By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN

WASHINGTON - Airport security officers around the nation have been alerted by federal officials to look out for terrorists practicing to carry explosive components onto aircraft, based on four curious seizures at airports since last September.

The unclassified alert was distributed on July 20 by the Transportation Security Administration to federal air marshals, its own transportation security officers and other law enforcement agencies.

The seizures at airports in San Diego, Milwaukee, Houston and Baltimore included “wires, switches, pipes or tubes, cell phone components and dense clay-like substances,” including block cheese, the bulletin said. “The unusual nature and increase in number of these improvised items raise concern.”

Security officers were urged to keep an eye out for “ordinary items that look like improvised explosive device components.”

The 13-paragraph bulletin was posted on the Internet by NBC Nightly News, which first reported the story.

A federal official familiar with the document confirmed the authenticity of the NBC posting but declined to be identified by name because it has not been officially released.

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How the zero-tolerance policies of “America’s Mayor” set us up for the Patriot Act and Guantanamo.

from Mother Jones Magazine
By JoAnn Wypijewski

In Miami last fall, amid news that corrupt housing authorities and developers had deprived thousands of poor people of promised homes, Ivan Martinez began projecting immense images against the walls of the luxury towers that have sprouted with wanton ambition in the footprint of demolished low-income housing. No one commissioned these images; Martinez is a guerrilla artist, an outlaw. As governments across America have imposed increasingly harsh penalties against postering, graffiti, and their requisite tools (New York has made graffiti-writing a felony in some instances, as has Ohio, convicting a man for spraying “Troops Out Now” on a highway overpass; Richmond, Virginia, threatens its citizens from the backs of buses, “Use a spray can, go to jail”), wall’size projections have developed as a fleet-footed alternative. One of Martinez’s ephemera featured a running silhouette crying, “Gentrification!!!!” Another showed a man saying, “I love downtown’s revitalization, but where are the poor people?” One night as Martinez and two friends were projecting from a moving car, police pulled them over and pointed guns at their heads. He hasn’t done a projection since.

Martinez broke no window, destroyed no property. Except through the play of evanescent light, he didn’t even “aesthetically alter” property, as some graffiti artists describe their work. No reasonable person would call him a vandal, one of those punks who elicit curses for their indecipherable scrawl. Like them, though, he made an unsanctioned claim on public space, which was enough to get a gun to his head, and shut him up.

Among a thousand political lies, one of the most durable, and lulling, is the assertion, central to a “quality of life” or “broken windows” theory of policing, that graffiti is the first link in a criminal chain that ends in murder. Hammer petty flouting of the law, the theory holds, and violent crime will decline. New York was the pioneer in this. Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins cracked down on graffiti writers in the 1980s and early ’90s, but it was Rudolph Giuliani who redefined quality of life in terms of a theory and practice of brute force that has since been adopted by city administrations and police departments across the land. Now the graffiti-murder continuum is widely accepted as fact. New York is officially the safest big city in the country unless one is unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of 50 shots, or 41, or a toilet plunger, from the police. It is also a strangely passive city, its political atmosphere inert. Like the midnight wheat-paster, whose posters about displacement or aids death distinguished the urban vista until the early ’90s, the dissenting slogan, the broadsheet alert to action from corner mailboxes, has largely vanished. Giuliani is running for president, and no handicapper counts his easy sacrifice of liberty to security as a political liability. He compares President Bush’s escalation of the war in Iraq to his own big-fist approach to New York, and suffers no harm for the implication of that admission: that he pursued a war on part of the city’s population while the rest of us became inured to punishment, to brakes on free expression and policing as a way of life.

read more at MOTHER JONES

Crossposted from Global Research:

The US government and Washington elites are aggressively ramping up their “war on terrorism” rhetoric and propaganda, stoking fear and paranoia in order to bolster their war agenda, and reinvigorate the mass public perception of new and growing “homegrown terrorism” threats to the US homeland.

