo court, can be called a lynching. A lynch mob is an enraged crowd meting vigilante justice, hanging high what to them is an indisputable wrongdoer. The overwhelming number of lynching victims in America’s lawless west were hunted criminals. While xenophobia may always have skewed the mob’s judgment against Indian, Chinese, Mexican, or Black, a lynching was not by definition about racial prejudice.

If the beating of the Israeli commandos illustrated a hatred, was it racist? One is meant to assume the motive was anti-Semitic, but I wonder if Arab-Israelies serving in the IDF, or foreign nationals or mercenaries, don’t garner antagonism as vociferous. The historic prejudice decried by ADL and holocaust remembrance stalwarts has been against Jews, but the world today reviles Israeli arrogance. The US has become universal despised, but American tourists are still assured the world hates America, not its people. It’s what we’re told, if even if it is untrue. I do not know of course if Israelis are proffered the same polite assurance.

Did Israel mean that the Freedom Flotilla was an attempted lynching of Israel’s international reputation? In that case, Israel’s predictable militant reaction made such a hanging a matter of assisted suicide. If the Israeli national character suffers irreparably, who’s going to be to bame?

Presuming to paint its soldiers into a lynching scene, which character does Israel assert they played? Were the IDF the horse thieves? Bandying about the connotations of lynchings makes for an interesting turning of the tables. Were the convoy defenders the ones pronouncing hasty judgment upon their dark-of-night assailants? Or were Israel’s commandos declaring themselves judge and jury on the alleged arms smugglers?

In cases of breaking and entering, the home field advantage is accorded the right to self-defense. A SWAT team might make the argument that identifying itself as law enforcement preempts a homeowner’s recourse to armed resistance, based on the principle that an arresting officer’s safety is inviolate. Israel may assert it was policing its border, but unfortunately last Monday it was operating beyond its border. What protection can a law enforcement function claim if outside its jurisdiction?

It might be well and good to say Israel reserves the right to protect itself from enemies anywhere in the world, but it can’t pretend its badge should command universal obeisance.

The Mavi Marmara had declared her intention to run Israel’s blockade, but hadn’t yet attempted the crossing. In fact the Freedom Flotilla was moving away from the contentious area at the time of Israel’s attack.

Who then was the victim of this “lynch?”

I’ll tell you why it’s lynch and not lynching. Because Israel’s soldiers weren’t killed, they were beaten. Not to diminish what might have been their adversaries’ worst intentions, but the gantlet the IDF commandoes received was not a hanging specifically, and not very effective in terms of proving fatal. On the other hand, the outcome was the killing of an as yet undisclosed multitude of civilians, unarmed to an extent that the killings can be defined as executions, the entire result already adjudged to have been a massacre.

Israel’s invention of “lynch” is an utterance which I believe betrays the sign of shame the world longs to see from Israel. Even as the public revels in watching the Israeli hubris on self-destruct, empathy has us hoping to see Israel grasp for its lost humanity. To describe the events on the Turkish passenger ship as a “lynch” is to fail to summon the chutzpah to bear false witness, to accuse the dead of capital murder. Neither does Israel dare to raise the specter that summary executions were committed that night at all.

There is a term to describe

a) Israel’s taking the law into its own hands by pirating a ship belonging to another nation while it sailed in international waters,

b) Israel’s soldiers not being a police force but an ideology-deputized posse,

c) opting in a confused fervor to punish outlaws thought to have been caught red handed,

d) issuing on the spot death sentences.

It’s called a mass lynching.

Unusual mechanical failures delay, but fail to scuttle, Gaza Freedom Flotilla

Posted on May 29, 2010 by Eric Verlo

First the MV Rachel Corrie suffered a breakdown shortly after leaving port. Then the Challenger I lost its steering mechanism and another Greek ship has to return to port. Though derided by Israeli critics as “tin buckets,” the ships had been certified sea-worthy before the convoy set sail. Suspicions about system failures can wait until proper investigations. Cyprus denied the Challenger permission to harbor for repairs, so its passengers were transshipped to the Mavi Marmara, and the convoy delayed its rendezvous. The revised timing will deny the Israeli navy a chance to attack during the night. The relief ships will not be approaching the contested waters off Gaza until after daybreak.

As it did during earlier relief convoy efforts, Cyprus responded to pressure from Israel and refused to allow convoy ships to assemble at its ports. This time the Greek Authority of Cyprus enforced a ban against the Freedom Flotilla vessels from entering its waters. WitnessForGaza has a video of a Cypriot helicopter keeping the Challenger I at bay, even though it was becoming increasingly disabled and need to reach a safe harbor.

What can you do to protect the convoy?

Subject: Call For Action As The Flotilla Faces Serious Threats From Israel

“People are very aware that the Israeli authorities and indeed others are playing all sorts of mind games, with threats alternating with so called offers, which would include surrendering the aid into Israeli hands, something which the participants of the flotilla find entirely unacceptable”

Speaking from the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, Kevin Ovenden from Viva Palestina outlined some of the concerns and realities currently been faced by over 750 people on board the 9 ships sailing towards Gaza.

The last of the ships departed from Turkey at midnight last night, and they are all currently in International waters in the Mediterranean Sea. Their journey is faced with incredible danger, given the threats that have been issued by the Israeli Government. They have stated that they will stop this Flotilla at all costs, even by force if necessary. Their safety is in grave danger, and the time has come for the international community to stand up for their safety and well being.

Tomorrow, Saturday, the flotilla should be sailing into Gaza, however, given the threats issued, the likely hood of this happening is looking uncertain at this stage. We are calling on everyone to contact various political leaders to ask them to do everything in their power to ensure the safety of these brave people, and to stand up and add their voice in support of this humanitarian flotilla.

The Gazan People’s Front or People’s Front of Gaza less funny than Nazirene

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Eric Verlo

A Gaza Flotilla PR mishap, as minor as a participant speaking out of place, was seized upon by one reporter to suggest rivalry between co-sponsors of the relief convoy due to convene Saturday at Gaza’s door. When an interviewee said “Free Palestine Movement” instead of “Free Gaza,” the reporter recalled scenes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the mortal rivalry between the “People’s Judean Front” and the “People’s Front of Judea,” often understood to lampoon the PLO and it splinter groups. Haha. But why didn’t the reporter mention Python’s other irreverent terrorist gang also fighting the Roman occupation: the uber-Zionist Nazirene? Because Otto and the Nazirene, that’s right, not Nazarene, were cut from the video when control was wrestled from Monty Python for the rights.

Why the offense? Because they wore swastika-like Stars-of-David and they goose-stepped? Because they followed a small-mustached leader named Otto who dreamed of a racially pure state for Jews only?

I’m surprised that more Monty Python fans aren’t livid at the suggestion the classic has been censored for all posterity. But only those who saw Life of Brian in the theater, or can pick up an out-of-print paperback of the screenplay, would know what lines successive viewers don’t hear to memorize.

Lines like these between Eric Idle and Graham Chapman:

OTTO: It’s time, you know … Time that we Jews racially purified ourselves … We need more living room. We must move into the traditionally Jewish areas of Samaria.

BRIAN: What about the Samaritans?

OTTO: Well, we can put them in little camps. And after Samaria we must move into Jordan and create a great Jewish state that will last a thousand years.

Imagine a Zionist depicted using Hitler’s expression “living space!” Lebensraum meant a homeland where the German people could live unmolested, with room for their population to grow.

Associating Zionists with Nazis has always meant courting trouble. Does it sound incredible that defenders of Israel would take a knife to Monty Python’s work? Know any other blockbuster movies of the late 70s which mysteriously shed memorable scenes when they reemerged on video?

Criterion recently released a DVD with extras that purport to include the deleted scenes, you can see them on Youtube, but they are actually outtakes with bits missing still, in particular the lines above.

I wrote about this at length in an earlier post, when I came upon the missing dialog just by chance. In that post I also transcribed the full text of the censored scenes.

Back to the joke made at the Free Gaza Movement‘s expense. Hopefully the organizers can laugh it off. Really Jerusalem-based reporter Jackie Rowland was making hay of an email shown to her by a participant being compelled to switch the word “Palestine” for “Gaza” because they were not authorized to speak officially for the “Free Gaza Movement.” With any improvised collection of activists, only those tasked should speak for the whole. Especially someone who may have been admonished beforehand not to present themselves as a spokesman.

I cannot presume to know what were the motives in this instance, but it’s been my experience that characters bent on disrupting the work of activists often put themselves before the cameras to sabotage the message. Leaders have to guard against that tactic.

The reporter should have know as much. Imagine interviewing Rush Limbaugh and taking him at his word that he represented the White House.

The activist should have made that fact more clear. It certainly was disingenuous of the reporter however, because it would be easy to confirm that there was no such group, instead of concluding that rival non-profits were vying for taking credit for the convoy. In that way Jackie Rowland’s article seemed like a mean-spirited laugh.

The groups which have brought the multi-million dollar enterprise together that is the Gaza Freedom Flotilla appear to me to be far from adversaries, otherwise how could this be the ninth unified attempt?

The same cannot be said for Fatah and Hamas of course, nor of the extremists in Israel.

The latest reports have the relief convoy meeting in the international waters off of Gaza on Saturday. The story has been playing well in the international press, and is beginning to see daylight in the US. Apart from those with a Zionist slant, two decent reports emerged today in the WSJ and Time.

Robert Fisk and the language of power, danger words: Competing Narratives

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Celebrated reporter -and verb- Robert Fisk had harsh words, “danger words” he called them, for host Al-Jazeera where he gave an address about the language of power which has infected newsman and reader alike. Beware your unambiguous acceptance of empty terms into which state propagandists let you infer nuance: power players, activism, non-state actors, key players, geostrategic players, narratives, external players, meaningful solutions, –meaning what?
I’ll not divulge why these stung Al-J, but I’d like to detail the full list, and commit not to condone their false usage at NMT, without ridicule, “quotes” or disclaimer.

Fisk listed several expressions which he attributes to government craftsmen. Unfortunately journalists have been parroting these terms without questioning their dubious meaning. Fisk began with a favorite, the endless, disingenuous, “peace process.” What is that – victor-defined purgatory? Why would “peace” be a “process” Fisk asks.

How appropriate that some of the West’s strongest critics are linguists. Fisk lauded the current seagoing rescue of Gaza, the convoy determined to break the Israeli blockade. He compared it to the Berlin Airlift, when governments saw fit to help besieged peoples, even former enemies. This time however, the people have to act where their governments do not.

I read recently that the Gaza Freedom Flotilla might be preparing accommodations for Noam Chomsky to join the passage. Won’t that be an escalation? I imagine if Robert Fisk would climb aboard too, it would spell doom for any chance the relief supplies would reach the Gazans. A ship convoy with Chomsky and Fisk on board would present an opportunity that an Israeli torpedo could not resist.

