Guardian: How US Embassy Cables Leaked. Galen: The Secret Internet

How 250,000 US embassy cables were leaked

David Leigh guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 November 2010 18.14 GMT

US soldier Bradley Manning, left, who is accused of stealing the classified files and handing the database to the WikiLeaks website of Julian Assange, right. (Photograph: Associated Press/AFP/Getty Images)

An innocuous-looking memory stick, no longer than a couple of fingernails, came into the hands of a Guardian reporter earlier this year. The device is so small it will hang easily on a keyring. But its contents will send shockwaves through the world’s chancelleries and deliver what one official described as “an epic blow” to US diplomacy.

The 1.6 gigabytes of text files on the memory stick ran to millions of words: the contents of more than 250,000 leaked state department cables, sent from, or to, US embassies around the world.

What will emerge in the days and weeks ahead is an unprecedented picture of secret diplomacy as conducted by the planet’s sole superpower. There are 251,287 dispatches in all, from more than 250 US embassies and consulates. They reveal how the US deals with both its allies and its enemies – negotiating, pressuring and sometimes brusquely denigrating foreign leaders, all behind the firewalls of ciphers and secrecy classifications that diplomats assume to be secure. The leaked cables range up to the “SECRET NOFORN” level, which means they are meant never to be shown to non-US citizens.

As well as conventional political analyses, some of the cables contain detailed accounts of corruption by foreign regimes, as well as intelligence on undercover arms shipments, human trafficking and sanction-busting efforts by would-be nuclear states such as Iran and Libya. Some are based on interviews with local sources while others are general impressions and briefings written for top state department visitors who may be unfamiliar with local nuances.

Intended to be read by officials in Washington up to the level of the secretary of state, the cables are generally drafted by the ambassador or subordinates. Although their contents are often startling and troubling, the cables are unlikely to gratify conspiracy theorists. They do not contain evidence of assassination plots, CIA bribery or such criminal enterprises as the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan years, when anti-Nicaraguan guerrillas were covertly financed.

One reason may be that America’s most sensitive “top secret” and above foreign intelligence files cannot be accessed from Siprnet, the defence department network involved.

The US military believes it knows where the leak originated. A soldier, Bradley Manning, 22, has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months and is facing a court martial in the new year. The former intelligence analyst is charged with unauthorised downloads of classified material while serving on an army base outside Baghdad. He is suspected of taking copies not only of the state department archive, but also of video of an Apache helicopter crew gunning down civilians in Baghdad, and hundreds of thousands of daily war logs from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” He said that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.

Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format … It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

He added: “Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain.”

Manning, according to the chatlogs, says he uploaded the copies to WikiLeaks, the “freedom of information activists” as he called them, led by Australian former hacker Julian Assange.

Assange and his circle apparently decided against immediately making the cables public. Instead they embarked on staged disclosure of the other material – aimed, as they put it on their website, at “maximising political impact”.

In April at a Washington press conference the group released the Apache helicopter video, titling it Collateral Murder.

The Guardian’s Nick Davies brokered an agreement with Assange to hand over in advance two further sets of military field reports on Iraq and Afghanistan so professional journalists could analyse them. Published earlier this year simultaneously with the New York Times and Der Spiegel in Germany, the analyses revealed that coalition forces killed civilians in previously unreported shootings and handed over prisoners to be tortured.

The revelations shot Assange and WikiLeaks to global prominence but led to angry denunciations from the Pentagon and calls from extreme rightwingers in the US that Assange be arrested or even assassinated. This month Sweden issued an international warrant for Assange, for questioning about alleged sexual assaults. His lawyer says the allegations spring from unprotected but otherwise consensual sex with two women.

WikiLeaks says it is now planning to post a selection of the cables. Meanwhile, a Guardian team of expert writers has been spending months combing through the data. Freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke obtained a copy of the database through her own contacts and joined the Guardian team. The paper is to publish independently, but simultaneously with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, along with Le Monde in Paris and El País in Madrid. As on previous occasions the Guardian is redacting information likely to cause reprisals against vulnerable individuals.

The Secret Internet

by Rich Galen

A selection of hundreds of thousands of documents – most of them classified – were released yesterday by the New York Times and several other newspapers around the world having been provided to them several weeks ago by Wikileaks.com.

It is not clear whether any of the documents the newspapers are publishing today – mostly between U.S. State Department offices and embassies – will do physical harm, but they are likely to be embarrassing and, according to the Times, “could strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.”

These documents, and a similar cache which were released several months ago, were allegedly stolen by a U.S. Army private, PFC Bradley Manning, who was an intelligence analyst serving at a base north of Baghdad.

How, you might ask, can some 22-year-old private get his hands on this much stuff? The answer is: It’s all on the internet. But not the internet you’re looking at now.

The U.S. Government has an internet which is completely separate from your internet. It is called the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, but I doubt more than a few of the thousands of people who use it every day know it by that name.

It is better known as the SIPRNET (pronounced “SIP-er-net”) and no one can access it unless they have a security clearance at least at the SECRET level.

I know this because while I was in Iraq I had the appropriate clearance and the occasional need to access the SIPRNET. I would go to a secure room, log in using a separate ID and password, do whatever I needed to do, log off, and leave the room.

I was told that the act of plugging a personal flash drive into a computer connected to the SIPRNET was a court-martial offense.

The Military also runs the NIPRNET (NIP-er-net), the Non-Classified Internet Protocol Router Network which is available to anyone and hooks into the internet you’re using now.

There is no point – or there is supposed to be no point – where the SIPRNET and the NIPRNET intersect. SIPRNET e-mail addresses are different from the standard dot-mil e-mail address to which you can send a message. A SIPRNET e-mail address can only be reached by a person with his or her own SIPRNET e-mail address. I could not, for instance, send an e-mail to myself from my SIPRNET e-mail account to galen@mullings.com.

Thing is, I was often alone in the room with the SIPRNET terminals. I assume that someone like PFC Manning, whose job it was to troll the SIPRNET and provide analysis of intel he discovered there for the benefit of his commanders, was not closely supervised on an hour-by-hour basis.

Text documents take up very little space. The average MULLINGS column (about 750 words) uses about 90 kilobytes. The flash drive on which I keep my MULLINGS docs has a capacity of 32 gigabytes – 32 billion bytes of data. That means I could keep more than 350,000 MULLINGS columns on that one drive. Using inexpensive compression software, I could probably double that to about 750,000 documents.

Someone intent on stealing documents could easily plug in a flash drive, and download everything from the State Department’s folders. A 1993 GAO report estimated there were more than 3 million people who had the appropriate clearance to access the SIPRNET. That was eight years before 9/11 so one could assume that number has at least doubled.

All it takes is one person, bent on doing harm, to download and share hundreds of thousands of documents. It appears a Private First Class sitting in an office 40 miles north of Baghdad may have been that person.

May: Sabaditsch-Wolff – The Time That is Given Us: the Fight for Free Speech

The Time That is Given Us: the Fight for Free Speech

Posted by Ned May Nov 28th 2010 at 8:41 am

The International Free Press Society sponsored a conference today in Copenhagen. Below is the speech that was given during the event by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff (photo © Snaphanen).

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I stand here before you in the city of Copenhagen in the year 2010. This is widely considered to be an enlightened country in the heart of an enlightened continent.

