Congratulations to Assange – this is a richly deserved recognition.

Great to see you back to blogging after a few days – how’s the house coming on?

Congratulations to Mr. Assange!! Open disclosure is an essential precondition for democracy since for a meaningful public debate to take place one has to be made aware of the facts. But it is not just democracy that benefits from the disclosures in wikileaks, but human rights and civil liberties as well. Again, well done Mr. Assange, and well done Craig Murray for so eloquently bringing your issues to the public eye.

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/08/pilger-wikileaks-afghanistan

Shame on the British government for cowering in the face of Washington’s threats to Assange.

Assange has put lives at risk by revealing classified documents containing details about informers. In my view he has been gravely irresponsible and deserves not an award but a stiff jail sentence.

Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize too.

You kept that award quiet Craig. Well done.

How is the house refit going. Are you knackered? And will we get the ‘after’ photos having had the ‘before’ set?

Meant to add this obit. for Sam Adams.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/11/obituaries/samuel-adams-ex-cia-officer-and-libel-case-figure-dies-at-54.html

Is Julian Assange a hero or an intelligence operative.

Here’s Webster Tarpley’s analysis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BabOOgTPtE&feature=related

Abe Rene

Lives are always at risk when the war mongers get their way. Not only are they at risk, they’re lost on a daily basis often in staggering numbers and attended by horrendous injuries for those who manage to survive.

However, I’m sure a stiff jail sentence for Assange will ensure the war mongers can sleep safer in their beds.

John Pilger on “Why Wikileaks must be Protected”:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26192.htm

Abe Rene, here’s a paragraph:

“On 31 July, the American celebrity reporter Christiane Amanpour interviewed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the ABC network. She invited Gates to describe to her viewers his “anger” at WikiLeaks. She echoed the Pentagon line that “this leak has blood on its hands,” thereby cueing Gates to find WikiLeaks “guilty” of “moral culpability.” Such hypocrisy coming from a regime drenched in the blood of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq ?” as its own files make clear ?” is apparently not for journalistic enquiry.”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Yes! What excellent news.

Craig,

thanks for reporting this, and good to see a post from you. What a list of fine people you share this award with. I hope your new home is coming along well.

Abe Rene

(if that really was you), Wikileaks did check the material before they released, and withheld a substantial proportion to prevent people being put at risk.

OK, so it’s great to have someone like Assange, Wikileaks, and of course Craig Murray. But so what..we know most of this shit anyway and when was the last time we did anything about what these people bring to our attention.

I applaud the stated aims of Wikileaks and support them 100%. And Julian Assange is clearly a bright, techno-savvy young man – but a young man with a burning ambition.

According to John Young of Cryptome (and the original front-man for Wikileaks who resigned over its astronomical fund-raising ambitions), the market for illicit, classified and otherwise confidential information is vast – and VERY lucrative indeed.

Unfortunately, big-money potential, burning ambition, and the explosive emotionally-charged nature of Wilileaks recent leaks (and potentially of those it allegedly holds in reserve) is a combination that is manna from heaven for the Spooks.

Have a look at:

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Wikileaks_and_the_Mighty_Wurlitzer

For a disturbing alternative view of the Wikileaks saga. It expands on the Webster Tarpley analysis refered to at 5:45 above.

As for Abe Rene – yet another believer in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy – and an angry one too it seems. Oh dear.

Cid,

some of us do a little, some do more. Craig does a lot. But just knowing helps – we bear witness. That the Powers That Be know this influences their decisions.

Well done to Julian Assange, keep it coming. The public should be able to make decisions on fact not fiction… I would love to say “the truth sets you free” and mean it… unfortunately for some of my friends round the world its landed them in prison for subversion…though perhaps their minds remain free…

Clark: yes, it is me. Sabretache: I ceased to believe in the tooth fairy a few decades ago. Bush and Rumsfeld’s screw-up over the bad planning as well as the questionable decisions to go to war (especially Iraq) in the first place is no reason for Assange to release a great deal of material most which he admits he has not thoroughly read, let alone vetted. Most imprtantly, disclosure is not his decision to make. The informers who risk their lives do so on the understanding that anything they say will be completely secure. So I would say to Assange as would Col. Nathan Jessup to Lt. Kaffee in “A few good men”, but with justice: “You put people in danger. Sweet dreams, son.”

Like the wiki leaks thing was not endorsed by the Good ole Obama Administration and those monkeys at the CIA. Leak?? my butt. Just grooming the sheep

Obama, the drone-firing Peace Laureate should hand over his Nobel Prize to Assange and apologize for embarrassing it. Thank you, Julian.

Abe Rene

Hmm – I wouldn’t have gone that far but, now you mention it, your take on the issue would make a good Nathan Jessop (amoral, Orwellian “our business is saving lives”, wouldn’t bat an eye about killing if his childish sense of honour dictated – so long as it remained secret or he thought he would get away with it, massive ego, blind as a bat to the real issues) to Assanges Kaffee.

Nice one.

Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Assanges ask for the leaks to be vetted by the US Military then throw a hissy fit?

Don’t get me wrong I’m all for disclosure but be careful about making this guy a saint. This is from the wikileaks twitter

“Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review.Media won’t take responsibility.Amnesty won’t.What to do?” see “https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/20664647314″ Wikileaks whilst laudable is all about the ego of it’s main man what with his never sleep in the same place twice crap. FFS have you read about the ’1.4 gigabyte mystery file named “Insurance” on the WikiLeaks website’ ? Have a look at http://cryptome.org

Guess it will all go the way of Google, remember “Do No Evil (unless the Chinese ask us to remove the references to a certain Square).

Abe Rene

“Assange has put lives at risk by revealing classified documents containing details about informers.”

These informers, by collaborating with a foreign occupying armed force, are traitors to their own people. Is that really where your sympathy lies?

Paul,

I can’t find that Cryptome article from the Cryptome home page. Could you give a more specific reference please?

Paul,

is this what you were referring to?

http://cryptome.org/0002/wl-diary-mirror.htm

“These informers, by collaborating with a foreign occupying armed force, are traitors to their own people. Is that really where your sympathy lies?”

Informers are a very sensitive topic in Ireland, since we were bedevilled by them for centuries … I remember being taught that at the age of 8 or 9. However, Julian Assange says they contacted the Pentagon beforehand, and asked them to indicate where sensitive names might be, and they received no reply. So their whining now is two-faced.

“John Young of Cryptome”

Is he not a one-man amateur operation?

“(and the original front-man for Wikileaks who resigned over its astronomical fund-raising ambitions)”

Assange argues that their safety, secrecy and online anonymity cost money. He says they need new staff to handle all the material they have — which needs to be assessed and sometimes unencrypted. He claims they need people they can rely on, people who can be trusted, and they do a lot of background checks on potential employees. I imagine all that costs money.

I think his collaboration with Iceland can only be a good thing.

“The WikiLeaks advised proposal to build an international “new media haven” in Iceland, with the world’s strongest press and whistleblower protection laws, and a “Nobel” prize for for Freedom of Expression, has unaminously passed the Icelandic Parliament.”

http://www.countercurrents.org/assange170610.htm

Paul,

as I understood it, Google got to supply search facilities to China by brokering a deal: the Chinese government wanted certain search results not to be displayed. Google negotiated that such results would be acknowledged with a notice reading “This information is withheld by the Chinese government” or something similar. So they negotiated a compromise that was better than nothing; the Chinese government would not have accepted Google otherwise.

I found the recent activities of Wikileaks most odd.

The US and UK governments being so corrupt must live in perpetual fear of leaks. So, how much better if they could publicise Wikileaks extensively and gather up the leaks and decide which to publish and which not to. Also they could quite easily find out the source.

Read this excellent article and see what I mean:

Hidden Intelligence Operation Behind the Wikileaks Release of “Secret” Documents?

The real story of Wikileaks has clearly not yet been told.

at

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=20580&context=va

So when do you think Assange will publish documents that detail 911 being an inside job? Answer: never. They don’t exist, you silly gooses.

I can’t imagine how annoyed Assange gets with 911 Truthy Truthers bothering him all the time.

Is that the book ‘How I got WTC7 Collapsed and Collected the Insurance’ by Larry Silverstein?

I can’t help but feel that a call to throw Assange in jail is specifically hawkish, pro-war. As has been said earlier in the thread, putting the truth-tellers in jail helps the amoral warmongers sleep soundly in their beds.

It does rather seem that WL have taken care to filter the material, along with the journalists with whom they worked. But if that is not enough for the conservatives here, what would be? To have had the material released to WL and then for it to be destroyed, or never released? Isn’t that rather like telling Ellsberg he should not have released the Pentagon Papers – which were part of the building domestic pressure that ended the war against Vietnam?

Arthur Silber treats the issue of Wikileaks very well, as always. I find him one of the best and most honest bloggers.

Congrats, Julian

You deserved the award and I hope you get new ones every year.

John Van Rooyen: ‘traitor’ is a loaded word. The people who work for the Americans are fighting the Taleban, who are Islamists who would impose a lunatic and oppressive regime, treat women as slaves, and give support to Al-Qaeda. My sympathies are certainly against them. Assange has high-handedly put people at risk and deserves punishment, not sympathy as far as I am concerned.

I could give Abe Rene a long list of ‘loaded’ words connected to the illegal wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is from one of the doctors in the original group. Remember that they have been going at this for nearly seven years. I admire their tenacity throughout and their resistance to the cold water poured on them by the likes of Mangold and Aaronovitch, Blair’s pals Rentoul and Campbell and even Gilligan recently. The cold water has ended up just muddying the water but has so far failed to silence those who call for justice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/19/david-kelly-inquest-disgrace

Antidote,

i’ll second that comment about Arthur Silber – he’s one of the most uncompromising and consistently brilliant bloggers out there.

Does anyone else see what’s really going on here? Assange has conjured up one of the most elaborate spider’s web ever spun. I strongly urge everyone to be extra cautious.

ASSange. Enough said.

So much for any hope that the ConDems would act honourably to find the truth and to give justice to the late doctor.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1304588/Attorney-General-refuses-open-secret-David-Kelly-files.html

Larry said,

“So when do you think Assange will publish documents that detail 911 being an inside job? Answer: never. They don’t exist, you silly gooses.”

Larry, no one here raised the issue of 911. Did you by chance post this on the wrong thread, or perhaps the wrong web site?

And despite the name, aren’t you really a girl. I mean, how many guys go around calling people “silly gooses”?

Any how, it’s geese. So, run along you silly goose.

I take cognisance of F. William Engdahl’s view of the topic, as noted upthread^ (copy also here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/2dbr3a4).

Engdahl is one of the few to analyse the implicity of the leaks, rather than the (overwhelming) content of the leaks themselves (has anyone done that? – links please!)

Craig, I wouldn’t be assuaged at all by the rostrum that Julian Assange now shares with you. After all the ‘award’ is ‘_judged by a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel_’…… When was it you were awarded this similar ‘accolade’? & did the retired military and intelligence bods explain in detail their reasonings?

I ask with the greatest respect for you…

It is hard to discover the corollary of so many of the events of today/yesterday.

& totally off-topic, but worthy of a mention (particularly for the analysis in [youtube] parts 1-6 of historical events) is the new documentary ‘Seeds of Deconstruction’.

Further info on the film ‘Seeds of Deconstruction’ is available here:

http://tinyurl.com/35b78ow

Sorry for misplacing this comment!

i didn’t find the “post a comment” on that page.

i just ordered the “The Catholic Orangmen of Togo”, but i missed the “Special Instructions to Merchant” box for a signed copy. It’s the one for 16 Richards. Mille Grazie! Dio vi benedica!

Julian Assange is a good ‘C’ programmer and has written software tools for Unix including a port scanner:

http://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/scanners/strobe/

and an encryption program called ‘Marutukku’ for Linux

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberhose_(file_system)

Marutukku or ‘rubberhose’ as it was later called was used by doctors in Iraq in 2003/4 for storing data on abuses to Iraqi civilians who ended up in trauma.

Julian is no agent, his own emails have been hacked and he warns against sending sensitive information by this route, preferring good ‘ol ‘snail-mail’ to a PO Box No.

Bert,

Thanks – Seeds of Deconstruction is a ‘must-see.’

Attorney General Dominic Grieve has sloping shoulders preferring to leave the decision to release the ‘post-mortem examination report and other sensitive medical notes on David Kelly to Ken Clarke; the ‘Big Society’ awaits a positive outcome Mr Clarke -

open government is de rigeur n’est-ce pas?

Hippy.

Craig, if you ever bump into Sibel Edmonds – do have a chat with her about 9/11, OBL and AQ etc

Assange has now been accused of rape:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11047025

Like Scott Ritter.

Yes the dirty tricks dept have been working o/t. It must be very distressing for Assange all the same. Didn’t something similar happen to a presidential candidate.

technicolour, did Scott Ritter ever make the argument that the Vast Conspiracy had falsified the charges against him?

This will get you ROTFLOL Larry. Watch carefully @ 2.09 to see the smile wiped off Regev’s physog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME_NpnH7jDc

The ‘dirty trick’ is a plot to make the hosting and security of Wikileaks on Internet servers problematic.

A recent contract with The Pirate Party in Sweden serves to enforce the security of Wikileaks hosting.

Julian had dinner with the Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falk Vinge last Sunday when an agreement was signed that would offer some protection in Swedish law to maintain a Wikileak presence.

The Pirate Party does have about 10% support in Sweden (growing) and I believe has two representatives in the European parliament.

Since its defence against P2P file sharing, the Pirate Party is gaining strength, saying: “the proposals to censor The Pirate Bay from the Internet [are] an attempt to silence one of today’s most important voices related to civil liberties and freedom on the net. It is nothing less than political censorship, which every democratically minded person must condemn.”

I am very interested in the framework of this party and whether it could be applied successfully to British politics.

Let face it, in Britain, we are becoming sick to death of a defunct, obsolete and burdening political system that drains taxes, supports a ‘deep’ foreign policy and humiliates local community organisers by proposing a stupid ‘big society’ plan that is undermining hard working groups the width and breadth of Great Britain.

Further to my first comment here and at the risk of gilding the lilly on site promotion: The Wikispooks article on Wikileaks now has probably the most comprehensive set of non-MSM links to insightful information you will find anywhere. They include both Arthur Silber, Zahir Ebrahim and John Pilger articles, together with a tuned Google search of the Cryptome site and some commentary. John Young of Cryptome you will recall was the original registrant of the Wikileaks domain but resigned over their fund-raising ambitions.

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Wikileaks

Arrest warranty has been issued in Sweden today for Wikileaks founder with rape charges. CIA seems to be working pretty well.

Now he’ll have to spend all his time defending the rape allegations. Oh, it’s so transparent.

Peter,

I remind you that PGP can be broken and again I advise everyone to change your ‘PGP keys’ on a regular basis (special thanks to the ‘locksmith’ who gave me a ‘laugh’ by advertising key-cutting on this site).

Assange thinks you 911 nutters are conspiraloons, as Craig Murray does:

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/features/wanted-by-the-cia-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-14880073.html#

You people have NO right to know the contents of classified info. Where in the law does it state you are entitled to this infO?

This man was a hacker. He is a crook, a theif and, like most radical liberals, one who only cares about those who are no threat to him.

DOes he help try to topple radical islam or dangerous criminals? No

Does he try to topple Iran or VZ? No

Why is that? Because he’s a scumbag. Just like you phonies

Ooh er missus!

Troll alert

Troll alert

Calling

Calling

“Chief prosecutor Eva Finne has come to the decision that Julian Assange is not suspected of rape. Considering that, Assange is no longer arrested in his absence”.

http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/

How bizarre. Sounds like a typical disinformation/ mud-slinging black (or grey) op.

Suhayl said,

“Now he’ll have to spend all his time defending the rape allegations. Oh, it’s so transparent. ”

Ha! Who are the conspiracy theorists now?

Glenn Greenwald on Assange:

“Charges against Julian Assange withdrawn, unfounded”

http://tinyurl.com/36dt937

Since he says Scott Ritter was the subject of a ‘media smear campaign’, can I assume he was never convicted? Google throws up nothing.

I’ll do just about anything “to see the smile wiped off Regev’s physog” so I’m off to watch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter#Arrests

Alfred, I know. Although I never called you or anyone that, as far as I can recall. In fact, I – and many others – have supplied links to various articles, etc. across these boards over the years which have demonstrated how the intelligence services create and disseminate disinformation of various kinds in pursuit of political goals.

Anyhow, it’s pretty obvious. Assange will probably be accused of ‘child porn’ next. That’s the usual mud – because it’s the accusation whence refutation and redemption are hard to attain. And as always, there will be ‘sympathetic’ journalists ready with their poison pens, ready to follow their master’s voice. Woof-woof!

“Assange will probably be accused of ‘child porn’ next”.

No, they can’t access his computer. Hence the trumped up rape charge instead.

Hey, Suhayl:

I did not mean to suggest that you had called anyone a conspiracy theorist. I was just struck by the interesting fact that some conspiracy theories, as mere hypotheses, whether stated or implied, seem more acceptable than others.

My own view is that anyone who refuses to entertain a conspiracy theory is nutty, and anyone who believes a conspiracy theory without very good evidence is nuttier.

Incidentally, isn’t there some thing oxymoronic about the Sam Adams award for “integrity in intelligence”?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Adams_Award

I mean, after Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and the dodgy dossier, would any person of integrity be in intelligence to begin with?

Trenchcoats are sexy.

The wikileaks documents, particularly as relayed by the Guardian convey a few very simple ideas. See if you can identify whose agenda they serve:

Covert units hunt ‘taliban’ leaders for ‘kill or capture’

There has been a steep rise in ‘Taliban’ bomb attacks on NATO

The ‘Taliban’ have killed 2000 civilians, while US troops have killed just a few hundred.

Iran and Pakistan are helping the ‘Taliban’

There seem to be a load of people who are just *sure* that Wikileaks is an intelligence agencies’ front. I suggest they go and spend some time looking around the Wikileaks site – there’s a lot more there than just the latest Afghan War Diaries.

Yes, the Taliban do get shown up in the War Diaries; did someone think they were saints? Just because the Taliban are wrong doesn’t make US/NATO actions right.

Congrats Julian on latest award.Stay safe!

Congrats to Julian Assange. I don’t believe the rape allegations crap.

BTW:

For 9/11ers there’s a debate on this radio station here, now. It’s on for four hours!

http://www.ksfo560.com/article.asp?id=723446

I know it’s off-topic but it is live and thought some people might be interested.

Clark, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Angrysoba, Alfred thanks both for your sensible comments, above. Dreoilin, re. trenchcoats… (!)

Joe, the first three of those assertions we already knew, did we not, though I’m sure that if one takes the 8 year-war as a whole, NATO actions will have killed more civilians than that (many more than ‘hundreds’) in Afghanistan.

The fourth, well, let’s see how it pans out. Everyone I ask, I get a different view. I too am suspicious of ‘conveniently-timed’ information linking Iran – and the current regime in Pakistan – to anything (if US intel knew of this 5 years or more ago, why didn’t they put more pressure on the dictator Musharraf? Right now, there are very reactionary, military-Islamist elements in Pakistan trying to promote another military coup), but of course just because the USA says that Iran/ elements in Pakistan might be doing this and that and because some in the US hierarchy seem to want to weaken and maybe even then attack Iran (as happened with Iraq) doesn’t mean Iran is not doing the other (if you see what I mean). What would you do, if you were Iran and were being threatened and economically hemmed-in by a superpower? You’d deal with your enemy’s enemy, wouldn’t you? You’d deal with the devil himself, wouldn’t you, even though he murdered your diplomats? Just as China supplied the monsters, Pinochet in Chile and Mobutu in Zaire, with weapons to counterbalance Soviet influence in ‘Latin’ America and Africa, respectively.

Basically, I think we need to stop looking for white and black in all this; as in the Cold War. The USSR and the USA were (as we might say in Glasgow) ‘systemic shites’ in different ways and different places.

There are many one might admire, eg. the people working on the ground like the ordinary members of the Awami National Party (democratically elected) in Pakhtunwala, Pakistan and teachers, etc., who have been slaughtered by the (electorally-defeated) Pakistani Taliban. These are the types of people – grassroots – whom we ought to be supporting. Nurses, doctors, teachers who work in these areas and who are from the local community.

In this regard, think Khymer Rouge; the USA bombed Cambodia ‘into the Stone Age’ and Cambodia got the Khymer Rouge, who were supported by China but opposed by the USSR (who supported North Vietnam). The USSR and USA/ Pakistan, together, managed to destroy Afghanistan and what did ‘we’ get? The ‘Mujaheddin’/'Taliban’/'Northern Alliance’ – all a bunch of murderous bastards.

One has to understand that states behave coldly and with amorality. It’s a power struggle and that’s all it is; sadly, human rights/ morality do not enter the equation. Or rather, the ‘morality’ is Machiavellian and is that of the CIA/KGB/SAVAK/ISI/MOSSAD/SIS et al. It’s about wealth and strategic geopolitical power. This is part of the overall narrative of history aka the tragedy of the human condition.

“Britain scraps annual assessment of human rights abuses across the world”

‘NGOs concerned that ministers are ‘blindly’ pursuing commercial interests in countries where atrocities are taking place’

Observer:

http://tinyurl.com/2f4uazn

Ah, the authorities must be desperate, to be hauling out walking ‘cadavers’ like Dr Hunt, who seems to change his story every five minutes. A “textbook suicide”? No, even those who believe it was suicide would hesitate to call it that. Any doctor ought to be more cautious the Hunt seems to be being. I suspect he’s been fed a line and possibly put under pressure. ‘The Sunday Times’ – ah, that organ of truth, none of whose contributors have any links whatsoever with the security and intelligence services. If ‘The Sunday Times’ says the world is flat, we can be fairly certain that it is at the very least elliptical:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20100822/tuk-pathologist-calls-kelly-death-textbo-a7ad41d.html

“The fourth, well, let’s see how it pans out. Everyone I ask, I get a different view. I too am suspicious of ‘conveniently-timed’ information linking Iran – and the current regime in Pakistan – to anything (if US intel knew of this 5 years or more ago, why didn’t they put more pressure on the dictator Musharraf?”

We had definitely heard these allegations before the Wikileaks thing came out.

LSE, not usually considered a bastion of CIA thought, had produced a study about ISI assistance of the Taliban, IIRC.

Iran’s backing of the Taliban would surprise me slightly and I didn’t believe it for a long time based on the extreme animosity between the Iranian regime and the Taliban. But…as you say, Suhayl, states will make deals with all kinds.

In fact, the US ambassador to Afghanistan was likely murdered by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s group Hizb-i-Islami (I think) but that group became the largest recipient of CIA-funneled cash against the Soviets in the eighties.

Anyway, back to the radio show for me…

Saving you all £1 here for sight of the S Times editorial and article. Hunt has come out the woodwork now. Why? An extract of the evidence at the Hutton whitewash is at the bottom. NOTE that the doctors are asking for an inquest which was never held. Read the extract from the evidence and compare to what Hunt is saying here.

LEADER

Time to nail the David Kelly story for good

Conspiracy theories are unhealthy and it is time the government seized its opportunity finally to resolve the real cause of the doctor’s death

The Sunday Times

Published: 2010-08-22 00:01:00.0

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The rumour mill is churning over the death of Dr David Kelly

Conspiracy theories have a habit of getting such a grip on the popular imagination that the delusion can only be eradicated by extraordinary measures. This was true of the deaths of John F Kennedy and Diana, Princess of Wales where a stubborn body of opinion maintained they had been murdered by the mafia or MI6. In those cases it needed the Warren commission to nail the rumours about the president’s murder, while a three-year inquiry by Lord Stevens sought to quash the belief that Diana had been assassinated in a Paris tunnel. The same rumour mill is now churning over the death of David Kelly, the government scientist who was found dead on the edge of woods near his home seven years ago after becoming embroiled in the controversy over the war in Iraq.

Although it looked like suicide, many voices soon began to express doubts. Ambulance crews noted a lack of blood and said it was extremely unusual for anyone to die from cutting an ulnar artery. Others spotted further anomalies. The Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker became convinced that Dr Kelly had been murdered by Iraqi agents seeking revenge for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and even wrote a book to that effect.

That was where the story may have remained had it not been reignited recently when nine seemingly eminent doctors and lawyers wrote to a newspaper questioning whether Dr Kelly could have died from such a small loss of blood. Until then it had been the conclusion of the Hutton inquiry that he had taken his own life and there were no suspicious circumstances. Lord Hutton’s report into the controversy had replaced the inquest that would routinely have followed such an unusual death.

A further complication was that Lord Hutton’s inquiry was seen as a whitewash of the government and as a result his conclusions over the death of Dr Kelly, and his decision to keep the pathologist’s report secret for 70 years, further fuelled the conspiracy theories.

These have been disseminated so widely that a good bulk of the population now believes that, at best, there was something murky about the death of Dr Kelly, and at worst he was murdered either by Iraqi agents or by people acting on behalf of shadowy British agencies. Such beliefs in what should be a transparent democracy are unhealthy and it is time the government seized its opportunity finally to resolve the real cause of the doctor’s death.

The recent controversy certainly encouraged Nicholas Hunt, the Home Office pathologist, to speak out to this newspaper. He presents a convincing case for suicide after admitting he was so angry about Dr Kelly’s death and the pressure put on the weapons inspector that he consciously set out to find evidence of foul play. His examination looked minutely for the coercion or the drugging of Dr Kelly. After hours of work he could find nothing suspicious and came to the measured conclusion that the man had killed himself in despair at his public exposure. “It was an absolutely classic case of self-inflicted injury,” he said.

Dominic Grieve, the attorney-general, said last week that he would request a review if evidence emerged that cast doubt over the suicide verdict. That evidence seems not to be there, but there is still a strong case for an open inquest in which the evidence can be tested. Sometimes a government has to accept that lies proliferate and the only way to kill them off is to expose them to one of its favourite new mantras: transparency.

…….

Revealed: how David Kelly died

A post-mortem report into the death of the weapons inspector has been released as a pathologist moves to quash rumours of foul play

Steven Swinford

Published: 22 August 2010

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A post mortem report shows David Kelly died as a result of a ‘textbook’ suicide (PA) The pathologist who did the autopsy on David Kelly has broken his silence to reveal how the scientist died and says it was a “textbook case” of suicide.

Nicholas Hunt says he was horrified at the way the Labour government treated the 59-year-old weapons inspector and set out to look for evidence of murder. After eight hours examining the body he found none.

Hunt has spoken out for the first time in seven years to quash rumours of foul play and to challenge doctors who have questioned his findings. The Home Office pathologist has also disclosed details from his post-mortem report, which the official inquiry into Kelly’s death banned from publication for 70 years.

“nine seemingly eminent doctors and lawyers…”

Why “seemingly”? Even if one disagrees with their suggestion, there is no question about their professional eminence.

Why has Hunt come out of the ‘closet’ now, rather than waiting for an inquest? The stuff about him dearly loving to have found evidence of murder is (arguably) unprofessional. He ought not to have been pre-judging anything. Is this in, simply to convince people that he was anti-Blair, etc. and is not a stooge?

If the ‘evidence is so clear wrt Ischaemic Heart disease, why was it not released in detail seven years ago? It’s not as though anyone is suggesting that he had tertiary syphilitic heart disease!

Why does the journalist pre-suppose the outcome of the inquest and why is his call identical to that of Dominic Grieve – for an inquest to reassure the public, rather than an inquest to discern the truth, whatever that might be? Indeed why was there no inquest at the time?

It’s so, so patronising and in some ways it tells us more about the ‘ruling class’ in the UK than it does about Kelly’s death.

“Conspiracy theories have a habit of getting such a grip on the popular imagination that the delusion can only be eradicated by extraordinary measures. This was true of the deaths of John F Kennedy and Diana, Princess of Wales where a stubborn body of opinion maintained they had been murdered by the mafia or MI6″.

The ST appears oblivious to the fact that the second official inquiry into the death of JFK, conducted by the House of Representatives in 1974, concluded that Kennedy was murdered by the msfia.

Sorry to butt in like this, but, like many others, I am very curious about the Dr Kelly case.

I see that the post-mortem report states that “Kelly’s death was caused by bleeding from the cuts to his wrist, severe heart disease and an overdose of painkillers.” ?” i.e. “a combination of three factors”.

Nine eminent doctors and lawyers argued that the official explanation for Dr Kelly’s death was “extremely unlikely”.

Dr Andrew Davison, however, said that the experts’ disbelief in the official findings was due to their lack of “relevant pathology expertise”.

But, as far as I know, Dr Kelly did not have any relevant pathology expertise either. Why did he choose to commit suicide by using such complicated method? How did he know that the “combination of three factors” will result in his demise? Could he not have found a simpler, surer, method?

“it was a “textbook case” of suicide”.

Don’t think so. A textbook case would at the very least include a suicide note.

Suhayl: “Ah, the authorities must be desperate, to be hauling out walking ‘cadavers’ like Dr Hunt, who seems to change his story every five minutes. A “textbook suicide”?”

Somebody: “Hunt has come out the woodwork now. Why?”

It is possible that some shadowy organization (some call it the “deep state” or the “hard state”, others the “NWO” or the “Illuminati”) pushed Dr Hunt onto the stage with a broom handle with instructions. I accept that as a possibility.

However, another possibility occurs to me.

It’s possible that Dr Hunt, who was the pathologist in Dr Kelly’s case, has noticed an increased media speculation and the possibility that Dr Kelly’s death is going to be re-examined and has come to the only reasonable conclusion that at best his competence is being questioned and, at worst, he is being implicated in the coverup of a murder.

So when somebody asks: “Hunt has come out the woodwork now. Why?” it might be because he objects to the rather obvious innuendo being thrust his way. Just a thought.

By the way, what exactly is there in the Q&A with Hutton that differs from what he said in the paper today?

Gilbert: “But, as far as I know, Dr Kelly did not have any relevant pathology expertise either. Why did he choose to commit suicide by using such complicated method? How did he know that the “combination of three factors” will result in his demise? Could he not have found a simpler, surer, method?”

I suppose he could have jumped in front of a train, or shot himself or leapt off a very, very tall tower. Then again, those methods may have been unavailable to him and his depression may not have been the most conducive thing for clear thinking.

Essentially, we don’t know why David Kelly decided to do what he did.

MJ: “A textbook case would at the very least include a suicide note.”

Are you sure about that? I know that a storybook suicide is likely to include a suicide note but why should it be expected?

According to Wikipedia:

“It is estimated that 12?”20% of suicides are accompanied by a note.”

The coalition government is plunged into a major row today over its commitment to human rights amid claims that it will scrap the Foreign Office’s landmark annual assessment of abuses across the world.

The Observer has learned that civil servants have been told to stop working on the next edition of the FCO Annual Report on Human Rights, which highlights incidents of torture and oppression, monitors use of the death penalty and aims to expose the illegal arms trade. The report also acts as a guide to MPs and businesses over which countries it is ethical to trade with.

The former Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, broke ranks last night to claim that any move to end the annual report risked “downgrading human rights” and would be met with “fierce resistance”. NGOs said that doubts over the future of the report, which was introduced by Robin Cook in 1997, fuelled their concerns that coalition ministers were “blindly” pursuing commercial interests in countries where atrocities were taking place.

Last year the former Labour government used the report to publicly declare its concerns with 22 countries, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. David Miliband, the shadow foreign secretary and Labour leadership candidate, said that it had “saved lives”, revealing atrocities in Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gaza and Sri Lanka. “Britain has led the world in standing up for human rights and the coalition is taking a serious step back,” he said, arguing that the audit was not just “nice to have” but a crucial tool.

A Foreign Office source said a huge amount of effort went into the report each year, with some embassy staff spending months uncovering atrocities. He said the team had been told the future of the study was “under review” and staff had been asked to “hold fire on it”. He added: “The word has already gone out to the embassies that we need to concentrate on trade. It’s not surprising, but it’s very sad.”

NGOs fear the coalition is putting economic interests above the drive to stamp out abuses. Last week Tom Porteous, the director of Human Rights Watch in London, warned in an article on Comment is Free that by “blindly pursuing commercial interests” the UK risked undermining efforts to protect human rights.

Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK, said she had deep concerns about plans to axe the report, saying the move would “raise serious questions about how much they value human rights”.

“The government has already stressed that it will concentrate on trade when it comes to foreign policy” Allen said. “But that move cannot be at any cost. Amnesty International’s fear is that this is the latest step in putting economics before human rights.”

An FCO spokeswoman said: “The foreign secretary is determined that the UK’s foreign policy should reflect the values that we uphold at home and that our actions overseas be consistent with support for human rights.

“In the current financial climate …we need to look carefully at how best to communicate and ensure transparency with parliament and the public on our human rights activity.”

This is one cut way too far over the boundaries of fairness and decency. What the hell has Nick Clegg got himself involved with here ? Does he really support this shit ?

MJ: “The ST appears oblivious to the fact that the second official inquiry into the death of JFK, conducted by the House of Representatives in 1974, concluded that Kennedy was murdered by the msfia.”

MJ, I’m not sure if that is quite true. The House Select Committee on Assassinations did indeed conclude that there was likely a second shooter but they based this from “acoustic evidence” (I think it was a recording in which the Committee was partially convinced that they could hear four shots) that was highly disputed.

They didn’t implicate the mafia however – in fact I think they ruled out the mafia – they merely suggested a second shooter may have fired a bullet which missed. They still concluded that Oswald had fired the two bullets that counted and was responsible for Kennedy’s death.

The evidence for a second shooter appears to be very unreliable though.

Actually, as far as I can work out the Warren Commission’s purpose was indeed to be a reassurance but more to reassure the public that Kennedy hadn’t been killed by Soviet or Cuban agents. The HSCA also concluded that the Warren Commission had been conducted in good faith and not set up to deceive.

SO WHAT IS GOING ON?!

I criticised Dominic Grieve for passing the buck on the release of David Kelly’s medical documents to Ken Clarke as reported by the Telegraph on 19th August 2010.

The Guardian reporting on the Sunday Times revelation that David’s death was a ‘textbook suicide’ today Sunday 22nd August refers back with a link to Grieve’s ‘consideration’ statement dated 13th August – guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/13/david-kelly-death-inquest

I suggest MI5 get it’s act together and give their ‘stooges’ in the main media a slightly more conclusive ‘thread’ of misinformation.

