"Wanted by the FBI for questioning: Adil Pervez. Or is it Adel Pervaiz? Adil Pervaz, maybe?

As it turns out, Adil Pervez wasn't wanted after all. On Jan. 7, the FBI called off a manhunt for Pervez and four other Middle Eastern men. But the fact that alternative name spellings for the five suspects were posted online immediately after the alert points to an increasing need for understanding complexities of foreign names."

full story at wired.com

I didn't know it was still allowed to sell this thing, but I guess it's a classic by now. There are some interesting notes by the original author William Powell on the page for The Anarchist Cookbook at amazon.com

No more jokes about Bin Laden in Germany, friends!

"Holger Voss stands accused of "glorification of a criminal act".

Mr Voss, who will appear in court in the western German town of Muenster on Wednesday, insists his comments were meant to be sarcastic.

He had written a final sentence at the foot of his remarks - posted last summer on the Telepolis message board - which he says indicates that the sentiments expressed were not to be taken seriously.

"The court will decide whether he did indeed mean them ironically, and if so, whether or not that makes any difference," court spokesman Juergen Wrobel told BBC News Online.

The apparently offending remarks were made in response to a message posted by another internet user - Engine_of_Aggression - who appeared to be pleased about the alleged murders of thousands of Taleban fighters by local militias during the downfall of the Afghan regime in 2001.

"Congratulations to the people, who in this over-critical time, dare to grab evil at its root and eradicate it from the face of the earth!" wrote Engine_of_Aggression.

Mr Voss, who describes himself as an anti-militarist, responded:

"Yes, Congratulations to the murderers of 11.09.01.... Good, that on 11.09 a couple of real men (!) found the courage to show the evil ones, the USA how it really is!"

An anonymous complaint to the police led to the prosecution under a German law which forbids the glorification of a criminal act. "

full story at BBC

"That super-secret Air Force base near Groom Lake, Nevada -- purported site of everything from captured aliens to the highest of high-tech aircraft -- has been exempted by President Bush from environmental laws that would disclose classified information regarding base operations. President Bush's decision about Groom Lake was made last September and published December 24 in the Federal Register.

Groom Lake has been the target of litigation brought about by former workers at the base. That legal action focused on health effects resulting in the handling and disposal of hazardous wastes at the secret locale. Bush judged that 'it is in the paramount interest of the United States' to prevent disclosure of information about Groom Lake."

full story at space.com

"A senior officer, Pietro Troiani, reportedly admitted under questioning that two petrol bombs allegedly found at the school were planted by police to justify the raid.

In fact, they had been found elsewhere in the city, in the Corsa Italia, where protesters and police had clashed earlier in the day. " full Story at BBC

The issue of Cloning and Ufos have been common in Science Fiction for a few decades. While cloning seems to be technically possible by now, there has never been a proof that Ufos exist and little green men visit our planet on a regular base. Ufos have always been considered a hobby for the feeble-minded looking for something new to believe in after god was declared dead. People were not buying the story of some creator in the sky anymore since it turned out to be nothing but a sheme to hold people down and follow authorities into the next war. Since there is no proof of extra-terrestrial life, it's a matter of belief when people talk about the flying saucer which is supposed to have crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. You've heard the story. The US-gouvernment caught a bunch of gray little aliens and locked them away in some underground-complex. But if you believe in the crashed Ufo, you will also have to believe that there has been some sort of covering up, right? From there it's just a small step to believing all kinds of weird things which prove that Ufos actually exist. You will believe in Men in Black doing the dirty work and that story about large machines underneath the northpole which are not part of Santa's production facilites for sure.

The Nazis have believed this kind of shit already when they tried to prove that there was a sunken island called Thule north of Iceland which was populated by Übermenschen (Thule was supposed to be the home of the Aryans, an alien race of giants which fell from grace when they started to fuck around with the underlings). Theories like that had been invented by the Ariosophs and Theosophists in the late 19th century, but they were presented as "ages old germanic lore" to the public. It was nothing but disinformation used to get into power and stay there.
Mythology was one of the big secrets for the Nazis' success. If you believed in Thule or Atlantis and a forgotten primaeval culture, you were willing to believe in a lot of other things as well.

Now Clonaid came along in late 2002 and announced the birth of a clone-baby. Even though there was no proof that the kid actually existed, not even a picture of a baby in general, the media went wild. They did a lot of promotion for a bunch of lunatics who hid behind a guy calling himself Rael. Rael's mother stated in various interviews that her son had always been a liar and that he's simply out for the money. So far, so good.

