Entering a URL into a status update on Facebook usually renders a link, but in the case of www.collateralmurder.org this is not the case. Many of our readers have expressed concern that given the nature of the material at that web address it would seem apparent that an attempt to censor or restrict the user’s right to disseminate the address is being carried out by Facebook.

It would be very unfortunate for Facebook – whose profile page carries the motto “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”  – if this turned out to be anything other than unintentional filtering or scripting glitch. We asked Facebook about this apparent restriction of free speech, and they quickly responded, advising:

“To protect our users, we have automated systems in place that block the dissemination of links to known malicious websites, including phishing and malware sites.  On rare occasions, these systems wrongly identify a legitimate link as malicious.  We have reinstated this one and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

It should be noted that  the URL www.collateralmurder.com was not restricted and that the .org address is posting into notes.

(Update:  oops, I forgot to link to the source of that image, my bad: click here )

Controversy has surrounded the case of Binyam Mohamed, 31, who since his return to the UK earlier this year has accused his captors of carrying out acts of torture including beatings, threats, the ever controversial “waterboarding”, and having his genitals cut with razorblades. A UK citizen since 1994, Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of terrorism, and under the guise of the U.S. “rendition” programme was  ferried to Morocco, then Afghanistan and then finally Guantanamo Bay. He was released without charge earlier this year. Mohamed alleges that MI5 personnel provided key background informaton to his captors, advised of specific questions to be asked, and that at some points were also involved in the questioning and torture. 

Originally, Milliband reluctantly ruled that previously classified CIA documents relating to the case against Mohamed and his treatment whilst “in the care” of the U.S. government could be released to the public – but with seven key paragraphs relating to matters unkown redacted on grounds of “national security interests”. It was feared that releasing sensitive information that has passed between the UK and the U.S. intelligence services would cause irreparable harm to the intelligence relationship they share, and make the U.S. less keen to share furutre intelligence with the UK for fear it would be made public.   

Mohamed, backed by legal counsel and supported by human rights organisations, demanded that these paragraphs be made public also, as it would be more in the public interest to know if the Government was complicit and aware of acts of torture carried out on British subjects with the full knowledge of both them and British intelligence agencies. Many people felt at the time that the desire to “black out” these paragraphs supported these claims, and that the Government was putting the “special relationship” with its allies ahead of the protection and rights of its citizens.

In today’s landmark judgement at the High Court Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones ruled that the paragraphs should be released for public consumption as this material and similar claims had already been released in a separate legal action in the United States, and verified as true by a U.S. Judge. It was ruled that, as the information was no longer unavailable to the public, its release could no longer be considered a threat to national security. The Government immeduately appealed the ruling.   Milliband stated:

‘At the heart of this case was the principle that if a country shares intelligence with another, that country must agree before its intelligence is released. ‘This ‘control principle’ is essential to the intelligence relationship between Britain and the US. The Government fought the case to preserve this principle, and today’s judgment upholds it.

‘It agreed that the control principle is integral to intelligence sharing. The court has today ordered the publication of the seven paragraphs because in its view their substance had been put into the public domain by a decision of a U.S. court in another case. Without that disclosure, it is clear that the Court of Appeal would have overturned the Divisional Court’s decision to publish the material.

‘The Government has made sustained and successful efforts to ensure Mr Mohamed’s legal counsel had full access to the material in question. We remain determined to uphold our very strong commitment against mistreatment of any kind.’

Interestingly, the Court they also came to a similar decision last year, but this was kept secret to allow the foreign secretary leave of appeal.

When questioned directly about the issue of collusion and torture, Milliband replied:

“Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could be readily contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Binyan Mohamed by the United States authorities.”

He also stated to Jon Snow of Channel 4 News that it what was done to Mohamed may not necessarily be defined as torture because torture needs to be something carried out regularly. Personally, if you hack my man-parts around even once with a razorblade to extract information from me then I am pretty much 100% certain that constitutes torture.

Finally, and somewhat irnocally, despite Milliband’s assertion that “Mr Mohamed’s legal counsel had full access to the material in question”, it was soon after revealed that  a senior lawyer acting for the foreign secretary wrote to the Court of Appeal criticising some key phrases in the draft judgement without making Mohamed’s counsel aware at all. Jonathan Sumption QC suggested that certain points in the draft gave the impression that the ”Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques” and requested they be removed.

This is a legal right – for all parties to be allowed to make recommendations on the draft of the judgement before it is finalised. However, it has become clear that  although Sumption passed this request to the Court, he did not pass it to the team working for Mohamed – which is illegal. Any recommendations made must be disclosed to all parties in the proceedings simultaneously. The Government is not permitted to have secret dialogues with the High Court, who are independent of the Government. The letter stated that it had been cc’ed to Mohamed’s barristers, when it was in fact only passed to them the next day. On the assumption that Mohamed’s counsel was aware and had raised no counter-recommendation, the Judges redacted their comments.

With the whole affair a complete shambles, the foreign secretary reduced to scrabbling over paltry arguments about “what constitutes torutre”  and fielding accusations of “nobbling the Judges”, and with MI5 and Security services coming out looking like they were aware of and participated in illegal torture of a UK citizen, it has been announced in a hilarious comedy move that MI5 are now being investigated by the police. There are also now demands for a full public inquiry into the affair. Human rights organisations are now also investigating if allegations of war crimes against both the U.S and UK governments and intelligence services should be considered.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Milliband didn’t look like the nerdy kid next door that stayed in playing D&D and practising twirly-wirly writing all day. Prat.

