Outspoken Poet's Blog

By Naomi Wolf

Hearings are underway in the US Senate to assess what to do with the 240 detainees still behind bars at Guantanamo Bay, and what will become of the military tribunals and detention without trial that the administration of former US president George W. Bush and a compliant Congress put into place. The US Congress is also debating what will happen to the detention camp itself, which was established in 2002 to house men who were allegedly “the worst of the worst,” in a setting deliberately framed by Bush attorneys as “legal outer space.”
But are those Senate hearings actually window dressing on a new reality that is just as bad as the old one — and in some ways worse?

Military tribunals without due process are up and running again. While US President Barack Obama has released a few prisoners, notably Chinese Uighurs, and sent another for a real trial in New York City, he is now, chillingly, signaling that he is about to begin “preventive detention”(incarciration for crimes that suspects are yet to comit), which would empower him to hold forever an unspecified number of prisoners without charges or trials.

On a visit to Guantanamo, Department of Defense spokesman Joe DellaVedova told me that a series of panels were reviewing the detainees’ files, a process that will take until the end of this year. The review will sort the detainees into three categories: those who will be tried in criminal courts in the US; those who will be released and sent to other countries; and those who “can’t be released and can’t be tried and so have to be held indefinitely … what is being called ‘preventive detention.’”I was stunned. DellaVedova’s comment suggested that the review process was merely political theater. If there is to be a genuine review of the accusations against these detainees, how can it be known in advance that the third category will be required? Indefinite preventive detention is, of course, the foundation of a police state.Human rights organizations knew that Obama had prepared the way, in public-relations terms, for some criminal trials — talking up the “supermax” security of some US prisons, and noting that other terrorists have successfully been tried by the US’ justice system. (Other democracies, such as the UK and Spain, always try terrorism suspects, including alleged al-Qaeda members, in ordinary criminal trials.)

But, six months after he ordered an end to torture and CIA “black sites,” and promised to close Guantanamo within a year, Obama seems to be re-branding Bush’s worst excesses.He has brought in planeloads of journalists to Guantanamo Bay to show them a “safe, transparent and humane” facility that now offers fresh baklava and video viewing from a shackled loveseat.But the roughly 240 detainees remain incarcerated without having been charged with any crime, and will still not get a fair trial, even under Obama’s proposed military commissions. After all, the prosecutor, the judge and the “panel” are all to be US government employees.Furthermore, Obama’s Justice Department has invoked Bush’s argument that the State Secrets Act bars evidence about torture from being disclosed, which means that anyone who was tortured can never appear in court. Moreover, Obama has sought to suppress hundreds of photographs depicting sexual assault in US-run prisons, and has done nothing to roll back the Patriot Act.

Why should Obama, who has carefully studied the Constitution, be backtracking this way?First, he does not dare appear to be “soft on terror.” Second, perhaps he needs to be able to try the Guantanamo detainees in a rigged setting, or even keep them from trial forever: Lawyers claim that torture, including sexual torture, was so endemic in the CIA and the military that Obama could be holding scores, if not hundreds, of prisoners whose bodies are crime scenes.

Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents some of the detainees, said the Obama administration cannot risk calling the torture practices crimes, so it calls them “classified sources and methods” that cannot be revealed in court.
“I can’t even tell you about the way my clients were tortured or I will be prosecuted,” he says.
In fact, even the explanation of why this material is classified cannot be reproduced, because the explanation itself is privileged.Nor has the access of lawyers to their Guantanamo clients improved under Obama. “We are subject in all detainee cases to a protective order,” Dixon says.

“Under this order, everything the detainee says is classified,” unless the Department of Defense “Privilege Team” decides otherwise, he says.

Dixon then told me a revealing story of one of his clients, Majid Khan, a so-called “high-value detainee” who was held for three years in CIA “black sites.” Khan was tortured, Dixon said, though “the government would say that what happened to him is an ‘intelligence source or method.’”Because Dixon has a security clearance, he cannot discuss those classified “sources and methods.”On the other hand, Dixon continued: “When the government does something to [Khan] that they say is classified, they have disclosed to him classified information. But since he doesn’t have a security clearance, there is nothing that prevents him, unlike me, from saying to the outside world: ‘This is what they did to me.’ Nothing prevents that — except for the fact that he is physically in custody.”’

