Paul E. Ester's Flogger

Before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…before Timothy Leary…before Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests…before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, there was Alfred M. Hubbard: the Original Captain Trips.

You will not read about him in the history books. He left no diary, nor chatty relatives to memorialize him in print. And if a cadre of associates had not recently agreed to open its files, Captain Alfred M. Hubbard might exist in death as he did in life–a man of mirrors and shadows, revealing himself to even his closest friends only on a need-to-know basis.

They called him “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” He was to the psychedelic movement nothing less than the membrane through which all passed to enter into the Mysteries. Beverly Hills psychiatrist Oscar Janiger once said of Hubbard, “We waited for him like a little old lady for the Sears-Roebuck catalog.” Waited for him to unlock his ever-present leather satchel loaded with pharmaceutically-pure psilocybin, mescaline or his personal favorite, Sandoz LSD-25.

Those who will talk about Al Hubbard are few. Oscar Janiger told this writer that “nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should.”
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Documents revive debate on U.S. role
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At least four months before the FBI says he first arrived in this country, terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was living with (and physically abusing) an American girlfriend at an apartment they shared across from the Venice Airport.

According to numerous eyewitnesses, including their next door neighbor and the apartment manager, Atta lived with a girl named Amanda Keller during March and early April of 2000… Rest of Article

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Justice Department’s primary focus is on preventing another terrorist attack. Bringing any possible culprits of the Sept. 11 attacks to justice is of secondary importance to law enforcement agents, the official said…. Rest of Article

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday that “critical” security lapses in its Office software and Internet Explorer Web browser put tens of millions of users at risk of having their files read and altered by online attackers.

The world’s No. 1 software maker said that an attacker, using e-mail or a Web page, could use Internet related parts of Office to run programs, alter data and wipe out the hard drive as well as view file and clipboard contents on a user’s system.

Office is a software product that runs on Windows and is used to write documents and crunch numbers.

“Microsoft is committed to keeping customers’ information safe, and is providing a patch that eliminates three vulnerabilities in Office Web Components,” Microsoft Security Program Manager Christopher Budd said in an e-mail. … Rest of Article

BUTLER: The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration — the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil — an oil pipeline across Afghanistan.

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WASHINGTON – During the height of a bloody campaign more than two decades ago that left thousands dead, the Argentine military believed it had approval from senior U.S. officials to conduct a ”dirty war” against leftists as long as the killings were carried out quickly, declassified State Department documents reveal.

Documents from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires to the State Department in 1976, during the Ford presidency, indicate that Argentine officials felt ”euphoric” over signals from Washington that they could pay little heed to an outcry over human rights violations.

The cables say that Argentina’s foreign minister felt that he had received signals both from then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to get the brutal campaign over as soon as possible.

During a brutal military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 until 1983, as many as 30,000 leftists ”disappeared” off the nation’s streets, captured and killed by death squads. The brutal killing rampage, known as the dirty war, later became a symbol of the human rights abuses under military dictatorships across Latin America during that era.
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Israel was certainly funding the group at that time. One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said that not only was Hamas being funded as a “counterweight” to the PLO, Israeli aid had another purpose: “To help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists.”

In addition, by infiltrating Hamas, Israeli informers could only listen to debates on policy and identify Hamas members who “were dangerous hard-liners,” the official said.

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: “The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

“Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with,” he said…. Rest of Article

Defendants in the lawsuit were AT&T Broadband, Cable and Wireless, Sprint Corp. and WorldCom Inc.’s UUNet. Their representatives had no comment on the dismissal. … Rest of Article

Controversially, Prof Foster says the killer is likely to be highly patriotic individual who wanted to demonstrate that the US was badly prepared for an act of biological terrorism…. Rest of Article