(out of Kuwait:) STUMBLES FORWARDS, EVER CLOSER TO THE BLOODY FINGERPRINTS WHILE THE RATS BEGIN CONSIDERING WHEN TO JUMP SHIP.  ALISTAIR CAMPBELL IS GONE  BY NO MEANS A BAD MAN AS BAD MEN GO :)
(did u wonder why they kept going onnabout “everything was done at my commander’s orders?  their deal is:  if tony takes the blame ‘in principle’ for everything campbell did, alistair will take the secrets to the grave).

in america, bush’s ratings continue to ‘settle’ (into relative ‘sanity’ again), the various accusations and investigations proliferate like the Planet Aids Virus, while, like sleepwalkers, most media pundits continue to believe their boy shrub is coasting to another victory!  amazing!

never have i seen such a schizophrenia in the culture.  the people ensconced and most isolated in the dominant and dying culture can continue to believe that their side is streaks ahead and unstoppable as planned, while, from the centre of the amorphous but ever growing future culture, it is obvious that there’s so much ‘tail’ to this ‘gait’ that it’s bottomless; and everything’s hotting up and imploding as the vampire elite elbow their former fellow conspirators aside and bail out one by one, or jump (expect more) as a rising chorus of voices dares to break what’s now almost just a memory of those fascist patriotism days just round that last corner, remember?  when all serious yuppies were being ‘smart’ and keeping their heads down and ‘going with history’?  boy, if you think the hutton enquiry “ran out of control”, wait till you see the dinosaurs’ feeding frenzy on each other’s heads as they rock and then roll!

for IRAQGAIT is also about the henchmen and belligerents, the military in Iraq itself, generals and grunts, the corporations who paid good money for their ALL-U-CAN-EAT gobbles there, the quisling Iraqi middle class wannabe ‘leaders,’ all the other corporate trained freedom-assassins waiting in the wings across the Middle east for their turn,  BUT the whole damn thing is blowing apart, wisdom always said that saddam was a tyrant because nothing less could hold the country together and especially when it was suffering daily  hostilities from the US and britain and now bush must either equal saddam’s ruthlessness, or crawl to the UN with a Compleat Apologia  for no country on earth will actually send troops to that country now in its state of illegal anarchy and military madness & mayhem.

like Alexander the Great (Asshole), Georgius Bush thot he could cut through the intricacies of the Gordian Knot with a single impatient flash of the sword.  but it ain’t that simple, george.  that’s why the liberals, intellectuals and softhearted lefties will inherit the earth.  or what’s left of it.

but look at the upside for your gang, george.  none of ‘em will get the chair (for treason) like the hundreds you sent there (while they applauded) for infinitely less human suffering than your mafia have perpetrated in their 3 year Neo-ConRampage - those muddleheaded candy asses will have banished capital punishment as a medieval barbarity.

like yourself.

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TEXT JOCKEY //  TJ PHRASER (Fraser Clark) & THE MEDIA EVOLUTION  MIXING THE TRACTS LIVE ON THE KEYBOARD @ A MEDIA-MEME RATE OF 160 IPP * 
* Ideas Per Paragraph
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!IRAQGAIT!: BIGGEST INSIDER YET ‘SINGS’ RE RUMSFELD'S ACTIONS
by Jim Lobe, Middle East Analysis

WASHINGTON   "What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense [OSD]."  Air Force Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski,asenior Pentagon Middle East specialist who worked in the office of US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith until her retirement in April.

Little is known about OSD, originally created by Donald Rumsfeld andhis top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to investigate possible links between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terrorist group.  While only a dozen people officially worked in the office, scores of "consultants" were contracted, many closely identified with the neo-conservative and pro-Likud views held by the Pentagon leadership.

The operations Kwiatkowski witnessed during her tenure in Feith's office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress".

