Frustrated by Bush administration restrictions, a former senator said yesterday he might quit the special commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Ex-Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), now president of New York's New School University, told the Daily News that resigning is "on my list of possibilities" because the administration continues to block the full panel's access to top intelligence officials and materials.

The DC Antiwar Network fundraiser at Cafe Mawonaj tonight was rudely interrupted . . .

plainclothes officers in an unmarked car were performing a search of a car and had handcuffed the two men who had been in the car. The men were a DJ who was scheduled to perform at the event and a friend. As police were searching the car, DAWN participant Chris Otten was questioning them if they had the subject's consent for the search. An MPD officer identified by witnesses as Manny Rodriguez (badge #3762) replied they didn't need consent for the search if he arrested the subjects.
[...]
Rodriguez told Chris to leave the scene or he would be charged with assault. Chris asked how he was assaulting the officer, then Rodriguez approached Chris, got in his face and told him to leave again. Chris started backing away, still asking how he was assaulting the officer. Rodriguez started running toward Chris, who tried to run from the officer. Rodriguez and another officer grabbed Chris, pushed him against the wall, handcuffed him, and arrested him.

in DC Superior Court, Otten faced the reduced charges of disorderly conduct and the misdemeanor charge of attempted assault of a police officer. When attorney Karen O'Keefe of DAWN asked the prosecutor and public defender what attempted assault on a police officer was, both lawyers professed they had never heard of the charge. Nevertheless, Otten pleaded not guilty on both counts and faces separate trial dates
[...]
According to a 1987 Supreme Court decision (Houston v. Hill), the right of people to verbally oppose police action is protected. The Supreme Court majority wrote: "The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state."

[Otter] described jail conditions likening them to being forced to live like a rat. He slept on a metal bed, and he and others in custody were often denied water.

Witnesses to the event have filed formal complaints against officer Manny Rodriguez.

TORONTO (CP) - A Canadian who admitted his family has had links to al-Qaida says he was recruited to work for the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. military in Afghanistan and later at the U.S. prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In an interview that was airing on CBC-TV's The National on Thursday, Abdurahman Khadr said he was so frightened after his capture by U.S. forces, he agreed to live for nine months in a CIA safe house near the American embassy in Kabul. Key elements of Khadr's story were subjected to polygraph tests and he passed, the network said.

The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is refusing to accept strict conditions from the White House for interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and is renewing its request that Mr. Bush's national security adviser testify in public, commission members said Tuesday.

The panel members, interviewed after a private meeting on Tuesday, said the commission had decided for now to reject a White House request that the interview with Mr. Bush be limited to one hour and that the questioners be only the panel's chairman and vice chairman.

American scientists have declared that in ten years they will succeed in creating a radically new type of biological weapon. This weapon would be capable of infecting people according to a genetically predetermined marker such as skin color or eye shape.

A recent closed seminar held by the CIA was devoted to the topic. The event took place as part of the Project for the New American Century.

Three years ago, ideologues like US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and PNAC Director William Crystal were already discussing genetic weapons. They recommended that the Pentagon consider the possibility for using this type of weapon not only to successfully wage war, but also to reconfigure world politics. According to a PNAC report, genetic weapons could completely change the politics of the entire planet: “cutting-edge biological warfare targeting a certain genotype could turn the reign of terrorism into a politically useful tool.”
According to information from PNAC, Israel has also recently begun to work actively on mutagenic weapons. Israel geneticists confirm that Arabs carry a unique gene that no one else in the world has. This gene forms the basis for the Israeli research, believe American experts.

In March 1999, German intelligence officials gave the Central Intelligence Agency the first name and telephone number of Marwan al-Shehhi
[...]
Shehhi was a crucial member of the Qaeda cell in Hamburg at the heart of the Sept. 11 plot. Close surveillance of Mr. Shehhi in 1999 might have led investigators to other plot leaders, including Mohammed Atta, who was Mr. Shehhi's roommate.

GOING UNDERCOVER

There are undercover agents infiltrating peaceful protests in America. Pretending to be political activists, law enforcement officials are monitoring the activities of advocacy and protest groups based on what one judge calls those organizations' "political philosophies and conduct protected under the First Amendment." Operating under the Attorney General's new relaxed guidelines, is law enforcement abusing its power by spying on the lawful activities of ordinary citizens because they disagree with the government? NOW exposes a disturbing national trend that some say is part of a coordinated effort by the government to criminalize dissent. The report takes viewers inside incidents in Washington, DC, Colorado and Iowa, where government agents went undercover to monitor and disrupt peaceful acts of civil disobedience.