Wouldn't we assume that a story about Ufos without pictures wouldn't make the headlines? If you got a picture of an alien and his vehicle, fine, let us see it and we might be interested. Otherwise the press is not really interested in people who believe in Ufos, Bigfoot and the monster of Loch Ness. You know why? Because these people are foolish. They have no understanding of the real world we're living in because they're not able to process all the complex information thrown at them. They're looking for a nice and easy explanation for everything and that's where all the armchair-conspiracy-theorists come in.
Clonaid is obviously a hoax. You can't take these people serious. Last year Rael wanted to bring Hitler back from the dead to punish him for his crimes. This time he has cloned a human being. Next year he will charge money to enter the alien embassy he's building. People send him money to keep in contact with the aliens because they like to believe in things like that. But it's obviously a swindle. You know why? Because THERE ARE NO UFOS! It's a hoax! So, if we don't believe in Ufos in the first place, how can any sane person take the clone-story serious? It's just a promotion-stunt carried out by a bunch of attention-seekers trying to make money. Isn't it so obvious that a story like this should be on page 24 of any serious newspaper instead of being a headline for weeks?

It's not a matter of whether the clone-baby exists or not, it's about the question why everyone falls for these people. If you believe in step one, the Ufos, you might automatically buy the clone-story too. If you don't believe in Ufos, you will be a sceptic about the clone-baby too. So, it''s not about cloning, it's about Ufos. Why isn't anyone in the mayor media saying: "look at these people, they're idiots because they believe in Ufos, ha, ha!"

Nobody questions the Ufos and the cloning-story is taken seriously. Why does this pop up now? Why does the president of the United States, currently going to the war, have time to comment on this clone-story basically saying that it might be dangerous if anyone can clone whoever he want? Don't we know that already? Why isn't he saying: "look at these people, they're idiots because they believe in Ufos, ha, ha!"

It looks like there are so many people believing in Ufos in the US, that the gouvernment can easily work with that belief. There have been polls proving the facts that a lot of citizens of the US believe in falsehoods like god, ghosts and Ufos. In 1991, Gallup and Newport questioned 1236 adult Americans and the results (which can be found on pp.137-146 of their '91-report) are alarming. Around 52% believe in Astrology, 22% believe that aliens have already landed on earth, 33% believe in the lost continent of Atlantis, 41% believed that Dinosaurs and humans lived simultanously, 65% believed in Noah and his flood, 42% believed in communication with the dead, 35% believed in ghosts and 67% claimed they've had a psychic experience themselves.

Something is going wrong over there! It's known that most people in the US believe in the ancient text of the bible (Noah's flood). Everyone else keeps ridiculing the Americans for going to church all the time and all that. But 22% buy the Roswell-story! Almost every fourth person believes that aliens have visited us already! That's nuts! All these sexual abduction-stories are identical to the ones people kept telling when they were still abducted by fierce Native Americans on an almost weekly base. Back then when the aliens were not invented yet!

There is a book on this phenomena called Why People Believe Weird Things:... by Michael Shermer which I'd recommend. But then there are also books like Hollywood Vs. the Aliens by Bruce Rux which is a collection of bizarre conspiracy-stuff trying to prove that the CIA produced all these Science Fiction-movies to prepare ordinary citizens for the hard truth that aliens actually do exist. There are a lot of people building websites to prove that the US-gouvernment has something to hide.
The interesting part is that the US-gouvernment had always made a lot noise about Ufos themselves. Ever since the incident in Roswell there have been official statements that certain rumours are not true. The effect was that all these statements strengthened the belief that something must have crashed in New Mexico if the army put so much effort into simply denying it instead of saying "look at these people, they're idiots because they believe in Ufos, ha, ha!"

People started talking about Ufos when a mystery airship hovered across America in 1896/97. It was the birth of an idea which inspired H.G.Wells to write "The War of the Worlds". The novel later served as a base for the radio-play Orson Welles broadcasted on October the 30th, 1938. I just got a copy of the original recording and I've listened to it this morning while cleaning the dust off my robot-collection in the lab. Wells made sure that his play was "realistic". He used all kinds of dramatic tricks like letting the music beetween the speakers play extra-long. That way people got the impression that something terrible had happened and even the news-speakers had to go off the air. The results are known. A lot of people left their homes to run away from an alien invasion. H.G.Wells was not amused by the way. The author of the original novel had his attorney threaten leagal actions against Welles.

