This week: • Iraq • India • iRig™ •
• Spinoza • Shanghai • Sharks • Stuff •

 

US & UK behind mosque bombings

One of the great deceptions in this most deceptive of wars took place a fortnight ago which not a soul in the mainstream media has dared mention. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra was perpetrated by the US and the UK, most likely those folk who dare to win, the SAS. The bombs went off, the dome caved in and the next day the papers were awash with brazen headlines of Iraq descending into civil war as sectarian strife peaked. The spin doctors in Washington must have congratulated themselves on a job well done. Johnny Iraqi is fighting Johnny Iraqi and it ain’t got nothing to do with the invading Brits and Yanks.

By bombing Shias one day and Shiites the next, Rumsfeld is taking a leaf out of the age old British Empire tactic of divide and conquer — get the Iraqis to squabble among themselves, rather than blowing up American soldiers. Back in 1920, it was only when the different tribes and religions of Iraq united that they were able to throw the British out. The US, for once, has been studying its history books. Playing one side off the other is nothing new for the Department of Defense — vis the Iran/Iraq war, Nicaragua, Lebanon as text book examples of US interference.  

The elected Iraqi government is essentially Iranian-controlled, something the US cannot stand, so chaos is being promoted to make the government irrelevant. By generating hitherto never seen sectarian violence then the likes of al Sadr won’t join the Sunnis to kick the US out.

With coalition forces essentially no longer in control of the country — hiding behind Burger King-lined Green Zones — control has been handed over to militias across the country.

The mighty Robert Fisk speaking in Australia said last week: “Certainly, somebody at the moment is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Someone wants a civil war. Some form of militias and death squads want a civil war. There never has been a civil war in Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities.”

Tantalizingly, he hinted at the real source of the mayhem: “I don’t believe we’ve got all these raving lunatics wandering around blowing up mosques. There’s much more to this than meets the eye. All of these death squads that move around are part of the security forces.”

If you click here you’ll be able to read two eye witnesses reports from the night before the mosque bombing. At least two witnesses saw “unusual activities by the ING [US-trained Iraqi National Guard] in the area around the mosque.” Two mosque guards reported four men in ING uniforms had blindfolded them and planted explosives. A second witness, Muhammad al-Samarrai, the owner of an internet cafe in the area, was told to stay in his store and not leave the area. From 11 pm until 6:30 am, ten minutes before the bombs were detonated, the area surrounding the mosque was patrolled by “joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans,” according to al-Samarrai. We would suggest that those Iraqi National Guards were in fact SAS soldiers. Remember last September’s embarrassing mishap when a couple of SAS folk were caught with beaucoup explosives and thrown in jail. Click here to refresh your memory.

According to John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets, as cited by Robert Dreyfuss in an article for the American Prospect, a 2004 Iraqi appropriation bill contained $3 billion for paramilitary units. The “bulk of the covert money” went to “support US efforts to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force” and also “an Iraqi secret police staffed mainly by gunmen associated with members of the puppet Iraqi Governing Council,” thus revealing the situation in Iraq is not precisely as the hand-fed corporate media would have us believe.

Rumsfeld has also created a Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), designed to “stimulate” terrorist reaction.

So then, spooks and special forces are detonating distraction across Iraq: it serves the White House purposes of staying there permanently and also begins to realize the plan sketched out in Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” which urges for the Balkanization of Arab and Muslim society and culture.

Finally, let’s look at the timing of this bomb, coming as it did hot on the heels of the videos of the beatings of Iraqi youth by British troops and more horrific images of the treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib by US forces. Perfect Pentagon PR. And the aftermath has lead to calls for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to cede to the more moderate Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi. What a lucky coincidence!

 

 

Bush sets Indian honeytrap

Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.
— Mohandas Gandhi

 

Behind the glowing scenes of friendship the real resonance from George Bush’s trip to India is a cunning play to trap the subcontinent into the tractor beam of US economic dominance.

Like China, the US is trying its hardest to stymie economic growth in India, so that it grows at a pace and direction satisfactory to American aims. Last year the Chinese were denied in their bid for American oil giant Unocal. Without access to significant raw materials growth cannot carry on unchecked in India and China — something the US is using all its muscle to ensure. The rise of Asian giants, India and China, must not lead to a corresponding decline in US dominancewhich  marks the single most important aspect of US foreign policy in this region.

