Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell: 'I was visited by the FBI'

By Aaron Foley | MLive.com

December 31, 2009, 9:41AM

Courtesy photoLori and Kurt Haskell
Following up on a visit from FBI officials about an eyewitness account first described to MLive.com, Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell described the visit in comment sections across MLive on Wednesday.

Haskell and his wife, Lori, were aboard Flight 253 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to destroy the plane. They say another man tried to help Abdulmutallab board the plane in Amsterdam.

Haskell had two detailed posts in two different stories. Here is Part One, originally posted here:

"Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.

Ever since I got off of Flight 253 I have been repeating what I saw in US Customs. Specifically, 1 hour after we left the plane, bomb sniffing dogs arrived. Up to this point, all of the passengers on Flight 253 stood in a small area in an evacuated luggage claim area of an airport terminal. During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived, 1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30 ish Indian man. This is not the so called "Sharp Dressed" man. I will refer to this man as "The man in orange". The man in orange, who stood some 20ft away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) "You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out." We were then marched out of the baggage claim area and into a long hallway. This entire time period and until we left customs, no person that wasn't a law enforcement personnel or a passenger on our flight was allowed anywhere on our floor of the terminal (or possibly the entire terminal) The FBI was so concerned during this time, that we were not allowed to use the bathroom unless we went alone with an FBI agent, we were not allowed to eat or drink, or text or call anyone. I have been repeating this same story over the last 5 days. The FBI has, since we landed, insisted that only one man was arrested for the airliner attack (contradicting my account). However, several of my fellow passengers have come over the past few days, backed up my claim, and put pressure on FBI/Customs to tell the truth. Early today, I heard from two different reporters that a federal agency (FBI or Customs) was now admitting that another man has been held (and will be held indefinitely) since our flight landed for "immigration reasons." Notice that this man was "being held" and not "arrested", which was a cute semantic ploy by the FBI to stretch the truth and not lie.

Just a question, could that mean that the man in orange had no passport?

However, a few hours later, Customs changed its story again. This time, Mr. Ron Smith of Customs, says the man that was detained "had been taken into custody, but today tells the news the person was a passenger on a different flight." Mr. Ron Smith, you are playing the American public for a fool. Lets take a look at how plausible this story is (After you've already changed it twice). For the story to be true, you have to believe, that:

1. FBI/Customs let passengers from another flight co-mingle with the passengers of flight 253 while the most important investigation in 8 years was pending. I have already stated that not one person who wasn't a passenger or law enforcement personnal was in our area the entire time we were detained by Customs.
2. FBI/Customs while detaining the flight 253 passengers in perhaps the most important investigation since the last terrorist attack, and despite not letting any flight 253 passenger drink, eat, make a call, or use the bathroom, let those of other flights trample through the area and possibly contaminate evidence.
3. You have to believe the above (1 and 2) despite the fact that no flights during this time allowed passengers to exit off of the planes at all and were detained on the runway during at least the first hour of our detention period.
4. You have to believe that the man that stood 20 feet from me since we entered customs came from a mysterious plane that never landed, let its passengers off the plane and let this man sneak into our passenger group despite having extremely tight security at this time (i.e. no drinking even).
5. FBI/Customs was hauling mysterious passengers from other flights through the area we were being held to possibly comtaminate evidence and allow discussions with suspects on Flight 253 or to possibly allow the exchange of bombs, weapons or other devices between the mysterious passengers from other flights and those on flight 253.

Seriously Mr. Ron Smith, how stupid do you think the American public is?

Mr. Ron Smith's third version of the story is an absolute inplausible joke. I encourage you, Mr. Ron Smith, to debate me anytime, anywhere, and anyplace in public to let the American people see who is credible and who is not.

I ask, isn't this the more plausible story:

1. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don't want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers on a flight with a live bomb on the runway for 20 minutes.
2. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don't want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers in customs for 1 hour with a live bomb in a carry on bag.
3. Customs/FBI realize that the man in orange points to a greater involvement then the lone wolf theory that they have been promoting.

Mr. Ron Smith I encourage you to come out of your cubicle and come up with a more plausible version number 4 of your story."

Haskell continued his comment in a different post on MLive.

"For the last five days I have been reporting my story of the so called "sharp dressed man." For those of you who haven't read my account, it involves a sharp dressed "Indian man" attempting to talk a ticket agent into letting a supposed "Sudanese refugee" (The terrorist) onto flight 253 without a passport. I have never had any idea how it played out except to note that the so called "Sudanese reefugee" later boarded my flight and attempted to blow it up and kill me. At no time did my story involve, or even find important whether the terrorist actually had a passport. The importance of my story was and always will be, the attempt with an accomplice (apparently succesful) of a terrorist with all sorts of prior terrorist warning signs to skirt the normal passport boarding procedures in Amsterdam. By the way, Amsterdam security did come out the other day and admit that the terrorist did not have to "Go through normal passport checking procedures".

Amsterdam security, please define to the American public "Normal passport boarding procedures".

You see the FBI would have the American public believe that what was important was whether the terrorist in fact had a passport.

Seriously think about this people. You have a suicide bomber who had recently been to Yemen to but a bomb, whose father had reported him as a terrorist, who supposedly was on some kind of U.S. terror watchlist, and most likely knew the U.S. was aware of these red flags. Yet, he didn't go through "Normal passport checking procedures." What does that mean? Maybe that he flashed a passport to some sort of sympathetic security manager in a backroom to avoid a closer look at the terrorist's "red flags"? What is important is that the terrorist avoided using normal passport checking procedures (apparently successfully) in order to avoid a closer look into his red flags. Who cares if he had a passport. The important thing is that he didn't want to show it and somehow avoided a closer inspection and "normal passport checking procedures." Each passport comes with a bar code on it that can be scanned to provide a wealth of information about the individual. I would bet that the passport checking procedures for the terrorist did not include a bar code scan of his passport (which could have revealed damning information about the terrorist).