The fact that so many people believed in aliens already must have been noticed by the gouvernment. Then Roswell happened right at the beginning of the Cold War in 1947. It started a large wave of interest in the topic and a series of strange remarks by various presidents of the US considering aliens and Ufos. Especially Ronald Reagan was fond of the idea that earth to stand together and face an alien invasion some day. Here are some presidential quotes about Ufos and here are more Ufo-quotes by famous folks.

And it's not only Ufos!

"I refer to it as the world's worst-kept secret that President Reagan relies on astrology." Astrologer Sydney Omarr 1988

"Astrologers rumored to be connected to the Reagan White House included Joyce Jillson, who told the Associated Press that the Reagans regularly consulted astrologers, and that it was this counsel that led to Reagan doing things like having news conferences during the full moon. Jillson stated that "she had been to the White House" and "spent a lot of time there after the assassination attempt on Reagan."

Most importantly, Jillson claimed she had originally been employed by Reagan insiders, and paid $1200, to help pick Reagan's Vice President from a list of seven candidates. The Jillson claim actually backed up the same Bush-astrology allegation that had been made five years earlier by Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald. On April 30, 1983 McDonald speaking to the John Birch Society stated,

Mr. Reagan and his wife are both very avid followers and believers. And guess what these seers of the horoscope had to say? That Mr. Reagan would be the nominee and that the Republicans could win the White House only if George Bush was his running mate.

"One of my jobs," wrote Jillson, "was to review the charts of all Vice Presidential candidates. I told Reagan that George Bush was the only choice. The rest is history." The basic astrological sign involved in the decision was that "George Bush, a Gemini, was the most compatible with Reagan, an Aquarian."

The efforts to hide the paranormal and other strange beliefs of the president went as far as to clean up "his oral meanderings" before a text was released for public consumption." This practice, however, had to be cut out when the White House writers were caught altering an interview Reagan had given with the Wall Street Journal.

In this interview, done in 1985, Reagan began to talk about thoughts he had earlier in the morning concerning Armageddon, and how he agreed with many theologians who believed the prophecies were coming together. This idea of an impending upcoming Armageddon being spoken of by a leader with his finger on the nuclear button was too much for the White House handlers.

When the White House transcript of the interview was released publically, the references to Armageddon were gone.  The Wall Street Journal quickly exposed the omission, and the White House publicity people scrambled to explain   that the writers had "accidentally" omitted the references to Armegeddon Reagan had made."

stolen from Presidential Ufos

All of this only leads to the conclusion that Reagan and Bush needed a mighty good excuse for their SDI-program in the late 1980s when the Cold War was getting boring. It all sounds like an old strategy of disinformation. Even though the Soviets were still the official enemy in 1987, the US knew that the Cold War might not last forever and they were right. The German reunification in 1990 put an end to the concept of superpowers threatening each other and suddenly the Cold War was over. Nonetheless, Bush proposed a budget for SDI to Congress in late 1990 which included a 4.5 billion-dollar increase. Even though their were plans with Gorbachev for an American/Soviet-joint venture to got to Mars already, they wanted to push the SDI through. Bush also voted for a twenty-four percent raise for Nasa "to bring astronauts back to the moon" and a revival of the SETI-program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which had been cut off by Congress iin 1983 with a tripled budget "to search for proof that life exists-or has existed-beyond earth, by studying other planets of the solar system." So, did these guys build the Star Wars-program to actually shoot at aliens or did they just get their percentage off the people building the technology?

Since there are new talks about another SDI-program in outer space under Bush jr., it's no wonder the aliens are taken so serious again right now. It's no wonder that the Clonaid-story gets blown up beyond proportion if you wanna keep people interested in the possibility of meeting aliens some day. There is still no proof that Ufos exist, but it looks like the US-gouvernment is busy trying to create the impression that something is out there and we could be the target of some enemy up in the sky any day. If everything else fails and earth becomes a peaceful planet, it will always be a good excuse to deal with arms and shoot expensive laser-weapons at least.

by Peter Beaumont, and Ed Vulliamy in New York

"UN weapons inspectors in Iraq fear their work - which has failed to turn up any evidence thus far of weapons of mass destruction - will still be used as an excuse to trigger a US-led invasion of Iraq.

Leaks from the inspections teams - and the two agencies in charge of them, UNMOVIC and the International Atomic Energy Agency - have fueled an increasingly frenetic diplomatic effort among opponents of the war.

