Get your Rapture hats ready, kiddies! The sky is falling, and our wise gift of nuclear winter will propel us all into the loving arms of the all-knowing and all-everywhere G-d.

2006-09-30


http://www.btinternet.com/%7Enlpwessex/Documents/christmasquiz.htm


'Fight Smart' Christmas Quiz 2001


NLPWessex would like to wish all its 'WAT' bulletin readers a very happy Christmas.
We look forward to the arrival of more encouraging news in 2002.
Good riddance to 2001!

If you can't wait till then, and need immediate access to the spirit of Christmas good-cheer and to a bright ray of light for the new year,
THEN click here - the most important site on the web!
http://istpp.org/news/2001_december/01.htm


"The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them."
Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. president 1953-1961

"I think we're finding all over the world this hunger people have for connectedness. Those of us who view the world in a holistic way, seeing it as an unbroken whole, understand that there is an essential interconnectedness which we all have. And when people awaken to the pulsation for peace which is out there, when they hear of programs that work to further it, they can get very excited about it."
U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich on his proposal for 'Department of Peace' legislation
http://hagelin.org/news/08_10_2001.htm


War Against Terrorism Christmas Quiz

The ultimate party game for thinking citizens, Christmas 2001 - pass it onto your friends or print it out and put it in their Christmas crackers and stockings

'Who's really in charge here this Christmas?'

Smiles  

This is a picture taken at a service at the Washington National Cathedral
reported on by
Time Magazine 24 September 2001
(European Edition, p56)

  • Which person(s) in the above picture has major connections to one or more of the last four sectors listed above?

If you are having difficulty answering these questions, then please refer to background information provided below for further assistance. But first one piece of advice we'd like to pass on from Rense Radio in the United States if you are a citizen of the 'civilised' world - please make sure you "don't wear your national flag as a blindfold".

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex


"The CPC [Caspian Pipeline Consortium] project also advances my Administrations National Energy Policy by developing a network of multiple Caspian pipelines ....... These projects will help diversify U.S. energy supply and enhance our energy security, while supporting global economic growth."
George Bush, White House Press Release, 28 Nov 2001
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011128-11.html

'[On Sept 11] After dividing the work among his closest aides, Bush instructed a military operator to place a call from Air Force One to the last American who had to grapple with the decision of whether and how to go to war. When his father came on the line, Bush cleared the cabin so they could confer privately."
Time Magazine, 24 September 2001
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010924/nfallout.html

"It is well known that [Bush's] father is a close adviser to his son and therefore it does raise concerns....The public has a right to feel their leaders are making independent judgments without the influence of private interests.''
'Bush advisers cashed in on Saudi gravy train'
Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, Boston Herald, 11 Dec 2001
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/americas_new_war/saud12112001.htm

"Ever since a 1995 uproar about the CIA's use of Guatemalan informants linked to torture and murder, the agency has been required to perform 'human rights' checks on its assets. Last week George H.W. Bush criticized the restriction. 'We have to free up the intelligence system from some of its constraints,' he said..."
Time Magazine 24 September 2001on former CIA chief, son of Prescott Bush, and father of the current president of the US
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010924/nintelligence.html

".....how could thousands of spooks who supposedly had Osama bin Laden in their cross hairs for a decade miss every single moving part?  At some point, when the nation has moved beyond grief and vengefulness, CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller will have to explain how the $10 billion-a-year anti-terror system failed...."
Time Magazine 24 September 2001 on US intelligence services
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010924/nintelligence.html

"[CIA] Director Tenet [is] the only Clinton holdover in the Bush cabinet... Now we are learning that, according to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, 'hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers have crossed the border and can regroup in Pakistan.' ....The real question here is: how could Tenet and the CIA screw up yet again? ....Furthermore, we are now told that CIA has suddenly been given an 8% budget increase! This after their massive failure to prevent - or at least warn us about - September 11. And after already being given a supplemental one billion dollars in late September.... How - with every satellite, overflight, radio intercept and on-the-ground agent imaginable - could these criminals have crossed into a country that's a supposed ally? Especially an ally whom we have plied with money and debt relief since September 11? The answer is clear: Tenet and his boys are fools. They are not qualified for the jobs they hold. [or they know exactly what they are doing and we are the fools. Bin Laden has been let go before, nlpwessex.] The Pentagon now admits that several 'high ranking Taliban leaders' have 'paid for safe passage into Iran'! So now we have Pakistan and Iran both harboring terrorists - one of President Bush's central criteria for determining which nations are 'terrorist nations'. What are we going to do about that?"
NewsMax.com, 13 Dec 2001
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/12/13/83210.shtml

"...by the time the third plane hit the Pentagon, nearly an hour after the first hit, hard questions were being asked: how could this have happened, why hadn’t air traffic controllers and the military done something?... To double-check our own understanding of the system, IEEE Spectrum asked an air traffic control expert, who requested anonymity... Procedures dictate that controllers alert the U.S. military when a hijacking is known to be under way. The typical response is for the Air Force to scramble intercept jets...."
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
'Hard Questions to Answer'
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/special/sept01/questions.html

"Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday. We had such facts too.  As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up.”
Commander-in-Chief of Russian Airforce, Anatoli Kornukov
Pravda online: 18:50 2001-09-12
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/09/12/14983.html

"There remains one question to ask about Sept. 11. What happened?... Marine Corps Maj. Mike Snyder, a spokesman for NORAD, echoed Myers in a Sept. 15 Boston Globe story, which stated: '[T]he command did not immediately scramble any fighters even though it was alerted to a hijacking 10 minutes before the first plane…slammed into the first World Trade Center tower... The spokesman said the fighters remained on the ground until after the Pentagon was hit...' U.S. inaction was all the more astonishing because the same story had Snyder admitting that 'fighters routinely intercept aircraft.' So why were no fighters dispatched to intercept planes on an extraordinary day like Sept. 11?.... Happily, the war against the Taliban managed to push these questions out of the papers. For now."
New York Press, 12 Dec 2001
http://www.nypress.com/14/50/taki/bunker.cfm

"Terrorists could not have carried out such an operation with 4 hijacked planes without the support of a secret service."
Horst Ehmke
, former coordinator of West German secret services
"Euro Intel Experts Dismiss 'War On Terrorism' As Deception" - American Free Press - 4 Dec 2001
http://www.rense.com/general17/eurointelexperts.htm

"The attacks against the twin towers started at 8:45 a.m. and four flights are diverted from their assigned air space and no air traffic controller sounds the alarm. And no Air Force jets scramble until 10 a.m. That also smacks of a small scale Air Force rebellion, a coup against the Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders fail. No IFF -- friend or foe identification -- challenge. In Pakistan, if there is no response to IFF, jets are instantly scrambled and the aircraft is shot down with no further questions asked. This was clearly an inside job.... Bush [Jnr] doesn't realize he is being manipulated by people who understand geopolitics. He is not leading but being led. All he can do is think in terms of the wanted-dead-or-alive culture, which is how Hollywood conditions the masses to think and act..... Bush [Jnr] follows Bush [Snr]..."
General  Hameed Gul, former director general of the Pakistani Intelligence Services ISI and previously a close ally of America working hand in hand with the CIA.
United Press International, Sep. 26, 2001
http://globalfire.tv/nj/e2001/politics/wtc_mossad.htm