Bush and Co are alarmed at India’s incredible technological savvy, having built up highly sophisticated nuclear facilities from nothing, despite American-imposed sanctions from the 1970s. Meanwhile, the US’ own nuclear know how is at a low ebb, having not constructed a nuclear reactor for more than three decades, since the Three Mile Island close shave of the late 1970s. Acknowledging high oil prices are here to stay, Bush has reactivated the American nuclear reactor programme and thanks to the deal thrashed out last week in New Delhi he will use Indian ingenuity to develop this sector.

As Bush’s own nuclear negotiating team has made clear in testimony to Congress, the administration wants to “lock in” India to a deal before moving to tie down and restrain the country’s nuclear potential in non-proliferation discussions.

Condoleezza Rice would have us believe that Bush’s policy in south Asia is a “balance of power that favours freedom”, which also appeals to Indians’ view of their country as a moral force in the world. Casting India as a friend and Iran as a foe can also be conveniently justified on such terms.

India’s size, geography and economic clout mean it is less susceptible to the kind of tactics used to intimidate Tehran and its own nuclear programme. The hypocrisy of giving his blessing to India and targeting Iran for exactly the same nuclear build up does not stop there, with Bush quite happy to allow Brazil to quietly initiate its own uranium enrichment programme on the quiet this past week.

The Guardian notes that “India’s energy policy has already come under serious pressure from America; the last petroleum minister had ambitious plans to build an Asian grid of oil and gas pipelines stretching from Ukraine to Japan. This plan, to be kickstarted by a pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan, ran counter to Washington’s interests. Last month the minister lost the oil portfolio…

“Unlike the cold war, where America shut out its rivals from the world market and refused to trade with them, its policy in the coming decades is to entangle rising powers in a web of rules designed to favour itself. As India may find to its cost, getting into a hot embrace with Washington is easy; getting out may be much harder.”

But perhaps most sickening of all for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets last week to denounce Bush was allowing this war criminal to be taken to visit Gandhi’s memorial in Rajghat.

Award winning author Arundhati Roy summed up Indian feelings on this matter, saying that when Bush put the flowers on the revered shrine it was as if he had “poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.”

 

 

Vote Republican with the new iRig™

It’s all over. Don’t bother placing bets. The fate of 2008’s presidential election in the US was decided this past week on the sly. The same machines that swung the vote Bush’s way controversially in Ohio to give him victory against Kerry in 2004 have been installed in California. The significance of this cannot be underestimated — no Democrat has won the presidency without taking California thanks to the curious arcane set up of the electoral system whereby your vote does not actually go towards the candidate but towards an electoral college who then picks the winner. California, with more seats on the electoral college than any other state, is crucial.

California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson decision last week to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008.

“It doesn’t matter who the Democrats run — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It won’t make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency is lost and the Bushists are in — already. It’s over,” wrote Chris Floyd this past week.

The Republican appartchik gave the greenlight for electronic, paperless voting despite the expert panel he had commissioned to look into it reporting a whole host of problems, the machines were riddled with curious built-in glitches that effectively ceded complete control of the system to hackers who could change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates and change the races being voted on, according to one blogger with access to someone on the panel.

What’s more, “hackers wouldn’t need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work,” the Los Angeles Times notes. “Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn’t necessarily know they’d been rooked.”

America’s votes are increasingly controlled by a small number of interrelated corporations: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, all of which have close political and financial ties to the Bush faction — and to other dark forces as well. Diebold and ES&S were both bankrolled by tycoon Howard Ahmanson, who was also a major funder of the Christian “Reconstructionist” movement, which openly advocates a totalitarian theocracy in America, including the death penalty for homosexuals, slavery for debtors, stoning for sinners and stripping nonbelievers of citizenship. As journalist Max Blumenthal reports, these extremists have been welcomed as a key part of the Bushist base of politicized evangelicals, whose cadres have been quietly filling government posts for the past five years. Meanwhile, Sequoia — whose machines racked up 100,000 “mistakes” in just one Florida county in 2004, according to a recent audit — is owned by a business partner of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm whose insider deals and war profiteering have earned millions for the Bush family.

Faceless machines bankrolled by right wing nutjobs have sealed Republican hegemony for years to come. It’s time for us all to be Luddites again and go out smashing the machines that dictate our lives.

 

• If you want to see how Diebold machines work, head on over to Where’s The Paper.

 

 

I can whatever I want. Signed, me.

As part of an assessment of torture methods under consideration at Guantanamo, a military lawyer, Lt Col. Diane Beaver, acknowledges that American soldiers are bound by The Uniform Code of Military Justice, but that if they get a form of permission, or immunity, in advance, then they would be off the hook.

