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How to arm a atomic bomb

Meirion Jones, Newsnight producer, reports:

Newsnight has discovered that until the early days of the Blair government the RAF’s nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key.

There was no other security on the Bomb itself.

While American and Russian weapons were protected by tamper-proof combination locks which could only be released if the correct code was transmitted, Britain relied on a simpler technology.
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Michael Hoffman, Army Times, reports:

A B-52 bomber mistakenly loaded with six nuclear warheads flew from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30, resulting in an Air Force-wide investigation, according to three officers who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.
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Laura MacInnis, reports:

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

“There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people,” it said.
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Al jazeera reports:

According to most recent surveys, just 28 percent of Americans think the president is doing a good job, the lowest in a decade. But pollsters say that even without running a poll; just wandering down to the local coffee shops you will see the amount of anger and frustration as a result of Iraq war, the mounting casualties, skyrocketing energy prices and the government’s policy.

“More and more Americans are angry,” says retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004. “They are angry about the president’s incompetence and his general unwillingness to acknowledge with some humility that he has made some terrible and tragic mistakes regarding the mission in Iraq.”

Last month, thousands of American anti-war protesters, carrying signs that read “Bush Lied, Thousands Died,” and “End the Occupation,” rallied in Washington and other U.S. cities demanding the return of U.S. troops and the end of Iraq war- It was the largest gathering since the war began in March 2003.

“We believe we are at a tipping point whereby the anti-war sentiment has now become the majority sentiment,” said Brian Becker, national coordinator for ANSWER, a famous antiwar group.
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Mark Benjamin, Salon.com, reports:

On Sept. 24, 2005, tens of thousands of protesters marched past the White House and flooded the National Mall near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue. They had arrived from all over the country for a day of speeches and concerts to protest the war in Iraq. It may have been the biggest antiwar rally since Vietnam. A light rain fell early in the day and most of the afternoon was cool and overcast.

Unknown to the crowd, biological-weapons sensors, scattered for miles across Washington by the Department of Homeland Security, were quietly doing their work. The machines are designed to detect killer pathogens. Sometime between 10 a.m. on Sept. 24 and 10 a.m. on Sept. 25, six of those machines sucked in trace amounts of deadly bacteria called Francisella tularensis. The government fears it is one of six biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States.
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The Unicef advert, which shows the Smurfs’ village being bombed

David Rennie in Brussels for the Telegraph (UK) reports:

The people of Belgium have been left reeling by the first adult-only episode of the Smurfs, in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters’ village is annihilated by warplanes.
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Ireland Online reports:

British forces in tanks and helicopters stormed an Iraqi jail tonight to rescue two service personnel who were arrested after allegedly shooting dead a local policeman and wounding another, the governor of Basra said.

The two men had been taken to the Basra jail after violence erupted earlier today in the southern Iraqi city.
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Bullet holes are seen on the media identity cards of Waleed Khaled after he was shot in Baghdad’s Al Ghazalea district August 28, 2005.

Alastair Macdonald, Reuters, reports:

BAGHDAD, Aug 28 (Reuters) - A Reuters Television soundman was shot dead in Baghdad on Sunday and a cameraman with him was wounded and then detained by U.S. soldiers.

Iraqi police said they had been shot by U.S. forces. A U.S. military spokesman said the incident was being investigated.

Waleed Khaled, 35, was hit by a shot to the face and at least four to the chest as he drove to check a report from police sources of an incident involving police and gunmen in the Hay al-Adil district, in the west of the city.

“A team from Reuters news agency was on assignment to cover the killing of two policemen in Hay al-Adil; U.S. forces opened fire on the team from Reuters and killed Waleed Khaled, who was shot in the head, and wounded Haider Kadhem,” an Interior Ministry official quoted the police incident report as saying.

“I heard shooting, looked up and saw an American sniper on the roof of the shopping centre,” cameraman Kadhem, who was wounded in the back, told colleagues who arrived at the scene.

The only known eyewitness, he was later detained by U.S. troops and was still in custody six hours later despite Reuters’ requests that he be freed to receive medical attention. His precise whereabouts were not clear.
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Greg Szymanski, The Arctic Beacon, via Rense.com, reports:

Don Stout looked up into the Midwestern sky one afternoon two weeks ago and saw a strange helicopter flying over his five-acre piece of land in rural Albany, Ohio.

Before he knew what happened, the 77-year-old long-time resident, law-abiding citizen and Korean War veteran had eight law enforcement officials swarm on his property, checking the place out for marijuana.

Never before having a run-in with the law, Stout said the heavy-handed looking group of law enforcement thugs “came and went without saying a word” after suspiciously looking at a large bush on his property not in the slightest bit resembling a pot plant.

“I’ve been here since 1994 and everybody’s knows me including the sheriff. I never smoked marijuana and they know it, but I think they just like terrorizing people,” said Stout in a telephone conversation from his rural home, adding he still hasn’t received an answer from anyone why law enforcement officials invaded his privacy and entered his land without a proper search warrant.

