TODAY’S ZAMAN
11 February 2009

Seven people, including five members of the military, were detained late on Tuesday as part of an investigation previously launched by the Air Forces Command into secret meeting places of a clandestine terrorist organization.

These covert meeting places, also known as Karargah Houses, were used by members of the Ergenekon terrorist group to discuss strategic plans to manipulate the decisions of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). Ergenekon is a clandestine criminal organization charged with attempting to create chaos and undermine stability in Turkey in order to trigger a coup. Eighty-six of its alleged members are in jail and standing trial. Many other suspects are awaiting indictment.

The existence of Karargah Houses had been revealed as part of the ongoing Ergenekon investigation. These places are also known to be meeting spots for generals plotting coup d’états as well as hideouts for hit men and ammunition storage.

By Nicholas Eberstadt
February 9, 2009

President Obama has ended the ban on federal funds imposed by the Bush Administration on groups that promote or perform abortions abroad and on the United Nations Population Fund. He must take this opportunity to put pressure on the UNFPA to concentrate on the health of women and babies–and to stop wasting money assaulting the poor with wrongheaded population-control schemes.

“Continued rapid population growth poses a bigger threat to poverty reduction in most countries than HIV/AIDS,” the UNFPA said in an hysterical statement on World Population Day, last July. This is plain wrong: it is not human numbers that cause poverty, but bad economic policies, laws and institutions.

The densely-populated Netherlands and Japan are prosperous but poor in resources, while much of impoverished Africa is thinly populated but rich in resources. The United States rose to affluence with one of the world’s highest long-term population growth rates, while now-prosperous Ireland had negative long-term rates. Clearly, neither human numbers nor natural resources are keys to the modern story of global wealth and poverty.

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February 3rd, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

Change (in rhetoric) we can believe in.

I’ve said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away — Barack Obama’s first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we’ll never know the names of all the victims — It’s doubtful that even Pakistan knows — or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying “I’m not going to get into these matters.”¹ Where have we heard that before?

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by Gary North

I have lived through three monumental historical events. I remember only two of them.

I do not remember the dropping of the two atomic bombs in August of 1945. As symbols of scientific world transformation, this constituted the most momentous event of the 20th century. This breakthrough, so far, has not led to nuclear war, even though on several occasions, it looked as though nuclear war was a distinct possibility. Nevertheless, the arrival of the nuclear age heralded a transformation of the modern world. We have not yet seen the end of that transformation.

Martin van Creveld, the great military historian in the State of Israel, has argued that the nuclear age ruined the plans of empire for large nations. They could no longer risk a war with each other. Yet spending on empire increased. Today, large states face resistance from non-State groups. The Soviet Union went down when the Afghans beat them by using Stinger missiles. The USSR was an empire, and an empire that loses to insurgents has lost its reason for existence.

We are about to experience a similar defeat in the same country.

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By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
February 9, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

[NOTE: On July 2, 2008 Barack Obama in Colorado said, “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded as the military.” Obama’s attorney-general Eric Holder on NBC’s This Week (May 2, 1999) said: “[The Second Amendment] talks about bearing arms in a well-regulated militia. And I don’t think anywhere it talks about an individual.” Since Holder doesn’t believe you as an individual have a right to bear arms, can you envision Obama’s civilian national security force knocking on your door and asking you to turn over any weapons you may have? What would you do?

Further to my recent column “If War Had Not Come In Fierce and Exaggerated Form,” the (London) Daily Mail on December 20, 2008 published “Secret of the Lusitania: Arms Find Challenges Allied Claims it was Solely a Passenger Ship.”]

Continuing with the final (political/New World Order) element of the Rockefeller plan, in David Rockefeller’s Memoirs (2002) he revealed on page 405 that he’s part of a “secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States,… conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.” Of course, in David Brooks’ lengthy review of this book in The New York Times on October 20, 2002, there’s absolutely mention of this remarkable admission by Rockefeller.

Many believe Americans will never succumb to the Rockefeller plan. However, that’s why David Rockefeller praised Chairman Mao in his August 10, 1973 New York Times article, helping to open the door to Communist China and thus increasing its economic (and military) power. More recently, Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had traveled to China 70 times and started the U.S.-China Strategic Cooperation and Communication Initiative. Paulson was formerly with Goldman-Sachs, which financially represents China in the U.S. in some important areas. In addition CFR member Paulson recently was given authority by Congress to use TARP (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act) money any way he saw fit, so Bank of America used $7 billion of their loan from Paulson to buy an interest in a Chinese bank (Citigroup used $10 billion to buy 44 Spanish toll roads).

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by Al Martin

(2-9-09) What we have seen in market reactions is that Obama has everyone pumped up into believing that he can fix everything and mitigate the effects of the current recession.

Obama is now being billed by the Democrats as some sort of a miracle worker, even though he’s promising things he can’t deliver, namely mortgage relief that is unworkable and tax relief that isn’t going to happen. He keeps saying that we’re going to be able to create 4 million new jobs.