Our basic freedoms have long been guaranteed — first by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as passed by the United Nations in 1948, and then buttressed by the Council of Europe in 1950 through the European Convention of Human Rights, which was later affirmed by the European Union. Our individual countries have additionally codified the same basic rights in their own constitutions.

These rights include the freedom of individual conscience, the right to assemble peaceably, and the right to practice our religion freely, or to have no religion at all. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they include the right to voice our opinions freely and to publish them without hindrance.

Yet freedom of speech is under attack today here in Denmark, as it is in my own country Austria, and indeed all across Europe. Today, in 21st century Western Europe, our right to free speech is being shut down quietly and systematically with an effectiveness that the commissars in the old Soviet Union could only dream of.

 

A milestone in this ominous totalitarian trend will be reached tomorrow, 28 November 2010, when the member states of the European Union are required to implement an innocuous-sounding legal provision known as the “Framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia”, or, more fully, the “Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law.” According to the final article of the Framework Decision, “Member States shall take the necessary measures to comply with the provisions of this Framework Decision by 28 November 2010.”

Why does this matter to the cause of free speech in Europe?

If you read the full text of the Framework Decision (which may be found in the legislative section of the EU’s website), you will learn that “Each Member State shall take the measures necessary… to ensure that the following intentional conduct is punishable.” Such “intentional conduct” includes “conduct which is a pretext for directing acts against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.”

Based on what has recently happened to Geert Wilders and me — and earlier to Gregorius Nekschot, Jussi Halla-aho, and numerous others — we can all guess who will be punished under this provision of the Framework Decision: those who criticize Islam.

Even worse, a complaint made by a member state does not have to be “dependent on a report or an accusation made by a victim of the conduct”, nor does the alleged offender have to be “physically present in its territory”.

In other words, if the dhimmi Austrian government objects to a cartoon published by Kurt Westergaard here in Denmark, Mr. Westergaard may be extradited by the Austrian Ministry of Justice to answer to hate speech charges in Austria. The European Arrest Warrant guarantees that the Danish government cannot legally interfere with such an extradition, and the 800-strong “European Gendarmerie Force” would be available to fetch Mr. Westergaard out of his bed and bring him to Vienna — with impunity.

As of tomorrow, the above scenario becomes a real possibility. It is not a paranoid fantasy. These legal provisions are detailed in the EU’s public documents, and they will enjoy the full force of law in all EU member states as of midnight tonight.

The death throes of free speech in Europe begin tomorrow morning.

As most of you already know, nearly a year ago I was made aware that “hate speech” charges might be filed against me — I had “denigrated religious teachings” by giving one of my public lectures on Islam.

The possibility of my prosecution was not communicated to me directly, but through articles in the press.

It was not until last month that a court date was set for my case. Once again, I had to discover this fact in the press — in NEWS, the same left-wing newspaper that brought the original complaint against me. I was not officially notified of my hearing date until several days later.

The evidence used against me this past week was a transcript of a tape of my lecture, provided to the court by the same socialist newspaper. It included words that were not spoken by me, and words that were not spoken in public, which therefore were not a violation of the law.

But my case is not really about the law. It is a political trial, and like the trials of Geert Wilders and Jussi Halla-aho, it is intended to silence someone who speaks out against the barbaric nature of sharia law.

Above all else, it is intended to discourage anyone who might consider following in my footsteps. The oligarchs who rule Europe are determined to prevent any frank discussion among their citizens of Islam and its legal doctrines.

These are the methods of a totalitarian state.

They are more successful than those of the Nazis and the Fascists and the Communists because they are accomplished quietly and peacefully, with no need for concentration camps or gulags or mass graves or the shot in the back of the neck in the middle of the night.

They are surgical strikes executed via our legal systems, and they are quite effective. Between the summary punishment carried out against Theo Van Gogh and the Framework Decision applied though our courts, there is no room left for us to maneuver.

We are systematically being silenced.

I admire the provisions of the First Amendment that all Americans enjoy as their birthright. Its free speech provisions will make the imposition of sharia that much more difficult in the United States.

But here in Europe we are not so well-protected. Our constitutions and the rules imposed upon us by the EU allow certain exceptions to the right to speak freely, and those little rips in the fabric of our rights are enough to tear the entire structure to pieces.

We desperately need our own version of the First Amendment. We need leaders who are wise and courageous enough to compose and implement legal instruments that affirm the same fundamental rights that are guaranteed to all citizens by the United States Constitution.

We do not yet have any leaders of this caliber. But they are beginning to appear on the scene, and one day they will be the real leaders of our individual European nations, replacing the internationalist totalitarian usurpers who oppress us today.

Our nations will be governed by their own people, by those who truly represent them. Their leaders will be true patriots, people like Jimmie Åkesson and Kent Ekeroth in Sweden, or Oskar Freysinger in Switzerland, or Geert Wilders and Martin Bosma in the Netherlands, or Filip Dewinter and Frank Vanhecke in Flanders.

We are going to reclaim our continent and our nations. We will take our countries back from those thieves who sneaked them away from us while were lulled into somnolence by our wealth and our pleasant diversions.

This will not be an easy task. Our path will be strewn with obstacles and great dangers. But we must travel it nonetheless, because if we do not, European civilization — the heart of Western Civilization — will be destroyed.

What were formerly our nations will become regions with indistinct boundaries, populated mainly by people of foreign cultures and administered by corrupt totalitarian bureaucrats. The natives — the original inhabitants, our children, the descendants of those who created the greatest civilization the world has ever known — will be reduced to curators and costumed actors in a quaint theme park.

Call it “Euro World”. Authentic cuisine, ethnic dancers, and fireworks at ten o’clock.

This is what we will face if we give up our cherished freedoms. If lose our freedom of speech, then we are lost forever.

I am not a victim. I intend to stand up for what is right. I will defend what needs to be defended. Above everything else, I will exercise my God-given right to speak freely about what is happening. Freedom of speech is the single most important freedom we possess.

I am doing this for my daughter, and for her children, for those who will have to live in the world we are now preparing for them. I am doing what our grandparents should perhaps have done during the 1930s, when their own freedoms were under threat.

This is our time. This cup will not pass from us.

I am reminded of a passage in J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.

It is an exchange between Frodo the hobbit and Gandalf the wizard, and it concerns the perilous quest on which Frodo and his friends have been sent.

Frodo says: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

Gandalf responds: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

It is time for us to decide what to do with the time that is given us.

If I were to speak these same words tomorrow morning, I might be subject to arrest. I could be charged under the provisions of the Framework Decision, and extradited to the country that charged me using a European Arrest Warrant, escorted by the European Gendarmerie.

This is not an imaginary scenario; it is a very real possibility.

It is true that only a few people are likely to undergo such an ordeal. But it only takes a few people.

How many people have to endure what Mr. Wilders and I are enduring before everyone else gets the message?

How many examples have to be set before the rest of the European population understands the new rules, and is cowed into submission?

And we must remember to whom they will be submitting in the end. They will be submitting to our successors in Europe. They will be submitting to our replacements.

We must remember that the word for submission in Arabic is Islam.

When there are enough Muslims living in Europe — and it doesn’t have to be a majority of the population, just somewhere around fifteen or twenty percent — we will be living under Islamic law, and not the laws that presently govern us.

We will no longer enjoy what constitutional rights remain to us now. Our rights will be completely prescribed and delimited by sharia. Women will become the virtual chattel of men. Christians and Jews will be driven out or forced to convert to Islam. Atheists and homosexuals will be killed.