The weapons inspection teams in Iraq have visited breweries and former nuclear plants, and raided missile factories and pharmaceutical production lines. They have examined former weapons factories and interviewed scientists and university technicians. As of yesterday they had checked 230 sites in all. If one is to believe the few inspectors who have been prepared to be interviewed anonymously, they have found absolutely nothing.2 Published on Sunday, January 5, 2003 by the Observer/UK

Judith Resnik was the first Jewish astronaut. She died in 1986 aboard the Challenger (teachers in space, remember?). Some guy hijacked a plane in Frankfurt and threatened to crash it into a building to remind the public. Strange one... One of our dear readers came up with the following conspiracy theory: "I heard that the guy who just stole that glider was Resnik's boyfriend back in the 70s and the two of them made a pact to hijack the Space Shuttle and fly it into Skylab to protest the PLO bombings, but then Skylab fell to Earth on its own in 1979 and they were shit out of luck."

The files at space.com

"Now you would think that being a business partner of the brother in law and alleged financier of 'Enemy No. 1' would be considered a bona fide 'conflict of interest,' particularly when your mandate--as part of the 9/11 Commission's work--is to investigate Enemy No. 1.'" (Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research)

story at disinfo.com

Baghdad's uncensored report to UN names Western companies alleged to have developed its weapons of mass destruction. by Tony Paterson , The Independent (UK), 18 December, 2002

"Iraq's 11,000-page report to the UN Security Council lists 150 foreign companies, including some from America, Britain, Germany and France, that supported Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programme, a German newspaper said yesterday. Berlin's left-wing Die Tageszeitung newspaper said it had seen a copy of the original Iraqi dossier which was vetted for sensitive information by US officials before being handed to the five permanent Security Council members two weeks ago. An edited version was passed to the remaining 10 members of the Security Council last night.

British officials said the list of companies appeared to be accurate. Eighty German firms and 24 US companies are reported to have supplied Iraq with equipment and know-how for its weapons programmes from 1975 onwards and in some cases support for Baghdad's conventional arms programme had continued until last year.

It is not known who leaked the report, but it could have come from Iraq. Baghdad is keen to embarrass the US and its allies by showing the close involvement of US, German, British and French firms in helping Iraq develop its weapons of mass destruction when the country was a bulwark against the much feared spread of Iranian revolutionary fervour to the Arab world.

The list contained the names of long-established German firms such as Siemens as well as US multi-nationals. With government approval, Siemens exported machines used to eliminate kidney stones which have a "dual use" high precision switch used to detonate nuclear bombs. Ten French companies were also named along with a number of Swiss and Chinese firms. The newspaper said a number of British companies were cited, but did not name them.

"From about 1975 onwards, these companies are shown to have supplied entire complexes, building elements, basic materials and technical know-how for Saddam Hussein's programme to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction," the newspaper said. "They also supplied rockets and complete conventional weapons systems," it added.

The five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China -- have repeatedly opposed revealing the extent of foreign companies' involvement, although a mass of relevant information was collected by UN weapons inspectors who visited the country between 1991 and 1998. The UN claims that publishing the extent of the companies' involvement in Iraq would jeopardise necessary co-operation with such firms.

German involvement outstripped that of all the other countries put together, the paper said. During the period to 1991, the German authoritiespermitted weapons co-operation with Iraq and in some cases "actively encouraged" it, according to the newspaper which cited German assistance allegedly given to Iraq for the development of poison gas used in the 1988 massacre of Kurds in northern Iraq. It said that after the massacre America reduced its military co-operation with Iraq but German firms continued their activities until the Gulf War.

Die Tageszeitung quoted sources close to the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, as saying the Bush administration was hoping to prove a German company was continuing to co-operate with the Iraqi regime over the supply of equipment allegedly useful in the construction of weapons of mass destruction.

American weapons experts have recently voiced concern that the German Government has permitted Siemens to sell Baghdad at least eight sophisticated medical machines which contain devices that are vital for nuclear weapons. The machines, known as "lithotripters", use ultrasound to destroy kidney stones in patients. However, each machine contains an electronic switch that can be used as a detonator in an atomic bomb, according to US experts. Iraq was reported to have requested an extra 120 switches as "spare parts" during the initial transaction.

The delivery of the machines was approved by the European Commission and the UN because sanctions against Iraq do not apply to medical equipment. Siemens and the German Government have insisted that the machines, which are being used in northern Iraq under a World Health Organisation programme, cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.

