Tom Diemer
Politics Daily
March 4, 2010

Karl Rove, the White House adviser whom George W. Bush called his political “architect,” admits in a new memoir that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq severely damaged the Bush presidency — and he suggests the war might not have occurred had Bush actually known the truth.

Of his own role, Rove writes that his biggest mistake was not pushing back against claims that the president had led the country into the Iraq war under false pretenses.

If Bush had known about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, Rove questions whether the United States would have gone to war, according to an excerpt quoted by the New York Times. “Would the Iraq War have occurred without W.M.D., I doubt it,” Rove writes. “Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the W.M.D. threat. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change and deal with Iraq’s horrendous human rights violations.”

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Authorities’ claim that virtual strip search pictures immediately destroyed proven fraudulent – use of devices needs to be halted now

Paul Joseph Watson
prisonplanet.com

UPDATE: Scannergate: Facts Contradict Heathrow Claim That Naked Images Can’t Be Printed

Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.

UK Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said last week that the images produced by the scanners were deleted “immediately” and airport staff carrying out the procedure are fully trained and supervised.

“It is very important to stress that the images which are captured by body scanners are immediately deleted after the passenger has gone through the body scanner,” Adonis told the London Evening Standard.

Adonis was forced to address privacy concerns following reports that the images produced by the scanners broke child pornography laws in the UK. When the scanners were first introduced, it was also speculated that images of famous people would be ripe for abuse as the pictures produced by the devices make genitals “eerily visible” according to journalists who have investigated trials of the technology.

However, the Transport Secretary’s assurances were demolished after it was revealed on the BBC’s Jonathan Ross show Friday that Indian actor Shahrukh Khan had passed through a body scan and later had the image of his naked body printed out and circulated by Heathrow security staff.

“I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You’ve got to see them. It makes you embarrassed – if you’re not well endowed,” said Khan, referring to how the scans produce clear images of a person’s genitals.

“You walk into the machine and everything – the whole outline of your body – comes out,” he said.

“I was a little scared. Something happens [inside the scans], and I came out. Then I saw these girls – they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said ‘give them to me’ – and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them,” stated Khan.

The story was carried by Yahoo News under the headline “Shah Rukh signs off sexy body-scan printouts at Heathrow”.

Khan’s reference to “girls” with printouts of his naked body scan can only refer to female airport security staff responsible for processing the images produced by the scanners, “professionals” who are supposed to instantly delete the images, according to Lord Adonis.

The revelation that airport security staff are completely abusing any notion of the professionalism promised by authorities by printing out and circulating images of naked body scans should set alarm bells ringing, especially in light of the fact that such images of minors break child pornography laws. British authorities have made it mandatory for travelers to submit to the naked body scanners when asked and have overturned previous rules that prevented under 18’s from passing through the devices.

Within days of the devices being introduced at Heathrow, staff have abused their professionalism and printed out naked scans of a famous actor for their own titillation.

We were promised all along that the body scanners “increased privacy” because they were only accessible to a single staff member who had no personal contact with the passenger taking the scan, in addition to the assurance that the images could not be saved and were instantly deleted. It in fact turns out that airport staff have been saving, printing and circulating naked body scans in complete violation of these supposed guarantees.

Furthermore, we were told that the identity of the person undergoing the virtual strip search would also be kept private. The fact that Heathrow employees must have known that the actor was about to take the body scan in order to print out copies of the image also proves this claim to be a total fallacy.

The abuse of the naked body scan images in this instance is a total violation of every data protection law in the UK. Far from treating the story in a comical manner, Khan should be filing a very expensive lawsuit and preparing for a successful and lucrative outcome.

In the meantime, the revelation that the naked body scanner images are being freely printed out and circulated by airport security staff should prove to be the death knell for plans on behalf of governments worldwide to institute the scanners on a widespread basis.

Courts have consistently found that strip searches are only legal when performed on a person who has already been found guilty of a crime or on arrestees pending trial where a reasonable suspicion has to exist that they are carrying a weapon. Subjecting masses of people to blanket strip searches in airports reverses the very notion of innocent until proven guilty.

Barring people from flying and essentially treating them like terrorists for refusing to be humiliated by the virtual strip search is a clear breach of the basic human right of freedom of movement. Security experts agree that such scanners would not even have stopped the incident that has been exploited to justify their widespread introduction – the Christmas Day underwear bomber.

Not only have the scanners proven to be a total violation of privacy, but major international radiation safety groups are now warning of the health risks they pose.

Despite governments claiming that backscatter x-ray systems produce radiation too low to pose a threat, the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety concluded in their report that governments must justify the use of the scanners and that a more accurate assessment of the health risks is needed.

Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, according to the report, adding that governments should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.”

“The Committee cited the IAEA’s 1996 Basic Safety Standards agreement, drafted over three decades, that protects people from radiation. Frequent exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” reported Bloomberg.

Elizabeth Cohen
CNN

When Annie Brown’s daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.

While grateful to have the information — Isabel received further testing and she doesn’t have the disease — the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel’s genes in the first place. After all, they’d never consented to genetic testing.

It’s simple, the pediatrician answered: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it’s often done without the parents’ consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center.

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infowars.com

Subversives who think government is corrupt and should be controlled by the people face 10 years in prison and a $25,000 dollar fine if they fail to register with authorities in South Carolina, in another chilling example of how free speech and dissent is being criminalized in America.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act” is now officially on the books and mandates that “Every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

Of course, the right to overthrow a government that has become corrupt, abusive and completely unrepresentative of its electorate is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence – that’s how America came to be a Republic in the first place – advocating or teaching that the people should “control” the government via their elected representatives is a basic function of a democratic society, but this law effectively makes it a terrorist offense.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness,” states the Declaration of Independence.

Under the sweeping terms of the law, members of tax protest organizations, the Tea Party movement and the States’ Rights movement based in South Carolina are all domestic terrorists if they fail to register their dissent with the authorities.

It is important to stress that the notion this law somehow only applies to “Islamic terrorists” is completely at odds with the fact that federal and state authorities now consider the main terror threat to be from informed American citizens exercising their constitutional rights in opposition to the big government agenda they are being subjected to.

As we saw with the MIAC report and a plethora of similar training manuals which were leaked over the last decade, police are being trained that libertarians, gun owners, Ron Paul supporters and anyone who is mildly political is a domestic extremist and a potential terrorist – these people are the real target of the subversives list in South Carolina.

The infamous Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation manual (page one, page two) produced in association with the Joint Terrorism Task Force listed “defenders of the U.S. constitution” and “lone individuals” as terrorists. Will anyone in South Carolina who defends the Constitution, the very bedrock of what America stands for, have to register with the authorities unless they want to be locked up for a decade?

Of course, since nobody is going to register as a “subversive” with South Carolina authorities, their failure to “comply” with the regulation will later be used against them as a means of eliciting criminal charges, in what represents a clear end run around the First Amendment.

The government isn’t going to just come out all guns blazing and ban free speech, they are simply going to make anyone who refuses to register for permission a criminal for failing to adhere to a separate mandate.

Just like people in places such as New York and Chicago were told that they had to get a license to purchase a gun – at first the process was a mere inconvenience but now the licensing process means they have to jump through 200 flaming hoops and the second amendment has effectively been outlawed in these cities.

They won’t hesitate to pull the same tricks with the First Amendment, and it’s already happening with calls to license Internet users and force them to get government permission to run a website.