I personally believe Boris Karpichkov, he is right with his assumption David Kelly was assassinated -

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1297444/KGB-agent-Boris-Karpichkovs-claim-David-Kelly-exterminated-faces-probe.html

Anthrax is the key – shape up or MORE will be revealed.

Angrysoba is working overtime.

Are there such things as stooges of stooges?

“A textbook case would at the very least include a suicide note.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Of course. A “textbook” case would have to establish beyond reasonable doubt the intention of the victim to take his own life.

“They didn’t implicate the mafia however”

Although the Committee refrained from making definitive accusations the mafia was heavily implicated owing to Ruby’s mafia connections and those of CIA agent David Ferrie, who was Oswald’s handler and died (suicide?) before he could give evidence.

“Of course. A “textbook” case would have to establish beyond reasonable doubt the intention of the victim to take his own life.”

Why?

“Why?”

As in why would only a suicide note provide that given that suicide notes are considered to be a feature in only a minority of cases?

The people who are so determined to believe that there was foul play involved in the death of Dr. David Kelly are not forensic pathologists. Even Kelly’s family has said nothing favouring the conspiracy theorists. The report in today’s Sunday Times appears to vindicate the chapter on Dr. David Kelly in David Aaaronovich’s Voodoo Histories. Time to put away such nonsense.

Abe, thanks, but somehow I do not share your faith in what to date has not been due process in this case. That’s not say I definitively buy either hypothesis, merely that like many others not normally given to wild paranoia I am dissatisfied with the official explanation and with the actions of the authorities.

Furthermore, from reading his previous output, I’m afraid that I do not regard Aaronovich as not a reliable commentator on any of these matters; that’s not to say he doesn’t have interesting things to say, but simply that both he and The Sunday Times remain deeply tainted as sources of information, as opposed to choir-stalls of official propaganda.

Mark, by “anthrax is the key…”, do you mean Porton Down and anthrax and God-knows-what-else? Please would elaborate? Thanks.

Angrysober,

re – David Kelly’s family here from:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/06/doune_the_rabbi.html

“Janice Kelly and the family of Dr David Kelly have endured misery for far too long. Since being turfed out into the garden in the cold in her dressing gown while ‘police’ stripped the wall-paper of her house; witnessed a death certificate that bluntly said ‘found’ as the place of death and unsigned by a doctor; told that friends and colleagues should not attend the burial; told by Hoon MP that he had evidence in this case that could bring Blair down as Prime-Minister; forced to sell up and move away by intimidation.”

- least we forget?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/22/david-kelly-tony-blair-iraq-wmd

“Of course. A “textbook” case would have to establish beyond reasonable doubt the intention of the victim to take his own life.”

“Why?”

Because without evidence that the victim intended to take his own life there remains some doubt that it was really suicide. This is obvious stuff.

Of course many suicides occur without this evidence but these are not “textbook” cases, which was the point at issue.

“Time to put away such nonsense”.

All that is being demanded is that there is a proper inquest, conducted by a coroner with the powers of a court to call witnesses and experts to testify under oath. This is a legal requirement in cases such as these. The only nonsense thus far is that this requirement has not yet been met.

There was also David Kelly’s cousin who very recently voiced her concern. I’m not sure how reliable the ex-KGB man is, though. But he has presented potentially explosive information. And who is this Everett person? Mai Pederson. The whole matter becomes murkier and murkier, with spies and ‘ex-spies’ circling around like black crows.

The MSM and our politicians, etc. – were all very eager to believe that Litvinenko was assassinated and willing to believe that Russia did it. No-one talked about ‘conspiracy theories’ then. It was simply accepted that there had been a conspiracy to murder. Someone obviously murdered Anna Politkovskaya; there was a conspiracy there, too, which, unfortunately, successfully eliminated this brave journalist.

“Because without evidence that the victim intended to take his own life there remains some doubt that it was really suicide. This is obvious stuff.

Of course many suicides occur without this evidence but these are not “textbook” cases, which was the point at issue.”

This is false. All you are doing is creating your own definition of a “textbook” case and then saying David Kelly’s didn’t match yours. How do you know this is Dr Hunt’s definition?

It appears to me, that instead he is basing it on the fact that there is no evidence for anyone else being there when David Kelly died. No sign of a struggle but signs of hesitancy in the act of suicide.

“The MSM and our politicians, etc. – were all very eager to believe that Litvinenko was assassinated and willing to believe that Russia did it. No-one talked about ‘conspiracy theories’ then.”

Do you think there was a plausible case for suicide?

” It was simply accepted that there had been a conspiracy to murder. Someone obviously murdered Anna Politkovskaya; there was a conspiracy there, too, which, unfortunately, successfully eliminated this brave journalist.”

She was gunned down in her apartment building and her murder caught on camera.

These analogies are NOTHING LIKE David Kelly’s death.

Well, yes, but Litvinenko’s death may not have been so clearcut; there were aspersions cast that he may have been handling radioactive material; others have pointed fingers towards various other possible dynamics. I’m not saying that’s the case, not at all, simply that at various stages in the case, there might have been other possibilities. Yet the MSM mostly leapt immediately and conclusively at the ‘Russia assassinates’ conspiracy theory.

Politkovskaya was assassinated, though we don;t really know yet by whom. My point in mentioning her death was that there was likely to have been a conspiracy against her – by those who plotted her death.

Yet in neither of these cases – each very different from the other, really almost as different as they both are from the David Kelly case – was the phrase, ‘conspiracy theory’ used.

There seems to have been a presupposition and dominant assumption on the part of our authorities here in the UK that in two of the cases (the Russian ones), there was a conspiracy to murder but that in the third (Kelly) there was not. The language used by most of the MSM (in this case, The Daily Mail excepted!) then tends to support the initial, dominant thesis.

“The language used by most of the MSM (in this case, The Daily Mail excepted!) then tends to support the initial, dominant thesis.”

Yes. What’s sauce for the goose is not acceptable sauce for the gander. Or to put it another way, an “acceptable” thesis is put to the media by an “official” source, and following that all other theories are labelled “conspiracy theories”. No matter what holes are in the “official” one. Like ulnar arteries closing up after being severed? Or how clots can soak into the ground and disappear, when they don’t even soak into soft cloth? Or why the 80% blocked coronary artery is only being mentioned now? Dr Michael Powers QC has said there is more evidence in the Sunday Times than was put before Hutton. (Channel 4 Snowmail) He’s due on Channel 4 News at 6.30.

And as Angry knows very, very well, this subject was thrashed out on an earlier David Kelly thread where he lost out badly, but he’s still insisting on bringing up his objections here …

I find myself wondering why he finds his own blog so boring.

I seem to remember Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace prize. This award to Assange is in the same league.

“And as Angry knows very, very well, this subject was thrashed out on an earlier David Kelly thread where he lost out badly, but he’s still insisting on bringing up his objections here …”

This isn’t true. I only pointed out that David Kelly died months after the Iraq War started and that his death couldn’t have smoothed the way for the Iraq invasion.

My objections here are to the insinuations that the pathologist is being “wheeled out” as if not of his own volition when the fact is that he’s being casually accused of conspiracy to murder and may want to defend his name.

they killed a million people in Iraq. they’re killing people every day in Afghanistan. people are dying from state-sponsored violence everywhere. politskvaya’s murder means that the press can focus on her death, and ignore the atrocities she uncovered. i bet elements are delighted that kelly’s death looks so dodgy, whether they were responsible for it or not.

sorry, have gone a bit Diceman recently. carry on.

Having read some of Politkovskaya’s work I would agree that there were quite a number of people who would want to kill her and jumping to the Kremlin conclusion rules out too many other possibilities. She had been quite a thorn in the side of organized crime and of certain people in Russia’s military and the government installed by Russia in Chechnya. As a journalist she was astonishingly brave and more so because of the fact that power politics in Russia is almost certainly a far more cut-throat business than it is in Britain. That really is the truth, and messing with the military, the police (in its various forms), the mafia and the corrupt politicians is extremely hazardous. (No doubt attempts to equate Britain will now be made but such attempts are ludicrous.)

The fact is that a lot of people had a motive for going after Politkovskaya and they weren’t shy about doing it.

Journalism in Russia is a seriously dangerous occupation:

http://cpj.org/killed/europe/russia/

In David Kelly’s case there is hugely compelling evidence (if not completely conclusive according to some) that he killed himself and had apparently telegraphed his intent (at least in hindsight) there appeared to be no obvious motive for his murder (so one is often surmised) and the people closest to him are convinced it was suicide as was the pathologist and the police officer who found him.

But eddie, if Kissinger were in govt today, I’ll bet you’d be supporting him in his proposal to bomb [insert name of country] into the Stone Age on behalf of the security of the USA and the ‘Free World’.

Good point, anonymous at 6:31pm. But it is the possible link and leverage b/w the alleged individual state assassinations and the mass state atrocities that is key. In terms of critique, both tracks must proceed apace. They are not mutually exclusive.

Zionist troll,

yes, we have all read the words of Cohen, the radical author of “Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England”

He challenges the left as hypocrites ‘standing on their heads’ after the blood-bath of an illegal Iraq war. Cohen’s drift towards neo-conservatism over the last eight years seems to have beeen caused by a perceived view that the liberal left has apologised for a militant Islam while neglected the aspirations of moderate Muslims. His radar has obviously missed the diverse range of democratic Muslim voices.

Cohen’s attempts at ‘purifying’ the left from within are misguided and in clear view are a dangerous pursuit of a ‘war on terrorism’ as confronting one homogeneous army of radically different Muslims many of which are strands of the intelligence services.

Poke your liberal interventionism Cohen and start rowing back to the facts; the starving Iraqi children, crucified by sanctions; the shock & awe; the divide and conquer rules in Iraq that ordained our own special forces to dress as Arabs and plant bombs and explosives; the refusal of Mrs Blair, Dr Barnardo’s President to answer my cries of help for the malnourished Iraqi children. Fuck your money Mr Blair’s donated to veterans – who needs blood money?

We live in a confused and topsy-turvy time but true liberals see thru the mist of deception and Nick Cohen’s ‘follies of the Left’ are in the real world our fight, our battle and our atonement.

“This isn’t true. I only pointed out that David Kelly died months after the Iraq War started and that his death couldn’t have smoothed the way for the Iraq invasion.”

–angrysoba

Excuse me??? You don’t remember telling me that people had died from cutting one ulnar artery and when I asked you where those reports were you had nothing?? You don’t remember the discussion about how there were 20+ tablets missing but the post mortem found that he had only ingested a normal dose, i.e. one or two??

I agree, angrysoba, that Anna Politkovskaya was a very courageous woman who was working in a terrifying environment, in which editors and journalists across Russia are murdered on a frequent basis, esp. if they try to expose corruption. She remained in Russia even when she knew that her life was in grave danger, because, she said, it was her job and how would she have been able to do her job from a position of exile? Also, I wonder whether, having faced death several times (at least); she’d been subjected to a mock-execution in a pit and had been poisoned on an aeroplane; perhaps she’d come to be fearless and/ or to feel that she would survive anything. I met her a book festival in (I think 2005), when we shared a stage for a PEN event. She seemed like a lovely woman whose account on stage brought tears to the eyes of her translator, a veritable and mature British academic.

At another book festival (I know I sound like a luvvie!), Tarun Tejan, Editor of Tehelka (whistle-blowing Indian newspaper), who sent a journalist undercover posing as an arms-dealer to expose the Bofors Scandal, an act which ultimately helped to bring down the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist BJP Government, recalled the year-long period during which he had to be under 24-hour armed guard.

He said that at first he spent a lot of time understandably in abject fear; after all, he was up against the arms lobby, the Swedish Govt., the Indian Govt. and the Indian (Hindu) religious extremists; but that one day, he thought, “Well, the worst that can happen is that someone will come into the office and put a bullet in my head. After I’d come to that realisation, it was easy”.

One can only salute such people, and marvel.

anonymous above was me.

“You don’t remember telling me that people had died from cutting one ulnar artery and when I asked you where those reports were you had nothing?”

I told you my source and posted it. I asked you where your source was that said death from a cut ulnar artery was impossible was and you came up with nothing. In fact, I think you said something along the lines of “Look for it yourself!”

Funny Dreiloin.

“You don’t remember the discussion about how there were 20+ tablets missing but the post mortem found that he had only ingested a normal dose, i.e. one or two??”

Where’s your source?

“In David Kelly’s case there is hugely compelling evidence (if not completely conclusive according to some) that he killed himself”

–angry

Bullshit! Have you ever seen anyone having an angiogram? Both femoral arteries open, for the use of a camera and the injection of dye up and into the heart. What do the docs do afterwards? They allow these femoral arteries to close up, with the aid of doctors’ fists shoved hard into the groin. No stitches or clamps. That is what arteries do.

And that is what the very tiny ulnar artery does when severed. How did Kelly bleed out from that?? And since when do clots soak into the ground? Was all of his blood up his sleeve?

And how come it was said originally that his coronary arteries were in much the shape that would be expected for any man of his age, and now suddenly he had one or two blocked 80%? Suddenly I don’t trust Hunt.

“I told you my source and posted it.”

Yes, Angry, and it didn’t fit. It wasn’t ONE severed ulnar artery. You were trying to be smart.

“Where’s your source?”

Go to hell, Angry, I’m not re-doing a debate with you that was finished long ago.

“Bullshit!”

No, not “bullshit!” I did tell you before that you can be needlessly petulant. I think your response to that was “Bullshit!” But it is the truth and you continue to be petulant.

“Yes, Angry, and it didn’t fit. It wasn’t ONE severed ulnar artery. You were trying to be smart.”

No, I posted a source. It’s up to you to decide if it is believable. I don’t care either way but I am not lying about what the source said:

“However, according to the National Statistician and Registrar General there are other recorded cases of death being caused by a severed ulnar artery, two in 2001, one in 2002, and one in 2004.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/6378681.stm#3

Note, the source I am quoting says there are other recorded cases of death being caused by A severed ulnar artery. This is what I said and I backed it up. Now stop lying about me and I might stop telling the truth about you.

On the tablets, you say, “You don’t remember the discussion about how there were 20+ tablets missing but the post mortem found that he had only ingested a normal dose, i.e. one or two??”

Yet the toxicologist (what does he know) disagrees with you:

“But the toxicologist who gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry could not be definitive about how many tablets were taken.

Tests the toxicologist carried out suggested it was an overdose, and that Dr Kelly had 10 times more than a typical medical dose of co-proxamol. But he also said that the concentrations of the constituents of co-proxamol found in Dr Kelly were less than is usually fatal.”

The dose wasn’t usually considered to be fatal but it was not the “normal dose” at all.

On the heart condition, I know you have said, over and over again that there was no problem with his heart and you haven’t provided any thing but your say so on that one either but here is Dr Hunt at the Hutton inquiry:

“It was noted that he has a significant degree of coronary artery disease and this may have played some small part in the rapidity of death but not the major part in the cause of death”

This is completely contrary to your claim:

“And how come it was said originally that his coronary arteries were in much the shape that would be expected for any man of his age”

So it appears that you are the one who is untrustworthy. You completely misrepresent and at the same time blithely accuse Dr Hunt of some kind of conspiracy.

“No, I posted a source.”

“This is what I said and I backed it up.”

What source did you give? The BBC one above? Give me a link to the thread please.

Because it doesn’t appear to be this one

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/david_kellys_mu.html

OK, let’s say it was proved he was murdered. What does one conclude?

Let’s say it was proved that he wasn’t. What does one conclude?

INTELLIGENCE INSIDER ALLEGES CSIS USES SOMETHING SIMILAR TO ZERZETSEN IN CANADA

Talking about conspiracies… Under the following Indymedia URL is a rather interesting story. It is by a writer asking Indymedia to withdraw several articles he published earlier in April, because his employer is threatening to fire him if he doesn’t remove the Articles. What is interesting is that he is a self professed “Intelligence Analyst” who allegedly works for the Canadian Government, and the withdrawn articles have headlines such as – “CSIS abuse”- and – “In the event of my death … life under CSIS rule.” As most of you know, CSIS is Canada’s equivalent of MI5, and adopts similar methods.

The 3 articles seem to appear and disappear from Indymedia, perhaps indicative of an intelligence operation – I have Adobe PDF copies of them all. As of this morning, some of it appears under this URL:

http://publish.indymedia.org/en/2010/04/937189.shtlm

What the withdrawn articles alleged is that CSIS practices torture in Canada against innocent citizens – The writer alleges that CSIS regularly uses what they call “D & D” tactics (apparently their name for Zerzetsen) to persecute perceived enemies (of CSIS, whistleblowers, former mistresses of top politicians (apparently called “bimbo control”), etc) in Canada, and that amongst those being victimized by CSIS are himself and his wife. And, of course, if asked, allegedly CSIS and Canadian Law Enforcement go into cover-up conspiracy mode. My interest is that all these allegations are remarkably similar to what I have experienced myself, and been complaining about for years – except that unlike this complainant, I am not alleging that I am a 25 year intelligence insider in the Canadian government.

Do I know for certain if his allegations are true? No, I don’t know for certain. Either way it is an important story. But, it does appear to me from the retraction, that rather than prosecute on these allegations, the Canadian Government and CSIS are going into cover-up-mode.

Indeed the same gentleman has also contacted the Canadian press with the same story, but in much more detail than the original articles published in Indymedia. A journalist, who believes his allegations, sent me a copy of what the press have received, and I spoke on the phone to the gentleman himself for over an hour. What was even more interesting to me was that the information sent to the press alleges some involvement in all this by a very prominent Canadian, which, if true, would suggest to me why these issues (including my own) are being covered-up. Will the press publish the story, or will the story be that the press have been censored yet again?

er, yes, Roderick. Could you not just link to your own website when you have a new piece to write?

sorry didn’t mean to sound rude. ignore me.

Thanks to Julian Assange and a well deserved award indeed.

May he keep safe for the next few weeks until he releases the really crucial evidence.

Kelly facts and time line clashes and why is it nhecessary to make this a 70 year secret?

I do not buy the family protective argument whenb they already have been dragged through the media by this.

With this I leave you for another two weeks of blissfull ignorance of media, computers, TV or Radio.

Angry,

None of what I’m talking about (and did talk about) seems to appear on the thread entitled ‘David Kelly’s Murder’.

I’d like a link to the relevant thread, please, and to know what source you gave at the time for your “one ulnar artery” claim.

Either Angry is being primed from the inside or else he/she is a fully qualified and experienced

physician

surgeon

pathologist

toxicologist

lawyer expert in coronial law

or perhaps just comes here when the stuctures of the state are threatened.

Interesting that on such a highly topical subject there are only three comments under the ST article and one from one of the doctors. Some scope for Angry there.

An inquest is required to test the evidence. One has NOT been held.

“I know you have said, over and over again that there was no problem with his heart”

–angry

I said nothing of the sort. I quoted some report that said that his heart was ‘much as it would be expected’ for any man of his age.

For some reason you wrote above, “I only pointed out that David Kelly died months after the Iraq War started and that his death couldn’t have smoothed the way for the Iraq invasion.”

We’re not talking about the same thread, are we??

I didn’t say you were ‘lying’ either. I said you were being ‘smart’. I’d appreciate a link to our whole discussion, as I can’t find it on the David Kelly Murder thread. What thread did you re-quote that BBC source from?

“Our criticism of the Hutton report is that its verdict of “suicide” is an inappropriate finding. To bleed to death from a transected artery goes against classical medical teaching, which is that a transected artery retracts, narrows, clots and stops bleeding within minutes. Even if a person continues to bleed, the body compensates for the loss of blood through vasoconstriction (closing down of non-essential arteries). This allows a partially exsanguinated individual to live for many hours, even days.

“Professor Milroy expands on the finding of Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry – that haemorrhage was the main cause of death (possibly finding it inadequate) – and falls back on the toxicology: “The toxicology showed a significant overdose of co-proxamol. The standard text, Baselt, records deaths with concentrations at 1 mg/l, the concentration found in Kelly.” But Dr Allan, the toxicogist in the case, considered this nowhere near toxic. Each of the two components was a third of what is normally considered a fatal level. Professor Milroy then talks of “ischaemic heart disease”. But Dr Hunt is explicit that Dr Kelly did not suffer a heart attack. Thus, one must assume that no changes attributable to myocardial ischaemia were actually found at autopsy.”

(signed by various docs)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/feb/12/davidkelly.huttonreport

[via Angry's BBC link above]

“One of them is vascular surgeon John Scurr, a specialist in veins and arteries. He told the programme: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody die from wrist injuries. I have seen a lot of wrist injuries. It is a very common cry for help type of attempt at suicide, rather than a genuine attempt at killing themselves.

“Frankly I don’t believe that simply cutting an ulnar artery will cause death. The thing we know about the ulnar artery is it’s quite small and so if Dr Kelly had cut it clean it would have gone into spasm and it would have, you know, probably oozed for a little while trickled.

“He might have lost a few hundred mills of blood. And then it would have stopped.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/6378681.stm

from Angry’s BBC link above.

Suhayl

Kissinger was a very evil man so your comment is pointless and silly. Today’s Sunday Times article closes the case on the Kelly suicide so why don’e you all go off and do something useful instead of this constant faffle.

Consider whether it is right for Dr Hunt to be speaking to the media especially if these allegations have truth in them.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1300935/Official-probe-Dr-Kellys-post-mortem-pathologist-mixed-servicemens-remains.html

Good lord.

And I had written, “Suddenly I don’t trust Hunt”.

Whatever, my playlist currently includes this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-S90Uch2as&feature=related

Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel

so grateful for debates & this board

Why would UK intelligence service want to kill Dr Kelly?

I’d say it’s really quite obvious. He knew things the government didn’t want let out. Humilating him in public was no doubt a tactic to make him appear to have a reason to commit suicide.

The Express of 5 July 2009 has an interesting article part of which I reproduced here:

WEAPONS inspector David Kelly was writing a book exposing highly damaging government secrets before his

Gilbert – ‘How did he know that the “combination of three factors” will result in his demise?’

Good analysis there. Not that I needed any more good analysis to figure out the truth. Still, more fodder for the undecided mind.

but what does it prove, either way?

Dr Hunt looks like a very useful idiot.

Technicolour at August 22, 7:46 PM

I like this line of reasoning. We’re stymied with the investigation, and will probably continue to be so, seeing as the stated aim is to “reassure the public”. So it’s a nice idea.

Technicolour – ‘but what does it prove, either way?’

What does what prove? The fact that he was murdered you mean?

I think Ruth’s point is strongest – it was Dr Kelly’s book. This doesn’t mean it was necessarily UK Intelligence that killed him, but the UK establishment certainly covered up, and presumably continue to do so, so it’s not a Blair / Labour thing.

Eddie,

Err – far from closed…

Paramedics Dave Bartlett and Vanessa Hunt (15yrs experience) arrived at Harrowdown Hill and witnessed many people, “‘There were a lot of police around,’ said Hunt. ‘Some were in civilian clothes and others in black jackets and army fatigues.”

Both saw that the left sleeves of his jacket and shirt had been PULLED UP to just below the elbow and there was dried blood around his left wrist.

There was no gaping wound… there wasn’t a puddle of blood around,’ said Hunt. ‘There was a little bit of blood on the nettles to the left of his left arm. But there was no real blood on the body of the shirt. The only other bit of blood I saw was on his clothing. It was the size of a 50p piece above the right knee on his trousers.’

Hunt found this very strange. ‘If you manage to cut a wrist and catch an artery you would get a spraying of blood, regardless of whether it’s an accident… Because of the nature of an arterial cut, you get a pumping action. I would certainly expect a lot more blood on his clothing, on his shirt. If you choose to cut your wrists, you don’t worry about getting blood on your clothes.

A heat-seeking helicopter had searched the woods(witnesses on a Thames boat had seen the helicopter and ‘police officers’) called Harrowdown Hill the night before David Kelly’s body was found by an air-scenting dog called Brock. His owner Louis Holmes, a hearing dog trainer saw Brock was indicating near a tree, but he returned to Louise and lay down prompting her to think something was unusual.

Louise went to where Brock had indicated and found “a body slumped against the bottom of a tree.”

“He was at the base of the tree with almost his head and his shoulders just slumped back against the tree.

His legs were straight in front of him. His right arm

was to the side of him. His left arm had a lot of blood

on it and was bent back in a funny position.”

Detective Coe had been to David Kelly’s house and questioned neighbours on the morning of the search and then walked towards the River Thames and Harrowdown Hill.

He said, at the Hutton Inquiry when asked “Who were you with at this time?”

1 Detective Constable Shields.

2 Q. It is just the two of you?

3 A. Yes.

In fact there were three people, all in civilian clothes and the third was MI5?

The gics (gangsters-in-charge) are trying too hard. Gary O’Donoghue reporting on the BBC 1 Ten O’Clock News referred to the need for a *second* inquest (no inquest has ever been held). He also lumped together the phrases ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘group of doctors’. How dare he cast aspersions and speak such untruths.

If Dr Kelly had decided to publish, then he had lost faith in the state. He had changed his mind about the benefits of maintaining secrecy.

I believe you are right ‘Clark’ like me, after Iraq and the promises David Kelly made about ‘inspections guarantee NO war’ he made to Iraq, he felt betrayed and decided to publish.

David Kelly was an expert and knew about top secret spray devices associated with *drones* to stealthily contaminate areas at night with sarin, VX and mustard to botulinum toxin, anthrax spores and smallpox, all under remote control from vast distances.

Interestingly and little reported, Iraq weapons analyst, John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7 2003. Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal’s body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location.

At risk of humiliation I stick my neck out – I personally believe David was injected with a lethal dose of dextropropoxyphene and the muscle relaxant succinylcholine which metabolises even after death. An attempt was made to force him to swallow the pills which he could not.

Dried regurgatative material was found in a line from both corners of David Kelly’s mouth to his ears – more was distributed on the ground beside his body. This suggests that a substantial amount of any pills ingested would have been ejected, hence only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach.

The cuts found on his wrist were there to disguise the injection site.

Who did it and why?

Certainly not MI5/6 or any British intelligence/secret service – No – David was a British intelligence asset – the order I believe came from America – David worked very closely with the United States intelligence and worked very closely with Sergeant Mai Pederson in particular, he was also very highly thought of in the US intelligence community prior to his disclosures.

Britain gave the tasking nod and I believe certain persons in Whitehall knew in advance. But it was the French Direction Ginirale de la Sicuriti Extirieure that got a three man Iraqi team to do the evil deed and then executed them.

What did David Kelly know? Too much.

AS: “I know you have said, over and over again that there was no problem with his heart”

Dreiolin: “I said nothing of the sort. I quoted some report that said that his heart was ‘much as it would be expected’ for any man of his age.”

This amounts to the same thing. The point I am making is that it had already been said that Dr Kelly had significant heart disease and the pathologist had testified to that at the Hutton inquiry.

“None of what I’m talking about (and did talk about) seems to appear on the thread entitled ‘David Kelly’s Murder’.

I’d like a link to the relevant thread, please, and to know what source you gave at the time for your “one ulnar artery” claim.”

This issue seems to crop up on a number of threads which weren’t to do with David Kelly. Anyway, the source I gave was the same, the officially recorded statistics. I may not have provided a link to the BBC Conspiracy Files webpage though which features a lot of the claims and counterclaims in the case.

The vast majority of suicides are simple, obvious and uncomplicated affairs.

Most everything about the Dr David Kelly death is complex, secret and hidden and involving a multiplicity of areas of dispute.

There ought to be immense concern amongst reasonable people, and serious questions asked of those harbour the bizarre notion that everything is above board and totally straightforward.

It ain’t, and won’t be, no matter how much the increasingly useless and tiresome BBC and its acolytes pretend otherwise.

Angry “This amounts to the same thing.”

No, it certainly does not. The newspaper report I was quoting stated (correctly) that most men of his age would have some thickening/blocking of the arteries. Not necessarily major, but not remotely akin to “no problem with his heart” either.

Angry: “This issue seems to crop up on a number of threads which weren’t to do with David Kelly. Anyway, the source I gave was the same, the officially recorded statistics.”

But not necessarily from the same webpage or with the same commentary. You see, I remember that what you linked to mentioned “ulnar arteries” (plural) and it wasn’t at all clear whether one or both had been severed in the deaths listed. And I made a remark to that effect on the thread. At which point you disappeared. Whether you came back later or not I don’t know.

Angry: “I may not have provided a link to the BBC Conspiracy Files webpage”

MAY not? You implied above that you had. But I don’t believe that you did. Because that BBC page says “a severed ulnar artery”, so I would have had no reason to scoff at that source if you had used it previously. But you didn’t use that page, Angry, did you. (Was that a fortuitous find yesterday?) You accused me of lying about you, and you then called me “untrustworthy” and said I “completely misrepresent”, when all along it appears you had no idea what webpage you quoted in the original argument, or whether my memory of events is in fact correct. (Or maybe you do know, but you’re not telling here?)

You also suggested that when you called me ‘petulant’ I responded with “Bullshit!” which is not the truth either, is it. Nor did I accuse Dr Hunt of any conspiracy, did I.

Let’s stick to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Angry.

You said, “This issue seems to crop up on a number of threads which weren’t to do with David Kelly”. List those threads for me, please. I’d like to read them for myself.

Dreiolin says: “Go to hell, Angry, I’m not re-doing a debate with you that was finished long ago.”

But, later…

“Let’s stick to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Angry.

You said, “This issue seems to crop up on a number of threads which weren’t to do with David Kelly”. List those threads for me, please. I’d like to read them for myself.”

I’ve no idea why it is that I should search through all the threads in which this issue came up given that you don’t want to go through the debate again. It’s far too much trouble for what I am sure will be little gratitude.

If you want to prove your assertions then maybe YOU should search through the threads.

I’m only interested in this:

You say that:

a) cutting one ulnar artery can’t cause death. My source says it can. That’s more substantive than our bickering.

b) that “the original reporting” was that David Kelly had no more than a regular amount of thickening/blocking of the arteries than expected from someone his age. Yet Dr Hunt said at the Hutton inquiry that it was significant and has elaborated on that since then to say 80% blocked.

c) that the amount of co-proxamol in his blood was a normal dosage. Yet this isn’t true and none of the sources say it was a normal dosage but rather that it was an overdose.

So, I say that you are untrustworthy because I have to check everything you say against other sources and find that you have downplayed every factor that his death was attributed to.

But, yes, I am wrong for saying you accused Dr Hunt of being part of a conspiracy, you only said you didn’t trust him.

I apologize for that.

“MAY not? You implied above that you had. But I don’t believe that you did. Because that BBC page says “a severed ulnar artery”, so I would have had no reason to scoff at that source if you had used it previously. But you didn’t use that page, Angry, did you. (Was that a fortuitous find yesterday?)”

As far as this goes I certainly did know of the statistics and it is possible that that is all I posted. It would be HIGHLY fortuitous if I had simply made up the statistics and then found a source which agreed with me.

That’s not what happened.

Anyway, this is getting rather pointless. Clearly we’ll just have to see what the inquiry says.

“I personally believe David was injected with a lethal dose of dextropropoxyphene and the muscle relaxant succinylcholine”

Thanks for sticking your neck out Mark. Given that the known evidence casts some doubt as to the accuracy of the cause of death suggested by Hutton, speculation over what might be the actual cause is remarkably thin on the ground. But wouldn’t these drugs have shown up in the toxicology report?

“As far as this goes I certainly did know of the statistics and it is possible that that is all I posted”

–angry

No, Angry, you didn’t link to any official statistics page, or if by any chance you did, then THEY were unclear in what they said.

“I’ve no idea why it is that I should search through all the threads in which this issue came up given that you don’t want to go through the debate again.”

It’s simple, Angry, it’s because you accused me of lying. I didn’t ask you to search through all the threads, I asked you for the thread names. I’ll happily read them for you – and then come back and quote.

“If you want to prove your assertions then maybe YOU should search through the threads.”

No, Angry, YOU accused ME of lying, of being untrustworthy, and of ‘misrepresenting’ so YOU need to prove your assertions. You have said the issue came up on more than one thread. So provide those thread names so I can read them please. Or withdraw your allegations.

“Anyway, this is getting rather pointless.”

It is? You fling accusations around and when asked to back them up, you announce that it’s pointless? In fact you say that you’ll get ‘little gratitude’?

Nice try, Angry.

You know, ‘Larry’ accused me of lying too. And when I asked where (and I asked it about four times) I got no answer from ‘him’ either. You’re a right pair.

“It’s simple, Angry, it’s because you accused me of lying.”

Well in that case I can’t back that up so I apologize and retract.

It can’t find any posting of the BBC link previously, so I was probably mistaken.

Sorry.

Thank you.

Dreoilin,

always count to ten and take a few deep breaths before replying to Angrysoba. He is a crafty so-and-so.

Angrysoba says: “Clearly we’ll just have to see what the inquiry says”. Ha! As if it’ll say anything significantly different from the previous whitewash!

But two whitewashes prove that Angrysoba is whiter-than-white, the new blue whiteness you only get with SuperSoap!

Dreoilin,

well done. Angrysoba and his new ally Tomk have certainly been giving you a hard time recently.

“Nothing to see here, move along please!”

Thanks, Clark.

Change of theme. I’ve just been listening to an excellent BBC Radio 4 programme on “British Muslims – Father and Son” – an extended account of the world seen from the perspectives of Moazzam Beg and his father.

Three voices stick in my mind: Moazzam Begg (born Birmingham, family Moslem immigrants from India/Pakistan; his father; and Jack Straw (born Buckhurst Hill, with great-grandfather a German Jewish immigrant). All represent different values. I generally reject the term “British values”; but many of the values I respect are upheld by the Beggs and are dishonoured by Straw.

From the BBC website: “Moazzam Begg spent three years as a prisoner in Bagram and Guatanamo Bay before being released without charge. Throughout that that time his father fought for his son’s release. Since his release Moazzam Begg has remained in the headlines. He is a controversial figure – for some he is an innocent victim, while others have hard questions about his beliefs and actions. Steve Evans tells an extraordinary story of a father and son and their very different experiences of being a British Muslim. From the generations of Begg family military history, to Moazzam almost joining the British army, to his support for Muslim causes around the world – there are many contradictions and paradoxes in the Begg family story. The exceptional bond between father and son, though, is clear throughout.”

