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Three unrelated items--or are they?

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The article "Qwest CEO's 'classified defense' raises question on NSA surveillance" at
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Qwest_CEOs_classified_defense_raises_question_1012.html
states "A former CEO who stood up to the Bush administration's demands that he assist in the warrantless surveillance of Americans suggests in court documents that the National Security Agency withdrew a lucrative contract in retaliation for his refusal.
Documents released as part of Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio's insider trading trail also seem to indicate that the NSA was discussing the secretive, possibly illegal, surveillance of Americans several months before the 9/11 attacks President Bush used to justify the program.
The heavily redacted legal filings reveal the "classified defense" Nacchio was unable to present during his trial, and they outline a Feb. 27, 2001, meeting between the Qwest CEO and NSA officials to discuss a $100 million infrastructure project, and another topic. Discussion of the second topic was blacked-out in released court documents, but observers believe the NSA could've been discussing its program to compile a database of tens of millions of Americans' phone records....
Nacchio is appealing his conviction on 19 accounts of insider trading for $52 million of stock sales in April and May 2001. He was sentenced last spring to six years in prison, but he is free pending appeal. Prosecutors argued that the CEO did not warn investors before he sold his stock that Qwest was unlikely to meet its revenue goals, but his defense team argued that he acted in good faith with investors because he expected that the secret contracts would come through.
Although the redacted documents do not say what the program was, several mentions are made to Nacchio's belief that the NSA's proposal was inappropriate and illegal, the Rocky Mountain News reports. Prosecutors said the classified defense "would have been proven false," according to the paper.
USA Today revealed last year that Qwest was the only phone company not to comply with the NSA's request to compile phone records into a massive computer database, which it said was instituted only after 9/11. Attorney Herbert J. Stern said at the time that Nacchio had asked the NSA whether "a warrant or other legal process had been secured." Stern said Nacchio learned there was a "disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process" and concluded that "the requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

That's one civil right W is willing to steal from you. Any others?

The article "Author Naomi Klein: America is succumbing to fascism" at
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Naomi_Klein_explains_how_we_willingly_1013.html
discusses an interview between Bill Maher and Naomi Klein which reminds us that W is getting kickbacks come CEOs who profit by dismantling our civil rights and doing the scutwork after "Shock and Awe" as "Her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.... which shares a sentiment that, while corporations are engineered to profit off of situations, planned or otherwise, the United States under President Bush has corporations opportunistically poised to collect taxpayer-funded payouts from disasters such as 9/11, Katrina and the Iraq occupation.
Calling it the "mission statement of the Bush administration," Klein says that politicians are seeing themselves as facilitators between disasters and their friends in the private sector. Each time there's a disaster, says Klein, politicians use the "shock" felt by the citizenry to "push through a further privatization agenda" with little opposition.
"In New Orleans," continues Klein, "it's the privatization of the school system, the public housing. After September 11th, it was the launching of a new economy in privatized homeland security, and in Iraq it's the Blackwater economy--The worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized--and profitable--this war becomes.
So it's not about the corporations taking advantage; we expect corporations to do that. It's about the politicians who think the government should be an ATM machine and just transfer wealth to their friends in exchange for a deposit in the form of campaign contributions."
"But you're talking about our government and corporations as if they're two different things," quips Maher. "Now, we all know that communism is when the government takes over private business. But, when corporations take over the government, that is what has been defined as fascism.
Do you think that's where we're at?"
Klein agrees, adding: "You could call it crony capitalism, you could call it corporatism; but it certainly not the free market."
"And, the irony is," she continues, "it's the free market ideology that gets used to propel this vision forward which has absolutely nothing to do with--it's not free for anybody but the contractors..."
Governments have historically colluded with business to manipulate the public after traumatic events, says Klein; The Shock Doctrine, she says, aims to prepare the public for the next disaster, as to not remain vulnerable to big business and big government."