Here is his list. If you can’t peruse the lecture, at least ponder these words with as much skepticism as you can. The parenthesis denote my shorthand.

peace process (detente under duress, while enduring repression)

“Peace of the Brave” (accept your subjugation, coined for Algeria, then France lost)

“Hearts and Minds” (Vietnam era psych-ops, then US lost)

spike (to avoid saying: increase)

surge (reinforcements, you send them in you’re losing)

key players (only puppets and their masters need apply)

back on track (the objective has been on rails?)

peace envoy (in mob-speak: the cleaner)

road map (winner’s bill of lading for the spoils)

experts (vetted opinions)

indirect talks (concurrent soliloquies, duets performed solo in proximity to common fiddler calling tune)

competing narratives (parallel universes in one? naturally the perpetrator is going to tell a different tale, disputing that of victim’s; ungoing result is no justice and no injustice) examples:
occupied vs. disputed;
wall vs. security barrier;
colonization vs settlements, outposts or Jewish neighborhoods.

foreign fighters (them, but always us)

Af-Pak (ignores third party India and thus dispute to Kashmir)

appeasers (sissies who don’t have bully’s back)

Weapons of Mass Destruction (not Iraq, now not Iran)

think tanks (ministry of propaganda privatized)

challenges (avoids they are problems)

intervention (asserted authority by military force)

change agents (by undisclosed means?)

Until asked otherwise, I’ll append Fisk’s talk here:

Robert Fisk, The Independent newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, gave the following address to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on May 23.

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words – and the use of words.

It is about semantics.

It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history.

More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.

Is this because we no longer care about linguistics? Is this because lap-tops ‘correct’ our spelling, ‘trim’ our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?

Let me show you what I mean.

For two decades now, the US and British – and Israeli and Palestinian – leaderships have used the words ‘peace process’ to define the hopeless, inadequate, dishonourable agreement that allowed the US and Israel to dominate whatever slivers of land would be given to an occupied people.

I first queried this expression, and its provenance, at the time of Oslo – although how easily we forget that the secret surrenders at Oslo were themselves a conspiracy without any legal basis. Poor old Oslo, I always think! What did Oslo ever do to deserve this? It was the White House agreement that sealed this preposterous and dubious treaty – in which refugees, borders, Israeli colonies – even timetables – were to be delayed until they could no longer be negotiated.

And how easily we forget the White House lawn – though, yes, we remember the images – upon which it was Clinton who quoted from the Qur’an, and Arafat who chose to say: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. President.” And what did we call this nonsense afterwards? Yes, it was ‘a moment of history’! Was it? Was it so?

Do you remember what Arafat called it? “The peace of the brave.” But I don’t remember any of us pointing out that “the peace of the brave” was used originally by General de Gaulle about the end of the Algerian war. The French lost the war in Algeria. We did not spot this extraordinary irony.

Same again today. We western journalists – used yet again by our masters – have been reporting our jolly generals in Afghanistan as saying that their war can only be won with a “hearts and minds” campaign. No-one asked them the obvious question: Wasn’t this the very same phrase used about Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam war? And didn’t we – didn’t the West – lose the war in Vietnam?

Yet now we western journalists are actually using – about Afghanistan – the phrase ‘hearts and minds’ in our reports as if it is a new dictionary definition rather than a symbol of defeat for the second time in four decades, in some cases used by the very same soldiers who peddled this nonsense – at a younger age – in Vietnam.

Just look at the individual words which we have recently co-opted from the US military.

When we westerners find that ‘our’ enemies – al-Qaeda, for example, or the Taliban -have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it ‘a spike in violence’. Ah yes, a ‘spike’!

A ‘spike’ in violence, ladies and gentlemen is a word first used, according to my files, by a brigadier general in the Baghdad Green Zone in 2004. Yet now we use that phrase, we extemporise on it, we relay it on the air as our phrase. We are using, quite literally, an expression created for us by the Pentagon. A spike, of course, goes sharply up, then sharply downwards. A ‘spike’ therefore avoids the ominous use of the words ‘increase in violence’ – for an increase, ladies and gentlemen, might not go down again afterwards.

Now again, when US generals refer to a sudden increase in their forces for an assault on Fallujah or central Baghdad or Kandahar – a mass movement of soldiers brought into Muslim countries by the tens of thousands – they call this a ‘surge’. And a surge, like a tsunami, or any other natural phenomena, can be devastating in its effects. What these ‘surges’ really are – to use the real words of serious journalism – are reinforcements. And reinforcements are sent to wars when armies are losing those wars. But our television and newspaper boys and girls are still talking about ‘surges’ without any attribution at all! The Pentagon wins again.

Meanwhile the ‘peace process’ collapsed. Therefore our leaders – or ‘key players’ as we like to call them – tried to make it work again. Therefore the process had to be put ‘back on track’. It was a railway train, you see. The carriages had come off the line. So the train had to be put ‘back on track’. The Clinton administration first used this phrase, then the Israelis, then the BBC.

But there was a problem when the ‘peace process’ had been put ‘back on track’ – and still came off the line. So we produced a ‘road map’ – run by a Quartet and led by our old Friend of God, Tony Blair, who – in an obscenity of history – we now refer to as a ‘peace envoy’.

But the ‘road map’ isn’t working. And now, I notice, the old ‘peace process’ is back in our newspapers and on our television screens. And two days ago, on CNN, one of those boring old fogies that the TV boys and girls call ‘experts’ – I’ll come back to them in a moment – told us again that the ‘peace process’ was being put ‘back on track’ because of the opening of ‘indirect talks’ between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ladies and gentlemen, this isn’t just about clichés – this is preposterous journalism. There is no battle between power and the media. Through language, we have become them.

Maybe one problem is that we no longer think for ourselves because we no longer read books. The Arabs still read books – I’m not talking here about Arab illiteracy rates – but I’m not sure that we in the West still read books. I often dictate messages over the phone and find I have to spend ten minutes to repeat to someone’s secretary a mere hundred words. They don’t know how to spell.

I was on a plane the other day, from Paris to Beirut – the flying time is about three hours and 45 minutes – and the woman next to me was reading a French book about the history of the Second World War. And she was turning the page every few seconds. She had finished the book before we reached Beirut! And I suddenly realised she wasn’t reading the book – she was surfing the pages! She had lost the ability to what I call ‘deep read’. Is this one of our problems as journalists, I wonder, that we no longer ‘deep read’? We merely use the first words that come to hand …

Let me show you another piece of media cowardice that makes my 63-year-old teeth grind together after 34 years of eating humus and tahina in the Middle East.

We are told, in so many analysis features, that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are ‘competing narratives’. How very cosy. There’s no justice, no injustice, just a couple of people who tell different history stories. ‘Competing narratives’ now regularly pop up in the British press. The phrase is a species – or sub-species – of the false language of anthropology. It deletes the possibility that one group of people – in the Middle East, for example – are occupied, while another group of people are doing the occupying. Again, no justice, no injustice, no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly ‘competing narratives’, a football match, if you like, a level playing field because the two sides are – are they not – ‘in competition’. It’s two sides in a football match. And two sides have to be given equal time in every story.

So an ‘occupation’ can become a ‘dispute’. Thus a ‘wall’ becomes a ‘fence’ or a ‘security barrier’. Thus Israeli colonisation of Arab land contrary to all international law becomes ‘settlements’ or ‘outposts’ or ‘Jewish neighbourhoods’.

You will not be surprised to know that it was Colin Powell, in his starring, powerless appearance as secretary of state to George W. Bush, who told US diplomats in the Middle East to refer to occupied Palestinian land as ‘disputed land’ – and that was good enough for most of the American media.

So watch out for ‘competing narratives’, ladies and gentlemen. There are no ‘competing narratives’, of course, between the US military and the Taliban. When there are, however, you’ll know the West has lost.

But I’ll give you a lovely, personal example of how ‘competing narratives’ come undone. Last month, I gave a lecture in Toronto to mark the 95th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the deliberate mass murder of one and a half million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish army and militia. Before my talk, I was interviewed on Canadian Television, CTV, which also owns the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper. And from the start, I could see that the interviewer had a problem. Canada has a large Armenian community. But Toronto also has a large Turkish community. And the Turks, as the Globe and Mail always tell us, “hotly dispute” that this was a genocide. So the interviewer called the genocide “deadly massacres”.

Of course, I spotted her specific problem straight away. She could not call the massacres a ‘genocide’, because the Turkish community would be outraged. But equally, she sensed that ‘massacres’ on its own – especially with the gruesome studio background photographs of dead Armenians – was not quite up to defining a million and a half murdered human beings. Hence the ‘deadly massacres’. How odd!!! If there are ‘deadly’ massacres, are there some massacres which are not ‘deadly’, from which the victims walk away alive? It was a ludicrous tautology.

In the end, I told this little tale of journalistic cowardice to my Armenian audience, among whom were sitting CTV executives. Within an hour of my ending, my Armenian host received an SMS about me from a CTV reporter. “Shitting on CTV was way out of line,” the reporter complained. I doubted, personally, if the word ‘shitting’ would find its way onto CTV. But then, neither does ‘genocide’. I’m afraid ‘competing narratives’ had just exploded.

Yet the use of the language of power – of its beacon-words and its beacon-phrases -goes on among us still. How many times have I heard western reporters talking about ‘foreign fighters’ in Afghanistan? They are referring, of course, to the various Arab groups supposedly helping the Taliban. We heard the same story from Iraq. Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinian, Chechen fighters, of course. The generals called them ‘foreign fighters’. And then immediately we western reporters did the same. Calling them ‘foreign fighters’ meant they were an invading force. But not once – ever – have I heard a mainstream western television station refer to the fact that there are at least 150,000 ‘foreign fighters’ in Afghanistan. And that most of them, ladies and gentlemen, are in American or other Nato uniforms!

Similarly, the pernicious phrase ‘Af-Pak’ – as racist as it is politically dishonest – is now used by reporters when it originally was a creation of the US state department, on the day that Richard Holbrooke was appointed special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the phrase avoided the use of the word ‘India’ whose influence in Afghanistan and whose presence in Afghanistan, is a vital part of the story. Furthermore, ‘Af-Pak’ – by deleting India – effectively deleted the whole Kashmir crisis from the conflict in south-east Asia. It thus deprived Pakistan of any say in US local policy on Kashmir – after all, Holbrooke was made the ‘Af-Pak’ envoy, specifically forbidden from discussing Kashmir. Thus the phrase ‘Af-Pak’, which totally deletes the tragedy of Kashmir – too many ‘competing narratives’, perhaps? – means that when we journalists use the same phrase, ‘Af-Pak’, which was surely created for us journalists, we are doing the state department’s work.