If the CIA and the Government weren't involved in the September 11 attacks then what were they doing? - FTW analysis

"The author Salman Rushdie believes that US authorities knew of an imminent terrorist strike when they banned him from taking internal flights in Canada and the US only a week before the attacks...The FAA confirmed that it stepped up security measures concerning Mr Rushdie but refused to give a reason.”
London Times, 27 September 2001
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001330019-2001334144,00.html

"Is it O.K. to talk about the [US Presidential Election] recount yet? It wasn't the right time on September 10th, because the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center had only just finished organizing the data gleaned from its meticulous examination of a hundred and seventy-five thousand uncounted Florida ballots. It wasn't on September 12th, because the news organizations that had commissioned the study were otherwise occupied.... Maybe it'll never be the right time. But what the hell. Let's talk about it anyway.....it turned out... no matter what standard or combination of standards is applied, Al Gore got a handful more votes than George W. Bush."
The New Yorker, 17 Dec 2001
http://www.newyorker.com/THE_TALK_OF_THE_TOWN/CONTENT/?011224ta_talk_hertzberg

"It's absolutely crucial that we expose the lies of the media consortium and get the truth out to everyone that Al Gore won the 2000 election and that there's an illegal occupant in the White House."
Online Journal, 15 Dec 2001
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/Kuhn121501/kuhn121501.html

Sept 11 Deja Vu?

"The FBI's investigation into the anthrax attacks is increasingly focusing on whether U.S. government bioweapons research programs, including one conducted by the CIA, may have been the source of deadly anthrax powder sent through the mail, according to sources with knowledge of the probe..... the FBI has turned its attention to learning more about the CIA's work with anthrax, which investigators were told about by the agency within the past few weeks, government officials said.... The FBI remains extremely interested in the CIA's work with anthrax, with one official calling it the best lead they have at this point...."
Washington Post 15 Dec 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49502-2001Dec15.html

"On October 1, 2001, approximately two weeks prior to the first publicized anthrax mailing, I personally delivered information to the FBI that should have prompted an immediate investigation of affiliated military-industrial and pharmaceutical contractors that maintain intimate ties to BMI and the CIA - information and an investigation that might have prevented the mailings sent more than a week later from Trenton, NJ. In fact, as evidenced by Sunday’s report in the Washington Post, this information still appears to be actively suppressed, namely, the most obvious motives behind the mailed anthrax was to fan fears, dramatically expand pharmaceutical industry profits, and meet military-industrialists’ and political objectives grossly jeopardizing American freedoms and civil rights."
Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz KRLA Radio, Los Angeles, 17 Dec 2001
http://www.centrexnews.com/opinion/2001/12/18.horowitz.html

"Many of the same American corporate executives who have reaped millions of dollars from arms and oil deals with the Saudi monarchy have served or currently serve at the highest levels of U.S. government, public records show. Those lucrative financial relationships call into question the ability of America's political elite to make tough foreign policy decisions about the kingdom that produced Osama bin Laden and is perhaps the biggest incubator for anti-Western Islamic terrorists. Nowhere is the revolving U.S.-Saudi money wheel more evident than within President Bush's own coterie of foreign policy advisers, starting with the president's father, George H.W. Bush. At the same time that the elder Bush counsels his son on the ongoing war on terrorism, the former president remains a senior adviser to the Washington D.C.-based Carlyle Group. That influential investment bank has deep connections to the Saudi royal family as well as financial interests in U.S. defense firms hired by the kingdom to equip and train the Saudi military. ..The elder Bush is reportedly paid between $80,000 and $100,000 for each Carlyle speech he makes. The company declined comment on the former president's pay....... A spokesman for former President Bush, reached yesterday, had no immediate comment on his work for the Carlyle Group. A significant portion of the millions of dollars U.S. companies and their politically influential executives have earned in deals with the Saudis has been through military contracts... "
Boston Herald, 11 Dec 2001
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/americas_new_war/saud12112001.htm

Meet George H.W Bush and the Carlyle Group
-
Former World Leaders and Washington Insiders Making Billions in the War on Terrorism

". . .The CIA did not just deal drugs during the Iran Contra era. It has done so for the full fifty years of its history. I will give you evidence which will show that the CIA and many figures such as Richard Secord, Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, Felix Rodriguez and George Herbert Walker Bush, who was DCI when I first became exposed to Agency drug dealing, have been selling drugs to Americans since the Vietnam era."
CIA Cocaine Smuggling Crack Epidemic - 'Dark Alliance' - City Times Book Review
http://zolatimes.com/V3.1/Ciacrack.html

"The often shameful role of the US press is a vivid skein in this saga. The CIA's intimacy with gangsters and drug trafficking is a tale that courageous investigators have managed to unearth, only to be savaged by some of America's most prominent reporters and newspapers....The ultimate irony is that as the CIA struggles desperately to redefine its mission, it proposes to act as global cop, battling international crime. The Mafiosi, Asian drug traffickers, and Central American smugglers featured in Whiteout would laugh uproariously at the effrontery by their old comrade-in-arms in making this proposal."
Read 'Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press'
http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/cockburn_alex_whiteout.shtml

"Starting in the late spring of 1976 Teddy had wanted me to join her [CIA] operations from within the ranks of LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department]. I had refused to get involved with drugs in any way and everything she mentioned seemed to involve either heroin or cocaine along with guns that she was always moving out of the country. The Director of the CIA then was George Herbert Walker Bush."
'THE BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE' - Click here
http://www.copvcia.com/stories/previous/bush-cheney-drugs.html

Buy this Book from Amazon.com for Christmas

'The Immaculate Deception : The Bush Crime Family Exposed'
Written by Russel Bowen, a retired Brigadier General with the Office of Security Services (OSS),
who reveals his former drug running activities on behalf of the US government

"This is perhaps the most shocking book written this century about treason committed by the highest leaders within the U.S. Government. This disturbing and thought provoking expose, which few americans know about, shows the truth about the drug running activities on behalf of the 'secret government'. You will learn about the unsavory past of George Bush [Snr] and his family, as well as the unscrupulous activities in which he has been involved." - Amazon.com

Other Books from Amazon.com on the Bush Family and the CIA - Great Christmas Presents: some available for one day delivery by 24 Dec!
The Mafia, CIA and George Bush
The CIA's Greatest Hits
Compromised : Clinton Bush and the CIA
Dark Alliance : The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
The Dirty Truth, The Oil and Chemical Dependency of George W. Bush
The Big White Lie : The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War
Defrauding America : Encyclopedia of Secret Operations by the CIA, DEA, and Other Covert Agencies
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II

Also (not Amazon)
'Powderburns'
"The saga of DEA Agent Celerino Castillo's heroic attempts to expose direct CIA and White House involvement in cocaine smuggling during the Contra War years. Photos of Bronze Star winner Castillo's confrontation with George Bush at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala. The original publisher moved his production run [of this book] out of the country."

