Even the Criminals of Climategate Avoid Gore

No wonder the CRU gang ignored Gore. He took their false work and falsified it some more.

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”—Mark Twain.

canadafreepress.com | Dec 16, 2009

By Dr. Tim Ball

Twain’s observation is precisely the issue with the Nobel Peace Prizes given to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC are now completely discredited because the ‘scientists’ at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia controlled the data, the computer models and the press releases officially known as the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

Their prizes were obtained for work deliberately falsified then used for policies that creates unnecessary hardship rather than peace. Equally disgraceful is how one prizewinner, Al Gore, distorted and falsified the distortions and falsifications of the other prizewinner, the IPCC.

Gore was already discredited, especially when his carbon footprint was found too big for his mouth. Other discredits include; the millions he made from his misdirection on carbon; failure to answer questions or participate in debate; character assassination of scientists who raised legitimate questions; the false claim that “the science is settled”, and failure to correct the major errors in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”. Gore must have created a major dilemma for the IPCC and CRU.

A minor dilemma was the contradiction over projected sea level rise. The IPCC 2001 Report said, “Global mean sea level is projected to rise by 0.09 to 0.88 m between the years 1990 and 2100,”. The 2007 Report raised the lower projection to 0.18 m but significantly lowered the upper limit to 0.59 m. In his ridiculous movie, Gore predicted a 20 ft (6m) rise but gave no time frame. Recently he made the false statement that the Arctic ice cap is the size of the continental US. Wrong! That is the amount that melts and refreezes every year. Then he said it would be all gone in 5 to 10 years, but ice this year has already recovered what it lost in the last few years.

Now, in a more bizarre twist, we learn Gore’s claim about the Arctic ice came from another scientist, Dr. Wieslav Maslowski. The professor then claimed Gore misquoted him, but his prediction was published in a Danish journal.

The problem is they’re both wrong, but that is the pattern of the climate issue. Lies on lies on lies create the tangled web Sir Walter Scott predicted when you practice deception.

But Gore doesn’t stop. There are academics and scientists lining up to provide him with more false information. He incorrectly claims Antarctica and Greenland are melting. Maybe he got the Antarctic idea from the false research produced by some at CRU that Antarctica is warming.

And he is still at it with incredibly stupid comments. On the Conan O’Brien show of 11/12/09, he said the temperature in the mantle, the deep layer immediately below the crust, is several million degrees just two kilometers down. This is many times hotter than the Sun. It is truly frightening to think this man was one step away from the Presidency, no wonder Clinton didn’t support his presidential run.

The CRU gang had to know what Gore was presenting in his movie and speeches, yet I am unable to find any direct reference to him in their emails.  When they occur it is in outsider emails. I am unaware of any public comments by CRU people about Gore’s work; it appears they studiously avoided him. You must be bad when the criminals avoid you.

Gore says the emails “don’t change established conclusions.” “These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.”

Well he got that completely wrong too but it’s not surprising because he misinterpreted their original work. Maybe he is relying on another academic source. Trevor Davis, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of East Anglia says, “There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation. CRU’s peer-reviewed publications are consistent with, and have contributed to, the overwhelming scientific consensus that the climate is being strongly influenced by human activity.”

What planet is this Davis on? Besides the clear evidence of criminality there is also the deliberate falsification of the science and perversion of the scientific publication and peer review process. His statement shows a complete lack of understanding of the email content and climate science. Like Watergate the problems of Climategate are compounded by the cover-up and nobody does it better than universities. Davis began with his condemnation of the leaks when first disclosed, but he had no problem with leaked emails he obtained about funding and provided to the CRU gang.

Of course, they were bringing in massive amounts of funding and that apparently bought Davis’s support. I watched funding create disturbing behavior and biases throughout academia.

No wonder the CRU gang ignored Gore. He took their false work and falsified it some more. Of course, they couldn’t denounce him because they might expose their own corruption. Together they achieved only one success by disproving the adage that there is honor among thieves.

The Green Hypocrites: Prince Charles and Gordon Brown take separate jets… to lecture the world on global warming

Daily Mail | Dec 16, 2009

By Rebecca English and David Derbyshire

Cold comfort: Charles steps from jet into snow in Copenhagen

Prince Charles and Gordon Brown were accused last night of ‘green hypocrisy’ after jetting into Copenhagen to lecture the world about global warming.

