Recalling the Downing Street Minutes

Ray McGovern| consortiumblog.com | July 24, 2009

Seven years ago this week, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair gathered his top national security advisers at 10 Downing St. to hear a report from U.K. intelligence chief Richard Dearlove, just back in London from face-to-face talks with then-CIA Director George Tenet in Washington.

Blair and President George W. Bush had been talking regularly by telephone for several months. But, as is well known, even the most secure phones can be tapped, and there are some things — like preparing criminal wars of aggression, I suppose — that are so outrageous one doesn’t dare take any chances.

Besides, Blair apparently had some misgivings about taking at face value the Texas-size braggadocio he was hearing at the other end of the phone about what was going to happen to Saddam Hussein and why. It is understandable that he would seek independent, authoritative confirmation that this was also what Bush was sharing with his top accomplices.

Who better to confirm or deny than Bush-vassal Tenet, who met six mornings a week with the American president to discuss the President’s Daily Brief?

Original Story

Ray McGovern at the Downing Street Memo Hearing (6/16/05)

Former CIA specialist Ray McGovern gives a powerful speech on pre-war intelligence and what people in the U.S. should do to defend the Constitution.

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Anti-racist Jews against racist Zionism

Editorial

Gideon Polya, Media with Conscience, July 24, 2009

The World has been horrified by latest Gaza Massacre inflicted by Apartheid Israel on what the Catholic Church describes as Gaza Concentration Camp – over 1,300 Palestinians killed (one third being children) and over 5,000 wounded in response to zero Israeli deaths from Gaza missiles in the preceding year.

This latest Israeli atrocity has highlighted the utter racist obscenity of the continuing 42 year Occupation and has led to growing indignation against Apartheid Israel and the Zionists and other Western neocons who support Jewish colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The racist Zionists routinely falsely condemn critics of the State of Israel as “anti-Semites” and indeed extend this false abuse to Jewish critics of Zionism by falsely calling them “self-hating Jews” as well as “anti-Semites”.

Anti-Semitism means damaging Semitic people in word or deed for being ethnically or culturally Semitic (something Semites can’t help being), noting that Semites include 300 million Arab Semites, 1,500 million culturally Semitic Muslims and 15 million largely culturally Semitic Jews.

Continued >>

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• A Somber Anniversary
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• Defending the Indefensible: Israel, Gaza, and Idolatry
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“Surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean”

Source: http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/fed/oeip/EcInFigs/ecinfigfour.jpg

wattsupwiththat.com | 23.07.09

A new peer-reviewed climate study is presenting a head on challenge to man-made global warming claims. The study by three climate researchers appears in the July 23, 2009 edition of Journal of Geophysical Research. (Link to Abstract)

Full Press Release and Abstract to Study:

July 23, 2009

Three Australasian researchers have shown that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate, in a study just published in the highly-regarded Journal of Geophysical Research. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.

The research, by Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key indicator of global atmospheric temperatures seven months later. As an additional influence, intermittent volcanic activity injects cooling aerosols into the atmosphere and produces significant cooling.

“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely” says corresponding author de Freitas.

“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.”

Source

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