Aug 18

Preparing for an urban WMD attack


On Saturday, the San Francisco Fire Department, along with a group of other public and private agencies, ran a large-scale training exercise revolving around an urban weapons of mass destruction terrorist attack. Here, an emergency worker in a full hazmat suit examines the faux chemical that was supposedly found in the attack, which was said to be sodium cyanide, a poison that quickly affects peoples respiratory systems. On the ground behind, volunteers playing the role of dead victims lay prone. (Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO - “Weapons of mass destruction multi-agency exercise.”

If I’ve ever covered an event with a more stark title, I can’t think of it.

But there I was Saturday morning, along with several hundred firefighters, police officers, Army National Guard personnel, and members of other local, state, and federal agencies for a large-scale exercise designed to help train all these emergency responders how to deal with a major terrorist attack involving suspected chemical weapons or other bio-hazards.

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Jul 02

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is considering a plan to ship deadly chemical weapons to military sites in four states to accelerate the destruction of the munitions, a new report to Congress says.

The idea of transporting such lethal agents along routes such as from Colorado to Oregon is prompting opposition from Congress and watchdog groups.

They say the plan exposes the American public to unnecessary risks as the U.S. government is concerned about terrorist attacks.

To honor a 1997 treaty banning chemical weapons, Congress has ordered the military to destroy all its munitions by the end of 2017.

In an unpublicized report delivered to lawmakers last week, the Pentagon said it probably could not meet that deadline unless it ships nerve agents and mustard gas to additional sites for destruction.

Even adding more people and working around the clock at the two sites with complicated dismantling requirements in Kentucky and Colorado may not help the military meet the 2017 deadline, the report said.

Work would be speeded up if some weapons at Kentucky’s Blue Grass Army Depot are moved to sites in Alabama and Arkansas, the report said, while some at the Pueblo, Colo., site are sent to Utah and Oregon.

Congress would have to change laws that forbid moving the weapons, the report said.

That prospect is uncertain. While chemical weapons have been destroyed safely at the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, it is too risky to ship more there, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said in a statement.

It’s shocking and irresponsible for the Department of Defense to even propose to ship large volumes of weapons of mass destruction across the highways of the United States considering the risks and atmosphere of terrorist threats,” said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a Kentucky citizens organization.

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Jun 11

Since former LA prosecutor Vince Bugliosi charged that Bush was guilty of the crime of mass murder, allegations by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan have simply ‘buttoned up’ Bugliosi’s already open and shut case. Bugliosi now has a material witness.

Bugliosi has much more than ‘probable cause’ to bring charges against Bush and his inner circle. He has the smoking gun, the open and shut case, the verifiable, indisputable fact that Bush knew Saddam did not have WMD but sent some 4,000 Americans to their deaths in Iraq anyway. I want to see McClellan on the witness stand spilling his guts about how Bush planned to hoax the world for the benefit of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton!

Bugliosi’s book hit the stores just recently and since then the capital murder case against Bush has been made open and shut with a material witness to the crime: Scott McClellan. McClellan’s ’smoking gun’ is his recent confirmation that Bush and co-conspirators inside the White House deliberately planned the US attack and invasion of Iraq knowing full well: 1) that Saddam did not pose a threat and, 2) Saddam did not have WMD. It’s open and shut. Let Bush’s murder trial begin. Not mentioned by Bugliosi in the video is the fact that because the US attack and invasion of Iraq was a fraud, Bush may be held accountable in the International Court, as well, for the deaths of every Iraqi at the hands of US troops. This is not merely a matter for the International Court however. It is the subject of federal law, US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441, which makes George Bush subject to the death penalty under US federal law.

You can buy the Book here (Amazon.com): The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

The timeline of events, a matter of public record, and the testimony of Scott McClellan who supports the charge that Iraq was but a fraud upon the entire world, is the case that must be made against Bush in court. As we know –Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN consisted of ten year old, obsolete black and white satellite photos, a plagiarized student paper (cited as authoritative), and other bogus so-called ‘evidence’. Events have proven all of these deliberate fabrications to be bald faced lies. Saddam never had WMD, in fact, few weapons but those provided him by the US.