Please note that there is a very easy way to verify the veracity of my prior "sharp dressed man" account. Dutch police have admitted that they have reviewed the video of the "sharp dressed man" that I referenced. Note that it has not been released anywhere, You see, if my eye witness account is false, it could easily be proven by releasing the video. However, the proof of my eyewitness account would also be verified if I am telling the truth and I am. There is a reason we have only heard of the video and not seen it. dutch authorities, "RELEASE THE VIDEO!" This is the most important video in 8 years and may be all of two minutes long. Show the entire video and "DO NOT EDIT IT"! The American public deserves its own chance to attempt to identify the "sharp dressed man". I have no doubt that if the video indicated that my account was wrong, that the video would have already swept over the entire world wide web.

Instead of the video, we get a statment that the video has been viewed and that the terrorist had a passport. Each of these statements made by the FBI is a self serving play on semantics and each misses the importance of my prior "sharp dressed man" account. The importance being that the man "Tried to board the plane with an accomplice and without a passort". The other significance is that only the airport security video can verify my eyewitness account and that it is not being released.

Who has the agenda here and who doesn't? Think about that for a minute."

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , some really weird and strange stuff about it from Scientists!

'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC

Attack of the Hyperdimensional Juggernaut-Men

By Lewis Page

Posted in Physics, 6th November 2009 12:02 GMT

A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension".

"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.

The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons - typically either protons or lead ions.

The differences are, firstly, that the streams of particles are moving at velocities within a whisker of light speed - such that each stream has as much energy in it as a normal car going at 1000mph. Secondly, the beams are arranged in such fashion that the two streams swerve through one another occasionally, which naturally results in huge numbers of incredibly violent head-on collisions.

These collisions are sufficiently violent that they are expected to briefly create conditions similar to those obtaining countless aeons ago, not long after the Big Bang, when the entire universe was still inconceivably small - it was smaller than a proton for quite some time, seemingly, still with all the stuff that nowadays makes up all the supra-enormity of space and galaxies and so forth packed in somehow.

Naturally, some extremely strange phenomena are to be expected when one mangles the very fabric of space-time itself in this fashion. Various eccentric nutballs have claimed that this would doom humanity in one fashion or another; perhaps converting the entire Earth, everything on it and possibly the rest of the universe too into "strangelet soup", monopole mulligatawny or some other sort of frightful sub-particulate blancmange or custard.

It has also been suggested that cack-handed boffins at the LHC might inadvertently call into being a miniature black hole and carelessly drop this into the centre of the Earth, rather irritatingly causing the planet to implode. It's certainly to be hoped that the button marked "Call Black Hole Into Being" on the control board has some kind of flip-down cover over it.

Obviously all that's utter rubbish. But some boffins have speculated that black holes might alternatively act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. This would seem to chime with Bertolucci's remarks this week on hyperdimensional "doors" out of which might come unspecified "somethings".

and ............................

Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?

By Eben Harrell Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009

An engineer works on CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2007

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty

Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures

The Large Hadron Particle Collider

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future. (See pictures of the Large Hadron Particle Collider.)

The LHC, a 17-mile underground ring designed to smash atoms together at high energies, was created in part to find proof of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. According to current theory, the Higgs is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons.

In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird. (A CERN spokesman said power cuts such as the one caused by the errant baguette are common for a device that requires as much electricity as the nearby city of Geneva, and that physicists are confident they will begin circulating atoms by the end of the year). (See the top 10 animal stories of 2008.)

In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, "you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."

Many physicists say that Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory, while intellectually interesting, cannot be accurate because the event that the LHC is trying to recreate already happens in nature. Particle collisions of an energy equivalent to those planned in the LHC occur when high-energy cosmic rays collide with the earth's atmosphere. What's more, some scientists believe that the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (or Fermilab) near Chicago has already created Higgs bosons without incident; the Fermilab scientists are now refining data from their collisions to prove the Higgs' existence. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)

Nielsen counters that nature might allow a small number of Higgs to be produced by the Tevatron, but would prevent the production of the large number of particles the LHC is anticipated to produce. He also acknowledges that Higgs particles are probably produced in cosmic collisions, but says it's impossible to know whether nature has stopped a great deal of these collisions from happening. "It's possible that God avoids Higgs [particles] only when there are very many of them, but if there are a few, maybe He let's them go," he says.

Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory represents one side of an intellectual divide between particle physicists today. Contemporary physicists tend to fall into one of two camps: the theorists, who posit ideas about the origins and workings of the universe; and experimentalists, who design telescopes and particle accelerators to test these theories, or provide new data from which novel theories can emerge. Most experimentalists believe that the theorists, due to a lack of new data in recent years, have reached a roadblock — the Standard Model, which is the closest thing the theorists have to an evidence-backed "theory of everything," provides only an incomplete explanation of the universe. Until theorists get further data and evidence to move forward, the experimentalists believe, they end up simply making wild guesses — like those concerning time-traveling saboteurs — about how the universe works. "Nielsen and Ninomiya's theories are clearly crazy theories," says Dmitri Denisov, a physicist and Higgs-hunter at the DZero experiment at Fermilab. "In recent years theorists have been starving for experimental input and as a result, theories of second type are propagating widely. The majority of them have nothing to do with world we live in." (See the best inventions of 2008.)

Nielsen concedes, "We have very little data, so theorists are going their own ways and making a lot of theories that may not be very plausible. We need guidance from experimentalists to make the theories more healthy."

"But," he adds, "in terms of our theory, we are submitting to a form of experiment. We are saying the LHC won't be allowed to produce a large number of Higgs. If it does, it would be very damaging to our theory."

Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, "Of course not, but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it." In other words: if preposterous theories are mathematically sound and can be confirmed by observation, they are true, even if seemingly impossible to believe. To scientists in the early 20th century, for example, quantum mechanics may have seemed outrageous. "The concept that you could have a wave-particle duality — that an object could take on either wave-like properties or point-like properties, depending on how you observe it — takes a huge leap of imagination," says Roberto Roser, a scientist at Fermilab. "Sometimes outlandish papers turn out to be the laws of physics."