Gita Sahgal lost her job at Amnesty International for protesting at AI giving public support to Moazzam Begg’s organisation as poorly judged. Human rights lawyers appear to be reluctant to help her. Her statement may be of interest:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/martinbright/5759197/gita-sahgal-a-statement.thtml

Here’s a wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gita_Sahgal

I see a parallel with Craig’s story. In both cases, a a senior member of an important organisation was forced out for publicly protesting aganist official policy, and then had a hard time finding public support.

MJ, yes, I’m no toxicologist, but I think that both dextropopoxyphene and succinylcholine would be detectable (directly or indirectly via metabolites) in the tox. screen at PM. The MOSSAD Dubai hit victim had succinylcholine in his blood, picked-up at PM.

I’m sure there are respiratory-paralytic toxic drugs with very short half-lives which degrade quickly into natural compounds even after death (?insulin and potassium chloride, which causes unconsciousness and cardiac arrest?), but I’d have to look up the textbooks again to find out; an anaesthetist, toxicologist, crime writer, pharmacologist – or a Public Executioner! – would know – though of course the execiutioner doesn’t have to worry about the chemicals being undetectable. The injection of large quantities of air directly into the venous system will also cause death and apart from the injection-mark, is undetectable. It’s also very problematic to interpret PM blood-levels of drugs and compare them to ‘fatal’ blood-levels of drugs.

MJ,

Thank-you for your confidence – Of course you are right, toxicology would have found dextropropoxyphene and it did – as the now banned (and dangerous) component of co-proxamol.

succinylcholine metabolises and is thus very difficult to detect without enzyme analysis. Dr Hunt, the pathologist, we know is somewhat incompetent having confused the identity of serviceman’s remains:

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1300935/Official-probe-Dr-Kellys-post-mortem-pathologist-mixed-servicemens-remains.html

His mm by mm inspection of David Kelly’s body found nothing – the left wrist injection site was obscured/obliterated by the many so called ‘tentative’ cuts that is indicative of overcoming the natural ‘suicide barrier’ in the majority of sane humans who attempt to kill themselves by bleeding out.

The prescription only co-proxamol strips had no fingerprints or DNA (neither did the knife); David we remember was NOT prescribed co-proxamol and would have been aware of the dangers associated with dextropropoxyphene:

bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7397/1006

My wife’s (fuzzy) brother survived an overdose of 11 grams of paracetamol (22 tablets) some years ago – a real case and I expose the details to you reluctantly with his permission, such is the importance of obtaining an inquiry to the satisfaction of Janice and her three beautiful daughters.

A British detective lied at the Hutton inquiry -

Why?

Yes, Iain (and Abe), Begg, in my view, is a ‘problematic’ figure; the Gita Sahgal whistleblowing-and-loss-of-job was an example of this. He’s not the only such figure.

Apart from all that, it irks me a little (a lot) that for years, on the basis of ‘Unity in Diversity’, Islamist figures and some organisations seemed able to leverage tons of money form the Government/ Govt-associated bodies, allowing them to attain a position of prominence in the UK in relation to ‘representing’ the ‘UK Muslim community’ (as though that were a monolithic entity!). Then, after ’9/11′, some of these individuals and organisations seemed to re-invent themselves (trimmed beards, two-piece suits, no fists, lots of fessing-up, self-improvement books) in favour of ‘Community Cohesion’ and ‘Anti-Terrorist Facilitators’ (I’ve invented the latter term, but it’s not much of an exagerration) and again to leverage piles of dosh from the government and assocaited bodies and again to ‘represent’ ‘UK Muslims’ from the highest to the most grassroots level.

Secular organisations face a much more difficult process, not least because they have to operate in a field where it has become convenient and mutually beneficial for both Islamists (the term being used here in its broadest sense) and authorities to deal with each other in an ongoing systemic manner.

“Thank-you for your confidence – Of course you are right, toxicology would have found dextropropoxyphene and it did – as the now banned (and dangerous) component of co-proxamol.”

Mark, can you see what you have just done here?

“David we remember was NOT prescribed co-proxamol and would have been aware of the dangers associated with dextropropoxyphene”

Can you also see what you have done here?

nvm

Mark:

“toxicology would have found dextropropoxyphene and it did – as the now banned (and dangerous) component of co-proxamol”

But as I understand it only a therapeutic, non-lethal dose was found; a couple of tablets.

“The prescription only co-proxamol strips had no fingerprints or DNA (neither did the knife)”

Well well.

“I expose the details to you reluctantly with his permission”

Many thanks.

“A British detective lied at the Hutton inquiry -

Why?”

You can say what you like at inquiries. At inquests you’re under oath.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I seem to recall that it was originally reported that Kelly was found with pads on his chest, under his shirt, the type that are used by doctors for monitoring cardiac activity. I haven’t heard this detail mentioned of late. Or I might be dreaming it.

Suhayl:

“I’m sure there are respiratory-paralytic toxic drugs with very short half-lives which degrade quickly into natural compounds even after death”

“The injection of large quantities of air directly into the venous system will also cause death and apart from the injection-mark, is undetectable”

Interesting.

MJ

The sticky pads were put there by the paramedic.

Alistar Hay, Professor of Toxicology, questions findings of the Hutton inquiry. Alexander Allan, the forensic toxicologist at the inquiry, considered the amount ingested of Co-Proxamol insufficient to have caused death less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose. The toxicology report on David Kelly reports blood level concentrations of 97 micrograms of paracetamol and 1.0 micrograms of dextropropoxyphene per millilitre. He calculated that it was equivalent to approximately 20 tablets.

Angrysober,

explain?

So detropops did not kill him, so he wasn’t injected with dextropos. PCM doesn’t kill suddenly in any case, so PCM didn’t kill him. So we’re left with the ischaemic heart disease and presumed blood loss (if one is considering that it wasn’t murder).

‘The Assassin’s Cookbook’ – good title for a graphic novel, eh? Sick, though.

“The toxicology report on David Kelly reports blood level concentrations of 97 micrograms of paracetamol and 1.0 micrograms of dextropropoxyphene per millilitre. He calculated that it was equivalent to approximately 20 tablets”.

OK, so he had the equivalent of 20 tabs in his blood, but the remains of only a couple of tabs in his stomach if I’m not mistaken. This suggests either that he took a larger quantity of tabs much earlier, which had already been absorbed, or he had been injected with dextropropoxyphene then forced to take tablets to give the impression of a self-inflicted overdose. The latter scenario is supported by the wounds in his mouth and the trail of undigested tablets on his clothes, suggesting he had spat them out. But this still doesn’t explain the non-lethal concentrations in his blood.

Thanks for the clarification re the pads.

Summary of incompetence

Doubt – Doubt – Doubt

1. David Kelly’s body was propped up against a tree. (Hutton Photo? Louise Holmes) and *moved* so he was laying flat ‘a short distance from the tree.’

2. Livor mortis (post mortem lividity), which indicates that Kelly died on his back, or at least was moved to that position shortly after his death. Propping the body against the tree was a mistake that had to be rectified. Rigor mortis present? – who knows.

3. Coe maintained there was only one other person besides himself. He was not questioned about the discrepancy.

In fact the third young man with a ‘posh sounding voice’ was according to my source collecting documents/evidence on behalf of MI5/secret service. MI5 were ‘fuming’ over Kelly’s ‘death’

4. The police took over 300 statements from witnesses but less than 70 were forwarded to the Hutton inquiry. Witness statements were not to be released (even to the inquiry) unless the witness signed an authorization permitting it.

5. A listing of evidence provided to the Hutton inquiry by Thames Valley Police shows a reference to a document described, ‘TVP Tactical Support Major Incident Policy Book

Suhayl,

Enough muscle relaxant and opiate to stop David breathing? Fuzzy’s brother’s breathing stopped and he had to be resuscitated after 22 tabs of paracetamol.

That’s very odd. PCM causes liver failure which usually takes several days to become apparent. The liver failure then causes (as well as the panoply of liver failure effects) gradually deteriorating consciousness, jaundice, ‘flapping’ tremor, etc. On its own (and that’s the key point), prior to the liver damage, why would PCM cause loss of consciousness or respiratory depression? PCM overdose is a horrible way to die.

http://www.pharmweb.net/pwmirror/pwy/paracetamol/pharmwebpic9.html

Having said all that, as you know, Mark, I think David Kelly’s death very suspicious and the fact that all of these eminent scientists (who know far more than I) have raised concerns in suhc a public manner is good reason to maintain a high level of skepicism about the case.

“explain?”

Okay, Mark.

a) We know David Kelly didn’t kill himself because there wasn’t enough dextropropoxyphene from the co-proxamol he supposedly swallowed in his blood to be fatal.

b) Yet, we know that he was given a lethal injection of dextropropoxyphene because the toxicologist found it and put it in his report.

Are you not struck by the illogicality of a) & b)?

You appear to be saying he wouldn’t swallow co-proxamol himself because he knew how dangerous it was. Yet, if it was his intention to commit suicide then clearly its dangerousness was very much the point!

Also if a lethal injection explained the presence of dextropropoxyphene then what explains the paracetamol? Oh, the co-proxamol!

But he wasn’t prescribed them. No, but his wife was.

“a) We know David Kelly didn’t kill himself because there wasn’t enough dextropropoxyphene from the co-proxamol he supposedly swallowed in his blood to be fatal.

b) Yet, we know that he was given a lethal injection of dextropropoxyphene because the toxicologist found it and put it in his report.

Are you not struck by the illogicality of a) & b)?”

The low levels of dextropropoxyphene found cast doubt only the theory that it was this that caused Kelly’s death. Mark said nothing about “knowing” there was a lethal injection. It was pure supposition and clearly prefaced as such. Please pay attention.

“But he wasn’t prescribed them. No, but his wife was”.

Any views on the fingerprint/DNA business?

MJ: “Mark said nothing about “knowing” there was a lethal injection. It was pure supposition and clearly prefaced as such. Please pay attention.”

Don’t be silly. The point is that Mark was positing a lethal injection on the basis that dextropropoxyphene was found on the toxicology report when it was obviously better explained as being from co-proxamol, especially given the presence of paracetamol as well.

What I find odd is that now the very things the pathologist reported as cause of death which were considered insufficient for suicide or even a cause of death are now being put forward as sufficient for homicide.

“Any views on the fingerprint/DNA business?”

I don’t know much about forensic science. But I have heard that the taped handle of the knife, which was apparently quite small was less likely to retain fingerprints than, say, a steel-handled knife.

It sounds a bit like something called CSI effect:

“The CSI effect (sometimes referred to as the CSI syndrome) is a reference to the phenomenon of popular television shows such as the CSI franchise raising crime victims’ and jury members’, even criminals’, real-world expectations of forensic science, especially crime scene investigation and DNA testing… The CSI effect is purported to skew public perceptions of real-world forensic science, as well as the behavior of criminal justice system actors; this is of particular concern in the courtroom setting, where many prosecutors feel pressured to deliver more forensic evidence.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect

Am I the only one here who finds Angrysoba — Yawn — a bore.

“The point is that Mark was positing a lethal injection on the basis that dextropropoxyphene was found on the toxicology report”

I thought the point was that you claimed that Mark “knew” this was the case, when in fact he was clearly hypothesising.

The wider point is that co-proxamol is an equally speculative suspect, given the amounts found in Kelly’s blood and stomach.

“…the taped handle of the knife, which was apparently quite small was less likely to retain fingerprints than, say, a steel-handled knife”.

I’m sure cotton gaffer tape is hopeless at retaining fingerprints, but pretty good at absorbing and retaining DNA. There is also the question of the co-proxamol packets. Were they wrapped in tape too?

To return briefly to the original topic of this post, I see that Assange has made a rather interesting remark today:

“Australian intelligence services had warned WikiLeaks of “dirty tricks” before Swedish authorities issued a short-lived arrest warrant for founder Julian Assange over a rape claim, he said Monday.

“We were warned on the 11th (of August) by Australian intelligence that we should expect this sort of thing,” Assange said in a telephone interview with broadcaster Al-Jazeera from a secret location in Sweden”.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/0823/wikileaks-australia-intelligence-warned-dirty-tricks/

I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that he is on such good terms with the Australian Intelligence service.

Yes, that is somewhat odd, isn’t it, MJ. Also, everyone knows about honeytraps.

Someone who has stirred-up such ire from the ‘establishment’ would need to understand that esp. at the present time, they would need to behave almost like a monk – otherwise the tabloids and/or the intelligence services will get stuff on them, even if there is no real basis for the stuff: mud sticks.

Now, if he’s saying he was warned and if – I say if – he still got into some kind of ‘intimate interaction’, well, all one can say is: Tommy Sheridan and the SSP (!) – allegedly.

But think for a moment of the allegations swirling around against Arthur Scargill specifically (and the NUM in general) during the 1980s – every single one was proven to be a load of tripe and to have been manufactured by the intelligence services. That’s part of their job description – to bring down anyone who threatens power.

Also, why on earth would anyone trust the Australian intelligence services? They are very close to the CIA et al. There has recently been (another) de facto constitutional coup in Australia – with the sudden toppling of the former Labour PM and his replacement with his Deputy (I’m not talking about the General Election).

It seems incredibly naive – and Assange cannot be naive. Maybe he’s playing a game with Australian Intelligence, roping them in somehow. I sense he must have powerful protectors – maybe wise to have some if you’re going up against the hyperpower.

This reminds me a little, just a little and perhaps unfairly, of the stories floating around relating to Gerry Gable, Editor of anti-fascist ‘Searchlight’ magazine. I emphasise that these are merely allegations. But it’s not just the fascists who’ve issue them; highly respected outlets also have explored his provenance.

So, if you’d just ‘outed’ 90,000 (or whatever it is) secret US state documents re. to war, war and more war, and the SS or SIS came to you and said, “Be careful, we think that the Pentagon are going to play dirty tricks on you” (as if you hadn’t guessed), would you say, “Why, thank you kindly, gentlemen. Cup of tea?” or would you say, “Get tae…”, or would you say, “Gie’s a job, then” (!)

‘Am I the only one here who finds Angrysoba — Yawn — a bore.’

No, I don’t. I take a contrary view to him on just about every subject discussed here but I think he fights his corner very well.

But it’s also important to understand, I think, that Western intelligence services are not monolithic and that they engage in turf wars with one another – and indeed that they routinely spy on one another’s (mainly commercial) operations.

What a dirty messy business to be in. I wonder do they all fancy themselves as 007s.

I suppose that, in a sense, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a country’s security service is offering a measure of support and assistance to one of its own citizens, particularly one who appears to be in some danger, though that seems an awfully out-dated view of how things really are.

Maybe the tacit agreement is that they’ll look out for him and he’ll back off from material that might compromise Australian security interests.

I don’t know; I’d be interested to hear the views of the Australian chap who posts here occasionally under the name of ‘nobody’.

i have to confess that, until I read that news item, it hadn’t quite occurred to me that Australia even had a security service. It just doesn’t seem that sort of place. A few jokes about Australian secrets came to mind that I was going to share, but I have thought better of it.

Dreoilin: “I wonder do they all fancy themselves as 007s.”

You might get an idea by reading the autobiographies of real spies, like Richard Tomlinson’s “The Big Breach”, or Victor Ostrovsky’s “By Way of Deception”. These were not in good standing, but an example of one who was would be Greville Wynne’s “The Man from Odessa” (he recruited Oleg Penkovsky).

MJ,

There’s a fake Aussie security service on Twitter and he can be very funny. He issues ‘alerts’. Which reminds me, he’s been quiet for some time. I must look him up.

Speaking of Twitter, I have no idea how far the Twitter campaign effort went, but apparently donations to the DEC for flood victims in Pakistan have increased hugely, which is great news.

Thanks Abe! I’ve got myself a Kindle and will be registering it shortly. Book recommendations are exactly what I need!

Dr Michael Powers QC speaking on Radio 5 this morning on the Victoria Derbyshire Show to a presenter called Stephen Nolan who seems to have been primed. Nolan 0 Powers 1

1hr 7mins in

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tjn6m/Victoria_Derbyshire_23_08_2010/

http://www.medneg.co.uk/index.htm

The College of Shame

The Air Marshal

Sir Joe French, 57, was Chief of Defence Intelligence.

Salary: up to £95,000.

Role: Testified before Hutton, defending the notorious – now disproved – claim that Saddam’s weapons could be launched within 45 minutes.

Now: Retired ex Commander-in-Chief of RAF Strike Command on £154,000 a year.

The MP

Ann Taylor, 59, Labour MP, was chairwoman of Parliament’s Intelligence Committee.

Salary: £56,000.

Role: She headed the committee that published a report which exonerated Downing Street over allegations of manipulating the Iraq intelligence.

Now: Ennobled as Baroness Taylor of Bolton. In her first year in the Lords she claimed more than £30,000 in tax-free “subsistence allowances”.

The Select Committee Chairman

Donald Anderson, 67, was Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Salary: £56,000.

Role: Caved in to Government request not to ask David Kelly awkward questions about Iraq’s WMD. Kelly was found dead two days after he appeared before Anderson’s committee.

Now: Elevated to Lords as Baron Anderson of Swansea. Claimed £25,000 in tax-free attendance allowances in return for attending Lords on a total of 94 days.

The Defence Secretary

Geoff Hoon, 53, was Defence Secretary.

Salary: £129,000.

Role: Accused of neglecting his duty of care towards MoD employee David Kelly by sanctioning the release of his name to the media. Hoon admitted he could have done more to help the scientist.

Now: Jobseeker, cluster bomb expert

Blair’s mouthpiece

Godric Smith, 41, was one of Blair’s two Official Spokesmen.

Salary: £80,000.

Role: Announced Kelly’s death to reporters on the then PM’s plane as it arrived in Tokyo – responsible for many subsequent briefings.

Now: Honoured with CBE. Sports-mad Smith landed dream job as chief spin doctor for the 2012 London Olympics. Paid £120,000 a year.

The spin doctor

Alastair Campbell, 49, was Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy.

Salary: £130,000.

Role: Allegedly masterminded the “sexing up” of the official report on Iraq’s WMD, author of the second so-called “dodgy dossier”, and was the man behind the strategy that led to the public naming of David Kelly.

Now: Charged Labour £40,000 plus VAT for a few weeks as a consultant during 2005 Election. Sports writer for Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper. Stands to make £1 million for his memoirs.

Blair’s other spokesman

Tom Kelly, 51, was Blair’s Official Spokesman (joint post).

Salary: £80,000.

Role: Briefed reporters that David Kelly was “Walter Mitty” character.

Now: FSA Communications Director £100K+

The Whitehall intelligence chief

Sir John Scarlett, 58, was chairman of Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee.

Salary: £130,000.

Role: Accused of acting as “human shield” for Alastair Campbell. Scarlett insisted he had “overall charge and responsibility” of the Iraq intelligence report – No 10 had not meddled.

Now: Promoted in 2005 to the most glamorous job in British intelligence: Chief of MI6. Known as “C”. Salary up to £200,000. Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George now retired.

The deputy intelligence chief

Martin Howard, 52, was Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence.

Salary: £90,000.

Role: Insisted Downing Street had no knowledge that 45-minute claim was wrong.

Now: Assistant Secretary General for Operations NATO £100,000 plus

The Chief of Staff

Julian Miller, 51, was Chief of the Intelligence Assessment Staff, Cabinet Office.

Salary: £80,000.

Role: Defended Alastair Campbell, suggested David Kelly was too junior to have had access to crucial intelligence.

Now: Made Companion of the Order of the Bath. Was Director-General of Resources and Plans in the MoD on £100,000.

The Inquiry Secretary

Lee Hughes, late 40s, was Secretary to the Hutton Inquiry.

Salary: £50,000.

Role: Managed day-to-day logistics of the hearing.

Now: Made CBE. Was promoted to senior role in Department of Constitutional Affairs, on £60,000. Unknown

The MoD Press Officer

Kate Wilson, late 30s, was chief Press officer at MoD.

Salary: £50,000.

Role: Responsible for strategy that led to Kelly’s “outing”. Journalists were told in advance that if they gave the correct name, the MoD would confirm it.

Now: Honoured with an OBE “in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in connection with operations in Iraq”. Was chief Press officer at MoD. Salary around £60,000.

The PM’s top foreign adviser

Sir David Manning, 57, was Tony Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser.

Salary: £120,000.

Role: Present at all Downing Street sofa summits leading up to the war.

Now: Promoted to Washington Ambassador, the most sought-after job in the diplomatic service. Basic salary £130,000 plus tax-free allowances of £90,000. Now adviser to the Princes & an intelligence company staffed by ex MI6 officers.

The top civil servant

Sir Kevin Tebbit, 60, was Permanent Under Secretary of State at MoD.

Salary: up to £264,250.

Role: Sir Kevin admitted “responsibility” but not “culpability” for Kelly’s death.

Now: Enjoying comfortable semi-retirement as non-executive director of the Smiths Aerospace group on £60,000 a year and is also a visiting professor at Queen Mary College, London.

The MI6 supremo

Sir Richard Dearlove, 61, was Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6.

Salary: up to £200,000.

Role: Insisted to Hutton he was not aware of any unhappiness within the intelligence community over the 45-minute claim.

Now: Living in genteel retirement as Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, on Civil Service pension of up to £100,000.

Thanks Rowena – we love you

The truth is, in my view, that the top spooks aren’t the heads of MI5 and MI6. There’s probably one smaller hidden organisation that oversees everything to do with state tyranny. It would be permanently staffed by the same control freak douchebags who would even put Blair to shame. And like Blair, despite being private and not public, they’ll just never fuck off. Just in case they ever read Craig’s blog…

‘HI THERE YOU EVIL FUCKTARDS.’

MJ, yes ‘nobody’ knows his stuff, especially about the paedophilia. I don’t think he was too thrilled about Craig not officially stating 9/11 was an inside job. :-0 He certainly hasn’t appeared as much since then.

For anyone that may not have seen this, it has a great angle of WTC7 collapsing. The guy’s channel has loads of vids on it and is quite funny too. He lives in Arizona and calls his local cops, who he frequently films, the Phoenix Pirates. :-0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=972ETepp4GI&NR=1&feature=fvwp

“Dr Michael Powers QC speaking on Radio 5 this morning on the Victoria Derbyshire Show to a presenter called Stephen Nolan who seems to have been primed. Nolan 0 Powers 1″

Stephen Nolan is a fat ugly little shit on the make.

The best critique of fattie Nolan is that provided by Gerry Anderson, a colleague of his on Radio 4 Northern Ireland. They had adjoining progs on the station and Anderson used to take the piss out of fattie Nolan’s shock jock efforts on regular occasions as they handed over.

The clue is that fattie Nolan has been promoted to BBC national broadcasting precisely because of his Faustian instincts. London notices those without integrity rather quickly. They have much need of them in these propagandist times.

Such scumbags are still relatively rare.

“I thought the point was that you claimed that Mark “knew” this was the case, when in fact he was clearly hypothesising.”

NoOooOoOOoOooooOOOoOOo! I’m pointing out the absurdity of any investigation concluding that. How can you keep switching from non-lethal dose to lethal dose depending upon how convenient it is for your theory?

“The wider point is that co-proxamol is an equally speculative suspect, given the amounts found in Kelly’s blood and stomach.”

There’s nothing equal about them at all. Because co-proxamol WAS found at the scene and in his stomach and it was accompanied by the presence of paracetamol in the blood. This is explained by co-proxamol whereas there is absolutely NO evidence of a lethal injection at all.

***This is not to say that co-proxamol was obviously THE cause of death; it wasn’t determined to be. But co-proxamol clearly explains the presence of dextropropoxyphene better than anything else.***

“I’m sure cotton gaffer tape is hopeless at retaining fingerprints, but pretty good at absorbing and retaining DNA. There is also the question of the co-proxamol packets. Were they wrapped in tape too?”

Now, you’re just being absurd. Was forensic evidence expected to be found on the co-proxamol packets? Would the absence cause concern in a regular police investigation? Was the packet even tested for forensic evidence or are we just trying to create doubt where none really exists?

That’s why I referred to the CSI effect when juries require far higher levels of forensic evidence than is usually possible to obtain.

“No, I don’t. I take a contrary view to him on just about every subject discussed here but I think he fights his corner very well.”

Thanks King of Welsh Noir!

You are pointing out absurdity stupidsoba? Ha ha ha. What about the absurdity of you LITERALLY LIVING on Craig’s blog for a minimum wage income to disseminate government propaganda? Freak!!! When you first showed your nasty mug, a year ago I think, you said you were on holiday when queried about the amount of time you spent here. Some holiday eh?

Stupidsoba, ‘This IS your life.’ No red book i’m afraid. Sorry.

“What about the absurdity of you LITERALLY LIVING on Craig’s blog”

That is pretty absurd. Maybe you should look up the word “literally”.

Mark – thanks for the info. on toadies being promoted and handsomely rewarded. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Jaded, how d’you know it’s minimum wage?

“Freak!!!”

Three exclamation marks, no less. It’ll give you away every time, you know.

If you want to know the Real Secret Establishment, consider the Brotherhood of the Bell:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=brotherhood+of+the+bell+xooberant&aq=f

Damn good film! See clip 9 to see how a talk show host (William Conrad, who later played the P.I. in the excellent series “Cannon”) deals with conspiracy enthusiasts of different types.

I think Angrysoba makes important points at August 23, 4:59 PM. However, how do these poisons’ concentrations in the bloodstream decrease with respect to time when (a) ingested via the stomach and (b) injected in pure form?

“How can you keep switching from non-lethal dose to lethal dose depending upon how convenient it is for your theory?”

Whether one leans toward the suicide theory or the murder theory the dextropropoxyphene issue is problematic because, although Kelly had quite a lot in his blood, it was way short of what is generally considered a lethal dose. The matter is complicated further by the small amounts of co-proxamol found in his stomach and the evidence that he had spat several tablets out. So where did the high – but non-lethal – dose of dextropropoxyphene come from? I agree that there is no evidence of an injection but in the absence of an inquest it is legitimate to indulge in conjecture. You may prefer to point the finger at co-proxamol and you may be right but the forensic evidence does not particularly support it.

Rather weighty expert opinion also casts doubt on the notion that Kelly died as a result of his severed artery, so we are actually left not knowing for sure how Kelly died at all. The case is clearly screaming out for an inquest.

“Was forensic evidence expected to be found on the co-proxamol packets?”

Yes. On each bit of the blister pack pushed out to release a tablet one might reasonably expect to find a thumb print, or part thereof.

“Would the absence cause concern in a regular police investigation?”

The absence would be noted.

“Was the packet even tested for forensic evidence”

It was a potential crime-scene so forensic examination would have been thorough. Fingerprinting of found items is part of the routine of helping demonstrate or eliminate the possibility of foul play.

“Whether one leans toward the suicide theory or the murder theory the dextropropoxyphene issue is problematic because, although Kelly had quite a lot in his blood, it was way short of what is generally considered a lethal dose. ”

Exactly, so while the pathologist thought it wasn’t sufficient to have been the cause of death ON ITS OWN, according to Mark’s hypothesis it was.

That’s the problem I am pointing out and which you seem to be at pains to avoid.

“It was a potential crime-scene so forensic examination would have been thorough. Fingerprinting of found items is part of the routine of helping demonstrate or eliminate the possibility of foul play.”

Fine, but Mark said there had been no fingerprints found on the strips of co-proxamol but I can’t find this being said anywhere but here.

Mark, do you have a source for this?

“Exactly, so while the pathologist thought it wasn’t sufficient to have been the cause of death ON ITS OWN”

That’s not what was said.

From the doctors’ letter:

“Professor Milroy expands on the finding of Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry – that haemorrhage was the main cause of death (possibly finding it inadequate) – and falls back on the toxicology”

Assange’s revelations damaged no establishment figure. Their primary impact was to release ‘secret’ information connecting Pakistani government with the activities of the Taliban in Afghanistan, thus providing a pretext for further US expansion of its war against Pakistan.

Assange is not be trusted, imo. These leaks look like a CIA operation.

The recent charge of rape against him and then its withdrawal looks, to the public mind, like a CIA dirty tricks operation further boosting his credibility as an anti-establishment truth teller.

Let’s see what he comes up with next and how damaging it is to the US/UK/Israel Imperial ‘make war for peace’ project.

‘Kelly’s death was caused by bleeding from the cuts to his wrist, severe heart disease and an overdose of painkillers …’

“It was an absolute classic case of self-inflicted injury. You could illustrate a textbook with it.” –Nicholas Hunt (Sunday Times)

Dr Kelly couldn’t have known if he had partially-blocked coronary arteries since he wasn’t being treated for them, was he.

So how was he trying to kill himself? By cutting one wrist and half-swallowing some tablets? But Hunt’s version would make heart disease one of a trio of vital causes. So how then is it a “textbook” case?

Given what ‘somebody’ posted about Nicholas Hunt at August 22, 2010 9:41 PM, how do we know if he’s competent? or if anything he says can be trusted? And if that doubt is there, why can’t someone theorise about injections? an injection site can be easily covered up under “numerous cuts” to the left wrist.

And references to ‘CSI effect’ are downright silly since ‘fingerprinting’ has been in use since the late nineteenth century.

“So how then is it a “textbook” case?”

He was probably referring to “The Textbook of Baffling, Ambiguous, Suspicious and Downright Dodgy Deaths” (OUP 2004).

“how do we know if he’s competent?”

On the question of there being very little blood found at the scene, Hunt says:

“There was plenty of blood ?” it was either hidden or had soaked into the ground”

Come again? The mind boggles as to what else may have been “hidden” at the scene. Harvey the giant rabbit almost certainly. A herd of vicious killer wombats perhaps.

What he meant to say, if he were being intellectually honest, was: “although it is correct that very little blood was found, there remains a theoretical possibility that some blood had soaked into the ground and was not immediately visible. In this instance however it is likely that the blood would have been found in the subsequent forensic investigation of the scene”.

Chris Lee was seen running off in a cape. :-0

angry (I take it that was you):

“That’s the problem I am pointing out and which you seem to be at pains to avoid”.

Hardly. I’ve been going to great pains to emphasize it. I don’t actually agree with Mark on the issue, as is clear from my initial response to his suggestion, but I accepted that he was merely hypothesizing, which you did not. On the basis of the known facts the proposition that the high but non-lethal amount of dextropropoxyphene was caused by injection is no less plausible than the proposition that it was caused by taking co-proxamol.

Back to Assange on what has become a dual Assange/Kelly thread.

a~

Assange prosecutor cited for secrecy breach

Published: 24 Aug 10 16:39 CET |

Online: http://www.thelocal.se/28556/20100824/

The prosecutor who issued the warrant for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been reported for violating rules on the confidentiality of preliminary investigations, newspaper Dagens Juridik (DJ) reported on Tuesday.

The prosecutor on duty, Maria Haljebo Kjellstrand, decided on Friday to issue a warrant to arrest Assange on suspicion of rape. She later confirmed to Expressen that there was a case and that Assange was charged in absentia. The warrant was withdrawn one day later.

Due process organisation Rattssakerhetsorganisationen (RO), which had previously notified the prosecutor through the Ombudsmen of Justice (Justitieombudsmannen, JO) for her conduct in connection with the decision to issue the warrant, has now supplemented its notification, the report said.

According to the organisation, the prosecutor violated the confidentiality of preliminary investigations by giving the media information about this case, DJ reported.

“We believe that the matter has been handled extremely badly for all parties involved and we are highly critical of how quickly one has taken the decision to detain a person,” RO Chairman Johan Binninge told DJ.

“From an investigative standpoint, it is a disaster to go out in public this way, which can only harm the investigation. A prosecutor must also take into consideration all parties involved, including the suspect, and consider the consequences of a particular intervention for the suspect, in this case, an internationally known person,” he added.

The supplement submitted to Swedish Prosecution Service Authority (

Sometimes Assange appears as a long-haired platinum blond, other times as a well coiffed brunette.

So does he sometimes bleach his hair, or is he a natural albino who sometimes dyes his hair?

unbeliever, that had occurred to me and I’m sure to many others. One doesn’t know what to believe. But an allegation like that tends to damage the recipient even if repudiated later; people remember the initial news rather than the follow-up. Plus, there will be those who will say, ‘no smoke with out fire’, etc. We’ll see what transpires. I suspect that if the US authorities really wanted to arrest Assange and have him extradited, they’d have got their pals in [insert name of country] to effect it. Maybe it’ll still happen. Who knows? Anyway, ‘damage’ is something which may occur over a period of time. Let’s see.

Dreoilin:”Book recommendations are exactly what I need!”

I would try and get the books by John Barron, “KGB: the secret work of Soviet secret agents”, “KGB Today: The hidden hand” and “Breaking the Ring”. Unfortunately they are not available as kindle books.

On the other hand, Daniel Ellsberg clearly sees Assange and Wikileaks as genuine subversive entities. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone does a ‘Vanunu’ on him anytime soon. If the US authorities get him, and they do seem to be after him, they may well toss him into jail and throw away the key.

We shall see, we shall see.

Brotherhood of the Bell – good film, Abe. A TV film, at that. But I thought it starred Glenn Ford.

Claudy bombing – police – church – government cover-up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2010/aug/24/claudy-bombing-report-priest-northern-ireland.

In 1972 nine people died in a GOVERNMENT conspiracy – so heads up people – keep digging – yes as MJ clearly sees I am hypothesizing – My axiom relating to the death of David Kelly hinges on a compound in David’s blood that was missed in toxicology – not an exact science as Suhayl has quite rightly pointed out.

As usual Angrysober has used his myopic ‘vision’ in adversarial twists to fight his corner; Hunt would have directed toxicology and I believe his incompetence and the ‘planted’ c-proxamol narrowed the search for other compounds – if I am wrong – then I will give a public apology and I will write a letter to Janice Kelly offering my sincere apologies. Meanwhile I say again , when is the date of the inquiry?

Sorry that was me above not my son.

Unbeliever – ‘Assange’s revelations damaged no establishment figure. Their primary impact was to release ‘secret’ information connecting Pakistani government with the activities of the Taliban in Afghanistan, thus providing a pretext for further US expansion of its war against Pakistan.

