"At least 90 companies that provide services normally performed by national military forces – but without the same degree of public oversight – have operated in 110 countries worldwide, providing everything from military training, logistics, and even engaging in armed combat. Amid the global military downsizing and the increasing number of small conflicts that followed the end of the Cold War, governments have turned increasingly to these private military companies to intervene on their behalf around the globe, a new investigation by the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found."
Read the report, "Making a Killing: The Business of War"

The National Security Archives are "the largest collection of contemporary declassified national security information outside the United States Government."
They got all kinds of authentic material online, stuff like the handwritten letter in which Elvis Presley applied for being a special secret super agent for Dick Nixon (What a goof!)

more in the Nixon meets Elvis-section

He's one of the most prominent critics of the Bush-administration and he lives in Italy by now.
He's not only a relative of Al Gore, he's also one of the most interesting intellectuals to read right now.

And he's got an interpretation of the events following 9-11 that makes sense.
Read the story in The Observer

Donald Rumsfeld gave birth to another group of ultra-secret troublemakers: the 'Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)'

It was founded to carry out dirty operations which will provoke certain terrorists to react and kill a few more innocents while the US can keep playing cavalry.

There is a very revealing Story in the Moscow Times which has some more info.

Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose, head of the task force catching "the sniper" has his own club now.
Join the Chief Moose Fan Club

Paul Wellstone has been called " the only progressive in the U.S. Senate" on alternet.org and the death of the politician had a deep impact on the american left. it's not only that he died in a plane crash like a lot of people who got in the way of those who wanna take over the world....
alternet raises the obvious question: Was Paul Wellstone murdered

It's that time of the year again and you don't have money anyway. So, why not save it on November the 29th?
The campaign at adbusters
And don't forget to buynothingchristmas.org

The left and the right share a nowarblog with an interesting list of people taking part in the discussion.

A very good source in general is cursor.org. They have a good link-list of international Middle East Media if you're also interested in the views of the people over there.

"The merger of Time Inc. with Warner Communications and then America Online may make for dramatic headlines, but it doesn't mean global media conglomerates are taking over the Fourth Estate, drowning out local content, killing hard-hitting journalism, or driving U.S. foreign policy, writes a Massachusetts Institute of Technology media scholar." ~~ Benjamin Compaine, "Global Media"

Quit whining about the global media-situation and all that. Actually it's never been better than right now. Folks with a simple weblog can kick Disney's ass.

interesting article at foreignpolicy.com

...and it doesn't look too good for western democracies!

full Story

Download the Public Space Info "to spread democracy like a virus through the creation of public space."

Fun with everyone's favourite chimp!

Nice exercise produced by the fellows of the

stop the war coalition uk

A bunch of lunatics made it possible that being a Jedi is officially regonized as a religion. Now, some people got into politics to push through that downloading a lot of music you're never gonna listen to is legal no matter where you got it from and all that.
I mean, come on! Have some more dignity! What a pathetic joke!

Article at The Regus

Members of the czech intelligence claim there is no evidence of a meeting of Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi offical expelled for "activities inconsistent with his diplomatic status."

This imaginary meeting is the base of all that Irak pay for 9-11. It'S the only evidence the public knows about.
"Quite simply, we think the source for this story may have invented the meeting that he reported. We can find no corroborative evidence for the meeting and the source has real credibility problems " a high-ranking source close to Czech intelligence told UPI Sunday.

Someone made it up. I wonder who that might be...

Exclusive Story at UPI

Stephen R. Shalom and Michael Albert have raised 45 Questions and Answers Regarding Intervention in General, 9-11 and Afghanistan One Year Later, and Iraq on the Verge of War over at znet.

Very sum-up of the situation as it is right now.