So what would Peter Higgs himself make of the intellectual controversy surrounding his eponymous particle? Speaking on behalf of his friend, Professor Richard Kenway, who holds Higgs' former position at the University of Edinburgh, says that the 78-year-old emeritus professor remains quietly confident that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson when it is eventually running at full strength. For his part, Kenway says the LHC's delays are to be expected given the size and intricacy of the $9 billion experiment. And he says if he ever needs further proof that the Higgs boson is not abhorrent to nature, he need only spend time with his friend and mentor. "If nature truly did not want us to discover the Higgs, a cosmic ray would have zapped the embryo that became Peter, preventing its development into a physicist," he says.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,00.html?xid=rss-health#ixzz0Wc7rUYAk

iSnitch ... report on your fellow people.

WATCH, THINK, DECIDE

Telephone Company is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit

• By Ryan Singel
• October 8, 2009 |

AT&T was the first of many telcos sued for helping the NSA spy on Americans without warrants

The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: the nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.

Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to squash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.

The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records:

“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because the government and the companies have a common interest in the defense of the pending litigation and the communications regarding the immunity provisions concerned that common interest.”

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffery White disagreed and ruled on September 24 that the feds had to release the names of the telecom employees that contacted the Justice Department and the White House to lobby for a get-out-of-court-free card.

“Here, the telecommunications companies communicated with the government to ensure that Congress would pass legislation to grant them immunity from legal liability for their participation in the surveillance,” White wrote. “Those documents are not protected from disclosure because the companies communicated with the government agencies “with their own … interests in mind,” rather than the agency’s interests.”

The feds were supposed to make the documents available Friday, but in a motion late Thursday, the Obama administration is asking for a 30-day emergency stay (.pdf) so it can file a further appeal.

Read more at the EFF’s blog.

Spy on your own people for cash from Government in Britain.

Internet game that awards points for people spotting real crimes on CCTV is branded 'snooper's paradise'

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 12:27 PM on 05th October 2009


A new internet game is about to be launched which allows 'super snooper' players to plug into the nation's CCTV cameras and report on members of the public committing crimes.

The 'Internet Eyes' service involves players scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers.

Players who help catch the most criminals each month will win cash prizes up to £1,000.
Internet Eyes

Crime deterrent or snoopers paradise? The CCTV website allows access to a network of cameras where watchers can report crimes to camera owners

The Internet Eyes' website will also feature a rogue's gallery of the so-called 'criminals' along with a list of their offences and which internet user caught them.

But civil rights campaigners today condemned the game, which launches in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, next month, and branded it 'a snoopers paradise'.

They claim nosey neighbours could snoop on homeowners putting the wrong rubbish in bins and even motorists guilty of the most minor misdemeanors.

But businessman Tony Morgan, a former restaurant owner, said it would give local businesses protection against petty criminals, and act as a deterrent once 'Internet Eyes patrol here' signs are prominently displayed.

He will charge those who use the service, which could eventually include local authorities and even police forces as well as shop owners, £20 a week per camera to have their CCTV included on the site - amounting to thousands each year.
Internet Eyes

He said: 'This could turn out to be the best crime prevention weapon there's ever been.

'I wanted to combine the serious business of stopping crime with the incentive of winning money.

'There are over four million CCTV cameras in the UK and only one in a thousand gets watched.

'Crimes are bound to get missed but this way people the cameras will be watched by lots of people 24-hours-a-day.

'It gives people something better to do than watching Big Brother when everyone is asleep.

'We've had a lot of interest from local businesses and hope to roll it out nationwide and then worldwide.'

He said the team had seen a wave of support and denied that liberties were being affected.

'There are more than four million cameras in the UK so everybody is on camera already, it is just that no one is watching the cameras.'

Players collect points by watching the cameras, which show CCTV images in real-time, and click a button every time they see something suspicious taking place.

An SMS or text message, along with a still image of the alleged crime, is sent to whoever controls the camera. They can then decide whether or not to take action.

The camera controller will send a feedback email back to the player indicating whether a crime has taken place.

Players are awarded one point for spotting a suspected crime and three points if they see someone committing an actual crime. Players also lose points if the camera operator rules that the alert was not a crime.

The game has been condemned by civil rights campaigners who claim it will encourage people to spy and snitch on each other.

Charles Farrier, director of the No-CCTV pressure group, said: 'It is an appalling idea for a game and will create a snoopers paradise.

'It is something which should be nipped in the bud immediately. It will not only encourage a dangerous spying mentality by turning crime into a game but also could lead to dangerous civil rights abuses.

'What if a group of racists decide to send alerts every time a black person is seen on screen and what's stopping criminals using the cameras to scope out where to commit crimes.'

James Woodward, head of the technical team for Internet Eyes, which is based in Devon and Stratford-upon-Avon, said safeguards - including blocking players out for sending three incorrect alerts - would prevent the game being abused.

He said: 'For privacy reasons users will not know the location of the cameras. They will find it very difficult to work out where the camera is.

'It is possible that someone who is blocked out could see a crime taking place but be unable to alert the operator.

'But it is probably safe to assume someone else looking at the same camera will raise the alarm.

'Whoever has a CCTV camera, be it the police, local authorities or business or home owners can sign up to have their cameras watched. We hope to include police cameras very soon.'

The game will initially use CCTV cameras in shops and businesses in Stratford-upon-Avon but will be rolled out across Britain by December before going worldwide next year.

Last month it was revealed that Britain has 4.2 million CCTV cameras - the equivalent of one per 14 people - one-and-a-half-times as many as Communist China.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218225/Internet-game-awards-points-people-spotting-crimes-CCTV-cameras-branded-snoopers-paradise.html#ixzz0T6TFjU6E

Arugument for Atheist world view.

Kent Hovind vs Molecular Geneticist

We have a village Idiot In this country, It's called fundamentalist Christianity

Obama supports extending Patriot Act provisions

Obama supports extending Patriot Act provisions

By DEVLIN BARRETT (AP) – 4 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration supports extending three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are due to expire at the end of the year, the Justice Department told Congress in a letter made public Tuesday.