Assange is not be trusted, imo. These leaks look like a CIA operation.

The recent charge of rape against him and then its withdrawal looks, to the public mind, like a CIA dirty tricks operation further boosting his credibility as an anti-establishment truth teller.

Let’s see what he comes up with next and how damaging it is to the US/UK/Israel Imperial ‘make war for peace’ project.’

It’s good to keep questioning and remain openminded. I appreciate you making that argument and wondered the same myself, like Suhayl did. I think Assange is genuine myself, but couldn’t swear to it. Let’s not forget that they are ‘already’ in Pakistan doing pretty much what they like. They have ‘already’ connected the Pakistani authorities to terrorism. I haven’t scrutinised the plethora of documents that wikileaks published, but would bet my bottom dollar that most of it damages U.S. reputation rather than provide evidence that links Pakistan to the Taliban. Moreover, the controlled mass media would ‘already’ have harped on about this link if it was part of some U.S. plan. Like they would expect Joe Bloggs to trawl through it all and say:

‘Ah, links between the Pakistani authorities and the Taliban. Hideous Hillary was right!’

Going on to the rape allegations it is indeed a bit of a conundrum. I even had the thought that the woman involved might have secretly been on Assange’s side. A false allegation deliberately made and withdrawn. A move to discredit the U.S. authorities even more. I thought that because it happened so soon after the leak. In the end, that scenario just didn’t sit as quite right with me though. On balance, I think the most likely explanation is that it was some punishment for what he did and a warning to not leak anything else. Even all the online numpties that can’t see past their noses were shouting ‘government job!’

Suhayl – ‘Jaded, how d’you know it’s minimum wage?’

Well, I don’t actually ‘know’, but he’s hardly the sharpest tool in the box. I wouldn’t even hire him in the first place. It seriously disgusts me that he is tax payer funded.

ah, ad hominem attacks; how I’ve missed them…

MJ, I don’t care how strongly you endorse Mark’s “hypothesis” nor how strongly Mark endorses it.

I am looking at the hypothesis itself and saying it sounds silly.

“On the basis of the known facts the proposition that the high but non-lethal amount of dextropropoxyphene was caused by injection is no less plausible than the proposition that it was caused by taking co-proxamol.”

WRONG! It’s far less plausible than the idea it was caused by taking co-proxamol because WE KNOW HE TOOK CO-PROXAMOL.

How did the paracetamol get there? Was that injected too? What was the co-proxamol doing there?

“Moreover, the controlled mass media would ‘already’ have harped on about this link if it was part of some U.S. plan.”

But Jaded, that’s exactly what the New York Times did. Their coverage wasn’t the same as the Guardian’s:

http://tinyurl.com/365vjxz

which is not to say that I don’t (as yet!) distrust Assange. I find it interesting to watch him in action a few times and try to evaluate his sincerity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpwGMdJdyl0

Abe,

Many thanks again. No worries about Kindle. There’s always the bookshop and the library.

technicolour,

You’ve been very brief lately. As if you have only one foot in the door. How are you?

Don’t worry about the ad hominem. Angry told me to, “try to look a little less like a proud and petulantly ignorant idiot”, and when I remarked, “angry indulges in abuse”, he promptly said, “I don’t think that’s very fair”. I think it’s funny (most of the time.) Although on balance the civility here is a pleasure compared to some blogs I’ve frequented.

Jaysus, Angry, don’t shout. There’s no need.

“How did the paracetamol get there? Was that injected too? What was the co-proxamol doing there?”

It was shoved into his mouth by a herd of vicious killer wombats. Would you calm down? This isn’t an exam.

Man Talking Bollox on the Internet #1: “As I stand I can but find the truth! A truth which delves beyond consciousness and survival…

I PERSONALLY BELIEVE David Kelly was killed with a samurai sword after being injected with succinylcholine by a three man team comprising of Michael Shrimpton, platinum blonde Julian Assange (who had died his hair a less conspicuous blue for the job), Father James Chesney assisted by Harvey the Rabbit and a herd of vicious killer wombats who were disguised as Iraqi Ba’athists on a boating trip. They clearly received direction from France and were paid for their work through a Dominican Republic bank. The money had been wired from Moscow under the orders of Englebert Humperdink, although he didn’t know he was part of it.

Michael Shrimpton’s unrivalled access to the intelligence world extends even as far as having all of Tom Clancy’s espionage novels and it was there, in the “Teeth of the Tiger”, that he found the method of succinylcholine to relax his prey. You could say it was a “textbook suicide”.”

Man Talking Bollox on the Internet #2: “But the autopsy made no mention of the samurai sword cuts.”

Man Talking Bollox on the Internet #1: “But my dear Man Talking Bollox on the Internet #2, they did. They found the wound to the left ulnar artery.”

Man Talking Bollox on the Internet #2: “That’s ingenious! Well, I suppose it is just as likely that it was a samurai sword which caused those cuts as it was the small blood-covered gardening knife that could easily have been planted there. I suppose the smaller cuts were there to disguise the samurai sword wounds.”

Confused Man on the Internet: “But haven’t you, for the last few years, asserted that the wound is unlikely to have caused death and therefore made you believe the suicide verdict is unsafe? Why do you now say a samurai sword was the cause of death?”

Man Talking Bollox on the Internet #2: “Hello? It’s just an extraordinarily far-fetched and detailed hypothesis. No one is saying they believe it! And anyway it is just as likely that he was killed with a samurai sword than committed suicide with a knife and dangerous medication!”

I wonder if there’ll be a plethora of groups like Wikileaks (such as Cryptome, I suppose) which will start trying to investigate each other:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704554104575436231926853198.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

The thing is that whatever standards Wikileaks might impose on themselves (and I think they tend to be at the responsible end) don’t have to be adhered to by any other similar enterprise which might choose that no one has a right to any kind of privacy. There’s no oversight for it, in the end.

Angrysober,

The latest disclosures from Hunt are that:

1. Mr Hunt said Dr Kelly’s wrist was red from where he had been rubbing it to keep the blood flowing.

So arterial blood was everywhere from rubbing – on his right hand, on his clothes, on his legs and on the ground.

..an *overdose* of co-proxamol, a strong pain killer withdrawn from sale in 2007.

Despite the fact that only 1/5 of one tablet was found in his stomach. He could not swallow tablets – there were NO fingerprints on the water-bottle so – err – wiped clean?

Toxicology c2003 is not exact because non-flowing blood/time of death/site where blood sample taken makes extrapolation difficult and inaccurate.(Professor Robert Forrest)

I have not mentioned some other facts (from Hunt) – David had a cut lip, a grazed head and bruises on his chest and legs.

Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, has said they [doubters], “may have a valid point”

Nothing is ‘silly’ at the moment Angrysober – a newspaper comment that suggests, perhaps it was, ‘the tooth fairy’ is what I regard as ‘silly’ and insulting.

I have read conflicting reports that Hunt said blood clots were found ‘inside his sleeve’ and in another statement said, ‘inside his Barbour jacket’. Jeez!

dreoilin – ‘”Moreover, the controlled mass media would ‘already’ have harped on about this link if it was part of some U.S. plan.”

But Jaded, that’s exactly what the New York Times did. Their coverage wasn’t the same as the Guardian’s:

http://tinyurl.com/365vjxz

which is not to say that I don’t (as yet!) distrust Assange. I find it interesting to watch him in action a few times and try to evaluate his sincerity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpwGMdJdyl0‘

Ok, but I was referring to the TV networks. It would have been in the headlines for days. They would obviously try and use some of it to their advantage, like with the article you posted, but to set all this up just for articles like that and get all the other bad press at the same time? I can’t see it myself. Pakistan is a done deal and they were already doing what the hell they wanted to.

It’a common tactic of the intelligence services to criminalise their operatives particularly when there’s a suspicion.

I thought Assange’s revelations and the way he went about publicising them very odd and so did other people.

The rape charge makes him look as if he’s being persecuted. To me he appears nothing more than an intelligence operative.

Suhayl: indeed, it was Glenn Ford who starred (with Dean Jagger) in “Brotherhood of the Bell”. I’d see it on Youtube while you can, before some busybody gets it removed.

Glenn Ford also starred in the comedy “Cry for Happy”. In the story, as a sideline a Japanese film-maker shows his attempt at a silent film drama combining the best of East and West: “The Rice Rustlers of Yokohama Gulch.” In one scene someone looks at a piece of paper and the caption appears on the screen “NOTE SAY (sic): GET OUT OF TOWN BY SUNSET!” In another scene, before a gunman goes into a saloon to shoot it out he takes his boots off Japanese-style. The director is mortified that the audience roar with laughter instead of being moved by his drama, we can only guess why.

Ruth – ‘It’a common tactic of the intelligence services to criminalise their operatives particularly when there’s a suspicion.

I thought Assange’s revelations and the way he went about publicising them very odd and so did other people.

The rape charge makes him look as if he’s being persecuted. To me he appears nothing more than an intelligence operative.’

Fair play and i’m open to that view, but for what purpose? So everyone believes something he leaks in the future which isn’t true and suits them? They want to foster some attempted, limited uprising to introduce new laws? Why? There are a lot of murky goings on, which i’ve always ahouted about. Maybe, and with good reason, we can get over-suspicious on occasion.

I think the reason is that the revelations have given Wikileaks a lot of publicity and anyone who wants to leak something will think immediately of doing it through WikiLeaks especially now as it’s involved with Iceland in setting up a ‘safe haven’ for whistleblowers.

With their hands in it, how easy will it be for the CIA, MI6 etc to censor the leaks?

Most certainly in the near future as more and more people lose their jobs, they’ll have nothing to fear in divuging the corrupt practices of their employers particuly when they’ve been working for a government.

WHO CARES ABOUT A STINKING AWARD!

This sums up Craig Murray’s shallowness and hypocrisy.

Without whistleblowers, there could be no Assange.

No mention of Bradley Manning who is facing 52 years in jail.

To hell with Manning, right Mr Murray? He didn’t get an award, so he doesn’t get a mention.

Assange doesn’t give full disclosure regarding donations to his site or where the money goes, so a bit less integrity than I’d expect.

WikiLeaks raised over $1 million last year.

Should not enough money be raised for Manning’s legal defense, is Assange going to hang Manning out to dry?

Murray doesn’t care about anything except stupid awards, his ego, and corporations.

Murray likes to fool people that British foreign policy is about assisting British corporations to develop other countries’ economies. BP is doing a great job, isn’t it? Oh, but BP is just an aberration, right?

ASSANGE IS FREE – MANNING ISN’T!

www dot bradleymanning dot org

Larry from St. Louis writes:

“So when do you think Assange will publish documents that detail 911 being an inside job?”

Julian Assange doesn’t find the documents he releases – whistleblowers and others do. He effectively sits and waits while others act.

Time to give the whistleblowers a mention, too, like Bradley Manning: www dot bradleymanning dot org.

Carol writes:

“Well done to Julian Assange, keep it coming.”

KEEP WHAT COMING? ASSANGE DOESN’T DO ANYTHING BUT PUBLISH. HE’S A PUBLISHER! Though I’m aware that he’s technically a journalist – being a “journalist” confers certain legal protections that he needs.

It’s whistleblowers and others who release the information you read.

Good God – is everyone so ignorant?

THE CELEBRITY CULTURE HAS ROTTED PEOPLE’S BRAINS. People will be asking for Julian’s autograph next, while others will be claiming that they are having his baby.

Abe Rene

“Assange has put lives at risk by revealing classified documents containing details about informers.”

-

Who are you kidding? Bush and Blair put millions of lives at risk when they lied about WMD in Iraq, hurriedly invaded, and showed a complete disregard for international law designed to protect the civilian population. They killed hundreds of thousands, directly and indirectly. Bush “forgot” to mention that Saddam had volunteered to go into exile.

How about the brutal sanctions on Iraq? 500,000 children killed as a result of those sanctions. Madeleine Albright in 1996, then Secretary of State under Clinton, said that the deaths of half a million children was a price worth paying. Her exact words: “…we think the price is worth it.” (“60 Minutes”, 12/5/96).

How about the US encouraging Saddam to wage war with Iran in 1980, leading to one million deaths. When Saddam looked to be losing, America stepped in and gave Saddam satellite photos and other intelligence to prevent his defeat. The US did this because it wanted to weaken both countries, not have one side defeat the other.

And what about the uprising in 1991, shortly after the first Gulf War? Bush Senior gave Saddam permission to fly his military helicopters so that he (Saddam) could crush the rebellion. Tens of thousands were slaughtered. They were sacrificed because Bush didn’t want Iraqis carrying out their own regime change – it might have meant a government hostile to American “interests” – so Saddam was kept in power, and brutal sanctions were imposed. America didn’t “liberate” Iraq in 2003 – it had kept a dictator in power that could have been overthrown in 1991.

And let’s not forget that America and Britain armed Iraq in the 1980s. Read “Spider’s Web” by Alan Friedman, at the time, a London Financial Times correspondent.

But “Abe Rene” claims Assange has put lives at risk.

WikiLeaks contacted the Dept. of Defense for assistance in expunging sensitive names. The DoD wrote back telling Assange that they will NOT help him. In other words, the Afghanis who helped the US are COMPLETELY EXPENDABLE. It is not WikiLeaks, but the US military, that has potentially endangered their lives.

You can read the letter by Googling: “wikileaks pdf gc letter”

As Craig Murray is studiously avoiding mentioning his name – because he didn’t get an award! – I will: BRADLEY MANNING.

He’s 22 years old, and accused by the US government of being a whistleblower – of giving WikiLeaks a video showing US soldiers killing Iraqi civilians. Some claim he was behind the leaked Afganistan “war” documents, too. That’s right, it wasn’t Assange at all – Assange doesn’t do any actual leaking. Journalists don’t make the news, they write about it. That’s effectively what Assange does, too.

Manning needs a legal team that has a sound understanding of military law.

You can help him buy a legal team by clicking a link on this site:

www bradleymanning dot org

Donations are collected by “Courage To Resist”.

“Wikileaks Afghanistan: Osama bin Laden alive:

Osama bin Laden is alive and playing a key role in directing the war in Afghanistan, leaked US military files suggest.

Telegraph 27 July 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7913050/Wikileaks-Afghanistan-Osama-bin-Laden-alive.html

“A secret “threat report” drafted by the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in 2006 locates bin Laden as well as the Taliban leader Mullah Omar to the Pakistani city of Quetta as well as several villages on the Afghan border.”

So here’s one document published by $million-dolla-a-year Julian Assange, which does much to justify Obarmy’s new war on Pakistan.

Daily Mail”

“Glimpses of Bin Laden: Now WikiLeaks reveals Al Qaeda boss was seen at village meetings”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1297916/Wikileaks-reveals-Osama-Bin-Laden-seen-village-meetings.html#ixzz0xaKLEnTk

Just keep those drone attacks coming. Who knows, Obarma might get lucky and wack Osama as well as all those wedding parties.

‘British spy’ found dead in bath”

“The man, believed to have been working for MI6, had been missing for 10 days”

“Police were last night investigating the murder of a man whose body was found stuffed in a sports bag in the bath of his London flat.”

“The man, who was in his early 30s, is believed to have worked for the government’s intelligence agencies. An unconfirmed report suggested he had worked at GCHQ, the government’s secret listening service, and had been on secondment to MI6, the secret intelligence service, when he disappeared up to 10 days ago.”

BUT, BUT, BUT…

“But a police source stressed that he had not been formally identified, and that while the man’s employment documentation suggested he had indeed worked for the secret service, “he might have been an air conditioning technician rather than a spy”.

“If he really was a spy, you imagine someone would have reported him missing rather sooner,” the source added.”

YEAH, YEAH, YEAH. BUT, BUT, BUT. If he were only a cleaner why all these counterterrorist and security service officials on the scene?

“Last night Scotland Yard launched a murder inquiry, with the homicide and serious crime command working in conjunction with counterterrorist and security service officials.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/25/british-spy-dead-in-bath

Are these Police spokespeople just routine liars?

It very much seems so, in this case as in so may others.

They’re clearly not working for the public who pay their salaries, so who exactly are they working for?

I’ve been seeing such routine lies from Police PR people for quite some time now.

Is it really satisfactory that the taxpayer funds liars whose only function is to ensure that taxpayer funded institutions are not subject to proper public scrutiny?

Ant bets on the identity of the latest disinformation/confusion merchant GoToHell?

‘My lord, he doth protest too much’

Any bets….

GoToHell: since you have named yourself thus, out of your own mouth be you judged. The West’s terrible blunders in Iraq do not justify Assange putting people at risk by releasing classified information about them. I maintain my position that he deserves punishment, not reward.

@ruth

Check here for more on anthrax in Africa (links on top left of first page). Dig back into older posts to find much material on the alleged suicide of Dr Bruce Ivins and the ‘Amerithrax’ attacks, with many disturbing parallels to the Kelly case. The material is highly specialised so it is difficult for trolls to get traction (although there’s at least one trying).

http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/

I would like to exchange links with your site http://www.craigmurray.org.uk

Is this possible?

“Let’s talk about…shares”

Talking about ‘bets’ – Looking at a Portfolio line chart of bank shares this morning over a ten year period has brought home the calamity of the financial ‘crash’

In 2002 a banks share price was 817p – now, 2010 they are 66p and falling after a low of 40p.

Just to put this in perspective if one had a £million shares in 2002 worth £8million then today that investment is worth £600,000 and falling.

Hey the prophet was right – the poor really will inherit our earth.

Abe Rene,

Err – Robin Cook and David Kelly blew the whistle on the ‘dodgy dossier’ an uncredited report plagiarised from an article in Sept. 2002 by Ibrahim al-Marashi.

Robin Cook’s warning fell on deaf eyes and David Kelly, troubled by his security clearance was too late in his exposure.

Both might have saved the deaths, maiming and traumatising thousands of Iraqi babies, toddlers and teens if the British public and the world had been fully aware of the deceit.

Again we read of a myopic ‘drone’ killing women and children in Afghanistan – Google the link – I’m too disgusted.

GoToHell, the case and plight of Manning has been well covered on the TV networks. Whatever your opinions I am sure that everyone here knows Assange wasn’t the whistleblower and the role he played. Anyhow, if Assange is genuine, then he is just as important as any whistleblower on state matters. They give him the whistles and he blows them. I don’t think ‘Bin Laden is alive’ was the headline behind a contrived leak!

Ruth – ‘I think the reason is that the revelations have given Wikileaks a lot of publicity and anyone who wants to leak something will think immediately of doing it through WikiLeaks especially now as it’s involved with Iceland in setting up a ‘safe haven’ for whistleblowers.

With their hands in it, how easy will it be for the CIA, MI6 etc to censor the leaks?

Most certainly in the near future as more and more people lose their jobs, they’ll have nothing to fear in divuging the corrupt practices of their employers particuly when they’ve been working for a government.’

So an anonymous person leaks something from an anonymous connection and Wikileaks censor it. What would happen? They would go elsewhere and say

Wikileaks didn’t publish it probably. The C.I.A. etc. aren’t Gods. They couldn’t be sure to know who leaked it, whether they had made copies, whether they had told anyone else and where they currently were. That’s the beauty of the internet. If you are right about Assange, then i’m not convinced that’s the right reason. Like you said, we will all be watching closely…

All this conspiracy stuff eh? Why can’t everything be incredibly simple to figure out like 9/11, 7/7, the War On Terror and the N.W.O. ambitions of the secret societies and financial elites. Darn it! :-0

PSYWAR

Watch this brilliant, if depressing, film (link below) about the creation of wars and the war against our minds. If Assange were not serving US/UK interests and being directed by CIA managers he would have been ‘dealt with’, in my opinion. His material would never have made it into the mainstream press right across the world.

http://exposureroom.com/members/Durruti/f8bb07c6a12646e199602f6d16d53d55/

non-believer,

Thanks for the link

April 9th 2003 Rumsfeld described the operation (falling Saddam statue) as ‘breathtaking’ – the British Army called the event, ‘historic’ and the media said it was ‘amazing, which it was because the whole event was staged.

“The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.”

E. V. Lucas

I was working in a care home when the Saddam statue came down and the footage was everywhere and no-one – no-one, careworkers or residents – was taken in. I didn’t have to say anything.

dreoilin, thank you. I feel we’ve had the Kelly discussion, and am disinclined to tangle again in depth, hence the one foot. Also not sure how I’m being useful – apart from disturbing the sounds of silence and hopefully stopping some bullying, natch. All good things, and a hug to you.

great quote mark, thanks!

Wikileaks Afghanistan papers leak does not harm US national security says U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense David Lapan:

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/26/pentagon-says-wikileaks-war-logs-do-not-harm-national-security-neocons-disagree/

And,

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor [said] no one in the White House has pointed to any specific revelation from the WikiLeaks trove that harms national security.

Ha, so we really can trust Trikileaks for integrity in [counter]intelligence. Give

Assange the gong, by all means.

I must admit when I heard that Julian Assange & Wikileaks had resurrected Osama bin Goldstein I smelt a rat.

Unknown – ‘Wikileaks Afghanistan papers leak does not harm US national security says U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense David Lapan:

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/26/pentagon-says-wikileaks-war-logs-do-not-harm-national-security-neocons-disagree/

And,

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor [said] no one in the White House has pointed to any specific revelation from the WikiLeaks trove that harms national security.

Ha, so we really can trust Trikileaks for integrity in [counter]intelligence. Give

Assange the gong, by all means.’

And who said it had harmed U.S. national security? All I recall is that there were some accusations about informants becoming endangered. The leaks further harmed U.S. national reputation mainly due to the revelations on civilian deaths.

KingofWelshNoir – ‘I must admit when I heard that Julian Assange & Wikileaks had resurrected Osama bin Goldstein I smelt a rat.’

Bin Laden was never dead in the mass media so Wikileaks had no need to resurrect him. The TV networks haven’t even mentioned Bin Laden in relation to Wikileaks from what i’ve seen. It’s only to be suspected that the U.S. had some fictional Bin Laden bullshit on their files.

It seems to me that some genuine people here are suspicious, and that’s healthy, while others are are trying to smear Assange as a certified, outright stooge. That makes me even more suspicious. Every single dissident isn’t one of them and under their control. That’s a fact!

Jaded, I agree with your posts on this. I think we need to keep an open mind as well as a healthy skepticism. I’m not sure what revelations people are seeking in relation to the US wars of the early C21st. In my view, while every new piece of information is welcome and reinforcing and sometimes also eye-opening and often shocking, there is more than enough damning evidence already in the public domain (and has been right from the beginning) to allow to people to say that these wars are hugely damaging to the world and to campaign against them.

I am advised that this has just been released

http://www.wikileaks.com/wiki/CIA_Red_Cell_Memorandum_on_United_States_%22exporting_terrorism%22,_2_Feb_2010

Suhayl,

You are right there is enough damning information, but I think more importantly, the people in Iraq and Afghanistan are already well aware of what is going on in their countries.

They don’t need to read Wikileaks. Torture and black ops killings are happening right before their eyes and to their friends and families. They know all about it. Most stopped seeing coalition troops as their saviours a very long time ago.

It is of course the British public who are being lied to and misled about what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan in an attempt to keep up political and popular support for the wars, while most of us, if we knew what was really going on, would be demanding our troops be returned home as soon as possible.

We constantly hear the words “support our troops” because they are “protecting our freedoms” while our very freedoms are being taken away by and our troops lives put at risk to protect us from terrorism, when, in reality, the danger to us from terrorism is increased and our troops are fighting a war even they have no faith in any more.

Thanks to organisations like ‘Wikileaks’, fearless journalists and the few politicians who dare to speak the truth, those who really give a damn about the troops have even more reason, to demand their return home as soon as practically possible and not have them constantly used as political pawns fighting an endless and unwinnable wars to benefit corporations, governments and oil the cogs of a massive war machine.

I find it abhorrent ordinary folk being tricked into a false patriotism by the popular press and start condemning the few politicians and whistle-blowers prepared to risk assassination by disclosure. Of course operational war plans need protection, but such plans are always encrypted by my knowledge.

Leaks might serve as propaganda for the terrorists but those radicalised have been so long ago; the over-arching concern is to try and prevent the deaths of innocent families and put pressure on governments to end operations and start building infrastructures hopelessly destroyed so that clean water and electricity is available and families can start re-building their homes and lives.

Totally agree, Mark.

Propaganda was being transmitted by the BBC last night, namely The Wounded Platoon which attempted to elicit sympathy for the footsoldiers.

We were shown not just a mad society, but a psychopathic one.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tlgzt/This_World_The_Wounded_Platoon/

We will have to wait for the BBC to produce a 20 part film in one hour segments on the maiming of bodies and minds in the olive skinned peoples – the ‘hajjis’ as the Iraq people were called.

Brutality by a brutal society was shown – 52 years in jail was handed down for one of the platoon members (culprit/victim) who obviously had mental disturbance. But the possibly more lethal man, Eastridge, got off largely with a plea bargain.

It was a peep into the supreme war crime, supreme because from it all other crimes flow.

‘all hajjis are all guilty’

‘open up on anything – any male, shoot ‘em up – didn’t need to be armed’

‘when they got back from Iraq, they buy out the gun stores and drink the bars dry.’

You might know at in the last 10 years more have died of suicide, than were killed in ‘battle’. In this country we have a major propaganda exercise called ‘Help for Heroes’. It is less to do with the wounds of unlawful war but more with glorifying it.

As a small aside, Assange has rubbished ’9/11 Truth’.

He is the CIA’s boy all right.

somebody,

Yes you are right – who the hell is controlling the Beeb – we learn this morning from News24 that, quote, a senior official in Washington has said the Taliban will exploit the floods and attack and kill foreign aid workers.

This is a prelude; next we will learn that foreign aid workers have been bombed, shot or attacked – I say to the BBC – NAME your official now.

The story appeared in Fox News here:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/08/25/warns-taliban-attack-aid-workers-pakistan/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+foxnews/world+(Internal+-+World+Latest+-+Text)

non-believer,

Assange helped Iraqi doctors get information on murdered civilians out using cypher and other means. To get involved with a past terrorist attack on America will damage his credibility.

My own reputation has been warped by investigating the events in September 2001; however I stated in the Washington Post two years ago I would pursue the truth even if it took 25 years to unravel the spectrum of gross incompetence at one end to false-flag at the other. Bush was on watch then and two years later murdered, crushed and destroyed the lives of more than 300,000 innocent infants and children. He has to pay and his atonement is my mission.

Mark Golding – ‘somebody,

Yes you are right – who the hell is controlling the Beeb.’

We all agree on something then! It does stretch the mind as to how it all works. The only concluson one can draw is organised conspiracy. Some wallies must actually sit in a room discussing all the propaganda they sre going to put out.

Dissidents denying 9/11 truth doesn’t automatically discredit them in my eyes. I’m sure ‘some’ of them are controlled stooges, but many of them will try to avoid the ‘conspiraloon’ tag and think that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I find this a little puzzling as 9/11 truth is pretty obvious and mainstream now, but each to their own. They may well have other reasons too.

Note the use of the low IBC figures here.

It’s a nice example of mutually beneficial black propaganda ie lies. IBC ‘voluntary group’???? brings a cabal of liars/conjurers to task – seemingly. Chilcot will be pleased to deny the Iraqi holocaust by echoing the 10% of reality figure. The dear little ones are denied within their very many graves. Mankind is dying.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/27/chilcot-inquiry-iraq-civilian-deaths

Jaded,

“each to their own”?…..

Sorry, but this is one issue that no one has the right to deem ‘insignificant’. The official story is clearly, provably a lie. The laws of physics and professionally executed chemical analysis do NOT lie.

It is one of the darkest and most telling facts proving our collective degeneracy that when incontrovertible proof is available for all to see……to nail the lies, to nail the criminals and to expose the reality behind our murderous presence in Iran and Afghanistan…..the mainstream media refuse to present it to the public.

9/11 is an acid test. It is just too important and will remain so because the proof and all that follows from that proof is right there before us. Once the evidence is seen, only the terminally stupid or the morally disabled can ignore it.

Jaded,

“each to their own”?…..

Sorry, but this is one issue that no one has the right to deem ‘insignificant’. The official story is clearly, provably a lie. The laws of physics and professionally executed chemical analysis do NOT lie.

It is one of the darkest and most telling facts proving our collective degeneracy that when incontrovertible proof is available for all to see……to nail the lies, to nail the criminals and to expose the reality behind our murderous presence in Iran and Afghanistan…..the mainstream media refuse to present it to the public.

9/11 is an acid test. It is just too important and will remain so because the proof and all that follows from that proof is right there before us. Once the evidence is seen, only the terminally stupid or the morally disabled can ignore it.

New article from foremost 9/11 investigator, Christopher Bollyn, today.

http://www.bollyn.com/making-sense-of-the-media-cover-up-of-9-11

As long as they have the same goal as us what’s the problem? Everyone can fight in their own way. And don’t forget that the higher profile you have, the more likely you are to have negative things happen to you for actively endorsing 9/11 truth. Try and save your criticism for those saying nothing about anything.

“New article from foremost 9/11 investigator, Christopher Bollyn, today.”

I don’t care at all unless I can blame the Jews!

Oh great! Your article does exactly that!

Dickhead!

“New article from foremost 9/11 investigator, Christopher Bollyn, today.”

Yep, once again a thread at Craig Murray’s blog wraps up with racist Jew hatred.

Proud, Craig?

Ah, soba from St. Louis is showing his racist colours. No, I don’t think Craig is proud of you little boy.

You may have fooled some, but I think you are one and the same. Don’t forget, Jaded is smarter than thou…

Somebody said:

“I am advised that this has just been released

http://www.wikileaks.com/wiki/CIA_Red_Cell_Memorandum_on_United_States_%22exporting_terrorism%22,_2_Feb_2010”

Oh,ho. Are we supposed to take an interest in something because it’s been released by Wikileaks?

Who the fuck are Wikileaks and Julian Assange?

No one knows, but people here seem to lap up everything they say because the call themselves Wikileaks, and because they got a gong from a bunch of CIA hacks.

LOL. Are people stupid or what?

If they called themselves Trikileaks, or CIATriks or some such thing, folks would maybe get it.

Ok, ok. I’m a bit of an idiot and so is my other half angrysoba. There’s no need to bully and rub it in though.

technicolour,

Stick around won’t you, I think we have things in common.

Congratulations to Julian for his award. He’s a very courageous man and I hope these ‘molestation’ charges are dropped. I find it difficult to believe that these charges are genuine. Why would such a high profile person behave in that way, knowing that the tabloid media and right wing press would have a field day.

Here is an example of a journalistic piece, which, it might be argued, has been fashioned – moulded, sculpted, shall one venture – to accord with the disinformative constructions currently emanating from, one suspects, that entity euphemistically known as the ‘security and intelligence community’.

Apart from obvious nudge-nudge, wink-wink suggestiveness of the content, it possesses a prose style peculiar to that type of article. Read the last sentence: The kick in the tail, something to leave readers with, that which sticks in the mind, is common journalistic practice. Yet here, on top of the general thrust of the article, it has a not-very-subtle, yet ever-so-gentle (one is allowed to rock gently in a womb of warm Ambrosia), progandising effect, so that to me, it comes across more like the poorly digestive and hack-written product of a briefing than a piece of genuine journalism.

In other words, it looks like the kind of government propaganda one sees often in some other countries but which often is more skillfully disguised in this sceptred isle.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/did+mi6+spy+gareth+williams+commit+suicide/3766602

On which note, did anyone mention the name, Con Coughlan? Why not check out the glorious Mr Coughlan’s website? Let’s do it right now. I can’t wait!

Ah, the man’s right on cue – we learn that the Baddies, none of whom are named, Illiam, William or Quilliam, are ready, RIGHT NOW, to ATTACK BRITAIN!! Your country needs you!

Incidentally, has anyone thought of the possibility that the recent ATTACKS!! on William Hague might have been an attempt to undermine the Foreign Secretary in favour of ‘the lovely, the wonderful, the auspicious, the brilliant, the cuddly, the Cadducean, the suave, the brave, the forceful, the thrusting, the keen-eyed, the coiffured, the sanguine, the sharp, the Right Honourable, the medicinal, the pharmacological, the…’ Liam Fox?

Ah, yes, right on cue again, I see a piece critical of Hague (and Osborne – re. Trident) and very positive about Liam Fox.

Link to Connie’s blog in next post.

Any mention of Gareth Williams? I can’t find one in August or September. Odd, that.

And so it goes.

Say hi to Connie!

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/concoughlin/

Ah! What a visage! Would make the demons in the ninth layer of Hell, tremble!

Hello!

Anyone here?

“Anyone here?”

Nope [makes gentle clucking noises].

Hello Richard!

More on Stuxnet, from

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/09/the_stuxnet_wor.html

“4. Official data confirmed a huge reduction in the number of centrifuges operating during the time number of centrifuges operating during the time the Wikileaks article claimed”

[...]

The “centrfuge” design is something which has a “Pakistan” link as well as “North Korea”.

If you look back a while you will see that one of Pakistan’s top nuclear scientists went rouge and started selling “Nuke tech know how”. Due to the fortunes of war and the US now regarding Pakistan as “one of the good guys” these days the centrafuge plant design became well known even outside the intel community.

That is there are quite a few places (around 24) the rouge scientist flogged the designs to.

It is one of the reasons the US are in my top three suspects for “state sponsor” (in alphabetical order Iran Israel USA).

Because the worm would (if it had not been seen) have very likely have “air gap jumped” all the other places the rouge scientist had sold the centrafuge plans to.

The problem with this is it also means that any one of the other states buying the technology could have produced the worm likewise so could India all as a way of removing the capability from potential enemies.

Further there are many ex CCCP nuclear scientists who might well be interested with “Russian Mafia” interest in “trashing the market” to then sell their own “system” in as replacment.

I have a subjective measure when looking at these things, I call it the “Tom Clancy Test”, that is if the idea looks like a valid plot line for one of his novels then it has the capability of reality.

However at the end of the day it showes for real that “air gap crossing” is now in amongst the low hanging fruit. It’s happened in considerably less than the eight years I predicted when I thought up a way to do it a couple of years ago. And importantly it has very real security implications for defenders using the physical issolation model.