The European Union would consider these words to be “hate speech”. Under the Framework Decision, they would be classified as “racism and xenophobia”, and I could be prosecuted for saying them.

But they are in fact the simple truth.

Anyone can verify them by studying history. Anyone who chooses can read the Koran and the hadith and the Sunna of the Prophet.

Widely available official treatises on Islamic law confirm that my description is not “hate speech”, but a plain and accurate reading of the tenets of Islamic law.

It has become obvious that to tell the truth about Islam is now considered “incitement to religious hatred”.

It is now clear that non-Muslims who reveal the tenets of sharia law to the public are “denigrating religious teachings”.

If we meekly accept these rules, then we are acquiescing in the imposition of sharia law in our own nations. And I, for one, will not sit silently while this happens.

I don’t want my daughter to live under sharia.

Our time is short. If you and I do not envision an Islamic future for ourselves, then we must speak out now.

If we wish to preserve the right to speak and publish freely, then we must exercise it now.

I wish this need not have happened in my time. But it has.

We must make full use of the time that remains to us.

Thank you.

Power to the People! U.S. “Repeal Amendment” Gaining Strength

Breaking – Power to the People! Repeal Amendment Gaining Strength

by James M. Simpson

The great fear of all dictators is provoking rebellion before they are ready to handle it. So the Democrats, our Nation’s aspiring despots, have become refined experts at offering soothing, even encouraging, but always deceptive rhetoric about their sleazy, underhanded power grabs. Supported by a largely complicit mass media, they have brought our country to the breaking point.

But throughout history, the American people have repeatedly shown an amazing capacity for finding innovative solutions, often at the very last minute, to seemingly intractable crises. This fact of the indomitable, resourceful and defiant American spirit literally terrifies the left, and with good reason. They are now outed.

First we got the Tea Party, a genuine, spontaneous, grassroots revolution that rose up in less than a year to become the most dynamic, influential political movement in America. It gave us the stunning defeats of Democrat politicians in New Jersey, Virginia and even the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts.

Finally, the Tea Party should be credited with the November 2010 election results in the U.S. House of Representatives and the state legislatures, where Republicans now hold the largest number since 1928. But we all know that even these gains are not enough, at least not yet, to stop the leftist juggernaut—led by the most radical President and facilitated by the most corrupt Congress in U.S. history. So Communists, er, Democrats, meet your nemesis, those damned innovative Americans, again.

The proposal calls for a constitutional amendment that would allow the states, by a two-thirds majority vote, to repeal objectionable federal legislation and regulations. Virginia Representative Eric Cantor, slated to be Majority Leader in the upcoming Congress, has gotten behind the movement, as has Virginia’s governor, and lieutenant governor, leaders in the state legislature and Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Cantor articulates the justification well:

Washington has grown far too large and has become far too intrusive, reaching into nearly every aspect of our lives.  In just the past few years, Washington has assumed more control over our economy and the private sector through excessive regulations and unprecedented mandates.  Our liberty and freedom has lessened as the size and scope of the federal government has exploded.  Massive expenditures like the stimulus, unconstitutional mandates like the takeover of health care, and intrusions into the private sector like the auto-bailouts have threatened the very core of the American free market.

Yeah, that about says it, although I would add the outrageous, blatantly corrupt misappropriation of trillions of taxpayer dollars for personal and political gain this administration and Congress have wantonly engaged in. These people need jail.

The Amendment is straightforward and simple:

Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.

This Repeal Amendment was inspired by Barnett’s April 2009 groundbreaking article in the Wall Street Journal, which described Constitutional remedies for taking our country back. The Amendment was publicly proposed for the first time on September 15 of this year, and a mere two months later has garnered the support of prominent legislators in nine states: Virginia, Utah, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Florida, Indiana, and South Carolina. Virginia has led the way with support from Governor McDonnell, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, House of Delegates Speaker Bill Howell, Lieutenant Governor/Senate President Bill Bolling, in addition to Representative Cantor.

It has gotten a lot of play in the press too. On November 23^rd, Professor Barnett and Virginia House Speaker Howell went on Fox Business News to discuss the proposal with Fox News’ commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano. Napolitano was ecstatic about the idea:

…this sounds almost too good to be true, if it could happen. We wouldn’t have unfunded mandates; the Tenth Amendment would reign supreme; the states would be sovereign within their own borders…

But the Judge had his doubts.

Adding amendments to the U.S. Constitution is a deliberately difficult task. According to Article V of the U.S. Constitution, there are two ways it can be accomplished:

1. Both Houses of Congress agree to propose an Amendment with a two-thirds majority vote.

2. Two-thirds of state legislatures (34 states) pass a resolution to call for an Amendment Convention to vote on the amendment.

In both cases, the amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures (38 states).

In his interview, Judge Napolitano raised the questions everyone asks: 1. would Congress vote against its own interest by passing an Amendment specifically designed to check its power? 2. If the states were successful in suing for an Amendment Convention, would it become a “runaway Convention?”

In addressing the first question, Delegate Howell responded that if such amendment is requested by two-thirds of the states, Congress has no choice in the matter. He also observed that the newly-elected Congress has a decidedly different attitude towards governing, many having been elected on a platform specifically calling for limited government.

Some conservatives express anxiety about the specter of a “Constitutional Convention” or “ConCon” as it is colloquially known. This is when the entire Constitution is thrown open for rewrite—Judge Napolitano’s “runaway Convention”. It has only happened once, however, when in 1787 the Articles of the Confederation were rewritten to create the Constitution as we know it, and that was the purpose for which it was called.

Both Barnett and Howell are careful to point out that Article V speaks of “Amendment Conventions” which consider individual amendments as opposed to the entire document. Since amendments require a two-thirds majority vote from the fifty states, it is difficult to imagine a “runaway convention.” It is more difficult to imagine enactment, since three-fourths of the states must ultimately agree to each amendment.

Whatever the case, it is a very high hurdle to call a convention. According to Wikipedia, since 1787, Amendment Conventions have been requested by states over 700 times. None have occurred.

RepealAmendment.org’s Moran, however, does not believe a convention is necessary. In the past, when states got close to obtaining the requisite two-thirds support, Congress stepped in to act, thus maintaining control of the process. This has happened at least four times, regarding the 17^th, 21^st, 22^nd, and 25^th Amendments. (Citation). The original Bill of Rights was also created by Congress under threat of a second Convention.

In some circumstances, Congress has passed legislation that addresses the demands embedded in the Amendment without creating a new Amendment. This occurred during the Reagan administration, when in response to a Convention called by 32 of the requisite 34 states for a balanced budget amendment, Congress passed the Gramm, Rudman, Hollings Act. All other Amendments have been formulated in Congress and passed to the states for ratification.

Either way, Moran explains, “…the goal is to force Congress to act in lieu of an amendment convention, as has happened every time the states have used the Article V mechanism. It should be used again now with Virginia once again leading the way.”

Supporters of the Amendment are optimistic, saying the time has come for states to take back the power Congress has increasingly usurped. It may just work. It is a good idea whose time has definitely come, and is a possible solution to Congressional Democrats’ seeming determination to jam as much awful legislation down our throats as possible before the clock runs out this January. Yet more reason to redouble our efforts for 2012.