Lawmakers and civil rights groups had been pressing the Democratic administration to say whether it wants to preserve the post-Sept. 11 law's authority to access business records, as well as monitor so-called "lone wolf" terrorists and conduct roving wiretaps.

The provision on business records was long criticized by rights groups as giving the government access to citizens' library records, and a coalition of liberal and conservative groups complained that the Patriot Act gives the government too much authority to snoop into Americans' private lives.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama said he would take a close look at the law, based on his past expertise in constitutional law. Back in May, President Obama said legal institutions must be updated to deal with the threat of terrorism, but in a way that preserves the rule of law and accountability.

In a letter to lawmakers, Justice Department officials said the administration supports extending the three expiring provisions of the law, although they are willing to consider additional privacy protections as long as they don't weaken the effectiveness of the law.

Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the administration is willing to consider stronger civil rights protections in the new law "provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important (provisions)."

Leahy responded with a statement saying it is important for the administration and Congress to "work together to ensure that we protect both our national security and our civil liberties."

The committee has scheduled a hearing next week on the Patriot Act.

From 2004 to 2007, the business records provision was used 220 times, officials said. Most often, the business records were requested in combination with requests for phone records.

The lone wolf provision was created to conduct surveillance on suspects with no known link to foreign governments or terrorist groups. It has never been used, but the administration says it should still be available for future investigations.

The roving wiretaps provision was designed to allow investigators to quickly monitor the communications of a suspects who change their cell phone or communication device, without investigators having to go back to court for a new court authorization. That provision has been used an average of 22 times a year, officials said.

Michelle Richardson of the American Civil Liberties Union called the administration's position "a mixed bag," and said that the group hopes the next version of the Patriot Act will have important safeguards on other issues, particularly the collecting of international communications, and a specific bar on surveillance of protected First Amendment activities like peaceful protests or religious assembly.

"We're heartened they're saying they're willing to work with Congress," Richardson said, adding that is "definitely a sea change from what we've seen in the past."

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Kings of the Hustle on Mike Murdock

This surely beats any Jesus seen on toast or in a door or on a clothe

BUDDHA-ING PEAR TREE

Pears grow in a buddha-like shape in moulds

Saturday September 5,2009

e

HOW about this for a funny looking pair? Or, if it comes to that, a funny looking pair of pears.

Chinese grower Gao Xianzhang has spent six years developing these bizarre-looking fruits, each formed into the shape of a meditating buddha as it grows inside an individual mould.

Gao’s customers in Hexia, northern China, have been snapping them up at £5 a time as soon as they are picked.

“People seem to think they are cute or lucky and will buy them as soon as they’re off the tree,” Gao explained.

So far this season he has cropped 10,000 of the exotic-looking pears and now his bright idea has borne fruit he is planning to export them to the UK and the rest of Europe.

They could soon be the pick of the bunch in supermarkets – so let’s hope demand doesn’t make the home fruit market turn pear-shaped

Fox news, caught in a lie .. again.

Former High-Ranking Intelligence Officer: Cheney Responsible for 9/11

From:

Washington's Blog

David Steele is a former 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer, the second-ranking civilian in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer.

Steele has previously written that "9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war".

This month, Steele went further, writing:

Pakistan briefed Cheney [about the plans for the terrorist attacks ahead of time] …nations also got wind of this and warned the CIA. We also had two walk-ins to the FBI, one in Orlando, one in Newark, that were dismissed by the FBI because the names were all virgins and not in the FBI data base—the arrogance of stupid bureaucracy.

Cheney saw an opportunity for what Bush called his trifecta, and gave it to him by giving the go-ahead to ISI and Al Qaeda, and ordering up a terrorism exercise that allowed him to send all relevant close-in air defense strip alert craft away from the target areas, and to disable the NORTHCOM normal response to flight path diversion.

While the details might be open to debate, many other very high-level intelligence officers have said the "official" explanation for 9/11 makes no sense. And see this and this.

Think the News lies to you now ? If they did before they do now.

Taser-crazy cops becoming global epidemic

Taser-crazy cops becoming global epidemic

August 18th, 2009 · 10 Comments

By Carlos Miller
Tasering incidents have gone so mainstream.

Before, it would take a high profile incident like a University of Florida student trying to ask John Kerry some hard questions - only to end up getting Tased and carted away - to generate any national news coverage.

And that was only because the student’s final words - “Don’t Tase me, bro” - were turned into a national punchline.

But nobody is laughing now.

Americans are beginning to realize that all they have to do is catch the cop on the wrong day at the wrong time and they can wind up with 50,000 volts of electricity ripping through their body.

Get in an argument with your girlfriend? You get a Taser stuck up your ass.

Grandma disputes a traffic ticket with a cop? She gets Tasered on the side of the road.

Grandpa insists on driving his tractor during a parade? He gets Tasered repeatedly.

Teen daughter throws a tantrum over the guys she is texting? She gets Tasered on the side of the head.

It don’t matter if you’re a pregnant woman, a 6-year-old child or a deaf, disabled man.

And the list goes on and on and on.

The latest Tasering incident to make national news, including The Today Show, involved a suburban mother who was Tasered in front of her kids because she disputed a traffic ticket. She is now suing.

The irony is that these devices were introduced as “less lethal weapons,” meaning that they were meant to be used as a replacement for guns. When police began using them ten years ago, they predicted that they would kill less people because they now had the ability to torture people instead.

But if there has been a decline in officer-involved shootings over the last decade, nobody is bringing that fact to the limelight, which indicates there has not been a decline. A search through the FBI website will promptly tell you how many cops were killed, but they make you file a Freedom of Information request if you want to find out how many people were killed by cops throughout the country over the last few years.

And the truth is, Taser guns are anything but less than lethal. Between 2001 and 2008, more than 350 people died after being Tasered by police, according to Amnesty International.