I guess based on this that we should start thinking in terms of the “embeded in chip” attack vector (from the likes of China etc) as being the next candidate to join the low hanging fruit in the next couple of years…

It might be worth watching who goes “back in house” with the likes of the NSA in the next couple of years, and what silicon level “secure by design” hardware mask micro code checking programs apear…

Posted by: Clive Robinson at September 25, 2010 4:55 PM

Note the “Embedded in chip” attack vector warning above. This is one of the reasons I like to hang on to old hardware – Crab take note!

Hi, Clark.

I do like the idea of somone Going Rouge …

Stuff to do, more time later, see you. Shopping, rain, yuck.

“one of Pakistan’s top nuclear scientists went rouge”

Did he indeed! That must have been quite a sight

Seriously though, having older technology is often no bad thing. My mobile is about 10 years old, and lacks the ability to become my personal tracking device., nor can it be remotely turned into a bug by the security services.

Hi Clark,

Stuxnet looks potentially very serious, with the capability to cause catastrophic failures within powerstations and production plants. If it is confirmed that Iran is the target, it could be seen of more than a provocation, an actual act of War.

This is unlike any computer virus threat to date, the virus is created to be capable of causing immediate physical crisis -meaning large explosions and power losses at affected powerstations and production plants.

Although the infection has been detected now, it is managing to reinfect by mutating and using as yet undiscovered reinfection routes.

Hopefuly it has been caught early enough and can be safely disinfected by the worlds antivirus gurus. But the fact that some military has decided fit to unleash it on Iran or the area, is already woeful.

I hope it has been caught early and the global response will prodcue some sane reflection on its purpose and origin.

Somebody (from the previous thread), yes, Alexander Allen is a colourful figure with an odd story that has never fully been explained.

He also had a website – or his wife did – that published his address; this became a mini-scandal a little akin to Jonathan Evcans in Speedos! I think his wife, a prominent visual artist, died of cancer recently.

He seems an eccentric character, Grateful dead fan, etc., flamboyant and not your typical spook whose aim is to sink into the backgfround.

But perhaps, this is an example of what I mentioed earlier, that in spite of Alexander Allen’s obvious talents, systemic oversight of the security and intelligence services is inadequate.

Does this stuxnet have the capability to replicate itself in other ‘nuclear installations?

It seems to be quiet known for some time, but has morphed somewhat, not that I have any clue of Computers.

Or has the Westinghouse systems in western nuclear plants been spared such attacks due to the programming of the virus?, naughty…

This from Mr. Tanese from Kaspersky GREAT in the Bankok tech.:

What is amazing is that Stuxnet uses two different rootkit technologies. One is in the controlling PC to prevent the Stuxnet worm from being seen. It also uses four zero-day attacks and two more vulnerabilities to enable elevation of privileges.

An infected PC will neither see the Stuxnet work nor the malicious code it is injecting into the programmable logic controllers (PLC).

Stuxnet spreads through USB sticks, which is the only way to infiltrate factories with networks not connected to the open Internet.

Infected machines then become part of the Stuxnet Botnet and the controller can steal codes, documents and designs and inject new orders into the PLC.

The authors of Stuxnet were not out to steal, but to modify, but in order to modify, first you need to see what the code is doing.

Stuxnet can spread through versions of Windows from XP to Windows 7.

“This is unheard of. If a malware used one zero day, that was amazing, but malware using four zero-days is mind-blowing,” Tanase said.

And the intrigue continues. The files were signed with real digital signatures, stolen from real companies, in this case J-Micron and Realtek. Malware is rarely signed and the fact that they were signed with real stolen certificates from two companies in the same industrial park in Taiwan is fuelling conspiracy theories. Did someone break into Realtek and J-Micron? Did they have insider access? Or did someone just drop a couple of infected USB drives in the parking lot?

The certificates were later revoked, but only after Stuxnet was discovered. This marks another milestone and poses a new dilemma for security experts, whether signed code and certificates can be trusted at all.

And what of the target? The biggest point of infection for Stuxnet was Iran or India, depending on when. But infections were global and Tanase believes Iran was targeted as it had by far the highest infection rate per capita. What exactly was targeted is not known.

Today, the command and control for Stuxnet has been taken offline, but it still has peer-to-peer control. Someone can still inject updates into the Botnet as long as infected machines are out there. What it was used for, what its payload was and whether it had already accomplished its task or not, is anyone’s guess.

“Stuxnet brings targeted attacks to a whole new level of sophistication,” said Tanase.

“I’m not just making these allegations when you look at what’s being applied: Four zero-days, two stolen certificates and using SCADA networks as a target. They had to have immense technical resources, and to get those certificates is probably the reason people suspect nation state involvement.”

Stuxnet is the first moment where cyber crime is moving from pickpocketing to something that can really affect national infrastructure. Attacks like Stuxnet are too complicated to become mainstream.

I note that Alex Allen was the British HC to Australia – so Craig Murray will know him, or know of him, I’d have thought.

He seems like a colourful, High Tory type of figure.

Was he poisoned? Who knows, and if not, why the silence?

“Stuxnet is the first moment where cyber crime is moving from pickpocketing to something that can really affect national infrastructure”

It isn’t, though. This may be an “over-excited reporting” alert.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/A-Year-of-CyberAttacks-Georgia-Not-First-and-Wont-be-Last-to-Fall-Victim-to-Hackers/ is a couple of years old.

(Getting a bit picky, one could also look at the constant flood of junkmail, unwanted adverts & godonlyknows what else, and consider that as a degradation of infrastructure. What proportion of our bandwidth is wasted on this parasitism ?)

“The Privy Council allied with the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and the Cabinet and Cabinet Intelligence Unit which is the real control over the security and intelligence services are part of the secret permanent unaccountable Government.

We have seen from the arms to Iran, Iraq affairs, the Sandline affair and other scandals that politicians and Parliament have little or no control and are more like players in a pantomime put on for the general public and gullible public.”

Gerald James.

I dont think the hyped reporting has started yet Richard, so far this is coming from the ‘Nerdy’ sources.

http://www.virusbtn.com/conference/vb2010/abstracts/LastMinute7.xml

“Stuxnet is the first publicly known worm to target industrial control systems, often generically referred to as SCADA systems. Not only did Stuxnet include malicious STL (Statement List) code, an assembly-like programming language, which is used to control industrial control systems, it included the first ever PLC (programmable logic controller) rootkit hiding the STL code. It also included a zero-day vulnerability to spread via USB drives, a Windows rootkit to hide its Windows binary components, and it signed its files with certificates stolen from other unrelated third-party companies. All of these characteristics are noteworthy in their own right, however when they all converge within one threat it is clear that there is a special force at work. Any threat that is capable of taking control of a real-life physical system is worthy of a closer look, and here we present our analysis of such a threat.”

thanks for that crab, that virus seems as virulant as Avigdor Liebermann.

“I dont think the hyped reporting has started yet …”

I agree it could well get worse ;-/ (and also, of course, potentially more illuminating, as people have time to dissassemble it more completely).

(That Symantec link seems to have a tinge of vapourware ? Much talk of how a ‘presentation’ ‘will show’ this that and the other, but it doesn’t seem to be actually there and doing it ?)

I’m not saying it isn’t all awesomely clever and etc, I’m just remarking that an expert who doesn’t seem aware of events that were quite loudly reported 2 years ago should maybe be taken with a pinch of salt in his less-checkable assertions.

See also some of the analyses of the Storm botnet, military analogies were drawn there too, though in that case I think the fingers were pointed at Russian mafias.

I’m not saying it isn’t all a major problem, either.

Ruth, that’s exactly it: Pantomimus.

‘welcome Ingo -on that note, people have been refering to this Reuters report from last year -

“Wary of naked force, Israel eyes cyberwar on Iran”

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3742960,00.html

Hi Richard, the previous (known) incidents seem to be just website and email hacks. They might be said to have the same malicious intent, but i can’t see a practical parallel with this combined windows/PLC rootkit.

Sorry i was disappointed to when i realised my link was only the abstract to a talk. I dont really have time for this but i will be fascinated to hear more details about this virus. It is like a new genus of malware, -military/industrial malware

“i was disappointed to when i realised my link was only the abstract to a talk”

There was a German one Clark (? I think) posted, was the same (“geekheim” ? nice name); shocking conclusions, all will be revealed at a speech he’s making later … there are reputations to be made here, if only it’s a really stupendously big-enough issue. People are marking territory.

Which, in the technoworld, is how it works. I guess. People take bits of it apart, guess at conclusions and argue over them, and when the dust settles, the ideas that survive are the one that weren’t wrong; then immune systems are built, and every now and then someone even installs them.

But in the meantime, the reporters only have to sell a story. And, I have to say, the idea of a nuclear reactor running control software from someone who warns that it’ll go titsup if you try and change the passwords, all based on an unlicensed Windows installation, is a striking story, genre “horror”.

“It’s a new genus”. Well, possibly, but all sorts of assorted malware have been the first to do this-that-and-the-other, in their day. The Great Worm of ’86 (breaks into Geordie-accented song) did clever stuff no-one had experienced before, too. It’s an arms-race.

None of which is to dismiss the fact that it appears to exist, and could be serious (or that malware in general is a problem. It is, in a big way). Just, it doesn’t follow that everything written about it will be true.

Spot on, Crab: Military-Industrial (Complex?) malware. Notable points that make Stuxnet special:

1) It modifies actual industrial control systems, not just PCs. This is absolutely new.

2) It uses four Windows ‘Zero Day’ exploits. Two is the most ever seen together before, and could indicate complicity by Microsoft.

3) It can infect PCs not attached to the Internet, via infected USB memory sticks. This is rare.

4) It deliberately LIMITS its own propagation, to help prevent being detected, ie it is stealthy and targeted.

5) It is very well written so as not to crash its host PC – more stealth.

PLCs control industrial systems. Stuxnet’s target is Siemens PLCs, which are prepared for use by Siemens ‘Step 7′ software that runs on Windows. So the attack route is:

Internet to Windows to USB Stick to offline Windows to ‘Step 7′ to PLC to physical machinery.

‘Step 7′ software is password protected to prevent abuse, and Stuxnet uses the default password. Siemens recommend that the default password not be changed. This could indicate complicity by Siemens.

Stuxnet was discovered by an almost unheard of anti-virus company in Belarus called VirusBlokAd in June 2010. It may have been released in June 2009, in which case it may have already completed its ‘mission’.

Ralph Langner says that Stuxnet is precisely targeted at ONE industrial process, by examining Data Block 890 in the PLC – this would require insider knowledge within the targeted organisation. However, Symantec say that Stuxnet creates DB890 itself.

http://www.langner.com/en/

http://frank.geekheim.de/?page_id=128

Richard: Good points there. The reporters haven’t got the faintest clue about the technical issues, being liberal arts graduates that are functionally innumerate and technically illiterate. I’d be pretty surprised if the Iranians (or anyone else for that matter) were running their control systems on Windows-7. That by itself would be a recipe for disaster, you wouldn’t need any virus/worm to destabilise it. And the idea that one could gain real-time control is ludicrous – you’d need a direct “Internets” connection to enable such a thing, and we’ve already heard that the systems are stand-alone.

If it depended on interfacing with the various three term controllers (proportional, derivative and integral) that typically manage each of the tens/hundreds of thousands of components comprising typical plants, we’d have to target the systems so accurately, that the information about those systems would have to come from precise blueprints. To make the attack catastrophic, so that automatic safety systems all fail, it would be easier to have set the systems up so that they’d all fail in the first place as an inside job.

I can quite imagine that a lot of personal computers might have been compromised, but that’s the limit of it. A massive series of individually redundant three-term controllers are not going to find themselves all reprogrammed in such a precise way that reactors go into meltdown, by dint of laptops getting a virus. How is such a virus/worm/whatever going to distinguish between petrochemical plants, nuclear reactors, biscuit factories, countries, or official friends as opposed to official enemies? Israel might find its own nuclear programme compromised just as readily – and does it really want another Chernobyl on its doorstep?

The entire story seems a bit overblown for this former writer and designer of software for the nuclear industry to take seriously.

Suhayl Saadi,

a question for you. The following ‘string’ was found within Stuxnet:

b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb

Myrtus? Guava? What significance might these words have?

Glenn,

Stuxnet is specific to Siemens Step 7 PLC programming software, which only runs on Windows. And we know that the Bushehr reactor was (is?) running unlicenced Windows XP.

http://www.upi.com/enl-win/b00bf188f7671cf2f939d18b1453852f/

[Stuxnet] has affected a number of Siemens plants, according to company spokesman Simon Wieland. “We detected the virus in the SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] systems of 14 plants in operation but without any malfunction of process and production and without any damage,”

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9185419/Siemens_Stuxnet_worm_hit_industrial_systems?taxonomyId=142&pageNumber=1

Clark,

Thanks for the Stuxnet analysis – nice one!

Richard Robinson,

there are two interesting articles from Germany I’ve found. There’s the Langner link above; Langner is a PLC expert who has analysed Stuxnet’s behaviour in PLC chips. I linked to the wrong Frank Geekheim article. His theory is that Stuxnet has already crippled Iran’s uranium centrifuges:

http://frank.geekheim.de/?p=1189

PS

The ‘Malicious software removal tool’ checks for Stuxnet:

Download here if your autoupdate is OFF:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?FamilyId=AD724AE0-E72D-4F54-9AB3-75B8EB148356&displaylang=en

Hi Clark…

The interface might be handled though a windoze interface, but the system itself is running something else altogether, which needs to be programmed through pretty much an assembly language level protocol that needs detailed knowledge before it can do anything more than simply be a tiny malfunctioning component.

The idea that an entire nuclear plant is being controlled by a single (or even a group of) XP systems is utterly ludicrous – many of the monitoring or interfacing control systems might be, but sending in a blind virus to cause a meltdown is pure science fiction, along the lines of the film Independence Day (where a virus is supposedly uploaded to the systems of invading aliens ships, causing their systems to all set to self-destruct).

You’d need to simultaneously re-programme thousands of the three-term controllers to behave in a very specific, catastrophic way on an individual basis. It would require an extensive, advance knowledge of the function and identity of each of the controllers – not to mention the plant – all of which would have to be pre-programmed into the virus, there’s no way it could work it out of the fly, in the vague hope that it would hit the specific group of systems for which it had been individually designed. And just hope nobody had changed anything on the plant between getting the information, designing/writing the virus, sending it out and it reaching the target machines. Pretty staggering odds for a plant which is a work in progress!

It’s an interesting story, but having spent years working at scores of nuclear and other plants (petrochemical and the like), the idea that a windoze virus might make the whole shebang unstable to the point of a catastrophic event occurring is… well, highly improbable to say the least.

Clark “Langner is a PLC expert who has analysed Stuxnet’s behaviour in PLC chips.”

Mmm. I saw a comment on a half-dozen lines of asm. How many more remain to investigate ? And he’ll tell us more details next week, coming soon, watch this space … which doesn’t imply he’s bound to be wrong, just that we haven’t seen the reason to believe he’s right yet. It’s a trailer.

“I linked to the wrong Frank Geekheim article. His theory is that Stuxnet has already crippled Iran’s uranium centrifuges:”

Thanks, yes, I saw that somewhere.

And I saw somebody else asking why it’s got update mechanisms built in if it’s a once-off, why it’s still propagating if it’s so cunningly built and did its job 18 months ago. And somebody else pointing out that actually there are a hell of a lot of infections in Indonesia too, and another place or two that I forget. And stuff. And maybe some of the theories are right.

It’s good to hear from someone who actually has experience of these things, thanks glenn.

“b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb … What significance might these words have?”

That there are Windows systems involved. “HTH”. w2k_x86 ??? Okay, okay, if it is aimed at Bushehr, they’ve been a long time building the thing. But …

Coming soon, a new theory, OMG, this reactor is built on cowboy software running on obsolete high-street silicon, Why Oh Why will nobody see that it’s our _duty_ to the whole *world* to stop it ?!?!?

Night night …

Glenn,

Richard Robinson,

I sense that I’m pissing you off with this. Still, I think I should point out some things.

I find Geekheim’s centrifuge scenario far more convincing than the Bushehr reactor being the target, if Iran’s nuclear industry is the target at all. The Bushehr theory seems like typical Mainstream Media sensationalism.

Glenn, you’re overlooking that it is much easier to make something stop working than to make it work right. I wasn’t suggesting that Stuxnet was designed to cause a meltdown. But setting back Iran’s uranium enrichment program (Geekheim page 1189) seems quite plausible to me.

With only about 100,000 infections worldwide after six to twelve months, Stuxnet is a rather slow replicator by Windows virus standards. At peak, the Slammer worm was doubling itself every 8.5 seconds.

Assuming the screenshot on the AP site is genuine, then Bushehr was or is running unlicenced Windows XP, for system monitoring. If that system is of no importance, why have it? If it is important, it’d better work, Stuxnet or not.

My motorcycle instructor once asked the class which bolt on a motorcycle was the most dangerous. “The wheel spindle”, “The singing arm”, came the replies. “No”, he said, “it’s the one that’s loose”.

Glenn,

here’s someone who thinks security in industrial process control is not taken seriously enough:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/interviews/weiss.html

Does anyone know if Garreth Williams was working on a cyber-warfare project?

I watched the BBC 2 documentary, the 1st episode of a series on the Iraq invasion/ occupation last night.

1) The accounts from army/insurgents are fascinating and intriguing in terms of urban guerrilla warfare and stuff we already knew – i.e. that the occupation was handled appallingly badly.

2) That the USA/UK sent a 100,000-strong death squad into Iraq in the form of a private army.

3) The narrator takes his cue from the narrator of the early 1970s British series, ‘The World At War’. The lugubrious tone is one of inevitability. This was not an inevitable war; this was a deliberately-engineered destruction of a country and the theft of its resources. To be fair, one of the Resistance gets to say this.

4) I am not interested – not the least bit interested – in hearing soldiers/diplomats/miscellaneous spooks say that it was an error or that it was incompetantly handled or in seeing them swallow heavily when described the rescue of deaths of their comrades. I am not the least bit interested in allowing them on-screen redemption of any kind. I am nauseated by the sight of a faux confessional box a la Richard Nixon and David Frost. The only soldiers I have any respect for are those who stood up AT THE TIME, when it mattered, and deserted.

5) The only non-combatant civilian voice we hear is that of the Chief Surgeon from one of the hospitals in Fallujah, Iraq. His testimony is harrowing: operating without water or anaesthetic and using what appeared to be Cola as a ‘sterlising agnet’. NO casualties from the 2nd battle of Fallujah because the US Marines shot all prisoners.

6) I wanted to hear the voices of women and children. There were none. We get Wootton Bassett every day. War widows fill our newspapers. Where are the Iraqi war widows? The orphans? You would get the impression from the 1st episode that there were no women and children in Iraq who were able to speak. If they were too afraid, then there should have been actors reading from their testimonies. There were no testimonies. Perhaps there will be, later in the series. But there were women and children in Fallujah when the US Marines attacked. Silence.

7) The moment Iraq was invaded was the moment the British people LEARNED that they had no democracy; it was a de facto revelation of a situaion of coup d’etat. We are ruled by the Military-industrial complex; democracy is s pantomine. The most important action a state can take is to go to war. Millions marched in the streets of Britain; the British people were overwhelmingly against the attack on Iraq. They were completely ignored. Politicians ask why people are disengaged. They are disengaged because the state’s operations have been laid bare and there is a loss of faith in the UK in democracy. When it mattered, democracy did not matter.
The BBC – for raising the possibility that the government might have lied to the people – was deliberately defenestrated, purged of dissent – after the Iraq invasion by the security and intelligence machine – ex-spooks (now Govt ministers) on the Board of Governors, etc. – and now in essence functions as a toothless organ of state propaganda.

This is a brief resume. I’m sure there will be more.

Far from the BBC being defenestrated, Suhayl, it appears that they jumped out of the window themselves with gusto, those with critical voices were silenced or sidelined.

I saw the monotone programme last night and it was the most hopefull programme for some time, because it showed the cooperation, regardless of religious differences and Saddams flagging influence, what resolve Iraqi people have to help themselves.

The insurgency managed to organise itself within 3 month and fight back, despite the chaos and turmoil that was designed into this attack.

Opposition to the current shower in power seems to be ongoing and unless the wealth of the nation is equally shared amongst Sunni’s Shiites Kurds and Shias, this will go on to fester, giving plenty of scope for the US to stay ad nauseum.

Thanks for that critique Suhayl. I missed it. Glad now that I did.

Some more on Stuxnet -

I read through this quite detailed paper last night:

http://www.eset.com/resources/white-papers/Stuxnet_Under_the_Microscope.pdf

Glen regarding -”sending in a blind virus to cause a meltdown is pure science fiction”

A meltdown is not what i had in mind when mentioning explosions and “immediate physical crisis”. I think you are being dismissive about this worm, which is the most sophisticated ever discovered – by quite a clear margin.

When the worm detects http is accessible (by innocently checking microsoft update), it then sends an encrypted message to mypremierfutbol.com. which contains details about it’s hosts network position and installed Seimens PLC software and drivers.

That is its standard message, it also listens and can receive encrypted updates and executable code, to report anything, and install anything on the host system and attached PLC.

The worm is around half a megabyte in size, consisting of modular, compressed, encrypted C,C++ libraries and drivers and PLC code.

The PLC rootkit, installed from windows through corrupted drivers, is fascinating itself, hiding and refreshing itself on the PLC in case of problematic reads and writes.

The recipents of the worms http messages (whoever they are), can use their resources to determine perhaps exactly where and what each infected host is attached to, and can design and send instructions to each instance perform on a schedule.

Having such hidden telemetry and potential control on critical parts of an enemys plant facilities. I think could be used to cause more than minor annoynances and outages in those facilities.

Clark, I dont think there are really any grounds to suggest Microsoft were in on the stolen security certificates. And USB drives are notorious for carrying viruses (always check your new sticks before using them)

- But this worm’s usb exploit is a new one, and the authors of that paper suspect it was a mistake by the developement team to include it. That it made the worm spread too quickly and led to its detection.

Suhayl… I missed that programme, I’ll see if it’s available online. Your points above are all very fair indeed. Point 4, that it was all just a mistake made in good faith by the Powers That Be, is such a blatantly false claim, I’m amazed they are still saying it. When we were trying to ‘wrong-foot’ SH (with suggestions of painting a military plane with UN colours in the hope it would attract fire or even just a radar lock) , when the ‘facts were being fixed around the policy’, when we’d need second resolutions but then apparently didn’t after all, when we were claiming SH was refusing to disarm even while Al-Samoud missiles were being destroyed on TV, when we claimed the inspectors were being kicked out of Iraq even while Blix was appealing to _us_ for more time to complete the inspection for 100% verification – well, what’s another lie on top of that, in claiming it was all just an honest mistake?

My wife tells me one of the strongest impressions she had was when a large group of clearly frightened Iraqis were appealing to a camera crew before the war started, saying, “Please – don’t do this! We are no threat to you, we have no weapons, we haven’t done anything to you!”

I wonder how we’d have treated their civilians if, oh let’s say China was planning to invade us, and they sent reporters here to gauge our reactions.

*

Clark: I’m not annoyed at you in the slightest – sorry for giving that impression! I am a bit sceptical about all this, though. It might have been introduced to throw a few spanners in the works, with the happy side effect that we can jump up and down in feigned horror that the Iranians are _still_ pressing ahead despite such obvious danger. How can the be so reckless, oh those SOB’s, maybe there should be a ‘surgical strike’ on the reactor for everyone’s safety such as when Israel destroyed Iraq’s reactor under construction at Osirak. And so forth.

Ingo,

my impression at the time was that the government decimated the BBC. However, looking back at reports I see, for instance, that Greg Dyke offered his resignation, expecting it to be rejected by the Board of Governors – but it was accepted.

The combination of Dr Kelly’s ‘suicide’, Alastair Campbell’s tirade and the various resignations (though I thought I remembered sackings) did seem to be very effective at bringing the BBC back into line, just when the government needed them ‘On Message’ for Iraq.

Glenn,

Richard Robinson,

on reflection, I think that Langner has been a bit sensationalist about Stuxnet, too, as the Bushehr reactor suggestion seems to have come from him. But to be fair, he did get Stuxnet into the Mainstream Media.

It’s a funny situation, eh? Israel has hundreds of nukes that hardly ever get a mainstream mention. US/UK decimate Iraq and it’s a “mistake”. Iran, NPT signatory with a fatwa against nukes, is constantly in the mainstream for a bomb they might be able to build, some years hence. Muslims in possession of sugar are described as “terrorists” – “suspects” if they’re lucky. Then something like Stuxnet appears, with (I maintain) vast destructive potential, but we have no idea who built it. Should the Mainstream mention it or not? They can’t tell if it’s from the ‘good’ guys or the ‘bad’ guys!

Mark Golding,

another drone article for you:

http://blog.eset.com/2010/08/25/rise-of-the-machines-navy-uav-goes-awol-malware-or-skynet

Crab,

yes. Knowledge of Siemens’ password insecurity in Step 7 has been available on-line for years, so no complicity there. There’s no evidence that Microsoft the company are complicit in Stuxnet (though I wouldn’t put it past them), but with so many new Windows exploits used in Stuxnet, I think that a leak from within Microsoft has to be regarded as probable. But is this not the way of the Military Industrial Complex? Most employees are just civilians doing their jobs. But some are more than that, and can exploit ‘trade secrecy’. Be safe – publish the source code.

crab – thanks for that esnet link. Bouncing around from that, they have a lot of good stuff in it. There’s some good solid actual examination of the exploits&propagation stuff – which, I notice, is dated from mid-July. Obvious question: where is the new news ? Why does that make it hit the headlines now ? And their current stuff still seems to be firmly talking of the difficulties in determing possible payloads.

Clark – what I’m pissed off at is the “telephone game” nature of this, the echo-chamber.

My original point was, that the “OMG, this thing could target a whole country” line is exactly the same headline that was flung around a few years ago re: concerning the attacks on Estonia. I’m not interested in the “but this one does Y, and that one only does X” line of thought – it’s reasonable enough for those that are interested in the techy details, but the point I’m aiming at is that the headline has been used before, so anybody who uses “this is the first time that …” as part of the headline makes it looks as though they are passing along something that they haven’t actually applied any of their own thought to. Or, if they don’t actually _remember_ those headlines, then maybe they just don’t have enough knowledge to evaluate the stuff they’re passing on. I have no special knowledge or understanding, I’m just an unremarkable amateur geek. My point is only that it’s not unreasonable to expect someone who claims to know about these things to know at least as much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia

It’s like – if somebody offers you their services as a taxidriver (as opposed to a journo) and you notice that one of their tyres is quite obviously flat, wouldn’t you be thinking “FFS, shouldn’t they have thought to kick it already ? I’m not sure I want to take this ride”.

At which point, it would be easy to go spinning off into the usual name-calling ad-hominem stuff (which *does* piss me off, not Clark), and is the opposite of my intention. This is not a football match with a media article standing in for the team, support it in its entirety, right or wrong. What I’m trying to say is, that one bit is wrong _doesn’t_ necessarily disprove other bits, but it indicates that people are passing on stuff they’re getting from other sources, without necessarily having given all of it a good-enough kicking first. It’s a headline that sells, people with livings to make are selling it. And, of course, the conspiracy-inclined could be asking, “who, out there, might have an interest in wanting us to think that ?”. For any value of “that” we can think of …

It is interesting stuff, I’ll be curious to see what the final conclusion is.

The technical stuff I’ve found on Stuxnet is nearly all “it does so-and-so to Windows”. The really juicy stuff – what it does to actual industrial processes – is rare and contradictory. If Langner is right, Stuxnet identifies a specific routine written for a specific (set of identical) machine(s) in a specific factory or plant, and modifies its parameters. Unless the operators of that factory or whatever publicly state that Stuxnet targeted their machinery, we will never know what Stuxnet was intended for. So if Stuxnet was aimed at an installation that is cloaked in secrecy, we will probably never know.

“If Langner is right, Stuxnet identifies a specific routine written for a specific (set of identical) machine(s) in a specific factory or plant”

Yes, I noticed comments to that effect. The implication seems to be that each s/w installation needs a lot of individual setting-up for the details of that specific process (so, maybe Siemens know, do they do it themselves ? Or was that the Russian contractors ?), so you’d need similar knowledge to make use of the opportunities once even you have the software inside the setup. And some discussions show how it tests for ‘net connections and then “calls home”, raising possibilities about gathering such information (??), while other people state that the absence of any such activity shows how it must be a once-off attack-and-destroy thing … and, maybe they’re looking at different instances ? Or are they all based on the same hexdump ?

And, I wondered if all that has any bearing on the bit about the hard-wired don’t-change passwords – are they universal factory settings, or are they maybe installed-in-place and unique to that installation ? It would still be a bad idea and hard to see a good reason for, but would make a difference to our perception of the risk.

I’m going all Rumsfelt, basically. There are Things We Know We Know. Sometimes, when we give them a good kicking we notice that what we actually do know is that person A has got a piece published about how person B said that somebody somewhere knows something. How (or whether) we know which bits of that are actually the case, is another matter.

“If Langner is right, Stuxnet identifies a specific routine written for a specific (set of identical) machine(s) in a specific factory or plant, and modifies its parameters.”

The Esnet paper details how the windows worm is modular and can recieve updates. So Langer’s particular routine could be one that was custom made for the equipment at a particular node of the infection. The system is capable of that, the makers were capable of designing and delivering a generic PLC rootkit -there is little reason that they would not use their abilities to customise some of the rootkits, and be able to co-ordinate failures and disturbance to the targets plants.

I was surprised at finding such an informative study as Esnet peice. Imagine the hype we would have if this was something discovered in Western systems. I think the rest of the details will be tech stuff. But basically yes – Iran has been targeted and infected with the most dangerous and sophisticated computer virus ever seen.

It looks like Iran has been lucky with the infection getting spotted early, from how it spread too far and out of network control over the USB stick vector.

This thing and its percussions would have been impossible to take care of during a physical strike/invasion.

“The Esnet paper”

I made the same typo earlier, and meant to correct/apologise – it’s “eset”, not “esnet”. Risks confusion, because esnet exists, and is a US govt (DOE) network, while the people doing this work, eset, are an AV firm.

woohps – im terrible for it!

me oot.

Richard,

Siemens wrote the password into the Step 7 PLC programming suite either (1) such that it couldn’t be changed or (2) advised against changing it (I’ve read of both scenarios). The password has been available on the Internet for ages. That made it easy for Stuxnet in Windows to subvert Step 7. Many steps up to here are well documented. What Stuxnet does to the target PLCs seems to be a matter of disagreement so far.

Yes, there are loads more articles than actual pieces of research.

Suhayl Saadi,

did you notice my question to you of September 30, 2010 1:46 AM? So far, those two words are the only clue as to who wrote Stuxnet. Who would use those words?

Israhell.

EXCLUSIVE-Cyber takes centre stage in Israel’s war strategy

* Iran’s Stuxnet worm has fingers pointing at Israel

* Israelis seen weighing “deniable” tactics against foe

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM, Sept 28 (Reuters)

http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE68R0GB20100928?sp=true

The striking thing about the BBC Iraq documentary for me was the endless repetition of the word ‘insurgency’ when quite clearly what they were talking about was the resistance.

Oh the BBC, once proud and characterful, today vain and duplicitous.

Somebody,

I think that Israel has to appear high on the list of suspects for the creation of Stuxnet. The following article was published by Ynet in July ’09, just a month after the earliest estimated date of Stuxnet’s release:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3742960,00.html

We’re still hopelessly short of actual evidence. Myrtus? Guava? These words were found in Stuxnet’s code.

The arrogance inherent in that word “insurgents”. As if all the people of Iraq should have welcomed the invasion, and anyone who didn’t and instead fought back was rebelling against rightful authority. The same arrogance that characterised the British media’s attitude to the arrest of Navy personnel in Iranian / disputed waters.

“We’re still hopelessly short of actual evidence. Myrtus? Guava?”

Yes. And, who dug that string out of the code, and what other bits of text did they not mention ? There are some seriously flaky-looking stories about how, it’s latin for the shrub myrtle and if ‘myrtle’ is translated into Hebrew it just might be a really stretched and mangled reference to something in the Old Testament … and who thought of that translation/conection and fed it into the media ? I can’t see how it’d be the first (or second or third) thing that’d arise if you start wondering what ‘myrtle’ or ‘guava’ might signify. I could just as well say that the Scots used to use it to flavour beer when they couldn’t get hops and claim that that proves it’s all Ken MacLeod’s work.

What’s this noise about Pakistan closing the Khyber Pass to NATO ?

The USA is also high on the suspects list, having set up a department with this particular purpose:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/world/middleeast/26iran.html?_r=3&src=me

Richard, that string is detailed in the Eset article. I’m just wondering what sort of person would have chosen those two particular words.

Here’s an interesting little thing (well, for me, anyway).

Someone shows up on a motorbike forum, who clearly knows nothing about bikes and has no interest in them. Nevertheless, that user has the name Mezher xxx zheye L!v!n! (with the s’z replaced by z’s, and the a’s by e’s, etc., and separated to thwart search engines). The avatar for that user is the Israeli flag. On the profile page of that user, we find a picture of a freaking tank and :

Other stuff about me:

would love to join the IDF ( mahal brigade )

Real Cute. 8 posts to date, joined 29/9/10. It doesn’t take long before this user decides to put this into a thread about protests about bikes being able to park without paying the full car charges:

—-start quote

funny that you should mention protests

but according to my uncle , who phoned a few hours ago , there were a number of protest marches on the West Bank today

IDF soon put paid too them

—-end quote

Another user of that forum objects to this, and is told:

—start quote

you have too understand , this years bottle/stone thrower is next years sniper/suicide bomber/terrorist . its a sad fact and true .

i agree that sometimes the security forces can be a little heavy handed , but all in all the safety/security of the Isreali people is paramount .

lets bury the hatchet here eh? no more politics & religion

—-end quote

This is also objected to, and I’ll save you the guessing – the charge of anti-semitism is hauled out.

Luckily, it doesn’t appear that the UK motorcycling community was particularly shocked and cowed by that accusation. Here is that small thread:

http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/community/Forums/Categories/Topic/?&topic-id=401945

It’s worth a minute of your time.