A press conference will be held this upcoming November 30^th with select Speakers, Senate Presidents, members of Congress, and other State legislators at 9 a.m. at the Grand Hyatt Washington, McPherson Square Room – ALEC Media Room, 1000 H Street NW Washington, DC 20001.

The American people have just begun to fight. Professor Barnett’s proposal, and the movement that has sprung up around it in a mere two months, is one example of that fine, unpredictable, independent spirit embedded in the American psyche, something that the hidebound, gutless left will never understand. It is reflected in the spirit of the Gadsden Flag:

Don’t tread on me!

‘Fox News North’ gets the go ahead

On the air: SUN NEWS granted licence

By QMI Agency [Toronto Sun] Last Updated: November 26, 2010 2:03pm

The line for shuddering and moaning on the political left forms here.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on Friday morning announced approval of a Category 2 digital specialty channel licence for SUN NEWS.

The Quebecor Media Inc. backed channel — with its moniker of ‘Hard News and Straight Talk’ — has caused a national sensation and even international debate since plans were announced by company president and CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau, in June.

But the CRTC approval formally allows for the switches to be turned on.

Peladeau, in a release, likened the announcement to the dawning of an important new era for Canadian media.

“SUN NEWS will be a welcome addition to Sun Media Corporation’s English language newspapers and news websites,” he said.

“It will aim to challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice on TV.”

Peladeau noted that despite the media industry shakeup, thanks largely to online sources, television remains a vital source of news and information for Canadians.

The SUN NEWS specialty channel will play a vital role, the company says: “In keeping Canadians well informed on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour basis and ensuring that news coverage is both broad and deep.”

When he earlier unveiled plans for the national television news carrier more than five months ago, Peladeau said English Canada was ill served by the incumbent specialty channels, including CBC News Network and CTV News Channel.

The media firestorm that followed has largely subsided.

Early last month, Quebecor confirmed it was no longer trying to get approval for a ‘must carry’ exemption on the Category 2 application that would have forced the country’s cable and satellite TV companies to offer the new channel.

Luc Lavoie, a senior advisor to Peladeau and the man in charge of overseeing the transition into English television, tells QMI Agency they have always supported the law of the market, but had looked to be on an even footing with other 24-hour TV news competitors.

Of the ‘must carry’ designation, he added: “We don’t really need that. We’ll be quite OK.”

Officials had originally wanted to begin broadcasting on January 1t, but equipment logistics and building delays have pushed back the clock to March.

While frustrated with start-up delays, Lavoie said the pace is now good.

Officials with SUN NEWS say they propose to go beyond the obvious day-to-day headlines to cover a full range of stories that impact Canadians.

The ‘hard news and straight talk’ formula follows the success of the French-language all-news specialty service, LCN, which saw ratings more than double when it moved toward that lineup a little more than three-years ago. Today, LCN is a commercial success and has re-energized news coverage for French-speaking viewers, Peladeau has pointed out.

Among the personalities previously announced to take up key positions with SUN NEWS are veteran Winnipeg-based commentator and broadcaster Charles Adler, Gemini-nominated journalist Krista Erickson and outspoken columnist Ezra Levant.

Rebuttal

Yup.

My Rebuttal to a Progressive who Admonished Me to Play Nice ….

The following rebuttal is mine alone. I do not speak for my husband, for my friends, for my children, but solely for myself.

I am tired of being told to sit down and shut up.

I am tired of being told what I can and can not say.

What is “acceptable”, while my ideas and values are mocked and trampled.

Enough. I have had enough.

I remained stoic when your acolytes spit on my car and called my husband a “baby killer” when I crossed through your phalanx at Walter Reed to take my children for medical care. I refused to respond as you smashed your fists into the hood of my car, destroyed my mirrors with bottles and keyed my doors in California, my children mute and terrified as you screamed your hate and bile.

I remained calm the day after 9/11 when the progressives in my office, in typical overwrought hyperbole of your side, were shrieking about “TANKS IN THE STREETS”, when in fact it was nothing more than two National Guardsman, fresh-face boys of about 19, stationed at an intersection, armed with whistles and a Humvee, deployed as extra eyes and ears two blocks from the White House.

I stayed silent when your leadership called my friends and my husbands’ colleagues “Cold Blooded Killers” and judged them guilty in the court of media opinion.

I turned the other cheek when your liberal propaganda outfits refused to report on the humanitarian success stories in Iraq and Afghanistan, but delighted in the roll call of the lost as a way to bludgeon and demoralize our military.

I stopped listening to CNN and MSNBC when they openly reported lies about Marines in OIF – I know– my husband was one of them.

I began paying attention to FOX news when only they – Oliver North, Bill Hemmer and like-minded conservatives like G. Gordon Liddy, had the courage to travel into the most dangerous parts of the battlespace to actually report on the successes of the surge, rather than filing reports that affirmed the narrative of the LSM from behind the Jersey barriers of the Green Zone.

I have been silent long enough. I have bent, I have yielded, I have endured slander, dishonesty, ad hominem attacks and actual physical threats.

Anger is a powerful motivator.

I began to push back. The first time was when I decided to counter demonstrate against the Code Pink harridans who had set up shop outside the Pvt Bolio gate at the Defense Language Institute on November 18, 2007 to ostensibly run a “Torture Teach-In” and to demonize and excoriate our troops.

Approaching them first with logic, facts and civility didn’t work.
I explained that the School of Americas isn’t even on the west coast (it’s on the east coast), and has nothing to do with the mission of DLI.

That pertinent fact was “irrelevant” and dismissed.

I then patiently explained that the SOA does not teach “torture”, and that policy is in contravention to the doctrine of our military forces.

I was called a liar.

I tried a third time to explain that my husband had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq where he was an advisor to the Iraqi army, and he had specifically advised them against torture as a method of intelligence gathering and intimidation.

I was called naïve.

So, you see, I have had multiple first hand encounters where it has been obvious that your side is intellectually lazy, refuses to do their own research, and dismisses facts that don’t fit with the pre-established narrative.

I then disengaged, but not before telling them I was personally very proud of my husband, and the thousands of other men and women in uniform, who chose to defend their right to conduct protests, (even fallacious ones) against US policy and the military, but asked simply that they honor that by being at least honest with their facts and information.

No acknowledgment.

My girlfriends and I then retreated to my home where we elected to play by their rules and stage a protest against their encampment and Islamofascist “love-in”. We tried very hard to channel our best moonbattery, but it was difficult, since we were still tethered to reality.

Some of our signage included:

I will never be a Dhimmi.
Hands off my clitoris.
Got Freedom – Thank a Vet!
My husband fights for your right to protest!

We staged ourselves on the sidewalk on Lighthouse Avenue, with our backs to Camp Pink(o), and facing the oncoming traffic.

We got honks, cheers, chuckles, and a plethora of thumbs-up out of the windows of passing cars.
In very liberal, deep blue Monterey.

The Pinkies were very pleased with this turn of events, and started to cheer as well when cars gave us an energetic “toot-toot” of approval.

Then we turned around to face them and showed them our signs.

Some moments in time are priceless. That is one I will cherish for a long time. The look of the faces of the Camp Pink(o) will be forever etched in my mind.

The Left likes to use what they believe to be witty signage (although I am not sure how BUSHCHIMPHITLER qualifies as “witty”), props and sheer numbers of die hard believers and rent-a-students to validate the “justness” of their cause-du-jour and to manufacture a sense of widespread support for their “issue”.

