The Dusty Dog

Greg Palast - Kudos To You, Mon....

This morning, I had the unexpected pleasure of turning on CSPAN and finding that Greg Palast, one of my favorite writers and journalists, was a guest. Unfortunately he was a guest with that dirtbag R. Emmett Tyrrell, the Editor-in-Chief of the American Spectator. If you're not familiar with the American Spectator, I can only sum it up as follows: I've been wondering who were the 29% of Americans who still support the dubya regime. Tyrrell is a prime example, a total blowhard who cannot think of anything else but to call everyone not of the neocon ilk a "socialist". Very reminiscent of Limbaugh and Santorum. Blechhhhhhhh... enough of him.

My real point of this article is to alert readers to one of the most amazing things I learned this morning from Mr. Palast. As they were discussing the illegal wiretapping and the huge database that the government is keeping of Americans' phone records, he mentioned a company called ChoicePoint. ChoicePoint, it seems, is that same company that was used by Jeb Bush, and his sidekick Katherine Harris, to develop a phony list of felons, predominantly African Americans and democrats of course, to toss off the voter roles in Florida in order to hand over the 2000 presidential election to his brother, the cockroach.

Holy mother of scandalous stories (this is Mothers Day, after all), is there really a pattern here? Realy an actual conspiracy to defraud on the part of this great American democracy? Apparently, there is. According to Palast, from his website:

This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

snip....

he leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?

snip....

And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected.

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.

This is exactly the kind of crap Tyrrell and his American Spectator buddies support. He even went on to say that in order to win the "war on terror", we have to lose a few civil liberties. At which point, Palast jumps in to say "THERE IS NO WAR ON TERROR!" The war on terror is, in fact, an undeclared war against not only the Iraqis, whom we invaded in order to liberate their oil for our cockroach coffers, but also against the American people, the chumps who continue to believe that there is some kind of "war". We were attacked by a few Saudi nutcases, which did not constitute an act of war. If it did, we should have attacked Saudi Arabia. But, that was never going to happen. After all, the Bush Crime Family is part of OPEC, that cartel that is now pushing up the price of oil and making them all richer than god.

And, speaking of this phony war, here's another little piece of neocon lunacy. Apparently, there is this leaked document (click on this image to the left) which indicates that:

"... there are over 30 pages of documentation obtained by the BBC and the National Security News Service (Washington) indicating that the FBI was pulled off the trail of [bin Laden] on September 11, 1996 - and reactivated exactly five years later. According to agents and higher level sources in the CIA who spoke with us, before the attack on the World Trade Center, these cases were shut down for political reasons. While President Clinton "constrained" investigations of alleged Saudi funding of terror networks and the making of the "Islamic" atomic bomb, Bush "Jr." effectively "killed" those investigations - until September 2001."

Essentially, what Greg Palast points out in his article See No Evil: What Bush Didn't (Want To) Know About 9/11 is that even though Bill Clinton started this policy failure, dubya took it to the next level, and effectively killed off any further investigations into the Saudi family's ties to terrorism:

The Family Business

I still didn't have an answer to all my questions. We knew that Clinton and the Bushes were reluctant to discomfort the Saudis by unearthing their connections to terrorists -- but what made this new president take particular care to protect the Saudis, even to the point of stymying his own intelligence agencies?

The answers kept coming back: "Carlyle" and "Arbusto."

While some people have guardian angels, our president seems to have guardian sheiks....

This is such an ugly history, and there is so much to read, and all I want to do is stick my head in the sand, like so many Americans choose to do, and I have so much dog fur floating around my house (Dusty Dog is blowin' her coat), and my house is such a mess, that I just don't have the time to know it all. Therefore, I trust people like Greg Palast to do the hard investigative work that he does, and teach those of us who are inclined to listen. It seems that more and more Americans are becoming more inclined to listen. At least, I hope so. However, there are those 29% jingo blowhards who will support the neocons no matter what. They are hopeless, and I try not to dwell on their stupidity for too long. It just ruins my day.

posted by Dusty Dog at 5/14/2006