The “logical conclusion,” Dixon says, is that Khan “must be detained for the rest of his life — regardless of whether he is ever charged with a crime — because if he was ever released, nothing would prevent him from disclosing this information.

Majid Khan — and there are many more like him — is a classic product of the Bush administration’s disregard for the fundamental principles of the rule of law. Unfortunately, Obama’s administration, for all its lofty rhetoric, appears too willing to perpetuate it.

COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE

Daily Telegraph
By James Slack
Last updated at 8:44 AM on 21st October 2009

An astonishing £380 a minute will be spent on surveillance in a massive expansion of the Big Brother state.The £200million-a-year sum will give officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen - on top of the email and telephone records already available.

It is a 1,700 per cent increase on the cost of the current surveillance regime.

Last night LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne described the sum as 'eye-watering'."There is already enough concern at the level of Government snooping,' he said.The increase in money spent on tapping phones and emails is all the more baffling when Britain is still one of the few countries not to allow intercept evidence in court, even in terrorist cases.'

State bodies including councils are already making one request every minute to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public.The number of snooping missions carried out by police, town halls and other government departments has rocketed by 44 per cent in two years to a rate of 1,381 new cases every day.

Ministers say the five-year cost of the existing regime is £55.61million, an average of £11million a year.

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Open up your eyes,realise those lies!

I didn't have a blog back then, so I post it now.

In A Secret Paris Cavern,
The Real Underground Cinema

By Jon Henley in Paris
The Guardian - UK
9-8-4

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries. "We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said. "There were two swastikas painted on the ceiling, but also celtic crosses and several stars of David, so we don't think it's extremists. Some sect or secret society, maybe. There are any number of possibilities." Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access. Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said. Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs". There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said. "The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there." Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us." The miles of tunnels and catacombs underlying Paris are essentially former quarries, dating from Roman times, from which much of the stone was dug to build the city. Today, visitors can take guided tours around a tightly restricted section, Les Catacombes, where the remains of up to six million Parisians were transferred from overcrowded cemeteries in the late 1700s. But since 1955, for security reasons, it has been an offence to "penetrate into or circulate within" the rest of the network. There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics. The recent discovery of three newly enlarged tunnels underneath the capital's high-security La SantÈ prison was put down to the activities of one such group, and another, identifying itself as the Perforating Mexicans, last night told French radio the subterranean cinema was its work. Patrick Alk, a photographer who has published a book on the urban underground exploration movement and claims to be close to the group, told RTL radio the cavern's discovery was "a shame, but not the end of the world". There were "a dozen more where that one came from," he said. "You guys have no idea what's down there." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Unknown to most of the world and even to most car fans, a small English auto-company called Lister, by the surname of its founder, Lister Cars Ltd. Produced one of the most-outstanding pieces of auto art-work only to see it’s creations’ premature end. In this article I want to present to you the Lister Storm and its story.

Originally Lister started out tuning Jaguars such as the JSX. The common upgrade was a displacement increase on the V12 from 5.3 to a full 7 litres. In 1991 the company wanted to move up the evolution chain and create there own super car. After 2 years in development the Lister Storm was unveiled in 1993. With its slick yet sharp design and massive looks the Lister Storm was the centre of attention. A four-seated bullet, holding in itself a luxury interior, with extras such as letter, air conditioning and 2 air bags it was way ahead of other super sport coupes, striving to cater to all the needs of the affluent lovers of speed. The car was equipped with a 7.0 Litre V12 engine capable of producing 546 hp. Weighing at 1,664 kg it took the 0-100 km sprint in 4.1 sec. only to reach its limit at 335 km/h making it the fastest four-seated vehicle at the time - a title it held until very recently. It seemed like Lister had the perfect weapon to enter the elite world of GT sports cars as well as GT racing.