So we took your tools and began to employ them against you. And you don’t like it very much. Except we don’t have to pay anyone to come to our rallies, and that just infuriates you further.

I don’t “do” protests, because I think the time and resources are better employed elsewhere. I also don’t do sarcasm and contempt well either, because I prefer to discuss facts and measurable outcomes, but you have framed the terms of the engagement, and I am learning as fast as I can.

Contrary to your false accusations against the genesis of the Tea Party, I began protesting the bailouts before Obama was selected and around the time that McCain had elected to suspend his campaign in order to rush back to Washington to sell us all out.

I went to the big April 15th rally with a “violent” sign forged from pink posterboard which simply stated, “Give all of Congress Pink Slips”. Frightening imagery, I know.

I went to the first 9/12 rally in DC, which you did your best to disrupt by shutting down the orange metro line and turning away buses, and which your scribes and stenographers diminished and which the White House refused to acknowledge. We weren’t deterred. We were there. We knew the size of the crowd – and more importantly – the fastness of their determination. A sleeping giant had been awakened.

I went to 8-28 and to the following 9-12 rally. I began commenting on blogs, writing letters to the editor, and showing up for Tea Party strategy sessions.

I donated money to outlier Tea Party candidates who were mocked by the “all knowing” media and had been dismissed by the Establishment. Some of them actually won. They are the hired mercenaries of the Tea Party. Do not underestimate or misunderstand their mission and their support. They are on the front lines in the upcoming battle of ideas and the direction of our nation.

No where in the history of civilization has the welfare state succeeded over the long term. From Plato to Thatcher, warnings about the propensity for the professional politicians to expand the looting of the public treasury and to debase the currency as a mechanism for retaining power has been well documented and a rallying cry for sound money and conservative principles.

I challenge you to name one state where it has survived longer than two generations, for it is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme predicated on the willingness of our youth to voluntarily shackle themselves.

You have seized the public schools and the universities and conducted a purge of any non-compliant conservatives; a massive re-education for the faculty was in order. You believe you can turn our children against us. Unfortunately for you, all it takes is one look at their first paycheck as working adults for them to question the validity of your wealth redistributive economic policies. Homeschooling, constitutionally upheld, is on the rise; Ron Paul now fills college auditoriums, while the Won struggles to fill them without piggybacking on the coat tails of a free pop concert.

Your side knows you can not prevail on the battlefield of open and honest ideas, so you retreat behind the fortification of expanded regulation, unelected czars who rule by decree and diktat, and a boy-king who is being urged by the janissaries to complete the transformation to a totalarian state by executive orders.

Except, that to emplace your policies and “vision” requires the consent of the people. You can not hire enough guards, build enough prisons, operate enough courts to entrap and control the whole population of these (for-now) united states. It only takes a small percentage of dissenters, non-conformists and cascading acts of strategic civil disobedience to bring your entire command-and-control crashing all around you. Decapitating by legal and tax retributive means, a few titular heads of the resistance, will only serve to strengthen and embolden the diffuse movement. Look back at how the Solidarity movement was organized and how it ultimately prevailed before you declare Victory.

Your side has chosen to engage in a low-level, asymmetric campaign for decades. Deceit, dishonesty and exploiting the mechanisms of state have been your weapons.

Unfortunately for you, you can no longer hide and your methods have been revealed and exposed for what they are. The Fabian operational concepts are only successful when they are hidden and cloaked in disingenuous “narrative”. Thousands now are aware of, and have read, Alinsky and his fellow socialists and have formulated a counter strategy.

At first, your team mocked and lied and delighted in debasing our ideals and beliefs. Why wouldn’t you feel confident? It had worked so well in the past, and you had the stenography class to support you.

Then you lowered yourselves even further by deriding anyone not in agreement with your viewpoint as “low information voters”. Given what we know now about the mortgage fraud, the chicanery of the stimulus, the hidden deceptions of Obamacare … who, pray tell, is the “low information” voter?

You were jubilant November, 2008. You strutted, you crowed, you reveled. Newsweek triumphantly declared, “We are all Socialists Now!”.

Except for one thing. You misunderstood the battlespace. You failed to recognize the numbers who stayed home rather than vote for a progressive RINO like McCain. You misread the temperment of the people, who wanted an end to the theft, the lies, the spending, the corruption and the deceit. Instead, you doubled down.

The people went underground. Everyday work folk, alarmed at the rising tide of tyranny and the rhetoric of hate, weary of the false accusations and the lies, joined the libertarian and conservatives and forged an underground resistance. The town halls in that raucous summer were not an aberration – they are the new norm. Get used to it.

Word spread – from uncensored blogs, to private e-mails and forwarded commentary, meet-ups large and small, the resistance grew and strengthened. There were gatherings of the clans across the nation. The movement began to grown organically, a leadership structure evolved, and a long term plan developed.

“Burn down the House”.

Yes, in your world, graphic or martial imagery is only to be exploited by the Left.

“We bring a gun”

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/06/14/obama-if-they-bring-a-knife-to-the-fight-we-bring-a-gun/

“Get in their faces”

Oh yes, your side “went there”. Not only was there no outcry about the “violent imagery”, there were claps and cheers of agreement. You framed the imagery. Own it.

“Retreat and Reload”and “Burn down the house”. Get used to it. Don’t think for a moment you’ve earned the right to open your mouth in protest.

Here’s some more martial imagery for you.

Yes, we will burn down the house of Progressive Democrats and lay waste to the entire construct of the welfare state. It will be a long, decades-long battle, but we will prevail because we learned the consequences of not teaching our young ourselves. We delegated that to you, and that was our first mistake. We assumed you were honest brokers, but now we know better.

Carthago delenda est.

I accept that’s the intellectually lazy response, but I have to work with what you can understand.

My preference is more of a “Thucydides account of the no-mercy overthrow of the oligarchs at Corcyra” type of historical reference.

Either way, I am confident you can deduce the “tone”of my rebuttal.

Realizing that you are losing your grip on the public schools, that the youth that propelled the boy-king to victory have abandoned you, that the bitter, blue collar white workers are now Tea Party grandmas and grandpas, that you have lost control of the federal checkbook and the legislative calendar,

now you want to petition for peace?

now you cry out for civility and consensus?

I have a message for you:

Go. To. Hell.

When you retreat back to the comfort and safety of your salon filled with like-minded Hopeium addicts, perhaps you can rouse them from their stupor long enough to send them this message.

We don’t want civility.
We don’t want to “play nice”.
We don’t want to “compromise” with you.

From coffee shops to soccer fields and everywhere in between, the message has been clear.

Draw a line in the sand.

Those who we have sent to Washington this January who yield will be removed from the field and replaced. Make no mistake about it.

We came to you with ideas and a sincere intent to find common ground.

Our emissaries were told,

“I won”.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/01/23/obama-to-gop-i-won/

We tried to engage you and bring alternative solutions to the health care crisis. We met in good faith at Blair House. Our concerns and our emissaries were rudely dismissed.

So, this is our message to you:

The scorched earth policy is in effect.

A court of accounting will be convened.

Fix bayonets.

Aronoff: Pesky lines between News and commentary: Counterpoint

Roger Aronoff of Accuracy in Media offers a counterpoint to Ted Koppel’s Olbermann, O’Reilly and the death of real news, reported here on November 13th.