About 50 a year. Almost one death a week.

Last month in Canada, a judge called for tighter control of Taser guns after controversy over a death of an airline passenger in 2007.

Last Saturday, one of the most influential Hispanic organizations in the United States, the League of United Latin American Organizations, called for the end of Taser guns in police departments across the country, claiming that the blacks and Hispanics are the most common groups Tasered.

And the BBC yesterday published a piece on how Taser incidents have been on the rise in the United Kingdom.

In the latter three articles, police spokespeople from three different countries all defended the use of Tasers as vital for the safety of citizens.

Canadian official: “When properly used in appropriate situations, by officers who are well trained, the (Taser) is a useful tool, that contributes to officer and public safety.”

UK official: “They are making a real difference on our streets and helping to keep both the public and our police officers safe.”

Albuquerque official: “The department feels it’s a good tool, it keeps the officer safe, it keeps the citizens safe and it saves lives.”

Who do they think they are kidding?

I have a small condo, which I will work the rest of my to pay off. Meanwhile ...

... the ancestors of others whom by gile, political will and sheer force and bloodletting have managed to come into what I call Royal inheritance. They are Royals by bloodline and have items, money and land given unto them because of their family History. Shameful to think how 99.9999 percent of us work so hard and we cannot lay claim to any of this land. With each new generation the people with vast amounts of wealth will manipulate the system to ensure an ever growing hold on the worlds resources, it's people laws and of course land titles. Wanna know who oens what, there is a fantasic website you should visit.

http://www.whoownstheworld.com/about-the-book/largest-landowner/ :


Data is from 2007 :

“Queen Elizabeth II the largest landowner on Earth.”

Queen Elizabeth II, head of state of the United Kingdom and of 31 other states and territories, is the legal owner of about 6,600 million acres of land, one sixth of the earth’s non ocean surface.

She is the only person on earth who owns whole countries, and who owns countries that are not her own domestic territory. This land ownership is separate from her role as head of state and is different from other monarchies where no such claim is made – Norway, Belgium, Denmark etc.

The value of her land holding. £17,600,000,000,000 (approx).

This makes her the richest individual on earth. However, there is no way easily to value her real estate. There is no current market in the land of entire countries. At a rough estimate of $5,000 an acre, and based on the sale of Alaska to the USA by the Tsar, and of Louisiana to the USA by France, the Queen’s land holding is worth a notional $33,000,000,000,000 (Thirty three trillion dollars or about £17,600,000,000,000). Her holding is based on the laws of the countries she owns and her land title is valid in all the countries she owns. Her main holdings are Canada, the 2nd largest country on earth, with 2,467 million acres, Australia, the 7th largest country on earth with 1,900 million acres, the Papua New Guinea with114 million acres, New Zealand with 66 million acres and the UK with 60 million acres.

She is the world’s largest landowner by a significant margin. The next largest landowner is the Russian state, with an overall ownership of 4,219 million acres, and a direct ownership comparable with the Queen’s land holding of 2,447 million acres. The 3rd largest landowner is the Chinese state, which claims all of Chinese land, about 2,365 million acres. The 4th largest landowner on earth is the Federal Government of the United States, which owns about one third of the land of the USA, 760 million acres. The fifth largest landowner on earth is the King of Saudi Arabia with 553 million acres

Largest five personal landowners on Earh

Queen Elizabeth II	6,600 million acres
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia	553 million acres
King Bhumibol of Thailand	126 million acres
King Mohammed IV of Morocco	113 million acres
Sultan Quaboos of Oman	76 million acres

Page last changed: 27th February 2007 @ 2:55 pm

9/11

Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

By Clive Anderson, CounterPunch. Posted May 25, 2009.

The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

There can be little doubt now that President Bush's reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam's Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse can only inflame suspicions across the Middle East that the United States is on a crusade against Islam.

There is a curious coda to this story. While a senior at Yale University George W. Bush was a member of the exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones society. His father, George H.W. Bush had also been a "Bonesman", as indeed had his father. Skull & Bones' initiates are assigned or take on nicknames. And what was George Bush Senior's nickname? "Magog".

JESSE VENTURA (not aired ,after the show interview) by the FASCIST CHANNEL talking about 9-11.

Magnus Betner on God and Jesus and more ....

Obama Promises to Spend Billions to Address Bogus H1N1 Pandemic

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
May 3, 2009

During his Saturday PR video, Barack Obama told us not to worry, the government will do all it can to protect us from the H1N1 virus. The government will dish out to the states drugs from the so-called Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), a large cache of antibiotics, chemical antidotes, and antitoxins purchased by the taxpayers from Big Pharma.

SNS is a scheme cooked up by by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security. The SNS is releasing one-quarter of its antiviral drugs, personal protective equipment, and respiratory protection devices to help states respond to the overblown H1N1 pandemic.

Obama’s cache of expensive drugs will have to be replenished at the cost of billions of dollars so we are ready to respond to the next designer virus and the one after that.

Obama is merely following in the footsteps of those that came before him. Back in October of 2005, the Pentagon ordered the vaccination of all military personnel worldwide against the so-called avian flu, or H5N1. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he’d budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the vaccine Oseltamivir (sold under the name Tamiflu). Bush urged Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks. As it turns out, this scheme was a boondoggle for Rumsfeld who’d been chairman of the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu.

Rumsfeld and crew cashed in again after the latest manufactured flu scare hit the boards last month. “Since the outbreak of Swine Flu Panic (not Swine Flu but Swine Flu Panic) sales of Tamiflu as well as any and every possible drug marketed as flu related have exploded. Wall Street firms have rushed to issue ‘buy’ recommendations for the company,” writes F. William Engdahl.

Obama will hand out Tamiflu and other drugs to the states to fight against a flu virus that has killed exactly one person in the United States — a toddler from Mexico — and then the CDC will take your money to buy more (or more accurately, the government will borrow money from the bankers, buy billions worth of questionably effective drugs from Big Pharma, and fill up the SNS stash in anticipation of the next engineered release of a designer virus).

