MARCH 2004

doremus observes

Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah The Daily Informer, in Sinclair Lewis' famous book "It Can't Happen Here", at its conclusion, "drove out saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom.....still Doremus goes on, into the sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die......
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Your Papers, Please
The Washington Times
2-27-4
http://www.rense.com/general49/pprs.htm

Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case to decide whether or not all Americans must have identification on them at all times. The case has been brought by a cowboy in Nevada who was asked to show ID while he was leaning against his pickup truck on the side of the road near his ranch. The police officer did not offer any specific reason why he demanded proof of identity. Having committed no crime, Dudley Hiibel, the cowboy, refused -- and was arrested. He was later convicted for "Delaying a Peace Officer." In America, still a free country, citizens should not be required to provide identification papers at any whim of the authorities.

In the case at hand, Mr. Hiibel gave the arresting officer a chance to justify his request. But when asked why he demanded identification, the sheriff's deputy said only, "Because I'm investigating." When asked what he was investigating, the policeman responded with a wisecrack: "I'm investigating an investigation." The argument before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether requiring identification at any time is a violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures or an invasion of privacy by the government.

In a 4-3 decision, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Hiibel, stating that the Nevada statute requiring identification during a police investigation "strikes a balance between constitutional protections of privacy and the need to protect police officers and the public." The argument is that police cannot rule out whether or not a stranger is a suspect in a crime until he is identified. In the dissent, Justice Deborah Agosti argues that merely knowing an individual's identity does not enhance safety. Regarding the Fourth Amendment, she explains, "Anonymity is encompassed within the expectation of privacy, a civil right." The Fifth Amendment also guarantees the right to remain silent, which can be construed as the right to guard one's identity.

The cowboy-ID case is timely because of the momentum in the federal government to mandate various kinds of national identification cards. Even some conservatives, such as Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, support the idea of so-called Social Security cards with biometric identifiers such as retina scans and electronic fingerprints. The Nevada high court's ruling notes that "the right to wander freely and anonymously, if we so choose, is a fundamental right of privacy in a democratic society." The openness of the prairie symbolizes this freedom. It would be a shame if cowboys were required to carry a driver's license to ride a horse while roaming the open range.

Copyright © 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

ban on scientific publications

 GSCOMM-L@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU>
  Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 04:40 
 
Dear colleagues,

This email is to draw your attention to a ban on scientific publications for authors of countries for which the USA declared a trade embargo.

Under the terms of the trade embargo, a publisher of a journal that accepts a scientific paper from an author residing in Libya, Iran, Iraq, Sudan or Cuba can be fined US$50,000 per case and be sent to jail for up to 10 years.
 
Some professional organizations, amongst others the American Chemical Society, IEEE and AAAS, have in the past declared that they will ignore the ruling. The American Chemical Society alone received 195 papers from  the banned countries. But the current policy under President Bush is going towards enforcement of the trade bans. As a result there has been a meeting of science publishers in Washington recently to discuss how to resolve the situation and guarantee freedom of scientific publication.
 
If you want to support the publishers in their effort you can sign a  petition at
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/PWC/

  The site has a more detailed explanation of the situation and links to  further editorials, for example
http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/82/i04/html/8204edit.html

 and comments on the issue and allows you to see who else has signed.
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HOW TO OPT OUT OF NEW YAHOO! SNOOP TOOL
Yahoo is now using 'Web Beacons' to track Yahoo Group users around the net, somewhat similarly to cookies. About half-way down the privacy statement page at http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/pixels/details.html in the section 'Outside the Yahoo! Network,' you'll see a little 'click here' link that will let you 'opt-out' of their new method of snooping. If you use more than one web browser, repeat the procedure with each. Caution: Don't be tricked by the "Cancel Opt-out" button. Tricky little devils, aren't they? Feel free to forward to others. ~~~
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-Republican Candidate for President
takes on the 9-11 issue (Jan 22)