Marc Dutroux blamed a police-backed paedophile network and his estranged wife yesterday for the gruesome deaths of four girls abducted, drugged, abused and held captive at his Belgian home.

In 150 minutes of extraordinary testimony, Mr Dutroux claimed policemen helped kidnap and rape two teenage victims. The court in Arlon gasped as he also described how he stored the emaciated bodies of two eight-year-olds in a freezer.

The book, by two French journalists, is a sensationalist account of the case of Marc Dutroux, the alleged sex offender and killer whose discovery five years ago caused such trauma in Belgium and the country's political establishment.

Apart from general accusations of government cover-ups, the authors personally connect the name of King Albert with the scandal, saying that as crown prince he attended parties at which paedophiles were present.

KARLSRUHE, Germany - A German court Thursday overturned the world's only conviction for the Sept. 11 attacks and ordered a retrial for a Moroccan found guilty last year of aiding the Hamburg cell of suicide hijackers.

Mounir el Motassadeq's conviction on more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization was flawed because the lower court failed to properly consider the absence of evidence from a key witness who is in U.S. custody, the Federal Criminal Court ruled.
[...]
El Motassadeq's lawyers argued he was denied a fair trial because the United States refused to allow testimony by Ramzi Binalshibh, thought to be the Hamburg cell's key contact with al-Qaida. . . .

The U.S. Justice Department told the Hamburg court that Binalshibh is "not available." Also, the German government refused to release transcripts of his interrogations, saying the United States provided them only for intelligence purposes.

The U.S. government on Wednesday allowed "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla to meet with his lawyers for the first time since being locked up without charges in a Navy brig in South Carolina in June 2002.

His lawyers, Andrew Patel and Donna Newman, met for about three hours at the brig in Charleston with Padilla, a U.S. citizen the government has accused of plotting with the al Qaeda network to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States.

Patel said the government closely monitored the meeting, and that he and Newman told Padilla, a former Chicago gang member and convert to Islam, not to discuss with them the details of his case because the meeting lacked the usual attorney-client confidentiality.

The Supreme Court on April 28 is scheduled to hear arguments in Padilla's case and in the case of another American citizen also deemed an "enemy combatant," Yaser Esam Hamdi.
[...]
Padilla was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport in May 2002 on a return flight from Pakistan. He was held at the Manhattan federal prison until June 9, 2002, when the government declared him an enemy combatant and transferred him to the brig in Charleston. He had been locked up there without access to lawyers and without charges.

The two leading contenders for the U.S. presidency are both members of Skull and Bones, one of the oldest secret societies in America. Why is this not a major election-year issue?

Mr. Russert: You both were members of Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale. What does that tell us?

Senator Kerry: Not much, because it’s a secret.

— Meet the Press, August 31, 2003

What are the odds that out of a population of nearly 300 million the two front-runners for the most powerful political office in the world would be "brothers" in a super-elite, secret society that numbers probably fewer than 800 living members? The odds are even slimmer than that, since only a handful of that already minuscule number actually hold political office and would, therefore, be potential candidates.

Mr. Russert: You were both in Skull and Bones, the secret society.

President Bush: It’s so secret we can’t talk about it.

— Meet the Press, Taped on February 7, 2004

Every politician, it is said, has skeletons in his closet, but this is ridiculous. In the cases of President George W. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), we have two politicos whose careers, literally, were launched in a crypt full of skeletons. The crypt we refer to is the hulking mausoleum on the Yale campus that houses The Order of the Skull and Bones, the infamous, occultic fraternity that both men joined in the 1960s during their senior year at the university. Both Bush and Kerry have been asked in recent interviews about their membership in this very old, super-secret club. Each has waved off the question with a laugh and refused to say anything further on the matter. And the Establishment media have politely dropped the subject.

For the first time in history the race for the U.S. presidency is shaping up to be completely a "Bonesman" affair.

Two separate accusations that Bishop Howard Hubbard had homosexual relations, including paying for sex with a 16-year-old minor, have left the leader of the Albany diocese embarrassed and humiliated. At press conferences, in public statements, and on talk radio he has steadfastly refuted both allegations, saying that he has "never had sexual relations with anyone."

