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DOREMUS OBSERVES :
MATTERS OF INTEREST
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.
THE
QUESTIONS I MUST ASK
MARILYN A. GUINNANE
1615 EAST GUFFEY DRIVE
WASHOE VALLEY, NEVADA 89704
September 5, 2003
Richard H. Gilman, Publisher
THE BOSTON GLOBE
POB 2378
Boston, MA 02107-2378
Dear Mr. Gilman:
Who called Mayor Willie Brown, telling him not to fly on
September 11?
Who purchased all the put options against the downed
aircraft that day, earning him/them millions of dollars?
And why hasn't this been given serious attention by
the press?
Why were we told these victims were calling from cell
phones from those doomed aircraft when calling from cells
at their air position would have to be deemed technically
impossible?
Why were the alleged terrorists' names not on the
passenger manifests of the downed aircraft? (And
since they were not on the manifests, how could they have
been identified, and so rapidly? As a matter of
fact, sir, I was a flight attendant for eight years and I
can tell you point blank, if they're not on the manifest,
they are not on board. No ifs ands or buts on that
one.)
Why were the bin Laden family members flown out of the
country when all planes were supposed to have been
grounded? In fact, why were they even allowed to
leave the country without first being interrogated?
Why does everything we've been told about 911 sound like
a badly written B-movie script? Consider that silly
staged passport that was supposed to have frisbee'd
itself clear of all that carnage! The Koran found
in a parked car at the airport. Some book on how to
fly an airplane . . . and the date itself: 911.
All of it, strictly corn. It would be knee
slappingly laughable were it not so tragic.
Why have attempts at investigations as to what really
happened been thwarted by the government? Aren't
they supposed to want to know?
Why did that
imbecilic-puppet-who-did-not-win-the-election sit there
in a classroom reading a goat story for a good twenty
minutes after he'd been informed that the Twin Towers had
been hit?
Why did the WTC Towers collapse with the sort of symmetry
associated with demolition? Why did three towers
collapse when only two here hit?
Why don't newspapers and TV "journalists" talk
about the longstanding relationship of the Bushes and the
bin Ladens? Or the ties to Adolf Hitler of the
president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, in the early
1940s?
Why have we never seen a single picture of the plane that
supposedly hit the Reichstag---um, excuse me, the Pentagon?
Just some scattered pieces (read: plants).
And why was the damage not in keeping with what a
jumbo jet would have really done? The hole in the
building wasn't even big enough to have accommodated such
an impact.
Why was our civil defense ordered to stand down on that
fateful day? A general, allowed to speak only once
on television, said so.
Let us repeat that first question: Who called
Willie Brown, telling him not to fly on Sept. 11?
An Arab terrorist? Or Condoleeza Rice?
Ah Mr. Gilman, I think at some level every American knows
the answers to all these questions. It's just that
Americans are terrified of the truth, that their own
government engineered the entire catastrophic affair.
Foreigners know. Americans, however, have
their collective frightened heads in the sand. And
we have no real journalists, apparently.
Sincerely,
Marilyn A. Guinnane
cc:
Martin Baron, Editor
Renee Loth, Editor, Editorial Page
Helen W. Donovan, Executive Editor
Richard J. Daniels, President
"As
you may have heard, the U.S. is putting together a
constitution for
Iraq.
Why don't we just give them ours? Think about it -- it
was written by
very
smart people, it's served us well for over two hundred
years, and
besides,
we're not using it anymore."-- Tonight Show host Jay Leno
Republicans Seem to Want to Keep Computerized Voting
Easily Corruptible
by Rob Kall
OpEdNews.Com
Before the age of computers, there were all kinds of
ways for a local politico to "mess" with the
voting apparatus. He could arrange for a mechanical
machine to count wrong. Or, the names of people in
cemeteries could be kept or put on the voter rolls.
But now, in the wondrous age of computers and the
internet, it's possible, with a virtually undetectable
line of software code that can make itself disappear
after its done its dirty work, to wreak corruption on
hundreds or thousands of computerized voting machines
reflecting hundreds of thousands or millions of votes. A
number of recent elections are suspected of being tainted
by this voting corruption. We've opened a Pandora's box
with computerized voting, not knowing what was going to
come out.
But it looks like the Republicans like the way things
are, in spite of clear proof of a multitude of
errors and easily corruptible vote counting. US
Congressman Russ Holt introduced a bill earlier in the
year that would take many of the risks out of
computerized voting, and it would add safeguards to
prevent theft of elections or computerized tampering with
the voting process.
It seems that any patriotic American who cherishes the
central role of an honest voting process in the
maintenance of democracy would almost by reflex support a
bill that would make voting safer and more honest. Yet
since the bill was introduced, not one republican
congressman has signed on to the bill.
Now, one might not expect enemies of democracy
and the law, like Tom DeLay, support such a bill. But it
is shocking that not one single Republican has the spine,
the courage, the commitment to democracy to support a
bill that should be receiving bi-partisan support. It is
a sad time when elected representatives respond in lock
step, obedience to the ruling (in this case hedless)
leaders, rather than voting based on principles or for
the good of the nation.