We've got a wonderfully bizarre 9/11 visibility gig going on up here in the New Hampshire Primary now and need a lot of web visibility support to alert the legions on the ground.  John Buchanan is the guy who documented the Prescott Bush/Nazi finance story last fall (and got it spilled out from the NH Gazette to AP - see http://tinyurl.com/rfiz ). Last month he was asked by patrician Republican and Earth Day founder, John McConnell to run against Bush in the NH GOP Primary. Having barely enough to pay his South Miami rent, he reluctantly agreed and now he is up here running as the "9/11 Truth Candidate" and making a hell of a noise.  His hardscrabble campaign is starting to get traction and he's certainly shaking up his audiences. Last Monday he walked in cold to the podium at the new England Community Action Association Presidential Forum at the Nashua Sheraton where everybody was waiting for Joe Lieberman . They sat spellbound for 30 minutes and offered massive applause at the windup. Wednesday he spoke at New England College's College Convention in Manchester and the kids gave him a lo-o-ong hooting thumbs up ovation.  So PLEASE get everyone you can to link to our John Buchanan, "9/11 Truth Candidate" site as well as his his own highly skeptical blog. The URLs are: http://johnbuchanan.org and http://www.buchanan04.blogspot.com

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SPEECH TO MANCHESTER SUPPORT GROUP 1/7/04

Good afternoon and thank you for welcoming me so warmly. I stand before you today less as a candidate and more as a messenger and the message I bear is simple and stark. We have all been lied to about 9/11, the country is in mortal danger and only you can make it right. If you need a label, I stand here as a 9/11 Truth Candidate and some may thus dismiss me as a single-issue candidate and in a narrow sense that is true. But if you consider that 9/11 has led us into fiscal ruin, endless war and constitutional twilight, my issue is the mother issue of our age.

That said let me return to the 9/11 message the first line of which is this: They wanted it to happen. They being the neocon members and associates of PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, an ultra-rightwing think tank and mouthpiece for Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and most Bush's handlers these days. Cheney, Wolfowitz and their PNAC fellows had been campaigning publicly for Mideast oil wars since 2000, but also said publicly that the American people were not likely to buy these plans without a quote "catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor" unquote. They wanted it to happen. And despite over 23 warnings from 11 foreign governments in the months preceding the attacks they did NOTHING to protect or warn the country. They did less than nothing. They quashed 5 different investigations into Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda by FBI teams, and then promoted the FBI official who did most of that quashing after 9/11. They wanted it to happen. And the day it finally did they let it run its course.

There was a mysterious total collapse of all our air defenses. Even though planes had been routinely scrambled 67 times for far lesser threats in the preceding year, on 9/11 all standard operating procedures inexplicably broke down. With 4 hijacked planes in the air and Flight 77 taking more than an hour to reach the Pentagon, not a single plane was there to intercept its deadly course. Think about that for a long moment. A trillion dollar defense establishment, over three months of top level warnings, an hour's lead time, fighters based ten minutes away, and they could not even protect their own goddamn headquarters.

So 9/11 happened. 3000 people were instantly killed. The economy was desperately wounded, the country paralyzed with fear. Madness, you say. Who could possibly benefit from such a tragedy? Well, let's just recite some facts.

-- The president's poll numbers nearly doubled overnight.

-- Our intelligence and defense services, who neither informed or defended us, got a huge new budget bounce.

-- The FBI got a big cash bonus too plus a secret police wet dream in the form of the Patriot Act. (And when a couple senators Daschle and Leahy say, "Slow down, this act's not exactly patriotic or even constitutional" guess who gets anthrax in the mail?)

-- Arms merchants like Daddy Bush's Carlyle Group reaped billions, no, tens of billions, from new "War on Terrorism" orders. Washington insider firms like Cheney's Halliburton, and GOP cash cow Bechtel harvested hundreds of billions in no-bid contracts as we methodically blow up and renovate both Afghanistan and Iraq.

So 9/11 happened and the administration ordered, "thou shalt not investigate! It will distract us from the fight against terror and all the war we have to make." White House refusal may seem natural, but where was our crusading press? It is another simple sad fact that the journalists who should have been investigating this whole peculiar business were now owned and operated by big media corporations who were making so damn much selling these wars that they held their peace instead. They not only did not question the scores of 9/11 lies and contradictions, they never even told the public there were still unanswered questions out there at all. So 9/11 happened, flags were waved, money flowed and the press shut up.

