Online Journal Editors' Blog

Two typical news reports below provide a snapshot of worsening conditions, with ominous worldwide implications. The first (New York Times) article confirms the heavy and increasing Israeli role in domestic US police/spy operations, and exemplifies the new post-London "war on terrorism" propaganda, declaring “inevitable-not-if-but-when” suicide bombings. Reposting of the New York Times piece on America Online came with the headline, “Suicide Bombs Next For U.S.?”

The emphasis of all such material is not true investigation or true law enforcement (both long lost commodities), but to condition the public to accept the premise of “unstoppable and impending ‘terror' attacks”—and all policies launched under the pretext.

The second article covers the just-concluded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) summit in which the DLC leadership (which is setting up for a possible Hillary Clinton presidential run) calls for more troops (100,000-plus, according to reports from this event) and unlimited military recruiting in schools. This is the desired expansion of the “war on terrorism," as described in "London bombings and the 'war on terrorism' consensus" and "The Make Us Safe believers."

All the above comes at the same time that the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a permanent extension to the Patriot Act.

The leaders of the New World Order want a world permanently set to September 12, 2001. A permanent tyranny.

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Suicide Bombings Bring Urgency to Police in U.S.

Updated: 09:49 AM EDT

By SARAH KERSHAW, The New York Times

Seattle (July 22)—Inside a former Starbucks warehouse, this city's bomb squad headquarters, the police chief and 15 captains and sergeants - accompanied by a robot that can extract explosives from packages and pin down a suspect - huddled the other day to tackle a topic suddenly urgent to the police across the nation: suicide bombers.

"Now it's really time," the chief, Gil Kerlikowske, told his commanders. "It almost seems to be a question of when in this country, not a question of if, after London."

Across the country, police departments large and small are preparing for a possibility once thought improbable and now feared to be inevitable. On Thursday, the day of four attempted explosions in the London subways, the New York City police began randomly searching bags and backpacks at subway stations and other travel hubs.

In Miami, the police chief returned recently from a conference in England and Scotland that included a long session on suicide bombers. Several officers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department returned last Thursday after spending a week with the British authorities studying terrorism responses, department officials there said.

A growing number of police departments, including ones in Seattle; Boston; Los Angeles; Washington; Suffolk County, N.Y.; and Sterling Heights, Mich., a small city north of Detroit, are also turning for guidance to the place many police officials consider the pinnacle of terrorism training. They are sending groups of officers to Israel and bringing Israeli officers to the United States to train the police on the harrowing science of suicide bomber intelligence gathering and apprehension.

Several American police officials said advice from the Israelis had included looking out for suicide bomber "handlers," who scout bus stations or other crowded areas for deadly attacks. And although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching officers to aim for a suspect's head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso.

But the growing relationship between Israeli and United States law enforcement, expanding now after the London bombings, has prompted criticism among some Muslim groups, who say they fear that American police officers will engage in religious or ethnic profiling.

Some officials talk about receiving reports from the public about what the police refer to as "M.E.W.C.'s" - Middle Eastern with a camera - perhaps taking pictures of a bridge, a hydropower plant or a reservoir.

"Israel's antiterror tactics are largely based on profiling, whether it's on airlines or at checkpoints," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington. "And they've produced tremendous resentment and hostility in the Palestinian population through humiliating tactics and through abuses on a daily basis. And I don't think that's something we want to replicate."

But Chief Kerlikowske said that the focus of the work with Israelis - an Israeli police general based at the Israeli Embassy in Washington is expected to come here for training next month - was on technical skills, and that the police were focusing on the behavior of potential bombers, not on race or religion.

"None of the discussions I've heard have to do with profiling," Chief Kerlikowske said.

"Now it's really time . . . It almost seems to be a question of when in this country, not a question of if."

In the last week, officials in Seattle - not far from where an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, was arrested in 1999 trying to enter the country with explosives to be used at the Los Angeles airport during the millennium celebration - have proposed ways to train officers with a three-part "lesson plan" for detecting and stopping suicide bombers. Some police officials, however, acknowledge that many of the roughly 18,000 American police departments and federal law enforcement agencies lack access to centralized training for response to such attacks and say that the biggest weakness lies in intelligence gathering on extremists.

The National Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board, which works with more than 450 bomb squad units, is drafting the first national protocol for "suicide bomber response," to be distributed to all the units in September, said Sgt. Jim Hansen of the Seattle Police Department's arson bomb squad and a member of the organization's board.

Inside the warehouse here, the Seattle police officials talked about how they would get the word out to their roughly 1,250 officers - whether through a video or special training - to help them see signs of a potential attack: gunpowder, a suspicious backpack, a suspect sweating profusely. They spoke about the "nine steps" a suicide bomber takes, but were reluctant to share the details with a reporter for fear of tipping off would-be bombers, they said.