It's been shown repeatedly that when mistakes have
been made by computerized systems, and there have been
hundreds of them, the mistakes almost unfailingly are in
favor of Republicans. While there is no clear proof yet,
there are a lot of people who believe that a number of
congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial elections
have been stolen by electronic tampering.
One reader suggested that tampering with the voting
process is such a serious offense that the punishment
should be the death penalty. But the fact is the
punishment for vote fraud is less than it is for other
forms of criminal fraud.
We need smart, strict laws that regulate computerized
voting so it provides the benefits of the power of
computers, while eliminating any risks of vote corruption
or manipulation. This is such simple, common sense, it's
very hard to understand why any honest politician would
oppose it.
Voting systems must provide a voter verifiable audit
trail, Software fraud expert Rebecca Mercuri reported at
the Computerized voting forum held Sept. 7, in
Philadelphia (organized by investigative reporter Lynn
Landes.)
Mercuri, who has become a widely cited expert on
voting software, says "A vote that can not be
counted is not a vote." And the fact is, that the
way most computerized voting systems work, you can't
count the votes after their cast. You have to trust the
software company, and trust that no-one is tampering with
the software or the data. You have to trust the data
acquisition and transmission process and we know that
there have been many problems there.
This issue-- making voting auditable and verifiable is
not a minor consideration. Every single democratic
primary candidate should be raising it-- they should all
be raising it in unison at the debates they participate
in. If it's not resolved by the time of the 2004
Presidential and congressional elections, there's a good
chance george the liar Bush will steal his way back into
a second term as president, and there's no telling how
many more congressional and senatorial seats will be
stolen, or gifted to crooked republicans.
The tens of millions of people who voted for Al Gore,
who were outraged by the theft of the election, should
all be contacting their national and state
representatives, demanding that laws be passed to prevent
any further shenanigans like what happened in Florida or
Indiana (Senator Hagel won an election with a percentage
way out of the polls' predictions, and he happened to be
a major shareholder in the local company that managed the
computerized elections and that refused to allow a
re-count.) While it may be difficult to get a
republican-run congress to pass bills that keep
elections, it is also possible to pass laws at the state
level. At least some states will be producing honest
elections. There will soon be model legislation available
for any state to model it's own laws after.
People who protested against the war should be getting
out and protesting against corruption-at-risk voting
systems. MoveOn.org and workingassets.com should get on
this issue along with, of course, the democratic
national committee.
Establishing a more honest, less vulnerable election
process, in which people can trust that their votes
really count, will help to bring more voters to the
polls, will enable people to regain their faith in
democracy. Failure to do so will spell ill for our
nation. Patriotic Republicans who value the democratic
process-- ie., the ones who haven't sold out to corporate
and other special interests-- should treat honest
election legislation as bipartisan.
"It's not the VOTING that's democracy,
it's the counting." Tom Stoppard
Rob Kall rob@opednews.com is publisher of progressive news and
opinion website www.opednews.com and organizer of cutting edge
meetings that bring together world leaders, such as the Winter Brain Meeting and the StoryCon Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and
Application of Story
DEPLETED
URANIUM WEAPONS
- The Pentagon has portrayed DU
munitions as indispensable in giving U.S.
soldiers an edge on the battlefield. The high
density of DU shells allows them to punch through
walls and armoured vehicles.
-
- But some see a more cynical reason
for their popularity: the United States is the
largest generator of DU in the world, with a
stockpile of 700,000 tonnes and growing. Since
the supply is controlled by the Department of
Energy, it is readily available and free of
charge. Transforming DU into weaponry has the
added advantage of easing the DOE's burden to
safely store the spent nuclear fuel.
We're in the Midst of a Nuclear War
http://www.nypress.com/16/37/news&columns/zen.cfm
The Heavy Stuff Cobalt casings and more, below the
decks.
My sourceI’ll call him "Ethan"is dead,
and now, having kept our agreement, I'm finally free to
write about this horror story.
Ethan had read about a recent decontamination drill that
was conducted in Denver. A transit train was filled with
mock victims and decontamination personnel. The article
went on at length about the abomination of "dirty
bombs"the impetus for this drill.
It reminded Ethan of the time he was in the Marine Corps,
when he was stationed on a big aircraft carrier.
"Jarheads" were placed on these ships for the
exclusive purpose of guarding the nukes. That, and
administration.
His job was to interview Marines in order to gather
information about their status, with mundane questions
such as, "Do you want to continue your dental and
medical coverage for your dependents this year?" and
"Do you want to take your accumulated leave or cash
it in?" Despite the innocuous nature of his work, he
was often below decks, where the weapons holds and
security personnel were. That required a Top Secret
clearance.