The Washington Post reported that the infamous clone-baby, bred by a bunch of people believing in little gray men from outer space, has been brought home.
Why does the media still pretend this is a real story even though it's obviously a hoax? Last year, Clonaid wanted to bring Hitler back from the dead to put him on trial. How can anyone take these people serious?

"Clonaid is likely a fraud, respecting its cloning, since the Raelians (followers of Rael, a 'contactee' with 'aliens') are a fraud in all other respects--well, they are authentic one way, they're an authentic cult. If they did clone a child it will have birth defects, and thus it was very irresponsible of them. But as they are liars, self deceivers who worship a liar and a self deceiver, they probably have cloned no one, and are just pretending in order to raise more cash with their immortality/cloning snake oil. Flying saucer Believers are fixated on the alien presence because they are afraid of death. It has been many times observed that aliens are today's fairies, or angels; they stand in for religion for people who've lost religion but still need it psychologically. (I am a person who believes there's a spiritual reality but have lost all 'faith' as it were in organized religion, although I think it had its uses for awhile.) " ~~, John Shirley "What the Raelians' Clonaid Nonsense Is Really About"

The last tape of Fu Manchu raised the question whether this guy is still alive or not or whether he ever existed.

"The more I work on this, the more I'm confident that it's not him," says Hervé Bourlard, director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, one of the world's leading voice-recognition institutes. -quoted from the Toronto Star

AP news has found a tape shot at an Enron-party in 1997. Hear former President Bush tell Enron's president Kinder: "You have been fantastic to the Bush family. I don't think anybody did more than you did to support George." An executive joked at this party about making "a kazillion dollars" through something he humorously dubbed "hypothetical future value accounting," the Houston Chronicle reported Monday.

The Council for a livable world has released a nice new Missile Defense Update. Just in case you were wondering were all the money goes...

Did anyone notice these ads for goarmy in US comics and elsewhere? America is recruiting an army of videogamers.

Go army and suddenly you're on a page for a new game called Americas Army. You can download it for free or order a free disc and then you can join the national tournament . But it's not just a game, you can also read the weblog of "a real soldier" in Afghanistan!. A "real soldier", whew!

Videogames are just so much cooler than politics...

The french paper La Charente Libre pointed out that the US-gouvernment withheld the 11.000 pages of the Iraque-arms-report for 18 hours. No other member of the UN-security council was allowed to see the report right away since the US stated that, only the Americans have copy-machines fast enough to get the document out in time.

QUESTION: Well, can you tell us whether a copy has reached Washington yet, or is it just -- 

MR. BOUCHER: As I mentioned, the documents in the declaration contain sensitive data. They need to be handled in a secure manner, in keeping with our overall nonproliferation concerns. So we have been asked to ensure that the document is copied in a controlled environment in order to guard against the inadvertent release of information. So yes, we have a copy that is being reproduced for other members of the Security Council.

QUESTION: In Washington or in New York?

MR. BOUCHER: I don't want to get into exactly where it might be. We have a copy that's being reproduced using the resources of the US Government because we are able to do this in the high volume necessary, with the technical expertise necessary, and to do it in a controlled environment. So we are making the copies for other members of the Council.

QUESTION: And during this copying process, is somebody simultaneously starting to look at it?

MR. BOUCHER: I don't know. I wouldn't necessarily know one way or the other. I can't say.

quoted from Daily Press briefing of the US department of state U.S. Seized Iraqi Declaration in Night Raid - story at Newsmax

Machtspiele - Story bei telepolis

"In the grand tradition of JFK's brain, the 18.5 minutes of Nixon's tapes, RFK's bodyguard's pistol, the Branch Davidians' front door, Vince Foster's X-rays, and the black boxes from numerous doomed airplanes, we now can add crucial WTC documents to the list of missing evidence." Story by Sara Kugler of AP Just in time after Henry Kissinger, the man they called "the monster". has taken over the job to run the investigation of the events on Sept 11th 2001. disinfo.com suggests we should have a "Conspiriology's Missing Exhibits" museum!

"American citizens working for al-Qaida overseas can legally be targeted and killed by the CIA under President Bush's rules for the war on terrorism, U.S. officials say." Story by John J. Lumpkin of AP

I sneaked around the Info-page for Guantanamo Bay at globalsecurity.org. They got all the statistics. The boys of the US Army also have an official Homepage for the base at Guantanamo Bay", but it looks like a job for the Under-Construction-Club

Anyway. The US got this spot on the south-eastern end of Cuba in 1902 when Cuba managed to become an independent state after three years of American occupation.
The island played a big role in the Spanish-American war which started with the explosion of the war-ship "Maine" in the port of Havanna in 1898 (it was supposed to be sabotage, but it looked more like some explosive gas blew up). The US kept Guantanamo Bay as an Army base until today, even though they lost their right of intervention in 1934. It became the only base in a socialist country after Fidel Castro kicked Batista's ass and made him escape to the US.