But it is the death of Fr. John Minkler that has severely complicated matters for the accused bishop. Fr. Minkler, 57, was found dead in his home on Sunday, February 15. Three days before, the deceased priest was identified in a television news report as the author of a 1995 report addressed to New York’s Cardinal John J. O’Connor. Among other things, the letter detailed "a ring of homosexual Albany priests" including Bishop Howard Hubbard’s alleged long-term homosexual relationships with two younger priests.

Police won’t say how Fr. Minkler died, only that the circumstances surrounding his death are not yet clear. The coroner has yet to release his report of the autopsy.

Oklahoma prosecutors [are] dragging Timothy McVeigh's friend and convicted accomplice, Terry Nichols, back into court today: not satisfied with the life sentence he is already serving, they want to send him to the death chamber for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

As the trial gets under way, however, a flurry of new evidence promises to demonstrate quite the opposite of what the prosecutors are hoping to prove: that Nichols, far from being a key player in the conspiracy, was a relatively marginal figure, and that a gang of neo-Nazi bank robbers, hitherto ignored by federal and state prosecutors, had a far more prominent role.

In other words, what is intended to be an exercise in judicial "closure" for bereaved Oklahomans could end up demolishing the FBI's theory of how the worst peacetime atrocity . . .

Already, the FBI has acknowledged destroying evidence linking the bank robbers to the bombing, for reasons that have yet to be made clear. An array of colourful witnesses - including McVeigh's best friend on Death Row and the self-proclaimed ringleader of the bank robbery gang - are expected to substantiate that evidence in testimony and add details of their own.

When confronted with IAHF's information about how the FDA has set us up to lose in a future WTO trade dispute via which our dietary supplement laws are scheduled to be overturned in a similar trade dispute, most Americans ignorantly turn a deaf ear saying "that could NEVER happen HERE".

Failing to grasp whats happening in the world, all too many American vitamin consumers have been turning a deaf ear to my plea that we need to assist the Alliance for Natural Health to overturn the EU Food Supplement Directive due to its global implications.

Wrong. It not only CAN happen, but this Reuters article PROVES it can happen.

Since 1996 IAHF has been exposing the exact mechanisms by which the USA has been set up for the harmonization of its vitamin laws to a mindlessly restrictive international standard, and also the exact mechanisms via which the pharma dominated vitamin trade associations have been pulling the wool over the eyes of their members to keep them from fighting back.

ANH needs grass roots support to take their legal battle to overturn the EU Food Supplement Directive on to the EU Court of Justice in Luxemborg. Please donate to them at www.alliance-natural-health.org.

For thousands of Britons battling the debilitating effects of cancer, depression, even eczema, diet is crucial. They view the vitamins and minerals they take as vital in their fight against sickness. So why does the EU want to cut off their supply?

Metro Group has abandoned a trial of RFID radio tags, after protests by digital rights activists.

The German retail giant has tested RFID tags at its Extra Store in Rheinberg, near Duisburg for nearly a year. The chips, hidden underneath price tags for cream cheese, shampoo and razor blades, were read over the air using radio waves, without physical contact and unnoticed by customers.

Maryland voters will get their turn at the polls today.

Polling places will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and for the first time, touch-screen voting machines will replace paper ballots and punch cards.
[...]
The most interesting U.S. House race to watch is the challenge to Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, Republican.

Mr. Bartlett opposes abortion and homosexual "marriage," favors lower taxes and wants the Ten Commandments posted in the House and Senate. But he is too liberal for Frederick County State's Attorney Scott L. Rolle, who calls himself "the real conservative" in the 6th District primary.

Mr. Rolle hopes Mr. Bartlett's opposition to capital punishment, reluctant support for the Iraq war and qualms about the Patriot Act will persuade Republicans to choose him in the state's most closely watched House race.

Dave had over $1000 dollars in his back pocket (in his wallet). New twenties were the lion share of the bills in his wallet. We walked into a truck stop/travel plaza and they have those new electronic monitors that are supposed to say if you are stealing something. But through every monitor, Dave set it off. He did not have anything to purchase in his hands or pockets. After numerous times of setting off these monitors, a person approached Dave with a 'wand' to swipe why he was setting off the monitors.

Believe it or not, it was his 'wallet'. ...

Dave and I have brainstormed the fact that most items can be 'microwaved' to fry the 'rfid' chip, thus elimination of tracking by our government.

So we chose to 'microwave' our cash, over $1000 in twenties in a stack, not spread out on a carasoul. Do you know what exploded on American money?? The right eye of Andrew Jackson on the new twenty, every bill was uniform in its burning...