As a critic of US foreign policy in the Middle East, especially when unsubstantiated allegations of weapons of mass destruction are used to sell a war, I am no stranger to the concept of questioning authority, especially in times of war. I am from the Teddy Roosevelt school of American citizenship, adhering to the principle that “to announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public.”…

As a weapons inspector, I was very much driven by what the facts said, not what the rhetoric implied. I maintain this standard to this day in assessing and evaluating American policy in the Middle East. It was the core approach which governed my own personal questioning of the Bush administration’s case for confronting Iraq in the lead-up to the war in 2002 and 2003. I am saddened at the vindication of my position in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, not because of what I did, but rather what the transcripts of every media interview I conducted at the time demonstrates: The media were not interested in reporting the facts, but rather furthering a fiction.–Investigate This, Scott Ritter

The Washington Post is now trying to re-write history in favor of Bush’s latest ‘counter-offensive’. By his own accounts, Bush did not lie about WMD though we were told repeatedly of Saddam’s chemical and nuclear programs. Bush now claims that his ‘war like talk’ was a mistake. This latest round of revisionism is beginning to look like a ‘full court press’ to salvage a few shreds of credibility. Notably, the Washington Post is wasting ink with its latest efforts to rewrite the history according to George W. Bush.

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president’s statements “were substantiated by intelligence information.”On chemical weapons, then? “Substantiated by intelligence information.”On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.” Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? “Generally substantiated by available intelligence.” Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.” –Fred Hiatt, ‘Bush Lied’? If Only It Were That Simple Continue reading »

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Jun 06

President George W. Bush and his top policymakers misstated Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorism and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq’s arms programs as they made a case for war, the Senate intelligence committee reported on Thursday.

The report shows an administration that “led the nation to war on false premises,” said the committee’s Democratic Chairman, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia. Several Republicans on the committee protested its findings as a “partisan exercise.”

The committee studied major speeches by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials in advance of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and compared key assertions with intelligence available at the time.

Statements that Iraq had a partnership with al Qaeda were wrong and unsupported by intelligence, the report said.

It said that Bush’s and Cheney’s assertions that Saddam was prepared to arm terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the United States contradicted available intelligence. Continue reading »

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Jun 01

(NaturalNews) The use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by the U.S. military may lead to a death toll far higher than that from the nuclear bombs dropped at the end of World War II.

DU is a waste product of uranium enrichment, containing approximately one-third the radioactive isotopes of naturally occurring uranium. Because of its high density, it is used in armor- or tank-piercing ammunition. It has been fired by the U.S. and British militaries in the two Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, as well as by NATO forces in Kosovo and the Israeli military in Lebanon and Palestine.

Inhaled or ingested DU particles are highly toxic, and DU has been classified as an illegal weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations.

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has estimated that 50 tons of DU dust from the first Gulf War could lead to 500,000 cancer deaths by the year 2000. To date, a total of 2,000 tons have been generated in the Middle East.

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May 29

‘Climatic warfare’ potentially threatens the future of humanity, but has casually been excluded from the reports for which the IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Michel Chossudovsky is a Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and an editor at the Centre for Research on Globalization, www.globalresearch.ca
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Beware the US military’s experiments with climatic warfare, says Michel Chossudovsky

Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.

Environmental modification techniques have been applied by the US military for more than half a century. US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’.

During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), is an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative - ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.

Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, ‘offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes: ‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.’ Continue reading »

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Apr 29
Dave Gaubatz is no stranger to controversy.

The former Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent maintains he found Saddam’s WMD bunkers, but that the U.S. military declined to follow up. His repeated allegations were picked up by a number of media outlets– and attracted the attention of prominent Congressmen, like then-Sen. Rick Santorum, then-Rep. Curt Weldon, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra. There hasn’t been any confirmation, however.

Lately, Gaubatz has been pushing another eye-opening assertion. Earlier this month, Gaubatz claimed that the Active Denial System, the military’s allegedly-nonlethal “heat ray,” is really a killer weapon, after all. It’s an allegation that, if true, would mean the entire public face of the program is a cover up of sorts. Gaubatz says he saw first hand the military testing the ray gun on… goats.

DANGER ROOM caught up with Gaubatz recently to quiz him a bit about his claims: Continue reading »

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Apr 09

MIDDLEBURY - Scott Ritter, former head of weapons inspection in Iraq who protested there were no weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion, believes the same is true for Iran.

But there is an 80 percent chance of war with Iran, he told about 200 people Wednesday at Middlebury College as part of a series of talks facilitated by the Vermont Peace and Justice Center.

The pattern of preparations for such a conflict has been steadily developing and involves Congress as well as the Bush-Cheney administration, he said. Continue reading »

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