Much of life consists of keeping a straight face in a world in which the reflective hears of this shit and is motivated to have a stiff drink and a good horse laugh, like Mister Ed.

Moral seriousness compels us to respond.

Earth to Lt. Col. Diane Beaver. A pure exemption to a law, given to a named person, is legally equivalent to private law and a bill of attainder which names a person as exempt to either the normal protection of the law (attainder) or passes him a note, saying as private law, “this law don’t apply to you, Louie, signed, da Boss”.

I’m not a lawyer: I don’t even play one in the movies. But I do know that the Constitution names bills of attainder as an abuse because they were used during wars of religion in Britain to nail specific individuals that pissed off the Crown or — after 1688 — Parliament for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all.

A bill of attainder has the syntax of “Lord and Lady Douchebag are hereby attainted as scum”. It names in order to attaint. Its logical complement has the syntax “Lord and Lady Douchebag do not have to obey law X, not as members of a class that is open to new members, but purely as Lord, and Lady Douchebag” “names names” in order to make private law.

The problem is that the law can’t name individuals in such a pure way, it has to apply to any x, characterized as John Q. Citizen: it names the abstract human soul. Now, I am well aware that in the legal dreamtime of the average Joe, bills of attainder (known as wolves’ tickets in the Soviet Union) and private law (affording membership in the nomenklatura, the named ones, another Soviet term) are complementary halves of the real world, which we apologize for by assuring each other that it is a mug’s game and it sucks, too.

The problem is that if Colonel Beaver (how do her male underlings keep a straight face?) issues a special permission note to interrogators, and if (as it happens in the Real World) corporations are issued “private letters” (private law) by the Internal Revenue Service in the USA, saying that their tax dodges are going to be ok as regards matter X for the foreseeable future, John Q. Citizen, Joe Blow, Jane Roe, and the rest of us ordinary slobs will find ourselves living in a legal shadowland, compressed between bills of attainder on the one hand (wolves’ tickets to Gitmo) and private law on the other.

Legal regression is a reality. Bills of attainder and private law contradict the very idea of legal impartiality in which we go to law to get elemental fairness, which means being treated the same as the other slob. Anarchists beware, for the fantasy of living outside the law, if that is yours, is being sold quietly to the American public by post-sixties neocons.

 

 

Trees banned in smoggy Shanghai

Atop the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition sprawls a gargantuan scale model of how this financial metropolis will look in 2010. Most incongruous in this Blade Runner-esque vision of the old Paris of the East are the amount of trees in the model — the place teams with greenery, completely against today’s reality.

The little red email has just returned from Shanghai where the pollution continues to hurt your throat, blue skies are at a premium — though not in the business sense. On Thursday, the wonderful Shanghai Daily newspaper — known by locals as the Sunshine Daily, due to its cheery propaganda nature — ran what can only be described as an ‘only-in-China’ type story.

“Downtown residents won’t be allowed to plant trees when Tree Planting Day arrives on March 12. Instead, they will only be allowed to adopt existing trees,” the paper wrote.

Allegedly this annual event has had to change as the downtown area “has run out of room for any new trees,” according to the Shanghai Greening Committee — as unlikely a committee as you’ll find in this industrial city of 17 million people.

“We encourage people to adopt trees nearby their homes,” said Gao Xiangwei, a spokesperson for the Shanghai Greening Committee.

And authorities wonder why the nation — with 16 out of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world — is slowly dying from asphyxiation.

 

 

Maritime Mibs

These sharks might not have “freakin’ laser beams” as per Dr Evil’s request, but the Pentagon is planning to use these meat chomping marine mammals as “stealth spies” mirroring a shoddy 2003 American TV movie called Dark Waters. The New Scientist reports defence scientists are putting neural implants in sharks, to transmit their controllers’ bidding.

“The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks’ natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails,” says the report. “By remotely guiding the sharks’ movements they hope to transform them into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted.”

The news follows on from last year’s leaked report that as many as 36 military trained killer dolphins had fled their pen following Hurricane Katrina, something we reported on here.

Dolphins and sealions have been used by the American military since 1971 during the Vietnam War for mine clearance and object retrieval respectively.

If the electrode inspired brain implants work how soon till they are transferred — Manchurian Candidate style — to humans?