Four months had now passed since the car was unveiled and only 4 orders have been made. Over the next years those were produced but it was announced that in the future Lister will focus solely on GT racing and develop the racing versions of the storm , effectively putting an end to the road version’s production. And from the stand point of time it is now clear that this was a result of bad PR and the inactivity on Lister’s part to ensure maximum exposure to the car as in the years to come it popularity would only rise. By today the Lister Storm has a classical status among collectors and friends. With only 4 vehicles produced, only 2 are currently “on the market” as one is in the Lister museum and another one had simply disappeared from sight.

The Lister Storm did not die in 1993 though. The company focused on their programme in GT racing and through the years produced the very successful GTS, GTL and GT version with the works team even claiming the FIA GT World Championship title in 2000 with a factory programme run by Labre Competition and the impeccable Jamie Campbell-Walter behind the wheel alongside Julian Baily. More on the Lister Storm in sports coming soon.

This is a review of an album you almost never got to hear.

In 2001, riding off the success of the 1999 single "Vibrant Thing" and subsequent album Amplified, former A Tribe Called Quest member Q-Tip began work on his followup, a jazz-influenced album in the style of Miles Davis.

Initially Reid supported the album, but upon hearing the work, believed it lacked commercial appeal and droped the release. In 2006, Q-Tip began negotiations with Arista to release control of the album to him. Meanwhile, he began work on another album, The Renaissance, eventually released on Universal Motown in 2008. Due to The Renaissance's success, Q-Tip finally decided to release the long-delayed, now fully remixed and remastered Kamaal the Abstract on Battery Records. So does this album live up to the hype?

In a word, yes.The Album is a piece of art.

From the opening chord of the first track, "Feelin'," Q-Tip announces that Kamaal the Abstract will not be a typical hip hop album. Scatting over a scratchy guitar riff and funky organ solo, the song melds rock, jazz, and rap into an irresistible mix. In a further nod to musical originality, one of the backup singers on the track is none other than Aisha Morris, daughter of legend Stevie Wonder. Feedback of various sorts accents Q-Tip's vocals — yes, he sings on multiple tracks, and does so extremely well.

Many of Kamaal the Abstract's tracks feature extended jazz solos, such as the flute breaks on "Do You Dig U" and keyboard runs on "A Million Times." Another standout track, "Heels" recalls Prince's funkiest songs, yet transitions into jazzy chord changes in the chorus. The driving guitar and bass relentlessly thump as the piano softens the tone in the chorus. In addition, the song showcases Q-Tip's considerable MC skills and songwriting talent — only he could use a shoe metaphor to comment on a lady's character. "Abstractionisms" lives up to its title, with Q-Tip spitting his particular brand of funky yet smart hip-hop poetry from his tribe days.

"Even If It Is So" also brings on the funk, but the complicated bass line (which Q-Tip mimics in his rapid fire rapping style) and trumpet solo reveals more jazz leanings. His scatting emphasizes the thumping bass, which defies the listener to sit still while hearing this track. "Make It Work" even provides commentary on Kamaal the Abstract's theme, that he's "introducing to you a brand new sound," which is certainly the case with this ambitious album.

Only "Caring" is the somewhat weak track on the album, including surprisingly clichéd lyrics and limited vocal ability on Q-Tip's part. His voice better suits up tempo funk and rock tracks.

It should be noted that Kamaal the Abstract is not the first rap work to flirt with jazz. The early 90s spawned two such fusions: "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)" by Us3, and "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" by Digable Planets. Q-Tip builds on these initial experiments and forges a new, sophisticated blend of hip hop, rock, funk, and jazz. While Kamaal the Abstract may have seemed avant-garde back in 2001, it deserves more appreciation in today's music landscape. Run, don't walk to pick up Q-Tip's latest masterpiece.It shall only thrive in value as time goes by.

(c) OutSpoken Poet

The Nerd Who Saw Too Much

The Guardian - UK
7-15-5

Terrified Gary McKinnon says his forays into secret Pentagon networks were never politically motivated.