It looks to me as if the megaphone desktop crew are putting out feelers all over the place. It also looks like they really don’t get it very, very badly – racism against muslims just isn’t working out as well as they thought. And screaming “Anti-semitism!” doesn’t work as well as the manual said it should.

Not sure if this has been posted Clark re myrtle and guava etc

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/middleeast/30worm.html?_r=2

a~

Remember a horrible liqueur called Myrte when on holiday in Corsica years ago. Sickly and very alcoholic!

Somebody,

thanks for that link. There is definitely some disinformation there:

‘Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, said he was “convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.”

“We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,” he said. “We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.” ‘

1) No one else has claimed to have completely disassembled Stuxnet, as some of its code is encrypted.

2) With four highly valuable ‘zero day’ exploits, there is essentially no chance that Stuxnet is an “academic experiment”.

3) Stuxnet was contacting servers after it had infected PCs, until those connections were re-routed.

4) Nothing Blitzblau has said rules out Israel anyway.

Oh, and (5), it isn’t espionage against Siemens. Whoever wrote Stuxnet obviously had a thorough understanding of Siemens’ Step 7 software already. Stuxnet clearly targets the USERS of Step 7, rather than the makers.

Shai Blitzblau is telling a pack of lies.

Shai Blitzblau heads Maglan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglan

Or does it mean this Maglan – a company with “headquarters” in Italy, research in Israel – or are they related?:

http://www.maglangroup.com/maglan/index.jsp

Guava is a member of the genus myrtus. The stuff about myrtle being of significance in Judaism seems to be true, but is possibly unremarkable – myrtle is common in Mediterranean countries and has claimed medicinal/magical properties in many cultures (guess who’s been busy with Wiki).

The genus/species thing is interesting as the string is a file location – it suggests a folder structure with genus at the top level and species beneath – sys admins like this kind of thing (I wanted to have servers called Pearse, Connolly and McBride, but was dissuaded). So one would expect other paths like:

b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\clove.pdb

…so, more than one database. And specifying the ‘b’ drive is taking a bit of a chance unless you know the target hardware, or the worm can alias whatever drive it finds. Of course it could try all the likely local drive identifiers and see what works. Taken all together, sounds as if there was more than one string of this type in the code, or perhaps the code manipulates this string as a template.

Shai Blitzblau would like us to fear “terrorists”:

http://defense-update.com/wp/20100930_stuxnet_cyber_terror_weapon.html

Vronsky,

you’ve been thinking along the same lines as myself (genus / species = project / module).

It was odd to see the “b:” drive specified, “normally” b: is the second floppy disk drive, but who even uses one floppy these days? But doesn’t that string identify where a compiler should find the source code? At half a MByte, the Stuxnet object code would fit on a floppy. Maybe the source would, too.

Or maybe they were working in a LiveCD environment – sensible if they’re developing infective agents. If you boot off a DOS-style CD (floppy emulation), the CD becomes “a:”, and the floppy gets reassigned to “b:”, doesn’t it?

WARNING – I don’t trust Maglan’s Web pages. Don’t visit them from Windows, turn off JavaScript, preferably use a LiveCD.

“Maglan’s labs conduct a range of classified research projects for commercial, government and defense sectors”.

http://www.maglanlabs.com/

Maglan do NOT just do “Computer Defence” – they have a page called “Exploits” linked from the “Tools and Exp” link on the page above.

“It was odd to see the “b:” drive specified”

Yes. I wondered if that indicated specific knowledge of some particular piece of equipment. There is still (or was until recently) equipment in production areas that used floppy disks for program loads, e.g. steppers in the semiconductor industry.

I suspect that this was just a file path from someones developement environment, which was accidentaly compiled in somehow, and the creators left it in (and/or edited it afterward) ensuring there is no danger of it providing any useful information to the curious.

I dont think there are likely to be any more curious strings left in the worm, though it is possible there are, in an as yet undiscovered level of encryption – if there are unidentified chunks of data left(?).

The Eset paper lists embedded database query strings at the end – it also mentions the ‘bulkiness’ of the code relative to other sophisticated malware, which can be extremely efficient and ‘tightly woven’ . Stuxnet worm isnt constructed like that, clear signatures of 2 different compilation enviroments (ubiquitous microsoft ones) were noted in the code as well.

Today’s q&a on the virus at f-prot:

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002040.html

States confidently,

Q: Was Stuxnet written by a government?

A: That’s what it would look like, yes.

And if the mysterious file path caught your attention, you might be interested in

Q: How does Stuxnet know it has already infected a machine?

A: It sets a Registry key with a value “19790509″ as an infection marker.

Q: What’s the significance of “19790509″?

A: It’s a date. 9th of May, 1979.

…..

-but these are the kind of infinitely manipulatible details which i think are only allowed to slip, because they are useless attention sinks.

The only bit i would take issue with in that q&a is here:

Q: What does it do with Simatic?

A: It modifies commands sent from the Windows computer to the PLC. One running on the PLC, it looks for a specific factory environment. If this is not found, it does nothing

The Eset paper, indicates the worm can be instructed to unistall itself. But in the case that it does not find the certain target hardware/system so far discovered in its default state, it does still try to contact C&C ( mypremierfutbol.com) and is still ready to take updates and instructions from there. So it is actualy doing ‘nothing’ in the sense that a sleeper agent may do nothing, until instructed to do… whatever…

…how do none of the news reports mention “mypremierfutbol.com” ? This is surely a quite ‘popularist’ detail.

I suspect this whole thing could be a bit of a concern to the world’s leading virus crackers, because the most capable of them are a rare, highly experienced breed, and if this sort of thing continues, rather than their revealing work being upheld as that of ‘the good guys thwarting criminal efforts’ they could become considered as assets and enemies within national conflict narratives.

Clark – “I’m just wondering what sort of person would have chosen those two particular words.”

I’ve seen one (only) explanation of them on offer, and it seems so stretched that I’m wondering what sort of person would have chosen to offer it. (chorus: “Dan Brown ?”)

Given that the file is part of the attack, shouldn’t it have been loaded from the USB stick ? Or are there theories about the infection coming from laptops with floppies ? (notice it’s w2k-specific, floppies were more common in those days). Or an attack that has someone insert both a pen-drive and a floppy ? Or are there systems that map USB drives to a: and b: ?

“I suspect that this was just a file path from someones developement environment”

A project so Massively Awesome, requiring resources that are claimed to show it must be the work of [insert least favourite government here], and they’re developing it on floppy discs ? Well, I’m not saying it could absolutely never make sense, but …

What is a .pdb file, anyway ? At first (ignorant) guess, something databasey ?

Description of the .PDB files and of the .DBG files -

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/121366

The drive letter could have been changed, the whole path could have been made up and pasted over some totaly different string that they didnt want revealed.

The worm has a version number feild in its configuration data file at – %windir%\inf\mdmcpq3.pnf (page 52 eset)

Every version/update released will have been checked, with a resource hacker and other standard, quite powerful string search/detection tools, for leaked info. Whats left -pointless attention sinks imo.

Thanks, crab.

I had it in the back of my mind that I would once have recognised a .pdb – I used VC++ v1, for a while, but it was a long time ago. (It was one of the factors in my jumping ship to Linux).

So, as you say, left over from development, and, surely, shouldn’t be there in a runtime distribution ? (But. Makefiles, who knows ?)

I guess none of the people working on this have put a copy of the code they’re looking at, anywhere where us ordinary mortals could get a look ? I’m thinking, it might be constructive to run it through ‘strings’, for a list of all the bits of text that are there for people to be offering explanations of.

Of course, this being infective stuff, there are reasons why one might not want to make it easily available, and presumably no-one’s being paid to disable it first; but “many eyeballs make any code shallow”, insert open-source advocacy here, EMWTK, etc.

Sorry, should have mentioned that the link says the pdb extesnion of the mystery file path is a file made kind of temporarily by a microsoft debugger.

And you want a copy of the worm Richard? eek! it hadn’t occured to me but i had a quick look on packetstorm and torrent search but no sign.

Of course it would need unpacked/decrypted before someone could do there own searches on it, and i just expect that the Eset guys have mentioned everything they managed to find.

Im thinking that, even in black/red(?) hat circles, the worm files could be considered pretty heavy shit, and not lightly passed around.

I didn’t notice that pdb was a debug database extension until you asked ,so it was a very lucky guess, and then maybe not so made up.

Now myrtle & guava puts me in mind of an earthy character, bearded perhaps, subconciously recalling the flora on his favourite desktop background…

..calling Sherlock..

In the main – Iran has been infected more than any other country by this most sophisticated blah blah…

In todays World, what does this tell us about the worms creators?

I went and had a look around Maglanlabs pages. “Tools and Exp” leads to two FTP pages, “Tools” and “Exploits”. “Tools” contains publicly available stuff, like Netstumbler. There is something called “wifikeyfinder” there. “Exploits” has several files, but they’re all password protected. One of them is called something like “Word 2007 Zero Day”. There are also some password lists in a folder called “Dictionaries”, sorted by password length.

Crab,

thanks. It looks like F-prot are agreeing with Langner rather than Symantec. So Stuxnet proliferates between Windows systems, but is finely targeted at one industrial process.

Langner has a new update:

http://langner.com/en/

“And you want a copy of the worm Richard? eek!”

Well, I did say there are arguments against (it could, presumably, be datched from the transport vector, thus not actually executable ? But this is something of a red herring). All I’m thinking is …

“i just expect that the Eset guys have mentioned everything they managed to find”

I’d just like to be able to verify that, instead of having to trust stuff put out by people I don’t know anything about. It would clarify the context of the single bit we have, if nothing else.

I’d put money on the proposition that it’s not literally the only sequence of printable characters they’ve found. As to whether all the others are obviously and totally without any meaning that anyone might be able to read in them … as I say, I’d like to see that for myself before going too far into the only one on offer.

Right Richard, i shouldnt be glib.

I pretty much trust the Eset guys though, and Langner ive read for the first time at Clark’s link -are talking my language too. The swaggering team photo and caption is good form. Seems they are also of the impression that the situation is being smudged by *our/western* Authorities.

“In the main – Iran has been infected more than any other country by this most sophisticated blah blah…

In todays World, what does this tell us about the worms creators?”

The (Pakistani) Daily Times has a rather excitable-looking piece in which Stuxnet is “creating havoc” by “infecting millions of machines” in China …

http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\10\01\story_1-10-2010_pg4_5

Again – this is not a football match, I’m not supporting any team. I’m just noting that when it was The Mysterious Death Of Gareth Williams, people were ready enough to consider the possibility that some of the suggestions reported weren’t necessarily to be taken as the absolute last-word truth, so … both of these being ongoing mysteries to which we’re not sure we have the full story yet, why not adopt the same attitude here ?

“The swaggering team photo and caption is good form”

*grin*. It made me think of a poster advertising the sort of thriller-film I probably wouldn’t want to go see, yes. (er, if that is a “yes”)

“Seems they are also of the impression that the situation is being smudged by *our/western* Authorities”

The little rant about CERT ?

There also seems to be a certain element of self-promotion. Even if it’s so precisely targetted and all, it’s still a major threat to everyone else because other hackers could use the same techniques in more general attacks, all will be revealed at a future date, and here’s how you can contact them if you want to hire them as consultants against this possible future threat that nobody else is taking seriously and they’re the ones on top of.

Which, again, is not to cast doubt on the quality of their work or the posibility that they might be right. I’m just remarking that not all the work being done and all the things said about it are for reasons of pure disinterested altruism. In the long term, of course, this is a field where self-interest could well lie in being right; but we’re not there yet.

Richard Robinson,

absolutely. Most of the reports in the Mainstream on on the ‘net are just speculation. Langner and Eset are my favourite analyses, and there’s the Symantec blog. I haven’t found the F-prot material yet, so…

Crab,

got a link? Hey, it’s not so hard to handle worms and viruses. I keep an image of Windows, which I decompress onto a spare hard disk, for use with disks that might have an infection. I wipe the spare hard disk when I’ve finished.

Richard Robinson,

note that Langner Communications do industrial control systems, not PCs. The usual PC security companies are out of their field on Stuxnet’s PLC capabilities. Yes, there’s an element of self promotion. Good luck to them, I say. Stuxnet had been known within the PC security world for three months before I saw it on the BBC site.

The (Pakistani) Daily Times: “…infected more than six million individual accounts…” Yeah, right. The best figure I’ve seen is 100,000 worldwide!

Ironic that there are so many copies out there, but there’s nowhere to download a sample.

Here’s a good summary about what the teabaggers are about, since someone was asking earlier:

http://www.fucktheteaparty.com/

Pardon my interruption of the Stuxnet discussion, I know there’s nothing else of any significance going on in the world.

Talking about how to deal with integrity. Canada’s Parliament shows Westminster the way denouncing the prestigious Maclean’s Magazine for an article headlined “The most corrupt province”. This is surely the solution to the political corruption that is also endemic in Westminster – Don’t allow the press to talk about it!! I need hardly add that most of the rest of Canada’s media has been roundly attacking Maclean’s as well, no doubt for breaking the unofficial rules of self censorship.

There are still a few dissident voices. One written comment in support of Maclean’s even says — “Well done Maclean’s!! I would have thought that important issues about the integrity of politicians were raised, but apparently not. Too often our media today practices censorship, placing undue deference to authority ahead of truth. It is a sad reflection on Canada that it is not the corrupt who get attacked but those who expose the corruption.”

I’ve downloaded a sample of Stuxnet. I don’t know how genuine it is yet.

“I haven’t found the F-prot material yet, so… Crab, got a link?”

You missed this one?

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002040.html

More generaly, we see that when something newsworthy and sensitive is up, all sorts of reports appear, putting out mainstream ideas about it, which only need to be thrown out there to be propogated. Then even reporters who should be specialists start accomodating the mainstream outlook.

Langer, Eset etc – these guys are the horses mouths, bigging themselves a bit maybe, but ‘the Register’, Symantec, a paper in Pakistan etc, are part of this modern/commercial news gossip farce.

Im not unsure about what has happened here. Iran has been attacked virtualy by US or Israel or both, 10-1 odds. It may not become a settled matter in the mainstream, but it is already clear as day to the main researchers.

Glenn – i apologise.

“Pardon my interruption of the Stuxnet discussion, I know there’s nothing else of any significance going on in the world.”

Absolutely. Seductive and sexy though the techie speculations might be, they’re trivial. I’ve worked as a white hat hacker (penetration tester) and could never fathom all the geeky stuff. Oh, maybe it could be done, but if you were seriously in the position of needing it done, it just isn’t the path you would follow. Much easier to get into the pants of the CEO’s secretary, or find out which genealogy/motorcycle/cookery sites their sys admin looks at. Must gloomily confess I had more luck with the latter options than with the CEO’s secretary – life is littered with such sadnesses. Well, except once – my wizened old body glows in remembrance. Ah, successful penetration – I can almost remember.

Vronsky, a “white hat hacker” sounds exotic and entrancing (well, at least if you dig cowgirls, hard hats and suchlike) and the thought of you getting “into the pants of the CEO’s secretary” is… ferociously apt, if I may say. Was that before, or after, your soiree with the mezzo-soprano? Tell us all: ‘Confessions of an ‘Ud Player’, or perhaps, ‘What the ‘Ud Player Saw’, or maybe even, ‘Carry On up the Oud’!

Interesting article. Complex, or what? Is this ‘Smiley’s People’, or what? But of course knows how such dynamics operate:

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/global-drug.htm

Fascinating writer:

http://www.peterdalescott.net/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-kelly-murdered-yes-and-i-bet-you-believe-in-the-tooth-fairy-too-2017805.html

Interesting that Tom Mangold gets hauled out – again. Actually, while one is skeptical about the input of Pederson, she most certainly did not wait for seven years to come out with her allegations but has been saying similar things – in a consistent way – for seven years. No-one is suggesting that DK was abducted from his home. Mangold raises up a number of strawman arguments.

Quite simply, Mangold has been forcefully and publically arguing the suicide theory since the very day DK’s body was found – before anyone knew anything much at all.

he does not examine any of the criticisms of the suicide theory, not does he grapple with the statements made by eminent doctors and others casting doubt on the suicide hypothesis.

It’s quite clear that, in both tone and substance, this article is a piece of propaganda. This applies, I would suggest, whether or not one agrees with the suicide theory. Mangold’s article is inadequate and looks – reads – as though it’s been churned-out quickly, to order, on a Saturday afternoon, local tabloid-style. Hence the rather pathetic, ‘sting-in-the-tail’ tooth-fairy allusion.

Will I risk being sued now, for saying his article is propaganda and appears as though it was written ‘to order’?

Frank Gardner, Con Coughlan and Thomas Mangold – three-of-a-kind!

Roll up! Roll up! It’s the Francie, Connie and Tommy Show!

For those who like an occasional but very interesting read, try Mark Morford of the SF Chronicle… which I used to buy locally while living there

Just a couple of examples:

Damn you Muslims, get off my lawn:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/15/notes091510.DTL

Thank God global warming is a hoax:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/08/18/notes081810.DTL

The archives are not hard to find.

“Fascinating writer:

http://www.peterdalescott.net/”

A sharp and deep man.

You know, Suhayl, I wonder at The Independent sometimes. They’ve got that awful Howard Jacobson, bigot, sexist, racist, Zionist, pro-war, Israel-can-do-no-wrong boor, the slimy John Rentoul who _still_ can’t stop glorifying Blair and is baffled that anyone wouldn’t Blair’s life-sized portrait above the mantlepiece. Not content with them, they’ve now got that dreadful Julie Burchill on board. (Actually, I’m glad they put her unbecoming features on the cover as a warning, whenever they’re hosting her column, so one can buy The Guardian instead.)

Can anyone suggest a decent Sunday newspaper? The Observer is a shadow of its former self – Nick Cohen alone was a good enough reason to stop buying it. The IoS has long since gone to the dogs, or Janice Street-Porter anyway. I repeat myself. Both papers have gone from mostly good to excellent, to some good but mostly mediocre if not downright terrible.

But for a daily, I think The Guardian has the edge once more over The Independent.

I think the papers are stuffed with people from the intelligence services or people who for a fee put out propaganda when the need arises just as I believe Parliament is now stuffed with undeclared agents.

On the other hand, Vronsky (to resume the narrative of the CEO’s secretary), one may posit, in one’s naughtier moments, that silicon entanglement with Stuxnet is, for some, the passionate equivalent of a soiree with a mezzo-soprano.

I agree with Ruth, what little papers still inform opinion, are stuffed with misinformers and spin merchants.

Whatever we can glimpse of reality lies in the twilight of comments by people who know on blogs and on the comments pages of newspapers, as well as places like facebook and twitter.

But newspapers, not only due to economic reasons, do not like to be put on the spot, have the public telling them whats wrong on their fora, they do not like their prefered politicians/councils dragged into the limelight and exposed.

Here in Norwich the EDP has stopped their forum debates, only the Evening News now operates a forum that is currently made harder to access.

Stories like ‘shoddy work to reinstate Lutyens war memorial in Norwich City centre’, do not get scrutinised. Work is carried out by Carter, fined 3 milliona for fraud, and it took them a whole year to do the job, now they are racing to make rememberance day deadline by….

MIXING RED BRICKS WITH YELLOW LIMESTONE AAARRRGHHHH.

Basically they are not reinstating like for like on a grade 2 listed memorial, planners don’t give a flying …. and Archant news is just looking on to report the veterans first meeting there, nobody cares how it will look after all it nearly costs 4 million to do the work.

Another story past by the public is that South Norfolk DC has lost 700k this year in planning rows, i.e. their legal advisor is crab and nobody wants to tell us.

Another little snippet not many people know is that section 106 monies, of which some 90 billion is outstanding to councils nationwide, (a big chunck of the deficit innit?) are not enforcable because they do not appear in any legal register. Unless these works carried out under 106 are registered with the land register, they have no legal basis for mortgage protection, hence nobody can force developers to pay up, a massive hole.

Many 106 moneis have disappeared into black holes, free floating money that can be used at the behest of those we elect, something known for years, but continued.

Ingo,

I recently went to buy fish and chips. On the counter was our local paper, lamenting the cancellation of the new runway at Stanstead airport; “So-many thousand jobs… (etc)”. This made me mad. Opposition to the new runway is almost unanimous here. I held the headline up for the other customers, and asked “Who agrees with this? Does anyone here want another runway? Whose interests does this paper represent; ordinary people’s, or Big Money’s?”

Suhayl Saadi,

a virus, like any piece of computer code, is a human artifact. Far from interacting with “silicon”, I’m engaging with the work of other people, just as, if I read a novel, I’m engaging with the ideas of its author, rather than paper and ink.

Modern warfare has taken an interesting turn. Here on my hard disk I have a copy of an actual modern cyber-weapon, developed in the secret labs of the people that we oppose. Information wants to be free!

Good point, Clark – that’s an excellent way of putting it!

Ingo, systemic corruption on a massive scale, good post,

A slightly surreal typo here: “i.e. their legal advisor is crab…”

Really? I thought our co-blogger, crab was on the side of the angels (!)

There seems to be a similarity between security against terrorism and computer security. In each case, a large and profitable industry has been developed to counteract the threat, rather than facing or even admitting to the sources of the problems. In the case of terrorism, the primary motivators are Western foreign policies.

In computer security, the problem is the insecurity of the Windows operating system, which is itself a symptom of the failure of governments to effectively regulate the market, permitting Microsoft to achieve a monopoly and thus to have no incentive to make their system secure.

In each case, the focus of governments and the media is upon what can be done to counteract the symptoms, with barely a mention of the root causes.

I think the same argument applies in the cases of climate change, and health and medicine.

Clark,

What is the download link for the Stuxnet sample? Is it source code?

Thinking back to Glenn’s link to the Adbusters video:

https://www.adbusters.org/abtv/gross_domestic_product_gdp.html

“Every time Windows gets a virus, the GDP goes up. Every time the terrorist threat increases, the GDP goes up”.

Mark Golding,

no, it’s a RAR compressed file, password protected, containing the three files that an infected USB stick would contain. It’s just one version; there are more.

Mark Golding,

I’m not sure I should put a link to a virus up here. If anyone wants it, they can e-mail me.

I agree, Glen, Ruth and ingo you might as well read the Daily Star and get clued up on Suhayl’s ‘naughty moments’ with ‘bad girls who shock us!’ – Perhaps we need a ‘Press Newspaper’ because I get a more pragmatic and ‘unbrainwashed’ truth from Press TV News.

presstv.ir

You’re right there Mark. Apologies for my typo’s, in no way did I want to malign anybody on here or crack cheap jokes.

Interesting interview with Barenboim. He conducted a concert to commemorate the wall coming down in Berlin. At the interval he sat at the piano and played the slow movement from Mozart K330. Not a dry eye in the house.

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/09/daniel-barenboim-music/

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/09/daniel-barenboim-music/

That’s good reading. Thanks, Vronsky.

http://www.reddit.com/r

/worldnews/comments/dlvqa

/the_flotilla_attack_may_bring_major_consequences/

The redditor’s are discussing the illegality of the Israeli flotilla raid.

http://www.france24.com/en/20100928-icc-can-examine-aid-flotilla-case-un-expert

Reddit is the webs most prolific web news/link/curio review forum. It is not quite an ‘enlightened’ community, but i find the mobs chatter is encouragingly above the baseline anglo-american web opinion blurb.

Vronsky,

thanks for the link to that excellent interview.

Yes very cool site, “Index on Censorship : Too Much Information”

Richard Robinson,

output of ‘strings’, acting upon the three files you’d find on a Stuxnet infected USB stick. You won’t find that path string in here; it’s in one of the files Stuxnet creates when it infects Windows, and I haven’t got around to trying that yet.

http://www.killick1.plus.com/strings.zip

Richard Robinson,

that ZIP will give Windows a headache, as I’ve used filenames that differ only by upper and lower case characters. Please let me know when you’ve got it, so I can delete it from the server.

“Please let me know when you’ve got it”

… Sorry, I only just saw this – yes, thank you, I have it.

Looks fine on my Debian box

Not a lot you could build a good conspiracy-theory on, right enough … the binary-looking gunk in the big last one displays rather-better-than-random as autodetect/Russian in FireFox. It’s too late for coherent geeking. Good night.

Richard Robinson,

thanks for that. There is already a possible Russian connection. See the second paragraph of the section “Ralph’s theory — completely speculative from here” on Langner’s page:

http://langner.com/en/

I really have learned a lot from you.Thanks for sharing.

So many people have come to your blog.

This is interesting from PressTV:

‘Iraq’s Buratha news agency had earlier revealed documents indicating Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, who heads the Saudi National Security Council, appointed a new leader for the al-Qaeda cell operating in Iraq.

The prince, who some quarters allege has supported a number of regional terrorist groups, has reportedly chosen a militant leader identified as ‘Abu Suleiman’ as the new commander of al-Qaeda militants in Iraq.’

And yet Bander is best buddy with Bush and helped negotiate the Al Yamamah deal.

And again from infowars Ireland

‘Prince Bandar “Bush” Running, Equipping And Financing Terror Organizations In Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan’

I note Index is partnered to ACLU – Bravo

Ruth,

bandarbush.co.uk – coming soon – thanks for the bit from Buratha news agency, I can use that.

Ruth,

Google found this link near the top of its listing, searching on ‘Buratha news agency’ (without quotes):

http://forum.pakistanidefence.com/lofiversion/index.php/t89071.html

I have no idea who either of these sites really are, but I had a go with a ‘whois’ lookup. Buratha news agency is registered to a PO box in the Netherlands, and the registrant’s name is hidden by “privacyprotect.org”. The Pakistani Defence Forum is registered to a PO box in Vancouver, US, and the registrant’s name is shown as ‘NAMESDIRECT’.

Mark Golding,

I don’t understand. ACLU is the American Civil Liberties Union, but what is ‘Index’ that you referred to?

Didn’t PressTV misquote Ahmadinejad as saying that the US used Haarp to create the earthquake in Haiti, and then issue a retraction?

Index on censorship Clark – http://www.indexoncensorship.org/ Britain’s aspiring ACLU I guess bt without the teeth.

HAARP or High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme has one purpose despite all the theories and scientific mumbojumbo, that is to disrupt communications by using Giga Watts of high frequency radio waves concentrated on the ionosphere. In my book it is a weapon and nothing to do with so called scientific research.

Talons open, tentacles multiple. Mixed metaphors to describe Israel, active even in Latin America. When will they crawl away under the stone in the dark cave?

I was looking for this info in reply to a troll on another site who was denying any Israeli influence in the attempted coup on Correa. The same troll often comes on to denigrate Castro and Cuba.

http://milfuegos.blogspot.com/2010/09/obama-administration-fingerprints-on.html

Last night I went to a concert and heard magificent performances of a Beethoven piano concerto and his 7th Symphony. At one stage, as the players in the orchestra were all working together in complete harmony to create beautiful and thrilling music, I was thinking why are our lives blighted by war and other evil like that described in the link above, and our livelihoods threatened by the effects of the banksters’ frauds. The BBC are assiduous in preparing us for the coming of the ConDems cuts.

Concern That Terror Teams Have Selected Targets, Ready to Strike in Europe.

A comment follows I found in response to the head-line above and other BBC warnings.

‘A short speech has been prepared to be read to the masses after these hideous attacks have been carried out.

My fellow (fill in your nationality here). Today was one of the most heinous criminal acts ever to be witnessed by ourselves and our brothers and sisters around the world. It is important that we recognise that terror not only effects us, but also all peoples and all nations. Terrorism is a global threat. It is a threat against humanity. It is a threat against liberty. It is a threat against civilization itself. It is because of this threat that we must work together as one world and one people to bring peace and security to us all. I have been in close talks with the leaders of all nations. We have agreed to work together to end the threat of terrorism and to secure our future and the future of our children. This is why I am asking (fill in your legislative branch here) to act quickly to authorise new security measures. Among these security measures will be, authorisation for a global solution to this problem, since this is not just our problem, but the problem of all nations and all people. We can no longer afford to act separately on these matters, but must do so together in order to prevent the destruction of our way of life. I call on (fill in legislative body here) to greatly expand the capacity and the powers of (fill in institution associated with your nation’s international anti-terrorism treaties here), so that we may once and for all defeat the threat of global terrorism. We must not tolerate hate. We must not tolerate prejudice. We must not tolerate the hinderance of progress. In order to protect our way of life we must become one people, one family, one race of humanity united against hatred, bigotry, and the hinderance of progress. That is why I am asking you to support me and to support the freedom and progress of all humanity. Thank you.’

I leave you to ponder?

Has Ahmadinejad’s speech triggered a ‘final solution’ – is the West in panic mode?

If a scientific world body investigated 9/11 thoroughly – would that be the end of civilisation as we know it?

Are you being pathetic and delusional Mark?

Clark – “There is already a possible Russian connection”.

Yes, but I haven’t seen any suggestions that they wrote the code (yet). (Mapping the chars as Russian, there are also things that look like the old dos ‘line-art’ symbols, and possibly some maths. It may just be that the codepage Firefox picked reuses the empty spaces ?)

me – “Not a lot you could build a good conspiracy-theory on, right enough …”

Including the bit that the much-quoted theory is built on, wry smiley. I’ll wait till more info emerges, I think. (I have also searched my copy of the Bible. “Myrtle”, in English, has only a few references, mostly good-vibes ones).

Yet Another Theory – http://antivirus.about.com/b/2010/10/02/debunking-the-bunk-of-stuxnet.htm

The suggestions in the last para. seem to make at least as much sense as any other on offer.

From the Guardian

‘UK upgrades Europe travel advice over terror threat’

I reckon they’ve got a two in one job in hand. An atrocity causing terrible casualities with the perpetrators linked to Iran followed by a massive curtailment of civil rights across Europe to to stem the economic demonstrations. And, of course, a step nearer to all out war with Iran

Richard Robinson,

you’re obviously enjoying this. Go on, take the plunge! E-mail me and I’ll send the whole thing.

Richard Robinson,

good article. The two domains that Stuxnet contacts, mypremierfutbol.com and todaysfutbol.com, are both registered in Arizona, and both hosted in Dublin. I thought I’d read differently elsewhere, though…

Clark – thanks, but I think I’ve reached my limit with it. I’m sort of reluctantly enjoying getting annoyed at the tenuous over-excited [enough, you did that one already - ed] but I don’t have enough knowledge/time/energy to take it further, and anyway I have “useful” things to do …

I’m just doing “how do we know we know that, how sure are we and why ?”, trying to separate the good analysis from the hand-waving, while remembering that any report can contain a mixture of both.

Something possibly weird; those two domains are all that is hosted on that Dublin server.

The server in Dublin Clark (193.95.161.220) can be pinged and the admin anner international seems valid:

Anner Media Group

Contact Andy Ruane CEO

Address 50 Upper Mount Street

-

Dublin 2

Ireland

but has an unreachable web address:

http://www.annerinternational.com

Schneier’s security blog is well worth a look today:

http://www.schneier.com/

Article “Me on Cyberwar”:

“And so the threat of cyberwar is being grossly exaggerated and I think it’s being done for a reason. This is a power grab by government. What Mike McConnell didn’t mention is that grossly exaggerating a threat of cyberwar is incredibly profitable”.

The article “Wiretapping the Internet” is good, too.

Mark,

The Anner Media Group is a dissolved company

Mark,

This link’s got so much interesting info

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread615788/pg1

Ruth,

well found. I have a feeling that I’ve heard of Serco in connection with something dodgy before.

You might like this article, too. The interesting sources wished to remain anonymous, unfortunately. Those bits start near the end of page three:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1003/Stuxnet-worm-Private-security-experts-want-US-to-tell-them-more

Yep, dodgy as hell. “The biggest company you’ve never heard of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serco_Group

Outsourcing and consultancy. Doing very well in these hard times. Fingers in pies all over the world. Formerly RCA:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11084819

I knew I’d heard of Serco somewhere before:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html

Mark Golding:

“HAARP or High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme … In my book it is a weapon and nothing to do with so called scientific research.”

Mark, this is one of the reasons that Craig Murray refers to you as a conspiraloon. There’s plenty of information out there that refutes every single HAARP conspiracy claim.

Once again, you’re showing how easy it is for you to be manipulated by American right-wing nutjob Tim McVeigh types.

Serco is part of the CIA Wackenhut global empire.

Serco run most if not all of the immigration removal centres.

corporatewatch.org/?lid=3534

If the government wants to spy on you they use Serco.

Careful – this site may damage your mind:

http://www.ethosjournal.com/

I believe that HAARP was originally designed to communicate with with submarines whilst underwater, but it can undoubtedly also be used to disrupt communications, as Mark Golding said above, October 3, 2010 1:39 PM.

abovetopsecret.com = right-wing American insanity.

Of course the left in Britain latches on.

Global warming denial? abovetopsecret.com

Tim McVeigh was innocent? abovetopsecret.com

America is the best country in the world?

abovetopsecret.com

Mark Golding runs a phony charity, and pockets all donations. In other words, he makes money off of the suffering of the Iraqi people.

Mark Golding is a fraud.

Sue me, Mark Golding, you fraud.

And you people are sick for enjoying his pictures depicting the results of Islamic jihadism.

It appears or shall I say Larry appears when we touch on something sensitive. Larry, you can’t be anything else than a government hack.

There can be a lot of dross on ATS but it has a number of sharp and well-informed members and some threads are excellent. Ruth’s link is one example. Another fine recent thread concerned the Wikileaks ‘insurance’ file; probably the best discussion on the matter anywhere on the web once the heavy-duty hackers and crackers started weighing in with their two-penn’orth.

Ruth,

Larry is a bully, who only respects more vicious bullies. If he gets paid for his abuse, that is merely a bonus to him. But yes, there are plenty of people and organisations that will buy the loyalty of his sort.

I don’t like the look of Serco, but as pointed out in Ruth’s link, it is possible that their server was compromised – my guess is by one of Serco’s employees.

MJ,

got a link for that one?

ATS is also strictly moderated and off-topic posts and those containing ad hominem attacks are quickly removed. Loopy from St Larry wouldn’t last a second.

Clark: I think this is it:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread598787/pg1

It’s a long thread, 48 pages, and it doesn’t really get going until a few pages in so you can skim the earlier posts.