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NBC News Exclusive: Political ties to a secretive religious group

A Must Read: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

The Guardian, Friday 6 February 2009

It is not any one cigarette or one extra drink that is ruinous to the health. The damage is done over the years, almost imperceptibly. Grave threats to the health of democracy can also accrue so incrementally that they draw little attention. A committee of peers diagnose one such danger today in a report on the steady creep of surveillance. The charge of hysteria is routinely used to sweep aside such talk when it comes from crusading journalists and pressure groups. The Lords constitutional affairs committee, however, cannot be dismissed the same way. A more dignified band of dignitaries would be hard to imagine - it includes a former attorney general who is a conservative champion of that antiquated role, a Tory expert on the constitution, and a founder of that force of militant moderation that was called the SDP.

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Arie Hoekman, representative of United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

MEXICO CITY, February 3, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A leader in the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has declared that the breakdown of traditional families, far from being a “crisis,” is actually a triumph for human rights.

Speaking at a colloquium held last month at Colegio Mexico in Mexico City, UNFPA representative Arie Hoekman denounced the idea that high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births represent a social crisis, claiming that they represent instead the triumph of “human rights” against “patriarchy.”

“In the eyes of conservative forces, these changes mean that the family is in crisis,” he said. “In crisis? More than a crisis, we are in the presence of a weakening of the patriarchal structure, as a result of the disappearance of the economic base that sustains it and because of the rise of new values centered in the recognition of fundamental human rights.”

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Grand Master Shuki Shamir

Par Mati Ben-Avraham - 5 février 2009 à 07:55

Translated: Shuki Shamir, the 30th Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the State of Israel, was inducted (installed in masonic language) last night in Tel Aviv. The raising ceremony occurred in the presence of numerous delegations from foreign Grand Lodges, particularly those from England, Russia, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

You may recall that the Grand Lodge of Israel was consecrated on 20 October 1953, in Jerusalem. Its headquarters, however, was established in Tel Aviv. And it was recently moved to its new home, near the Opera and the Museum.

The Israeli Freemasons number 1,152, in 57 lodges. Its unique feature is the languages spoken within the Lodges: Hebrew, Romanian, Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Russian, Turkish …–

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NB: My first reaction after reading that Turkish is spoken in the Lodges, was to wonder whether any Donmeh (or Dönmes) partake in the rituals.

Obama and Etzioni

Amitai Etzioni, the high priest of communitarianism, was in Israel recently and was interviewed by the Jerusalem Post.

Here’s a short, but revealing excerpt:

Why did you call your movement “Communitarianism”?

That’s actually an interesting story. I started a little group in 1990, and I tried to find a word to counter excessive individualism. Communitarianism is actually associated with…

Communism?

Well, yes, when it first came up in the mid-19th century, it was associated with communism in East Asia. So we had a very long debate about whether to use it or not. But we just couldn’t come up with another term that would speak for community and common good. And we hoped that our kind of neo-communitarianism would succeed in becoming a kind of a symbol for this other approach. It’s a particularly key point at the moment, because there is no philosophy that better describes Obama’s position than communitarianism. But nobody wants him to label it thus, because it immediately evokes the image of East Asia, Singapore and Japan. So, it may have been an imperfect choice of a term, but now we’re kind of stuck with it.

1) He admits that Communitarianism is traditionally associated with Communism; and 2) he specifically identifies Obama’s ideology as that of Communitarianism.

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Richard Cimino
5 Feb 2009

Holding its rituals and gatherings in a Parisian restaurant, the Kolob Order may well be the first effort to bridge the differences between freemasonry and Mormonism.

The order is the brainchild of a Frenchman who goes by the pseudonym Adama. He is both a Freemason and a Mormon convert and Sunday school teacher. In the independent Mormon magazine Sunstone, it is reported that the founder converted to Mormonism in 2005 and a year later started the Kolob Order after studying the Book of Abraham, an early Mormon scripture.

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Audio aired on Glenn Beck’s radio program has media-darling telling kids, ‘there are some things about our world that you know that older people don’t know.’

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
2/4/2009 3:43:35 PM

Imagine this – a former high-ranking and well-respected government official telling your children that they know something you don’t. Is this Cold War-era Soviet Union? Nope. It’s Maryland, and the official is former Vice President Al Gore.

In audio aired on the Feb. 4 “Glenn Beck Radio Program,” Gore was advising school children on the eve of the inauguration of President Barack Obama, presumably at the University of Maryland Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference. He said that it’s up to them to question their parents on conventional wisdom in order to overcome the challenges of modern America, one of them being global warming.

“But I’m thinking back a long way to when I was your age and the civil rights revolution was unfolding,” Gore said. “And we kids asked our parents and their generation, ‘Explain to me again why it’s OK for the law to officially discriminate against people because of their skin color?’ And parent’s try to tell their kids the right thing, you know? Usually, I do. And when our parent’s generation couldn’t answer that question, that’s when the law started to change.”

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