Her charges, which tend to confirm reports offered to the press by retired officers from other intelligence agencies and their still-active but anonymous former colleagues, are likely to make her a prime witness when Congress reconvenes in September for hearings on the manipulation of intelligence to justify war against Iraq.

According to Kwiatkowski, the same operation that allegedly cooked the intelligence was also responsible for the administration's failure to anticipate the current problems now faced by 150,000 US troops [make that 149,997 - ed] in "the world's nastiest rat's nest, without a nation-building plan, without significant international support, and without an exit plan".
>> add ‘and with no legality’.

Her comments echo the worst fears of some lawmakers, who have begun looking into the OSP's role in the administration's mistaken assumptions in Iraq.  Some are even comparing it to the Iran-Contra scandal, an off-the-books operation run from the National Security Council (NSC) during the Reagan administration .
>> except that was kept secret while this was sententiously, religiously, lyingly and self-servingly publicised to the whole world.

"OSP was charged with collecting, vetting, and disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus," David Obey, a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, said last month.  "In fact, it appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with the established intelligence agencies, and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted by anyone other than Rumsfeld."


O.S.Who?!
Headed by a gung-ho former navy officer, William Luti, and a scholarly national-security analyst, Abram Shulsky, OSP was given complete access to reams of raw intelligence produced by the US intelligence community and became the preferred stop, when in town, for defectors handled by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmed Chalabi.

It also maintained close relations with the Defense Policy Board (DPB), which was then chaired by Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Feith's mentor in the Reagan administration.  Perle and Feith, whose published views on Israeli policy echo the right-wing Likud party, co-authored a 1996 memo for then-prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu that argued that Saddam's ouster in Iraq would enable Israel to transform the balance of power in the Middle East in its favour.

In her article, Kwiatkowski wrote that OSP's work was marked by 3 major characteristics:

First, career Pentagon analysts assigned to Rumsfeld's office were generally excluded from Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld’s 3 "key areas of interest", notably Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.  "In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by political appointees; in the case of Israel, a desk officer appointee from the Washington Institute for Near Policy [a think tank closely tied to the main pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee."

Second, the same group of appointees tended to work with like-minded political appointees in other agencies, especially the State Department, the NSC, and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, rather than with those agencies' career analysts or the CIA.  "I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel.".

Third, this exclusion of professional and independent opinions, both within the Pentagon and across government agencies - according to Kwiatkowski - resulted in "groupthink", a technical term defined as "reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterized by uncritical acceptance of conformity to prevailing points of view".  In this case, the prevailing points of view were presumably shaped by neo-conservatives like Feith, Wolfowitz and Perle.

Kwiatkowski's broadside coincides with the appearance in neo-conservative media outlets, notably the Wall Street Journal, of defences of Feith, who is widely seen as the Pentagon's most likely fall guy if it’s forced to shoulder blame for bad intelligence and planning.  British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pressed President Bush to fire Feith for several months, according to diplomatic sources.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH07Ak01.html
UP!  Tupay - the bad hair one (Saddam family member on the run)


THE LESS HAMPERED BY SENTIMENTAL SLOGANS THE BETTER
"The US now has about 50% of the worlds wealth but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day dreaming and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.  We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.
“We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not very far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts; the less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans the better"  George Kennon, famedUS State Dept official in 1948.
UP!  Sapheway - the grocery store owner (Saddam family member on the run)

PROUD OF OUR SOLDIER!
ASHAMED OF OUR PRESIDENT!
FAMILY OF SOLDIER DISPLAYING OUTRAGE TOWARD PRESIDENT

With their 23-year-old son serving as an Army reservist in Iraq, Pat and Paul Vogel are trying as best they can to support the work he and his fellow soldiers are doing. But they’re finding it much more difficult to endorse their commander in chief.

"Our primary concern with the president is we feel like a lot of bad decisions have been made leading up to our son's and a lot of other troops' being involved," Paul Vogel said. They accuse him of using fabricated information about former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's ties with Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hussein's potential use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States as the basis for declaring war on Iraq.