According to the Lancet medical journal, Tamiflu and the similar drug Relenza would do nothing in the event of a real pandemic. Tamiflu and Relenza reduce the severity of real influenza, but do not work on viral infections, the Guardian reported in January of 2006. Tamiflu, however, is good for Wall Street “buy recommendations,” thanks to all the corporate media and government generated hype.

Obama has also dedicated your money to developing a vaccine for an outbreak he says will strike this autumn. On Sunday, CFR member and recently installed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Meet the Press “the government is accelerating production of vaccine against the seasonal flu, which is expected to infect millions of Americans,” according to Reuters.

The scandal-infected pharmaceutical company Baxter announced last week that it is working with the World Health Organization on a potential vaccine. A few weeks ago Baxter was implicated in a scandal involving vaccines tainted with the deadly avian flu virus. “Since the probability of mixing a live virus biological weapon with vaccine material by accident is virtually impossible, this leaves no other explanation than that the contamination was a deliberate attempt to weaponize the H5N1 virus to its most potent extreme and distribute it via conventional flu vaccines to the population who would then infect others to a devastating degree as the disease went airborne,” Steve Watson wrote on April 27.

Part of this scheme is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency, although you will not read about it in the New York Times. According to Senator Mike Enzi, Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, this proposed agency will “work closely together and with our global partners to stop the spread of swine flu.” The HELP Committee, chaired by the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy, is working to “reform” health care (that is to say “walmartize” health care).

Obama also said the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ (otherwise known as the “stimulus” bill) that sailed through Congress in February will be used in part to expand government infrastructure in order to fight phony pandemics in the future. It will continue the transfer of billions to Big Pharma. Obama is simply putting the best face on the “debt engine” created by the banksters and unleashed on the American people who will be paying for this scam for generations to come. Rolling the phony pandemic into this scheme makes perfect sense, not that it is particularly required — a Gallup poll revealed in February that 75% of Americans support the “stimulus” con job (corporate polls, of course, should be taken with a large pinch of salt — actual support is probably far less enthusiastic).

Finally, Obama thanks Bush for setting up the structure required to implement a police state and declare martial law. Obama talks about Bush’s “Pandemic Influenza Strategic Plan” (although not by name) that not only calls for the militarization of public health care, but also calls for quarantine, travel restrictions, and other martial law impositions. “After the bungled initial federal response to Katrina, Bush suggested putting the Pentagon in charge of search-and-rescue efforts in times of a major terrorist attack or similarly catastrophic natural disaster. He has argued that the armed forces have the ability to quickly mobilize the equipment, manpower and communications capabilities needed in times of crisis,” CNN reported October 4, 2005. “He urged Congress to give him the ability to use the military, if needed.”

Obama will use the military, too, “if needed.” It is all part of the effort to incrementally usher in a dictatorship by stealth and under the cover of protecting the little people from a flu pandemic that is not a pandemic but rather orchestrated corporate media hype surrounding the release of a genetically engineered virus.

H1N1 is a beta test for things promised to come this autumn.

Ricky on Creationism

Steve gets "peer" review

Wednesday, April 8 2009 - Research/Evidence

What you need to know about "Peer-review"

Useful information for "non-scientists" about the process of peer-reviewed publishing, such as has been the case with Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction, and Environmental Anomalies at the World Trade Center: Evidence for Energetic Materials .

– Ed.

April 7, 2009
Steven Jones
911blogger.com

Since the days of Sir Isaac Newton, Science has proceeded through the publication of peer-reviewed papers. Peer-review means a thorough reading, commentary and even challenge before publication by "peers", that is, other PhD's and professors. This paper was thoroughly peer-reviewed with several pages of tough comments that required of our team MONTHS of additional experiments and studies. It was the toughest peer-review I've ever had, including THREE papers for which I was first author in NATURE. (Please note that Prof. Harrit is first author on this paper.) We sought an established journal that would allow us a LONG paper (this paper is 25 pages long) with MANY COLOR IMAGES AND GRAPHS. Such a scientific journal is not easy to find. Page charges are common for scientific journals these days, and are typically paid by the University of the first or second author (as is the case with this paper) or by an external grant.

A peer-reviewed journal is also called a "refereed" journal. Peer-reviewers are almost always anonymous for scientific publications like this -- that is standard in the scientific world. While authors commonly recommend potential peer-reviewers, editors choose the referees and usually pick at least one or two reviewers that the authors did NOT mention -- and that is almost certainly the case with this paper (based on commentary we received from the reviewers). In the end, all the reviewers -- who were selected by the editor(s) -- approved publication. Thus, the paper was subjected to peer review by the editor or editors, and it passed the peer-review process.

Debunkers may raise all sorts of objections on forums, such as "Oh, it's just paint" or "the aluminum is bound up in kaolin." We have answered those questions in the paper, and shown them to be nonsense, but you have to read to find the answers. I may also provide answers here and in emails, often quoting from the paper to show that the answers are already in it.

Here's what you need to know (especially if you are not a scientist): UNLESS AN OBJECTOR ACTUALLY PUBLISHES HIS OR HER OBJECTION IN A PEER-REVIEWED ESTABLISHED JOURNAL (yes that would include Bentham Scientific journals), THEN THE OBJECTION IS NOT CONSIDERED SERIOUS IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY. YOU SHOULD NOT WORRY ABOUT NON-PUBLISHED OBJECTIONS EITHER.

So how do you, as a non-scientist, discern whether the arguments are valid or not? You should first ask, "is the objection PUBLISHED in an ESTABLISHED PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL?" If not, you can and should say -- "I will wait to see this formally published in a refereed scientific journal. Until then, the published peer-reviewed work by Harrit et al. stands. "

BTW, there also has been no PUBLISHED REFEREED paper yet that counters either the "Fourteen Points" paper or the "Environmental Anomalies" papers we published last year.

