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Canada least corrupt in Americas
The U.S., burdened by ongoing views that lobbyists and deep-pocketed special interest groups hold too much sway in government decisions, ranked 18th in the world. The U.S., burdened by ongoing views that lobbyists and deep-pocketed special interest groups hold too much sway in government decision... more
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John McCain has a bizarre history of hiding evidence about his fellow POWs
McCain has worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home.
Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute; a longer version of this article is available at nationinstitute.org.
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.
Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.
The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number -- probably hundreds -- of the US prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners -- just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.
*********CONTINUES McCain has worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn... more -
Once elected, Palin hired friends and lashed foes
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials. Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between gov... more
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Woodward keeps US "secret killing program" a secret
In a move that only the lappiest of lapdog journalists could pull off, veteran journalist Bob Woodward noted that the US currently has a "secret killing program" in Iraq. It's so powerful, Woodie claims, that it's the real reason behind the drop in violence in Iraq (thus taking credit from the surge). So what is this top secret killing machine? Woodward won't say, thus dropping him to the level of that girl who came up to you at the 6th grade lunch table and said, "I know who has a crush on you, but I'm not telling." In a move that only the lappiest of lapdog journalists could pull off, veteran journalist Bob Woodward noted that the US currently has... more
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Steve Jobs Says He Doesn't Have Cancer (And Why It's Not Your Business A...
New York Times writer Joe Nocera speculated on the health of Apple's CEO after Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)—got a call from Steve Jobs himself. It wasn't pretty from the very beginning:
“This is Steve Jobs. You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”
Top Apple flack Katie Cotton, who has long put Jobs's interests above those of Apple shareholders', flat-out lied when she attributed Jobs's gaunt appearance to "a common bug."
Apple's secretive ways have paid off for it in turning every product release into a marketing event. But by applying that same Kremlin-like opaqueness to its corporate affairs, Apple has gone astray. "By claiming Mr. Jobs had a bug, Apple wasn’t just going dark on its shareholders," Nocera writes. "It was deceiving them."
"The New York Times is saying that Steve Jobs doesn't have cancer, but that he needs to disclose all the information about his medical condition so investors can decide. Gizmodo's strong rebuttal says that everyone has the right to keep medical records confidential. They argue that, if prominent US presidents legally kept their grave illnesses secret — even while the security of the country was at stake — a simple CEO should be able to do the same: 'Steve Jobs has the right to keep his medical records private for as long as he wants. Like FDR. Like JFK. Like any single person in this country and the world. It's our right, as humans, to do so.'" New York Times writer Joe Nocera speculated on the health of Apple's CEO after Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)—got a call ... more -
Jesse Helms on Secrecy
The late Senator Jesse Helms, who died on July 4, was an arch-conservative opponent of civil rights legislation, arms control treaties and other liberal causes. Though none of the obituaries mentioned it, he was also an outspoken critic of government secrecy.
“This government is shot through with willy-nilly applications of secrecy,” he complained in January 1995 at the first meeting of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (the Moynihan Commission), of which he was a member.
“I’ve been fussing for years about the application of secrecy on just about every document in this town,” he said then.
Senator Helms co-sponsored secrecy reform legislation based on the recommendations of the Moynihan Commission. That legislation was not enacted. But as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he helped pass legislation to require disclosure of most U.S. arms sales to foreign governments, which was signed into law.
“Secrecy all too often … becomes a political tool used by Executive Branch agencies to shield information which may be politically sensitive or policies which may be unpopular with the American public,” he testified at a Senate hearing in 1997. “Worse yet, information may be classified to hide from public view illegal or unethical activity.”
“On numerous occasions I, and other Members of Congress, have found the Executive Branch to be reluctant to share certain information, the nature of which is not truly a ‘national secret,’ but which would be potentially politically embarrassing to officials in the Executive Branch or which would make known an illegal or indefensible policy,” Sen. Helms said. The late Senator Jesse Helms, who died on July 4, was an arch-conservative opponent of civil rights legislation, arms control treaties... more -
The PNAC website is down!
If you click on the link, you will land on a page with another url which announces that "This Account Has Been Suspended"
That is something I had not anticipated - now I can no longer act on my intentions of downloading all their PDF files in which much of their planned crimes (some already committed) were laid out in detail. I did download the most important one - "Rebuilding America's Defenses". Doubtless countless of people have downloaded the lot, so they are not altogether lost, but one can get lost in conjectures as to the reasons why they have suspended their internet account. If you click on the link, you will land on a page with another url which announces that "This Account Has Been Suspended" ... more -
Photographing secret sattellites - All 189 of them
Trevor Paglen has been taking pictures of satellites that officially don't exist, and now his photos are part of his exhibition in which he compares government secrecy of today with the Catholic dogma and secrecy of Galileo's time.
"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.
He also takes pictures of other secret type stuff, including what he calls "torture taxis". Check the link for the full article and tell us what you think! Trevor Paglen has been taking pictures of satellites that officially don't exist, and now his photos are part of his exhibition i... more -
How To Find Secret Sites And Articles
On the internet there are a lot of site owners that hide some of the site's pages or even the entire site from the search engines. You can now find those sites with robots.txt.
Robots.txt is a text file present in the root directory of a site which is used to control which pages are indexed by a robot. If you use the 'disallow' word you can block parts of your sites to be found by search engines.
1. Open http://www.google.com and search after the keyword :
"robots.txt" "disallow:" filetype:txt
2. You will find the robots.txt file from sites that uses disallow command in it.
Find Secret Sites And Articles
3. Let's open for example the first site: WhiteHouse. We can see that a lot of pages were made invisible.
Find Secret Sites And Articles
4. To open 'forbidden' pages just copy the text from what disallow command you want, without the "text" at the end.
Find Secret Sites And Articles
5. Now replace in the browser /robots.txt with your copied text and press Enter. The page will open.
Find Secret Sites And Articles
This is the hidden page from WhiteHouse.
Find Secret Sites And Articles
Of course you can find more interesting pages, this was just an example.
Now you can be like a modern online Sherlock Holmes. Find what others hid.
check the link to the main site for more detailed instructions On the internet there are a lot of site owners that hide some of the site's pages or even the entire site from the search engines... more -
Al Gore Makes Waves On My Little Pond!
The press was locked out of the recent ceremony in which Al Gore received a Doctor Honoris Causa degree at the famous Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) in Switzerland. As a result, there are no photographs, no videos, no audio tapes of the event. Naturally, Al Gore did not charge for the speech he made. The local press, however, is pretty sore. The press was locked out of the recent ceremony in which Al Gore received a Doctor Honoris Causa degree at the famous Ecole Polytechni... more
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When Giuliani stepped down from being Mayor, he needed a warehouse.
When a mayor of New York leaves office, little goes out the door but memories - unless he's Rudy Giuliani. Government rules discourage the city's most powerful officeholder from departing with more than token gifts collected on the job.
This guy give me the creeps.. I hope he doesn't get elected. He is just as much a megalomaniac as Bush.
What do you think? When a mayor of New York leaves office, little goes out the door but memories - unless he's Rudy Giuliani. Government rules disco... more
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Secrecy