Remember the PNACers begging for a new Pearl Harbor before 9/11 so that they could get their radically insipid and insane concepts into action? It seems like yesterday that we were all told how Rove wanted to use Katrina as an experiment for their right-wing extremist tactics of improving an area by giving all of the CEOS all of the money for not providing anything. With the mercenaries in Iraq 43's crew tested how private companies could not only kill innocent Iraqis--and therefore jeopardize the good work our US military accomplished, but also could be placed outside of Iraqi and US law. Remember Erik Prince's remark that what could his company do to his employees who committed atrocities in Iraq as they don't have the rights to flog them?

That is the "intellectually incurious" ones grand plan. When his term is over as "commander-in-chief" he'll become "chief-private-industry-thief" going into private industry to help those who were devastated by his policies. Remember that "Good work Brownie" became a private industry consultant dealing with victims of Katrina and other national disasters?


The article "US Appeals for Turkish Restraint on Iraq" at
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hVlpEWcX_bvmHkBTvXSgMQNJl21wD8S8K7N00
is a reminder that Rove's strategy of always attacking can work, if the 4th estate reports big bro 43's propaganda instead of trying to connect the dots. Turkey had its troops primed to attack Iraq before the House decided to condemn Turkey for war crimes against Armenians almost 100 years ago. The GOP use any excuse to pass blame onto another entity as a reflex action. There has been hatred between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurdish population for as long as there has been an Iraqi Kurdish population.

This just happened a few years ago. Rumsfeld had planned to use Turkey for GWOT's Iraqi theatre "Shock and Awe". Turkey nixed that idea at the last second. The article "2003 invasion of Iraq" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
details that "Plans for opening a second front in the north were severely hampered when Turkey refused the use of its territory for such purposes. In response to Turkey's decision, the United States dropped several thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade into northern Iraq, a number significantly less than the 60,000 strong 4th Mechanized Infantry Division that the U.S. originally planned to use for opening the northern front." W, and particularly the failed Rumsfeld, desperately tried to lay all of the blame on the failed occupation of Iraq on this matter. In short, Turkey hasn't been a great ally, although that is what W is now saying.

The article states "The Bush administration sent Edelman and Dan Fried, assistant secretary of state for European Affairs, to Ankara for talks with government leaders, Saturday, Oct. 13, 2007. They will discuss Turkish plans, opposed by Washington, for a military attack on Kurdish rebel bases over the border in northern Iraq, a U.S. official said....
In Moscow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged "a difficult time" in relations with Turkey. She appealed for restraint against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and in Turkey's angry response to a genocide resolution in Congress.
Turkey's military preparations come amid concern in Washington that the genocide resolution could jeopardize supply routes the American military has used to move armored vehicles to troops in Iraq."

If Turkey withdraws support for the US it won't be the first time as the article "2003 invasion of Iraq" described. What is all of the uproar about if Turkey does it a second time? It is only a ploy to blame the Democrats for the genocide resolution.

"Fried promised the Bush administration would work to prevent the adoption of the resolution.
"We will do everything we can so that this resolution will not come to the House floor," he said in an interview with private NTV television....
"Secretary of State Rice Condoleezza Rice asked us before we came here to express that the Bush administration is opposed to this resolution," said Edelman, who was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 2003-2005."

These three items can be thrown away as being unrelated unless they all are seen as components of W's insatiable quest for "unitary executive" powers. When you have mangled the US constitution as thoroughly as W has you will have to stonewall and obstruct justice as hard as you can-which we have seen.
Add in how W's team used an e-mail service that allegedly doesn't exist anymore-- and W's secrecy and willingness to exclude any and all relevant documentation in every issue, and, last but not least, Rove's use of the 4th estate as a propaganda organ for the GOP's plan of a perpetual partisan political power as far as making the GOP the only choice in a one party country, then you have a picture of a paranoid crook reminiscent of "Tricky Dick".

Big bro 43 makes Nixon look like a piker though. Nixon thought he was checked by the other equal branches in the US government and by the 4th estate. W, at least in his own deluded mind, thinks he controls everything.
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Winston Smith is an ex-Social Worker. I worked in child welfare, and in medical settings and in homeless settings. In the later our facility was geared as a permanent address for people to apply for welfare. Once they received that we could send (more...)
 
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