"The Bush administration, citing executive privilege for the first time, refused Thursday to honor subpoenas from a House committee investigating ..... the use of informants in organized crime investigations....[including] a former federal drug enforcement agent.... Burton subpoenaed 17 sets of documents related to the FBI investigations and informants beginning 1965 and continuing through the present hunt .... Every request was denied, apparently under orders of the President."
NewMax.com 14 Dec 2001
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/12/13/164837.shtml

"...President Bush claiming Executive Privilege in withholding documents pertinent to the FBI's framing and jailing for 30 years of John Salvati is an act of arrogance that equals or surpasses anything done by Bill Clinton. Clinton at least did not originally participate in the crimes he pardoned; Bush has now made himself an active participant in a very serious pattern of criminal behavior. Salvati was framed by the FBI to protect a criminal associate of theirs and was kept in prison for 30 years."
Sierra Times 18 December 2001
http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/dec/18/robinson.htm

"Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that an active FBI Special Agent filed a complaint last week concerning FBI/Justice Department interference in and mishandling of terrorist investigations. The FBI Special Agent, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, alleges that he was retaliated against when he continued to push for and pursue certain terrorist investigations over the objections of his FBI and Justice Department supervisors. The FBI Special Agent, who is represented by Judicial Watch and David Schippers, Esq., filed the complaint last week with the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (IG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). Based on the evidence, the FBI Special Agent believes that if certain investigations had been allowed to run their courses, Osama bin Laden’s network might have been prevented from committing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks ....."
Judicial Watch, 14 Nov 2001
http://judicialwatch.org/press_release.asp?pr_id=1819

"In a federal corrections facility [Rodney Stich, the author] meets Gunther Russbacher, a CIA asset with a very high covert position in the agency, who relates to him, through many subsequent contacts (with Stich out of prison), the large amount of conspiracies against the American public being perpetrated by high-level political leaders and governmental agencies. Thus ensues his exposure to extreme government corruption on all levels and the huge extent of this corruption as though there is another government behind the one which we think exists. Stich has contacts with other CIA operatives.... who want to expose the crimes being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizens of the U.S. and the world." - Amazon.com reader review of 'Defrauding America'

"....since Sept. 11, intelligence sources tell TIME, the agency has been on a hiring binge and has spent tens of millions of dollars on extra hardware..... For the worldwide war against terrorism, 'the CIA is practically creating its own army, navy and air force,' says an intelligence source..."
Time Magazine, 10 Dec 2001
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101011210-186628,00.html

Meanwhile who's in charge in this picture?
(Clue - not the person on the left clinging terrified to the table; weekly lunch at the Whitehouse, Oct 2001)

"The more invisible [Cheney] becomes, the more powerful he seems... He participates by videophone in the daily national security meeting held in the White House situation room with the president .... friends and advisers say the relationship between the two men is as crucial as ever, and still refer to Mr. Cheney as the president's consigliere...."
New York Times 26 Nov 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/26/politics/26LETT.html
(
con·sig·li·e·re COUNSELOR, ADVISER <consigliere of a Mafia family> Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary)

".....yesterday’s revelation [was] that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, single-handedly decided that next week’s meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Qatar must go ahead and that top US officials would attend. In doing so, he reportedly overrode State Department objections about 'substantial security risks' and the personal fears of US delegates and their families."
London Times, 1 Nov 2001
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,258-2001380392,00.html

"After leaving the Pentagon [under Bush's father's administration], Cheney ran Halliburton, the company that owns Brown and Root..... More than $2 billion of the $14 billion the Pentagon has spent in the Balkans since December 1995 has gone to private contractors led by Brown and Root...."
Time Magazine, Friday, Jan. 05, 2001
 
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,93858,00.html

"Another example of the complex web connecting U.S. and Saudi powerbrokers is Dick Cheney, who moved from the Pentagon to the international oil business and back as vice president last year. After serving as the elder Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was hired to run oil-services giant Halliburton Co., where he worked until he resigned last year to campaign with the younger Bush. In 2000, his last year with Halliburton, Cheney received $34 million when he cashed out from the company. Not surprisingly, Halliburton's links to Cheney and other Washington power brokers appear to have helped the company's business prospects in the Middle East. Just last month, Halliburton was awarded a $140 million contract to develop an oil field in Saudi Arabia by the kingdom's state-owned petroleum firm, Saudi Aramco, and a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, along with two Japanese firms, was hired by the Saudis to build a $40 million ethylene plant."
Boston Herald, 11 Dec 2001
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/americas_new_war/saud12112001.htm

MORE ON CHENEY'S OIL AND MILITARY INTERESTS
http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm
http://www.copvcia.com/stories/previous/bush-cheney-drugs.html
http://www.spotlight.org/08_06_00/Oil/oil.html
http://www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?articleid=713
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=470
'Government Ties Helped Cheney and Halliburton Make Millions'
http://www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?articleid=512

"The F-16s sale was criticized in the Arab world on Sept 8. In a November 9 interview with Pakistan's Ausaf newspaper, Bin Laden justified the Sept 11 attack by noting that the US government sells advanced weapons to Israel which Israel then uses to kill Muslim Palestinians. Wasn't the Sept 11 attack triggered by the sale of the F-16s? Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne Cheney, was on Lockheed's Board of Directors from 1994 until January of this year. Did she have any influence on White House approval of the F-16 sale? "
'Questions Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George W. Bush' By Don Williams, 5 Dec 2001
http://www.counterpunch.org/dwilliams1.html
(see also 'L
ockheed Martin beats its rival Boeing to win the biggest military equipment contract in history' - BBC Online 27 Oct 2001)

The Best Enemies Money Can Buy

From Hitler To Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden – Insider Connections and the Bush Family’s Partnership with Killers of Americans - Click here

"The Nixon staff lied to one another and to the President..... Two of the most startling examples of the culture of deception occurred at summit meetings Nixon had with the Soviets and the Chinese. In both cases, Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, asked the foreign leaders to join them in lies to deceive Nixon’s own Secretary of State, William Rogers...."
Inside the White House That Was Built of Lies - Time Magazine 5 Nov 2001
http://www.time.com/time/europe/ta/magazine/0,9868,181822,00.html

NLPWessex 'War Against Terrorism' Bulletin Archive - Click here


More Merry Christmas 'Entertainment'

Animated display of effects US war on terrorism - click here
George Bush's 'sophisticated' WAT strategy song - click here
Animated Movie Staring 'Lady Liberty' - click here
Ho, ho, ho?


Don't Take the Bait - Fight Smart
ANIMATED PHOTO ESSAY - CLICK HERE
WHO IS THE ENEMY?

PREVENTING TERRORISM
A Scientifically Validated Approach to Prevent
Terrorism and Ensure U.S. Society and World Peace

For more information on how to prevent terrorism please click here

Manual for a Perfect Government
by John Hagelin, Ph.D.

  NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.comwww.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012705_ptech_pt2.shtml


PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR
PART II

PROMIS Connections to Cheney Control of
9/11 Attacks Confirmed

  • The FAA & Ptech
  • Debriefed by Secret Service - looking for a PROMIS
  • Muslim Brotherhood, Christian Cultists, and Nazis

by

Michael Kane

© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

"I believe that Dick Cheney also had the ability using evolutions of the PROMIS software, to penetrate and override any other radar computer or communications system in the government."

- Mike Ruppert, in "Summation: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury," from Crossing The Rubicon, p.592

[At the heart of our story is a program (we'll call it Ptech, after the company that produced it) that combines artificial intelligence, datamining, and "interoperability," the capacity for one program to read, operate, and modify the source codes of other programs. The computational power of the Ptech evolution of PROMIS represents a daunting new surveillance-and-intervention capability in the hands of the same elites who planned 9/11, prosecute the subsequent resource wars, and are presiding over what may become a full economic and military disaster for the resource-consuming citizens of America and the world. Since the "War On Terror" and the coming dollar/fossil fuel collapse will necessitate new levels of domestic repression, this is just the capability those elites require. Ptech is the functional equivalent of Total Information Awareness.

The human side of Ptech is where the thievery and murder come in: among the financiers and programmers of Ptech are apparent members of an international network of organized criminals involved in decades of narcotraffic, gunrunning, money laundering, and terrorism. Their personal and professional connections reach up into the highest levels of the American government, and their activities are still underway.

The issue of Saudi complicity in the attacks of 9/11 has played out into two different views. The first is the idea that the Saudis were solely responsible. This has been pumped up by Fox News and largely accepted as gospel in certain parts of the mainstream media. The second view is that the Saudis were set up to take the fall for having pulled off 9/11, covering up U.S. complicity. Neither view is correct, and both depend on a mistaken view of that country as a monolithic, homogeneous actor on the world stage. The opposite is true.

At the top of Arabian society is the giant royal House of Saud, descendants of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, a charismatic warlord who used religious and marital alliances to consolidate his military conquests and, eventually, found a modern state on the Arabian Peninsula in 1932. Ibn Saud's success was partially dependent on his powerful religious allies, the inheritors of a doctrinaire form of Islam founded by the cleric Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab (1702 - 1793). That coalition became increasingly unstable with the massive influx of oil wealth that began shortly after the first Arabian discoveries by SoCal (now Chevron) and Texaco, also in the 1930's.

Like virtually all Islamic states, Saudi Arabia has been the target of ongoing efforts by American intelligence aimed at suppressing any stirrings of incipient secular leftism. This is opposed, we believe, to what may be convenient and clandestine support for "al-Qaeda" terrorists (i.e. fundamentalists), acting as US proxies, who might destabilize the kingdom in advance of the US carving off only those regions with oil reserves. Socially polarized oil wealth, the ever-changing Arab-Israeli conflict, and American geopolitical maneuvering configure a daunting matrix of hidden forces that can't be fully understood or managed - not least because the intelligence elements are often double or triple agents with inscrutable loyalties.

The Ptech story is of intense interest for its implications about US government guilt in 9/11. As Ralph Schoenman, Michel Chossudovsky, Paul Thompson and others have argued, "al Qaeda" is not only traceable to CIA activity in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Soviet period, it is also a current tool of American imperial ambitions. That directly contradicts the official story, in which al Qaeda is the foreign devil incarnate, a militant hate group formed straight from the soil of Saudi ideology - with no economic grievances, no interests in common with anyone in the non-Muslim world, and above all, no connections to the United States through funding, personnel, armaments, drug trafficking, visa assistance, or communications. It certainly is a militant hate group, but the rank and file may be totally unaware of real connections between their own leaders and the people they oppose with their very lives. These disturbing links would be just as agonizing - and just as unthinkable - for American citizens as they would be for a militant Islamist teenager in a ski mask jumping hurdles at some secret training camp.

Beneficiaries of the Ptech-connected MAK charities, the young men in Hezbollah and Hamas are fighting in land disputes, not heady ideological quests. They are also bitter, bereaved, murderous bigots with all the psychic rigidity and hysteria found in fundamentalists from Oklahoma to Hebron to Jeddah. Their hatred of the American national security state is surely absolute, but they are also beneficiaries of the Pentagon's need for an Enemy. That means that they can expect the United States to provide covert help of some kind at crucial points in the game. And the most despicable element in the American side of that process is the Bush-Cheney junta itself, which used its own assets inside the terrorist network associated with Osama bin Laden to murder three thousand civilians in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania as a pretext for unending warfare. This was done for reasons of state. But it was also done for personal gratifications including vast sums of money, permanent blackmail over those involved, and a heroin-like rush of criminally insane individual power. Sophisticated or naïve, cynical or grandiose and idealistic, each person involved betrayed humanity. And the apparatus that permitted this remains in place - as do most of the personnel.

The solution to the Ptech problem is not just to get all that creepy software the hell off the computers. The bigger solution is transparency and disclosure, de-militarization and political internationalism; localization of production and exchange; and a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. As Stan Goff has explained in these pages, the word opportunity does not necessarily refer to competition for purchasing power and domination. It means the opportunity to grow Haitian rice in Haiti and sell it in Haiti, without having to contend with the export dumping of American corporate agribusiness. It means the chance to maintain a tribal existence in an Afghanistan that is neither the proving ground for a US-Soviet proxy war nor the playground of American-funded drug lords. And though all ideals are warped by the rigors of practice, this was the point of President Kennedy's de-escalation in Laos, his Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and his refusal to invade Cuba:

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

Now let's get back to the business of sticking up for people who were murdered on 9/11 and in its aftermath, and to diminishing the present danger. - JAH].

January 27, 2005, PST 0900 (FTW) - Ptech - the software company whose major investors and directors are strongly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood - produced software that derived from PROMIS, had an artificial intelligence core, and was installed on virtually every computer system of the U.S. government and its military agencies on September 11, 2001.

This included the White House, Treasury Department (Secret Service), Air Force, FAA, CIA, FBI, both houses of Congress, Navy, Department of Energy, IRS, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Enron and more.

Whoever plotted 9/11 definitely viewed the FAA as an enemy that morning. Overriding FAA systems would be the most effective way to ensure the attacks were successful. To do this, the FAA needed an evolution of PROMIS software installed on their systems and Ptech was just that; the White House & Secret Service had the same software on their systems - likely a superior modified version capable of "surveillance and intervention" functions.

Ptech is enterprise architecture software, which Indira planned on customizing to use as "risk architecture" software.

Enterprise architecture software is designed with the express purpose of knowing everything that is going on throughout the entirety of the enterprise in real-time. In the case of Ptech software installed on Whitehouse, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA systems, the enterprise included all of the data produced by those agencies in real-time.

Maybe this is why Ari Fleischer stated the Whitehouse didn't view Ptech as a threat; quite to the contrary.1 The Ptech software was a vital asset needed for the White House to execute the 9/11 plot, and may still be in place for possible use against professionals in government and military positions trying to do their jobs in the future.