“It scared the hell out of me as eight or ten men swarmed my place. I was weeding my garden and the next thing you know, they were on my property, looked at this bush and left without saying a word. It was ridiculous, but the sheriff, the deputy sheriff and the game warden all raided my place for no reason and I am still looking for an explanation.”

Although Stout can’t pinpoint why authorities entered his property without a warrant, earlier that day he aired his strong opinions against President Bush, calling him an outright liar, on a free speech and truth-telling talk radio show on the popular WAIF AM770 local radio station.

Stout said he has been calling in regularly voicing his anti-Bush opinions, saying people in rural Ohio are finally starting to wake up to lies, deceit and treachery imposed on the American people by what he calls a “lying dog of a President.’

“I think he and the rest of his buddies are corrupt, down right crazy and Bush should be impeached plain and simple for lying to the people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” said the former Korean War veteran, who lashed out at Bush for going to war illegally and in the process killing thousands of innocent civilians, including more than 1,700 GI’s.

“I think George Bush is a liar and is personally responsible for the deaths of many good young men in order that his rich buddies could profit from this illegal war.”
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Dominick Jenkins, The Guardian, comments:

The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.
The use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not provide the US with the free hand it had wanted and has proved disastrous for the world.

It did not bring about surrender. With 62 Japanese cities destroyed by firebombs and napalm, Japan was not overwhelmed by the destruction of one more. The army minister, General Korechika Anami, told the supreme war council that he would fight on. What actually brought about surrender was the combination of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on August 8 and the US decision to let Japan retain the emperor.

The use of the bomb led to an atomic arms race. Truman had been warned that the Soviet Union would interpret the use of the bomb as a threat but went ahead. After Stalin heard about the bomb from Truman at Potsdam, he said the US would try to use its atomic monopoly to force the Soviet Union to accept its plans for Europe, adding: “Well, that’s not going to happen.” The USSR exploded the atomic bomb in 1949 and the hydrogen bomb in 1953, far more quickly than Truman had believed possible.
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The LaRouche PAC writes:

Lyndon LaRouche, on this Wednesday afternoon, issued an international alert, covering the period of August 2005, which is the likely timeframe for Vice President Dick Cheney, with the full collusion of the circles of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to unleash the recently exposed plans to stage a preemptive tactical nuclear strike against Iran. The danger of such a mad, Hitler-in-the-bunker action from the Cheney circles would be even further heightened, were the United States Congress to stick with its present schedule, and go into recess on July 30 until September 4. With Congress out of Washington, the Cheney-led White House would almost certainly unleash a “Guns of August” attack on Iran.

LaRouche based this assessment on a series of factors, reported to him over the recent days, beginning with the qualified report, from a former U.S. intelligence official, published in the American Conservative magazine, that Dick Cheney ordered the Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to prepare contingency plans for a conventional and tactical nuclear strike against hundreds of targets in Iran, in the event of a “new 9/11-style attack” on the United States. As EIR reported several months ago, the Bush Administration, under CONPLAN 8022, had already placed the relevant “mini-nukes” under the control of theater military commanders, as part of a new Global Strike doctrine, a doctrine originally conceived when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s.
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Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent, Telegraph (UK) via BoingBoing, reports:

Soldiers are facing the undignified prospect of being forced to shout “bang, bang” on military training exercises after an admission by the Army that it is running out of blank ammunition.
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DHS Truck, via Cryptome.

Aljazeera reports:

For the first time, Washington has acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at U.S. detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said on Friday.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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H.D.S. Greenway, The Boston Globe, writes:

IF YOU TAKE something to read at the beach this summer make sure it is not one of George Orwell’s books. The comparison with current events will ruin your day.

In what was then the futuristic, nightmare world of ‘’1984,” written in 1949, Orwell introduced the concepts of ‘’newspeak,” ‘’doublethink,” and ‘’the mutability of the past,” all concepts that seem to be alive and well in 2005, half a century after Orwell’s death. In the ever-changing rationale of why we went to war in Iraq, we can imagine ourselves working in Orwell’s ‘’Ministry of Truth,” in which ‘’reality control” is used to ensure that ‘’the lie passed into history and became the truth.”

And what about the Bush administration’s insistence that all is going well in Iraq? In the Ministry of Truth, statistics are adjustable to suit politics — ‘’merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another,” Orwell wrote. ‘’Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection to anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in the rectified version.” Welcome to the Iraq war, Mr. Orwell.

What of Donald Rumsfeld’s newspeak, or was it doublethink, saying that ‘’no detention facility in the history of warfare has been more transparent” than Guantanamo? We have the FBI’s word for it that prisoners were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, left for 18 to 24 hours with no food and no water, left to defecate and urinate on themselves.

