Wednesday, October 22, 2003
WAKE UP, SLEEPYHEADS!
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
SORRY, YOUR 15 MINUTES IS UP, DON'T FORGET YOUR GIFT BASKET
From the "You Ain't All That" bureau, we bring you the winners of this month's Most Pathetic Needy Greedy award, Paris and Nicky, collectively known as The Hilton Sisters.
Internationally famous for, well, wanting to be internationally famous, these two silver-spoonfed bimbos continually prove you can never be too thin or too rich to make a complete ass of yourself. As heirs to the obscenely huge Hilton (as in Hilton Hotels) legacy, worth bazillions, Paris and Nicky do whatever they want, when and wherever they want. Unfortunately, they usually want to do it in public.
With absolutely no talent to speak of besides the ability to tip lavishly and name every top photog in the biz, The Hilton Sisters are a (currently) anorexic version of Patsy and Edina from "Absolutely Fabulous". Only without the humor. Or the style. Or the ratings.
Still, they bravely soldier on, pretending to be actresses and designers, sultrily posing for the paparazzi every chance they get and then complaining bitterly about the paparazzi to the gossip rags, appearing at any cheeseball gathering larger than 3 people that has even a hint of media coverage, and generally doing everything they can to get the world to "look at me - pleeeease!".
Try as they might, they still can't crash the Hollywood "A-list", and have to make do with picking fistfights with other "B-list" slags like Shannon Doherty. They do, however, get to party with famous get-down hodawgs Barbara and Jenna Bush.
Hang with Britney and J-Lo, no. Hang with the Bush twins, yep.
'Tis a bitch being merely rich.
Monday, October 20, 2003
GRANDPAPPY BUSH WAS A NAZI
Documents: Bush's Grandfather Directed Bank Tied to Man Who Funded Hitler
(Associated Press)
Friday, October 17, 2003
WASHINGTON — President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power, government documents show.
Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp., a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Fritz Thyssen was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism. The documents do not show any evidence Bush directly aided that effort. His position with Union Banking never was a political issue for Bush, who was elected to the Senate from Connecticut in 1952.
Reports of Bush's involvement with the seized bank have been circulating on the Internet for years and have been reported by some mainstream media. The newly declassified documents provide additional details about the Union Banking-Thyssen connection.
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for President Bush, declined to comment.
Union Banking was owned by a Dutch bank, Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaardt N.V., which was "closely affiliated" with the German conglomerate United Steel Works, according to an Oct. 5, 1942, report from the federal Office of Alien Property Custodian. The Dutch bank and the steel firm were part of the business and financial empire of Thyssen and his brother, Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the report said.
The 4,000 Union Banking shares owned by the Dutch bank were registered in the names of the seven U.S. directors, according a document signed by Homer Jones, chief of the division of investigation and research of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, a World War II-era agency that no longer exists.
E. Roland Harriman, the bank chairman and brother of former New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman, held 3,991 shares. Bush had one share.
Both Harrimans and Bush were partners in the New York investment firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co., which handled the financial transactions of the bank as well as other financial dealings with several other companies linked to Bank voor Handel that were confiscated by the U.S. government during World War II.
Union Banking was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
No charges were brought against Union Banking's American directors. The federal government was too busy trying to fight the war, said Donald Goldstein, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
"We did not have the resources to do these things," Goldstein said.
Fritz Thyssen broke with the Nazis in 1938 over their persecution of Catholics and Jews, and fled to Switzerland. He later was arrested and spent 1941 to 1945 in a Nazi prison. His brother lived in Switzerland from 1932 to 1947 but continued to operate businesses in Germany.
The new documents were first reported by freelance writer John Buchanan in The New Hampshire Gazette.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
OCTOBER SURPRISE
Bush’s popularity poll numbers continue to sink. The economy is still in tatters, in spite of Bush and Co claiming that we are recovering. It’s still a jobless recovery. In comparison to what his father’s presidency experienced, 22 months after the 1991 recession, the jobless rate was at least back to where it was prior to the recession; Dubya’s economic policies have created 3.3 million more jobless 22 months after the 2001 recession.
September 11 wasn’t enough to give Dubya his crown of “Wartime Leader” to the extent that it would give him legs to win a re-election, and he knows it. Bush told Intelligence agencies to take a hand’s off approach to members of the bin Laden family, including Osama bin Laden, which led to the resignation of John O’Neil, the FBI’s top expert on terrorist activities, and his taking a job as Director of Security for the World Trade Center, where he died on 9/11. John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice denied the FBI’s attempts to search Moussaui’s computer hard drive to investigate possible terrorist activities (and now he’s using his own incompetence as an excuse to foist the Patriot Act upon the rest of us). NORAD was pulled off air support without explanation, so that they wouldn’t respond in time to attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington. Bush has done everything he can to suppress proper investigation into why 9/11 was allowed to happen. And over two years later, Bush’s own commission has failed to provide the US public a complete accounting of what happened and who allowed it to happen.
Gail Sheehy’s “Middletown, America” recounts the actions of four young women widowed from 9/11, who directed their energies into digging for the truth, and getting facts of Government Officials Prior Knowledge of the Potential for Terrorists Using Commercial Airliners as Flying Bombs, that our government has consistently failed to acknowledge publicly. In a joint inquiry by the House and Senate intelligence committees held at the Hart Senate Office Building in a hearing room where the Iran-Contra hearings had been held, these four women had been able to collect information that the media itself had failed to find out despite Freedom of Information requests.
Kristen Breitweiser is one of these women, and she gave compelling testimony that shows that the Bush Administration has lied and is continuing to lie to cover up the facts.
“On May seventeenth, 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice stated emphatically, ‘I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center…that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.’ Kristen said, eyeing the panel and cooling reciting a laundry list of historical facts to illustrate that such a possibility had been not only predicted, but predicted by, variously, the Pentagon, the Library of Congress, FBI agents, and foreign intelligence services.