The FAA & Ptech
In the 9/11 Commission report a "phantom flight 11" was added to the official version of what happened that day. A tape was played at the final commission hearing on June 17, 2004, of a woman from the FAA telling NORAD that flight 11 was still airborne at 9:24 am, long after it had actually struck the WTC. Originally this was reported to be the time when the FAA notified NORAD that flight 77 was off course and headed to the Pentagon.

This information was used by the commission to claim NORAD had never been informed that flight 77 was headed towards Washington D.C., leaving the FAA holding the bag for the penetration of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world. The commission's report states they were "unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information."

It has been clearly documented that "false blips," or radar injects, were placed on FAA radar screens on the morning of 9/11 as part of the Air Force war games that morning.2 "Phantom flight 11" fits the description of a "false blip." If it was, in fact, a radar inject, that would explain why the 9/11 commission was unable to locate the source of the "mistaken FAA information." The 9/11 war games are classified and specific information regarding such details is not publicly available. We do know by the time "phantom flight 11" appeared on FAA screens - 9:24 am - the war games had reportedly been called off.3

So what was it doing there?

FTW's position is that "phantom flight 11" was injected onto FAA radar screens by "the maestro"4 using Ptech software to override FAA systems. Let's examine the feasibility of such a scenario.

Ptech had been working on the data blueprint of the FAA's entire network for 2 years prior to 9/11. Their confidential business plan lays out just how much access they had to the FAA's data systems.

Ptech Inc. Confidential Business Plan: Page 37 of 46 11/7/2001

The FAA recognized the need for leveraging its IT investment, with a means of centralizing activities and introducing consistency and compatibility within the operating systems environment. A Ptech consulting team was organized to use activity modeling to identify key functions that could be examined for improvement in network management, network security, configuration management, fault management, performance management, application administration, network accounting management, and user help desk operations.5

What the above tells us is that Ptech had access to the entire informational barn door of the FAA's data systems. In an amazing exchange published in part 1 of this series, FTW editor Jamey Hecht was able to confirm a central thesis of Crossing the Rubicon while interviewing Wall St. Whistleblower Indira Singh. Indira is an IT professional who started First Boston's first Information Technology group in 1975 and had worked on Wall St. until 2002. She's been an IT consultant for Banker's Trust, the U.N., JP Morgan, and American Express. In 1988 she started TibetNet - a derivative of DARPA's Internet, the service you are likely reading this report on at the moment. The exchange was as follows:

Jamey Hecht: You said at the 9/11 Citizens' Commission hearings, you mentioned - its on page 139 of transcript - that Ptech was with Mitre Corporation in the basement of the FAA for 2 years prior to 9/11 and their specific job was to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force, in case of an emergency.

Indira Singh: Yes, I have a good diagram for that…

Jamey Hecht: And that relationship had been going on mediated by Ptech for 2 years prior to 9/11. You elsewhere say that the Secret Service is among the government entities that had a contract with Ptech. Mike Ruppert's thesis in Crossing the Rubicon, as you know, is that the software that was running information between FAA & NORAD was superseded by a parallel subsuming version of itself that was being run by the Secret Service on state of the art parallel equipment in the PEOC with a nucleus of Secret Service personnel around Cheney.

…In your view, might it have been the case that Cheney was using Ptech to surveil the function of the people who wanted to do their jobs on the day of 9/11 in FAA & NORAD, and then intervene to turn off the legitimate response?

Indira Singh: Is it possible from a software standpoint? Absolutely it's possible. Did he (Cheney) have such a capability? I don't know. But that's the ideal risk scenario - to have an over-arching view of what's going on in data. That's exactly what I wanted for JP Morgan.

You know what's ironic about this; I wanted to take my operational risk blueprint which is for an operational event going wrong and I wanted to make it generic for extreme event risk to surveil across intelligence networks. What you're describing is something that I said, 'boy if we had this in place maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened.' When I was going down to In-Q-Tel and getting these guys excited about creating an extreme event risk blueprint to do this, I'm thinking of doing exactly what you're saying Cheney might have already had! [emphasis added]

-- end of transcript

Ptech was working with Mitre Corp. in the FAA and, according to Indira, Ptech was the Alpha dog in that relationship. Mitre has provided simulation & testing technologies for the Navy.6 They provide multiple FAA technologies and boast in their annual reports that their two biggest clients are DOD & FAA. Mitre knew the FAA's technological enterprise inside and out, including any simulation-and-testing (war game) technology operated by the FAA.

This was the perfect marriage to ensure that the capacity to covertly intervene in FAA operations on 9/11 existed - in the middle of simulated war games.It is also the perfect marriage to ensure that the command and control of these capabilities was readily available to Dick Cheney via Secret Service Ptech software in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker to which Cheney was "rushed" by the Secret Service. As already pointed out in part 1 of this series, Ptech does what Total Information Awareness (TIA, the DARPA program to monitor all electronic transactions in real-time) is supposed to do. (There are an undetermined number of other software programs in the hands of an undetermined number of corporations also capable of this. Again, enterprise architecture software is designed with the express purpose of knowing everything that is going on throughout the entirety of the "enterprise" in real-time.

In the case of Ptech software, installed on White House, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA systems (as well as most American military agencies), the enterprise included all of the real-time data of the above mentioned agencies. Indira has confirmed Ptech software could have been set up to allow Dick Cheney to surveil and intervene on FAA radar screens.

As documented by former Bush counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies, on 9/11 the Secret Service had the capability of seeing FAA radar screens in real time; and as documented by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, Secret Service has the authority to take supreme command over any and all American agencies - including the Air Force.

9/11 is a prime example of what Indira Singh calls "extreme event risk." In the months prior to the attack, she was working on a program capable of providing data in real time to prevent these types of events from happening. She had pitched this very idea just one week before 9/11 at In-Q-Tel Headquarters (CIA) in Virginia, giving a final presentation for an ICH (Interoperability Clearinghouse) project code named "Blue Prophet." Indira explained to CIA why she was supporting ICH in this project.

She told the In-Q-Tel team, "The intelligence and other agencies need this now." One of the men with CIA looked at Indira with what she describes as the "blackest, coldest look anyone has ever given her."

They weren't interested in Blue Prophet's software for interoperability or risk, but rather the data it would produce because the data would point in the right directions. That data was very predictive, producing quality real-time intelligence. This is one week before 9/11. If In-Q-Tel already had this capability, it's no wonder they would be wary of someone like Indira - the woman from New York in Risk Management who resided a few minutes' walk from the Twin Towers.

Debriefed by Secret Service - looking for a PROMIS
It was Indira Singh whose investigative research into Ptech laid the groundwork for this series. One of the first reporters Indira contacted was Joe Bergantino, a 20-year veteran investigative reporter for a CBS affiliate in Boston.

"There are some great people in mainstream media," says Indira, and according to her, Joe is one of them. Joe told her that Ptech's CEO Oussama Ziade had stated, "If it wasn't for that woman in New York, none of this (the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) raid) would be happening". Neither Joe nor Indira liked the way that sounded.

Joe contacted Senator Grassley's office. A Secret Service agent, Charlie Bopp, was reassigned to Grassley's office, and put in charge of the Ptech file. An initial meeting was scheduled with Indira in January 2003.

