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Sunday, August 20, 2006 |
TimesOnline: "Prosecutors suspect that the apparent suicide of Italia Telecom's head of security is linked to his helping police to investigate whether members of the Italian secret service colluded with CIA agents in the abduction in Milan of a man accused of terrorism. They are working on the theory that Adamo Bove, 42, who fell from a bridge in Naples, had been threatened and was 'instigated to take his own life'."
AlterNet: "About 16 months earlier, in March of 2005, Costas Tsalikidis, a 38-year-old software engineer for Vodaphone in Greece had just discovered a highly sophisticated bug embedded in the company's mobile network. The spyware eavesdropped on the prime minister's and other top officials' cell phone calls; it even monitored the car phone of Greece's secret service chief. Others bugged included civil rights activists, the head of Greece's 'Stop the War' coalition, journalists and Arab businessmen based in Athens. All the wiretapping began about two months before the Olympics were hosted by Greece in August 2004, according to a subsequent investigation by the Greek authorities.
Tsalikidis, according to friends and family, was excited about his work and was looking forward to marrying his longtime girlfriend. But on March 9, 2005, his elderly mother found him hanging from a white rope tied to pipes outside of his apartment bathroom. His limp feet dangled a mere three inches above the floor. His death was ruled a suicide; he, like Adamo Bove, left no suicide note.
The Vodaphone eavesdropping was transmitted in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation. Some of these transmissions were sent to a phone in Laurel, Md., near America's National Security Agency."
KavkazCenter: "The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control-against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism-during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as 'facilitators' of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way."
OpEdNews: "For the second time in two months, a federal court has ruled that the president is in violation of the Constitution. This time it's a federal court in Detroit that has ruled that President Bush has violated the Fourth Amendment against illegal search and seizure for his order to the National Security Agency to monitor the phone and Internet messages of Americans without bothering to obtain a court order based upon probable cause.
The important thing about these two rulings - and it is a point that the squeamish mainstream media have shied away from mentioning - is that they both are declaring the president to be a criminal. That is, he has been found in the first case to be in criminal violation of the Constitution, as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and in the second, he has been found to be in violation of U.S. and International Law."
There is only one thing to do: arrest George W. Bush.
1:16:06 PM 
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JTA: "One-tenth of the Israeli tanks that took part in the Lebanon war were destroyed or disabled, a military study found.
12:48:42 PM
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Scotsman: "Terrorists are 'rolling around the caves of Pakistan, laughing' at Britain's response to the terror threat, an airline boss said last night as he gave the government a seven-day deadline to relax restrictions or face legal action.
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary described some of the security measures as 'farcical, Keystone Kops-like and completely insane and ineffectual'."
ICH: "So now we've (choke) just been (gasp) saved from the simultaneous blowing up of ten airplanes headed toward the United States from the UK. Wow, thank you Brits, thank you Homeland Security. Well done, lads. And thanks for preventing the destruction of the Sears Tower in Chicago, saving lower Manhattan from a terrorist-unleashed flood, smashing the frightful Canadian 'terror plot' with 17 arrested, ditto the three Toledo terrorists, and squashing the Los Angeles al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airliner into a skyscraper.
The Los Angeles plot of 2002 was proudly announced by George W. early this year. It has since been totally discredited. Declared one senior counterterrorism official: 'There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage.'
From what is typical in terrorist scares, it is likely that the individuals arrested in the UK August 10 are guilty of what George Orwell, in 1984, called 'thoughtcrimes'. That is to say, they haven't actually DONE anything. At most, they've THOUGHT about doing something the government would label "terrorism". Perhaps not even very serious thoughts, perhaps just venting their anger at the exceptionally violent role played by the UK and the US in the Mideast and thinking out loud how nice it would be to throw some of that violence back in the face of Blair and Bush. And then, the fatal moment for them that ruins their lives forever ... their angry words are heard by the wrong person, who reports them to the authorities.
Soon a government agent provocateur appears, infiltrates the group, and then actually encourages the individuals to think and talk further about terrorist acts, to develop real plans instead of youthful fantasizing, and even provides the individuals with some of the actual means for carrying out these terrorist acts, like explosive material and technical know-how, money and transportation, whatever is needed to advance the plot."
Meanwhile, the Israeli government is again violating a UN resolution.
12:43:41 PM
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A Daisy reader has been developed for the German market; this reader allows you to browse an audiobook as if it were a regular book. The software existed already for visually impaired people. Now it is introduced for the commercial audio-book market.
Mac users can load only the mp3 files in iTunes. There is a free cookbook (in German) available.
12:28:13 PM
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