Now let’s look at history. Our leaders love history. Most of all, they love the Second World War. In 2003, George W. Bush thought he was Churchill as well as George W. Bush. True, Bush had spent the Vietnam war protecting the skies of Texas from the Vietcong. But now, in 2003, he was standing up to the ‘appeasers’ who did not want a war with Saddam who was, of course, ‘the Hitler of the Tigris’. The appeasers were the British who did not want to fight Nazi Germany in 1938. Blair, of course, also tried on Churchill’s waistcoat and jacket for size. No ‘appeaser’ he. America was Britain’s oldest ally, he proclaimed – and both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

But none of this was true.

Britain’s old ally was not the United States. It was Portugal, a neutral fascist state during World War Two. Only my own newspaper, The Independent, picked this up.

Nor did America fight alongside Britain in her hour of need in 1940, when Hitler threatened invasion and the German air force blitzed London. No, in 1940 America was enjoying a very profitable period of neutrality – and did not join Britain in the war until Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in December of 1941.

Ouch!

Back in 1956, I read the other day, Eden called Nasser the ‘Mussolini of the Nile’. A bad mistake. Nasser was loved by the Arabs, not hated as Mussolini was by the majority of Africans, especially the Arab Libyans. The Mussolini parallel was not challenged or questioned by the British press. And we all know what happened at Suez in 1956.

Yes, when it comes to history, we journalists really do let the presidents and prime ministers take us for a ride.

Today, as foreigners try to take food and fuel by sea to the hungry Palestinians of Gaza, we journalists should be reminding our viewers and listeners of a long-ago day when America and Britain went to the aid of a surrounded people, bringing food and fuel – our own servicemen dying as they did so – to help a starving population. That population had been surrounded by a fence erected by a brutal army which wished to starve the people into submission. The army was Russian. The city was Berlin. The wall was to come later. The people had been our enemies only three years earlier. Yet we flew the Berlin airlift to save them. Now look at Gaza today. Which western journalist – and we love historical parallels – has even mentioned 1948 Berlin in the context of Gaza?

Look at more recent times. Saddam had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – you can fit ‘WMD’ into a headline – but of course, he didn’t, and the American press went through embarrassing bouts of self-condemnation afterwards. How could it have been so misled, the New York Times asked itself? It had not, the paper concluded, challenged the Bush administration enough.

And now the very same paper is softly – very softly – banging the drums for war in Iran. Iran is working on WMD. And after the war, if there is a war, more self-condemnation, no doubt, if there are no nuclear weapons projects.

Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words, in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drowning our vocabulary with the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation or what I call the ‘THINK TANKS’. Thus we have become part of this language.

Here, for example, are some of the danger words:

· POWER PLAYERS

· ACTIVISM

· NON-STATE ACTORS

· KEY PLAYERS

· GEOSTRATEGIC PLAYERS

· NARRATIVES

· EXTERNAL PLAYERS

· PEACE PROCESS

· MEANINGFUL SOLUTIONS

· AF-PAK

· CHANGE AGENTS (whatever these sinister creatures are).

I am not a regular critic of Al Jazeera. It gives me the freedom to speak on air. Only a few years ago, when Wadah Khanfar (now Director General of Al Jazeera) was Al Jazeera’s man in Baghdad, the US military began a slanderous campaign against Wadah’s bureau, claiming – untruthfully – that Al Jazeera was in league with al-Qaeda because they were receiving videotapes of attacks on US forces. I went to Fallujah to check this out. Wadah was 100 per cent correct. Al-Qaeda was handing in their ambush footage without any warning, pushing it through office letter-boxes. The Americans were lying.

Wadah is, of course, wondering what is coming next.

Well, I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that all those ‘danger words’ I have just read out to you – from KEY PLAYERS to NARRATIVES to PEACE PROCESS to AF-PAK – all occur in the nine-page Al Jazeera programme for this very forum.

I’m not condemning Al Jazeera for this, ladies and gentlemen. Because this vocabulary is not adopted through political connivance. It is an infection that we all suffer from – I’ve used ‘peace process’ a few times myself, though with quotation marks which you can’t use on television – but yes, it’s a contagion.

And when we use these words, we become one with the power and the elites which rule our world without fear of challenge from the media. Al Jazeera has done more than any television network I know to challenge authority, both in the Middle East and in the West. (And I am not using ‘challenge’ in the sense of ‘problem’, as in ‘”I face many challenges,” says General McCrystal.’)

How do we escape this disease? Watch out for the spell-checkers in our lap-tops, the sub-editor’s dreams of one-syllable words, stop using Wikipedia. And read books – real books, with paper pages, which means deep reading. History books, especially.

Al Jazeera is giving good coverage to the flotilla – the convoy of boats setting off for Gaza. I don’t think they are a bunch of anti-Israelis. I think the international convoy is on its way because people aboard these ships – from all over the world – are trying to do what our supposedly humanitarian leaders have failed to do. They are bringing food and fuel and hospital equipment to those who suffer. In any other context, the Obamas and the Sarkozys and the Camerons would be competing to land US Marines and the Royal Navy and French forces with humanitarian aid – as Clinton did in Somalia. Didn’t the God-like Blair believe in humanitarian ‘intervention’ in Kosovo and Sierra Leone?

In normal circumstances, Blair might even have put a foot over the border.

But no. We dare not offend the Israelis. And so ordinary people are trying to do what their leaders have culpably failed to do. Their leaders have failed them.

Have the media? Are we showing documentary footage of the Berlin airlift today? Or of Clinton’s attempt to rescue the starving people of Somalia, of Blair’s humanitarian ‘intervention’ in the Balkans, just to remind our viewers and readers – and the people on those boats – that this is about hypocrisy on a massive scale?

The hell we are! We prefer ‘competing narratives’. Few politicians want the Gaza voyage to reach its destination – be its end successful, farcical or tragic. We believe in the ‘peace process’, the ‘road map’. Keep the ‘fence’ around the Palestinians. Let the ‘key players’ sort it out.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not your ‘key speaker’ this morning.

I am your guest, and I thank you for your patience in listening to me.

Live webcam on Gaza Freedom Flotilla Turkish passenger ship Mavi Marmara

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Eric Verlo

GAZA FREEDOM FLOTILLA- DAY TWO. You can follow events from a live webcam on the Turkish passenger ship MAVI MARMARA, with camera pointing over bow. The Swedish/Greek cargo ship SOFIA is still livestreaming her loading in Athens. We await details of Algerian cargo AL-JAZAIR, Turkish cargos GAZZE and DEFNE Y, German passenger yacht CHALLENGER I and the Irish MV RACHEL CORRIE.
(Details on each relief convoy ship at this post.)

We probably cannot expect the webcams to broadcast as the flotilla nears the Israeli Navy. This is explained in article on Media Line which interviewed FreeGazaOrg’s Greta Berlin:

In an attempt to curtail a public relations disaster of armed troops confronting the civilian ships, the Israel Navy is expected to jam the satellite transmission and otherwise use electronic warfare to quash all coverage and photos of the event.

“They have turned off our satellite phones. They have blocked our transmissions. We have live stream videos and we will continue to broadcast as long as we can. As long as it is on live and the signal suddenly goes out, then I think the world clearly knows what is happening and what Israel is doing.”

Aboard MAVI MARMARA

SOFIA in port.

Now the US Coast Guard will know you know how oil cleanup is f-cking done

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Eric Verlo

As icky sneaky toxic crude permeates Louisiana marches, now experts tell us the eco-stain won’t ever come out. No really. The oil assault has been mounting steadily, BP poised dutifully with “booms” and it isn’t working. Exasperated oil spill cleanup professionals are not a bit surprised, one has even released a video throwing down expletives as much for humor as heartbreak. Accusations go beyond BP, calling the US Coast Guard head a “shameless piece of shit, and so’s President Obama if he can’t see that.” –But brightly, it’s all in the delivery.

About the looming oil invasion.

We can’t see the oil, but we can see the bright orange boom ringing our coastlines in apparent preparedness against the oil. When you watch the video you’ll learn that the boom is colored bright orange for you to see it, for the media cameras to allay our concerns that the prophylactic is in place. But from this video you’ll see that the boom is being deployed like a movie set facade, with little hope of effectiveness.

The key is in the “catch bassins.” Boom isn’t just Maxi-pad we stick into the water like a quicker-picker-upper. It’s meant to corral the oil into catch bassins. Absent those receptacles the oil is left for waves to push it up and over like trench warriors going over the top, wave after wave, to hit the beach, “all of it.”

You’ll note the major concern about oil spills is landfall, and it should be. Oil floats and thus isn’t as much a disaster on the surface until it hits populous surfaces. Of course, BP’s use of chemical dispersants breaks up the oil while it’s in the water, rendering the underwater a deadly war zone too.

The dispersant of choice has long been banned in the UK for its toxicity. COREXIT is named not after a chemical compound but as a phonetic abbreviation for what it does, Corexit “corrects-it” haha. It’s a cuncoxen applied to cover up the visible horror of a spill. HIDEZIT is apparently its nickname, acknowledging the darker humor.

Watch this video and you’ll know how boom technology works and you’ll understand what we need to ask of BP and government oversight.

The schoolroom-like lecture is delivered by an anonymous professional with straightforward simplicity and humor, but with palpable emotion. You hear the break in her voice especially as the oil industry is taken to task for its utter disregard for what’s happened.

There’s not enough boom, rope or anchor on this planet to properly boom the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico. There should be. It’s not that much of an expense. Really it’s not.

They said they were ready. Having enough materials to perform fucking proper fucking booming is part of being ready. They’re not ready, are they?”

This message could be subversive reassurance that oil spills can be contained, and thus, offshore drilling needn’t be restrained, but let’s burn that PR slick when we come to it.

I’m also a little wary when the preface mentions the misrepresentation of the magnitude of the blowout but pegs the flow at “up to 50,000 barrels.” Experts who’ve all along predicted it was 100,000 quantify that with “at minimum.”

OR, the video is a self-serving appeal from a booming-trainer for more funding to teach more boomers. Well that would be money better spent.

Here’s your chance to be trained in how to deploy oil spill booms without being sworn to silence by BP. If you’re anywhere near the coast, get out there.

This very funny piece is labeled Booming School 101. A better title might be “Fucking proper fucking booming” or subtitled, oil spill cleanup done fucking right.

Easy for Hume to say: Show me the oil

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Brit Hume can say that, can’t he? –confident that skeptical viewers can’t produce the evidence because it’s hogtied by dispersants at the bottom of the sea, for now, as effectively as a state witness in cement shoes. Actually, voluminous plumes of them, with countless victims suspended about them deprived of atmosphere. Anything incriminating that has reached the beach is kept from view by BP thugs, intimidating the gulf communities with the menace of Blackwater after Katrina.