Guantanamo Bay is the place where detainees from the war in Afghanistan are held as prisoners in camps that look like something out of a John Carpenter-movie.

"The first detainees arrived at Camp X-Ray January 11, 2002. As of February 1, 2002, detainee in-processing and questioning at Camp X-Ray had been limited to such subjects as basic name, place of birth, time of birth, name of parents, siblings and education, though according to Sen. Inouye more in-depth interrogations was to start soon thereafter. "

Quoted from the info-page for Camp X-Ray at globalsecurity.org

"Soon thereafter", why did they wait that long? Wouldn't you want to question these people right away to find out where Dr. Bin Fu Manchu is hiding?

Camp Delta was first occupied on April 28, 2002, when 300 detainees previously held at Camp X-Ray were transferred to Camp Delta. The rest of the detainees were moved on April 29. Camp X-Ray closed down on that same day. As of June 26, 2002, the total number of detainees at Camp Delta was standing at 536. " Quoted from the info-page for Camp Delta at globalsecurity.org

Maybe it wasn't about questioning since the Bushies were working on something else and the US Patriot Act was only the beginning. The US did everything to secure a new international status for themselves. They made sure that no American can be held guilty at the offical court for International War Criminal. "If they try it, we will attack the Netherlands and get our boys out there", one official said on TV. Yeah, right! Send Rambo! And now they introduced a second judical system to deal with the prisoners on Guantanamo Bay and other evil-doers who are too evil for a regular lawsuit.

"Guantanamo is central to the Bush Administration's strategy to prevent judicial review of the legal status of prisoners. Located on Cuban territory, it is the legal equivalent of outer space, according to one US government official, unlike military bases on US territories. These other locations were ruled out as prison sites because they fall under the jurisdiction of the often-liberal Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals. Quoted from the info-page for Camp Delta at globalsecurity.org

The soldiers call the base "Gitmo". They worry about things only Americans worry about. Here are the top-questions from The FAQ of The unofficial guide to Gitmo  

1. Where do you shop on base?
2. What sports are offered for the adults?
3. What sports are offered for the youth?

Those yankees!!!

"They are desperately eager to win an easy victory over a defenseless enemy, so they can strut around as heroes and liberators ... It's as old as history."

full interview at alternet.org

Chomsky also has a new book out called Rogue State

The city of Berlin is not able to stop the Nazis from having another demonstration against Israel on monday. Even though Israel's president Mosche Katzav visits the capitol of Germany at the same time, a demonstration under the banner "Hand off Palestine! No weapons for Israel" will take place in the heart of Berlin. The cops announced they will do anything to stop citizens from trying to get close to the march. It looks like the Nazis can do their thing for the media again. The radical right has been trying to assimilate the struggle for a free Palestine for quite some time now. Hopefully enough people show up to block the streets and offer some resistance.

I found this over in the log of Tom Tomorrow:

Your George W. Bush Fun Fact of the Day

According to Secrets of the Tomb, Alexandra Robbins' book about Skull & Bones (the Yale secret society to which our President and his father both belonged), some new pledges--called "knights"--are automatically assigned traditional secret names:

"Magog," the knight who has the most experience with members of the opposite sex; "Gog," the least sexually experienced member; "Long Devil," the tallest man in the club; "Boaz," any varsity football captain; and "Little Devil," Long Devil's rival and the shortest knight in the club. The knights who are left over are free to choose their own names…

But here's the fun part:

The Bonesmen who influenced George W. Bush's life would have known him by another name: Temporary, an appellation he used because he could not think of anything else and never bothered to change it.

(For what it's worth, George Senior was reportedly named Magog.)

-stolen from thismodernworld.com

The Sad and Sordid Whereabouts of bin Cheney and bin Bush - Part One: "What Does a 99-cent Bic Lighter Tell Us About the Bush War on Terrorism?" Read the free Online Chapter addition to "Stupid White Men" by Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine)

Books: Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich - A New History There a lot of books about Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, but if you wanna read only one, this is the one I would recommend after having read through all the standards this year. "Hitler" by Joachim Fest deals way more with the charakter of the dictator himself, but this book will give you a much broader and deeper understanding of the madness behind the Third Reich. Just check out the cover which shows an old poster of Hitler as a knight looking for the holy grail. That should kind of point you into the direction what this book is about. A must-read, as they say....