A computer geek faces 70 years in jail for hacking into the top levels of US defence. He tells Jon Ronson how, hooked and stoned, he landed himself in such hot water.

In 1983, when Gary McKinnon was 17, he went to see the movie WarGames. In the film, a geeky computer whiz-kid hacks into a secret Pentagon network and, inadvertently, almost instigates World War III. Sitting in the cinema, the teenage McKinnon wondered if he, too, could be a hacker. "Really," I say to him now, "WarGames should have put you off hacking for life."

"Well," he replies, "I didn't mean it to actually come true."

Last month he attended extradition proceedings at Bow Street Magistrates Court in London. He had, the US prosecutors said, perpetrated the "biggest military computer hack of all time". He "caused damage and impaired the integrity of information. The US military district of Washington became inoperable and the cost of repairing the shutdown was $700,000 US." These hacking attacks occurred immediately after September 11, 2001, they said.

This is McKinnon's first interview. He called me out of the blue last week, just as I was screaming at my child to stop knocking on people's doors and running away.

The sentence the US Justice Department is seeking - should McKinnon be extradited - is up to 70 years. What McKinnon was hunting for, as he snooped around NASA, and the Pentagon's network, was evidence of a UFO cover-up.

McKINNON was born in Glasgow in 1966. His parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, a bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk," McKinnon says, "and just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which is the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream that he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told me this and it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great science-fiction reader. So, him being my second father, I started reading science-fiction, too, and doing everything he did."

Then he saw WarGames, and he thought: "Can you really do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995, he gave it a try.

He sat in his girlfriend, Tamsin's, aunt's house in Crouch End, and he began to hack. McKinnon was looking for - and found time and again - network administrators in high levels of the US government and military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves passwords. That's how he got in.

He did a few trial runs, hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to places where I really shouldn't be."

"Like where?" I ask.

"The US Space Command," he says.

And so, for the next seven years, on and off, McKinnon sat in that aunt's house, a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's next to the mouse pad, and he snooped. From time to time, some NASA scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason. On those occasions, McKinnon's connection would be cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned McKinnon.

When I ask if he is brilliant, he says no. He's just an ordinary, self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone. "Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat - Network Status - and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand."

"All on at once?" I ask. "You could see hackers from all over the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks or the military realising?"

"What was the most exciting thing you saw?"

"I found a list of officers' names," he says, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."

"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.

"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe."

"What were the ship names?"

"I can't remember,"

Did you find anything in your search for evidence of UFOs?

Certainly did. There is The Disclosure Project. This is a book with 400 testimonials from everyone from air traffic controllers to those responsible for launching nuclear missiles. Very credible witnesses. They talk about reverse-(engineered) technology taken from captured or destroyed alien craft.A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files.

This was November 2000. By now, McKinnon was hooked. He quit his job as a systems administrator for a small business, "which hugely pissed off my girlfriend, Tamsin".

"It was the last straw," he says. "She dumped me and started seeing this other bloke because I was such a selfish waste of space. Poor Tamsin.

So, while Tamsin was trying to get on with her new relationship, McKinnon was in the living room of her aunt's house, hacking. He snooped around all the forts - Fort Meade, Fort Benning, and others - reading internal court-martial reports of soldiers getting imprisoned for rape and murder and drug abuse.

"You end up lusting after more and more complex security measures," he says. "It was like a game. I loved computer games. I still do. It was like a real game. It was addictive. Hugely addictive." It was never really politically motivated.

Yes, he was hacking immediately after September 11, 2001, but only because he wanted to see if there was a conspiracy. "Why did the building fall like a controlled series of explosions?" he asks. "I hate conspiracy theories, so I thought I'd find out for myself."

He strenuously denies the Justice Department's charge that he caused the "US military district of Washington" to become "inoperable". Well, once, he admits - but only once - he inadvertently pressed the wrong button and may have deleted some government files.

"I thought, 'Ooh, bloody hell.' And that's when I stopped for a while. And then my friend told me about DARPA. And so I started again."