The next phase of America’s war abroad (under the management of a post-Bush neocon/neoliberal consensus), and the deepening militarization of the US homeland towards a full police state, are well underway.

Who or what was behind the Fort Dix Six?

On May 8, 2007, six foreign-born Muslims were arrested during an attempt to purchase assault weapons, and accused of plotting a terror attack on Fort Dix (New Jersey), as well as an assault on a Pennsylvania Navy installation.

While evidence regarding this case continues to unfold, what is clear is that the FBI and US intelligence had been infiltrated and monitored over an extensive period, as early as January 2006. An unnamed “shadowy informer“, likely an intelligence asset, is the key figure behind this operation and the arrest.

An objective analysis of the Fort Dix incident leads to questions about US military-intelligence involvement, and the use of the incident as a pretext:

“There is no doubt that the actions of the US military around the world are provoking a level of disgust and anger that could well produce misguided terrorist attacks within the US itself. Nonetheless, the various terrorist A-plots- exposed by the Bush administration have virtually without exception been characterized by a similar lack of any real preparation for violence combined with the central role of a covert informant/agent provocateur.”

In each of these cases, the supposed conspiracy has been heavily publicized in a transparent bid to justify the ongoing military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and to create a climate of fear in order to suppress democratic rights in the US itself.

“The exposure of the latest alleged plot has coincided with an unprecedented political crisis for the administration. With the president’s standing in the polls falling to record lows and US military casualties in Iraq increasing as the quagmire in the occupied country deepens, the political motive for unveiling another supposed terrorist threat from within is abundantly clear.”

The Fort Dix suspects allegedly came to the attention of authorities after one of them was fingered by a Circuit City store manager while requesting to dub a terrorism training videotape from VHS to DVD. This bungling is reminiscent of the actions of the so-called 9/11 hijackers (all of them guided US intelligence assets), and suggests low-level and amateurish “patsies”, guided and set up by larger forces.

This foiled “spectacular” terror plot comes shortly after the bizarre Virginia Tech massacre (which, perhaps coincidentally, bears striking similarities to other “manchurian candidate” incidents such as the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley) successfully sparked fear across the country, and ignited new calls from citizens to “make our children safe”.

The clear political beneficiary of both the Fort Dix and V Tech episodes are the same: Homeland Security.

Read more »

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani reported a whopping $16.1 million in earned income over the past 16 months, most of it in speaking fees, according to financial documents filed Wednesday.

Democratic hopeful John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, reported $29.5 million in assets, including millions in a hedge fund Edwards worked for part-time. Edwards’ biggest single source of earned income was his $479,512 salary from the fund - the Fortress Investment Group - for consulting work last year.

Giuliani’s report is the first detailed glimpse of his vast holding and income since his term as mayor of New York ended. Since then, Giuliani parlayed his image as an in-charge mayor during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks into lucrative speaking fees and business enterprises.

Giuliani reported $13 million to $45 million in assets, including his share in Giuliani & Co., a partnership that provides an array of consulting services. He also listed income from dividends and interest on many of those investments of at least $411,332 and as much as $3.3 million.

The reports were part of a flurry released Wednesday by the Federal Election Commission. The deadline for filing was Tuesday, though several candidates received 45-day extensions, including Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republicans Mitt Romney, John McCain and Tommy Thompson. Republican Jim Gilmore asked for and received a 30-day grace period.

Sen. Barack Obama’s report showed a surge of interest in his writings as he drew closer to a presidential bid, earning more than a half-million dollars in 2006 in royalties for one book and an advance for another.

The Illinois Democrat received $572,490 for the books - his best’selling memoir, “Dreams of My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope,” an account of his political journey.

Giuliani’s biggest single source of income between January 2006 and February 2007 came from speaking engagements around the world. He grossed $11.4 million in speeches, which includes fees retained by the Washington Speakers Bureau. He typically charged $100,000 per speaking engagement and as much as $200,000 on occasion.

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