Vogel just attended the funeral of a 40-year-old reservist from his son’s unit, a Wisconsin man whose 3 children are fatherless after the truck he was driving in convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

THE YELLOW STAIN FROM TEXAS
To show their disdain, the Vogels have hung a sign outside their business, Assured Staffing, on Main Street, stating:

"PROUD OF OUR SOLDIER! ASHAMED OF OUR PRESIDENT!
Where's George? He's out GOLFING. He has no time for funerals  THREE MEN DIED today - THREE AMERICAN SOLDIERS. Men who served their country. BUSH has DESERTED The Military THREE TIMES. First: When he went AWOL for a year. That's Documented. Second: When he allowed the Troops and Veterans to have their benefits CUT, even while they are DYING in the field - Combat Pay reduced from $250 to $100. And that's just the start. Third: HE'S NEVER ATTENDED EVEN ONE FUNERAL OF A SINGLE US SOLDIER KILLED IN IRAQ.

YOU call that a LEADER? We call it the COWARD FROM CRAWFORD. The Yellow STAIN from Texas. He has NO SHAME. Impeach this Crook. Get a REAL President in the People's House. Send ALI BABA BUSH and his
FORTY THIEVES PACKING.”

Toward Revolution
the Future of Protesting
Prepared by Micah

Aug. 1  There is a significance to the simultaneous emergence of the idea of the swarm. It’s a concept birthed from a metaphor.
In each discipline a certain representation of how information is dispersed has taken hold: visually represented as the rhizome or the network. Biology, for example, has discovered that certain species such as ants have evolved a biological information sharing method that gives them an intelligence as a mass. Power flows throughout their body-politic.
Based upon such advances, the understanding and re-imagining of networks might be the most important concept driving innovation today.

=====================
The Flash Mob
This is not a protest, yet. These anonymous individuals are part of the first San Francisco flash mob  an activity that’s presently apolitical, but won’t be for long.
====================

Our own understanding of networks is not only broadening as we look at “social networks,” it’s even changing, for example, in searching for the best way to share that pirated mp3. The info flows of file-sharing have gone from
centralisation under Napster to
de-centralisation under Gnutella to
partial swarming under Edonkey to
total swarming under BitTorrent.
Each step requires a new algorithm, a new shared metaphor. It takes years to create them, and some are not ever done: Freenet.

The question of how to effectively, and most powerfully, organise an information sharing network has seeped into activism  popularised by MoveOn.org’s custom-coded scripts that allow tens of thousands to synchronise their action from diverse locations for traditional grassroots organising tactics such as calling their congressperson. But ultimately even MoveOn is powered by a tool we all have: e-mail. After all, even MoveOn began as a mailing list. The movement’s continued attempts to create online communities for specific end-goals has forced new ways of organising ourselves.
Originally the Internet, like its creators, was lonely and amazed with its own ability to simply create another person to chat. America Online socially networked the high-schools, IRC the world, and e-mail the intellectual.

We are just now beginning to see the Internet’s first attempt to challenge the world’s superpowers. By challenging Bush  which in this age necessitates an Internet connection  we are putting an emphasis on social-networks that activate and initiate actions in the material, real world. The “smart mob” we strive for is evolving before we can imagine or articulate it. We know there is power here ... somewhere.


THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION REMAINS, however, how exactly should we manifest ourselves physically. And for now it seems we are stuck with one answer: visibility.
Naively thinking that the media (their media) is our sword, we forget that what makes us operate now is not the tv but the media materialised in our computer by the Internet.
The recent Senate decision to block the Total Information Awareness program is not the first time a Bush Regime policy has been undone by the Internet spreading information more effectively than the mass media could silence it. The first example was the outrage directed against the TIPS program. It wasn’t via CNN that we even heard about this program, but via a single journalist, via a single newspaper in Australia (“US PLANNING TO RECRUIT ONE IN 24 AMERICANS AS CITIZEN SPIES”), then carried via Internet to every member of the movement. And I believe the result will be the same for the newest high powered meme  the news of the voter scam being perpetrated by Diebold, an odd company that makes ATM machines and paper(trail)less election computer systems.