And there it all would have ended PNAC with its oil wars, Bush with new poll Viagra, the FBI free from the Bill of Rights, the merchants of war rolling in blank checks and the media fat with cash. A happy ending, no? Not for the victim families, and if it weren't for a few hundred courageous ones I wouldn't be standing in front of you today. The government tried to buy their silence too, and offered all 3,000 families fat payments from a Victims Compensation Fund. Each would get about a million bucks if they just promised to shut, stop asking the logical questions and simply go away. Most did, it is true.

But some who were paying attention fought back and demanded a real investigation. They got the National 9/11 Commission instead. Can you imagine a 9/11 investigative commission where most of the commissioners have ties to the oil, airline and arms industries if not to the White House itself? Where the witnesses are not even asked to testify under oath? Where interrogations of FBI, FAA and NORAD insiders are all supervised by White House chaperones called "minders"? Where the executive director worked for years with Condi Rice, head of the National Security Council who herself refuses to testify under oath? Where the latest appointed commissioner is an Iraq war hawk who publicly said he thought the most important role of the commission was quote "not to embarrass the president" unquote?

Could you believe in an investigation like that? Can you believe the shit that is going down? Well, neither can I and that is why I am here today to ask you to join with the desperate victim families and demand belated truth. The country has been swindled into endless war, repression and financial collapse. Thousands of people have been murdered and we still don't know the facts. I am just one voice saying these things up here in New Hampshire today, but if you would just do some homework you would see there are thousands like me working in shadow on the internet trying get out what the victim families want to say.

One great crusader in this struggle is your own Ellen Mariani, a Derry 9/11 widow who is suing Bush, Cheney and their neocon kin for knowingly letting her husband die for personal and political gain. I beg you to rally around her as one of the heroes of this cause, I also beg you to read some vital texts like Nafeez Ahmed's "The War on Freedom" or the 9/11 timeline at http://www.cooperativeresearch.org

And finally I ask you to vote for me to send a message of your own -- that this land is our land and it's time for gestapo-minded war profiteers to get the hell out. I thank you for sitting here and pray you will now begin to move. Good night and god bless what's left of our democracy.

From: http://www.oilempire.us/mlk.html

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This is Not My Execution by Kevin Cooper 29 Jan 2004

I, Kevin Cooper, am writing this from death row at San Quentin Prison. I am scheduled to be the next Black man executed by the state of California on February 10th, 2004.

While I am an innocent man about to be murdered by this state, I realize that innocence makes no difference to the people who control the criminal justice system, including this prison. This is the same system that has historically and systematically executed men, women and children who look just like me, if only because they can.

While it is my life that will be taken, and my body filled with poison, I will not say that this is my execution! That's because it is not, it is just a continuation of the historic system of capital punishment that all poor people all over this world have been and are subjected to.

To personalize this crime against humanity as "my execution" would be to ignore the universal plight, struggle and murder of poor people all over this planet we call Earth. This I cannot and will not do!

If I must be murdered by the state, then I will do so with my dignity in tact. This guilt that the criminal justice system has put on me will be questioned by anyone and everyone who finds out the whole truth of this case.

Read the full article...
http://santacruz.indymedia.org/feature/display/7210/index.php


SWEATSHOPS AND MILITARY RECRUITMENT "High school students and parents were shocked to find out that according to a clause buried in a recently passed Bush administration education bill, any school eligible for government funds must automatically turn in the names and addresses of its students to the military to help them in their recruitment efforts ... [yet] ... America's youth continue to rebel against the multiplying injustices they see committed in their name; whether it is economic exploitation or the militarization of their society ... Despite concerted efforts ... to turn them into happy consumers and willing soldiers, a new generation of Americans are questioning the new and dangerous course being charted by the Bush administration." http://www.duckdaotsu.org/recruit.html
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"Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? Expediency asks the question - is it political? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, popular, or political; but one must take it because it is right." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
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In Dante's circles of hell, the hottest circle was reserved for those who did nothing in a time of great moral crisis.
The PERISCOPE is purveyed aperiodically with a panoramic if passingly paranoid perspective on the persistently prevailing pandemic privacy predations of the Potomac Politburo -- with a particular penchant to exposing the pernicious proclivities of predominantly parasitic politicians to pervert our precious and precarious republic into a palpably pervasive police presence under the pretense of protecting the People; with pertinent >pointers to prepare the perspicacious Pilgrim against the potentially perilous pitfalls of Patriot imprudence.
http://autocontactor.com/app/r.asp?ID=5977190&ARID=0