Those Pesky Lines Between News and Commentary

By Roger Aronoff  |  November 19, 2010

In a commentary in The Washington Post on November 14, Ted Koppel, the host of ABC’s Nightline for 25 years, analyzed the modern news landscape, in a piece titled “Olbermann, O’Reilly and the death of real news.” In it, he bemoaned the loss of a unified view of the news, a nightly perspective we can all agree on. Koppel made clear the world he longs for: “…we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers. We’re now a million or more clusters of consumers harvesting information from like-minded providers.”

Koppel started out his article—which had a different title in the print version, “The case against news we can choose”—making the same point I made about the recent incident with MSNBC and Keith Olbermann. Olbermann was suspended for two days from being on the network after it was revealed that he had given the maximum political donations to three Democratic candidates.  Koppel described Olbermann as “the most opinionated among MSNBC’s left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts.” The absurdity is MSNBC getting all high-minded about Olbermann having made political donations, when he is clearly on their network to act as a political partisan. Koppel, and I, wondered what sort of journalistic avoidance of the appearance of partisanship was violated by the “unabashedly and monotonously partisan” Olbermann. “It is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?,” Koppel asked.

But then Koppel seems to confuse and mingle some issues that aren’t really related. Back in the day, the national news on the three broadcast networks was 15 minutes a day when the 1960s began, and 30 minutes a day when the decade ended. The only national newspaper was The Wall Street Journal, which was primarily a business publication. It was a decade later that national TV news moved out of its dinner time box. ABC took to the airwaves after the late night local news broadcast with daily coverage of the hostage crisis in Iran, which became Nightline. After about four months of being all about the hostage crisis, they began covering other topics.

That was followed closely by CNN and C-SPAN, extending news coverage around the clock to people who were getting their TV through cable, rather than by radio or TV waves being beamed out. It was nearly a decade later that opinionated talk radio came on the scene following the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, a Federal Communications regulation that had existed since the late 1940s demanding equal time for opposing views on all broadcasters who licensed airwaves for radio or TV broadcasts. Then came the Internet, and cable news beyond CNN. The days of Walter Cronkite telling us, “And that’s the way it is,” were gone.

Koppel is not the first to long for those days, when we all supposedly were on board with the same set of facts. But the fact is that there really was no one to keep them honest. Accuracy in Media came along in the late 1960s just for that purpose, the first to identify itself as a “media watchdog.” And the media weren’t nearly as “objective” as Koppel recalls. Just because they weren’t quivering their lip, Olbermann style, or speaking in mocking tones and voices, doesn’t mean they were shooting straight. Bias can be by omission just as easily as by commission. And it can be based on carefully selecting quotes to support one’s position, and by heaping ridicule or scorn on those with different views. It can be by mischaracterizing and mislabeling the intentions of groups or leaders like Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat, and treating them as revolutionary heroes or liberators.

Koppel’s critique clearly hurt Olbermann’s feelings. We know that because Olbermann went on another of those crazy rants, where he gushed about how much he is just like his heroes Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and even like Koppel, though Koppel seems to have lost his way. Their finest moments, Olbermann argued, was when they were showing their liberal backbone and standing up to some evil conservative or another. And it wouldn’t be an Olbermann rant without linking Republicans and Nazis in the same sentence.  And yes, of course, MSNBC is a real news organization, while Fox makes up its stories, and it all happened “organically” and he was there for every “step of the way.” And of course Koppel stood by while Bush lied us into war, and tortured away. Are those opinions, or facts? I guess that depends on the definition of opinions. And facts. Olbermann clearly cannot separate the two. If it’s his opinion, he believes it’s a fact.

In the end, MSNBC buckled under Olbermann’s pressure, according to an article by Howard Kurtz in The Daily Beast. Olbermann threatened to take his grievance public, on Good Morning America, and the network caved. They had been talking about a suspension of weeks or months, but instead made it for only two days. And they didn’t dock his pay. Nor did they demand a letter of apology they had asked for. The network kissed Keith’s you-know-what. Didn’t want to offend their golden boy. The article also makes clear the degree to which many of the staff at NBC and MSNBC disapprove of Olbermann: “From the moment Olbermann was found to have donated money to three Democratic candidates, there has been a deepening sense of anger and frustration among his colleagues, according to interviews with eight knowledgeable sources. These sources, who declined to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the situation, say that several of NBC’s front-line stars, including Tom Brokaw, have expressed concern to management that Olbermann has badly damaged MSNBC’s reputation for independence.”

Part of Olbermann’s defense was that “Joe did it too.” That would be Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe on MSNBC. According to Kurtz, “Olbermann’s side asked why he was being penalized when Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman who hosted Morning Joe, had given $5,000 to a state candidate in Alabama the previous spring. Griffin checked and Scarborough provided the bank record showing that his wife had made the donation to a friend.”

But Scarborough has discovered what happens if you offend Olbermann, and the network’s rules. On November 19, Scarborough got a matching two day suspension for a total of eight donations for $500 each. According to Politico, when this originally came up, Scarborough said he “did not recall” some of the donations. Maybe that is why he is being docked for two days of pay while Olbermann wasn’t docked at all.

This reminds me of when I was on CNBC’s Kudlow and Company with Eric Alterman of The Nation magazine, talking about this very issue (scroll to 1:40). He said, “If I were going to give money to a candidate, I wouldn’t want a call from an investigative reporter about it. So you know what I would do? I’d have my spouse give it or I’d give it under my kids’ names, which is what people who give money do all the time.” Sounds like a plan. I wonder how many others are doing this.

Koppel goes on to say in his article that “The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic.”

He continued, “Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be.”

This is what is so galling to Olbermann—the equating of the two networks. Koppel got it right when he said that “We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts—along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.”

He made a big deal of what he described as the fact that news had been a “loss leader” for the networks, and their big entertainment arms, and that CBS’s “60 Minutes” changed all that. But Jack Shafer of Slate.com wrote a persuasive rebuttal to that notion, showing how hugely profitable news networks had been for a long time. Shafer writes that “The myth that network news didn’t make money owes its origin to artful bookkeeping…” He cites a 1965 Time magazine article that says that “NBC News’ nightly news program, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, brought in an estimated $27 million a year in network advertising revenues, making it NBC’s highest-grossing show. CBS News’ evening broadcast, anchored by Walter Cronkite, collected an estimated $25.5 million.” Again, those facts can be stubborn things, or interpreted differently. Koppel answered back on National Public Radio that he was repeating what the networks claimed. He said in the same interview that Olbermann’s perspective is “a little screwed up.”

The fact is that today, we all are consumers of news, and have more places we can go to find news. People should read The New York Times, and The Washington Post, but they should also read The Washington Times, National Review and the Wall Street Journal, as well as some reliable blogs. They will see that there are certain facts that we all agree on. For example, the unemployment rate is 9.6%. But does that really tell the story?

The reality of news today is that there are many, many sources of it available.

I, too, bemoan the loss of more newsmen covering foreign affairs. But the reality is that it forces people who care about it to dig out sources, usually on the Internet, that over time they come to trust. Others prefer to follow the meanderings of Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton, or fantasy football, or stay plugged in to their IPads, IPhones, or IPods, listening to who knows what. These are choices every individual has to make for him or herself. Limiting those choices, if we are to remain a free society, is not an option. At least it’s not an option for the government to choose. Parents, peer pressure, national leaders, sports heroes, all may have some influence. The bottom line is that we are living in the Wild West of news, talk, entertainment, sports and game info, and there is no turning back.

