77% Believe Iran is Likely to Have Nukes “Soon”

Seventy-seven percent (77%) of Americans believe that Iran is likely to develop nuclear weapons in the near future. Most doubt that anything can be done to prevent such a development.

These findings from the latest Rasmussen Reports poll come as officials of a United Nations’ agency complained to the Bush Administration about a Congressional report on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Representatives from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called parts of the report “outrageous and dishonest,” and suggested that misleading information about the true status of Iran’s nuclear capabilities has been released to the public. (more…)

Israel’s former military chief launched a devastating attack on the country’s leadership yesterday, calling for the prime minister and the top general to quit over failings in the Lebanon war. (more…)

Half of New Yorkers believe US leaders had foreknowledge of impending 9-11 attacks and consciously failed to act; 66% call for new probe of unanswered questions by congress or New York’s Attorney General, see Zogby, and thousands of Americans have signed a petition for a new probe.

A poll shows 89% of CNN Internet users feel this way and over 63% of Canadians feel similarly. On the 3 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks 80% Al-Arabia satellite TV viewers thought others, besides Bin Laden, were behind 9/11. (more…)

Economic and media globalization, however, have shrunk the planet in ways that blur the distinction between foreign and domestic propaganda. This has been acknowledged in the U.S. Defense Department’s Information Operations Roadmap, a 74-page document approved in 2003 by Donald Rumsfeld. It noted that “information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP [psychological operations], increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa. PSYOP messages disseminated to any audience… will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public.” (more…)

There was no Mission Accomplished banner, the venue was the U.S. Capitol not an aircraft carrier, and the president wore a business suit, not a Top Gun flight suit.

But the message was the same — victory had been declared. Prematurely.

Now, more than four years after George W. Bush trumpeted the liberation of Afghanistan in his 2002 State of the Union address, a resurgent Taliban is very much back in the game and Canadian troops are taking casualties in fierce fighting which many believe could have been avoided. (more…)

LOS ANGELES - The Internal Revenue Service has ordered a prominent liberal church to turn over documents and e-mails it produced during the 2004 election year that contain references to political candidates.

The IRS is investigating whether All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena violated the federal tax code when its former rector, Rev. George F. Regas, delivered an anti-war sermon on the eve of the last presidential election.

Watch out Quakers! None of that “liberal” anti-war talk! (more…)

In an echo of the intelligence wars that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a high-stakes struggle is brewing within the Bush administration and in Congress over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program and involvement in terrorism. (more…)

Other recent findings confirm that Israel may have dropped as many as 60 percent of the cluster bombs it used in the latest conflict in the 72 hours immediately before the cease-fire. Military analysts on the ground offer two explanations.

First, sheer frustration, hatred, and rage by Israel’s leadership and its obsession with punishing Lebanon for its more than 85 percent support (including Lebanon’s middle class and Christian citizens) for Hizbullah’s resistance to Israel’s attempted reoccupation up to the Litani River.

Second, a desire by Israel to get rid of as much of its US cluster-bomb inventory as possible, which the Pentagon has stipulated must be reduced to a lower level before Israel can reorder newer models like the M-26. This is why the 33-year-old CBU-58, almost extinct, was used so widely. Israel was cleaning out its CBU closet for new orders, one Lebanese Army source reported. (more…)

It’s so annoying to read mainstream press articles where they dance around what the real issue is on “terror suspect interrogations.” They use every euphemism in the book. Bush seeks “clarity” on interrogations. Bush wants “wider leeway” in interrogations. Bush wants “tougher interrogations.”

Tougher interrogations, my ass. Bush wants to torture people. (more…)

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed Friday the United States was the real nuclear threat and reiterated his insistence Tehran’s nuclear atomic program had peaceful aims.

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Forget the orange suit. Exxon Mobil Corporation, which admits it was behind the criminal complaint brought by Homeland Security against me and television producer Matt Pascarella, has informed me that the oil company will no longer push charges that Pascarella and I threatened “critical infrastructure.”

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· Troops could launch lawsuits, warns expert
· Veterans’ groups criticise ‘guinea pig’ decision

Soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are being treated with an experimental blood-clotting drug that has not been fully tested.

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According to reports, DVDs, CDs, Blu-ray discs and HD DVD discs may soon have RFID chips embedded into them to prevent illegal copying of movies and music. The chip is currently in development by a company called U-Tech, which is a subsidiary of Ritek, the world’s largest manufacturer of DVD discs — both stamped and recordable. The company developing the actual RFID chips is IPICO, and both U-Tech and IPICO have announced production at one of U-Tech’s main production plants located in Taiwan. (more…)

If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it — even if it’s not set to expire anytime soon. If you don’t have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don’t want one of these chips in your passport.

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Researchers at Princeton University have released a new “Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,” which finds many possibilities for election fraud in these particular voting machines. Their report also recognizes that similar problems likely exist with other direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, saying, “Simply put, many computer scientists doubt that paperless DREs can be made reliable and secure, and they expect that any failures of such systems would likely go undetected.”

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