Charles used the £1,019-an-hour Queen’s Flight so he could deliver a keynote speech to the climate change conference, flying back after less than three hours.

The Prime Minister chartered a 185-seat Airbus to take him and 20 aides to Denmark for their four-day trip.

Among Mr Brown’s team was his senior adviser on climate change, Michael Jacobs, who was at the summit at the weekend but flew back to London to join his boss on the flight.

By using private planes, both Charles and Mr Brown produced more carbon emissions – which is blamed for global warming – than would have been generated by taking a scheduled flight.

Hampshire-based Carbon Footprint Limited said the prince’s round trip would have produced around 6.4tons of carbon dioxide – 5.2tons more than if he had used a commercial flight.

They also estimated that the amount of CO2 generated by Mr Brown’s flight is likely to be double that of the prince’s.

Royal charter: Charles used the £1,019-an-hour Queens Flight to deliver a keynote speech in Copenhagen

Last night, a source insisted the Prime Minister’s office ‘couldn’t find enough seats’ on any of the 16 scheduled flights from London yesterday.

A Downing Street spokesman said the carbon produced by Mr Brown’s plane would be ‘offset’.

A spokesman for Charles – who yesterday warned that global warming was a bigger threat to mankind than terrorism and poverty – insisted the prince had no choice but the Queen’s Flight.

The HS 125 twin-engined jet is used by senior members of the Royal Family as well as ministers.

It seats seven and took Charles, plus an entourage of aides and bodyguards.

‘Flying scheduled was not possible due to the need to guarantee arrival on time,’ the spokesman said.

‘A key issue was timings. His Royal Highness had a meeting this morning and there was no British Airways flight after it ended that could get him to Copenhagen in time.’

Like the Prime Minister, the prince does offset his air travel. The trip will cost him around £70 – the price of planting six trees.

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker last night accused both the Government and the Prince of ‘green hypocrisy’.

‘It is unbelievable that those who lecture us on climate change set such a poor example,’ he said.

‘Prince Charles, over the last four years, has been travelling the world on a private jet lecturing us about carbon emissions.

‘As for Gordon Brown, I find it astonishing that he and his office could not find scheduled flights to suit them. If not, then maybe they should have followed the example of so many other delegates and gone by train.’

Yesterday, Charles, who was invited to attend the talks by the Danish government, warned leaders they have just seven years to avert a global catastrophe.

‘Reducing poverty, increasing food production, terrorism and sustaining economic development are all vital priorities, but it is increasingly clear how rapid climate change will make them more difficult to address,’ he said.

‘For the grim reality is our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.’

Russian think tank: British Meteorological Office ‘manipulated’ climate change figures

Met Office ‘manipulated climate change figures’ say Russian think tank

Daily Mail | Dec 17, 2009

By Will Stewart

An explosive new claim that the Meteorological Office in Britain ‘manipulated’ climate change figures has come from a leading Russian think-tank founded by a former adviser to Vladimir Putin.

As the Copenhagen summit comes to a climax on Friday, it was alleged that Siberian weather statistics were selected in a way that masks evidence not showing global warming.

The think tank strongly disputes the use of data from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change which were released in a bid to diffuse the recent row over hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia.

The emails were seized upon by global warming sceptics as evidence that academics were massaging the figures.

The Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claimed the Hadley Centre used statistics from weather stations in Russian and Siberia that fitted its theory of global warming, while often ignoring those that did not.

The report was seized on by media with close ties to the Kremlin, which is opposed to rigid new curbs on carbon emissions demanded by many Western countries at the Danish summit.  Russian meteorological station data did not substantiate the global-warming theory,’ stated semi-official RIA Novosti news agency.

It went further in saying the Hadley Centre ‘probably tampered with Russian-climate data’ by using statistics from only a quarter of available weather stations in its report.

‘Over 40 per cent of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for reasons other than the lack of meteorological stations and observations,’ claimed Kommersant newspaper, owned by pro-Kremlin oligarch Allisher Usmanov.

It was alleged the Hadley data known as HadCRUT used incomplete findings from Russian met stations ‘far more often than those providing complete observations’.

‘When choosing between stations with breaks in measurements and those with regular measurements in same region, HadCRUT would include the station with gaps in information but with a more obvious picture of warming,’ said Kommersant.

And data was also skewed to include stations in large populated areas more frequently than the correct data of remote stations, it was alleged.