Mercenary mall cops with the cinematic malevolence of the Terminator. What a mobster to stand behind armed thugs and taunt your accusers for evidence of your wrongdoings.

Get your dispersant out of the crime scene and I’ll show you oil. Keep your oil-industry-decides the law -enforcement officers’ hands off reporters trying to reach the beaches and I’ll show you oil. Unhand the submersible video footage from which any oil drilling professional can deduce the rate of flow of the oil and I’ll show you oil.

As one commenter put it, let’s drown those responsible in the oily uck, and those covering it up, with the same callous indifference which the culprits are condemning birds, mammals, fish and reptiles.

Case of curious cellphone, bandana and Greyson Chance’s perfect microphone

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Eric Verlo

PT Barnum would have been a terror on Youtube –I’m certainly sobered to see what fools America every time. Is sudden-tween-throb Greyson Chance’s talent for real? Too soon to say. But the 6th grade sound man at Cheyenne School of Edmond, Oklahoma has unlikely genius. * What’s hard to believe about doctors bandaging Bret Michaels’ massive brain hemorrhage with his signature headband? * And my favorite, Oprah Winfrey recording a show performance with her cellphone to attest to her surprise at “the coolest thing ever!”

Oprah
It happened ages ago (in blog-years) but television talk shows bind these three example together. Do you remember Oprah’s anniversary whatsit, taped like a big tailgate party in downtown Chicago? Oprah stood there on the outdoor stage beside the Black Eyed Peas and held her cellphone up, aimed at the audience, as if the dozen or more cameras on cranes, wires and rails weren’t going to be enough. And the crowd erupted in spontaneous dance, although it was choreographed, and a concept swiped from a European video. But Oprah’s deal went viral because, OMG would you believe it, and there was Oprah, OMG’ding herself, careful to record it to show her friends in case they wouldn’t have believe her, or watched the show.

Now how many of you believe the media diva even has her own phone, much less carries it or knows how it works?

Watching the video again, an establishing shot before the music begins shows someone in the audience (who later would turn out to be a dancer) aiming their cellphone like a camera, in case the audience at home needed a reminder that’s what normal people do today, and that’s what Oprah would be doing, to confound your awe with hers. Compound.

After the video had done its viral thing, Oprah had all the crowdsourced uploads removed, being unlicensed and all. I think it was really because her feigned incredulity wasn’t going to pass muster. Better a memory gone viral than video evidence of Oprah taking her viewers for fools.

Bret
Bret Michael’s blue bandana as he reclined on the hospital bed on the cover of People Magazine was just too silly for words. No doubt America wouldn’t know him without his bandana wig, so it was definitely an art director’s call.

Alright, it wasn’t a video, but the internet rumors went viral. Fans started to twitter about an oddly fortuitous recovery which put him back on the Celebrity Apprentice season finale, so now poor Bret is back in the hospital to prove it wasn’t a PR stunt, this time for a hole-in-the-heart, probably something to do with a tatoo, in any case nothing to interfere with his headband.

Greyson
Brand-spanking-fresh-phenom Greyson Michael Chance wowed everyone on Youtube, and Ellen’s people, reportedly before his views had even hit five-digits –are talent scouts that grassroots? He encored with the same brilliant performance on her show, thus certifying his authentic talent, based on the law that lightening can’t be fixed twice. Although the equalizer setting, for lack of a technical term, was remarkably identical, wasn’t it? Same tweaked toning, same very attentive fader, especially if it wasn’t the same microphone.

Seriously, SNL, of the notoriously bad music soundboard, should hire whoever miked that primary school performance.

On the subject of expensive equipment, how often do you see a shiny grand piano at a public school choir concert?

Although the camera work was shaky, the cameraman kept an interesting crop on Greyson, framed by the waiting choir girls. It reminded me of the soldier backdrop they used to give President Bush. Authenticity came of the development that none of the girls were compelled to look too interested, I’m guessing that was sheer fortuity. The result was that Young Mr. Chance was strangely placed off-center, the better to feature the girls. An actual parent would have framed their son to show his feet at the pedals, I guarantee you.

The close crop remained even as Greyson finished and the school emcee offered her remarks, her head off camera. The lens never zoomed, fitting for a digital still camera which cannot zoom in video mode, or because appearances of homemade authenticity be damned, broadcast editors will not abide zoom.

But Greyson gave the game away when he took his bow, aimed not at the audience, but directly at the camera. You’d figure he already had countless home recordings of his Lady Gaga cover, both practice and dinner guest performances. On this stage the camerawork was let to look improvised, like a parent’s afterthought, while Cherub Gaga sang the performance straight ahead, in the same direction to which the emcee addressed the audience. So to whom was Mr. Chance taking his bow?

Freedom Flotilla video streaming so far

Posted on May 19, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Freedom Flotilla organizers have released video of the Rachel Corrie’s setting sail from Ireland, presaging I hope, improved visual coverage of the Gaza blockade- running expedition. The Israel navy’s past successful repulsions have been executed in darkness, eluding damning visuals, so the Corrie’s nighttime sendoff wasn’t a favorable sign of improved media savvy on the part of 2010 Freedom Flotilla. (Did you see it?) ShipToGaza/Greece is livestreaming a fundraiser from Athens. Will a live camera follow the ships to sea?

Here’s the bridge of the MV Rachel Corrie where it’s hoped the world can follow the relief convoy as it sails past Israeli warships to reach Gaza. The Greek contingent have confirmed their intended departure, to be joined by US peace activist Ann Wright.

Americans upset by viral Single Ladies video don’t know their ass from TandA

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Eric Verlo

You thought ours was an oversexed culture obsessed with youth, but the recent furor over a viral video shows Americans don’t know their ass from their T & A.

Obviously everyone is aghast about too-young dancers gyrating to Beyonce’s SINGLE LADIES, but I think it says something hilarious about our ineptitude with sexuality. Like the mess of clueless philistines weighing in, I too am inexpert at what titillates about 7-year-olds, and it’s not going to stop me either.

Can we agree the Beyonce hit is lewd? I’m guessing her video was unremarkable, I recall the SNL spoof was camp, but what are Beyonce’s lyrics except deliberately crass? You expect a performance of “Single Ladies” to transcend its theme? You’re going to be offended regardless who is lip-syncing it.

Putting aside whether your daughter belongs onstage participating, where have you been? This is dance. Call it Vulgar Nouveaux or Burlesque Outré, it dates to Madonna’s mother’s virginity. This is dance, all you Kansans, onstage and on screen. Flashdance had nothing on Broadway, American Gigolo hid the sex behind clothes. Beside the point. Young dancers aspiring to tomorrow’s auditions want to learn what their role models are teaching. Children today love Spongebob, but they’re watching South Park and Family Guy too. The only uncomfortable party in the room is you.

I recently attended an elementary school talent show that included some dance-schooled troopers. Some of their precocious moves were admittedly out of place and some even off-putting, but it didn’t stop parents from appreciating the talent and obvious dedicated effort. Our little tarts didn’t come close, by the way, to the spirited Single Ladies performance, clearly well choreographed, taught, and executed.

Was outraged America also so unsophisticated to notice that the now infamous video was a multiple camera production? This wasn’t a family recording leaked by an indignant relative. It was a World of Dance competition where no one watching showed any shock at the performance. While I confess I’m still offended by the Jon-Benet pageant aesthetic, these costumes and the next Britney backup dancers did not surprise.

What entertained me most were the comments threading from the now multiple postings of the video. The original post accumulated over two million views and had to be removed for reasons that are self-explanatory apparently. On account of poorly-spelled death threats, I imagine. Eventually you’ll find observations defending the performance, but for the overwhelming part, everyone wants to weigh their indignation against the next, accuse the dancers’ parents of child abuse and round up a posse to chase the pedophiles they’re sure are lurking.

What I find endearing about their best Sunday earnestness is that these commenters wouldn’t know a stripper’s pole from where they get their haircut. Even as internet porn is so pervasive, and we worry it has saturated our psyche, it turns out the prurient pretenders– as hypocritical we know, as Republican congressmen– know as much about erotica as a prudes.

Even more entertaining is a certain tenor to their comments, part of a trend I’m horrified to recognize has been overtaking blogdom. It began I suppose when the personal computer extended the internet outside the lab. Emails used to abide a scientist’s protocol, then with the world-wide-web came spam. Blogs began with people who had something to say, and when comments deregulated to chat rooms, in came the freaks.

There’s a common tone to compulsive opinion-givers, I recognize it too often as I offer my own. It pervades the blogosphere now almost to have rendered discussion threads unreadable. It’s a tone of tone-deafness, in vocabulary, grammar and attitude. Related to a person not knowing what they’re talking about, the tell-tale ingredient is that they don’t care about the subject either. It’s a characteristic recognized in forced conversations and poor sales pitches, not always obvious when we’re regurgitating differences of opinion or ideology.

If I didn’t always before recognize the ignorance in the insincerity, this Tea Party tinctured pile-on has given me the scent.

The too-cursory indignation Middle America is showing about these 7-year-old dancers strikes a feeble, unfunny note. It’s the puritanical call for women of all ages to reduce themselves behind burqas, coming from voices self-loathing and unworldly.

16-year-old Jessica Watson completes solo circumnavigation, flunks geometry

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Eric Verlo

When 16-year-old Jessica Watson arrives in Sidney tomorrow, she will be the youngest person to sail around the globe alone. The precocious Aussie will be denied an official record however, for the same reason the Olympics enforce a minimum age for gymnasts, protecting suggestible minors from overzealous parents ostensibly. The snubbing might seem an unenforceable formality, but it turns out Jessica comes up short on another technicality, the same principle which holds that girth is measured at the waist.

The “circum” in navigate refers to circumference. Let’s take nothing away from the young adventurer who’s proven herself plenty brave, a capable sea-person, and undeniably a class act. Criticism of her geometry or vocabulary is aimed really at her internet fans who are now raining expletives on sailing officials who would deny her a world record.

Just as we credit her home team for media, communications, and consultation, readers of her blog know that Jessica set her autopilot to daily coordinates provided to her. Thus it was Team Jessica which charted the interesting compromise.

