From a great post on Alex Constantine's Blacklist :
...THE CIA'S HAND WORKED FOR PETER ABELES IN AUSTRALIA - ABELES, MURDOCH'S BUSINESS PARTNER, WAS A MAFIA KINGPIN:
" ... Bob Hawk's (Australian Prime Minister from 11th March, 1983 until 20th December, 1991) little mate SIR PETER ABELES was the US MAFIA representative in Australia for many years and is known to have attempted to bribe well known anti-corruption journalist Bob Bottom. Of course Bottom refused but it was well known that Abeles would tie someone up in court for years if they dared to print anything derogatory about him ... "
http://www.wpngnc.org/kissinger.htm
RUPERT MURDOCH, NARCOTICS KINGPIN
" ... Abeles and RUPERT MURDOCH (I seem to have heard that name before) just happened to own 55% of Australia's second biggest domestic airline - ANSETT. Ansett in turn just happened to own a 20% share in another airline - AMERICA WEST Airline. One of their planes was caught in the US chock a block full of DRUGS in the US. The result was intertesting to say the least. ... "
http://www.wpngnc.org/kissinger.htm
MORE ON MURDOCH, NUGAN HAND, THE CIA, DRUGS:
" ... Twenty percent of the stock of AMERICA WEST was owned by ANSETT AIRLINES of Australia and 55% of ANSETT was held by Sir Peter Ables and Rupert Murdock. We know from Jonathan Kwitney's book THE CRIMES OF PATRIOTS that Burny Houghton, perhaps the key figure in the founding of the CIA drug money laundering bank NUGAN)HAND in Australia, had coffee with Sir Peter Ables the night of his first day in Australia. ... "
http://www.wpngnc.org/ables.htm
CIA's Paul Helliwell meets Michael Hand and Frank Nugan
When Frank Nugan was found dead in Australia in 1980, it was accepted as a suicide and the sighs of relief could almost be heard in Langley, on the other side of the globe. But then William Colby's business card was found in Nugan's wallet, and Nugan's partner, Michael Hand, had been a contract agent for the CIA in Vietnam. Australian authorities began tracking Nugan Hand Bank, which developed into the most fun story of Golden Triangle drugs, money-laundering, profiteering, corporate shell games, and financial fraud that has yet surfaced in the CIA's unofficial history.
The most intriguing aspect of Nugan Hand Bank was the list of Yankees who were in on the scam. Theodore Shackley, Richard Secord, Thomas Clines, and Edwin Wilson played peripheral roles, while Gen. Edwin Black ran the Nugan Hand Hawaii office, Gen. Erle Cocke ran the Washington office, Gen. LeRoy Manor ran the Philippine office, Colby was their lawyer, former CIA deputy director Walter McDonald was a consultant, Adm. Earl Yates was president of Nugan Hand, and Robert Jantzen, a former CIA station chief in Thailand, got out of Nugan Hand when he smelled drugs. He needn't have bothered; apart from Kwitny's Wall Street Journal articles in 1982, Nugan Hand received little coverage and no official interest in the U.S.
http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/09/media-mafia-part-six-ciamafias-rupert.html
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
The politics of heroin at Fox News - Rupert Murdoch, the CIA, Shackley, Nugan Hand Bank & Crimes of Patriots
A gathering of eagles at Government Sucks Day
A small band of libertarians gathered on the grounds of the Middlefaire Renaissance Festival near Hillsboro, Texas, in near-perfect autumn weather to launch the First Annual Government Sucks Day Rally.
Speakers for the day that began at 11:30 am and continued throughout the day until dusk included notables on the national scene and local libertarians alike.
Attendees included political activists, Libertarian Party candidates, Ron Paul supporters, Ayn Rand admirers, anarchists, Texas secessionist sympathizers and other free minds eager to exchange ideas and experiences.
Karen De Coster presented an overview of the recent takeover of the once relatively free economy by the Bush and Obama administrations and described America as "quickly morphing into a socialist corporate state."
Mary Ruwart, longtime Libertarian Party activist and writer, best known for her books Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression and Short Answers to the Tough Questions, urged all freedom lovers to become active in whatever capacity best suited them. Her message was, "Find your calling, then do it."
Texas Libertarian Party activists discussed organization and tactics while candidates for office gave their stump speeches and fielded questions from the audience.
R. Lee Wrights, who helped organize the event, exhorted everyone not to shy away from the "anarchist" label. Explaining that anarchy doesn't mean chaos ("cats sleeping with dogs") but simply means self-government, Wrights declared, "Anarchy is not a four letter word. It's a seven-letter word. So is freedom. So is liberty."
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Super Monkey Collider loses funding
Satire from The Onion :
Controversial Experiment Comes To An End
Congress voted Monday to cut federal funding for the superconducting monkey collider, a controversial experiment which has cost taxpayers an estimated $7.6 billion a year since its creation in 1983.
The collider, which was to be built within a 45-mile-long circular tunnel, would accelerate monkeys to near-light speeds before smashing them together. Scientists insist the collider is an important step toward understanding the universe, because no one can yet say for certain what kind of noises monkeys would make if collided at those high speeds.