Live with the nightmare Larry (not from St Louis) because it’s there to stay ad infinitum by your own instruments.

‘Better the pain of truth than the cancer of deceit.’

challenge me in America Larry but first view this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrdFFCnYtbk

Quote of the day – Seneca the Younger (Roman philosopher and dramatist) :

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

DISINFORMATION ALERT!

Symantec have released their analysis of Stuxnet:

http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/w32_stuxnet_dossier.pdf

Please see page 38. After six pages of raising a technical smokescreen, they finally get to the important bit about what Stuxnet actually does. They repeat (plagiarise?) what Ralph Langner wrote two weeks ago; that Stuxnet is targeted sabotage. I’ve been following the Symantec blog, and they hadn’t mentioned it as of two days ago. But then we have the following outrageous nonsense:

“However, there are some additional interesting clues. For example, code added to OB35 uses a magic marker

value of 0xDEADF007 (possibly to mean Dead Fool or Dead Foot ?” a term used when an airplane engine fails) to

specify when the routine has reached its final state”.

Surely this is utter rubbish! “0xDEADFOO7″ is simply a number, it is 3,735,941,127 in hexadecimal, or base 16, as commonly used in computers. Resemblance to “Dead Fool” or “Dead Foot” is just a coincidence. Symantec’s technicians must be aware of this.

“Airplane engines”? Are they going to try to blame Stuxnet on Afghans in caves?

I don’t think aircraft engines use PLCs (anyone?), but even if they do, Stuxnet has been ‘In the Wild’ for six to twelve months. Have planes been mysteriously falling out of the air? Well, if they start to now, it isn’t Stuxnet!

I’ve never trusted Geoff Hoon and now an FOI reveals an Iraq war meeting with General Franks at RAF Brize Norton airbase in April 2002. A meeting that was not disclosed at the Chilcot inquiry by Hoon.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1317264/Britain-held-war-talks-US-general-Tommy-Franks-Iraq-invasion.html

RETRACTION AND APOLOGY.

Stuxnet queries a piece of program in the industrial controller (PLC) called FC 1874, which replies with the value 0xDEADF007. But FC 1874 was itself written to the PLC by Stuxnet.

I had wrongly assumed that FC 1874 was part of the original process control program, and therefore that Stuxnet’s designers had no control over its reply and were simply checking for a number from the original process. But since FC 1874 is part of Stuxnet, the number 0xDEADF007 is communication within Stuxnet, and Stuxnet’s designers could well have chosen 0xDEADF007 for its resemblance to “Dead [something]“.

I apologise to Symantec’s technicians for accusing them of disinformation. I still think they’re much slower than Langner.

Mark – An illustration of the uselessness and ineffectiveness of the Chilcot Inquiry. The participants should have been in the dock under oath. Chilcot was set up (at huge expense remember) to absorb dissent and that is all it was – a talking shop for actors like B£iar. Nothing will come of it.

For anyone wondering about Craig, his Facebook page shows no activity for him since before 4th of June, but Nadira posted to her wall late in September that she was enjoying walking on the beach in Ramsgate, and not missing London yet.

0xDEADF007 /* assassinate 15 MI6 agents */

We could speculate for ever about why They want us to think they shot themselves in the foot … perhaps it means “Hey look, I bet this’ll wind them up”.

Clark – “Please see page 38. After six pages of raising a technical smokescreen, they finally get to the important bit about what Stuxnet actually does”

It seems to me that that para. is the punchline :-

“While we are able to describe everything the injected PLC code does, what address are set, what values are

checked without design documents of the intended target, the information is essentially useless. For example, if

a particular output is set to 100, we can not determine if that output is connected to a pump, a centrifuge, or a

turbine. Without that context, we are unable to understand the real-world impact of the PLC code”

ie, they just plain don’t have the info. to be able to say what it was aimed at or what it was intended to do when it gets there.

What continues to strike me as strange is the constant repetition of the same old unsubstantiated guesswork embedded in the hard techy stuff. “DEAD” something is a term used wrt aeroplane engines (which of them ? fool ? foot ? both ?). The myrtle/Esther thing, which is _really _ peculiar. The May ’79 date, and one thing that happened then. They do qualify some of these as “only speculation” – but, why raise them at all, they’re not techy points, they add nothing to the context they’re mentioned in ? Nor, surely, are they unambiguous; they’re just being passed on without any picking apart at all, quite unlike the rest of it. To me, they just don’t seem to belong in the kind of analysis that the rest of it is.

Personally, I can’t see why the suggestion of a 31-year-old Spanish speaker with a botanical background isn’t at least as plausible (it also brings in the ‘futbol’ spelling for the servers).

On which, did you see the explanation of your observation on their being in Dublin and registered to whoever ? They used to point elsewhere, but have been “redirected”. Now there’s a thing ? The DNS has been taken over, in the passive voice ?

The mytus/Esther thing _is_ weird, and it’s winding me up. The suggestion seems to be that it can be explained by assuming the author(s) was religiously Jewish, yes ? But why would such a person, with such a reference in mind, translate it into the language of the Romans ? and if that is what they intend, then they’re not thinking about the plant family at all, so why ‘guava’, which says that they are (and wasn’t heard of east of the Atlantic until much much later). Wikipedia describes this as of genus ‘pomegranate’; I bet there could have been something more appropriate to be found there, for a Hebrew-speaking Torah scholar who wants to drop such Clues. No ?

Points like this are, perhaps, a kind of secondary virus, with analysis of the code as their path of infection ? People just read-and-repeat, from the eys to the fingers with no intervening processing.

Firstly, my thanks go to Crab (Sandcrab) for setting me right on FC 1874 / 0xDEADF007.

Richard Robinson,

I love your “assassinate 15 007s” joke. To all you non-techies out there, F in hexadecimal = 15 in decimal. Yeah, I’m not jumping to conclusions about that Myrtle / Esther speculation either; it’s too specific. That’s why I was asking Suhayl Saadi; I just wondered what sort of connotations those words might have, and who might use them.

I think this sort of speculation arises because there is little factual to go on. I hope the owners of the target system go public, but they’ve had a year and they haven’t done so.

“I think this sort of speculation arises because there is little factual to go on”.

Yes. And such guesswork getting jumped on as if it were fact, in the resulting vacuum.

“I hope the owners of the target system go public, but they’ve had a year and they haven’t done so.”

Yes. That’s one bit of public analysis that does have specific value, to let people know what it checks for. At least the people who run such systems will be able to see if whatever-it-is could happen to them, even if they’re not saying publicly (and weren’t already aware). (Conspiracy theory alert: assuming the published details are correct).

I wonder if this is also being picked over on the Farsi-speaking web ? They must be working on it …

“dead foot” is part of a pilots’ mnemonic for which engine has failed (in a twin-engine plane). The rudder feels stiff or dead on that side. The whole phrase is “dead foot, dead engine” its aim being to help the pilot avoid feathering the wrong engine.

I really dont know what has gotten into you to -Clark and Richard. %}

The fact is, the most sophisticated piece of malware yet seen, a worm which infects windows pcs and can infect a common kind of safety critical industrial equipment has been discovered and analysed by major computer security researchers…

The worm was found to form a controllable, commandable network of infected pcs ( this is normal, it is what many worms do, they create a ‘botnet’ from which the attackers can control infected machines – this worm did that too, it did it because it was programmed to do it, we know it was programmed to do it because the code has been documented. There is no point talking about “one target” A 100 thousand strong botnet, left to hang around despite owning a deinstall command, after it has done its job. This idea is silly. )

Symantec had the botnet’s control urls redirected so the network could be measured, and found that it consisted of about 100 thousand pcs, centered geographically and acutely or Iran.

All *facts* here so far guys. For *fuzz* read unconfirmed newspaper reports of a million infected pcs in China, -totally invisible or lied(?!) about by Symantec. Thats fuzz, believe in it when their is considerable evidence to seriously damn Symantecs reputation.

The programming evidence is provided in at least two exensive papers, and testified to by the accounts of at least 9 (Eset team, Symantec team & Langner….) named, known, proud, computer security researchers.

Also, Langner describes the attack as “directed” not “targeted” same as symantec. Only F-security mentions it “doing nothing if specific target is not found”, in its simplistic faq.

A possible live, or test, or default target has been idnetified in the difficult to analyse Plc code.

An developement sequence through different versions of the PC worm, and worms architectual modularity and network control has also been established.

This is a IT and Industrial reconnaisance and control Botnet, directed at and into Iran by state or corporated adversarys – admirably discovered and thwarted by computer security companies and experts.

No bets, caveats, fuzz, sound bytes, blog wizards or goose chases.

Those are the *facts* guys.

More details are available from Symantec, Eset and Langner…

@ Ruth,

‘Prince Bandar “Bush” Running, Equipping And Financing Terror Organizations In Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan’

Sure – if there is no conflict stirring – then how are arms going to be sold?

Vronsky, thanks.

Crab, thanks for the summary, with which I pretty much agree.

crab – “I really dont know what has gotten into you … This idea is silly”

I’m doing what you did there. Remarking that not all the statements made follow inevitably from the facts.

Sorry Richard, all totally factual statements there. Every statement is backed up by first hand documentary evidence. Irrefuteable by those bound to truthiness and not perhapsliness.

What did you find at all contentious? apart from admittedly the certain exxaassperated tone

crab – “What did you find at all contentious?”

The things I already mentioned. At 3:42, for instance.

I’m sorry, your tone of voice has me baffled. I was guessing sarcasm, until you mentioned “exxaassperated”.

Just a friendly suggestion… maybe all this stuxnet stuff could utilise another thread of its own? I mean, only about 3 people are interested in the subject yet it’s taken up ~80% of the posts since it started. And a lot of the regulars aren’t bothering to post much anymore. Not that this subject has no interest, but it’s not an interest to the exclusion of all else and – frankly – it’s starting to bog down the usual conversation around here.

The first 3 paragraphs of the 3:42 post read to me, as repetition of a old point, that specific targets and events are very difficult / impossible to discover from the code alone. – A basic reality, explained and not mislead by the researchers.

The rest of the post laments how certain fruitless details such as x and y, are talked about too much, and perhaps were unwise to ever be reported, because they will get talked about too much…

…Im not sure what my tone is.

I would like to see some clarity supported around this event rather than it being obscured ironicaly with curiosities and cynicisms.

It was almost certainly an aggressive experiment and excercise in accessing and potentially sabotaging at strategic points and/or times, important Iranian industrial computer resources -by its warmongering nation state enemies.

The non-partisan security researchers who did the work and wrote the reports did not overstate this likelyhood, they deserve a little more respect imbo.

Craig is tending his garden. I read that book after seeing it mentioned here months ago. Wonderful read.

I think tbh, we should meet up in another forum. I dont have loads to contribute, i try to keep it short, and stay out of the best conversations.

I wonder how writerman is these days, Sabertache.. Vronsky has made some of the best posts ive seen.. I could miss the spectrum of minds here.

wbr

Or rather, you should all meet up in another forum, and ill lurk and chip in occasionaly.. but its unlikely to happen.

Crab: I miss the spectrum of subjects too! Where the heck is writerman? I don’t recall him saying he was taking any sort of sabbatical. It really needs Craig to start posting again… dammit, he pulled us all here in the first place. You can’t start a party then slope off, and expect it to not fizzle out. Couldn’t Craig be at least persuaded to do a weekly update?

Funny thing about posting… once you get into it, each post comes pretty much naturally. Leave it for a while and it’s like starting to run again, or getting back on a motorbike after 20 years – there’s this curious reluctance and trepidation about the first crack back at it. You know how to do it, but you’d rather not, and the longer it’s left, the more difficult it is. You know the time and effort it takes and although it’s a nice thought, there are other things to do now.

Hopefully this isn’t what Craig is thinking, because the crowd is not going to come back otherwise, and it’s unlikely there’ll be many newcomers. Even the angry-stooge and the teabagger troll have lost most of their interest now, although maybe that’s no bad thing. Something like going on a starvation diet to get rid of tape-worms, perhaps.

Anyway, couldn’t those in contact ask CM to just put in a few words on a weekly basis, not only to get the blog more active again, but to get him back into the idea of getting back on that figurative bike.

crab – I’m not disrespecting their work, not am I looking for a fight. I am just, as you say, lamenting the pointless bits and looking for clarity. But I regard both curiosity and cynicism as valuable tools in that search.

The fate of independent newspapers in the US is an interesting and terrible phenomenon. They have fallen one by one, to speculators who have bought them out and then, when they have control of them, impose the debt of that purchase onto the newspaper itself. So agency staff are paid less, senior staff are let go. The newsroom is slashed to a minimum, investigative journalism is an unwelcome burden rather than a treasured resource. Advertising and infomercials get a very much increased profile, sponsored supplements replace regular features. Most insidiously, the newsroom and the advertising departments work more closely, with unwelcome news sidelined while “good news” concerning selective business is highlighted.

While we might – as ever – tut about such practices in the US, we find the same thing going on here.

We’ve got “call me Dave” Cameron taking advice from filthy money-grubbing shysters like Phillip Green. Green, when he’s not pressing his fat, ugly body against rapidly ageing supermodels desperate for sponsorship, also likes to buy companies with its own debt.

The way it works is this – you make a hostile takeover of a company, and then force that company to take out a loan to pay you back what it cost you to buy it. Magic, eh? Just what this country needs – we should all be doing it!

Once you’ve got a foot in the door though such a takeover, that’s not a reason to stop fleecing the opportunity. You can then force a company (say, TopShop, just as an off-hand example) to take a £1 Billion loan, trouser the cash yourself, and then work out how TopShop can service the debt over the next 10 years. Might cost them in staff wages, quality and all that, of course, but a company has to pay its debts after all!

*

This is pretty much how Cameron sees the UK. The exceptionally well connected have taken huge sums out of the country, leaving us to “service” the debt. Then fingers wag at us about living within our means, the importance of thrift and repaying debt – all done with a straight face. And take on Special Advisors like Green to tell how that is best done.

The real trick is getting the people doing the “servicing” to go along with all this, apparently it’s all working out rather well.

How about the Original Topic ? Anybody hear any more about Julian Assange ?

Last I heard, the Swedes (generically; I can’t remember if was the police or the prosecutor) were saying he was free to bugger off out of Sweden. So, did he ? Is that one charge still outstanding ? Did it scupper his reported plan to move there ?

“Did it scupper his reported plan to move there ?”

Good question. He was going to move there and write a regular column for a newspaper so he could take advantage of Sweden#s robust laws protecting whistleblowers and journalists’ sources.

Richard i do rate your comments, but was a bit worried like Glenn to see, in this state of limbo and possibly closure, that the stux-shop-talk was brainstorming scarce threadspace, and the esoteric curiosities of it seemed to blur what relevance the saga has to news of Iran’s hazardous predicament. That’s why my comments were surly.

-

Personally i don’t put much hope in Assange’s organisation after reading the accounts and leaked emails on Cryptome, but i wish them the best.

Glen, You have your grip on the nettles. I think you need a place with others to make your contributions where strong topics and posts aren’t so transient as here, at least while ‘here’ is inactive.

In the 80s and 90s we had glimmers of hope – the end of the cold war, advancing social communications technology (phones and computers), the Northern Ireland peace process, the end of Apartheid.. (perhaps fill out this list, focus on what did give hope for a while..)

A kinder, improved human future seemed plausible for a time. But it doesn’t now. There is no quality now, the TVs and newspaper corporations surreptitious political and commercial policies, systematically ensure that any good, pure of heart works from the remaining inspired communicators, are re-assimilated or noised out to the pervasive editorial medium of shallow, seductive, repressive, commercialism.

Modern technological media resources would be used by intelligent life to transmit inspirations, to uplift human conditions and aspirations, but the strongest signals pumping through them today are consume, worry, fear, fuck, fight. All selected, to increase mindless commerce.

Popular TV; “watch, fantasize, keep watching, we like you, listen to these draining manipulations and then watch more.. and more.”

Fake sincerity is default, as familiar and unavoidable in as taxes.

A wide cultural backlash against this economic disease of state trickery, corruption and conflict is the only thing barre disaster which can stop the descent into madness and turmoil.

A cultural backlash which can get into and clear out the minds of everyone, excepting only the most twisted bastards that drive this hiding to hell that we are on.

Be persuasive, artistic, promiscuous, inspiring for me.

If Craig won’t be maintaining this site then I’d be sorry to see this group break up. Could we set up a sort of community blog and simply allow guests to initiate threads on topics of their choosing? Much of the value of the site has been the multiple tangential viewpoints, all articulate, often with links and references to new and interesting sources.

Vronsky,

That’s a great idea.

Vronsky,

That’s a great idea.

“Much of the value of the site has been the multiple tangential viewpoints, all articulate, often with links and references to new and interesting sources.”

Thanks for articulating that. Yes. This emerging idea that we’re competing for a limited resource doesn’t seem conducive to interesting discussion.

Do we know anything about Craig’s intentions, though ? It would mean work to set up, after all …

This is an article about Craig in Ghana in 2000 when he was Deputy High Commissioner.

General News of Friday, 17 September 2010

Citi FM MD says Craig Murray needs to be examined

Comments (37)

A former General Manager in charge of programmes at Multi Media Group, Owners of Joy FM in Accra, Samuel Attah- Mensah has discounted claims by former Deputy British High Commissioner, Craig Murray that the NDC government, under ex President Jerry John Rawlings attempted to close down Joy FM on the eve of the 2000 General elections.

/…..

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=190533

The previous post was mine. I had just been looking on the net to see if there was anything current about Craig.

That one and this are the only ones I can find. Another site is asking ‘Where is Craig Murray?’.

http://www.adomonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2855:craig-murrays-book-ndc-tried-to-shut-down-joy-fm&catid=25:general&Itemid=233

All together now….

Cameroon’s hot air and claptrap. “We are all in this together”

The Eton Boating Song

1.

Jolly boating weather,

And a hay harvest breeze,

Blade on the feather,

Shade off the trees,

+Swing swing together,+

With your bodies between your knees,

+Swing swing together,+

With your bodies between your knees.

2.

Rugby may be more clever,

Harrow may make more row,

But we’ll row for ever,

Steady from stroke to bow,

And nothing in life shall sever,

The chain that is round us now,

And nothing in life shall sever,

The chain that is round us now.

3.

Others will fill our places,

Dressed in the old light blue,

We’ll recollect our races,

We’ll to the flag be true,

And youth will be still in our faces,

When we cheer for an Eton crew,

And youth will be still in our faces,

When we cheer for an Eton crew.

4.

Twenty years hence this weather,

May tempt us from office stools,

We may be slow on the feather,

And seem to the boys old fools,

+But we’ll still swing together,+

And swear by the best of schools,

+But we’ll still swing together,+

And swear by the best of schools.

That makes me proud to be an Etonian somebody.

A passing quote, recent article from the outstanding Medialens Folk:

“VEILED THREATS” OF “INDUSTRIAL CHAOS”

>>

At the recently ended United Nations “poverty summit”, global leaders once again solemnly declared their commitment to the Millennium Development Goals for 2015, just as they did at a previous UN summit ten years ago; just as they did, with different verbiage, at innumerable climate change talking shops.

The first goal, to “eradicate extreme poverty and hunger,” is now more distant than ever. Ten years ago, 830 million people were on the brink of starvation. This rose to over 1 billion during the world food price crisis of 2007-2008 and today remains at 915 million.

Another goal for 2015 is to cut infant mortality by two-thirds from the 1990 annual rate, when it stood at 12.5 million deaths. The current rate is a scandalous 10.5 million, and it is very unlikely that the 2015 target will be achieved.

These figures and failures offer a mere glimpse of the shocking reality of the destructiveness and instability of global capitalism. As ever, it is the poorest in “the Third World” who suffer most. But the First World is not immune. In the relatively affluent West, not just the poor but the middle classes are being hit hard. Here in the UK, the Tory ?” Liberal Democrat coalition government looks set to impose harsh cuts in the public sector of up to 40 per cent.

Writing in Red Pepper, former Financial Times employment editor Robert Taylor describes the “ultimate purpose” of the coalition: “to bury the British welfare state as we have known it over the past 60 years ?” based on a progressive and responsible state, redistributive taxation and social justice.” We will see the “wholesale demolition” of “the much-maligned public sector” with likely up to one million people losing their jobs. Many “victims of the government’s vicious attacks are going to be nurses, teachers, social workers and any others whose work is designed to help and protect the most vulnerable in our society.” (Robert Taylor, ‘Welfare to worklessness’, Red Pepper, 24 August, 2010; http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Welfare-to-worklessness)

<<

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php

@ All,

For those who want to think.

We are in need of a new global architecture.

There is no simple economic “communist” or “capitalist” solution in this world of ours.

Let’s consider:-

The ” Third World” exists as a reality of global impoverishment as much as it exists in vast sections of the globe that have a positive aspiration for something that will sustain life, health and general human welfare. The “First World” has run its gamut and now finds the conditions of the “Third World” appearing within their boundaries, when before exploitation could be kept distant and safely distant and external ?” but – now, the chickens are coming home to roost right on the front doorstep of the “First World”. Conclusion? We are all in this together ?” as we have always been, but the ones in the West are now compelled to pay closer attention as the problems are not just on their doorsteps, but within their homes and lives.

We need to consider the possibility of Martin Luther King’s dream of the possibility of a socially and economically just world. Sorry ?” I am a dreamer ?” so, let’s just continue with what we have and see where it lands all of us.

The possibility of a socially and economically just world?

The impossibility of the experiments of Cuba, China, the former Soviet Union and the United States of America for actualising the possibility of a socially and economically just world.

Truth be told ?” it all has not worked East or West.

So ?” now – what next?

CB ( http://www.globaljusticeonline.com)

“Ludicrous Diversion”

Abdul al-Jabber a UK citizen with a British wife has been murdered by a drone attack in North Waziristan.

Obviously he was the man behind the latest rise in the terror alert level by the foreign office from “general” to “high” for travellers to France and Germany. The official British terror threat level remained at “severe” meaning an attack was “highly likely”.

This is the second highest level. “Critical” ?” suggesting an attack may be imminent ?” is the highest.

Like many ‘terrorists’ al-Jabber is alleged to have been planning to set up a group called the Islamic Army of Great Britain to carry out another 7/7.

Much of the focus of the London bombings of July 7, 2005 (7/7), was focused on the “Pakistani connection.” The suspected bombers had all visited Pakistan, and apparently developed contacts with groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Lashkar-e Taiba.

However, a less known and less publicized connection yields some very interesting information. The suspected mastermind of the London bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, had visited all the suspected bombers leading up to the attacks. Phone records revealed that there were “around 20 calls between him and the 7/7 gang, leading right up to those attacks.”

This *is* significant because Haroon Rashid Aswat, apart from being an ‘al-Qaeda’ operative, also happened to be an MI6 agent, working for the British intelligence.

Haroon Aswat made his appearance on the scene of Islamic terrorism when he was in Kosovo in the 1990′s, where he worked for British intelligence.

Aswat, from Batley, West Yorkshire cannot be extradited to the US because he faces life in jail without parole, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.

Aswat is currently in Broadmoor secure mental hospital and I was hoping to contact him for a statement. An ‘insider’ known to the family has said he is stupefied, drugged, torpid and unable to converse.

WHY?!

“The possibility of a socially and economically just world”

I suspect that Game Theory has a bearing on this. An apparent problem for evolutionists is the existence of altruism – it seems paradoxical that a gene can increase its presence in the pool when it causes its host to act against its own interests. Surely it should disappear? One explanation comes from simulations based on game theory – a gene for aggressive or acquisitive behaviour will prosper, increasing its presence up to a particular level, but it cannot increase beyond this level as so many other individuals are equally aggressive, and the pool of passive targets is reduced. The passive targets may even stage a recovery, as their cooperative behaviour now gives them an advantage.

My fear is that our present state is somewhat short of the point where agressors cease to prosper. I see no evidence of growing resentment or resistance against the elite, at least not at any level that they need fear. The present inequities and excesses, though gross, are part of a stable system. Things could get worse (and they probably will) without reaching the tipping point where resistance becomes more attractive than passivity. At the moment we are like Vonnegut’s ‘briquettes’, the jibe he hurled at his fellow Jews for their passivity in the face of the concentration camps – they were easy to store, transport and combust.

Sorry, I have not had any contact with Craig since three weeks ago, he must be getting his garden sorted.

I agree with Vronsky and Ruth, we should keep some sort of exchange and pool our discussions and debates on a free list.

I’m sure ‘not at all gay’ Larry will not be interested in following us around, or will he?

Today we see the real nastiness of this Government come through. Talk of public sector pension, telling people that they have to work lonerger to receive less, and oH by the way there will be some major jobs cuts.

Those who question their pension policies and say so will now feel that theyare up for the chop, more fear and loathing in blighty.

“I’m sure ‘not at all gay’ Larry will not be interested in following us around, or will he?”

If we didn’t get larry’s monosyllabic abuse and angrysoba’s extended semantic gymnastics (and monosyllabic abuse) we’d have to assume that our opinions didn’t matter. I think they have to be invited in order to support our self esteem, to give us that regular assurance that we’re on the right track. They say they don’t want to validate our views but, shit, it’s what they do best.

Vronsky, you may have missed angrysoba’s dedicated investigation into the ‘wiped off the map’ business (above, easy to do on such a long thread) I’d want him there because he’s interesting: just as I wouldn’t miss the very dull Larry. Though what his sexuality has to do with it, I don’t know.

“you may have missed”

No, I note his occasional repentances. But as I’ve said elsewhere, he is a skilled and informed advocate of his viewpoint, and that is useful material for those who do not share it. Like all professional advocates, he doesn’t need to believe that his client is innocent. Does his personal scepticism leak through his professional advocacy, or is it tactical to let the mask of infallible authority slip occasionally, just enough to prevent us from dismissing him? From some of his posts on the 911 thread, I felt he was weary of his work.

But just to clarify, if we go elsewhere I’d want us to continue Craig’s policy of allowing everything except extreme wastes of space like tony_opmoc. I wouldn’t want to see angry or larry disappear – they’re ingredients of our accidentally discovered sauce. Larry has the merit of brevity, and angry can list contrary sources. Every bridge should have at least one troll under it, lest we little billy goats gruff think that the greener grass is easily accessible.

Trip-trap, trip-trap.

Another verdict of ‘lawfully killed’ is found in the case of Mark Saunders.

59 police with 100 guns were at the scene. Seven fired the shots which killed him. A witness described the scene as being like a ‘bad film’. Virtually another state execution has taken place like that of Jean Charles de Menezes. Why wasn’t he left to sober up and why wasn’t his wife allowed to talk to him?

A Brutal & Costly Anniversary…

“I’m tired of the up and down, they love us they hate us, we’re safer we’re not safer, more are dead less are? dead, more or less voted, blah blah blah, ridiculous pointless statistics that don’t change the? fact that we’ve shamefully destroyed their country based on lies and deception. What a great people we are.” – voice of America

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AEyNjltxf8

Here’s your Zionist bank Anno.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=20920

From the same stable, James Arbuthnot MP Defence Committee and ardent Conservative Friend of Israel, in fact the Chair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Arbuthnot

We need a New World Order.

Governments are rightly very unpopular, but we should remember that most of them were set up to displace the most powerful group by a somewhat less powerful group. That process needs to keep happening.

Governments were supposed to protect their people against other, less regulated powers, such as monarchies, the mega rich, and more recently multinational conglomerates of huge corporations. Over time, such powerful interests have infiltrated and subverted governments.

One aspect of this is the internationalisation of the mega corporations. These huge organisations are now richer and have a broader power base than many governments. An international government with international power of law is becoming a necessity.

Welcome to ‘Milbus’, a term coined by Dr Ayesh Siddiqa, author of a book which presents an incisive analysis of Pakistan’s militarised economy/ society.

The irony is, in what is otherwise an excellent book by a one-time insider, she calls on the US to pressurise tha Pakistan political/military to reduce the military’s influence in society/ the economy. Well, she was funded, I think, by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. That call, it seems to me, on all sorts of levels, must be a very subtle joke.

Has she never watched any of Michael Moore’s documentaries on the US?

Welcome, then, to Milbus, UK-style.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayesha_Siddiqa

There must be similar books analysing the US/UK Milbus. Does anyone know of any good ones? I’d be interested in reading one. Thanks.

Ive been having a look around for possible hosts/hangouts – not found much. Here is just a couple of intresting ones.

http://site.nissr.com/zeino/Resumeuk.html

A quite small personal forum. Might be an okay venue.

http://human-rights-forum.maplecroft.com/

There is not a great deal going on in this forum at the moment. It might be challenging forum to visit. Very establishment *up-eyebrow*

…just knocking about ideas. I dont feel a pressing need to abandon here yet, except from the length of threads, not to mention the opportunity to work and communicate more effectively about the issues troubling us… which is concerns motivation…

?leadership…

?social ‘capital’…

?muses…

:]

and spill checkling.

Folks, we could be writing the “news”.

“Barack Obama accused of exaggerating terror threat for political gain”

“Ive been having a look around for possible hosts/hangouts”

I was thinking about this … Is there any point in one of us opening a free blog and making all (or most of?) the regulars here “authorised posters”? I was involved in a couple of international group blogs and at one time we had seven+ posters on one of them … I don’t think there’s any limit. People could post as they see fit, long or short, or even one line and a link.

Moderation needn’t be a problem if everyone moderated the comments on their own posts? I don’t mean in advance. Comments could be allowed from OpenID and Google Accounts (and platforms other than Blogger have more options, even including Twitter IDs.) Blatantly offensive stuff could be deleted when necessary.

Having to sign in for comments should (more or less) stop people using multiple names, and more imporantly, stop them abusing *other* people’s names.

As far as I know, you can have numerous co-admins among the authorised posters, so no one person would be in control. The other question is how authorised posters would be chosen – especially after the initial group was set up. i.e. what criteria would be used for ‘admitting’ new posters?

Just a couple of thoughts … I know there are people here who are much more tech savvy than me and may well see some problems in the above.

PS: Don’t ask me about Ubuntu yet. I’ve been v busy and it’s a “don’t ask don’t tell” situation for now.

I miss Alfred.

“I miss Alfred.”

Well, you know what they say; “If at first you don’t succeed, try a bigger shotgun”.

Haha! Only a Predator drone would reach Canada I imagine.

[In other business, the deafening silence suggests that my idea at 11:09 AM must be very, very bad ...]

Ha! The FBI is still paranoid, it seems, even though he’s been dead for 30 years! Says something about the mindset, no? Or perhaps John Lennon was a Jihadist-in-disguise.

‘BOX’ Office, London, by the Thames:

” ‘Yellow matter custard

Drippin from a dead dog’s eye…’ ”

Well, that’s clearly a threat to Paris (and Rome, and Berlin and London… oh, let’s throw in Dublin and Stephen Dedalus while we’re at it!)”

http://new.uk.music.yahoo.com/blogs/behind_the_music/27894/john-lennon-fingerprint-card-seized-by-fbi/

So, in order to dispel any doubts that may have arisen among the slaves aka populace, no doubt anytime soon we will see an amazingly lucky just-in-time ‘find’ of a car packed with cans of fertiliser, a ball of flatus caught from an incontinent cow and a plastic model of Nessie, parked on a double-yellow line right in the middle of Paris/Dublin/Berlin/London/Madrid/Rome. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium.

This will lead (like Theseus and the Minotaur) to some or other group of patsy dupes, all called ‘Pervez Riaz Iqbal’ from Dewsbury/Tewsbury/Roddenberry/Rowanberry who went en masse on ‘charity work’ to Waziristan, where in general, except on very rainy days, they do NOT sing,

“Yellow matter custard

Drppin from a dead dog’s eye…”

Dreoilin,

your 11:09 idea is not bad. I’ve thought of three things that might be happening:

1) People aren’t coming here so much, because Craig hasn’t been posting.

2) People are hoping that Craig is coming back, and that things will carry on as before.

3) Probably other people feel as I do, that no blog of mine could be a worthy replacement for Craig’s.

Clark: I’ve still got my fingers crossed for option 2. I don’t think Craig would disappear for good without leaving a small valedictum.

MJ,

me, too. Moving is very demanding, and moving into a place that needs fixing up is particularly demanding. Maybe a “4:45″ link will appear at some random time of day.

Something to talk about?

http://www.mandaba.la/pastor-piragine-alerts-against-workers-party

Clark, MJ,

Option 2 was what I had assumed myself. Maybe we’ll hear soon. I thought an alternative forum was only a last resort.

I agree, me rambling a bit. Good catch Clark.

Suhayl’s remark about the incontinent cow and the patsies reminded me of something I used to do with my brothers. We’d go off and dig for clay, make turds and put them in the hall and wait for my mother to blow her top and take it out on the poor shaking dog.

Suhayl,

“Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.”

Sorry, it just came into my head.

Having given a bit of time to establish that other people can bang on about their interests too, I’m not finished with stuxnet. Anybody thinks it’s boooring, the key is “page down” …

A client contacts a webserver, and they’re not talking to who they expect, their traffic is going to an entirely different site that’s spoofing the conversation and making hostile use of the data they give it. Somebody can fiddle with the DNS of a couple of .com sites, and it ends up pointing to sites registered to someone with links to a company with links to [ etc ] CIA/NSA/the alphabet soup … Oh, really ? And no-one even comments ? Nothing to see here, then, move along now. Is this normal ? Does it happen often ?

First they came for the viruses, and I said nothing …

Good thinking Clark – (3) is the one. Although not a comparison it made me think of the time when ‘WebRejects’ was started up to replace ‘WebCameron’ after that blog was suddenly shut-down (the rejects were ‘us mob’ who formed the base commentators and migrated.) Without a ‘front man(woman)’ or in Craig’s case ‘a great front man’ it seems migrations wither and die.

Richard,

I get your point – but ‘stuxnet’ is of course ‘state sponsored’ part of the ‘war of terror’ and if one can ever imagine Obi-Wan on the side of the Emperor this becomes relevant:

Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.

Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don’t need to see his identification.

Stormtrooper: We don’t need to see his identification.

Obi-Wan: These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Stormtrooper: These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.

Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.

Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.

Obi-Wan: Move along.

Stormtrooper: Move along… move along.