Many police and federal officials have gone to Israel through a program organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a nonprofit group in Washington that promotes close ties between the United States and the Israeli military and the police. Marsha Halteman, director of corporate and community programs for the institute, said that it got its money from private donors and that it had been sponsoring such trips for American officers since 2002.

Since the London bombings of July 7, Ms. Halteman said, interest in cooperation between the countries' police agencies has increased considerably. The institute pays the cost of the trips to Israel, roughly $6,500 for each state or local officer; it does not pay for federal officers' expenses, Ms. Halteman said. Since 2002, the institute has sent dozens of American law enforcement officials to Israel and sponsored several conferences here with Israeli security experts. An itinerary for a recent institute-sponsored trip to Israel listed among the lessons "The Mind-Set of the Suicide Bomber," "Security Technology" and "Enlisting the Public in the Fight Against Terrorism."

Barnett Jones, chief of the Sterling, Mich., Police Department, with 259 employees, was one of more than a dozen officials who went to Israel for training in April.

"One would say it is the front line," Chief Barnett said of Israel. "We're in a global war."

Asked whether he had specific concerns because of the large Arab and Muslim population in the Detroit area, he responded delicately, saying: "The reality is we have a large population in our community that immediately become suspect, whether that is right or wrong, because of the global war. For me to sit here and say, 'I'm not concerned' would be wrong, but for me to sit here and say, 'Yes I'm concerned' would also be wrong."

The New York City Police Department has worked with the Israelis since soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and has permanently stationed a Hebrew-speaking detective in Israel, who returns to the city often to train other officers. Since the July 7 London bombings, the department, which has an annual budget of $2 billion, has spent an additional $2 million a week, primarily on mass transit security, said Paul J. Browne, the deputy commissioner for public information. He said he did not expect that the new policy of searching backpacks and packages would add significantly to the cost.

Chief Kerlikowske of the Seattle police, which pays its own way for trips to Israel, said his department, with an annual budget of $182 million, would spend up to $30,000 for additional training on suicide bomber response. Some expensive items like the robot and a portable X-ray machine using digital film have been paid for with money from the Department of Homeland Security.

The X-ray machine was used last month when a man upset about his case entered the federal courthouse in Seattle with a backpack strapped to his chest and a grenade in his hand. Officers shot him in the head and killed him; the X-ray machine was used to examine his backpack, which turned out to have only a cutting board inside. The grenade was determined to be inactive.

Even as more police departments seek suicide-bomber training, several officials said the police in the United States had challenges that did not exist in other countries.

"Here we don't have a centralized department, and the biggest obstacle is sharing information, working at local, state and then the overlay with the feds," Chief John F. Timoney of Miami said. "If you were George Bush, and you went to Harvard and asked them to design a policing scheme, the last one they would dream up is the American policing scheme; it's completely dysfunctional. We've got to do a much better job on intelligence."

Still, most agree there is little time to waste.

"I think now suddenly, what we are seeing is that it's really happening," said Brig. Gen. Simon Perry of the Israel National Police, now based at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and one of several Israeli security experts traveling around the nation to conduct training sessions for American law enforcement.

"I think for terrorist attacks, you need two things: you need a capability, and you need a motivation," he said. "The capability is here, and the question now is motivation."

07–25–05 08:34 EDT

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company.

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Posted on Mon, Jul. 25, 2005

Centrist Democrats propose agenda

MILITARY TOPS THE LIST OF PRIORITIES

By Steven Thomma

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Stung by criticism that their party offers no policy options for moderate voters, centrist Democrats proposed a broad agenda yesterday on national security, family values, health care, tax reform and managing the federal government.

Among the proposals: increasing the military by 100,000 troops, allowing military recruiters unrestricted access to college campuses and banning the marketing of violent material to children.

"There's nothing wrong with the Democratic Party that a positive agenda can't fix," said Al From, founder of the group that helped launch Bill Clinton to the presidency and that will hear today from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a potential 2008 presidential candidate.

The first day of a two-day session of the Democratic Leadership Council drew more than 300 elected Democrats, from state legislators to Clinton and other potential presidential candidates, including Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Govs. Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Mark Warner of Virginia.

No formal action on the proposals was expected at the meeting, which focused on discussing ways to win in states such as Ohio that once swung between parties but now lean Republican. Ohio helped clinch President Bush's re-election last year, and Republicans dominate its state government and congressional delegation.

From said it was critical to offer voters a clearer idea of where Democrats would take the country, rather than just criticize the Republican path. "You've got to know where you're going," he said.

National security topped the agenda he wrote with former Clinton White House adviser Bruce Reed. They urged increasing incentives to add more troops at a time during which the Army is falling short of its recruiting goals and said all colleges should be open to Pentagon recruiters. Some have turned those recruiters away.