THE TRADITIONAL PROTEST, also, has for too long been seen by us as our most powerful tool.

I propose there are at least 2 specific aspects of the traditional protest that we intuitively know have power:

1 Our Ability to Disrupt the Functioning of Symbols of the State  Let’s not forget that the synchronised movements of these actors we disrupt are the result of another by-product of a network of shared information.
2 - Our Ability to Force Our Meme, Our Thought-Virus, Into Other People’s Minds, Thereby Increasing Our Membership - Given the emergence of everything above, it’s clear we can safely, and more efficiently, move all these activities under the guidance of the Internet. We no longer need protests to be covered by the media in order to articulate our message because we now function via a network independent of mass media. We’re speaking into peoples’ homes every second of every day, not just at protests.

Our Ability to Disrupt the Functioning of Symbols of the State, however, is more difficult to separate and replace with the Internet. Instead we should seek to maximise that aspect by focusing all of our “organised” protest energy on fine-tuning the nonviolent-citywide shutdown. First we were centralised  International ANSWER manifested us by widely claiming a day. But it was Indymedia that de-centralised us by bringing us down locally  more accurately, nodally. Because of Indymedia’s structure any of us are able to begin our own.


HOW WE SWARM, however, is still the mystery we are stumbling/ swarming towards.
Swarming is a concept that owes its existence not to Howard Rheingold’s “smart mob” but to RAND’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. These theorists have made the curious discovery that swarming tactics, which they describe as “a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, and strategic way to strike from all directions, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force,” have often defeated larger, more advanced militaries (“Swarming and the Future of Conflict”, pg 45).
This is true historically: many different armies have organised themselves into a swarm. Because swarming necessitates a shared information network, it’s a developing military theory that evokes not only classic historical studies such as “Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present, and Future” but also the post-structuralist theory of “The Emergence of the Noopolitick”. Notice that the inspiration behind their work on the noosphere comes not from generals, but philosophers: Teilhard de Chardin, Foucault and Derrida.


It’s Gene Sharp who’s given the movement the necessary insight to even come to this discussion of swarming by way of the military. His philosophy of non-violence is a philosophy of strategy and tactics, and his conclusion is two part:
first, that there are dozens of sub-categories of non-violence
second, that non-violence can be as tactically powerful as violence.
Absolute pacifism, the type we’re taught by the mass-media that asks the believer to become purely inactive, is not the pacifism of the true nonviolent revolutionaries. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. both understood that non-violence is a powerful technique, but still a sibling of violence. They adopted non-violence not from a desire to fail to challenge the state’s violence while maintaining moral superiority, but in order to win.


IT’S TIME TO THINK ABOUT WINNING!
Have you shaken your doubt and reluctance toward action yet? 
I’ve seen the circle turn enough times to realise that there is one undeniable truth: the most powerful individuals are now too powerful.

I was afraid to believe myself on Oct. 9, 2002, when the Guardian told me ‘WHITE HOUSE ‘EXAGGERATING IRAQI THREAT’ and even though it was an American newspaper that now insisted I was being duped, the San Francisco Chronicle’s headline on Oct. 12, 2002, “BUSH’S EVIDENCE OF THREAT DISPUTED,” didn’t wake me.
But how can I look back and see
“PRAGUE CLEARS IRAQ OF LAST CONNECTION TO AL QAEDA” (New York Times, Oct. 21, 2002),
“PERLE SAYS US TO ATTACK IRAQ DESPITE INSPECTIONS” (Mirror, Nov. 11, 2002),
“CIA, FBI STAFFERS SEE NO LINK BETWEEN IRAQ, AL QAEDA” (New York Times, Feb. 2, 2003),
“BUSH MESSAGE IS INEVITABLE WAR” (Washington Post, Feb. 25, 2003), and finally
“BUSH ORDERS AMERICA’S FIRST PRE-EMPTIVE WAR” (Chicago Tribune, Mar. 20, 2003),
and not realize I do believe my fears?!
I am ready to act, to win.