Samuel Johnson prize for Non-Fiction 2001
Buy it through this site: The Third Reich. A New History, Pan Books, London, 2000.

My pal Sarah who writes smart shit over at alternet.org and elsewhere sent me the following clipping from AP:

Terror films, fashion stir Germany

By Stephen Graham

Nov. 17, 2002 | BERLIN (AP) --

They kidnapped business leaders, gunned down police officers and hijacked an airliner. But even after Sept. 11, the failed German revolutionaries who spread fear in the 1970s and '80s have acquired a certain chic.

Left-wingers were always nostalgic for the ideals of the student movement from which the feared Red Army Faction terrorists sprang - strident opposition to the Vietnam War, rebellion against their parents' silence on World War II, a society still not completely purged of old Nazis.

Now a wave of films giving the terrorists a more human face, and a series of cheeky fashion items, suggest a broader recasting of history is under way. Some, including Germany's president, are worried by the Red Army Faction's pop culture revival, while others see in it a harmless expression of a bygone era.

"There's an in-crowd who thinks it's chic to make the RAF into Robin Hood figures," said Klaus Boelling, who was the government's spokesman when the violence reached its bloody peak 25 years ago this fall.

"But murder is murder, and Germans know that ideological terrorism is a real danger, today and in the future," he said.

On Oct. 18, 1977, Boelling told a relieved nation that German troops had freed 86 hostages on a Lufthansa plane hijacked to Mozambique to force the release of three jailed RAF leaders. The three, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Jan-Carl Raspe, committed suicide in prison after the attempt failed.

But it was also Boelling's job, the following day, to announce that the kidnapped head of the nation's Industry Federation, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, had been found shot dead in the trunk of a car.

The Red Army Faction went on to bomb U.S. military targets and assassinate a string of business and political figures. It only formally disbanded in 1998, although it had been inactive for some years.

Several cases remain unsolved and suspects are still on the run. Yet filmmakers and writers, many from the same generation, have already begun to re-examine the period, placing a focus on the perpetrators that rankles older Germans.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Volker Schloendorff paved the way in 1999 with "The Legends of Rita," about a young woman swept into the terrorist movement by idealism and love.

The trickle has become a flood, with at least half a dozen new films in cinemas and on television this year.

"Black Box Germany" featured a gripping interview with the widow of Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank killed by a bomb in 1989 - and balanced it with a portrait of Wolfgang Grams, an RAF terrorism suspect who, according to an official investigation, shot himself to death in 1993 as police closed in.

Others include "The State I Am In," described by Der Spiegel magazine as an "RAF road movie," and "What To Do In Case of Fire," an attempt to make amateur bomb-making into sentimental comedy.

Most disputed is the movie "Baader," about the male half of the Baader-Meinhof name that evolved into the RAF. It drew stinging criticism at this year's Berlin film festival for glamorizing the era - but still walked off with a prize.

The movie, by little-known German director Christopher Roth, begins with a pounding punk-rock soundtrack and spends two hours painting a stylish picture of Andreas Baader as a moody maverick with a taste for fine clothes and fast cars.

It ends in his fictional death in a defiant solo showdown with dozens of armed police, strutting out of a garage where he had been cornered, pistols blazing. Baader was actually captured and imprisoned in 1972, five years before his suicide.

Some critics defend the Butch Cassidy-like embellishments as little different from any Hollywood director's efforts to freshen up a plot. But others say even that is done badly.

"It lacks a sense of timing, plot and tension," the left-leaning Tageszeitung daily said, judging that the film ultimately "capitulates before the RAF myth."

Addressing relatives of the terrorists' victims on the 25th anniversary of the Schleyer killing, President Johannes Rau expressed concern that young Germans know too little of what really happened.

"For many, the acronym RAF is foreign, a phenomenon, almost a phantom," he said.

While praising some documentaries for capturing the fear of the RAF years, Rau said others "seem to me to be strangely distanced and sober. They lack feeling and compassion."

Attention also has focused on the recycling of RAF symbols, such as its trademark machine gun and red star.

