Any Relation to Peri-911 NSA Domestic Spying? Ya Think?

Anti-leak policy enacted at Pentagon before and after 9-11. According to a senior Pentagon official, the Pentagon issued a strict anti-leak policy to Pentagon employees prior to and just after 9-11. The order was particularly emphasized to Air Force employees at the Pentagon.
Read More at WMR (Jan 15, 2006)

Spring House Cleaning

Furious cabinet revolt as Blair gives green light for security services to spy on elected representatives.
Read More at The Indepenent

This time around as we Shock & Awe the bejesus outta Iran, a better job must simply be done of shutting up those pesky and conscientious Members Of Parliament who leak like laughing old ladies.

We must acquire actionable heads up on any Downing Street memos, empathetic ears at the BBC, or babbling Galloways. House shall be spring cleaned for our Persian purposes. Jawohl!

He Who Can Blame Him - Throw the First Meatball

Saddam judge 'resigns from trial'

The chief judge in the trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has tendered his resignation, reports say.

Read More at the BBC

You Will Roll My Meatballs. Yes You Will!

President George W. Bush has signed executive orders giving him sole authority to impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus and ignore the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deployment of U.S. troops on American streets. This would give him absolute dictatorial power over the government with no checks and balances.

The White House press office would neither confirm nor deny existence of Bush’s executive orders or the existence of the Northern Command for National Defense. Neither would the Department of Homeland Security.

But my sources within the White House and DHS tell me the plans are in place, ready for implementation when the command comes from the man who keeps telling the American public that he is a “war time president” who will “do anything in my power” to impose his will on the people of the United States.

Read More of Doug Thompson's Rant at Capitol Hill Blue

Waiter, There Was A 9/10 Bug in My Meatball

Still, one thing that appears to be indisputable is that the NSA surveillance began well before 9/11 and months before President Bush claims Congress gave him the power to use military force against terrorist threats, which Bush says is why he believed he had the legal right to bypass the judicial process.

According to the online magazine Slate, an unnamed official in the telecom industry said NSA's "efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a 'data-mining' operation, which might eventually cull 'millions' of individual calls and e-mails."

Read More of Jason Leopold's article. Jason spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.

Pre Invasion Shuffle - Pick up the Fuckin' Slack EuroMeatballs!

Nato's very public announcement on 8 December that it will send an additional 6,000 troops to Taleban-infested southern Afghanistan next spring and Washington's more cryptic remarks that it wants to withdraw 4,000 troops from the same region at the same time are being read very differently by all those affected.

Are Nato troops really prepared to move beyond peace-keeping duties and take on a combat role in a region which is the hotbed of Taleban activity?

Is Nato going to be more than just the proverbial cleaner who arrives after the battle to clear up the mess and keep the peace in a failed state?

The Netherlands, which had promised 1,000 troops, hesitated for months before agreeing to the deployment, while it took weeks of cajoling to get Denmark and Sweden to come up with a few hundred extra troops.

Read more of Ahmed Rashid's excellent article at the BBC.

A Norwegian Meatball in Russia

In 1985 Norwegian superspy Arne Treholt was convicted of running errands for Iraq and the Soviet Union. His moonlighting stints landed him a 20 year sentence. He swung a pardon in 1992 and has more or less taken up permanent residency on Cyprus since then. Mr. Treholt has subsequently been engaged in various post-pardon Russian investment activities.

In 1997 Arne Traitor became CEO of FMC Securities which operates out of his off-shore Cypriotic isle of refuge. Russian Federation First Mercantile Fund is FMC's main fund and invests primarily in publicly traded Russian companies. The fund handsomely beat the Russian bourse index last year with an 80 % return. Good work traitor fcuk!

Treholt projects major growth in the Russian retail market for 2006 and cites IKEA's aggressive expansion in Russia as an indicator of such trends. Treholt says the Rusky's IT market promises tremendous growth given the abundant domestic supply of mathematicians and programmers.

Double Bubble Trouble

Swedish bourse and capital markets move in near tandem with their U.S. counterparts. Everyone's talking about the housing market on both sides of the bucket these days and about when the next major correction will swoop down and feast on the home equity positions of the eaters.

A couple of Macro-dudes outta HSBC just published a study entitled Interest Sting.

They claim that near half of the U.S. housing market is in the Bubble Zone and that this zone's overvaluation is in the range of 50 % of U.S. GNP - or 6000 Billion USD if you like your bubbles expressed in such a manner.

That would roughly correlate in size to the value of the U.K., German, and French economies together. Hubba Bubba!

Mining with Meatballs

Spotfire is a cute little company out of southern Sweden. They recently sold an equity post to the CIA's venture capital vehicle In-Q-Tel.

Spotfire has developed some nifty visualization software for data mining olive-hued terrorists and journalists alike into crying Uncle. And to think the incurable bozos at Newsweek still have a penchant for labelling Sweden a socialist state? Dumb fcuks do appear to remain...dumb fcuks.

Bush et Ethnic Shortstops Fear War Crime Charges. Si! Si!

....the Jordanian parliament approved two new security laws over the weekend. One of them would shield US citizens from war crimes
prosecution in the International Criminal Court, and the other is aimed at fighting terrorist financing.

