Monday, 26 August 2013
The Dark Tower
Diana : Global Media Blackout
Scotland Yard said it was "scoping" the information and "assessing its relevance and credibility".
It said it was "not a re-investigation" into the deaths of the couple in a Paris car crash on 31 August 1997.
An inquest in 2008 found they had been unlawfully killed, partly due to the "gross negligence" of their driver.
In a statement on Saturday evening, the Metropolitan Police said the assessment would be carried out by officers from the specialist crime and operations command.
It added that the deaths had been "thoroughly investigated and examined" by the inquest held at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
Reports in several British Sunday newspapers suggest there are allegations the military was involved and that information had been passed to the police by an Army source.
A Met Police spokesman said that the force would "not discuss the source of the information" it was assessing.
A royal spokeswoman also said there would be no comment on the matter from Prince William or Prince Harry, or from Clarence House.
A spokesman for Dodi's father Mohamed Al Fayed said he had no comment to make, but said he would be "interested in seeing the outcome", adding that he trusted the Met to investigate the information "with vigour".
Paparazzi on motorbikes
Scotland Yard said its assessmet did not come under Operation Paget - the police investigation into allegations that the princess and Mr Al Fayed, her boyfriend, were murdered.
The wreckage of the car after the crash which killed Princess Diana
The car carrying Princess Diana crashed in a tunnel
It was a theory endorsed at the time by Mohamed Al Fayed, the then owner of London store Harrods.
But in December 2006, the report into Operation Paget said it had found no evidence of murder and dismissed all conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths.
Operation Paget concluded, just like the French investigation in 1999, that driver Henri Paul had been drunk and driving at excessive speed.
Dai Davies, a former head of royal protection, told ITV news the deaths were "an accident by any definition, and three separate inquiries... have come to the same independent conclusion".
He added: "I am absolutely convinced this was an accident so I'm mystified, after 13 years, how any new information can possibly allege anything other than that this was a tragic accident."
Unlawful killing
Princess Diana, the former wife of the Prince of Wales and the mother of Princes William and Harry, was 36 when she died alongside Mr Al-Fayed, 42.
Mr Paul was driving when their hired Mercedes crashed into a pillar in Paris's Pont de l'Alma tunnel.
The crash happened after the couple had left the Ritz Hotel and were pursued by paparazzi on motorbikes. Mr Al-Fayed's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the only survivor.
At the inquest into their deaths, the jury found the couple had been unlawfully killed and the deaths were the result of "gross negligence" on the part of Mr Paul and the paparazzi.
The paparazzi pursuit, Mr Paul's drink-driving and a lack of seatbelts contributed to the deaths, the jury said.
The inquest lasted more than three months and heard from 250 witnesses.
After the hearing it was announced that its cost had reached £4.5m, with a further £8m spent on the Metropolitan Police investigation.
CCTV footage of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed on the day before they died
Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed died after leaving the Ritz Hotel in Paris on 31 August 1997
A tragic end to a day in Paris
Al Fayed abandons Diana campaign
Diana inquiry costs exceed £12m
Look closely.
Sunday, 25 August 2013
Syria: Pre-War Mass Ritual
- Douglas Adams, Life the Universe and Everything (1982).
- Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You won't need them, but it keeps the crowds amused.
- Rule Two: Find one good Brockian Ultra-Cricket player and clone him off a few times. This saves an enormous amount of tedious selection and training.
- Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large field and build a high wall round them.
- The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport, the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being able to see what's going on leads them to imagine that it's a lot more exciting than it actually is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life-affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.
- Rule Four: Throw lots of assorted items of sporting equipment over the walls for the players. Anything will do — cricket bats, basecube bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you can get a good swing with.
- Rule Five: The players should now lay about themselves for all they are worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player scores a 'hit' on another player, he should immediately run away and apologize from a safe distance.
- Apologies should be concise, sincere and, for maximum clarity and points, delivered through a megaphone.
- Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.