One account of the 21 page report said: ‘The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5 per cent of the world’s land mass.’

The institute – founded by Andrey Illarionov, a former pro-Western economic aide to Putin who quit the Kremlin criticising his authoritarian policies – alleges that the Hadley report over estimated warming in Russia by up to 0.64C between the 1870s and 1990s, based on fuller statistics.

Illarionov, who edited the report and is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, has a track record of strong opposition to the climate change lobby.

The report’s language is less lurid than some accounts of it, but it stated: ‘It is not easy to find a rational explanation to such a selective approach. Although one can build up a theory.

‘Analysing the temperature trends received from met stations it is hard to get rid of the impression that they do not show any noticeable trend to warming in second half of the 20th and beginning of 21st centuries.’

It stressed: ‘It is easy to see that the met stations are situated not evenly, their concentration is substantially and predictably higher in western and southern regions of the country, and notably lower in northern and eastern.’

It raises the fear that similar methods may have been used in other countries.

In releasing its report last week, the Met Office said it used a network of individual stations designated by the World Meteorological Organisation.

‘The subset of stations is evenly distributed across the globe and provides a fair representation of changes in mean temperature on a global scale over land.’

The hacked emails from climate change experts at the University of East Anglia were released to the world via a Russian internet server.

Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming

mensnewsdaily.com | Dec 16, 2009

The Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report stating that Russian meteorological-station data does not appear to substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory; contrary to the manipulated impression given by UK researchers involved in Climategate.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.

Indian Intelligence: Mumbai terror mastermind is a US double agent

Mumbai suspect is US double agent, India claims

An American man charged with plotting the attacks on Mumbai was a double agent for both the United States and al-Qaeda terror group Lashkar e Taiba, Indian officials have claimed.

Telegraph | Dec 16, 2009

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi

David Headley, a Pakistan-born American national arrested in Chicago in October, is alleged to have carried out reconnaissance missions in the run-up to the Mumbai attacks, in which 166 people were killed.

He is also believed to have been present in the terrorists’ “control room” in Pakistan where their handlers directed the killing spree over an open telephone line.

According to Indian officials, Headley travelled to India again in March this year, with the knowledge of American agencies who did not inform their Indian counterparts. During the trip, Headley is alleged to have collected intelligence for future terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets, including India’s National Defence College.

Indian officials are desperate to question Headley but have been frustrated by American refusals to grant them access. A team of Indian investigators travelled to Washington shortly after Headley was arrested in October but soon returned after their American counterparts told them they would not be able to meet him.

They want to question him about the Mumbai attacks involved Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency in any way and the role of Indian extremists in providing logistical support.

American officials say that under US law they cannot force any person in their custody to give evidence to foreign agencies. But Indian intelligence officers have questioned why Washington is not doing more to help their own inquiry and suggested Headley’s connections with American intelligence agencies is behind the reluctance.

Headley, who was born Daood Syed Gilani and schooled in Pakistan before moving to Philadelphia with his American mother in 1977, was convicted of smuggling heroin into the United States in 1998. He served only 15 months in jail after agreeing to become an informant for the Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA). He changed his name to David Headley in 2006.

According to Indian officials he continued to serve as a DEA informant until shortly before his arrest in October. Indian intelligence sources believe Headley may have been recruited to work for the CIA which, along with the FBI, shared intelligence with the DEA and other government agencies after the creation of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre in 2004.

B. Raman, a former senior official in India’s intelligence agency, said: “He was working for Lashkar e Taiba, taking photographs and video recordings of the [Mumbai] hotels and harbour. And he was an agent for the DEA on drugs, so in that sense he was a double agent.

“Indian officials are very keen to question him about his network, but we can’t because we might find out about any connections with the CIA or ISI. They don’t want that to happen. The Americans say ‘you ask us what you want us to find out and we’ll share the information’,” he added.

Prince Philip mocks people with disabilities

The Duke of Edinburgh made a joke at the expense of a comedian with an artificial foot, in his latest foray into politically incorrect humour.

Duke of Edinburgh makes joke at expense of disabled Royal Variety comedian Adam Hills

Telegraph | Dec 15, 2009

By Matthew Moore

Just days after it was disclosed that the Duke mocked the declining sight of a blind teenager, it has emerged he poked fun at the disability of an Australian entertainer at the Royal Variety Show in Blackpool.

After performing for the Queen alongside acts including Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Michael Bublé last week, the comedian Adam Hills spoke to the Duke about his plans to return home.