While no one expects round-the-world sailors to follow the equator, circumnavigation at minimum requires traversing an orb over its circumference. You cannot, as an extreme example, run a few paces off the South Pole and call yourself a circumnavigator. Soon we’d have swimmers circumnavigating the North Pole. The de-icing of the Northwest Passage likewise will be providing new shortcuts for would-be record breakers. Jessica Watson’s ability to traverse the south seas owed entirely to techncal innovations which have yielded stronger crafts and better storm avoidance. The latitudes formerly named for their impenetrability, the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties, are now open to sporting pursuits. Making the straight shot across all longitudes there is a distance a fraction of the equator. As a result, ocean racing adjudicators have decided that a proper circumnavigation should mean at least 21,600 nautical miles across the seas, a distance that approximates the width of our planet.

Did Team Jessica miscalculate? More likely it was an expeditious decision to enable a finish before the youngster’s 17th birthday. Going the extra distance would have added extra days to Jessica’s sixteen years. The course was thus plotted to make Sidney at greatest haste. Which meant setting their own interpretation of a circumnavigation.

To do this, Team Watson contrived a simplification of the minimum requirement: crossing all longitudes and passing over the equator twice, which their sailor dutifully did. Their explanation to Jessica’s fans sounds officious, but is not universally accepted as equivalent to a full circumnavigation. Can you measure a waistline by passing the tape around one leg so long as you extend it up through a belt loop? On a globe such an approximation comes up short. Level of difficulty to sail it, still enormous, but a foreshortened route.

Actually, Miss Watson’s Burmuda rig will have traveled 23,000 sea miles taking into account her drift and the tacks required to work the wind, but her charted course accumulates to only 19,000. Imagine shortening the Tour de France to substitute sections on stationary bikes. No less effort, but not quite the Tour.

Watson’s official start was delayed by a mishap that sent she and Ella’s Pink Lady back for repairs and may have sealed the fate of her world record.

Pink Lady’s departure made the news in a bigger than expected way over a half year ago. Concerns about allowing so young a person to attempt a solo circumnavigation appeared vindicated the next day when Jessica struck a freighter on her very first night. This meant a return to harbor for the Pink Lady and having perhaps to reroute the journey of shorter duration than initially planned.

Perhaps the racing officials are right to retire seafaring records based on age. With modern technology and remote systems having become what they are, what does it mean anymore to differentiate “assisted” or “unassisted”? 2009 witnessed the first Atlantic crossing of a catamaran captained by a quadriplegic. By any conventional understanding of seamanship that feat was impossible. Before long, who or what is put at the helm will be irrelevant, watercrafts will progress –“unassisted” meaning untouched– guided by unmanned vehicle operators at computer consoles. Perhaps the control could eventually even be crowdsourced online.

The crowd’s attention to Elle’s Pink Lady was owed undeniably to its captain being a 16-year-old girl. For a period on the official blog, public comments were closed off to shed followers whose infatuations may have been unflattering to the schoolroom audiences which Australian television news was drawing to the website. If I had to guess at what was jettisoned, it was probably fan fiction fantasies thinly veiled as hopeful advice to avoid Somali pirates. While some followers were no doubt titillated by the thought of a vulnerable young woman alone on the dark sea, to the average audience, the opportunity to check-in on the Pink Lady in 10-meter swells in near-real time, took vicarious adventuring to new heights.

On the other hand a 16-year-old captain’s log had obvious drawbacks. The facility to wax poetic hits at an age later than the teens apparently. Previous age-record holders like the teen who took five years to circle the globe in the Dove was in his twenties when he chose to write about it. Jessica’s narrative was extemporized and followed a pragmatic motif. Her notes reflected the singular focus of young specialist whose technical proficiencies might have crowded out wider observation skills. Preoccupied with her boat’s speed, in between, nothing. Her typical report was peppered thus:

“Yeah, so, nothing new to report really, so, yeah, so, that’s about it for me, so, yeah.”

When Captain Jessica wasn’t relating the progress the Pink Lady was making, or the occasional repair attempt she planned to revisit, her thoughts were on the day’s menu, the supplies packed for her which she opened like a Christmas chocolate calendar, supplemental gifts scheduled to lift her spirits at regulated intervals and the latest blog comments to which she relayed personal replies.

In addition to the typical teenager sweets fixation was another unexpected first, although clearly enough foreseen by Team Jessica’s sponsors. Video blogging on a daily basis meant that Jessica had to worry about her makeup and hair. She holds the world record I’ll bet for first solo circumnavigator to concern herself with wardrobe and beauty products.

For the most part, Jessica impresses like the average gifted and talented, and disappoints where you’d expect it too. How interesting are the whims of a child of millionaire parents able to indulge a not-necessarily world-changing enterprise? Elle’s Pink Lady is a model of commercial endorsement banking on publicity spectacle. No different from most high profile sports, professional tennis for example, but of virtuoso certainly less athletic. It’s more like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, watch their children take to the sea.

With Jessica’s upcoming arrival garnering excitement, isn’t it fitting that an unpredicted non-sponsor is stepping forward to reap product placement. It turns out the Australian conglomerate responsible for the “Pink Lady” apple considers the name of Jessica Watson’s project a trademark infringement, but they’re ready to settle if she considers adding them to her endorsements.

Apartheid haunts Israel Innovation Wk

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Eric Verlo

BDS activists take heart. Anti-Apartheid Bostonites targeted their Museum of Science for hosting Israeli Innovation Weekend, a propaganda event to solicit investment in Zionist high tech industry. Protesters disrupted the speakers, provoking venomous outcry from the audience, all lovingly captured on video. Insults were so arrogant, I predict the pro-Israel ego will become the next too big to fail.

MV Rachel Corrie to run Gaza blockade

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Final preparations are underway at Brown’s Quay in Dundalk, Ireland, to launch the Free Gaza Movement‘s next run against Israel’s blockade of Gaza. FGM were able to acquire the 1,800 ton MV Linda impounded by the ITF for failure to pay its Latvian crew. Anyone who wishes to embark on the freighter’s urgent relief mission to Palestine is enjoined to submit an application. Supporters with deeper pockets could consider adding tonnage to the flotilla. Riga’s bankrupt Forestry Shipping abandoned two similar ships in Holland, the MV Defender and MV Fairland, available for the cost of the back-wages due their sailors.

There are of course an already unending list of activists, journalists, victims and martyrs of the Palestinian struggle for whom additional ships could be named, but I like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society model of christening ships after benefactors, Steve Irwin, Bob Barker and Ady Gil. But the best example to follow is the Whale Warriors’ TV contract. If any edge could tip the balance in the maritime face-off with the Israeli destroyers, it will be the prospect of an attack being televised. At least that’s what we used to think would deter the IDF.

This next attempt to break the siege follows eight previous efforts, five of which were successful. I am curious how so little footage reaches the independent media, even after the fact. Boats have been rammed, forced back, or impounded, even with luminaries like Cynthia McKinney aboard, with very little incriminating video, and certainly without raising real time internet alarm.

The warnings which FGM provides about conditions for participation are fairly direct as to the risks posed by Israel’s armed responses, here is the background information required to apply:

Background Information

Please list your experience working in Palestine, and with Palestinian organizations or campaigns in your local community

What is your profession?

What are your areas of expertise? (please be specific)

Please list all the languages you speak

Please list all your affiliations (political, professional, or activist-based)

Please provide us with a one paragraph biography of you that we can post on our website in the event you travel with us to Gaza

Do you have a preference for which dates you would like to travel to Gaza on?

Are you applying as part of a delegation? (preference will be given to delegations, such as doctors, lawyers, students, teachers, musicians, labor activists, et al, who are traveling to Gaza for a specific purpose, such as do an assessment, consult with colleagues in Gaza, or build on solidarity campaigns)

If yes, who is the primary contact person for your delegation?

Are you planning on staying in Gaza long-term?

If you are planning to remain in Gaza, then you MUST have already made contact with organizations working in Gaza and have a clear plan for what you will be doing there. Please describe the contacts and plans you have already made.

Do you have health insurance that will cover you during your trip to Gaza?

Please provide us with your insurance information, in case of a medical emergency (policy name, number, and insurance contact information)

Please list any physical disabilities you may have (artificial knee or hip, for example)

Please list all medications you are currently taking

Can you swim?

Please also provide us with two, written recommendations from people who have been involved in working with Palestinians and Palestinian organizations. We require their names, telephone numbers and email addresses.

US inhumanity maxed at Azimuth Limit

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Eric Verlo

“Light ’em all up. Come on, fire!” Watching the leaked combat footage of the helicopter gunships killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007, I’m troubled by my own desensitized response. When I saw earlier leaked videos of an AH-64 vaporizing Iraqi farmers and a C-130 wreaking mayhem in Afghanistan, I remember my real shock at seeing a human life extinguished. This time not even flinch. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em just open ’em up.” Not at the brutality, nor the callousness of the play by play –even as the pilots targeted rescuers trying to help the wounded. I fault the Rules of Engagement that allowed the massacre, not the soldiers’ laughing swagger –as I hope they will not begrudge my unguarded satisfaction when eventually spectators will be treated to leaked footage of American soldiers taking some fire.

If you watched the video, perhaps you too were wishing that July 12, 2007 had recorded a massive setback for US troops in Iraq, at the height of the “surge” where a whole shitload of “dismounts” had been ambushed by IED explosions in a Baghdad square in the aftermath of a civilian massacre. Those who watched the 39-minute extended version I know were hoping to see a resolution like that, instead of an additional war crime of disproportional force and the targeting of civilians, a Hellfire missile attack on a building into which armed and unarmed men had entered, surrounded by passing innocents and rescuers scrambling to help.

There it goes! Look at that bitch go!
Patoosh!
Ah, sweet!
Need a little more room.
Nice missile.
Does it look good?
Sweet!

The Army has declared that no further inquiry will be made into the 2007 killing of the two Reuters journalists. Its FOIA requests long thwarted, even Reuters is not expressing outrage at this footage. The corporate media is hoping to let this story fade on the fringe. Does this mean that more pilots and gunners might become emboldened to leak other trophy reels? It doesn’t take Nelson Ratings for news outlets to see that viewers are already clamoring for more combat snuff films.

We could grant amnesty in exchange for those who turn in the most degenerate sequences.

And pretend they’ll remain anonymous. Ultimately friends and relatives will be able to place identities with the radio voices. Speaking on one of the clearest channels is the young voiced HOTEL-26, who reported taking fire from the photographers and ID’d the “RPG” with started the whole engagement. Likewise the gunner on CRAZY HORSE-18 who responded “Alright, hahaha, I hit ’em….” is addressed “God damn it, Kyle.”

And then there’s the poor 30mm gunner in CRAZY HORSE-19 who assessed his work thus:

Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!

While chomping at the bit to fire upon the improvised ambulance, he was momentarily thwarted by a puzzling “Azimuth Limit” which prevented his shooting.