I hope Craig resumes – although I’d hate to see the group break up I think Mark is right about migrations. It does make one notice that there is no obvious place to go if Craig does call a halt – but have you noticed Sibel Edmond’s new blog, promisingly billed as the Irate Minority Club?

http://www.123realchange.blogspot.com/

Is DNS redirection information publicly available? Does anyone know where to look it up?

Vronsky,

Thanks for that link. All the recent posts seem to be at a new blog linked from there:

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/

I think there could be some people here who would wish to sign this petition.

http://newsnetscotland.com/general/767-campaigners-launch-lockerbie-inquiry-petition

Ruth, that was very naughty of you! But also very funny!! Your mother must have been incandescent! INCANDESECENT! Did she ever find out that they weren’t real, but rather, creative soft-scuptures? Modern Art, indeed. Canine concrete poetry, you might say. Woof-woof!

For Mark:

“Mother Superior jumped the gun…”

You’ve all been at the cider. And Ruth pulled the wings off flies. I can tell.

(Or is the fashionable version “off of”?)

“Is DNS redirection information publicly available? Does anyone know where to look it up?”

whois, etc ? http://knowledgebase.demon.net/article/internet-tools.html gives a web front-end to some.

But I don’t think there’s much to see after the event, is there ? It’s only a row in a database.

“You’ve all been at the cider”

Only Beer, and loud music down the local pub. My head hurts, but it was fun at the time.

Richard Robinson,

thanks for that. Re: your post October 9, 2010 1:20 AM. So Stuxnet had two URLs that it communicated with, recorded as plain text within Stuxnet. These URLs led to servers in Malaysia. But when the anti-virus companies discovered this, they had Stuxnet’s traffic re-routed elsewhere. How, and where? Is it done by changing the DNS entry for those URLs? If so, surely this creates a record somewhere, of what the entry was, what it was changed to, who made the request, etc.

Plus, there must have been some piece of software on those servers to handle Stuxnet’s traffic. I have seen no news about this, but it could be a big clue to the origin of Stuxnet.

Vronsky,

Succinct link on Megrahi – note Cameron made it clear in his conference speech that it was very wrong to let this ‘scapegoat’[my word] go home to celebrations. It upset the American Senators and these are the people of course who decide whether we can upgrade our nuclear deterrent with a Trident replacement which Cameron has made clear will go ahead as planned.

America has told us not to cut the defence budget so Cameron the eternal ‘yes’ man has introduced a ‘rolling review’ of defence spending.

On the one hand the ‘huge’ deficit must not affect our ability to fight and maim, one the other Cameron must keep the ‘Big Society’ in check by screwing down the social thumbscrews, by invoking ‘fear,’ cutting essential services for the poor and weak and pretending to ‘fuck’ the ‘well-off’ with child benefit cuts while introducing ‘Mother’s benefit’ that will provide extra tax breaks to cover up the loss of the child benefit.

A case of Cameron spending £1.1 Billion to save £1 Billion – so much for the Tory manifesto – you lied Cameron and you are a slave to your masters as we found out when you booted WebCameron into the gutter.

It is about time ‘Nick’ you grew some decent balls, that is what the British people expect and that is why there is a coalition.

Clark – yes, those are the questions.

“Is it done by changing the DNS entry for those URLs”. That’s the assertion the reports make, yes. I don’t see how there can be any other way ? If the code has a name wired in, that needs to be resolved into the underlying numerical address that all ‘net transactions actually use, and the DNS database is what does that; it’s where that mapping information is stored. When they say that the name has been redirected, they’re saying that the relevant DNS entry has been rewritten by someone other than the owner, to point somewhere other than expected. This is, surely, not normal ? If just-anybody can do this to just-anybody else’s address, the entire ‘net is broken beyond any hope of repair. If there are exploits out there that can do this to .com, which probably represents more big money than any other section of the ‘net, surely that’s a much stronger contender for OMGEvilHackOfTheCentury!!! than anything about the construction of a virus ? There are mafias, governments, etc, that would pay fortunes for that …

But this doesn’t happen every day. It’s not the way things are, what we all expect to happen. Yet there’s no fuss. It’s okay. It disables an evil virus, it’s on the side of the good guys, there’s nothing out of order. It was done by the Legitimate Authorities, that’s so obvious nobody even bothers to mention it.

So, I’m asking, who are they ? Who has that power ? How often is it used ? The Symantec dossier leaves us to think, without ever quite saying so (“the passive voice was used to avoid discussion of agency”) that they did it. A private corporation ? I’d be suprised, and even more disturbed.

“surely this creates a record somewhere, of what the entry was, what it was changed to, who made the request, etc”

Well, yes. It’s a distributed system, records are updated all the time, for most of the nameservers it would have been a perfectly unremarkable transaction. The key point would be the toplevel .com nameserver, that tells the world which server is in charge of answering questions about the subdomains; that’s where the change must have entered the system. And, yes, surely they keep an audit trail. I’m guessing they won’t publish it in a hurry …

“Plus, there must have been some piece of software on those servers to handle Stuxnet’s traffic. I have seen no news about this”. No. Quite. There’s next to no info. on what conversations the spoofed servers have been having with the worm (a remark somewhere that most of the instances they’ve been talking to have Iranian addresses, I think, and that’s all). One imagines they’d be, um, “interesting”.

The theory that the originators of the virus are, perhaps, not a million miles away from the Authorities who are now spoofing these conversations, leads to some curious possibilities, as well.

Either I’ve misremembered the names, or they’ve changed again. No Dublin, now; Arizona and Florida.

Mark,

Yup, the security of ordinary people is too expensive but, as ever, WMD are supplied by the Tooth Fairy.

Do help to get the Megrahi petition going viral – people outside Scotland and the UK are eligible to sign. You can even have fun sending it to people you know it will render apopleptic (anyone got Cameron’s email?). If Labour return to power in Scotland next year there will be no chance of a review and the matter (and probably Megrahi) will be dead.

worth reading: letter posted on medialens board:

From: Jim

Sent: 08 October 2010 09:32

To: Guardian

Cc: Media Lens

Subject: ‘US accused of exaggerating terror threat’

Dear Sir,

‘US accused of exaggerating terror threat’ we learn from your front page headline (8.10.2010).Tragically the British government also vastly exaggerates the terror threat to its citizens. Since we started the ‘long war’ in Afghanistan 9 years ago 52 UK citizens have been killed by terrorists in England. In the same period tens of thousands of Afghan people have been killed. At a recent vote in the House of Commons a tiny 16 out of the 650 MPs voted to end the war. The view that government foreign policy represents the will of the British people is absurd. We can only assume this vote was the result of the vicious combination of a colonel blimpish hankering after the ‘glory days’ of empire and a craven willingness to do the bidding of the party whips. The government’s blatant contempt for the will (and intelligence) of the people is further illustrated every time Mr Fox, the Secretary of Defence, makes an utterance on our ‘independent deterrent’.

Would also add the recent ramping up of the ‘Real IRA’ terror threat over here, denied by Dublin, the designation of environmental protestors as ‘eco-terrorists’ and on.

The Lessons of Stuxnet

Stuxnet (from Symantec W32.Stuxnet Dossier – http://tinyurl.com/stuxnet-dossier) contains features such as:

(1) Self-replicates through removable drives exploiting a WINDOWS vulnerability allowing auto-execution.

[Microsoft Windows Shortcut 'LNK/PIF' Files Automatic File Execution Vulnerability]

(2)Spreads in a LAN through a vulnerability in the WINDOWS Print Spooler.

[Microsoft Windows Print Spooler Service Remote Code Execution Vulnerability]

(3) Spreads through SMB by exploitation [Microsoft WINDOWS Server Service RPC Handling Remote Code Execution Vulnerability].

(4) Copies and executes itself on a Microsoft WINDOWS network of remote computers through network shares.

(5) Copies and executes itself on remote computers running a Microsoft WinCC database server.

(6) Escalation of Microsoft WINDOWS privilege vulnerabilities that have yet to be

disclosed by Microsoft.

(7) Contains a WINDOWS rootkit that hide its binaries.

In 2005 and again in 2008 in response to coia.org.uk my computers were attacked by exploiting a vulnerability to corrupt the hive or WINDOWS registry. Without this information the operating system cannot load and an error is thrown that tells you:

WINDOWS XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

The registry information can get corrupted for instance by a disk read/write error so therefore Microsoft stores a backup copy that the loading process will use if the normal file is missing or corrupt. An ‘attack’ of this nature therefore involves deleting or corrupting two files in different locations.

So much for the ‘techie’ bit but what do these so called ‘exploits’ tell us about Microsoft WINDOWS? It has been proved that even Windows 7 can be attacked in a number of ways, two of which we DON’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT!

Therefore if you use the WINDOWS operating system your data, your information IS NOT SAFE unless you have a full backup that can be loaded back into a ‘clean’ install of the Windows operating system on a reformatted drive.

Or in two simple words – WINDOWS sucks!

Ironic, init? In the US, the military all jump up and down because Gary McKinnon ‘hacked’ into their Windows systems. In Iran, we see the following error message at a nuclear reactor:

http://www.upi.com/enl-win/b00bf188f7671cf2f939d18b1453852f/

In my opinion, the rulers of our world are mostly stark raving bonkers.

Quote of the day:

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Albert EInstein.

Isn’t nationalism just the other guy’s patriotism? The word is too often used as if interchangeable with ‘imperial expansionism’. Hitler was a nationalist. So was Gandhi, though – see the problem?

My quote of the day:

‘A Buddhist monk walked up to a hot dog vendor and said “Make me one with everything.”‘

- anon

A plague on them … sending both as Uruknet found such a chilling picture.

The Nightmare: The Iraq Invasion’s Atrocities, Unearthing the Unthinkable

by Felicity Arbuthnot

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21370

http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m70592&hd=&size=1&l=e

“In my opinion, the rulers of our world are mostly stark raving bonkers.”

Or simply avaricious and mendacious (to quote Meryl Nass), but wholly rational – they know they can get away with it. See my post at October 7, 2010 8:20 AM.

Felicity Arbuthnot: thank you.

Vronsky, I think you have to be psychopathic to *want* to get away with it.

A ‘big society’ that is not offering its subjects a fair referendum on a fair voting system, whilst banding about the fairness that is all in a sudden supposed to be within us, is not at all big, but desperate to pull the wool over our eyes once more.

I just about had enough of all this fair pounding society gets, large families, old people, the disabled, our services, whilst the tax system, in dire need of reform, is hardly mentioned.

A fair societ must be absed on fair representation and a fair vote.

They must be going soft, Orwell never used the word fair in his book.

A fair society is one where the people vote for representatives who are actually able to wield power. We have a pretend democracy where our leaders are just the executives for a secret government, which selects its potential executives for presentation skills.

“I think you have to be psychopathic to *want* to get away with it.”

I s’pose. But it’s not the pathology that scares me, it’s the rationality – I don’t have the feeling that they’re plunging headlong out of control, and their madness will be their undoing. I think that they know (or are well advised) just how far they can go without provoking uncontrollable reaction.

Recall that the construction of the welfate state here was not altruism or idealism, but a reaction to fear of socialism – the ‘spectre stalking Europe’. Bismarck explicitly understood that, and his ‘social insurance’ was copied by Churchill and the Tories: Labour, credited as authors of the welfare state, were in fact last to support the Beveridge Report’s proposals.

Today the elite have at their disposal technologies of social control, news manipulation, surveillance and suppression that Churchill and Bismarck could only dream of – they have much less need of compromise.

I have to agree with Vronsky here, the getting away is calculated. As yet the existing power systems can not contemplate radical change, regardless of how much it is needed.

Unless there is a sustainable indicator on everything we do, whether its finance, work or play, and this has clearly not been the case, their efforts will merely be a perpetuation of the same, living it up on the backs of future generations.

Give children the vote I say. If they can care for their elderly parents, dodge unsafe neighbourhoods on their way to school/shopping, and are apt enough to cope being bombarded with danger signals from an adult/predator world on a daily basis, than they can also make a choice on aspiring politicians at elections. The age is debatable, I would try 14 years with a view of lowering it further.

Such move would bring a new set of policies into the horizon of politicians, something to be considered at all times. It is long overdue imho.

Not that it will ever happen, but it does not stop us talking ’bout it. Whats your idea of a including thinking kids into this big society? or was it bog society?

“Whats your idea of a including thinking kids into this big society?”

Irrelevant. Whoever said ‘it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in’ was uttering a very profound truth. I’ve been involved in active politics for many years and it’s quite clear that our ‘representatives’ are self-selected. The party system is an immediate and severe filter – you almost certainly won’t be elected unless you’re a member of a party. It’s also worth noting that where there are ‘independent’ members, they first achieved prominence and election as members of a party – invariably the case in Scotland. If you’re not a ‘joiner’, then you’ll never be member of parliament. England occasionally elects an independent or single cause candidate – usually at a by-election, and to be discarded later.

There are other filters – the vetting processes and hustings. Ostensibly these are to identify the best candidates. Perhaps it’s accidental, but they always choose the most conformist. To cut a long story short, when you step into the polling booth all the important choices have already been made. No matter where you place your cross, it will be against the name of someone who is guaranteed not to be a problem.

Perhaps in Scotland we have a sliver of light: the SNP. But it cannot succeed in the face of a uniformly hostile media, with the result that principles begin to soften. Just now they are making common cause with the establishment parties to retain the manufacture of aircraft carriers – unmistakeably machines of power projection, not defence. To do otherwise, you see, would let the egregious Glasgow Herald and Scotsman ‘newspapers’ jump all over them for failing to defend jobs.

Whether the British ruling class is wicked or merely stupid is not the important question that Orwell claimed (and we seem to be debating now). Unfortunately for us they are wicked but not stupid. Back to my hobby horse: elections can’t work because an alias is not an option – there is merely an illusion of choice, like the GoCompare websites for insurance. We need sortition, parliaments chosen by lottery and immune to the inveiglings I’ve described. Aleatoric democracy. Aleatocracy.

If for Westminster we simply appointed 600 or so people selected at random, we would have the following statistically necessary consequences:

* On average, they would be of average intelligence. This is much better than what we have.

* On average, they would be of average morality. This is much better than what we have.

* Few or none would be on retainers from defence contractors. This is much better than what we have.

* Few or none would have attended private schools. This is much better than what we have.

* Half would be female. This is much better than what we have.

* Ethnicities would be represented at proportions close to their proportions in the population. This is much better than what we have.

* Professions and lifestyles would be represented at proportions close to their proportions in the population. This is much better than what we have.

* They would all be drawn from the society that they regulate, and they would all soon return to it. This is very considerably better than what we have.

I could go on, you can add to the list yourself. What also matters is the institutions of government from the Civil Service on down. They’re all fucked too.

I should have added:

Fewer than 2% will be members of political parties.

Non-UN-sanctioned US drone attacks have killed at least 8 people in northwest Pakistan amid reports of a surge of such US attacks on the country.

Though Washington claims the strikes target militants, most of the victims of the attacks have been civilians.

Almost a thousand Pakistanis have lost their lives in more than 100 US drone attacks during the past two years.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/10/10/pakistan.drone.attack/

Drones are quite slow in flight and my son has suggested designing an ‘attacker drone’ which might be of highly manoeuvrable helicopter design, radio controlled and use an electro-magnetic field produced from two sensors arrays, one transmitted the field and one receiving. If the field is bent by the bandit drone then this is detected by a receiver and some action is invoked from the ‘attacking’ drone to render the ‘bandit’ drone useless. Such a design would be cheap to construct using readily available parts so a ‘swarm’ of attackers would also confuse the ‘bandits’ remote control.

Vronsky – Sibel Edmonds: the darling of the right-wing whack jobs in the States and the left-wing nutcases in the UK.

At what point will you be subscribing to the American Conservative magazine?

Oh thanks god we are still important,’not so gay Larry has responded to mentioning kids and elections, what a surprise.

Tell us Larry, what makes you come back here? what morsel of information pulls your twig or rocks your flipper?

Vronsky,

lots of people will reject sortition because it’s not ‘democratic’, ie they don’t get to vote. But here’s a thought. People hate politicians. So put’em in at random, by sortition, but have a cumulative ‘Kick’em out’ vote; you can vote to have your MP replaced by lottery and it gets added to a running total. The MP gets replaced by sortition when the vote total reaches ten or twenty percent of their electorate. Adjust the percentage to get a healthy turnover. I reckon that negative voting would really appeal to people.

“have a cumulative ‘Kick’em out’”

Yes. I think the power of recall would be something that people would enjoy exercising.

I’m trying to get the idea of sortition taken seriously because that means taking ‘the problem’ seriously. I admit it would be no easier to realise than any other dream. It sounds very off-the-wall, but given that what we currently have by way of politics is unbridled criminality, isn’t it rather a moderate proposition? How else can we prevent the subversion of government by small interest groups? My answer might be wrong, but I think I’ve understood the question.

LfStL = Any comment on Felicity Arbuthnot’s moving words? Probably not.

Thank god you’re back, Larry. Only morons here, and swivel-eyed conspiraloons. And nutcases – as you say – and of course probably whack jobs, whatever they are. Wonderful to have someone of your acuity here, raising the tone. I’m working on Cherubito’s ‘Homenaje a Victor Jara’ at the moment. I’ve got to bar 26, and I have a bad feeling that there’s an E-flat there that should be E-natural. What do you think? It’s a buggered up copy I got in Barcelona (don’t worry if that doesn’t ring a bell, it isn’t in the States and it isn’t anywhere you’ve been bombing recently) a couple of summers ago – part eaten by a dog, I think, with a taste for scores in drop-G tuning. Still, would value your input, as ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en8yqVxuT-U

Check the links down the right, perhaps especially Violeta Parra. Gracias a la vida, I’m sure you’ll agree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW3IgDs-NnA

Felicity Arbuthnot – A Tribute and thoughts for the silent victims of Iraq:

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist specialising in social and environmental issues with special knowledge of Iraq, a country which she has visited thirty times since the 1991 Gulf war. Iraq, she describes as: ‘sliding from the impossible, to the apocalyptic.’

With former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Co-ordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, she was senior Iraq researcher for John Pilger©

Not 100% sure, but very possibly met Felicity at a Green Party Conference during the 1980/90/s, she gave a speech, I believe it was on some nuclear issue.

Thanks for the link somebody, a stark reminder to what Blair’s journey is really about, what should make him shudder before he goes to bed, cause him waking sweats at 5 am and make his heart work with reluctance.

‘Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index’

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/944

“Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation’s success by its productivity …”

(By the way: Costa Rica got rid of its armed forces in 1948)

The inquest on the July 7th bombing victims opens today. Will it be a whitewash in the style of those for Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson?

???http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a070705peterpower#a070705peterpower

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1iplQQJTo&feature=player_embedded

John and Lorna Norgrove are “devastated” by their daughter’s death and were joined at the weekend by their other daughter Sofie at their remote home on the Isle of Lewis.

I feel a great sense of sorrow for this family. Agent ‘yes man’ Cameron gave the go ahead for an American special forces rescue on the premise that the Americans ‘knew the terrain better than the British’ – rubbish! Her release could have been negotiated.

somebody,

Thank-you for reminding us of the 7/7 bombing inquest.

We will not learn the full truth from this inquest and burning questions will not be answered. Lady Justice Hallett pledged to “balance carefully the needs of national security with relevance and fairness”. That means the inquest will be bogged down with aftermath events such as the time taken for rescue services to act. We note there will be no assistance from the Security Services.

Dame Heather Hallett, 58, is being tipped as a future Chief Justice…

Of course this will be dependent on a nice clean white-wash of the events leading up to 7/7 and the MI6 CONNECTION TO THE SO CALLED ‘MASTERMIND!’

“US grenade may have killed British aid worker Linda Norgrove”

It had initially been reported that the 36-year-old died after her kidnappers detonated a bomb vest as American troops tried to free her.

Now it appears she may have been killed by a grenade thrown by US special forces. Six kidnappers also died in the mission.

The Foreign Secretary is to make a statement on her death at 3.30pm today in the Commons

“It had initially been reported”

Put out the ‘bomb vest’ story and then wait to see if you’re found out. Bastards.

The BBC can’t bear to say she was killed by the US goons. Their headline is ‘Hostage may have been killed by rescuers’ with a cosy piece about Cameroon phoning her family. That’s all they needed.

The Beeb also have the Banksy Simpsons intro with some explanations about the sequences. Quite a bitter commentary on our dependence on the third world for cheap goods.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11510513

In the town where I live, Primark have just opened a big store which was C&A originally and then BHS. Also TK Maxx have just opened in what was Woolworths. I will not be entering either establishment to buy clothes made in sweatshops.

That’s so terribly sad. It seems to me that they might have tried to negotiate her release – we don’t know the facts yet, obviously. It’s emblematic of this whole dreaful morass.

Cary Grant, Acid Head.

http://www.psymon.com/psychedelia/images/carygrant.html

Sorry, that was meant for the other thread.

Did you see the Panorama tonight on the cephalopod-like Lord Ashcroft – the tentacles reach from Belize and the Turks and Caicos Islands to Westminster and Hague? The most tragic case was about the most ghastly abortion of a resort hotel and marina, built within a national park and which is now derelict and in receivership with many local firms left high and dry for their money. Banks, telecommunications, charitable trusts and on and on. The British police will have their work cut out as they investigate his dealings.

Wonder why it is not on the iPlayer!? Next on News Channel at 04.30 Thursday. How convenient.

aa

Lord Ashcroft’s Millions

Watch:Availability:

Sorry, this programme is not available to watch again. (why?)

Last broadcast today, 20:30 on BBC One (see all broadcasts).

Next on:

Thursday, 04:30 on BBC News Channel

Synopsis

Lord Ashcroft, the biggest political donor since records began, is resigning as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. His millions bank-rolled David

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vcch5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ashcroft,_Baron_Ashcroft

….

His millions bank-rolled David Cameron’s election campaign, but where does Lord Ashcroft’s money come from?

Credits

Presenter Jeremy Vine

Broadcasts

Mon 11 Oct 2010 20:30

BBC One Thu 14 Oct 20100 4:30

BBC News Channel Fri 15 Oct 2010 00:25

BBC One (except Northern Ireland, Wales)Sat 16 Oct 20100 1:05

BBC One (Northern Ireland only)Sun 17 Oct 2010 20:30BBC News Channel

Private Eye reported that episode of Panorama was in long disputes and the subjects of holds and blocking orders by Ashcroft’s lawyers.

*

I’m surprised that the Americans didn’t also shoot the hostage a good few times after blowing her up, just to be sure. Can’t take chances, after all.

Makes one ponder on how the regard they gave to Afghan civilians, when they happen to have the misfortune of being in the vicinity of some Really Bad Person that needs to be “taken out”.

On Columbus Day

———————

Quote of the day: From Christopher Columbus in a 1503 letter to the King and Queen of Spain -

“Gold is most excellent, gold constitutes treasure, and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to paradise.”

In 1493 he also wrote to the Spanish monarchs, “It is possible in the name of the Holy Trinity to sell all the slaves [here, Haiti] which it is possible to sell. Here there are so many of these slaves [to offer], and also Brazil would… although they are living things they are as good as gold!”

When C. Columbus first arrived, one of his men Miguel Cuneo (a diarist of the crew) said that when the Spanish ships were to leave for Spain, they would gather 1600 males and females of the ‘Indians’, “and these we embarked on our [ships] on Feb 17th 1495. For those Spaniards who remained we let it be known that anyone who wanted to take any of these slave could do so, and the amount they desired was done.”

Columbus’ right hand man, Cuneo, further notes that he takes a beautiful teenage Carib girl as his personal slave, as a gift from Columbus himself. But when he tried to have sex with her, quoting the author, “she resisted with all her strength.” And in his own words, he “Thrashed her mercilessly and raped her.” He bragged about such exploits at length.

Sex-slaves were presented as rewards for the recipients to rape. The sex-slave trade business became the most important part of Columbus’ operation, there being no gold in Hispaniola. Columbus himself in 1500 wrote to a friend, “100 Castinalos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go out looking for girls. Those from nine to ten years old are now in the greatest demand.”

It went on. Many of these people opted for mass suicide, even hundreds at a time, rather than submit. Even the most cruel of punishments imaginable, from impaling to burning, being set on by dogs, shot, and ears and noses removed for even minor offences, did not deter their resisting, but the beset people took to killing even their newborn and aborting, rather than suffer endlessly. The population of Hispanolia (Haiti/ Dominion Republic) was, at the time of Columbus’ arrival, about 1.5 – 3 million people, estimated by scholars. By 1496, it was down to 1.1 million accord to a census carried out by Bartholomew Columbus (C.Columbus’ brother). By 1516, it was 12,000. By 1542, fewer than 200 natives were alive. 1555, ever single one was dead.

”

*

Somehow, while they’re busy honouring this brave founder during “Columbus Day” in the US, I doubt if they’ll be mentioning very much about this true history, and how the nation was founded in genocide. Such as it began, it continues even now.

Here is one of many emails I receive from Iraq:

“I am writing to you because my two year old is in need of desperate help, three months ago he was run over and was left in critical condition, the car’s tire ran over his head leaving him with 5 skull fractures, his ear hanging off, the skin on his right arm was completely peeled away. the right side of his face has dropped, and now doctors here are telling me that his left eye will need to be taken out, for the past three months his pupil has not moved, the tears in his eyes are drying, his eye has been sawn shut but had to be reopened because it swelled up and infected and his 7th and 6th nerve has frozen. I am writing to you from Iraq, Basrah and because of the conditions here we don’t have the right doctors or tools to treat his eye and because of the bombings sometimes we can’t even get to a doctor in fact we were caught in the bombings last month on the way. please, please help I don’t know what to do or were to go, I just want some advice from someone that understands.

Zahra

Iraq, Basrah

If anyone can help me with this case I would be very grateful. Here is the address of Zahra:

Basrah

Elle moofteya street

Infront of: company moo ta jat elle naftee yeah (opdc. G.co. south distribution)

We are a mosque called , sadia Albatat. house 112

Number 07604006247

?????? ???? ??????? / ????? ???? ????? ???????? ??????? / ????? ??????

?????? ?????? ??????

07801433232/

07604006247

“The extended sequence was apparently inspired by reports the show outsources the bulk of their animation to a company in South Korea.”

Eh? Sweatshops in South Korea? It’s got a better standard of living than the UK!

Now, Disney, on the other hand does outsource some of its “tweens” to North Korea. I’ve heard that the Lion King was largely made there.

Take a good look at this man, remember his face.

http://www.coia.org.uk/ben_ari.jpg

His name is Ben Ari, a former member of the terrorist ‘Kach’ party, now banned for inciting racism.

Ari’s ideology is advocating a Jewish state in accordance with the Hebrew Bible. He campaigned the idea of paying Arabs $40,000 to voluntarily leave, and expel those who refused. He argued for the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and also wanted Israel to conquer and annex certain parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq which used to be territories and client states of the Israelite kingdoms. He also was opposed to Israel as a Western Democracy, and wanted to transform it into a more religious state.

During a meeting of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) Committee for Rights of the Child on Monday, Ari was reported by the Jerusalem Post to have said that…

children throwing stones at Israeli soldiers/security should be shot.

jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?ID=190959&R=R1

In his latest outburst, he called all Britons, “dogs” after a decision to expel an Israeli senior diplomat after it was disclosed British passports were forged to assist Israeli terrorists or Mossad operatives.

Ari said, “The British may be dogs, but they are not loyal to us, but rather to an anti-Semitic system, and Israeli diplomacy partially plays into their hands. This is anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism”.

I am waiting for Agent Cameron to apologise to Netanyahu if he has not already done so!!

jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=171628

Mark, i stared at that letter for about hour late last night, wondering how to respond. I am ashamed to say my own financial means to contribute are extremely limited at the moment.

Such a tragedy requires love and material support…

I visted the COIA site again, it has a right to exist, the graphics are so disturbing it overloads the senses. Such rare character is required to work with that material. The site could do with a ‘safe’ page where observers and other victims can project beyond the horror, vital recuperative energy. No one can operate in the depths of the pit.

“Take a good look at this man, remember his face.”

I can’t be bothered clicking your link but if you say he is a member of Kach then he is basically an extremist similar to those of the Jewish Defence League. He’s of the same ideology as Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein and therefore a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer. Good on you for finally accepting that such a designation, “terrorist”, actually exists. With any luck you’ll soon be recognizing Hamas and Hizbollah of the same. Ben Ari, after all is banned from entering the US as he and his organization, Kach (as well as similar organizations) are banned in the US. In fact, the JDL is banned in Israel as is, I think, Kach.

“I am waiting for Agent Cameron to apologise to Netanyahu if he has not already done so!!”

Agent Cameron?

Angrysoba,

personally, I cannot designate Hamas as simply “terrorist”, it seems more complex than that: (1) they’re elected, (2) they are a political entity and (3) they have civil projects. I believe the situation is similar for Hizbollah, also. Yes, I know about the Hamas Charter, I do not condone it, but considering the Gazan’s longstanding circumstances, just how peaceful a response can be reasonably expected?

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/12/the_continuing_1.html

“just how peaceful a response can be reasonably expected?”

I think they should send polite letters to the Knesset. It’s only a little over forty years after all.

WATCH TO SHOOT AN ELEPAHNT

the humanity of the Gazan ambulance crews, it has to be seen.

Me, if I lived there, I would be welcoming the Israeli soldiers with cups of tea. Just to fuck happily with their heads a little. But now they’re dropping white phosphorous from miles away… I agree, polite letters to the Knesset. Must be worth a try.

Jesus, and there’s grief everywhere. Here, in the UK, travellers – grandmothers, babies – are about to be forcibly evicted from their own land by a notoriously violent firm of bailiffs and a council (Basildon) whose leader has made it personal. The eviction can happen at any time, day or night, and these people – mothers, children babies – will have *nowhere* to go. But who gives a toss, eh?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Farm

It was announced recently that Mordechai Vanunu is to receive the Carl Von Ossietzky medal 2010 on December 12th 2010 in Berlin.

German journalist Ossietzky won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 for speaking out against the Nazi Party.

In an acknowlegement speech Mordechai said, “today Oct. 5 is a historic day in my life and for whistleblowers world wide. On this day in 1986, I fulfilled my mission that I took on myself to inform all the world- not governments nor spies organization- but every human being who can read about Israel’s nuclear weapon arsenal as it was published by the Sunday Times, which put Mordechai Vanunu’s story on its front page under the headline: “Revealed — the secrets of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.”

For this I was sentenced to 18 years prison in Israel, 12 of them in isolation, and after the release 6 more years without freedom of speech and freedom of movements in Israel. I was following the spirit of Ossietztky without even knowing or having read about him. This proves that we, the people, have the same mind, same spirit, same beliefs in human rights and freedom and fight for the rights of the people everywhere. The first step is to give the people the information and let them chose the right direction.

Ossietzky did not survive the brutality of prison. I survived, and I am ready to continue to speak on behalf of all the whistleblowers. Knowledge is the power of every human being.

I hope Israel will now end all my suffering 18 years in prison and 6 more years of restrictions not to travel, so I can travel all over the world.

I want to thank International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) for the courage to give me the Von Ossietztky medal even if I receive it after 24 years. I hope this time I will be free to come to Berlin and speak also on behalf of Ossietztky in the city.

All the best,Thank You.” VMJC

FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW.

VANUNU MORDECHAI John Crossman.

KIDNAPPED IN ROME SEP’ 30 TH’-1986.

18 YEARS IN ISRAEL PRISON.OUT IN APR’-21-2004.

6 YEAR Waiting In East Jerusalem. AUG’ 2010 waiting in Tel Aviv-To Be Free,To Leave youtube.com/user/vanunuvmjc?feature=mhum

http:/www.vanunu.com

In awarding Mordechai Vanunu, the International League for Human Rights would like to draw international attention to the fact that he is still being held prisoner in Israel, deprived of elementary civil and human rights, although he has already served his prison sentence in full, and regardless of the fact that his information is now a quarter of a century old.

Likewise, 65 years after the first atomic bombs were dropped by the USA on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vanunu’s reminder of the dangers posed by nuclear weapons of mass destruction, for man and nature, should be strengthened, and his relentless efforts towards their worldwide abolition given continued support.

My thanks to OpEd Press for carrying this story while other media refused including the BBC – pathetic bastards!

@ Glenn,

Could not agree with you more.

Try Elizabeth 1 and John Hawkins on for size when next you are in search of partners in crimes against humanity.

But, all we hear is the glorification of “Empire” – not the truth.

Courtenay: Thank you, but I did forget to attribute that summary. It’s a very much boiled down chapter from Thom Hartmann’s rather excellent book, “Last hours of ancient sunlight”.

An interesting and novel concept, he argues that we’re harvesting ancient sunlight at such a rapid pace, we’re using up millions of years of it in just decades. That ancient sunlight provided the energy for the trees and other carbon based organisms that provided the oil we use today. Each day, we burn up the oil produced by many, many years of sunlight harvested in ancient times.

When we’ve used it all (and peak oil is considered to be passed, a mere century into our significant usage of it), we will have to again rely on sunlight at the rate it’s provided, instead of millions of times that rate as we do right now.

That will be quite a significant shift! So we should start preparing, given that what remains will have to make do for the indefinite future, instead of the 50-100 year future which is all we seem to care about. Damn, this is a selfish period we live in.

@Mark,

When you consider Vanunu’s pligh he is truly deserving of an international peace prize – but – guess what? It’s a secret now. Promise not to tell? O.K. – good. Henry Kissinger got one.

This blog has officially reopened

Praise be Craig. Glad you are OK. We have all been concerned.

Courtney,

Yeh so did Obama for doing nothing?

While America praises the safe return of trapped miners in Chile, we remember ‘Operation Condor’ when Kissinger was chairman of the committee overseeing US covert operations, an early example of ‘death squads’ in which a French judge requested Kissinger to explain the deaths of French citizens during the rule of General Pinochet. His refusal tells me Kissinger has much to hide.

Courtenay: Thank you, but I did forget to attribute that summary. It’s a very much boiled down chapter from Thom Hartmann’s rather excellent book, “Last hours of ancient sunlight”.

Wait a minute, Oyun-Oyna – I could have sworn I’d written something along very similar lines myself!