Observing the comic’s prosthetic limb, the monarch’s husband reportedly joked: “You could smuggle a bottle of gin out of the country in that artificial foot.”

Hills, who has forged a successful career as a television presenter despite being born without a right foot, took the jibe in good humour, telling the Daily Mirror that he thought the line was “brilliant”.

Yesterday the family of Stephen Menary, an army cadet who was blinded in an IRA bombing, told how the Duke offended the 15-year-old at a tree planting event in Hyde Park in 2002.

After the Queen asked the teenager how much sight he had left, the Duke responded: “Not a lot, judging by the tie he’s wearing.”

Carol Menary, 48, Stephen’s mother, said: “After he said it there was just stunned silence. The Queen just looked at him open mouthed. I don’t think she could believe what he had said.

“My whole family were just shocked. We knew he has a reputation for putting his foot in his mouth so we didn’t take offence, but mocking the sight of a blind boy is something, even by his standards.”

Prince Philip is notorious for his public gaffes and over the years has offered his own unique advice to people all over the world.

In 2002, he asked an aborigine whether he was “still throwing spears”.

Super Big Brother cameras with thermal imaging recognize faces, license plates and give orders to citizens

‘Talking’ CCTV cameras go live across Hounslow

CCTV cameras that have the potential to talk to passersby have gone live across Hounslow – but Big Brother will not be speaking just yet.

hounslowguardian.co.uk | Dec 16, 2009

By Ian Mason

Instead, the cameras, which can be fitted with technology to recognise faces and give people a ticking off through speakers, will remain silent as they keep a watchful eye on about 200 hot spots in the borough.

The new community safety system launched on Monday, enabling Hounslow Council and the police to monitor thousands of people from a lone control room, in Isleworth. It is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Specially trained operators will have full control over the cameras and police will be able to take over if an incident occurs that they need to keep tabs on.

In the future the cameras could be installed with thermal imaging technology to help search for suspects and missing people and a gadget to match faces and number plates against the police database, as well as speakers.

However, a council spokesman stressed: “The option is there but it is not something we are looking at at the minute.”

The control room is one of the first steps in a scheme to roll out more CCTV across the borough.

Camera locations are set by agencies including the council, police, and fire service.

Council leader, Councillor Peter Thompson, said: “People consistently tell us they want more CCTV to make them feel safer on the borough’s streets.

“But we don’t just want to put in more cameras for the sake of it, they have to be put where they’re needed, and those that are already in place need to work better.

“People assume that just because there is a camera, the police can see what’s going on, but that isn’t the case at all. Different organisations have different cameras, and in the past these haven’t been shared as well as they could.”

Councillor Paul Fisher, lead member for community safety at the council, said the council’s £1.8m investment will also allow camera sharing with Transport for London.

He added: “As the new system has a wireless element, it means it will be easier to deploy portable cameras to help tackle environmental crimes like fly-tipping and graffiti, which can have a massive negative impact on an area.”

US to expand drone attacks into Pakistani cities

presstv.ir | Dec 14, 2009

Senior US officials are pushing to expand CIA drone strikes beyond Pakistan's tribal region.

After confirmation that the CIA has been operating drone strikes in Pakistani territory, a new report says the US is seeking to expand the attacks into the country’s cities.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that top US officials were pushing to expand the air strikes beyond Pakistan’s tribal region and into the major city of Quetta to allegedly target the Taliban.

Although the US and Pakistan have long been denying that the drones were taking off from Pakistani soil, the CIA confirmed on Saturday that US security contractor Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, has been helping the agency to launch the attacks from within Pakistan.

CIA spokesman George Little quoted spy agency Director Leon Panetta as saying that US has been launching the attacks from secret airfields in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The new revelations also contradicted earlier US assertions that the notorious private security company does not operate in Pakistan.

Beside that, the Islamabad government and Blackwater itself had denied that the company was operating in the country.

The US claims that main Taliban leaders including Mullah Mohammed Omar fled to Pakistan’s Quetta after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Last month, a Pakistani military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas rejected the presence of the Taliban leadership in Quetta, saying that US officials are making such claims just to cover their failures in Afghanistan.

The administration of President Barack Obama who has intensified the attacks in Pakistan says the raids are to target militants but local Pakistani media say that civilians are the main victims.