Bloggers are now abuzz to decode the Azimuth Limit which slowed the turkey shoot when none of the gunners were showing restraint. Azimuth is the angular measurement of an object’s distance clockwise from True North. On rifles it expresses the adjustment of a gunsight to its boresight. On aircraft it apparently has something to do with the angle of relation to the axis of the fuselage. Whatever it is, maybe we can ratchet military Azimuth Limits down flat, if that’s what it will take to stop our soldiers from blowing away civilians, journalists, children and their rescuers alike. The shooters can cuss and salivate all they want so long as their trigger mechanisms respect human life or at least balk at excessive carnage.

What doesn’t come across the audio is what the US soldiers on the ground are saying to themselves as they survey “that big pile of [unarmed] bodies,” in their palaver, the “dead bastards.”

UPDATE — the testimonials begin:

From Iraq war veteran Michael Prysner, co-founder of March Forward!

The harrowing Apache footage released by WikiLeaks gives us a stomach-turning glimpse of war. Seventeen minutes of cold-blooded massacre in a war of more than seven years. A brief clip of one Apache video; a quick look at one part of one mission. Hundreds of those missions take place every day.

The video came to light thanks to military whistleblowers who provided it to WikiLeaks together with supporting documents. Imagine if we had access to all such videos, the things we would see. Imagine all the Iraqis killed who have no one to uncover the truth about their deaths. Had the death of two Reuters news staffers not generated interest in this video, then the destruction of three families by hellfire missiles fired into an apartment building with no provocation, in a separate engagement also featured in the video, would have never been made public.

This massacre is a drop in a sea of blood. Many other such “incidents” will never be known.

Officers claimed there was “no question” that the pilots were responding to enemy fire; the video shows there is no question that they were not responding to enemy fire. They said that they had “no idea” how the journalists were killed; the video shows that they know very well how those journalists were killed. They were gunned down standing in a crowd of unarmed people.
After the slaughter of that group, the pilots beg for permission to kill the innocent passers-by who had come to the aid of one of the wounded, like any of us would have done if we saw our neighbor dying on the ground as we drove down the street. They kill everyone trying to help the dying journalist, and critically wound two children seen sitting in the front seat.

We see a group of unarmed men mowed down by a machine gun designed to destroy armored vehicles. We see a vanload of good Samaritans obliterated for trying to help a dying victim. We see all this with the soundtrack of the pilots mocking the dead, congratulating each other and laughing about the massacre.

No wonder the U.S. military goes to such great lengths to keep such videos from us. They want us to see Iraq and Afghanistan through their lens, through their embedded reporters, filtered by censorship and restrictions. They know that, once the people of this country see the extreme racism and brutality behind these occupations, they will be repulsed by what their tax dollars are paying for.

The military brass and the White House politicians have tried to justify this senseless atrocity. “Cut the pilots some slack. This was in Baghdad. This was a battle zone”—that’s been their line. The pilots had been indoctrinated with the same colonial mentality. “That’s what they get for bringing their kids into battle,” one pilot says.

The father driving that van was not “bringing his kids into battle.” He was bringing them to school, driving down the street where they live. But the U.S. occupation has made all of Iraq a battle zone. To those pilots, to their commanders over the radio and to the generals in the Pentagon, every single person in Baghdad and in Iraq is “fair game.”

The pilots joked about the people they killed, laughed about U.S. military vehicles running over dead bodies, knowing that their commanders were listening and that they were being recorded. They were not acting out of character. This is the culture of the occupation. This is how these wars are being conducted.

Having seen this, one cannot honestly believe that these atrocities are committed day in and day out for the liberation of the Iraqi people.

The Pentagon’s talking heads and media lackeys are hard at work putting their spin on this story. It’s time to tell the truth. For more than seven years, the U.S. has unleashed criminal, unprovoked aggression against the people of Iraq, and they have been doing the same thing in Afghanistan for more than eight years.

The U.S. military presence in Iraq is a colonial occupation force. The only way forward is a complete, immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. This government will not do that unless all of us who are outraged by these criminal acts stand up and demand it.

Iraq war veteran Josh Stieber, US Army Specialist, 1st ID, Bravo Company 2-16 in Baghdad (Rustamiyah) 2007-2008. Although he was not present at the scene of the video, he knows those who were involved and is familiar with the environment.

A lot of my friends are in that video. After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are.

If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like. If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war.

Yeah look at those dead bastards. Nice.

Posted on April 8, 2010 by NMT

Here’s the Wikileaks decrypted Apache AH-64 combat footage of 2007 collateral murder of Iraqi civilians including two journalists, wounding two children.

Wikileaks is tweeting the ensuing developments. Democracy Now has interviews recorded the day after July 12, 2007 by Big Noise Films.

We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons.

Let me engage.

Roger, hey, we need to stop that.

Can I shoot?

Request permission to engage.

Picking up the wounded?

Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage.

Come on, let us shoot!

They’re taking him.

We have a Black SUV err, Bongo Truck picking up the bodies.

Fuck.

Request permission to engage.

Engage.

Transcript from the Full video:

00:03 Okay I got it.
00:05 Last conversation Hotel Two-Six.
00:09 Roger Hotel Two-Six [Apache helicopter 1], uh, [this is] Victor Charlie Alpha. Look, do you want your Hotel Two-Two two el-
00:14 I got a black vehicle under target. It’s arriving right to the north of the mosque.
00:17 Yeah, I would like that. Over.
00:21 Moving south by the mosque dome. Down that road.
00:27 Okay we got a target fifteen coming at you. It’s a guy with a weapon.
00:32 Roger [acknowledged].
00:39 There’s a…
00:42 There’s about, ah, four or five…
00:44 Bushmaster Six [ground control] copy [i hear you] One-Six.
00:48 …this location and there’s more that keep walking by and one of them has a weapon.
00:52 Roger received target fifteen.
00:55 K.
00:57 See all those people standing down there.
01:06 Stay firm. And open the courtyard.
01:09 Yeah roger. I just estimate there’s probably about twenty of them.
01:13 There’s one, yeah.
01:15 Oh yeah.
01:18 I don’t know if that’s a…
01:19 Hey Bushmaster element [ground forces control], copy on the one-six.
01:21 Thats a weapon.
01:22 Yeah.
01:23 Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight [second Apache helicopter].
01:29 Copy on the one-six, Bushmaster Six-Romeo. Roger.
01:32 Fucking prick.
01:33 Hotel Two-Six this is Crazy Horse One-Eight [communication between chopper 1 and chopper 2]. Have individuals with weapons.
01:41 Yup. He’s got a weapon too.
01:43 Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight. Have five to six individuals with AK47s [automatic rifles]. Request permission to engage [shoot].
01:51 Roger that. Uh, we have no personnel east of our position. So, uh, you are free to engage. Over.
02:00 All right, we’ll be engaging.
02:02 Roger, go ahead.
02:03 I’m gonna… I cant get ’em now because they’re behind that building.
02:09 Um, hey Bushmaster element…
02:10 Is that an RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenade]?
02:11 All right, we got a guy with an RPG.
02:13 I’m gonna fire.
02:14 Okay.
02:15 No hold on. Lets come around. Behind buildings right now from our point of view. … Okay, we’re gonna come around.
02:19 Hotel Two-Six; have eyes on individual with RPG. Getting ready to fire. We won’t…
02:23 Yeah, we had a guy shoot—and now he’s behind the building.
02:26 God damn it.
02:28 Uh, negative, he was, uh, right in front of the Brad [Bradley Fighting Vehicle; an tracked Armored Personal Carrier that looks like a tank]. Uh, ’bout, there, one o’clock. [direction/orientation]
02:34 Haven’t seen anything since then.
02:36 Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em just open ’em up.
02:38 All right.
02:40 I see your element, uh, got about four Humvees [Armored cars], uh, out along…
02:43 You’re clear.
02:44 All right, firing.
02:47 Let me know when you’ve got them.
02:49 Lets shoot.
02:50 Light ’em all up.
02:52 Come on, fire!
02:57 Keep shoot, keep shoot. [keep shooting]
02:59 keep shoot.
03:02 keep shoot.
03:05 Hotel.. Bushmaster Two-Six, Bushmaster Two-Six, we need to move, time now!
03:10 All right, we just engaged all eight individuals.
03:12 Yeah, we see two birds [helicopters] and we’re still fire [not firing].
03:14 Roger.
03:15 I got ’em.
03:16 Two-six, this is Two-Six, we’re mobile.
03:19 Oops, I’m sorry what was going on?
03:20 God damn it, Kyle.
03:23 All right, hahaha, I hit [shot] ’em…
03:28 Uh, you’re clear.
03:30 All right, I’m just trying to find targets again.
03:38 Bushmaster Six, this is Bushmaster Two-Six.
03:40 Got a bunch of bodies layin’ there.
03:42 All right, we got about, uh, eight individuals.
03:46 Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there, but, uh, you know, we got, definitely got something.
03:51 We’re shooting some more.
03:52 Roger.
03:56 Hey, you shoot, I’ll talk.
03:57 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
04:01 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six. Over.
04:03 Roger. Currently engaging [fighting/shooting at] approximately eight individuals, uh KIA [Killed In Action], uh RPGs, and AK-47s.
04:12 Hotel Two-Six, you need to move to that location once Crazyhorse is done and get pictures. Over.
04:20 Six beacon gaia.
04:24 Sergeant Twenty is the location.
04:28 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
04:31 Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.
04:36 Nice.
04:37 Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
04:44 Nice.
04:47 Good shoot.
04:48 Thank you.
04:53 Hotel Two-Six.
04:55 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
05:03 Crazyhorse One-Eight; Bushmaster Seven. Go ahead.
05:06 Bushmaster Seven; Crazyhorse One-Eight. Uh, location of bodies, Mike Bravo five-four-five-eight eight-six-one-seven [military map grid reference].
05:15 Hey, good on the uh…
05:17 Five-four-five-eight eight-six-one-seven [map grid reference]. Over.
05:21 This is Crazyhorse One-Eight, that’s a good copy. They’re on a street in front of an open, uh, courtyard with a bunch of blue uh trucks, bunch of vehicles in the courtyard.
05:30 There’s one guy moving down there but he’s uh, he’s wounded.
05:35 All right, we’ll let ’em know so they can hurry up and get over here.
05:40 One-Eight, we also have one individual, uh, appears to be wounded trying to crawl away.
05:49 Roger, we’re gonna move down there.
05:51 Roger, we’ll cease fire.
05:54 Yeah, we won’t shoot anymore.
06:01 He’s getting up.
06:02 Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand?
06:04 No, I haven’t seen one yet.
06:07 I see you guys got that guy crawling right now on that curb.
06:08 Yeah, I got him. I put two rounds [30mm cannon shells] near him, and you guys were shooting over there too, so uh we’ll see.
06:14 Yeah, roger that.
06:16 Bushmaster Thirty-Six Element; this is uh Hotel Two-Seven over.
06:21 Hotel Two-Seven; Bushmaster Seven go ahead.
06:24 Roger I’m just trying to make sure you guys have my turf [area], over.
06:31 Roger we got your turf.
06:33 Come on, buddy.
06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.
06:44 Crazyhorse this is Bushmaster Five, Bushmaster Four break. We are right below you right time now can you walk us onto that location over.
06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I’ll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We’re looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we’re gonna engage.
07:07 Yeah Bushmaster, we have a van that’s approaching and picking up the bodies.
07:14 Where’s that van at?
07:15 Right down there by the bodies.
07:16 Okay, yeah.
07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons.
07:25 Let me engage.
07:28 Can I shoot?
07:31 Roger. Break. Uh Crazyhorse One-Eight request permission to uh engage.
07:36 Picking up the wounded?
07:38 Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage.
07:41 Come on, let us shoot!
07:44 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:49 They’re taking him.
07:51 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:56 This is Bushmaster Seven, go ahead.
07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
08:02 Fuck.
08:06 This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.
08:12 One-Eight, engage.
08:12 Clear.
08:13 Come on!
08:17 Clear.
08:20 Clear.
08:21 We’re engaging.
08:26 Coming around. Clear.
08:27 Roger. Trying to uh…
08:32 Clear.
08:35 I hear ’em co.. I lost ’em in the dust.
08:36 I got ’em.
08:41 I’m firing.
08:42 This is Bushmaster Forty got any BDA [Battle Damage Assessment] on that truck. Over.
08:44 You’re clear.
08:47 This is ah Crazyhorse. Stand by.
08:47 I can’t shoot for some reason.
08:49 Go ahead.
08:50 I think the van’s disabled.
08:53 Go ahead and shoot it.
08:54 I got an azimuth limit for some reason [gunner moved gunsight too far]
09:00 Go left.
09:03 Clear left.
09:15 All right, Bushmaster Crazyhorse One-Eight.
09:20 A vehicle appears to be disabled.
09:22 There were approximately four to five individuals in vehicle moving bodies.
09:28 Your lead Bradley should take the next right.
09:31 That’s cruising east down the road.
09:34 No more shooting.
09:38 Crazyhorse; this is Bushmaster Four. We’re moving a dismounted element [troops] straight south through the Bradleys [tanks].
09:44 I have your Elem- uh, Bradley element turning south down the road where the engagements were.
09:53 Last call on station’s uh Bradley element say again.
09:56 Roger this is Crazyhorse.
09:58 Your lead Bradley just turned south down the road where all the engagements [shooting] happened.
10:03 Should have a van in the middle of the road with about twelve to fifteen bodies.
10:11 Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield!
10:14 Ha ha!
10:16 All right. There were uh approximately four to five individuals in that truck, so I’m counting about twelve to fifteen.
10:24 I would say that’s a fairly accurate assessment so far.
10:27 Roger that.
10:29 I want to just be advised Six, Bushmaster Six are getting mounted up right now.
10:35 Okay, roger. Hey, we can’t flex down that road towards that, uh, where Crazyhorse engaged.
10:43 So, uh, I don’t know if you want us to do so or stay put. Over.
10:46 Why can’t they go down there?
10:56 I think we whacked [killed] ’em all.
10:58 That’s right, good.
10:59 This is Hotel Two-Six.
11:03 Hey you got my dismounted element [troops] right there over to your left.
11:06 Roger, I see ’em.
11:11 Hey yeah, roger, be advised, there were some guys popping out with AKs behind that dirt pile break.
11:19 We also took some RPGs off, uh, earlier, so just uh make sure your men keep your eyes open.
11:26 Roger.
11:27 And, uh, Bushmaster ahead are, uh, Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
11:33 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six.
11:35 Yeah Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
11:37 Uh, location I have about twelve to fifteen dead bodies.
11:42 Uh, where else are we taking fire from?
11:48 Currently we’re not being engaged, ah, but just south of that location. Break.
11:55 You should see dismounted elements with Humvees [armored cars] moving to the east, over.
12:01 This is Crazyhorse One-Eight; we have elements in sight.
12:05 Bushmaster Three-Six.
12:07 I’m gonna get down a little lower.
12:09 All right.
12:10 I’m gonna come down a little lower and take a quick gander.
12:13 Roger that.
12:14 Six; this is four. We’re headed to the area where Crazyhorse engaged.
12:26 Bushmaster Six; this is Hotel Two-Six.
12:28 Request to go to the south to our original BP so if you flushed them to the south we will be there to uh intercept over.
12:39 Hey this is Bushmaster Seven; we’re coming up on B… on the ass end of the Brads [tanks].
12:54 Hey uh, Bushmaster Element; this is Copperhead One-Six break.
13:00 We’re moving in the vicinity of the engagement area and looks like we’ve got some slight movement from ah, the ah van that was engaged.
13:06 Looks like a kid. Over.
13:11 This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Uh, we’re about a hundred meters behind you.
13:16 Got that big pile, to the right?
13:18 Roger, you gonna pull in here? Do you want me to push stuff so you can, uh, get clear of it?
13:21 Right on the corner?
13:22 What’s that?
13:23 Got that big pile of bodies to the right, on the corner?
13:24 Yeah, right here.
13:25 We got a dismounted infantry and vehicles, over.
13:30 Again, roger.
13:31 And clear.
13:48 There’s the Bradley right there.
13:51 Got ’em.
14:00 Hotel two-six; are you uh at this grid over?
14:05 Yeah I wanted to get you around so didn’t you just get that one dude to scare them all away. It worked out pretty good.
14:11 I didn’t want those fuckers to run away and scatter.
14:12 Yeah.
14:15 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six. Roger, we linked up with our two element they are all mounted up in our trucks break.
14:23 We moved south so that we could ah possibly intercept personnel being flushed south. So we are vicinity Fifth Street.
14:30 And ah please line Gadins. Over.
14:37 Bring the trucks in, cordon this area off.
14:39 Can we move the Bradley forward so we can bring trucks in and cordon off this area.
14:44 If the Bradleys could take the south cordon, that could help out a lot.
14:53 Bushmaster or element. Which Element called in Crazyhorse to engage the eight-elem- eight-men team on top of a roof.
15:02 Bushmaster Six; this is Hotel Two-Six. Uh, I believe that was me.
15:07 They uh had AK-47s and were to our east, so, where we were taking small arms fire. Over.
15:20 Hotel Crazyhorse One-Eight.
15:26 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six.
15:28 Yeah Two-Six. One-Eight I just also wanted to make sure you knew that we had a guy with an RPG cropping round the corner getting ready to fire on your location.
15:36 That’s why we ah, requested permission to engage.
15:40 Ok, roger that. Tango mike.
15:46 Hotel Two-Six; do you understand me, over?
15:51 I did not copy last, uh, you got stepped on. Say again please?
16:00 They cordoned off the building that the helicopters killed the personnel on.
16:04 Don’t go anywhere else we need to cordon off that building so we can get on top of the roof and SSC the building. Over.
16:13 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
16:16 This is Hotel Two-Six.
16:19 Hey, whoever was talking about rooftops, know that all the personnel we engaged were ground level. I say again ground level.
16:27 Roger I copy ground level. Over.
16:30 One-Eight roger.
16:33 Can I get a grid to that one more time please?
16:36 Target twenty.
16:36 Roger.
16:40 You want me to take over talking to them?
16:42 S’alright.
16:46 Seven-Six Romeo Over.
16:49 Roger, I’ve got uh eleven Iraqi KIAs [Killed In Action]. One small child wounded. Over.
16:57 Roger. Ah damn. Oh well.
17:04 Roger, we need, we need a uh to evac [evacuate] this child. Ah, she’s got a uh, she’s got a wound to the belly.
17:10 I can’t do anything here. She needs to get evaced. Over.
17:18 Bushmaster Seven, Bushmaster Seven; this is Bushmaster Six Romeo.
17:20 We need your location over.
17:25 Roger, we’re at the location where Crazyhorse engaged the RPG fire break.
17:37 Grid five-four-five-eight.
17:46 Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.
17:48 That’s right.
17:56 Got uh, eleven.
18:01 Yeah uh, roger. We’re monitoring [observing].
18:02 Sorry.
18:04 No problem.
18:07 Correction eight-six-one-six.
18:16 Looking for more individuals-south.
18:18 Bushmaster Six-Bushmaster Seven.
18:29 I think they just drove over a body.
18:31 Hey hey!
18:32 Yeah!
18:37 Maybe it was just a visual illusion, but it looked like it.
18:41 Well, they’re dead, so.
18:44 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
18:56 Six; this is Four. I got one individual looks like he’s got an RPG round laying underneath him. Break.
19:05 Probably like to get…
19:10 Look at that.
19:12 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
19:29 Bushmaster Six; Romeo Hotel Two-Six over.
19:44 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
19:56 Hotel Two-Six; Bushmaster Seven colocated with Six.
20:08 Hotel Two-Six; Bushmaster Seven.
20:10 Bushmaster Seven; Hotel Two-Six over.
20:14 Roger, we got a little girl who needs to be evaced. What’s your location over?
20:22 On route Gadins, I am all the way to the south. So I am Gadins and Fifth Street.
20:28 I say again Gadins and Fifth Street, over.
20:40 Bushmaster Seven; Hotel Two-Six. Do you want us to push to your location?
20:55 Hey, uh, I need to get the Brads to drop rads I got a wounded little girl we need to take her off the maya.
21:04 Bushmaster Seven; Hotel Two-Six. Do you want us to move to your location over?
21:30 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
21:34 Hotel Two-Six; this is Bushmaster Seven. Roger, come to our location.
21:39 Okay, roger, we’re coming up north on Gadins and then we will push east to your location.
22:06 Bushmaster elements be advised we have friendlies coming from the south to your location. Over.
22:13 All right, got ’em moving up from the south.
22:35 Bushmaster elements be advised we are coming up from the east.
23:49 Hey One-Two; follow me over. I’m going to try and get out of here as quickly as possible.
24:10 You guys all right back there?
24:13 Yeah, we’re with you.
24:35 Lotta guys down there.
24:37 Oh yeah.
24:37 Came out of the woodwork.
24:38 This is Operation, ah, Operation Secure.
25:16 Yeah we have fifty rounds left.
25:17 Yep.
25:19 Two-Six; Six Romeo over.
25:21 Two-Six; Romeo over.
25:23 Hey roger, what’s your current location over?
25:47 Six; speak it’s Romeo.
25:50 Three-Six Romeo; Six Romeo over.
25:52 Roger, at the six once it’s back on this guy.
25:56 Lost him.
26:00 What’s he got for us?
26:01 Stand by.
26:06 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
26:21 Hey, did you got action on that target yet over?
26:25 Speak to Charlie roger.
26:32 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
26:55 Bushmaster Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
26:59 Roger, you have traffic over.
27:02 Roger. Uh, just wondering if you had anything else you wanted us to drive on?
27:08 Yeah roger keep on, ah, for the time being over.
27:11 Six calls Six Romeo. Can you tell battalion that two civilian children casualties are coming back to SMI in the Bradley over.
27:26 Six calls Six Romeo.
27:29 Bushmaster Six Copper White Six.
27:32 Copperhead White Six; this is Bushmaster Six Romeo over.
27:36 Roger, that’s a negative on the evac of the two, ah, civilian, ah, kids to, ah, rusty they’re going to have the IPs [Iraqi Police] link up. They can put us over here. Break. IPs will take them up to a local hospital over.
27:50 Copy over.
27:54 One six oh.
28:08 … they’re all going to.
28:10 Say again?
28:12 Where all those dismounts [infantry] are going to?
28:18 Going into this hous-. Sorry
29:29 Three Six, Three Six; Bushmaster Six Romeo over.
29:37 Six Romeo, Six Romeo.
29:39 Roger, Bushmaster Seven wants an up on all personnel in your battalion over.
29:44 Roger.
30:08 …friendlies [US troops] on the roof.
30:10 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Bushmaster Four over.
30:12 Bushmaster Four; this is Crazyhorse One-Eight.
30:15 Roger, I can ah hear small arms fire from your engagement area at two zero zero zero ah about three hundred meters from that objective over.
30:27 Crazyhorse; from what I understand small arms fire at two zero zero zero degrees about two hundred meters.
30:39 Just to the southwest.
30:41 Yup.
30:49 Right about where we engaged.
30:51 Yeah, One of them with that RPG or whatever.
30:55 He’s got a weapon. Got an RK–AK 47.
30:58 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
31:02 Gonna lose him.
31:03 Crazyhorse One-Eight this is Hotel Two-Six over.
31:08 Roger, have another individual with a weapon.
31:10 Dammit, they’re in the same building.
31:12 Hey roger that, just make sure that ah, you’re firing from west to east over.
31:16 Just went in the building.
31:18 Crazyhorse Three and Four will be on their way.
31:21 The individual walked into the building previously past grid [map reference]. So there’s at least six individuals in that building with weapons.
31:30 We can put a missile in it.
31:31 If you’d like, ah, Crazyhorse One-Eight could put a missile in that building.
31:46 It’s a triangle building. Appears to be ah, abandoned.
31:51 Yeah, looks like it’s under construction, abandoned.
31:52 Appears to be abandoned, under construction.
31:56 Uh, like I said, six individuals walked in there from our previous engagement.
32:01 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Bushmaster Six Romeo. If you’ve PIDed [Positively IDentified] the individuals in the building with weapons, go ahead and engage the building over.
32:08 Crazyhorse One-Eight; will be coming up north to south engaging with Hellfire [missiles].
32:13 All right, I’m going to do manual.
32:17 All right, we’ve been cleared to engage with…
32:18 This is Bushmaster Six Romeo. Crazyhorse One Eight is going to be engaging north to south with Hellfire missiles over.
32:24 This is Hotel Two-Six. Roger.
32:26 All right, you ready?
32:27 No, I’m trying to get over to the November [target]. Trying to find the fucking…
32:33 This is Bushmaster Six. Has that RPG round been extended already or is it still live, over.
32:38 Looks live to me.
32:40 Let me know when you’re going to fire.
32:44 All right, I’m fucking having a brain fart. Where’s the man [manual] advancement?
32:48 You got one on the clutch on the bottom left on your left door.
32:54 Roger let me stand by.
32:57 Got it?
32:59 No.
33:03 All right.
33:09 Let me just put a kilo [Hellfire missile] in there.
33:12 Ok.
33:15 Got it?
33:21 Put a kilo in?
33:22 All right, let me get back.
33:26 I’m gonna come around, get some more distance.
33:27 Roger that, you’re clear.
33:33 Got more individuals in there.
33:36 You wanna hit from north to south or you wanna go from west to east? I don’t wanna fire with the friendlies [US forces] right there, you know.
33:41 Yeah, go north to south.
33:53 Right, come around, right.
33:56 I’m just gonna put one or two in, if they want any more.
34:09 Right.
34:12 Found the missile.
34:15 Roger, I’ll get you in this straight.
34:16 You’re clear.
34:17 I’m firing.
34:26 Target hit.
34:28 It was a missile.
34:29 Left.
34:32 You’re clear. I’m above you.
34:36 Crazyhorse One-Eight; was that explosion you engaging over?
34:38 Crazyhorse One Eight, roger. Engaging building with one hellfire.
34:46 Let’s come around and we’ll clear the smoke. We’ll fire one more.
34:50 Hey uh, we’re going to wait for the smoke to clear.
34:52 Yes Crazyhorse One Eight now. We’re going to put one more missile into the building.
34:57 Yeah, did it ah, go in the building? I see the wall knocked out of the way.
34:59 Yeah, it went in.
35:01 Bushmaster Six Romeo; this is Hotel Two-Six. Yeah roger, that was Crazyhorse engaging with one Hellfire over.
35:10 Yeah roger, I got a November [target] if you want.
35:12 Fire away.
35:13 You want us to fire?
35:18 You ready?
35:19 Yep.
35:20 Bushmaster Six Romeo. They are going to engage ah, with one more Hellfire in that building.
35:24 Uh shit, why I do I have AP flashing on there? [warning on helicopter display]
35:47 We’re not even going to watch this fucking shit?
35:49 Till next one. It won’t come around, I need a little more distance.
35:53 Still want me to shoot?
35:57 You guys, following hot.
35:59 Roger.
36:13 You are clear.
36:14 Roger.
36:16 You going to bring up the missile?
36:18 Roger.
36:19 And firing.
36:20 Come down? There you go.
36:23 Fire.
36:24 All right.
36:28 I’ve got, ah BACKSCATTER [warning on helicopter display].
36:30 All right, come around.
36:32 Roger.
36:34 Coming around left, backscatter.
36:49 Firing.
36:53 There it goes! Look at that bitch go!
36:56 Patoosh!
37:03 Ah, sweet.
37:07 Need a little more room.
37:09 Nice missile.
37:11 Does it look good?
37:12 Sweet!
37:16 Uh, you ready?
37:18 Roger.
37:30 There’s a lot of dust.
37:36 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six. Was there a BDA [Battle Damage Assessment]?
37:40 This is Crazyhorse One-Eight. Stand by, engaging with another Hellfire.
37:43 All right.
37:45 You’re clear.
37:47 Lemme know when I’m clear.
37:50 Roger that.
37:59 He wasn’t.
38:02 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
38:07 Crazyhorse One-Eight.
38:09 Roger, building destroyed. Engaged with three hellfire missiles.

