People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.
Mr. Universe Assaulted by Cops. Though that is, needless to say, not the way the government employees or the pro-government media portray it. (Thanks to Steve Bartin.)… [LewRockwell.com Blog]
I wonder how often diabetics get attacked by cops that we never hear about because they aren’t famous enough for the mainstream media to care about?
The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis. A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.
Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.
In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.
[…]
The attempt by the US to seize the two high-ranking Iranian security officers openly meeting with Iraqi leaders is somewhat as if Iran had tried to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 while they were on an official visit to a country neighbouring Iran, such as Pakistan or Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Iran believes that Mr Jafari and Mr Frouzanda were targeted by the Americans. Mr Jafari confirmed to the official Iranian news agency, IRNA, that he was in Arbil at the time of the raid.
[…]
For more than a year the US and its allies have been trying to put pressure on Iran. Security sources in Iraqi Kurdistan have long said that the US is backing Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in Iran. The US is also reportedly backing Sunni Arab dissidents in Khuzestan in southern Iran who are opposed to the government in Tehran. On 4 February soldiers from the Iraqi army 36th Commando battalion in Baghdad, considered to be under American control, seized Jalal Sharafi, an Iranian diplomat.
The raid in Arbil was a far more serious and aggressive act. It was not carried out by proxies but by US forces directly. The abortive Arbil raid provoked a dangerous escalation in the confrontation between the US and Iran which ultimately led to the capture of the 15 British sailors and Marines – apparently considered a more vulnerable coalition target than their American comrades. [The Independent]
I’ve been reading about various attempts by the Evil Empire to provoke Iran for quite some time now, so I’d been wondering what prompted the Iranian government to finally fight back. Now I know.
In other news, the BBC is reporting that Jalal Sharafi has been freed.
Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese Americans in WWII: Scientific American.
Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese Americans in WWII: Scientific American: “Despite decades of denials, government records confirm that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Census Bureau surveys the population every decade with detailed questionnaires but is barred by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals. The Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed that protection to assist in the roundup of Japanese-Americans for imprisonment in internment camps in California and six other states during the war. The Bureau previously has acknowledged that it provided neighborhood information on Japanese-Americans for that purpose, but it has maintained that it never provided ‘microdata,’ meaning names and specific information about them, to other agencies.
A new study of U.S. Department of Commerce documents now shows that the Census Bureau complied with an August 4, 1943, request by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau for the names and locations of all people of Japanese ancestry in the Washington, D.C., area, according to historian Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and statistician William Seltzer of Fordham University in New York City. The records, however, do not indicate that the Bureau was asked for or divulged such information for Japanese-Americans in other parts of the country.
Anderson and Seltzer discovered in 2000 that the Census Bureau released block-by-block data during WW II that alerted officials to neighborhoods in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas where Japanese-Americans were living. ‘We had suggestive but not very conclusive evidence that they had also provided microdata for surveillance,’ Anderson says.
The Census Bureau had no records of such action, so the researchers turned to the records of the chief clerk of the Commerce Department, which received and had the authority to authorize interagency requests for census data under the Second War Powers Act. Anderson and Seltzer discovered copies of a memo from the secretary of the treasury (of which the Secret Service is part) to the secretary of commerce (who oversees the Census Bureau) requesting the data, and memos documenting that the Bureau had provided it [see image below].”
(Via Scientific American>.)
[Privacy Digest: Privacy News (Civil Rights, Encryption, Free Speech, Cryptography)]
Of course from my point of view it’s obvious that the government can and will use anything you tell it against you. Hopefully for those people naive enough to think that the census (with its huge questionnaire on every aspect of your life) is harmless, this will make them reconsider.
M 7.6, Solomon Islands. April 01, 2007 20:39:56 GMT [USGS M>2.5 Earthquakes]
Fortunately this happened in the middle of nowhere. However, contrary to the initial claims of the USGS, there was a tsunami.