Stores have marketed underwear bearing the slogan "PRADA-MEINHOF" - a play on "Baader-Meinhof" making unauthorized use of the fashion company's name. A Berlin boutique offers T-shirts for infants with "Terrorist" in bright colors across the chest.

"The symbols of murder have surfaced in stylish ad campaigns, as if the terrorists were heroes of pop culture," Rau complained.

Still, others argue the terrorists could only be remodeled because the leftism of the period is no longer relevant.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was once a street-fighting anarchist leader in Frankfurt - part of the mystique that has helped make him the country's most popular politician. Lawyer Otto Schily, now Germany's interior minister, once defended Baader in court.

Films such as Roth's, wrote the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, show just "how completely the memories have lost their political content, and into what deep sediment October 1977 has sunk." "So much time has passed that it has a different value today," said Christoph Heiss, an unemployed 40-year-old, after seeing "Baader" at a Berlin movie theater. "It's already a matter for history - even for pop history."

Now, Sarah wants to know if I wore the underwear. No! But I had Spider-Man-panties when I was eight and I agree with Jan Delay on the issue of the RAF. Check him out!
He is the first true Reggae-artist out of Germany and he's out on Buback, the traditional leftie-label from Hamburg. He did a song called "Söhne Stammheims". Stammheim is the name of the prison they built for the RAF and the title also mocks the name of a cheesy R&B-band from Germany.
It's pre-9/11 and the lyrics kind of go like this : "finally it's safe to drive your Mercedes again without being afraid that it might explode. Law, order and peace. And nobody cares about those fuckheads in prison anymore etc."
It's true. We don't care anymore. But we did for a while. We cared and we went to demonstrations for those prisoners and the cops kicked the shit out of us. Now people care about "Jürgen and Zlatko" as Jan Delay put it, referring to the most popular contanier-inhabitants of the Big Brother-era in Germany.
At the same time, the song was written, these two women from Berlin called themselves "Prada & Meinhoff" and they did funny interviews which they broadcasted on the web. They were the darlings of the new economy in Berlin and that's where the t-shirts came from.
It was a joke! Then there were a bunch of movies and "Blackbox BRD" is certainly a good one while "Baader" is complete crap. And the guy forgot "The Silence after the shooting" which was very good too. I don't know whether it's worse than "Pearl Harbour" since I don't wanna see either one.
But the scene or the underground in Germany has always been very political. That's where people come from. Look at the riots which have been going on the past week in Hamburg. That's not about some stupid punk-band or drinking prosecco at someone's artshow-opening. This "Radical Chick" has also been put up by "The Face", but losers like people making up trends for lifestyle-magazines need to come up with something new all the time.
People like that did Baader. These folks also like techno-disco-house and they're just urban attention-seekers trying to see their face in the local city-paper! Fuck them!

Then there is the case of the brains of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan Carl Raspe missing. For ten years they were preserved in the brain-collection of the university in Tübingen. Now, Pathologist Jürgen Pfeiffer has no idea where they are or who took them. The brain of Ulrike Meinhoff has showed up at the university of Magdeburg and it will be given to her daughters in a while. Fucked up!

In case you haven't noticed that, I added The Noam Chomsky Archive to the left bar of links. There are tons of things to read over there. Just in case you're bored!

Stay Free Mag has published a nice new report on Art of the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program, a.k.a. Cointelpro.
I especially liked the "Black Panther Coloring Book" they produced!

Schools of America Watch collects all information on the renamed "Schools of America" in Fort Benning, Georgia which is actually a base to train "freedom fighters" from latin-America. Manuel Noriega is one of their graduates!
Yesterday, more than 90 people, including seven nuns, have been arrested after a peaceful protest.
More also in the local "ledger enquirer"

guerrillanews has published a strange little story from the Asian Times.

"'Word got around the department that I was a good Arabic translator who did a great Saddam imitation,' recalls the Harvard grad student. 'Eventually, someone phoned me, asking if I wanted to help change the course of Iraq policy,'" writes Asia Times (Hong Kong) correspondent Ian Urbina. "So twice a week, for US$3,000 a month, the Iraqi student says, under condition of anonymity, that he took a taxi from his campus apartment to a Boston-area recording studio rented by the Rendon Group, a DC-based public relations firm with close ties to the U.S. government. His job: translate and dub spoofed Saddam Hussein speeches and tongue-in-cheek newscasts for broadcast throughout Iraq. 'I never got a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA or policy makers on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots,' says the student, 'but ultimately I realized that the guys doing spin were very well and completely cut loose.'"
Source: Asia Times, November 13,