The answer is for people to become responsible consumers of news and other information relevant to their lives. But the idea of Sen. Jay Rockefeller having the FCC overstep its authority and go after the content of cable news networks because their existence makes it harder to pass certain legislation he would like to see is dangerous. Rockefeller, like the rest of us, wants to see quality news. But he goes way too far: “I hunger for quality news. I’m tired of the right and the left. There’s a little bug inside of me which wants the FCC to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Good-bye.’ It’d be a big favor to political discourse, our ability to do our work here in Congress and to the American people to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly in their future.”

People should look at Fox News and MSNBC, particularly the evening shows, as opinion sources, like the editorial and op-ed pages of the newspaper, or, if they prefer, as entertainment, or as their source of news. Hopefully they will also decide to read publications and seek news from sources that they are not likely to agree with, so they can better understand where the other side is coming from. The stakes are enormous, and they manifest themselves in elections every two years.

The problem unique to MSNBC is that part of their name is NBC. And as such, they often have many of the same people reporting on the news and then commenting, or offering opinions, later on a different show. As a result, they are the envy of the other broadcast networks, but they have done more than any to blur the line between news and opinion and advocacy.

The reality is that, as maddening as the news media can be, and as coarse as the national dialogue has become, we are better served by the many voices that now make up The Media as opposed to some idealized memory of “That’s the way it is.”

---

Roger Aronoff is a media analyst with Accuracy in Media, and is the writer/director of Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope.” He can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org

Climategate – still the issue

Crossposted from Watts Up With That

Climategate – still the issue

Posted on November 20, 2010 by Anthony Watts

This week marks the one year anniversary of the release of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that we now know as Climategate.

Sitting here now, one year later, it’s becoming difficult to remember the importance of that release of information, or even what information was actually released. Many were only introduced to the scandal through commentary in the blogosphere and many more came to know about it only weeks later, after the establishment media had a chance to assess the damage and fine tune the spin that would help allay their audience’s concern that something important had just happened. Very few have actually bothered to read the emails and documents for themselves.

Few have browsed the “Harry Read Me” file, the electronic notes of a harried programmer trying to make sense of the CRU’s databases. They have never read for themselves how temperatures in the database were “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” or the “hundreds if not thousands of dummy stations” which somehow ended up in the database, or how the exasperated programmer resorts to expletives before admitting he made up key data on weather stations because it was impossible to tell what data was coming from what sources.

Few have read the 2005 email from Climategate ringleader and CRU head Phil Jones to John Christy where he states “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.” Or where he concludes: “As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”

Or the email where he broke the law by asking Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to delete a series of emails related to a Freedom of Information request he had just received.

Or the email where he wrote: “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

Or the other emails where these men of science say they will re-define the peer review process itself in order to keep differing view points out of the scientific literature, or where they discuss ousting a suspected skeptic out of his editorial position in a key scientific journal, or where they fret about how to hide the divergence in temperature proxy records from observed temperatures, or where they openly discuss the complete lack of warming over the last decade or any of the thousands of other emails and documents exposing a laundry list of gross scientific and academic abuses.

Of course, the alarmists continue to argue—as they have ever since they first began to acknowledge the scandal—that climategate is insignificant. Without addressing any of the issues or specific emails, they simply point to the “independent investigations” that they say have vindicated the climategate scientists.

…

Regardless of what one thinks of the veracity or independence of these so-called investigations into the climategate scandal itself, what has followed has been a catastrophic meltdown of the supposedly united front of scientific opinion that manmade CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming.

In late November of 2009, just days after the initial release of the climategate emails, the University of East Anglia was in the hotseat again. The CRU was forced to admit they had thrown away most of the raw data that their global temperature calculations were based upon, meaning their work was not reproducible by any outside scientists.

Complete transcript to the video here

The place where all the emails can be searched and  read:
http://eastangliaemails.com/

For a compendium of links relating to the Climategate escapades, WUWT has an archive here.

Breaking: Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Florida insurers rely on dubious storm model

Florida insurers rely on dubious model

By Paige St. John

Published: Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.  Last Modified: Saturday, November 13, 2010 at 5:54 p.m.

Hurricane Katrina extracted a terrifying toll — 1,200 dead, a premier American city in ruins, and the nation in shock. Insured losses would ultimately cost the property insurance industry $40 billion.

Related Links:

• Insurers’ computer models deeply flawed
• More storms now than ever? Yes. No. Maybe.

More Information:

• SPECIAL REPORT: Florida’s insurance industry

Click to enlarge 

To see a full-size version of this graphic, click here.

But Katrina did not tear a hole in the financial structure of America’s property insurance system as large as the one carved scarcely six weeks later by a largely unknown company called Risk Management Solutions.

RMS, a multimillion-dollar company that helps insurers estimate hurricane losses and other risks, brought four hand-picked scientists together in a Bermuda hotel room.

There, on a Saturday in October 2005, the company gathered the justification it needed to rewrite hurricane risk. Instead of using 120 years of history to calculate the average number of storms each year, RMS used the scientists’ work as the basis for a new crystal ball, a computer model that would estimate storms for the next five years.

The change created an $82 billion gap between the money insurers had and what they needed, a hole they spent the next five years trying to fill with rate increases and policy cancellations.

RMS said the change that drove Florida property insurance bills to record highs was based on “scientific consensus.”

The reality was quite different.

Today, two of the four scientists present that day no longer support the hurricane estimates they helped generate. Neither do two other scientists involved in later revisions. One says that monkeys could do as well.

In the rush to deploy a new, higher number, they say, the industry skipped the rigors of scientific method. It ignored contradictory evidence and dissent, and created penalties for those who did not do likewise. The industry flouted regulators who called the work biased, the methods ungrounded and the new computer model illegal.

Florida homeowners would have paid more even without RMS’ new model. Katrina convinced the industry that hurricanes were getting bigger and more frequent. But it was RMS that first put a number to the increased danger and came up with a model to justify it.

As a result of RMS’ changes, the cost to insure a home in parts of Florida hit world-record levels.

Read the full special report here.

Commentary from Roger Pielke Jr. at the University of Colorado here.

Commentary at WUWT here.

Dyer: Precarious Albion

Precarious Albion

by J.E. Dyer, November 13, 2010.  Hotair,  The Green Room.

Americans have seen the reports of British students violently protesting the hike in college tuition planned by London’s governing coalition.  Fewer may have seen the report of a protest by Muslims against the national moment of silence observed on Armistice – or, in Britain, Remembrance – Day, 11 November.

According to the UK Daily Mail, the protesters burned a model of a red poppy – the symbol of remembrance for World War I – and chanted “British soldiers burn in hell!”  Says the Mail: “They held banners which read ‘Islam will dominate’ and ‘Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell’.” The Muslim protest was countered by an English Defence League protest, with London police keeping the two groups separated.

Britain today still has a productive demographic that sees value in things like restoring fiscal responsibility to government, commemorating Britain’s national identity and history, and maintaining public order.  But that demographic is increasingly under siege.

Among Europe’s members of the G-8, Britain is also increasingly isolated in the rush of the others – Germany, France, Italy – to secure agreements with Russia.  The Cameron government is seeking to improve Britain’s long-frosty relations with Russia. But there’s a sense of restricted latitude in this move:  a lurking idea that Britain might be late to the table, and might need Russia’s goodwill more than vice versa.  Indeed, before the October visit of Foreign Secretary William Hague to Moscow, his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, averred that Moscow expected Britain to “make the first move” to improve relations.