El Paso County to thump on poor too

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Eric Verlo

El Paso County commissioner Sally Clark is pushing to enact county regulations to prevent Colorado Springs homeless from shifting their camps outside municipal lines in response to the new anti-camping ordinance. Recent business complaints prompted the city to evict the tent communities. No public poverty has yet been reported to be despoiling county lands, but apparently Pikes Peak region administrators share a uniform standard for pettiness.

Ed Billings scripted this video:

Joe Stack’s Piper Cherokee Manifesto

Posted on February 19, 2010 by Eric Verlo

It’s getting so you can’t fly a plane into a federal office building and hope somebody will finally find your website. Though engineer Joseph Stack left an online statement to explain his last act of desperation against the IRS, it was deleted “in compliance with a request from the FBI.” I guess his web hosts think the 1st Amendment has an FBI exemption. Even Google’s cache was expunged. This has freed Reporters to characterize Stack’s missive as a crazed rant. Nothing threatens the establishment like this conclusion: “Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, … violence … is the only answer. The cruel joke is that [those] at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at … fools like me all along.” I don’t know about you, but when I hear that a self-made engineer-businessman who has his own plane, commits suicide on principles he has articulated in a manifesto, I’m curious to hear him out.

I’m reminded of the sad story of the desperate antiwar activist who set himself on fire as a final protest of the escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He knew accomplices would only dissuade him, so he chose an isolated spot where he could proceed unmolested and set up a video camera to record the act. Naturally, policemen were the first to encounter his body and thus the footage of dramatic statement are consigned to the obscurity of their files.

Fortunately the internet is still too porous for redaction on the grounds of national security, or whatever reason the FBI contrived to censor Stack’s suicide note/screed/diatribe. The Smoking Gun has the usual non-text scans of what Joseph Stack wrote before he piloted his single-engine Piper PA-28 into the Austin TX IRS office. Here’s the full text of Stack’s manifesto.

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principles represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principle is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t stealing from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.

That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.

On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.

Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.

For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.

(a) IN GENERAL – Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:

(d) EXCEPTION. – This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. – The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.

Note:

·      “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.

·      “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.

·      “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.

Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.

After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.

Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.

Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.

Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.

To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.

So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.

When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.

This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I ensure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white-washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)

02/18/2010

Polk awards Neda midst propaganda

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Eric Verlo

How do you give formal recognition to journalism merit in a media landscape adulterated with propaganda? Award the dubious distinction to the pseudonym for commercial disinformation: anonymous! This year a Polk Award went to the unknown Youtube videographer who captured the death of Iran “Green Revolution” martyr Neda Soltani, a wrenching sequence which transcended exploitation to give iconic status to Iran’s election discontents. Fitting, while another snuff film is circulated to drum up interest in the Vancouver Olympics.

The Wide World of Sports used to loop the famous ski jump wipe-out, but we were assured the skier escaped without major injury. If he’d died the footage would have been buried like that of race care crashes. But that was another age. Now a fatal luge accident gets played again and again, the pretext being to compete with Youtube, but obviously it’s to amp interest in what has traditionally remained a lackluster Olympic category.

What’s the point of awarding nobody? Time Magazine did it when they named you as Person of the Year. It’s called pandering to everyman, this time as a bald excuse to give Neda another chance to incite anti-Iranian sentiment.

Shoot him in the chest – I want his hat

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Olympic television audiences can be shown Sunday’s violent luge death, over and over, but they won’t see the video recently leaked from Nigeria, of last summer’s cleanup effort against Islamic rebels. Nigeria is a US client state, violently repressing indigenous resistance to Chevron oil environment rape. Footage shows government soldiers leading unarmed men to lay face down in the public square for summary execution. Said one officer before killing a victim: “Sit properly we want to take your picture.” Another officer shouted: “Shoot him in the chest not the head — I want his hat.”

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The Myth of Middle Ground

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