IF it is so easy to publish in Bentham Scientific journals, or if these are "vanity publications" (note: there is no factual basis for these charges) -- then why don't the objectors write up their objections and get them peer-reviewed and published?? The fact is, it is not easy, as serious objectors will find out.

Our results have passed the gauntlet of peer-review (including in this case, review at BYU consistent with the fact that there are two authors from BYU).

We say that this paper has the "imprimatur of peer-review". That is a significant breakthrough. You cannot say that of big-foot or Elvis sightings... We are now in a different world from such things, the world of the published scientific community. CAN YOU APPRECIATE THE DIFFERENCE? I hope so. And this is what has our opponents so worried IMO...

Source URL: http://911blogger.com/node/19780

Thnk word of God has never changed? This man knows it has.

Just give this a quick read and watch the video, then allow yourself to think :

http://www.bartdehrman.com/flv_comedycentral/comedy_central.htm

Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Was the Bailout Itself a Scam? A Program of Financial Concentration by Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, March 20, 2009

Information Clearing House - 2009-03-19

Professor Michael Hudson (Counter Punch, [editor: Global Research] March 18) is correct that the orchestrated outrage over the $165 million AIG bonuses is a diversion from the thousand times greater theft from taxpayers of the approximately $200 billion “bailout” of AIG. Nevertheless, it is a diversion that serves an important purpose. It has taught an inattentive American public that the elites run the government in their own private interests. Americans are angry that AIG executives are paying themselves millions of dollars in bonuses after having cost the taxpayers an exorbitant sum. Senator Charles Grassley put a proper face on the anger when he suggested that the AIG executives “follow the Japanese example and resign or go commit suicide.” Yet, Obama’s White House economist, Larry Summers, on whose watch as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration financial deregulation got out of control, invoked the “sanctity of contracts” in defense of the AIG bonuses. But the Obama administration does not regard other contracts as sacred. Specifically: labor unions had to agree to give-backs in order for the auto companies to obtain federal help; CNN reports that “Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday [March 10] that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance”; the Washington Post reports that the Obama team has set its sights on downsizing Social Security and Medicare. According to the Post, Obama said that “it is impossible to separate the country’s financial ills from the long-term need to rein in health-care costs, stabilize Social Security and prevent the Medicare program from bankrupting the government.” After Washington’s trillion dollar bank bailouts and trillion dollar gratuitous wars for the sake of the military industry’s profits and Israeli territorial expansion, there is no money for Social Security and Medicare. The US government breaks its contracts with US citizens on a daily basis, but AIG’s bonus contracts are sacrosanct. The Social Security contract was broken when the government decided to tax 85% of the benefits. It was broken again when the Clinton administration rigged the inflation measure in order to beat retirees out of their cost-of-living adjustments. To have any real Medicare coverage, a person has to give up part of his Social Security check to pay Medicare Part B premium and then take out a private supplemental policy. The true cost of Medicare to beneficiaries is about $6,000 annually in premiums, plus deductibles and the Medicare tax if the person is still earning. Treasury Secretary Geithner, the fox in charge of the hen house, has resolved the problem for us. He is going to withhold $165 million (the amount of the AIG bonuses) from the next taxpayer payment to AIG of $30,000 million. If someone handed you $30,000 dollars, would you mind if they held back $165? PR flaks have rechristened the bonus payments “retention payments” necessary if AIG is to retain crucial employees. This lie was shot down by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who informed the House Committee on Financial Services that the payments went to members of AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary, “the unit of AIG that was principally responsible for the firm’s meltdown.” As for retention, Cuomo pointed out that ”numerous individuals who received large ‘retention’ bonuses are no longer at the firm” . Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor who was set-up in a sex scandal to prevent him investigating Wall Street’s financial gangsterism, pointed out on March 17 that the real scandal is the billions of taxpayer dollars paid to the counter-parties of AIG’s financial deals. These payments, Spitzer writes, are “a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.” Goldman Sachs, for example, had already received a taxpayer cash infusion of $25 billion and was sitting on more than $100 billion in cash when the Wall Street firm received another $13 billion via the AIG bailout. Moreover, in my opinion, most of the billions of dollars in AIG counter-party payments were unnecessary. They represent gravy paid to firms that had made risk-free bets, the non-payment of which constituted no threat to financial solvency. Spitzer identifies a conflict of interest that could possibly be criminal self-dealing. According to reports, the AIG bailout decision involved Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, former New York Federal Reserve president and currently Secretary of the Treasury. No doubt the incestuous relationships are the reason the original bailout deal had no oversight or transparency. The Bush/Obama bailouts require serious investigation. Were these bailouts necessary, or were they a scam, like “weapons of mass destruction,” used to advance a private agenda behind a wall of fear? Recently I heard Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a member of a congressional bailout oversight panel, say on NPR that the US has far too many banks. Out of the financial crisis, she said, should come consolidation with the financial sector consisting of a few mega-banks. Was the whole point of the bailout to supply taxpayer money for a program of financial concentration? Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts

The Two Documents Everyone Should Read to Better Understand the Crisis

William K. Black

Associate Professor, University of Missouri - Kansas City; Senior regulator during S&L debacle

Posted February 25, 2009 | 10:31 AM (EST)

As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator much of my research studies what causes financial markets to become profoundly dysfunctional. The FBI has been warning of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud since September 2004. It also reports that lenders initiated 80% of these frauds. When the person that controls a seemingly legitimate business or government agency uses it as a "weapon" to defraud we categorize it as a "control fraud" ("The Organization as 'Weapon' in White Collar Crime." Wheeler & Rothman 1982; The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Black 2005). Financial control frauds' "weapon of choice" is accounting. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime -- combined. Control fraud epidemics can arise when financial deregulation and desupervision and perverse compensation systems create a "criminogenic environment" (Big Money Crime. Calavita, Pontell & Tillman 1997.)