"It could be a thump, a splat, or maybe even a sound that hasn't yet been heard by human ears," said project head Dr. Eric Reed Friday, in an impassioned plea to Congress. "How are we supposed to understand things like the atom or the nature of gravity if we don't even know what colliding monkeys sound like?"
But Congress, under heavy pressure from the powerful monkey rights lobby, decided that money being spent on the monkey collider would be put to better use in other areas of government. Now, with funding cut off, the future of our nation's monkey collision program looks bleak.
Congress began funding the monkey collider in 1983, after Reed convinced lawmakers that the U.S. was lagging behind the Soviet Union in monkey-colliding technology. Funds were quickly allocated so that Reed could spend a week procuring monkeys on Florida's beautiful Captiva Island. Though Reed returned with a great tan and a beautiful young fiancee, he reported that there were no monkeys to be found on the sunny Gulf Coast island. Congress funded subsequent trips to the Cayman Islands, Bora Bora and Cancun, but these searches also yielded negative results.
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State to 'spy' on every phone call, email and web search
All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.
Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.
They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.
Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a single government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns.
However the Government announced yesterday it was pressing ahead with privately held “Big Brother” databases that opposition leaders said amounted to “state-spying” and a form of “covert surveillance” on the public.
It is doing so despite its own consultation showing that it has little public support.
The Home Office admitted that only one third of respondents to its six-month consultation on the issue supported its proposals, with 50 per cent fearing that the scheme lacked sufficient safeguards to protect the highly personal data from abuse.
The new law will increase the amount of personal data that can be obtained by officials through the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which is supposed to be used for fighting terrorism.
Although most private firms already hold details of every customer's private calls and emails for their own business purposes, most only do so on an ad hoc basis and only for a period of several months.
The new rules, known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme, will not only force communications companies to keep their records for longer, but to expand the type of data they keep to include details of every website their customers visit, effectively registering every online click.
While public authorities will not be able to view the contents of these emails or phone calls, they can see the internet addresses, dates, times and identify recipients of calls.
Firms involved in storing the data, including Orange, BT and Vodafone, will be reimbursed at a cost to the taxpayer of £2 billion over 10 years.
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said he had fears about the abuse of the data. He said: “The big danger in all of this is 'mission creep'. This government keeps on introducing new powers to tackle terrorism and organised crime which end up being used for completely different purposes. We have to stop that from happening”.
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Feds demanded identities of news site's readers
The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that, on January 30 of this year, the Justice Department not only demanded to know who was reading the IndyMedia alternative news site, but also forbade the site to publicize the demand.
[T]he government was asking for the IP address of every one of indymedia.us's thousands of visitors on that date — the IP address of every person who read any news story on the entire site. Not only did this request threaten every indymedia.us visitor's First Amendment right to read the news anonymously (particularly considering that the government could easily obtain the name and address associated with each IP address via subpoenas to the ISPs that control those IP blocks), it plainly violated the SCA's restrictions on what types of data the government could obtain using a subpoena. The subpoena was also patently overbroad, a clear fishing expedition: there's no way that the identity of every Indymedia reader of every Indymedia story was relevant to the crime being investigated by the grand jury in Indiana, whatever that crime may be. ...~ more... ~
... without any legal authority to back up their purported gag demand, the government ordered Ms. Clair not to reveal the existence of the subpoena, a subpoena that as already described was patently overbroad and invalid under the SCA.
TPUC gathering
An impromptu sharing from an ex soldier on the realities of being in the army @ the TPUC conference with John Harris. For more information about Jon Harris and the peoples' united community see: http://www.tpuc.org/
On the weekend of September 12th-13th 2009, the first ever TPUC.org, freeman-on-the-land gathering took place in a little remote area on the outskirts of Glastonbury.
Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
As historians ponder George W. Bush's disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.
To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal's “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan's administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.
That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter's key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.
Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report's Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter's conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor.
The American people thus were spared the chapter's troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.
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Tuning out the Taliban
Pakistani pop musicians are propelling anti-American messages. The lyrics reflect widespread views among their young educated fans who say Pakistan's problem is the West, not the Taliban.
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Vatican holds conference on extraterrestrial life
Though it may seem an unlikely location to happen upon a conference on astrobiology, the Vatican recently held a "study week" of over 30 astronomers, biologists, geologists and religious leaders to discuss the question of the existence of extraterrestrials. This follows the statement made last year by the Pope's chief astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, that the existence of extraterrestrials does not preclude a belief in God, and that it's a question to be explored by the Catholic Church. The event, put on by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, took place at the Casina Pio IV on the Vatican grounds from November 6-11.
The conference was meant to focus on the scientific perspective on the subject of the existence of extraterrestrial life, and pulled in perspectives from atheist scientists and Catholic leaders alike. It was split into eight different segments, starting with a topics about life here on Earth such as the origins of life, the Earth's habitability through time, and the environment and genomes. Then the detection of life elsewhere, search strategies for extrasolar planets, the formation and properties of extrasolar planets was discussed, culminating in the last segment, intelligence elsewhere and 'shadow life' – life with a biochemistry completely different than that found on Earth.
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The lie of the century
There is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war. Indeed because most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make.
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image from http://www.spitting-image.net
