Milkhouse Mouse

The DHS brain trust proposes to generously fund a "pilot program" for "securing" New York City that apparently is intended later for other U.S. cities. I can't wait....

On 13 April, Grants.gov posted this RFP (request for proposal)

from a State or local unit of government, interstate or intrastate entity, or a special district, who will work with governmental entities serving jurisdictions within 45 miles of NYC. This single application must include the following jurisdictions: States of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut; NYC (New York City Police Department (NYPD), in particular), the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey (PANYNJ), and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Listed in the Catalogue for Domestic Assistance ("CFDA Number: 97.106 -- Securing the Cities" and proposed under the auspices of "The Securing the Cities (STC) Initiative," the project is looking for an organization that can

design and implement an architecture for coordinated and integrated preventative detection and interdiction of illicit radiological materials that may be used as a weapon (Radiation Dispersal Device (RDD) or Improvised Nuclear Device (IND)) within a high risk metropolitan area.

Here's the program's description:

The overall goal of the STC initiative is to prevent a Radiological/Nuclear (RN) attack on high-risk metropolitan areas by enhancing regional capabilities to detect and interdict illicit radioactive materials in and around metropolitan areas. One aspect of addressing this goal is providing assistance to State and local jurisdictions in and around major metropolitan areas that will enable these entities to build capabilities by: • Leveraging current technologies and deploying them regionally in a coordinated manner; • Designing, acquiring, and deploying the components of an operationally viable regional architecture for radiological/nuclear detection, focused on State and local jurisdictions; • Developing and implementing a common, multi-agency Concept of Operations (CONOPS) for sharing sensor data and resolving “hits” within the sensor architecture; • Training and exercising by the regional agencies to execute this CONOPS to a high level of proficiency; and, • Evaluate and implement an equipment supportability concept to provide the ability to sustain operational capabilities upon the departure of STC financial assistance. Assistance provided through this STC Funding Opportunity Announcement will allow the regional stakeholders to continue scaled implementation of preventive radiological and nuclear detection operational capabilities. Subject to funding availability and an independent assessment, DNDO may execute the STC initiative in other regions in and around major metropolitan areas.

If you believe have the technical expertise DHS is looking for to prevent a radiological or nuclear attack on NYC, or

If you have difficulty accessing the full announcement electronically, please contact:

Joan Keiser
Grants Officer
Phone 202-447-5603

or email her at joan.keiser@dhs.gov

Now I'm going to sleep better at night knowing the lowest bidder got this federal opportunity.

Robert D. Steele, the former second highest-ranking civilian military intelligence officer, is well versed in the story on Google's relationship with American Spookdom. In 2006, Steele, also a former CIA agent, told internet radio show talks host Alex Jones “that the company was ‘in bed with CIA'.”

Ooppss...That kind of loose info can't be good for the company's stock prices, right? Hardly. Money is following swell at Google's international headquarters in Mountain View, 40 miles north of San Francisco.

Steele raised eyebrows when he confirmed from his contacts within the CIA and Google that Google was working in tandem with "the agency," a claim made especially volatile by the fact that Google was recently caught censoring Alex Jones' [documentary film] Terror Storm and has targeted other websites for blackout in the past.

"I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government - that is a huge mistake and I'm hoping they'll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off," said the ex-CIA man.

"Google was a little hypocritical when they were refusing to honor a Department of Justice request for information because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency, the office of research and development," said Steele.

Steele called for more scrutiny to be placed on Google if it continues to engage in nefarious practices, saying, "If Google is indeed starting to do harm then I think it's important that be documented and publicized."

Steele's analysis was spot on. In the 21 October 2007 edition of the London Times, staff writer John Aldridge chronicled how Google, the most recent incarnation of Bay Area-Californian touchie-feelie of lattes, laptops, alpha sprouts and stock splits was hemorgraphing after it continued it corporate descent into good old US fascism.

As the company "prepares to celebrate its 10th birthday"

Google has developed serious engine trouble. A series of missteps have left it facing claims that it has gone from a benign project – creating the first free, open-all-hours global library – to the information society’s most determined Big Brother. It stands accused of plotting some sinister link between its computers and us: that it wants, somehow, to plug us into its giant mainframe – as imagined in The Matrix or Terminator.

The crisis began a few months ago when Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, popped up in London and made some extravagant remarks about the firm’s ambitions.

He declared that the company’s goal was to collect as much personal data as it could on individual users so that it could improve the quality of its search results and even start making recommendations, like a trusted friend.

“We are very early in the total information we have,” he said. “We cannot even answer the most basic question about you because we don’t know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

His comments provoked a firestorm. Right-to-privacy campaigners howled that a machine that knows so much about us that it can tell us what to do would be the biggest-ever threat to personal privacy.

No totalitarian regime, no Bond villain had dreamt up anything so creepy.

“At what stage,” one critic asked, “did the company whose motto is ‘Don’t be evil’ evolve into the Evil Empire?”...read more

So keep dropping your leftover savings into Google stock, eh?, for what's good for Google is good for Americka, 'k?

