Paul E. Ester's Flogger

The Kalashnikov AK47 found yesterday was similar to the one uncovered at Uday Hussein’s palace in Baghdad last week, according to a newspaper report.

The loaded machine gun was discovered along with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, six bayonets and a sniper rifle in packages marked as computer equipment, the newspaper claimed.

A spokesman for Customs and Excise said: “A quantity of arms was found at Heathrow and investigations are ongoing.” No further details were given.

The newspaper said the arms are believed to have been stolen for the US black market in war trophies.

An unnamed source told the paper that the gun was loaded, bubble wrapped along with a spare magazine and was bound for an address in the US but was picked up by an X-ray machine. … Rest of Article

I prefer the MP

U.S. was warned that Moussaoui had close ties to al-Qaida, analyst says
French authorities alerted the FBI in August that the “20th hijacker” had trained in al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, according to an intelligence expert — but the U.S. did nothing. … Rest of Article

High Priced execs join the “chronically unemployed”.
Interesting note you can get health insurance from starbucks at 20 hrs a week. Rest of Article

According to the International Labor Organization, Americans now work 1,978 hours annually, a full 350 hours Ñ nine weeks Ñ more than Western Europeans. The average American actually worked 199 hours more in 2000 than he or she did in 1973, a period during which worker productivity per hour nearly doubled. … Rest of Article

Pentagon researchers this month completed the first set of test data for the controversial Total Information Awareness system, a key technologist for the project says.

Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), said at an IBM-sponsored conference on data privacy in Almaden, Calif., this week that Americans must trade some privacy for security. Rest of Article

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as “a horrible orgy of bloodshed.”

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim’s bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that “freaked everybody out” according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of “real power,” according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was “the most dangerous spot in the world.”

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed “close ties” with Qasim’s ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party “as its instrument.” … Rest of Article

Picture this: Aerosolized VX and sarin nerve gas descends on Navy ships. Biological and chemical agents are released over thousands of civilians. A germ able to wipe out a country’s wheat crop is stockpiled in secret.

What dastardly fiend is responsible? Iraq? Libya? North Korea? al-Qaida? No. The culprit is none other than our own government.

From 1962 to 1973, the Department of Defense planned 134 tests under Project 112, a chemical and biological weapons “vulnerability-testing program,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Earlier this year, the Pentagon admitted for the first time that some of the tests used real chemical and biological weapons, not harmless stimulants.

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In all, 37 secret tests were conducted in California, Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland and Utah. Land tests in Alaska and Hawaii used artillery shells filled with sarin and VX gas — the same deadly stuff our government claims Saddam Hussein has been stockpiling. Navy trials off the coast of Florida, California and Hawaii tested the ability of ships and crew to perform under biological and chemical warfare. The code name for the sea tests Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense — “SHAD” for short. The Pentagon has said that both the crew and the team disseminating nerve gas wore protective gear and went through decontamination, according to the New York Times. … Rest of Article

Japan mum on report of scrambling F-15s to intercept possible NKorean plane … Rest of Article

WASHINGTON, April 8 Ñ Working with the Bush administration, Congressional Republicans are maneuvering to make permanent the sweeping antiterrorism powers granted to federal law enforcement agents after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said today. … Rest of Article

The Secrets of Drudge Inc.
How to set up a round-the-clock news site on a shoestring, bring in $3,500 a day, and still have time to lounge on the beach.
… Rest of Article