But it was the ICC waiver that provoked the most heated debate, the network reports, with many opposition MPs saying the only reason that Jordan signed it was that the US threatened to withhold aid if Jordan didn't support the US position. The Bush administration is vehemently opposed to the ICC. Read More at CSMonitor

Meatball Refugees?

The Office of Net Assessment's Pentagon defence adviser Andrew 'Yoda' Marshall commissioned a secret study, the results of which were suppressed by U.S. defence chiefs until the Observer obtained a copy last year.

The story slipped beneath the radar of stateside major media. It projects that in the next 20 years Swedes will be transformed into tattered and frozen refugees crawling southward in search of warmer climes.

Are you lost Sven? Well Bend Over and Cough Buddy

Sweden pursued autonomous development of a post WW2 'black budget' nuclear deterrent until costs were found to be too exhorbitant for the country's population of 8 million to cloak and ultimately bankroll.

Aircraft 37 Viggen was developed in parallel as a delivery platform for Swedish nukes destined for Soviet targets. The home grown Swedish nuke program was eventually choked in favor of the continued and ambitious development of the multi-roll Viggen fighter aircraft.

Viggen's American contemporary in the R&D pipeline at that time was the American F111. Intensive ground breaking work was undertaken in the field of avionics for these planes and Sweden was eventually squeezed into contracting U.S. assistance to solve troubles with Viggen's navigational systems.

The U.S. wasted little time in exploiting Swedish vulnerabilities and offered the Swedes avionics assistance in exchange for...the U.S military's covert access to Swedish health care records (epidemiological data).

The beauty of this access pertains to the fact that Sweden has a universal health care system so any health care event can be discerned by interested trackers. I say no more. The exchange remains covert and active to this day.

The U.S. military has an illustrious recent history of conducting covert scale experiments on major U.S. populations centers. How convenient then with the addition of a Swedish petri dish with all its novelties.

The Patter of Eager Feet

Rice said she hoped "diplomacy has not been exhausted," but added that it was "becoming clearer" Iranians are not accepting a diplomatic compromise that constrains their nuclear ambitions. Read More at Reuters

Now we are but moments away from Bolton entering stage left in his tutu. Hey, the choreography of this dog and pony show ain't new. See you in Iran for Harvey Wallbangers in June.

How Please May I Shut the Fuck Up, George?

Swedish major media has been thoroughly media mapped into U.S. submission through the diligent efforts of a handfull of eager beaver analysts. Such mischief was once part of the grind of Meatball One's formative years.

On November 21st last year, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviewed investigative journalist James Bamford. He had just published an interesting piece on the roll of media mapping, John Rendon, and the Iraq war in Rolling Stone Magazine. Bamford's story shouldn't be missed cuz it accurately enough sketches how part of the real world chugs along on a rather mundane basis beyond the talking head mantras of shining beacons and vast parking lots of democracy. Heck Gomer, that shit's for the cretin majority of the electorate who are proud to believe in (and understand!) a Forrest Gump unified theory of world affairs.

Watch the interview with James Bamford

Our Own little Euro-Hammer

Take a good look. This is our NSA ambassador/super mole in Sweden - namely Swedish Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström.

In the coming days Meatball One will be tying in his flurry of transatlantic pow-wows with top NSA and FBI honchos and his breathtaking pointman drive to usher in an unabashed surveillance state throughout the EU.

But in the interim let it be said, "This guy is worth every penny we invested in grooming him - and it never took many. He's given us Europe and the Swedes on a platter. He be our DeLay d'Europe!"

Most Failed Meatball

Try going to Swedish Google or Google.com and run a search on 'Failure'.
And the most relevant search result is...

Thanks for the tip Mr. P and Mr. T of CapGemini!

Newsweek Digs the Meatballs

This week's issue of Newsweek thinks Sweden is hot. Well what'd'ya know. The 9 out of 10 visiting professors who divorce their dumpy assed tag-along wives while on sabbatical in Sweden can't be all that wrong then.

(I did mention that Jeb just luuuvs Stockholm, didn't I?)

Meatball Brinkmanship Gone Awry

The dispute between the Ukraine and Russia ain't no trade dispute despite what the Chicken Noodle News outlets are tellin' us. Putin hates Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko whom he tried to Bhopal in a botched poisoning hit. Matters weren't made rosier by American election rigging consultants brought in to successfully pull off the slick Orange Revolution coup d'etat right under Putin's beak.

Russia is in the process of reasserting herself as a superpower and she's using her vast energy resources to do so this time around. The private aspect of energy ownership in Russia has been aggressively neutered and Gazprom is now snugly liased with the Kremlin as an instrument with which to project power.

In this latest round of Russian-Ukrainian posturing, Putin tried to blackmail Yushchenko using gas prices but the brinkmanship spiel went a bit too far and now the two parties are sitting there like silly ducks not knowing what to do after threats and bluffs have been called. Meanwhile Western Europe is waiting for its gas.

Russia will eventually have to sell all its gas at world market prices (and thus avoid being accused of dumping energy intensive domestic aluminum on the world market) if it wants to follow through on its ambition of joining the WTO. That will entail inevitable price hikes on both domestic gas sales as well as sales to the Ukraine, favored Belarus, and elsewhere - but this sudden browbeating hike in price for the Ukrainians is for the time being only about meddling with their upcoming parliamentary election in an attempt to undermine President Yushchenko's juice. It's all rather Abbott and Costello funny if ya ask me.