Diana : Enemy of the (Apartheid) State (of Israel)
Saturday, 24 August 2013
I Have a Dream
Sourcebook: The Straw Man Attack
The Brennake Gambit: Guarding Against Straw Man Disinformation Stings from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
Old School Journalism - get two sources who will confirm on the record, plus deep background.
Only fight for what you KNOW to be provebly true. Or they with Dan Rather you....
Also referred to as "memogate," Rathergate is the scandal surrounding the 60 Minutes II story aired on CBS in 2004 about George W. Bush's National Guard service. Memos providing the basis for many of the claims in the report were supposedly created in 1973 and found in the files of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. Bloggers and blog readers investigated the suspicious looking documents which were made available to the public on the CBS website and found them to almost certainly be poor forgeries created on a modern era word processor. Four CBS employees lost their jobs over the report. Dan Rather famously defended the report, claiming the memos might be "fake, but accurate" and later went into early retirement.
[edit]
Background: Media treatment of Bush Guard Service
The story of George Bush's Texas Air National Guard service is an integral part of the story of Rathergate. It is the claims regarding the facts of Bush's service that formed the basis for the story that became known as Rathergate. There were five essential claims made about Bush's Guard service.
Ancillary to these claims were additional claims that, as a result of the facts alledged, Bush was "AWOL", "a deserter" and "a coward" and that he "joined the Guard to avoid going to Vietnam". Click on Bush Guard Service for an extensive background on media treatment of George W. Bush's service in the National Guard.
Timeline
08 24 2004 Burkett offers to meet with Mapes and Smith to share the documents he posses concerning President Bush.
09 02 2004 Burkett provides two documents to Mapes claiming they are copies of originals obtained from Killian's personal files via Chief Warrant Officer George Conn.
09 05 2004 Burkett provides four more documents to Mapes claiming they are copies of originals obtained from Killian's personal files via Chief Warrant Officer George Conn.
09 05 2004 CBS interviews Robert Strong, a friend of Killian's who ran the Texas Air National Guard administrative office.
09 06 2004 CBS interviews General Robert "Bobby" Hodges, a former officer at the Texas Air National Guard and Killian's immediate superior at the time.
09 08 2004 CBS news magazine 60 Minutes II airs story about George W. Bush National Guard service, featuring memos said to be written in 1973 and found in the files of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.
09 08 2004 Commenter "Buckhead" at Free Republic website notices that the memos are proportionally spaced font which did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of word processing software.
09 09 2004 Power Line blog posts The Sixty-first Minute where information is compiled from readers including an IBM typewriter expert. A reader points out the suspicious superscript "th" in the memos, which would have been virtually impossible to create on a 70's era typewriter.
09 09 2004 Charles Johnson of the blog Little Green Footballs copies one of the Killian memos into Microsoft Word and finds it is an exact match to the memo supposedly typed in 1973.
09 09 2004 CBS News releases a statement saying the memos were "thoroughly investigated by independent experts, and we are convinced of their authenticity.
09 10 2004 On the CBS Evening News, Rather dismisses critics of the story, whom he describes as "partisan political operatives."
09 10 2004 A CBS memo reiterates the company's confidence in the authenticity of the documents.
09 11 2004 A CBS News segment states that document expert Phillip Bouffard states that the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Typewriter, available at the time.
09 13 2004 Rather states that analysts and other experts strongly insist the documents could have been created in the 70s.
09 15 2004 Document authenticators Emily Will and Linda James both stated that the memos were of very poor quality and would not authenticate them.
09 20 2004 CBS stops defending the documents and reports that their source, Bill Burkett, "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
09 21 2004 CBS News addresses their contact with the Kerry campaign.
11 09 2004 Mary Mapes gives an interview to ABC News correspondent Brian Ross stating that the docuemtns have never been proven to be forgeries.
01 05 2005 Independent Panel Report (Thornburgh Report) released.
01 10 2005 CBS News reports four employees ousted for their roles in the 60 Minutes II story.
01 25 2005 Senior Vice President, Betsy West and Senior Broadcast Producer, Mary Murphy resign.