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Illuminati devil year 666
The year 2006, seems to be very important and significant in the Illuminati scheme of things. June 6, 2006 is calculated numerologically as 6-6-6. That date falls in the midst of the pagan and masonic veneration of the planet Sirius and its “Dog Days of Summer.”

Get connected to Crop Circles
If flattened crops are your thing, then Crop Circle Connector is your one-stop shop for all your crop circle needs.

 

Video: Taliban Ascendancy
This Channel 4 news report shows the rise of the Taliban in the Afghanistan of Operation Enduring Freedom, detailing the burning of schools in Helmand Province. The Channel 4 media player only seems to work in internet explorer — but you can’t have everything: where would you put it?

 

Book review: Nuclear Showdown —
North Korea takes on the world
The little red email caught up with rolling news’ rent-a-quote man for right wing, scary, alarmist Asia stories, Gordon G Chang, who is plugging his latest work Nuclear Showdown — North Korea takes on the world. Having authored, to much media fanfare, a book detailing the coming collapse of China five years ago, Chang is now warning though his latest opus that the world is imperilled by North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and his alleged stash of nuclear weapons.
While his detractors label him melodramatic, Chang is adamant that the threat posed by Kim’s rogue regime — the US’ longest running opponent — is deadly serious.
North Korea is the only nation to have withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, he points out. “By its defiance Pyongyang is shredding the world’s nuclear nonproliferation regime and inspiring other bomb builders,” he says, citing, “Iran’s atomic ayatollahs” as evidence. He reckons unless the DPRK is dealt with properly then others will simply become nuclear powers regardless. “North Korea is not just about Korea. North Korea is about Iran, Syria, Algeria and every other nation that wants the most destructive weapon in history.”
Chang’s research leads him to believe that Kim has “about ten bombs with plutonium cores”. Hmmmm … that claim is highly questionable. Chang reckons military strikes or a US nuclear climb-down are the only way out of the current impasse. Gordon should know that military strikes would a) unleash a storm of missiles on Seoul and b) enrage the Chinese.
Turning to China and Chang’s original high profile book, The Coming Collapse of China, a book that turned heads when it came out but now lies open to question, Chang is confident his predictions will still come through.
“I still believe that the Communist Party will fall from power by the end of this decade,” he tells the little red email, “The [Chinese Communist] Party may look stronger, but as China gets more prosperous, it is becoming less stable. Protests are becoming more frequent, larger, and more violent. And we are witnessing something that we have never seen before: middle class Chinese taking to the streets when they feel there is no other way to defend their interests. So I haven’t changed my ultimate conclusion,” he insists. Middle classes protesting in the streets? We haven’t clocked that one, Gordon.

 

The top 10 secret societies you should know about
The Canned Revolution clique didn’t make into this list — we are way too secret. Or is that obscure?

 

Ghost of Elvis appears on receipt
Never mind the Shroud of Turin, here is the Receipt of Office Depot. And you can buy it.

 

China develops solar powered flying saucer
This looks likely to become the spooks’ ride of choice for surveillance.

 

It’s Jerry time
What is life really all about? We at the little red email haven’t a clue. Jerry here has no idea either.

 

Anyone for a spot of Golf war syndrome?
Depleted uranium is now helping golfers hit the ball further. What the long time side effects will be, is not really covered. Chairman Walter Schmeitzer seems a little blazé: “Most of the guys who play golf are old and don’t really care about their fertility. As for the environment, I mean, we’ve been pouring chemicals and green dye onto courses for years now so a little bit of radiation isn’t gonna make a lot of difference.” Fertility might not worry old guys, but cancer would seem to be a concern to them.

 

Video Conspiracies: Iraq
Simon Reeve investigates the real reasons for the war in Iraq, in this programme made for Sky Television (even a stopped watch tells the right time twice a day). Starting with oil and the contracts set up between Saddam and non-American/British companies. The latter part of the film looks at the petro-dollar cycle and how OPEC members can threaten US power by using the euro to trade oil — could Iran be next?

 

Media Lens focuses on spooks in Fleet Street
This week, Media Lens has guest writer Richard Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, shedding light on the links between the UK press, MI5, MI6 and beyond.

 

Be corrupted absolutely
by Absolute Power. Enjoy episodes one, two, three, four and five of series three here.

 

Why burn flags when you can bust them?
Adbust? Flag bust? We’re all friends here so what’s the difference? Hey, it’s topical, after all. Pictured, one of the thousands of protesters who took to the streets to protest Dubya’s visit to India.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then how come Central and North America is bracing for a worse hurricane season than last year’s record one?