I remembered I had a couple of Euros in my wallet from my last visit to France and decided what the heck, I'll microwave them. After just three seconds the first note exploded into flame and fearing for my microwave's safety I quickly pressed the stop button. A fluke? Maybe, I tried with the second note, a five, again after precisely three seconds the same bright flash of flame.

It was obvious to see where the tags had been as two perfectly round holes could be seen in my notes. I noticed that the holes lay precisely over the metal strip within the notes.

Casey Nethercott, the owner of the Arizona ranch where Operation Thunderbird is ongoing, was thrown into jail on Monday 1 March 2004 on the authority of the Governor's signature alone. His civil rights have been stripped, and he is being held without bond

audio clip

I've heard some very underground news folks, and I don't want to spread any rumors here, but the deal has already been done. The Mossad is already thinking about taking out Mel Gibson.

While National Rifle Association officials were busy denying that they'd been orchestrating a sellout in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) -- an NRA Director -- had been working on an ammunition ban amendment. On the Senate floor Thursday, he introduced, discussed, defended and tried to justify the "Craig/Frist" amendment (Sen.Amendt 2625). This amendment, said Craig, is needed "to strengthen current armor piercing ammunition law." NRA's point-man in the U.S. Senate says that this is "what the law enforcement community needs."
[...]

HAITIAN leader Jean Bertrand Aristide was taken away from his home by US soldiers, it was claimed today.

A man who said he was a caretaker for the now exiled president told France's RTL radio station the troops forced Aristide out.

"The American army came to take him away at two in the morning," the man said.

"The Americans forced him out with weapons.

"It was American soldiers. They came with a helicopter and they took the security guards.

"(Aristide) was not happy. He did not want to be taken away. He did not want to leave. He was not able to fight against the Americans."

The RTL journalist who carried out the interview described the man as a "frightened old man, crouched in a corner" . . .

Macedonian Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski, together with Interior Minister Hari Kostov today took a Serbian aircraft to Sarajevo, to meet with Bosnian and SFOR officials and expedite the return of the bodies of President Boris Trajkovski and the 8 others killed with him when their small plane crashed near Mostar on Thursday morning.

Simultaneously, Macedonia’s civil aviation authority reportedly wants convention overruled and for the plane’s black box to be sent to Germany, rather than France, for analysis, as suspicions concentrate on the behavior of French SFOR ground controllers who were in charge in Mostar on Thursday morning.

Imagine divisions of grunts able to go without food and sleep for days on end while performing at peak level. That's the perverse dream of the Defense Sciences Office's new Metabolic Dominance Program.

"The vision for the Metabolic Dominance Program is to develop novel strategies that exploit and control the mechanisms of energy production, metabolism, and utilization during short periods of deployment requiring unprecedented levels of physical demand. The ultimate goal is to enable superior physical and physiological performance by controlling energy metabolism on demand," DARPA explains.

Much of this will be a matter of uncapping the natural safety mechanisms against excessive strain that humans have evolved with - overclocking the grunt, so to speak. But the DoD doesn't seem much concerned by the potential ill effects; nowhere in the call for proposals is there a request for a long-term health impact study.

"IT IS as simple as this," the former intelligence officer says. "The British Army took an honest soldier, paid him to become a terrorist and then fed him the information he needed to set up Catholics for assassination. We turned an ordinary man into a monster."

The honest soldier is Brian Nelson - perhaps the army's most infamous agent ever to operate in Ulster. His journey from ordinary man to monster begins at the fag-end of a five-year stint in the Black Watch regiment. It was then that the call came through from the shadowy Force Research Unit, the army's ultra-secret intelligence outfit in Northern Ireland.

They wanted to see Nelson. They had a proposition for him. It was 1977 and FRU officers asked him one question: would he be prepared to give up his career in the prestigious Scots regiment and return to his home on the Shankill Road in Belfast?

There was only one catch - he had to go back as a terrorist. The FRU wanted Nelson to accept a discharge from the army and join the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association. They had big plans for him.
[...]
As FRU sources told the Sunday Herald: . . . "This is probably the worst case of the use of an agent provocateur ever undertaken by the army - and there were actually anywhere between 16 and 20 agents similar to Nelson operating in Ulster. That means we put at least 16 decent soldiers into Northern Ireland and told them to commit terrorist crimes."
[...]
"It is hard to get your head around", said one FRU source. "To ordinary punters it is inconceivable, because it shows that the British were actually fighting the British. "
[...]