The proposal also urged cutting oil imports by 25 percent by 2025. That would curb the flow of U.S. money to Middle Eastern countries in which some of the money ends up financing terrorists, they said.

To cut the federal budget deficit, they proposed cutting congressional and nondefense government staff by 10 percent, reducing the number of consultants used by the government by 150,000 and cutting "pork barrel" road projects by 50 percent.

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In a Thursday Washington Post article about George W. Bush's Supreme Court pick, John G. Roberts, and what the wimpy Democratic sell-outs plan to do about Bush's awful choice, other than again capitulating to the GOP juggernaut, the Post picked up a remark Senator Orrin Hatch made on Fox News, comparing the Democrats to the Pharisees and Bush to Jesus Christ:

"'It's a little bit like biblical Pharisees, you know, who basically are always trying to undermine Jesus Christ,' he said on Fox News. 'You know, it goes on the same way. If they can catch him in something, they can then criticize and the outside groups will go berserk.'"

To Christians, is this remark not blasphemy?

Will Orrin next tell us that criminal Bush, who for all intents and purposes is now a dictator—though most Americans don't yet get it—is actually the Second Coming of Christ? Will Bush attempt to walk on water to prove it?

In the immediate wake of 9/11, and the bombings in Bali and Madrid, shock—“terror”—gripped the minds of people across the world, robbing them of their critical faculties. Today, July 7, 2005, as London received its version of 9/11 in multiple subway bombings, the ability to maintain focus is as important as it was on the previous occasions.

Now, mere hours following the bombings, while there is no reliable information on what really happened, there is a tidal wave of the fear, hysteria, and fear-mongering.

From the UK, researcher Ian Henshall is asking, among other questions, "Was the London attack helped or allowed to happen by rogue elements in the US/UK security forces?"

Henshall's questions are on the mark.

What really happened, and who benefits? What was this operation, and who or what had the ability to pull it off? (Who or what did not?) Who knew?

Did Israel know? What did the CIA, MI-6, etc. know?

What, indeed, is going on?

The answers will not come from the governments and government-controlled media. They never do.

What does a new terror event (intentionally or coincidentally) wipe off the front pages? Some events leading up to July 7, 2005:

• The CIA-Valerie Plame case hits the fan. Judith Miller goes to jail after refusing to divulge her Bush administration source. Matthew Cooper agrees to talk. Members of Congress, led by John Conyers, issue a letter demanding answers from the Bush White House, and the resignation of Karl Rove. Anglo-American Iraq war lies exposed.
• The Downing Street Papers. Anglo-American Iraq war lies exposed.
• G-8 summit.
• Blair-UK (political snapshot provided by Henshall).
• Insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthen, in opposition to Anglo-American occupation. Anglo-American occupations in trouble.
• Russia and China jointly call for end to Anglo-American “world domination.”
• Russia and China, and leaders of Central Asian republics, call for an outright US exit from Central Asia.
• Oil prices hit another new high. World economy shaky.
• Preparation for war against Iran (forecast by some as beginning in the summer of 2005) continues.

Listen to: "Galloway wary of staged attack as pretext for Iran invasion" (audio)

• Bush administration approval ratings plumb depths. Support for Iraq war plumb depths.

The larger backdrop:

• Peak Oil.
• The criminality of the world elite, led by Bush-Blair, an undisguised fact.
• All major terror events since 2000—including 9/11, Bali and Madrid—implicated Bush-Blair, and Anglo-American-aligned functionaries and intelligence fronts.
• “War on terrorism” a propaganda construct.
• Al-Qaeda is an intelligence branch of the CIA. Islamic terror groups are Anglo-American military-intelligence assets.
• Provocative Anglo-American wars have created native anti-occupation insurgencies, blurring the line between “terror” groups controlled by Anglo-American (and Anglo-American-connected) intelligence, and those opposed: blowback as fact.
• Continuing Anglo-American war hinges on continuing “terrorism”: blowback as welcome, whether manufactured or not.

Among the things to watch in the wake of the London event:

• Staged nature of media coverage, and singular focus (canned “war on terrorism” propaganda, bereft of analysis).
• Staged nature of official responses. (Think “jackals.”)
• Who or what is blamed.
• “Security” measures justified, and to be enacted.
• Military actions justified, and to be enacted.
• What comes next.

“Terror” alerts are now being issues around the world.

Web sites such as From The Wilderness, Center for Research on Globalisation and Online Journal have consistently separated wheat from chaff, realities from rhetoric, and information from disinformation. Sources like this will be increasingly necessary, as conditions worsen.

Only one thing is certain at this hour. It is up to you—an independent-thinking individual—to find the answers. It always is.

Focus.

Special thanks to Jamey Hecht for timely material.