Energy Independence or Blowback?

"The nation's electric utilities have failed to fully survey the vulnerability of their equipment to computer-based attacks from foreign countries and hackers, a government-authorized regulatory group concluded this week. That assessment came as senior U.S. officials renewed warnings that experts from Russia, China and other nations have been trying for years to probe and exploit those vulnerabilities. "-Washington Post

I wonder where these countries got the idea to use software to cripple a country's electric grid. Perhaps from the CIA which did exactly the same thing when it loaded bugged software into Russian computers that caused gas valves in a Russian gas pipeline to malfunction resulting in a major pipeline explosion during the cold war. As the song says "Teach your children well" and don't forget payback is a bitch!
Meanwhile all the talk about a "smart electric grid" seems to me like just a big PR effort to justify spending hundreds billions of dollars on such a system. It's to make the sheeple feel like someone is protecting them and the electricity grid so they can always charge their IPODS. Meanwhile the electric utilities and oil companies want to make sure you will always be connected to them. To me it is much more important to become completely independent from them and stories like this one show why.

Albert Hoffmann father of LSD dead at 102

"Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered in 1938 as his "problem child," died April 29 at his home in Burg, a village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack."- Washington Post

What I found interesting while reading the obituary of Hoffmann in the Washington Post was that it makes absolutely no mention of it's use by the CIA in it's mind control experiments during the cold war. So important did the CIA believe that LSD would be an important drug in getting it's cold war prisoner's to talk that the agency once attempted to buy all the stockpile that Sandoz Labs had so that it could not be sold to anyone else. The CIA then cut a check to cover the purchase of 25,000 lbs of LSD. The trouble was Sandoz only had about 25 pounds of the stuff. Somebody in the CIA had misread the quantity Sandoz had in stock. Even back then the CIA was getting the intelligence wrong. Of course LSD like many of the other "truth serums" turned out to be pretty much useless in getting quality information in interrogations.

The Santayana moment of the CIA and Congress

"WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department and the CIA's internal watchdog announced Saturday a joint inquiry into the spy agency's destruction of videotaped interrogations of two suspected terrorists as the latest scandal to rock U.S. intelligence gathered steam. "-Washington Post

It is with some amusement to see Washington all in a tizzy about the destruction of the waterboarding videos of the Central Intelligence agency. It seems everybody has forgotten the deeds of CIA employees Sidney Gottlieb and former CIA director Richard Helms who back in the seventies destroyed most of the documents of CIA brainwashing experiments of the MKULTRA, Bluebird and Artichoke programs. Helms even got the National Security Medal. Nothing ever really became of the destruction of these records. As the Grassley axiom states: "If you reward illegality you get more of it!" or perhaps in this latest case of CIA destroying records the outrage being expressed may be short lived as George Santayana said over one hundred years ago:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Bush colonoscopy and torture

CAMP DAVID, Md. -- Doctors removed five small growths from President Bush's colon Saturday after he temporarily transferred the powers of his office to Vice President Dick Cheney under the rarely invoked 25th Amendment.-Associated Press

Well, I guess the good news is that doctors found something other than his head up there. And I guess it's good Cheney resisted attacking Iran during his Presidency today.
Meanwhile in intelligence news:

President Bush set broad legal boundaries for the CIA's harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects yesterday, allowing the intelligence agency to resume a program that was suspended last year after criticism that it violated U.S. and international law- Washington Post

It seems that those currently conducting or condoning these interrogation techniques have forgotten the results of the British who used many of the same techniques on Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland in the early 1970's that we are using in detention centers on Iraqi and Afghanistan detainees. As one Irish IRA member said when the British started to use torture it helped increase the number of recruits for the IRA tremendously.

The White House of sand and fog.

We can only hope that the those who work in the White House and for the Bush administration begin to realize that there are consequences to lying as Scooter Libby has found out. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was spot on in calling what Libby did a "corrupt endeavor". It is ironic that the guilty verdicts for Scooter Fibby came down on March 6 2007. Four years earlier on March 6 2003 President Bush held his last press conference before the U.S. went to war in Iraq. At the press conference Bush said:

"We care about the suffering of the Iraqi people. I mentioned in my opening comments that there's a lot of food ready to go in. There's something like 55,000 oil-for-food distribution points in Iraq. We know where they are. We fully intend to make sure that they're -- got ample food. We know where their hospitals are; we want to make sure they've got ample medical supplies. The life of the Iraqi citizen is going to dramatically improve. "

-President Bush March 6, 2003

The Scooter Libby trail was not about Joe Wilson's wife, it was about an administration that was

obsessed about making the case for going to war in Iraq and destroying anyone who attempted to cast any doubt on their credibility or question their "facts". It was a PR program of sand and fog to push this country into war. In the end President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the Neocons got their war in Iraq. The life of Iraqi citizens did not dramatically improve and yesterday 10 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq. Yes, there are consequences to lying.