Germany has no new problems with right-wing-assaults after september 11th. After the reunification and the wall being gone the country feels closer to the states than ever before. Muslims are not a target what you would consider some mindless redneck-lynch-mob. German right-wing-extremists rather celebrate the atttacks as victory in their battle against the state that oppresses them all that bullshit. You have heard that sort of crap from the oklahoma-bomber and there is a whole lot of guys talking like that in germany. Big parts of the country are considered "National befreite Zonen", that's zones free of foreigners, immigrants, people of some other skin-colour, punk-rockers and just people who don't join their march in general. There's a lot of these guys in the south-west and all over the east. Well, look it up on the web, but just to explain that there is no real fear of muslim terrorists in germany. There is a big fear of a war breaking out and germany hosting america's biggest air-bases and army-hospitals on the continent. There are huge muslim-communities in germany, most of them being turkish families that have moved here three generations ago or something. There are some muslim extremist-groups, but they are more nationalists assholes like the gray wolves from turkey. And the ruling political parties (social democrats and green party) reside in Kreuzberg, which is the legendary fucked up part of the society that partly looks like Istanbul, as the conservatives like to put it. People have never really paid much attention to the muslims and now they kind of start to care and do this dialogue of religions-thing. Locally people start to go to church again and they share their faith with people of other religions and hold candles. It's more like, people in germany have been scared of foreigners forever and they have woken up a little bit. Europe has had it's share of terrorism. People don't only look at what the 11th of september. They might even remember the attack on the 1972 olympics and the oktoberfest in munich, the big terrorist hunt for the RAF in the late 70s and there is always the ETA in spain and northern-ireland, the siege of Rostock and Hoyerswerda,...

But there has never been so many victims before. You can't compare it to anything that has happened before. People are just speechless and germany is still in some kind of trance with us guys also being in charge of our little commando down in mazedonia from now on.

But thee Germans have dealt with terrorism before. As I said, there is a big problem with right-wing-acts of violence that are acts of terrorism in my book and suddenly voters are also willing to give away a big part of freedom for some fake promise. A few windows in four or five cities have been smashed, as far I have heard. Business as usual in germany, I guess. It's been way worse (look up the incidents above if you are interested) Then again 5 of the terrorists involved in the attack on sept. 11th lived in Germany, 3 at least in liberal Hamburg where an extreme right-wing judge called Ronald Schill (he calls himself "judge mercyless") and got 19.4% in the elections last sunday. Now this guy is a one-person-party with only one slogan: more cops provide more security. He might become the new mayor of the city where the Beatles had their first speed. Hamburg is the grand old liberal queen, home of the red-light reeperbahn and the famous squat-houses in the Hafenstraße. And now there is CIA all over Hamburg and Putin holds a speech in perfect german at the old Reichstag.

The way, people see it, it's The Secret Wars starring. the USA, guest-starring a bunch of minor-league Nato-countries, but since the americans seem to be willing to lose quite a lot of their own people in their crusade, we will simply wait. Since Turkey is so close and also part of the NATO, people have never adopted to seeing muslims as the evil enemy. But any inner security-issue they always wanted to do is on the table and there is a catalogue of new things the US would like to have, but we are not supposed to know. I I guess, most people know, we have to do our duty with NATO, but they don't think all this talk about a war is dangerous. There is no war. The CIA just goes on with whatever they have been doing all the time, but we don't care. And a new discussion about immigrants and people asking for political asylum has started, a popular favourite among the conservatives. It's all very fucked up.....

Be nice to your neigbours

Former MI6-Agent Richard Tomlinson has written a book which the british secret service tries not to get published. But since it is the age of self-publishing, you were able to find a copy for on the net.

A russian publisher hat put out The Big Breach now and you can read excerpts under that url up there.

"What we are seeing here is free market capitalism at it's finest" (Richard "Dick" Grasso on the day Wall Street reopened after the attack on the WTC)

"...It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world. All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday...." --Guardian, 9/15/01

W.Bush has taken over america by having his brother at the right place to make him president. Then we got the all-new "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropiate Tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism Act" or shortly, the USA-Patriot-Law.
Now, everybody standing up against any form of oppression in the states can be thrown into jail for acts of terrorism and all that shit.

"There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that. … It never is" - White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer

We are at War! Or let's say that's what the trigger happy crowd wants us to believe!

Actually W.Bush has corrected himself already. It's not a war, it's a crusade and no sacrifice is big enough to show those mercyless, faceless killers who they are dealing with.
Just ask the "farmers and ranchers" George W.Bush referred to when he addressed the public for the first time after september the 11th. "Dead or alive" W. said, just like in the wild west, he added, preparing to legitimize any sort of state terrorism that a bunch of honest democrats got rid of back in the 60s.