In 1992, the Pentagon had investigated the possibility of an airplane being used to bomb national landmarks. In 1995, Philippine authorities had discovered in Manila the bomb-making lab of Ramzi Youssef, the master-mind behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Interrogations of his accomplice, Hakim Mourad, revealed Youssef’s plot to blow up a dozen U.S. owned airliners over the Pacific and discussions of plans to hijack aircraft and fly them into civilian targets in the United States. This terrorist plot was known as “Project Bojinka.” Kristen pointed out that “In 1997, this plot resurfaced during the trial of Ramzi Youssef….FBI agents testified that the plan targeted not only the CIA but other U.S. government buildings in Washington, including the Pentagon and CIA headquarters. Youssef’s accomplice, Mourad, told U.S. intelligence officials that he would board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. And he would then hijack the aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it into CIA headquarters.” (Project Bojinka was significant since it had been an early warning that Osama bin Laden was a key promoter of a radical interpretation of Islam, and that his adherents were plotting to inflict mass casualties and attack symbolic targets within the United States, and were discussing plans to use aircraft as weapons. Eleanor Hill was the committee’s staff director. When she looked into the FBI’s criminal investigative files, she had found almost no references to Mourad’s plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. FBI agents interviewed about Project Bojinka said that those aspects of the plot had not been part of their case against Youssef or Mourad, so they had not considered them “relevant”.)
Kristine described a 1999 report prepared for U.S. intelligence by an arm of the Library of Congress. It stated, “Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the CIA, or the White House.”
The widow’s testimony was getting uncomfortably specific. The senators and congress members were by now chewing on their glasses, rubbing their chins, some taking notes. Obviously, long before September 11 the American intelligence community had had a significant amount of information about specific terrorist threats to commercial airline travel in America including the possibility that a plane would be used as a weapon. Kristen now addressed the cover-up:
“On May eighth, 2002, Director of the FBI Rober Mueller stated, “There was nothing the agency could have done to anticipate and prevent the attacks.”
She documented that throughout the spring and summer of 2001, intelligence agencies had been flooded with warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American targets. In June of 2001, Condoleezza Rice herself had warned officials – but not the public – “It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks.” On July 31, the FAA urged U.S. airlines – but not the public – to maintain a “high degree of alertness.” Kristen had learned from internal FAA documents that some of the hijackers had actually been randomly selected for prescreening of their carry-on bags. Airport security screeners had pass them through.
Slowly, punctuating her words for emphasis, Kristen said, “Two counter-terrorism officials described the alerts of early and mid-summer 2001 as ‘the most urgent in decades.’ How many lives could have been saved had this information been made more public?”
Senators rocked uncomfortably in their leather chairs.
Kristen didn’t let up: “On July fifth, 2001, the government’s top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, stated to a group gathered at the White House “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.” The group included the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, and the Secret Service.”
…”On August fifteenth, 2001, an alert civilian instructor at a Minnesota flight school called the FBI and said, ‘Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be a bomb?” The next day, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested. The FBI learned that he had Islamic extremist connections. They also knew that he was interested in flight patterns around New York City, and that he had a strong desire to fly big jets, even though at the time he didn’t have so much as a license to fly a Cessna.
“And then what happened?
“The FBI office in Minnesota attempted to get a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant to search Moussaoui’s computerbut they were rebuffed. A crucial mistake, because Zacarias Moussaoui’s possessions contained evidence that would have exposed key elements of the September eleventh plot.”
“What is not classified is that in early September a Minnesota FBI agent wrote an analytic memo on Zacarias Moussaoui’s case, theorizing that the suspect could fly a plane into the World Trade Center. And, tragically, this too, was ignored.
Kristen went on to raise questions well beyond the mandate of the joint inquiry:
“Why did the New York/New Jersey Port Authority not evacuate the World Trade Center when they had an open phone line with Newark Traffic Control Center and were told that the second plane was bearing down on the South Tower? New York/New Jersey Port Authority had at least eleven minutes of notice to begin evacuations of the South Tower. An express elevator in the WTC was able to travel from top to bottom in one minute’s time.” Her voice was now edged with contempt: “How many lives may have been saved, had the Port Authority acted more decisively or, rather, acted at all?
“Washington Air Traffic Control Center knew about the first plane before it hit the WTC. Yet the third plane was able to fly ‘loop de loops’ over Washington, D.C., one hour and forty-five minutes after the Washington Center first knew about the hijackings. After circling in this restricted airspace – controlled and protected by the Secret Service, who had an open phone line to the FAA – how is it possible that the plane was then able to crash into the Pentagon? Why was the Pentagon not evacuated?
“Why was our air force so late in its response?”
Her closing brought the issues home to the committee members in a personal way: “Undoubtedly, each of you here today, because you live and work in Washington, D.C., must have felt you were in the bull’s-eye on September eleventh. For most of you, there was relief at the end of that day…You were the lucky ones…Please, do not forget those of us who did not share in your good fate.”
Gail Sheehy’s “Middletown, America” pages 303-307.
But these acts of TREASON by the Bush administration weren’t enough to get the country rallied around “The Imbecile” long-term. Even his own party supporters are so worried about their own chances at re-election that they are pulling support from Bush’s policies in response to demands from their constituents.
Bush and Co have always relied on the “October Surprise Phenomenon” (wink, wink, nod, nod). You all aren’t foolish enough to believe that what happens is just a surprise, are you? Bin Laden has a new tape out urging Jihad today (Saturday October 18), and Bush (conveniently), is out of the country. Expect another October Surprise sometime soon.
(The preceding was written by an anonymous poster on an open discussion board. Thanks, DNSLRY.)