Indira showed up with what she called, "A major Ground Zero attitude." She was supposed to be on the 106th floor of the WTC on 9/11 but instead responded as a civilian EMT that morning. This was very personal for her. Charlie understood and nevertheless made the arrangements for a debriefing at the Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) in April 2003.

During the debriefing Indira was asked by a member of the Secret Service, "Is Ptech PROMIS?"

"I already knew what had happened to Danny Casolaro, and they were asking me if I had copies of Ptech," Indira told FTW.

Danny Casolaro was the investigative journalist mysteriously "suicided" in a West Virginia hotel room while investigating the theft of PROMIS software. Casolaro's investigation had uncovered a shadowy network he called "the Octopus" that seemed to have its hands in everything from drug trafficking and money laundering, all the way up to political assassinations and coups d'etat. When Casolaro's body was discovered, his arms were violently slashed and all the documents he traveled with were missing. He had told friends and relatives if anything happened to him they shouldn't believe it was by accident.

Being asked such a loaded question, she responded with her Ground Zero attitude saying:

"You have a copy of the software, why don't you tell me? This is not about the software guys, ok - was it a PROMIS? It was a place you could hide a PROMIS, a place you can drop a PROMIS."

Indira told FTW, "I was going to use Ptech software for risk surveillance at JP Morgan - Duh!"

By the very nature of risk surveillance, it is necessary to use PROMIS progeny based on artificial intelligence to achieve the capabilities we are describing. Charlie Bopp and those present for Indira's debriefing knew this, but they wanted to talk about the software and not the people behind the software. That is extremely significant. In part 1 of this series we've shown how the major people behind Ptech link to the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of the Saudi Royal Family, as well as Dick Cheney and the powerful American 'Christian' cult known as "The Fellowship," or, "The Family."

Indira wanted to name names, but Charlie wouldn't let her. "We can't investigate the people behind Ptech," said Charlie. "Just trust me, let's focus on the software." They gave no reasoning for this, they just said, "we can't."

"Well if you can't talk about the people behind this, it's a waste of time because with software like that you can't find trapdoors now. This is live stuff!" Singh told FTW. "You can't prove an intelligent agent [a small software component that reaches out to claim or insert information from another system - Ed.] went out and sent information somewhere. It's like proving you ate a piece of cake when you were 10 years old, unless you have video of it, it's not going to happen. It's that ephemeral." [emphasis added]

In other words, PROMIS-based activity leaves no footprints.

This means trapdoors are no longer necessary, or at least, no longer detectable. If Indira is correct, there would have been no "fingerprints" left of any kind showing just what Ptech software was used for on 9/11 and who used it.

"These guys debriefing me were from Military Intel, so they were trying to find out what I knew," says Singh. According to her, August of 2002 (the month before the story on Ptech was shut down by the White House, and three months before Ptech was raided) was a significant month. There were supposedly leaks of some kind coming out of the Persian Gulf. She was asked if Ptech software could have been the source of those leaks.

Singh responded, "Well if Military Intel are using Ptech in the Gulf, obviously! YES!"

During one of the initial meetings Indira threw a hat on the table from FDNY Engine 4, Ladder 15 and said, "I want you to put this on your desk, so any time you think of playing some political games you remember there were real people down there."

Indira Singh was done playing games.

Muslim Brotherhood, Christian Cultists, and Nazis
In part 1 of this series we documented the extensive ties from the Muslim Brotherhood running through Ptech. The Brotherhood was founded by Hassan Al-Banna and expanded with the help of Mahmoud Abu Saud of the House of Saud.7

This extensive network runs through various shell organizations and charities with interlocking boards, such as the New Jersey based real estate investment company BMI, CARE International, and the Northern Virginia based SAAR network - named after al Sulaiman Abdul Al-Aziz al-Rajhi, a scion of one of Saudi Arabia's richest families. Heading the SAAR network (renamed Safa) is Yakub Mirza, who also sits on the board of Ptech. It is of interest to note that claims against Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corp. for funding and supporting terrorism were recently dismissed by U.S. District Judge Richard Casey.

One of the central funding mechanisms in this nexus is the Al Taqwa Bank of Switzerland - now Nada Management - which the Department of Treasury says funds Al Qaeda.

Hitler supporter Albert Friedrich Armand Huber (aka Ahmed Huber) and Youseff Nada sit on the board of Al Taqwa. Nada reportedly helped the Grand Mufti escape from Nazi Germany when the Third Reich was teetering on the brink of collapse, and Ahmed Huber knew the Grand Mufti quite well; so well in fact, it was the Mufti who convinced Huber to convert to (the Brotherhood's form of) Islam.

Huber has spoken publicly of a "New Right" marriage of Nazi ideology and Islamist fascism. He has both a picture of Adolph Hitler and Osama bin Laden in his Swiss home.

Al Taqwa is a "hawala," a bank conducting transactions leaving no paper trail through a "good faith" global network that transfers funds - no questions asked.8 Bank Al Taqwa is located in the Bahamas; the parent company, Nada Management, is based in Lugarno, Switzerland, and is linked to the Royal Family of Liechtenstein.

Al Taqwa has done business with Asat Trust. The now deceased Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein became a board member of Asat Trust in May 1970 and stayed until November 1990, when he was replaced by Martin Wachter, the trust's current director.9

Asat Trust is on the American and U.N. terror list. According to the American Jewish Daily Forward, copies of business registration documents on file with authorities in Liechtenstein show that Asat Trust has been intimately involved with the Al Taqwa network during the last 30 years, registering changes in company names, personnel and financial structure.10

Most frightening of all is that this network seems to have links back to the powerful American Christian cult known as "The Fellowship," or "The Family." This organization is tied to American 'Christian' men of high political power including John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, multiple Congressional members and prominent business leaders. Some "Family" members have stated they would love to have Osama bin Laden as a guest speaker because of the covenant he has with his followers. Doug Coe, the Family's leader who was praised by George H.W. Bush at the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast for his "quiet diplomacy," openly admires Hitler's "covenant."11

Yassin Al Qadi - the Saudi terrorist financier who funded Ptech and BMI - claimed to have met Dick Cheney in Jeddah before he became Vice President and the two "still share cordial relations." When Cheney's office was asked to comment on this, spokeswoman Jennifer Miller Wise stated the Vice President gave her no reason to believe he had met with Al Qadi before he assumed office.12

That is a non-answer; "no reason to believe" he met Al Qadi leaves no reason to believe he didn't. Regardless, there are more transparent connections between elements of Saudi and American elites.

In November of 2001, Halliburton was awarded a $140 million contract to develop an oil field in Saudi Arabia by the kingdom's state-owned petroleum firm, Saudi Aramco, and a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, along with two Japanese firms, hired by the Saudis to build a $40 million ethylene plant.13

Dick Cheney is, of course, the former CEO of Haliburton.

As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former owner of the nation's largest bank, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of that allegation.14 He also denies any involvement in financing terror organizations.

One journalist who was sued by bin Mahfouz, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, is counter suing in New York Federal Court. She is the only one of some 30 authors not to retract claims that Mahfouz has financed Al Qaeda operations as published in her book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop it.