While everybody keeps mourning, the secret service announced an "intelligence war" and Mr.Rumsfeld asked for: a.) a new unconventional technich of war.( Bollocks! What would that be? More killer squadrons as in all the other dirty little wars the US fought after WWII?)

b.) a fourth secret service working along side with the NSA which officially didn't even exist until things got too obvious. Now we are getting another service in charge of "terrorism", controlling the CIA and the F.B.I. Oh, come on!

c.) being allowed to hire any sort of dirty scumbag for undecover-operations nobody is supposed to know about. That's what they always did, right?

But there we go. It's not a war, it's just a process that has been going on for quite a while.

History has gotten cheap and prepackaged. Good and evil, that's what's left of the world we used to live in. The world under texas state law. Smoke out the left! Violence disguised as justice.

Americans couldn't care less in their isolationsim and that's where it gets dangerous. They look up to their president and trust him, singing their anthem, waving flags for the camera and praying to god. What else are they gonna do? They don't even know where Afghanistan is, hell, most of them don't know where they are themselves if you show them a map of the world! Any unemployed guy in Bangladesh is smarter than you regular joe-next-door in the US.
W wants to make us believe, the only thing americans understand is american football and killing small animals with big guns.

But obviously most people in America are not as stupid as their representative wants us to believe. They simply don't understand why the mayority of the world thinks they are complete idiots who should stick to football and horseback-riding. Most americans have never been in another country where not everybody speaks English and they don't learn languages by themselves because they don't feel a need to communicate with the rest of the world. You know why? Because they are proud to live in a country that is sort of a perfect dictator-rulership.
The guy who was more or less responsible for preparing the world for global warfare is one big hero now, eh? He stole the election, he was hiding when things were happening and he still doesn't know how to deal with it. Some kind of hero.... America fights the popularity-war again! Whew, send in the cheerleaders and the end of the world will be just one giant superbowl. Buy warbonds and you can help fight terrorism too!

How to fight terror!

Get the right clothes! What the gouvernment does with your money

Osama's Weblog

the international tv-coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center has been collected for the real-player: televisionarchive - a library of world perspectives concerning sept.11th

Free Expression After September 11th - An Online Index

A long piece by Nicole Blackman on the WTC.... The Touristguy

Oliver Stone on Sept.11th

RAMBO IV: Night Of The Taliban?

(City Light Books)
A collection of the best essays on September 11th, it's origins and it's consequences. More than 30 authors give us their perspective on that strange "war on terrorism" we have to deal with in some way.

(Maisonneuve Press) Reports to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal and the Tribunal's Final Judgement.
This was put together by Ramsey Clark and others. It covers the American War Crimes in Iraque. 125000 to 300000 people were killed while the US destroyed a completely helpless country.
Yeah, you might not have heard of these violations and you're definetly not gonna hear anything about the next ones since no American can be judged by the International Tribunal anymore.
Very helpful to understand the international picture.

(Verso)
A collection of essays about the brave new world order by this excellent journalist. It's post-9/11 and provides all the basic-facts to fight the American disinformation.
This is the real shit and not one of these conspiracy-books!

(Regan Books)
Probably one of the most entertaining books written about US-politics and a bestseller in the States.
Michael Moore has his shit together and points us at some remarkable facts surrounding the gouvernment of W.Bush. He starts with the strange race which got this guy into power and focuses on telling the reader how to take action.
Some sections are kind of dull, but this is book makes more sense than a lot of the other ones which came out lately.

Moore is also the guy behind the series "Tv Nation" and "Awful Truth".

And check out Moore's website! It's really worth checking out on a regular base. Michael Moore

Not in Our Name is a new group of intellectuals, artists etc. trying to stand up against war and repression.
Worthwhile checking out. the statement of conscience can be read in English, Spanish, German or Arabic.

It's not like they made these guys up! The NSA is for real!

So, everyone could be an enemy and all that! Haven't we heard that one before? Does the style of these pictures look familiar?