New US aircraft strikes in Quetta city with population of 850,000 under the pretext of targeting the Taliban could sharply increase civilian fatalities.

If drone attacks, now confined to small villages, were to be mounted in a sizable city, the death rate of innocent bystanders would probably increase, the report concluded.

The Real Face of Obama’s “Good War”

australia.to | Dec 14, 2009

by Bill Van Auken

“WSWS” — Reports that mercenaries employed by the notorious Blackwater-Xe military contracting firm participated in CIA assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan have further exposed the real character of so-called “good war” that is being escalated by the Obama administration.

Citing former employees of the firm and US intelligence agents, the New York Times reported Friday that Blackwater gunmen, ostensibly contracted as security guards, “participated in some of the CIA’s most sensitive activities—clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees.”

These “snatch and grab” operations—many of them involving killings of individuals suspected of participating in the resistance to US occupation—“occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater employees playing central roles,” the Times reports.

Both the Times and the Washington Post quoted unnamed intelligence officials and ex-Blackwater operatives as asserting that the involvement of the company’s mercenaries in assassinations and abductions was not planned. Rather, they claimed, it was a matter of the division of labor between CIA operatives and private guards supposedly hired for the purpose of protecting them becoming “blurred.”

According to the Times, the Blackwater guards “were supposed to only provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to CIA officers and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected insurgents.” The newspaper added, “But in the chaos of operations, the roles of Blackwater, CIA and military personnel sometimes merged.”

The pretense that armed Blackwater contractors, most of them former US Special Operations troops themselves, would be used merely as security guards for CIA personnel is absurd on its face. Whatever justification was given for the contract, the “skill set” that Blackwater offered was precisely that of highly trained assassins.

A spokesman for Blackwater-Xe responded to the press reports by insisting that there was never any contract for the firm to participate in raids with CIA or Special Forces troops “in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.” He added: “Any allegation to the contrary by any news organization would be false.”

The absence of a contract spelling out Blackwater’s role in assassination missions is hardly surprising, given that the mercenary outfit’s chief attraction for the CIA is precisely its ability to act without regard to any government oversight or regard for civil or military law. As the Post put it, citing a retired intelligence officer, “For government employees, working with contractors offered ways to circumvent red tape.”

Blackwater’s role as an extra-legal extension of the Central Intelligence Agency tasked with dirty operations with which the CIA did not want its employees directly associated is more than evident.

An article published in the current (January) edition of Vanity Fair, written by Adam Ciralsky, a former CIA attorney, cites intelligence sources in reporting that Eric Prince, the multi-millionaire Republican founder-owner of Blackwater, was not merely a private contractor, but a “full-blown asset” recruited by the agency precisely for such operations.

The central role played by Blackwater in the CIA’s activities became increasingly clear as key agency officials left the CIA and took up positions in Blackwater’s management. These included J. Cofer Black, the former head of the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center, Enrique Prado, the center’s former chief of operations, and Rob Richer, formerly the second-in-command of the CIA’s clandestine service.

In Iraq, Blackwater’s employees acted with complete impunity, killing large numbers of civilians without being held to account by either the Iraqi regime or US military commanders. The scope of this violence came to public attention in September 2007, when a convoy of Blackwater operatives stopped in Baghdad’s Nisour Square and without provocation opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 17 Iraqis.

Six of the Blackwater mercenaries have been charged by federal prosecutors with voluntary manslaughter over the killings. One of them has pled guilty and is expected to testify against the others in a trial starting in February.

Meanwhile, the company is being sued in separate civil cases brought on behalf of 70 Iraqis over killings by the firm’s employees in Iraq. Two ex-employees of Blackwater have filed affidavits in these cases charging that company head Prince may have either murdered or ordered the murders of individuals cooperating with the Justice Department’s investigation of the firm.

Friday’s report in the Times follows a series of revelations that have surfaced since last June, when CIA Director Leon Panetta briefed Congressional intelligence committees about a covert assassination program involving Blackwater, which he claimed to have only just discovered and terminated. Panetta asserted that the program had never been implemented. Until then, it had been kept secret from Congress, reportedly on the orders of former vice president Dick Cheney.

It was subsequently revealed that employees of Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services in an attempt to shed the firm’s infamous reputation, were actively involved in an ongoing assassination program on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, carried out by means of Predator drones. The Blackwater mercenaries were assembling and loading the 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles used to carry out so-called “targeted killings,” which have taken the lives of hundreds of civilians. In addition, they provided security for the drone bases and according to some reports, participated in intelligence operations that determined the targets for the attacks.