Britain is by no means out of options. But she’s just about out of margin.  One reason for that, of course, is the all-but-explicit repudiation by Barack Obama of the “special relationship” between the US and UK.  Britain is no longer a true global empire or the sheriff of the seas, but she’s still an island kingdom a few short miles across the Channel from Europe.  To maintain political independence, she must either cultivate her own power or obtain the backing of a country that does.  The close connection with America has been Britain’s high card for the last half century.

But there was a Britain before there was a global America.  The pivot toward Russia represents the reemergence of an older pattern:  one in which Britain used continental alliances to maintain a regional balance of power.  Britain and France have tempered their courting of Russia with a new bilateral defense pact between the two of them, concluded last week.  As NATO dismantles its raison d’etre, the old fault lines of alliance and wagon tracks of diplomacy reappear.  The factors in why France and Britain made this agreement, but Germany is not part of it, are the same ones that obtained before there was a NATO or a global America:  some alliance is necessary, but a tripartite pact with Germany would alarm Russia too much.

Germany, naturally, prefers to retain a privileged central position anyway; for Berlin, the right note was struck with Angela Merkel’s participation in October’s three-way talks with Nicolas Sarkozy and Dmitry Medvedev.  But Germany is deeply embedded in Russia’s oil and natural gas empire too.  The Germans have their own growing ties to Russia.

The British soul may be much like ours, but British geography is a stern taskmaster.  As NATO and the special relationship fade, her leaders have tough choices to make.  Even in an earlier era of technology, Britain could never stand alone.  She required alliances and strategies; like a ship of state moored to Europe, she needed a network of bumpers and a way of keeping a steady strain on the lines to prevent collision or being cut adrift.  Now her post-World War II holiday from that history is coming to an end.

As it does, Britain finds herself not so much bolstered by a stiff upper lip as mired in a protruding lower one.  Only Britain can determine whether she will sink into that mire and become something else: a fractious and stupid society, paranoid, entitled, and immobilized.  It doesn’t have to happen; I’m pulling for the stiff upper lip to reclaim its territory.

If it does happen, Americans are in for times far more “interesting” than any we’ve had.  We’ve never lived in a world in which there was not an anchor of preferential goodwill towards us in Western Europe.  Throughout most of our history, that anchor has been Britain.  If that anchor is weighed, we will find out just how small, today, the Atlantic Ocean really is.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions” and as The Optimistic Conservative.  She writes a weekly column for Patheos.

Ehrenfeld: Obama Administration’s un-American Agenda.

Obama Administration’s un-American Agenda

by Rachel Ehrenfeld,  Nov 14th 2010

President’s Obama’s recent trip to Asia was intended to advance U.S. influence in the region, promote American exports, and create jobs at home.

But the U.S. President, and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have also been working to advance his un-American agenda – promoting a religion, the religion of Islam.

In June 2009, Americans were surprised to hear Obama’s deceleration in Cairo, that the U.S. and the Muslim world, where Shari’a law (Islamic law) dictates gender, racial and religious discrimination, “share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

On his visit to India, where sectarian violence between radical Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists groups, and attacks on Christians continue, Obama chose Mumbai’s Jesuit St. Xavier’s College, to praise Islam again, as “The religion [that] teaches peace, justice, fairness and tolerance.” Merely two years after terrorists from the radical Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba murdered 166 people, including six Americans in Mumbai, Obama stated: “All of us recognize that this great religion cannot justify violence.”

In Indonesia, speaking about American –Indonesian cooperation, Obama proudly declared: “many of the partnerships I’ve mentioned (trade, security and cultural exchange agreements) are a direct result of my call in Cairo for a new beginning between the United States and Muslim communities around the world.” However, such agreements were in place before he became president.

A few days earlier, in Kuala Lumpur, Hillary Clinton, emulated her boss, highlighting the “common values like respect for cultural diversity, pluralism, [and] religious tolerance,” that the U.S. shares with Malaysia, an Islamic state. She went on to praise Malaysia, as an example of religious tolerance, ignoring the fact that forty percent of the non-Muslim population suffers from governmental institutionalized discrimination. Indeed, the U.S. Department of State’s 2009 Human Rights Report noted that: “Longstanding government policies gave preferences to ethnic Malays in many area.”

At the same time as Clinton was suggesting that Malaysia’s Islamic governance should be “looked to as both a thought leader and a model globally in a number of significant areas,” a scandal was brewing in Kuching, the forth largest city in Malaysia with a large Chinese population, where a ten-year-old student at the St Thomas Primary School (not a Muslim school), received ten “whacks on his palm” for bringing non-halal food to school.

While Clinton was lauding the role of Islam in Malaysia, the Human Rights Report detailed how “The civil courts continued to allow the Shari’a (Islamic law) courts to exercise jurisdiction in cases involving families that included non-Muslims. Additionally, the criminal and Shari’a courts utilized caning as a form of punishment.” The report also documented how “freedom of press, association, assembly, speech, and religion,” were restricted by the government.

Yet, Mrs. Clinton continued extolling Malaysia’s creativity and leadership “in Islamic financing, which will provide a different approach to financing which can be very economically important.”

Indeed, Malaysia has become a major sponsor and promoter of Islamic banking. It is home to the “de facto Islamic Central Bank,” the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), which was established in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur “to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance.”

IFSB members include the central banks of Iran, Sudan, and Syria – all designated state sponsors of terrorism – and the Palestinian Monetary Authority (PMA), which is widely documented since its inception to be a terror funder.

Moreover, chairing the 2002 meeting, Malaysian Prime Minister at the time, Mohamed Mahatir, stated: “A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad (emphasis added) worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West].”

Mahatir was merely reaffirming the ideology behind the invention of Islamic banking created by Muslim Brotherhood founder, Egyptian Hassan al-Banna. Banna concocted Islamic banking in the 1920s as a tool for the financial jihad (holy war) against the West.  He understood that “to penetrate the Western finance system, corrupting it from within,” would help to create “a parallel system to re-establish a global Islamic empire governed by Islamic law (Shari’a).”

The real push for the global expansion of Islamic banking began in earnest with the establishment of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), in 1969. The OIC’s charter calls to “liberate Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa [mosque] from Zionist occupation”(This statement has been removed from the OIC’s English website). To achieve that, the Saudi led OIC established new regulatory, accounting and auditing organizations to govern Islamic banks compliant with Shari’a Law.

In addition to the IBSB, Malaysia is the home for other important Islamic banking organizations, such as the Islamic Banking and finance Institute Malaysia (IBFIM). All are “dedicated to promote the Islamic banking industry as per Quran and Sunnah.”

Was our Secretary of State aware of the true nature of Islamic banking when she praised it? Most likely not. Instead, she probably adheres to the same PC interpretation of “jihad,” as the President, who announced in Mumbai: “the phrase jihad has a lot of meanings within Islam and is subject to a lot of different interpretations.”

While the reform of the American financial system is urgent, Islamic banking governed by Shari’a and by Muslim clerics—not U.S. laws and regulators—should not be endorsed, for these serve an un-American agenda

Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the NY based American Center for Democracy, and author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It.

Related: “British soldiers burn in hell”