Khalid bin Mahfouz has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar BinLadin Group of companies and is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by the legal apparatus of multiple countries.15

George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney all have extensive ties to the Saudi Royal family and Saudi elites, who in turn have questionable ties to terrorist financiers such as Yassin al-Qadi. It is therefore not unreasonable for Dick Cheney to have met al-Qadi while in Jeddah while CEO of Haliburton.

This is the reality of the world we live in; where a covert international power structure supercedes the interests of nation states, and the misnomer of "national security" is used to keep this network's secrets hidden from the prying eyes of authentic journalists and the public at large.


1 On the very day the FBI raids Ptech, Ari Fleischer - president Bush's press secretary - gives Ptech a "clean bill of health" by stating: "The material has been reviewed by the appropriate government agencies, and they have detected absolutely nothing in their reports to the White House that would lead to any concern about any of the products purchased from (Ptech)."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/20021206-4.html.

2 See Crossing the Rubicon, chapters 19 & 20.

3 See footnote #1 from Part 1 of this series.

4 "The Maestro" is the term used by Major Don Arias of NORAD to describe the individual who was in charge of coordinating the 9/11 war games. FTW's research has concluded the 9/11 maestro was either Dick Cheney, or both Cheney and General Ralph "Ed" Eberhart. See Crossing the Rubicon for full documentation.

5 Copy of page 37 of Ptech's Business Plan from 11/17/2001, provided by Indira Singh via email.

6 http://www.stormingmedia.us/07/0720/A072083.html.

7 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12823-2004Sep10?language=printer.

8 "A Banking System Built for Terrorism," by Meenakshi Ganguly, Time, 10/05/01: http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,178227,00.html.

"Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" by Lucy Komisar, Salon, 11/09/01
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/15/al_taqwa/print.html.

9 "Terror Fund Trail Leads to Alpine Kingdom," by Marc Perelman, Forward
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.10.17/news4.terror.html.

10 Ibid.

11 Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the "covenants" they had forged with their "brothers": "Look at Hitler," he said. "Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden." The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the "total Jesus" of a brotherhood in Christ.

"In a document entitled "Our Common Agreement as a Core Group," members of the Family are instructed to form a "core group," or a "cell," which is defined as "a publicly invisible but privately identifiable group of companions." A document called "Thoughts on a Core Group" explains that "Communists use cells as their basic structure. The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four man squad. Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people." From "Jesus Plus Nothing," by Jeffrey Sharlet, Harper's, March 2003 http://www.harpers.org/JesusPlusNothing.html?pg=1.

12 "Software company tries to survive terror investigation," by Justin Pope, Associated Press, 01/03/03
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/03/ptech.htm.

13 "Bush Advisors Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train," by Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill, Common Dreams, 12/11/01
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1211-05.htm.

14 "COUP D'ETAT," by Michael Ruppert, FTW, 6/8/04 http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060804_coup_detat.html.

15 Ibid

2006-09-28


http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/01/18/new-news-deconstructing-the-newspaper/
[[ skipped to: comments]]
  1. Mike G Says: Three disconnected responses:

    You suggest a lot of stuff should be national pickup stuff, not locally generated. Jeez, it is already and if that’s all available online, why do I need the Booneville Hick-Redneck to read George Will or Roger Ebert? Localness and developing individual voices are the only hopes, it seems to me, not least because of the farm team role in developing talent. You’re looking at one real world aspect of it (much local writing is terrible) and deriving a universal principle from it (therefore no one should even try).
    I am always come back to how much more interesting and individual a writer and personality James Lileks is on his blog than in the Star-Tribune. How much more relevant he is to MY life when he’s just writing for himself, rather than for every imaginable reader all at once. (It’s eerie sometimes– we’ll turn out to have watched the same DVD or had the same experience with our kids on the same day.) There are a lot of writers out there being forced to write to an industry mold, I suspect. Don’t terminate them, liberate them! Instead of making one writer write for everybody, give everybody a different writer to read!
    Each represents a reader who blames the local paper for wrenching away a part of their lives they’ve come to depend on.
    I remember how someone in the symphony orchestra business phrased this. He suggested a program of new music– Philip Glass, say. (Or maybe new music just meant 20th century.) The board said “Our audience doesn’t like that kind of music.” To which the guy replied, “By audience, do you mean the one third that stayed, or the two thirds that stopped coming?”
    You have to get past the fact that you’re messing with the product some vocal people will love, or else you’re doomed to never change. Which they are, at the moment…
    Oh, and if you’re keeping a TV critic to report on new general managers at local TV stations nobody knew anyway, you’re wasting that money.
    A lot of that stuff exists to kiss up to local advertisers, though. It has nothing to do with readers per se.

  2. Bob Wyman Says:

    .../... Convenience is an extraordinarily powerful driver. The idea is that if the local “newspaper” site is the primary and best provider of local and hyper-local news *as well as* the portal to or aggregator of non-local information, then you’ll find it more convenient to go to the local paper for all your information needs. The local “newspaper” would draw you in with the local and specialized news that you need and package the non-local news.       .... local papers don’t have the resources to do this — but they do since many of them are owned by organizations that have the financial resources to build systems functionally equivelant to even the biggest “pure play” online systems. For those that don’t have the resources, there is always the possiblity of industry group cooperation on developing common systems and technology to make this stuff happen. (i.e. what “New Century Network” should have done. — Only the newspaper people will understand that comment… Or, what AP does for data distribution.)

    Local news is massively more “actionable” than non-local news. As such it is a fantastically powerful hook that can draw people into a “catch and feed” system that leads readers to shared non-local resources and away from the general services like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

  3. chartreuse Says:

    The problem is that the things you are talking about doing have already been done to local radio and look at the results.

    If the idea is for newspapers to replace content with syndicated alternatives we will be looking at problems down the road.

    I think the future is in becoming ‘hyper-local’. Newspapers should be divided by neighborhoods with maybe a national section in the front.

  4. Gerald A Davis Says:

    I am sure you have given many good suggestions. The main reason I stopped reading the newspaper was their spin.
    I will never forget how night after night the MSM harrassed Richard Nixon when he decided to go after North Vietnam. “Oh my God now he is bombing N Vietnam.” Night after night they kept it up.
    Then they reported a loss in the Tet offensive, absolutely inexcuseable.
    And it hasn’t stopped. They now feel that they were right to encourage the withdrawl from Vietnam. In spite of the loss of 58,000 men, and the death of millions of other people when we left. [what? is her pro-War, a neo-Conned? /js] Even the considerable loss of political power the left has sustained seems not to be considered.
    Now this carries through in the Iraq struggle. The left has maintained that Bush lied. In spite of the fact that most of their leaders are on the record [afraid of Antrax and illegal-eavesdropping obtained ammunition, NO DOUBT/js] to the contrary. The only way one hears those recordings is by listening to talk radio or other conservative outlets. If the Republicans had tried this in reverse, imagine how the MSM would have shot it down.
    You have many good suggesstions for improved profitability but the main problem is the lack of balance in reporting the news. They have alienated too many of us. The problems at the New York Times and CBS only exemplify this.
    I prefer to get my news from realclearpolitics.com, where I can easily see 'both' sides of the arguement. [Wow-True? I'll see!]