There have been at least 65 such aerial assassination strikes in Pakistan since August 2008, with a reported death toll of over 625 people. Some estimates put the number killed at over 1,000, many of them women and children. Most of these attacks have taken place since the Obama administration took office.

In addition to the more than 30,000 additional US troops being sent into Afghanistan, Obama has authorized the CIA to dramatically escalate the drone attacks. US officials have also warned the Pakistani government that these attacks are to be extended beyond the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan into Baluchistan, and potentially against the crowded city of Quetta, where Afghan Taliban leaders have reportedly taken refuge.

It is far from clear, based on the Times report, to what extent Blackwater’s role in targeted assassinations, both from the air and on the ground, is continuing. Since 2001, the firm has netted over $1.5 billion in government contracts, providing armed mercenaries for the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon.

One thing is certain, assassinations of the kind involving Blackwater mercenaries are going to be carried out on a far greater scale as part of Obama’s escalation of the US war in Afghanistan.

These plans were hinted at by Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. “There’s no question you’ve got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable,” Petraeus told the senators. “And we are intending to do that.”

The general continued, “In fact, we actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy.” He said that additional “national mission force elements” will be arriving in Afghanistan by next spring.

The “elements” cited by Petraeus include Special Operations units like the Army’s classified Delta Force, as well as CIA hit squads and, in all probability, mercenary forces like those fielded by Blackwater.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, tapped by Obama to direct the Afghan war, was previously the head of the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command, which consists of such special forces troops and assassination squads. Petraeus said that McChrystal could brief members of the Senate committee on this element of the Obama surge in a closed session.

It is noteworthy that the controversy in the major media is centered on whether the use of Blackwater mercenaries to hunt down and murder individuals suspected of opposing the US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan represented an illegitimate use of private contractors in carrying out a core government function.

The murders themselves are not an issue. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order barring the CIA from directly carrying out assassinations or contracting them out to others. The decision followed a wave of public outrage over a series of revelations of CIA assassination plots around the globe that earned the agency the epithet “Murder, Inc.”

In 2001, President George W. Bush overturned Ford’s ruling, issuing his own intelligence finding that such restrictions no longer applied in the “global war on terrorism.” The Democrats offered no objections, and the media has treated it entirely as a matter of course, while blacking out any serious reporting on the resulting carnage and victims.

As with every other essential question, President Barack Obama has adopted Bush’s policy. “Targeted assassinations,” extraordinary rendition, the use of mercenaries, all of the sordid crimes carried out under the Bush administration continue. These brutal methods are about to be unleashed with redoubled force against the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan as Obama oversees new war crimes.

Hundreds fall ill after having swine flu jab

herald.ie | Dec 14, 2009

By Clodagh Sheehy

Swine flu vaccine has caused adverse reactions in 619 people to date, varying from seizures and anaphylactic shock to fainting and vomiting.

Two more people have died from the flu but the number of people falling ill with the virus has halved in the past week.

More than 400,000 vaccinations against swine flu have been carried out, according to the latest figures from the Irish Medicines Board which details the reported side effects for both forms of the vaccines — Pandemrix and Celvapan.

Of the 619 people who showed side effects to the vaccine, 52 had an allergic reaction and three of these went into anaphylactic shock.

Altogether 210 children reacted adversely to the vaccine, 15 with an allergic reaction and some of the children needed hospital treatment as a result.

Forty pregnant women reported side effects, four of them allergic and one woman, with a history of miscarriage, lost her baby.

Six people had seizures, two people reported facial palsy and the IMB was made aware of the death of one patient 10 days after vaccination but says the patient had an underlying condition and there was no evidence of a link between the vaccine and the patient’s death.

“Most people receiving the vaccine have serious and/or chronic underlying medical conditions which put them at greater risk of developing serious complications of swine flu,” says the board adding “this is why it is important for these people to be vaccinated as a priority”.

Generally the reactions included flu-like illness, head-ache, dizziness and fainting, pins and needles, transient weakness of the vaccinated limb and nausea and vomiting.

The latest people to die from swine flu were two men with underlying illnesses, one from the east and the other from the south of the country, bringing the total deaths to 20.

Health officials say there has been a marked decline in the spread of the virus in the past week, down to 5,500 new cases compared to 10,500 the previous week.