The path forward is far from clear. Perhaps paradoxically, I’m not completely convinced that we can even entirely predict how the movement will organise itself. But there is indication that it will choose, or be forced to choose, a protest model based upon the simultaneous materialisation of flash-protests specifically designed to shut down the economic flows of a city without violence, without riots, and without giving the state any excuse  or indeed opportunity - for their obligatory retaliatory violence.

I imagine waking up one morning and finding an e-mail asking me to be at this corner at that time. I faithfully follow the directions only to find that a couple dozen others have materialised. Whispers through the crowd of the anonymous tell me that such groups have materialised on every street corner across the city. At noon, with a smile, we step into the street and stop.


ADDING INTELLIGENCE TO THE MOB
Here are some specific ideas on how the movement can adapt what’s been until now a largely military doctrine. Perhaps ironically, it’s been the movement that the originators of the military doctrine of swarming have looked toward for inspiration.

From the actions at the 1999 Seattle protest, which prompted the now famous essay “Netwar in the Emerald City,” to the zapatista movement, the theorists of RAND have been seeing something significant. That the movement, however, may act unconsciously as a swarm when the conditions are right will not win the larger war. Instead, the practice of swarming must come to be a practiced, and refined doctrine  a strategy.
Fortunately, if history is any guide, the movement may be the place whence ultimately a powerful intentional strategy of swarming will arise. It was social movements, as John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt point out in Swarming and the Future of Conflict, that were the first to develop theories of swarming:

The most clearly developed theoretical work on swarming can be found at the level of social conflict. In anarchist thought, for example, the “General Strike” theory of Mikhail Bakunin focused on the notion of pulsing the power of workers in simultaneous strikes aimed at bringing down the state. As E.H. Carr put it, Bakunin used his general strike theory as a means of overwhelming the state, a “conception of revolution through the people by destroying the power of the State” (1950, p. 101). His approach is strikingly different from classical revolutionary thought, which instead keys on ways to seize state power and use it in ways that are often ultimately beneficial to the state itself. [pg 41]
Swarming, for the purposes of protesting, can be thought of as the technique of quickly massing a large number of individuals from all directions onto a single position in order to attain a specific goal. There are roughly 4 different phases in a successful swarm: locate the target, converge, attack, disperse.
For these 4 phases to work correctly they must be synchronised between a diversity of seemingly disconnected individuals. Therefore, there must be a layer of instantaneous communication between these individuals. This level of communication is the most difficult aspect of swarming  and a pre-requisite that has made swarming up until now much harder to accomplish.


Using Your Cell Phone to Coordinate Via Text Messaging (SMS)
Upoc.com: Two-way all-channel communication
Upoc.com allows people to join cell phone groups that receive text messages. These groups are exactly the same as mailing lists, except instead of receiving an e-mail you receive a text message on your cell phone. The easiest configuration would be to encourage people to sign up for the Upoc.com group prior to the protest. The group could be set to accept messages from any member so that each person would have the ability to alert the greater cell phone group of the events in their location. The members who receive the bulletin could then shout out the information to the individuals nearest them and head for the flash point. This would immediately overwhelm any police at the flash point and would be virtually impossible to stop. After the protest people could simply unsubscribe from the group.

A major problem that’s been raised, and which this system does not resolve, is disinformation. We'll explore ways to counter this in future instalments. We plan on having a functional swarming system operating at the RNC protest in NY scheduled for late August. If you'd like to help in the development of swarming protest tactics, consider subscribing to the Swarming discussion list at.
www.flashprotest.org

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