"While that sounds super-secure," he told me,
"it’s really not. You have ENTNAC clearance at
the very bottom... Then you have Secret, which for me
covered my having access to everyone’s SSNs, home
addresses, medical records, disciplinary records, etc.
Then you have Top Secret, which you need to be around
anything nuclear.
"Then you have about ten dozen higher levels of
security clearance. So, Top Secret is relatively
bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Nonetheless, the NCIS [Naval
Criminal Investigative Service] does go to your hometown
and spends some time asking folks about you. And when the
investigation is done, prior to issuing the clearance,
you are sworn not to disclose certain information that
the clearance exposes you to...ever in life."
Since he was in Administration, his work took place above
decks. His office was right down the hall from the
Admiral’s office. He also had the benefit of having
quarters right next to the officers’ staterooms.
Although his was called a "duty barracks" and
was not in fact a stateroom, it was the same thing, minus
the mahogany. Meaning he didn't have to sleep in steerage
with the rest of the jarheads.
Ethan was also right down the hall from the Officers
Club, for field grade and down. He had met an officer
there who was "a cool guy" who regularly
invited him to the Officers Club to play cards, smoke
cigars and engage in conversation. This officer would be
on duty for three days and off duty for three days,
completely disappearing. It turned out that he was the
officer in charge of the nuke weapons’ holds.
One day, Ethan had to get some information from the
officer about a TAD (Temporary Additional Duty) request
that he’d put in for. Ethan was leaving the ship to
go ashore and would not see him again, so he wanted to
make sure to get his request right, because he knew that
his friend really wanted to stay. While the officer was
in the hold, he was not, under any circumstances, allowed
to leave. Ethan couldn't reach him on the phone, so he
went below.
"I’d been in most of the holds to talk to other
Marines," he told me, "but I'd never been to
the one where this officer worked. I went through several
guarded vault-type doors and finally arrived at a duty
station where, for the fifth or sixth time, I was
required to show my Top Secret clearance credentials and
enter the day’s pass code onto a small computer
console. When I was cleared, I stated my business and was
given a radiation suitbit of a space-suit lookin’
thing."
He asked the Duty NCO (non-commissioned officer),
"What the hell’s this?" Ethan had been
around nukes before, but was never required to wear a
suit. The Duty NCO replied only that the officer "is
in with the jackets."
"The what?"
"Need to know." This meant that his station
orders forbade him to discuss any details of his post.
Ethan suited up and walked into a triple- door
sally-port, where he progressed through each airlock via
ten-inch-thick lead-lined doors. Past the last door, he
stepped into a massive room/warehouse, about 60 feet wide
by 100 feet in length, with a 20-foot ceilinghuge for
battleship storage-room standards. From the floor to the
ceiling, thousands upon thousands of what looked like
missiles were stored. It was weird, because he'd never
seen missiles stored in such a way where they were on top
of one another.
The officer came around a row of missiles, and Ethan
asked him the question he had for him about his TAD
request, and then asked him, "What the hell kind of
missiles are these?"
"Those aren't missiles; they’re cobalt
jackets."
"What are they for?"
"Well, this is ‘need to know,’ so keep
your mouth shut, but they are designed to slide on over
most of our conventional ordinance. They’re made out
of radioactive cobalt, and when the bomb they’re
wrapped around detonates, they contaminate everything in
the blast zone and quite a bit beyond."
"So they turn regular ordinance into nukes?"
"No, not exactly. The cobalt doesn't detonate
itself. It just scatters everywhere."
"Well, what? Does the radiation kill people?"
"Not immediately. Cobalt jackets will not likely
ever be used. They’re for a situation where the U.S.
government is crumbling during a time of war, and foreign
takeover is imminent. We won't capitulate. We basically
have a scorched earth policy. If we are going to lose, we
arm everything with cobaltand I mean everything; we
have jackets at nearly every missile magazine in the
world, on land or at seaand contaminate the world. If
we can't have it, nobody can.
"Just another example," Ethan told me, "of
what treacherous creatures our leadership is made
of."
I e-mailed the above anecdotewith the subject line
"Yikes!"to no-nukes activist Harvey
Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War and co-author of
The Superpower of Peace. I asked him to comment in a
couple of hundred words.
"‘Yikes’ is right," he responded.
"This nightmare has now essentially come true with
the use of depleted uranium on anti-tank and other shells
in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The military
rationale is that the super-hard depleted uranium helps
shells penetrate tanks and other hard structures. But the
long-term effect is that the uranium vaporizes upon
explosion and contaminates everything for hundreds of
yards, if not miles.
"Thus there are now whole regions that are heavily
radioactive. Reports are pouring in from all three
countries about soaring cancer rates, infant death rates
and more. The mysterious ‘Gulf War Syndrome’
may have been caused by radiation exposure suffered by
U.S. troops. So, though ‘off the books,’ the
last three major U.S. attacks have in fact been nuclear
in nature."
Volume 16, Issue 37
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Paul Krassner Bio:
http://www.hippiemuseum.org/krassner_bio.html
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