The FBI correctly identified the epidemic of mortgage control fraud at such an early point that the financial crisis could have been averted had the Bush administration acted with even minimal competence. To understand the crisis we have to focus on how the mortgage fraud epidemic produced widespread accounting fraud.
Don't ask; don't tell: book profits, "earn" bonuses and closet your losses

The first document everyone should read is by S&P, the largest of the rating agencies. The context of the document is that a professional credit rater has told his superiors that he needs to examine the mortgage loan files to evaluate the risk of a complex financial derivative whose risk and market value depend on the credit quality of the nonprime mortgages "underlying" the derivative. A senior manager sends a blistering reply with this forceful punctuation:

Any request for loan level tapes is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE!!! Most investors don't have it and can't provide it. [W]e MUST produce a credit estimate. It is your responsibility to provide those credit estimates and your responsibility to devise some method for doing so.

Fraud is the principal credit risk of nonprime mortgage lending. It is impossible to detect fraud without reviewing a sample of the loan files. Paper loan files are bulky, so they are photographed and the images are stored on computer tapes. Unfortunately, "most investors" (the large commercial and investment banks that purchased nonprime loans and pooled them to create financial derivatives) did not review the loan files before purchasing nonprime loans and did not even require the lender to provide loan tapes.

The rating agencies never reviewed samples of loan files before giving AAA ratings to nonprime mortgage financial derivatives. The "AAA" rating is supposed to indicate that there is virtually no credit risk -- the risk is equivalent to U.S. government bonds, which finance refers to as "risk-free." We know that the rating agencies attained their lucrative profits because they gave AAA ratings to nonprime financial derivatives exposed to staggering default risk. A graph of their profits in this era rises like a stairway to heaven. We also know that turning a blind eye to the mortgage fraud epidemic was the only way the rating agencies could hope to attain those profits. If they had reviewed even small samples of nonprime loans they would have had only two choices: (1) rating them as toxic waste, which would have made it impossible to sell the nonprime financial derivatives or (2) documenting that they were committing, and aiding and abetting, accounting control fraud.

Worse, the S&P document demonstrates that the investment and commercial banks that purchased nonprime loans, pooled them to create financial derivatives, and sold them to others engaged in the same willful blindness. They did not review samples of loan files because doing so would have exposed the toxic nature of the assets they were buying and selling. The entire business was premised on a massive lie -- that fraudulent, toxic nonprime mortgage loans were virtually risk-free. The lie was so blatant that the banks even pooled loans that were known in the trade as "liar's loans" and obtained AAA ratings despite FBI warnings that mortgage fraud was "epidemic." The supposedly most financially sophisticated entities in the world -- in the core of their expertise, evaluating credit risk -- did not undertake the most basic and essential step to evaluate the most dangerous credit risk. They did not review the loan files. In the short and intermediate-term this optimized their accounting fraud but it was also certain to destroy the corporation if it purchased or retained significant nonprime paper.
Stress this: stress tests are useless against the nonprime problems


What commentators have missed is that the big banks often do not have the vital nonprime loan files now. That means that neither they nor the Treasury know their asset quality. It also means that Geithner's "stress tests" can't "test" assets when they don't have the essential information to "stress." No files means the vital data are unavailable, which means no meaningful stress tests are possible of the nonprime assets that are causing the greatest losses.
The results were disconcerting

A rating agency (Fitch) first reviewed a small sample of nonprime loan files after the secondary market in nonprime loan paper collapsed and nonprime lending virtually ceased. The second document everyone should read is Fitch's report on what they found.

Fitch's analysts conducted an independent analysis of these files with the benefit of the full origination and servicing files. The result of the analysis was disconcerting at best, as there was the appearance of fraud or misrepresentation in almost every file.


[F]raud was not only present, but, in most cases, could have been identified with adequate underwriting, quality control and fraud prevention tools prior to the loan funding. Fitch believes that this targeted sampling of files was sufficient to determine that inadequate underwriting controls and, therefore, fraud is a factor in the defaults and losses on recent vintage pools.

Fitch also explained why these forms of mortgage fraud cause severe losses.

For example, for an origination program that relies on owner occupancy to offset other risk factors, a borrower fraudulently stating its intent to occupy will dramatically alter the probability of the loan defaulting. When this scenario happens with a borrower who purchased the property as a short-term investment, based on the anticipation that the value would increase, the layering of risk is greatly multiplied. If the same borrower also misrepresented his income, and cannot afford to pay the loan unless he successfully sells the property, the loan will almost certainly default and result in a loss, as there is no type of loss mitigation, including modification, which can rectify these issues.

The widespread claim that nonprime loan originators that sold their loans caused the crisis because they "had no skin in the game" ignores the fundamental causes. The ultra sophisticated buyers knew the originators had no skin in the game. Neoclassical economics and finance predicts that because they know that the nonprime originators have perverse incentives to sell them toxic loans they will take particular care in their due diligence to detect and block any such sales. They assuredly would never buy assets that the trade openly labeled as fraudulent, after receiving FBI warnings of a fraud epidemic, without the taking exceptional due diligence precautions. The rating agencies' concerns for their reputations would make them even more cautious. Real markets, however, became perverse -- "due diligence" and "private market discipline" became oxymoronic. These two documents are enough to begin to understand:

* the FBI accurately described mortgage fraud as "epidemic"

* nonprime lenders are overwhelmingly responsible for the epidemic

* the fraud was so endemic that it would have been easy to spot if anyone looked

* the lenders, the banks that created nonprime derivatives, the rating agencies, and the buyers all operated on a "don't ask; don't tell" policy

* willful blindness was essential to originate, sell, pool and resell the loans

* willful blindness was the pretext for not posting loss reserves

* both forms of blindness made high (fictional) profits certain when the bubble was expanding rapidly and massive (real) losses certain when it collapsed

* the worse the nonprime loan quality the higher the fees and interest rates, and the faster the growth in nonprime lending and pooling the greater the immediate fictional profits and (eventual) real losses

* the greater the destruction of wealth, the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation

* many of the big banks are deeply insolvent due to severe credit losses

* those big banks and Treasury don't know how insolvent they are because they didn't even have the loan files

* a "stress test" can't remedy the banks' problem -- they do not have the loan files