Throwing off the political repression of the "Washington Consensus,"Latin American populist movements are nourishing seeds of democratic justice buried beneath a hard layer of imperial colonialism bequeathed the continent by every US president since John Tyler. Even the Spanish judicial system is inspired by their linguistic heirs--for about three minutes [See 18 April update below.]

Here's an online promo-blurb for a recent documentary The War on Democracy by Australian John Pilger, an award-winning journalist.

John Pilger's 2007 documentary explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Pilger claims that the film "...tells a universal story... analyzing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called "war on terror". According to Pilger, the film’s message is that the greed and power of empire is not invincible and that people power is always the "seed beneath the snow".

Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries and who he claims are profiting from the war in Iraq. He investigates the School of the Americas in the U.S. state of Georgia, where General Pinochet’s torture squads were reportedly trained along with tyrants and death-squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

Watch a two-minute trailer below:



If that vid clip sparked a suspicion that American hight-school--and college--history has been told by the wealthy and elite, the complete 93-minute online film can awakne you from your comfortable sleep. Watch here.

Spanish Justice Upstages American....

Blogger Scott Horton's 13 April Daily Beast report was well-received among readers (increasingly, an American rarity) possessing IQs above room temperature (now widely commonplace):

Spanish prosecutors report they will indict former Bush Attorney General Albert Gonzales and five Bush White House legal cohorts for legal sophistry in sanctioning torture at Guantánamo Bay's Camp Delta. According to Horton

The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. “The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation,” one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

Now doesn't that breath some fresh air into the notion of "overdue justice."

John Yoo, the primary author of an August 2002 memo legally approving torture for the Bush White House, warrants some special consideration. Currently a professor of law at UC-Berkeley, Yoo in a 2006 even argued Bush was legally justified in crushing the genitals of terrorists' children if the commander-in-chief deemed it necessary, for whatever reason.

Alex Jones blogger Steven Watson--you really didn't think Wolf Blitzer, Tucker Carlson (or even Keither Olbermann, for that matter) deigned to actually cover this story, did you?--preserved this following gem of perverse thinking for what we can only hope will be played again at Yoo's Madrid trial.

During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress; that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Click here for the audio.

Since he so confidently revealed this special legal twist of mind, I've emailed Professor Yoo a couple of times at his UC-Berkeley office at the law school, fawning over all the legal acumen he has demonstrated in the proud service of for our former Commander-in-Chief.

What follows is my latest "atta boy" email to Yoo titled "How's it hanging, Big John?". (Yes, this email now waits for him in his inbox.)

16 April 2009


John Yoo
Professor of Law
Office: 890 Simon Hall
Tel: 510-643-5089
Fax: 510-642-3728
Email Address: jyoo@law.berkeley.edu

Hey there, Big swingin'John:

You are to post-9/11 American legal education what Bernsetin and Woodward were to the 70s-era study of investigative journalism. What am I talking about here? Well, let me tell you, Big John.

Sir, your 1 December 2006 debate in Chicago with Notre Dame law professor Doug Cassell was one to have unquestionably inspired a raft of kids from America's inner city ghettos to enroll into YMCA night school law classes. I happen to know your words inspired these children to new heights, John.

Yes, I'm talking about your astute legal reasoning on behalf of your old boss George W. Bush--do you guys hang out anymore since Obama moved into the White House?--that gave him legal justification to crush children's genitalia.

Man, you've good a real pair of your own, John; you just didn't give a sh*t what that group of liberal whimps in Chicago thought of your legal acuity. Man, I so admire you, dude.....

And the Brits do, too, man, for, like hey, emulation is the best form of flattery, right? Did you hear about "Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay"? It seems he really did have his genitals sliced with a scapel. (John, just check out http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/09/mohamed-torture-uk-us/ for the update on how all terrorist charges eventually were dismissed against him.)

I mean, like really wow, dude....you rock the world of Muslims, Big John

I hope when your semsters ends soon there at Berkeley you have opportunity to fly to Europe--I'm thinking Madrid--for a long sit-down with some kindly Spanish prosecutors who, even as I'm sending you this email, are drafting a written invitation (subpoena) to have you over to see them and reveal more of you legal genius rolled up in that gray matter of your brain, pal.

God bless your abiding sense of fairness, parenthood and democracy, Big John.

Forever your admiring buddy,
Moose Kateer

==
18 April 2009 update: The Spanish prosecutors apparently have been leaned up enough for them to drop their torture investigation of Yoo et al. "Torture advocate" Bill O'Reilly of Fox News TV fame has taken credit for the criminally-insane to continue crushing young boys' nuts.

Labels: children's genitalia, Doug Cassell, John Yoo, Spanish prosecuton, torture, war crimes

"High times" may still be ahead for those among us who aren't waiting around on our bail out billions.

For those among us who are neither Wall Street banksters or AIG insurance fraudsters, we know our federal government isn't doing to use our tax dollars to bail us out when we make fraudulent loans or package and sell bad credit vehicles.

No, there will be no bail-out for the rest of us who are well-connected. So we'll have to look out for ourselves and our families.

So High Times magazine (yes, the mag is still around) has a suggestion for the rest of us to survive our elite-forced pillage of the US Treasury and economic downturn.