The deaths by torture in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan sound very much like what happens in Orwell’s fictional torture chamber: Room 101.
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American reporter George Weller

Mainichi Daily News reports:

American George Weller was the first foreign reporter to enter Nagasaki following the U.S. atomic attack on the city on Aug. 9, 1945. Weller wrote a series of stories about what he saw in the city, but censors at the Occupation’s General Headquarters refused to allow the material to be printed. Weller’s stories, written in September 1945, can be found below.
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Prison Planet reports:

On a recent trip to NY City (last weekend) three gun-mounted, armored tanks/vehicles were driving through the streets of Manhattan. I took these pictures with my camera phone (hence the crappy quality).

I couldn’t believe how many people just waved at the armed soldiers peeking out of the top, many even cheered loudly in support. Nobody took the time to say, “why the hell are armed soldiers and tanks rolling down the middle of the street?!”

This happened the day after I saw a NYPD officer in Times Square – he was simply standing around watching the pedestrian traffic, the only thing out of place… he was carrying a machine gun!

P.S. The tank pictures were taken at the corner of 53rd and 7th in Manhattan (just a few blocks from Central Park).

Opheera McDoom, Reuters, reports:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudan arrested the local head of an international aid agency on Monday over a report on hundreds of rapes in Darfur in the first such action against a top relief worker since a rebellion in the area began in 2003.
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Andrew Buncombe, The Independent (UK) , reports:

Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.

Last January, these memories became too much for this veteran of the war in Iraq. Informed his unit was about to return, he told his commanders he wanted out and applied to be considered a conscientious objector. The Army refused and charged him with desertion. Last week, his case - which carries a penalty of up to seven years’ imprisonment - started before a military judge at Fort Stewart in Georgia.

“If I am sincere in what I say and there’s consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it,” Sgt Benderman said. “If I have to go to prison because I don’t want to kill anybody, so be it.”
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The Sunday Times (Britain) reprints:

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING

From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
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Pravda reports:

Last week, American authorities arranged a meeting of the former Iraqi dictator with his wife.

She was the first of Hussein”s relatives to meet with the ex-leader of Iraq at a new place, at the American military base in Qatar. Accompanied by Sheikh Hamad Al-Tani, Sajida Heiralla Tuffah has arrived from Syria on his private jet in the end of March.

The outcome of their meeting turned out to be quite scandalous. Sajina claims that the person she encountered was not her husband, but his double. If someone were to say for sure that it was not insinuation, it would have been easy to believe the wife with a 25-year experience. It is also possible to assume that Saddam has simply changed since the day of his sons’ deaths, June 24 2003. This however is highly unlikely. In case we believe Hussein”s wife, all DNA testing of the ex-Iraqi leader should be considered a mere fake. Overall, today there remain more questions then there are answers.

On the other hand however, those statements of Hussein’s wife can in fact be quite understandable. After all, this is the easiest way to demoralize an enemy.
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Cpl. Tenzin Choeku Dengkhim, a 19-year-old immigrant has become the first Tibetan-American killed in combat in Iraq. Photo: RFA

Radio Free Asia reports:

WASHINGTON—A 19-year-old Tibetan from Virginia has been killed in combat in Iraq, less than one month after deploying there.

Cpl. Tenzin Choeku Dengkhim died as a result of “hostile action” April 2, the Pentagon said. He appears to be the first Tibetan-American killed in combat in Iraq.

“He was a very good boy, deeply religious, and [he] talked of serving Tibet as a soldier after he completed his military career as U.S. Marine,” his mother, Radio Free Asia (RFA) Tibetan service broadcaster Rinzin Choedon, said.
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IndyMedia via BoingBoing:

LOS ANGELES, November 9, 2004 - At 7:50 PM two armored tanks showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Westwood. The tanks circled the block twice, the second time parking themselves in the street and directly in front of the area where most of the protesters were gathered. Enraged, some of the people attempted to block the tanks, but police quickly cleared the street. The people continued to protest the presence of the tanks, but about ten minutes the tanks drove off. It is unclear as to why the tanks were deployed to this location. (more…)

The Associated Press reports via CNN, via BoingBoing:

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — Fears of a terrorist attack are not sufficient reason for authorities to search people at a protest, a federal appeals court has ruled, saying September 11, 2001, “cannot be the day liberty perished.”
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Bloomberg reports via :

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) — At least 11 al-Qaeda suspects held by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency have disappeared in custody as they are detained at unknown sites without access to the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch said in an e-mailed report.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., is one of 11 “ghost'’ detainees named by the New York-based human rights group. Other detainees who are missing include Abu Zubayda, a Palestinian who was third on the U.S. most-wanted list of al-Qaeda suspects, and Yemen’s Ramzi al-Shibh, also linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

“There may well be several or many more such detainees,'’ Human Rights Watch said in the report. “The use of forced disappearances and secret incommunicado detention violates the most basic principles of a free society.'’

The International Committee for the Red Cross said in July it hasn’t had access to a “certain number'’ of detainees held around the world as part of the U.S. war on terrorism. The Geneva Conventions on human rights provides the Red Cross with automatic access to prisoners of war.
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