Harvard to Enron: Pug Winokur Is Now History

From Cold Case Conspiracy Update:

The collapse of Enron occurred in October 2001, one month after the towers fell on 9/11. It's been more than ten years now, and we still don't know where the Enron money went. But all those years ago there were many researchers attempting to find out. One of them was Linda Minor, who went about the search in a unique way--by digging into the background of one of Enron's directors, a man named Herbert Simon Winokur, Jr., who somehow had acquired the moniker "Pug." This man who seemed to come from nowhere to become a bigwig at the Harvard Corporation was so intriguing to her because of the behind-the-scenes role he played in the life of one of the researcher's best friends, Catherine Austin Fitts. The two women set out to discover who this man was and what made him tick. Their dream of finding where the money went did not become a reality.

Nevertheless, as a result of their research, which was seen by many thousands of internet readers, Pug Winokur is now history.

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See also Part 2: The Corporate State of Fascism

Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You

The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing between. You are for us or against us. You are a patriot or an enemy of freedom. You either embrace the crusade to physically eradicate evildoers from the face of the Earth or you are an Islamic terrorist, a collaborator or an unwitting tool of terrorists. And now that we have created this monster it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it. Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors feed on paranoia, rumor, rampant careerism, demonization of critical free speech and often invented narratives. They justify their existence, and their consuming of vast governmental resources, by turning even the banal and the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.

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Alexa O’Brien, a content strategist and information architect who co-founded the U.S. Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process and wrest it back from corporate hands, was the first plaintiff to address the court. She testified that when WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, she discovered that the company was attempting to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as jihadist ideology.

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Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all

Jonathan Owen reports for The Independent:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

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Ferlinghetti: Assassination Raga

Ferlinghetti read his "Assassination Raga" for the first time that evening,
June 8, 1968. It had been completed a few hours earlier, as the
poet watched Senator Robert Kennedy's funeral on television.


Tune in to a raga
on the stereo
and turn on Death
without its sound
Outside the plums are growing in a tree
'The force that through the green fuse
drives the flower'
drives Death TV
'A grief ago

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Plums & planes are falling through the air
La illaha el lill Allah
as sitar sings its only answer
sitar sings its only answer
sitar sounds the only sound
that still can still all violence
La illaha el lill Allah
There is no god but life
There is no god but life
La illaha el lill Allah

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Musical Innerlube: Sir Richard Bishop - A Tribute To Omar Khorshid

Sir Richard Bishop live @Kulturrampe Krefeld, Germany. 12.02.2009. A tribute to Egyptian musician Omar Khorshid.