03 25 2005 Executive Producer Josh Howard resigns.
03 2005 Dan Rather resigns.
Syria: Crunch Time
The explicit reference to the CIA's role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release. Additional CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency's actions before and after the operation.
Syria
George Galloway Lambasts Gulf Arab Yuppie-Larvae and Wannabe Jihadis for Killing Sons of Syria from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
"There are Arab countries where thre is no freedom, or liberty, at all;
which have one-family rule, who even give the name of their family to their country.
But there is no Jihad in such countries,
But the Jihad is in Syria, and it seems that those who are fighting it are ready to spend an ocean of blood....
"So, when are you starting in Saudi Arabia...?"
"What you are askling us to believe is that a revolution supported by McCain, by Lieberman, by Britain, France, AmericaI, Isreal, Saudi Arabia, by Qatar - is a revolution for the good, for truth?
Are you asking me to believe that Netanyahu is now on the side of haq?"
Webster Tarpley interviewed on Syrian television from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
On the eve of this year’s Bilderberg meeting, the Anglo-French intelligence bosses have clearly shown their hand with two high-profile attacks on Obama. Wednesday, June 5 marked the liberation of Qusayr, the great Stalingrad of the Syrian terrorist death squads deployed by NATO against Assad. With the rout of these terrorists, the main units of the self-styled Free Syrian Army, along with the Nusra branch of al Qaeda, are likely to face annihilation in the short to medium term.
On the same day that Qusayr fell, the British and French governments hysterically demanded that Obama undertake a total bombing campaign against Syria, whatever the consequences in regard to Russia and other powers. To his credit, Obama is continuing to say no to this lunatic Anglo-French neocolonial adventure.
On that same June 5, the London-based daily The Guardian, in an article by the expatriate American Glenn Greenwald, hyped a court order from the secret FISA panel of federal judges showing that the US National Security Agency was routinely monitoring the telephone records (including time, locations, call duration, and unique identifiers, but not the contents of the conversations) of possibly unlimited millions of Verizon phone subscribers. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming
“Obama taps your phones!”
On June 6, again in advance of every other newspaper in the world, The Guardian published another article by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill revealing that the National Security Agency, under a program called Prism, had obtained direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Microsoft, and was busily monitoring the content of e-mails, file transfers, and live conversations. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming,
“Obama reads your e-mail!”
Under George Bush, warrantless wiretaps and similar illegal programs were revealed by various media organs. These revelations had minimal impact on Bush, whose base was indifferent to civil liberties.
Obama’s base, by contrast, cares very much, and has been visibly upset by these new reports.
While strongly condemning these totalitarian programs, we must also not lose sight of who is putting these reports into circulation, and why.
Phone taps are bad, but a general war in the Middle East leading to a possible Third World War is far worse.
The British and French defense and intelligence establishment (they have virtually merged) want Obama and the American people to take the lead and shoulder the risk in a perilous attack on Syria, in time to preserve the death squads so they can fight another day in another country.
London and Paris, of course, see themselves as the principal beneficiaries of the breakup of Syria.
Since Obama is currently blocking their plans, they are bringing up their big guns of scandal, with the center-leftGuardian evidently chosen to take the point, doubtless to obtain more attention among Obama’s leftist supporters.
Tarpley: Syria, The Shadow Government and Threats to Obama's Life. from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
After the failure of the Benghazi coup and the stealing back of the election, he's really made them MAD now...
All bets are off and no holds barred for the next 3 1/2 years.
Gaps are appearing in the Secret Service cover for him and Michelle and clear (non-verbal) warnings are being issued, clear as day, with a full programme of predictive programming in effect.
Stay Vigilant .
The Road to Damascus: Anglo-French Presumption in the Levant and the Unfulfilled Promise of Pan-Arabism from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
British Officer: "We can't just do nothing, sir..!"
General Allenby, The Butcher of Armageddon:
"Why not, it's usually best... And get us something to drink, Tracey!"