  5. Mike Phillips Says:

    I’ve just retired from one of the larger media companies, but I spent the last couple of years trying to get 21 newspapers to do much of what you’re proposing.

    To those who disagree with you, here’s some data to chew on: Only 30-35% of the newshole in American newspapers (all sizes) is local. Some 50-70% is commodity news — usually wire but not always, and always information that is readily available elsewhere for free. From proprietary research that I know well: The subjects that are most important to most Americans are health, kids/schools, family issues, community/local and religion/spirituality. Except for general community/local, less than 2% of newshole is the typical allotment for each of those subjects. And oh, by the way, the high-interest audience for sports is only about 25%.

    Conclusion: The fundamental challenge for newspapers is not print-to-web migration (although that’s an important operational strategy). It’s filling print and digital news products with relevant content. And that simply isn’t happening.

  6. BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Get me rewrite Says:   

    […] Yes, and I’ve also looked at what happens when editors and publishers waste editorial budgets on commodity news, fluff, and egos. Do we need to send 15,000 journalists to the political conventions where nothing happens, which we can all watch on C-SPAN? No. Why do we do it? Ego: to have our people there, our bylines. That is a sinful waste of editorial budgets. Ditto golf columnists going to golf tournaments. Ditto movie critics. Ditto stock tables. I made a few humble suggestions for prioritizing a newspaper budget here. I argue that local newspapers should, indeed, concentrate on what makes them valuable, on what they can do specially: local reporting and investigations. But that takes the strategic courage to get rid of a golf columnist and use the wires and damn the egos and cancel that convention boondoggle so you can have a local reporter truly provide value to your community. Where big papers are reducing staff and closing bureaus, small dailies in those areas are expanding to fill the void. […]

=== ------- ===
http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/09/26/unpopular-culture/

Unpopular culture

September 26th, 2006 Read More:

I’m at a PBS panel at Reuters on news and the tabloid culture. It starts on a snotty note: a commercial for PBS from its head and sniffing about popular culture, which I find rather disingenuous from an institution that has to exploit Yanni to get money. When people look down on popular culture — aka tabloid culture — they are looking down on the public they supposedly want to serve.

Carl Bernstein argues that “journalism is part of popular culture and we cannot get away from that.” He goes on to say that “I don’t believe that the reporting on the war is as bad as some people, particularly people on the left, say. . . . During Watergate, it took a long time for people to believe in our stories.” The country is turning on the war because they do not believe it’s working and he says they come to that belief because journalists have been dogging coverage of the war.” Yet he turns around to argue that we operate with an “idiot culture” that was once a subculture “but now it is more menacing because it is starting to drown out the process by which people previously have been able to absorb serious information.”

Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair says the problem is that what we in media do is boring. “The form has died.” He also says the economic basis of news is falling apart and that one cannot name a news industry and organization that is not in turmoil.

Poor Janice Min, editor of US Weekly, is being held up as the devil: Ms. Tabloid. She, in turn, holds up TV news as the devil. “I would just rather go online and read the news.”

Todd Gitlin blamed everything on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, until he was cut off.

Brooke Gladstone of On the Media tells a whining Bernstein that the relationship with media is fundamentally changing. “You can’t use media as a conduit anymore… you have to use it as a conversation.”

Wolff says to Bernstein and Gladstone that “this is all about condescension…. people are reading our news and saying it is full of sheet.”

Gitlin launches off on a lecture on Watergate. Wolff jokes that we should get off this Watergate thing. Gitlin explodes and tells Wolff he’s rude. “Gitlin part of the fucking problem with media” is shouting, he shouts. Wolff: “Part of the problem is is a lack of a sense of humor.” Gitlin, red-faced, proves the point, accusing Wolff of “a lack of grace.”

Bernstein asks the room who voted for Bush. Not a single person raises a hand. “This tells us something about we who are producing this,” he says.

A student from NYU says that between Frontline and US is Jon Stewart. I wish some journalism students — someone under 50 — were on this panel (and there are plenty here from NYU and CUNY). That’s the perspective we’re not hearing. Indeed, we heard some sniffing about having the follow the demographic advertisers want: namely, young people. After saying, with admiration, that Stewart should be nominated by his school for a “fake Pulitzer,” Gitlin — looking at media the old, mass way — says that Jon Stewart’s number[s] are “very low” and that “he is not the voice of a generation.”

I do my predictable rant arguing that this is about respect for the people and about listening. When we dismiss popular culture we dismiss the population. We do see Fanning of PBS and Gladstone of NPR making good use of new media to present news but I argue that is less than half the battle (and the head of PBS says that PBS — particularly Frontline — is looking to use new media to open up to new talent and new reporting): It’s about listening to the people.



Killer local advertising

September 25th, 2006 Read More: , ,

The Journal writes a good primer on marketing online via blogs and search and such. Buried in there is a gem of an anecdote that shows why newspapers and yellow pages are in deep trouble with local advertising — unless they find new ways to serve them and compete with Google:

It’s hard to engage in any public relations, of course, if the public doesn’t know you exist. In early 2004, Kenny Kormendy says he was on welfare and struggling to make ends meet as a taxi driver in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. He had tried to reach the public through typical means,  .../...

The sun sets on Hollywood

September 25th, 2006 Read More: ,

Peter Preston writes in the Observer:

. . . Professor Jeremy Tunstall has just written a successor to his magisterial 1977 study, The Media Are American. It is called The Media Were American.

Tunstall’s thesis is simple, but jolting. Of course America still floods the world with movies, music and TV shows. And, of course, their combined value climbs higher and higher. But if we’re talking something different - market share - then the US is in headlong decline, and has been for nearly 50 years. Discount around 100 annual hours of bigbudget movies and the residue is a pitiful, shrivelled thing.  .../...

Who’s afraid of the big, bad mogul?

September 22nd, 2006 Read More:

In light of the Knight Ridder and Tribune fiascos, I have to laugh at all the mewling about big, bad, media consolidation. The mewlers needn’t waste their breathy angst on media companies getting bigger. The big ones are toppling of their own weight, weighed down by their heritage, habits, and huge costs. Others are forced to open up — see the networks taking their shows to the internet. The irony of the parallel falls of the Tribune and Knight empires is that regulation against consolidation is what stopped Knight from diversifying, at least within media, and finding efficiencies with media cross-ownership within its markets. But the fact that Tribune was grandfathered in, owning one of every medium in Chicago, wasn’t enough to save it.

To those who celebrate that some newspapers will be freed from the yoke of remote corporate parents as they are bought up by local egotists, beware: New cash from would-be moguls and kingmakers in local markets will only stave off the inevitable. To those who want to regulate big media into extinction: Relax. They will die of their own weight.

: SEE ALSO: Jack Shafer, who says that trading the big, bad media conglomerate for the local mogul is not such an enticing prospect.

Everybody’s still avoiding the real necessity: restructing the news industry and its products and services. More later.

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