DARPA is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, an intriguing collection of brilliant military scientists, funded by the Pentagon. DARPA has been widely credited with inventing, among other things, the internet, the global positioning system, the computer mouse, and - somewhat more boneheadedly - FutureMAP, an online futures market designed to predict assassinations and bombings by encouraging investor speculation in such crimes. The US Senate once described FutureMAP as "an unbelievably stupid idea". DARPA has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists because it is semi-secretive, bizarre and occupies that murky world that lies between science and war.

McKinnon was caught in November 2002. He says it was inevitable because he was "getting a bit sloppy". He pauses. "I'd never have envisaged this happening to myself, but I did get a bit megalomaniacal, as well. It got a bit silly. I ended up talking to people I hacked into - I'd instant-message them, using WordPad, with a bit of a political diatribe. You know, I'd leave a message on their desktop that read, 'Secret government is blah blah blah."'

McKinnon was tracked down because he'd used his email address to download a hacking program called Remotely Anywhere. "God knows why I used my real email address," he says. "I suppose it means I'm not a secretive, sophisticated checking myself every-step-of-the-way type of hacker."

On the night before his arrest, McKinnon had been up playing games. "Maybe I'd been doing a bit of weak, fun hacking, too," he says. "I'd had one hour's sleep, and I woke up completely muddled, and suddenly at the bottom of my bed there was this voice: 'Hello, my name's Jeff Donson from the National High Tech Crime Unit. Gary McKinnon, you're under arrest.'

"They put Tamsin and me in the meat wagon. They took my PC, Tamsin's PC, three other computers I was fixing for friends. They went upstairs and took my girlfriend's aunty's daughter's computer."

McKinnon was kept in a police station overnight. Then the Americans offered him a deal, via his British solicitor. "They said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a good boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years, rather than the whole sentence.'"I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said, 'Oh, no, we can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right of appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in writing. My solicitor, doing her job, advised me to take it, and when I said no, she was very 'Ooh, they're going to come down heavy'."In return, McKinnon offered a somewhat harebrained counter deal, via a Virginia public defender. "I made a sort of veiled threat to them. I said, 'You know the places I've been, so you know the stuff I've seen,

"You know, the, uh, Non-Terrestrial Officers. The spaceships. 'The whole world thinks it's co-operating in building the International Space Station, but you've already got a space-based army that you refer to as Non-Terrestrial Officers."' There is a silence. "I had very little evidence. It's not a very good bargaining chip at all, really, is it?"

Nothing much happened in the years since his arrest in 2002 under the Computer Misuse Act - no charges were brought against him in Britain. Then, on June 8, he found himself in front of Bow Street magistrates, the target of extradition proceedings. That's when the panic attacks kicked in again, the horror visions of life in a US jail. He had poked around, he says, but he hadn't broken anything, besides that one mistake. He thought he was going to get a year, max. Now they're talking about 70 years.On 31 July 2009, McKinnon lost his application for judicial review of the Home Secretary's decision not to block the extradition, and also of the Director Of Public Prosecutions ' decision not to bring proceedings in the English courts.

The Guardian :
"Computer hacker Gary McKinnon lost his long battle to stand trial in the UK today(9 Oct 2009) when he was refused permission to appeal to the supreme court against extradition to the US on charges of breaking into the Pentagon's military networks.The court decided the case did not raise "points of law of general public importance", which are neccessary if a case is to be pursued at the higher level."

Edit (c) Outspoken Poet

I don't remember you,you faid away somehow.
I still feel touching you,so why is it that now,
whatever I do,whatever I say,I know deep down inside.
I'll forever be lonely.
But what could I do,what could I have said.
Now that you shadow's erased,I can't just stay.
I will never be anything other than lonely.

You don't remember me,I've faded from your mind.
I couldn't be all that wonder for what is loosing cover.
Can I feel what I felt,but not harm what I find?
After you,I'll forever be lonely and I
wonder what I could have made,
wonder where my image fades.
No need for another though,I'm lonely
Without you,I'm lonely,without you.
Ain't no day like the one before,I'm burning,without you,
I'm burning,efervescent,without you.