So, the first and most important rule of any super-secret science team working to create Godawful aberrations of nature for who-knows-what purpose is pretty self-evident: shut the fuck up and say nothing. So it’s both amusing and disheartening to hear that the fount of all super-secret military industrial complex conspiracy theories – DARPA – announced right in it’s annual budget – it’s annual fucking budget, I shit you not – that it is working on synthetic organisms that will live for ever and, should they turn out to be harmful, contain a genetic kill-switch. WTF? More info after the jump.

Wired magazine’s DARPAwatch section revealed this scary fact. Seems that the Pentagon is fed up with the “ randomness of natural evolutionary advancement” and has directed DARPA to work on creating fully synthetic organisms that will be immortal, but that will, should the highly predictable shit-hitting-the-fan outcome that we can all see coming a fucking mile away like a train with a massive headlight all the way down at the other end of the tunnel come to pass, include a biological kill-switch – allowing the organisms to be stopped dead in their tracks.

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch: “Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism”.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Now, forgive us here for sounding a little thick, but it seems to me that there can’t be that many practical, non-weaponizeable, non-evil-plan-formed-in-a-secret-volcano-base things you can do with a synthetic organism. After all, they are not talking about building something that can do the shopping, mow your lawn, or look after grandma whilst you are out to make sure she doesn’t drop another hip or something. And quite what they mean by the “intended biological effect” we are not sure. But, after doing a lot of SCIENCE! in our brains, we are pretty sure that something that is living and breathing isn’t going to be a cure for penile warts or halitosis.

And it stands to reason that if the genetic loyalty built into this organism is intended to avoid  nefarious enemy subjugation of the organism itself, then we are talking about something here that you would be designing to use against such an enemy.

So, one one hand, we have to applaud the openness of DARPA for telling everyone exactly what mysterious secret government projects they are working on. If only the guys with capture UFO tech in Area 51 could be so forthcoming, there would be a whole lot less tin-foil hat loonies about.

On the other hand…isn’t it about time they stopped screwing around with microbes and finally got on with making laser-toting dinosaurs and nuclear dolphins and all that shit? Man, they are taking, like, for ever. You may have the greatest minds in there, DARPA, but the internets have been ahead of you for years. Just hire 300 web-literate man-children and you will have weapons that would give any military  leader a pants-tent like a flagpole. Then again, thinking about it, whilst this would give rise to armored space-jellyfish and power-armor wearing kangaroos, a weaponized Pedobear would be somewhat less awesome. Just stay away from the chans, is all we’re saying.  

Read the full article here.

Well, I had this one half-done so I thought it would make a nice holiday treat for you all. If you don’t get the joke, then it’s clear you know nothing about videogame history and clearly are not awesome. Which you should sort out.

I’m going to put a little strip up on New Years’ day too, and then back to normal the weekend after. See you on the other side!

Catch this week’s second and totally not catastrophic strip right here 

Wikileaks has not revealed the source of the intercepts, but claims that the context in which the data was sent to them a few weeks ago along with other information confirms their validity.

The messages were broadcast “live” online on the wikileaks site and also Twitter between 25th and 26th November, with each message posted at the same time it was originally sent. More details after the jump.

Messages released range from the almost mundane everyday chatter of civilians enquiring about lunch to haunting automatic alarm messages issued to engineers and maintenance companies from servers and systems in the World Trade Center buildings. Although they help to provide an often jarring look at people’s thoughts on that day, the real meat is in what appear to be the more “official” messages, which can be grouped together into coherenet streams from the sender/receiver ID number: :

2001-09-11 12:26:59 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vze2j729@verizon.net|I’m At Home With Classified|Ray, I am waiting for the traffic to subside. Then I will take classified to Naval Secu
2001-09-11 12:27:01 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA rity Station or some other installation. Bryan (36

2001-09-11 14:27:44 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vmaq1vmaq4ecmo@hotmail.com|I’m okay|Ray, I wasn’t not at the pentagon this morning as had previously planned to be for the PE JWCA. Any news on the rest of our guys?????????? CAll me at home if you can. If
2001-09-11 14:27:46 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA not PLEASE email me at my be

2001-09-11 15:42:44 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vze2j729@verizon.net|Talked to Sgt Fisher and SSgt Webster|He OK’d me to stand fast until traffic subsides. Then
2001-09-11 15:42:46 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA I am to try the old Naval Security Station for an SSO or return to HQMC if traffic is open to it. (40

2001-09-11 15:54:59 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA david.whitney@verizon.net|Ray, Please Call me at home 780-3123, Dave|Also, need to give your muster to Mark Silver. Not sure where he is but = work is 614-4317 (41

2001-09-11 16:49:44 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vze2j729@verizon.net|Classified Material|Ray, I turned the classified material over to Sgt Fisher. Mission accomplished. (43

Still other messages suggest either confused Chinese whispers in action or events that were not made public:

2001-09-11 09:52:02 Metrocall {1175659} 1 2400 Frm: MSN Txt: Kavitha Sunand Nair: bomb was diffused at the heliport at pentagon. white house and pentagon being emptied…..

All very interesting stuff. Whether this illustrates perfectly the “fog of war”, or adds grist to the mill for those who do not believe the offical story of events, who knows? As Wikileaks describes the event:

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

Go have a read for yourself  here, and see what you think. As ever, I am remaining respectfully mute on the subject.

I was intrigued by this, but now, after seeing this shoddy, shoddy piece of crap, all I can think is “What, people get paid for animation this bad?”

Turn the lights off, lock the door, and go home. Nothing to see here.

(facebook readers click here to see the fucking awful video. If you must).

And, what is it with CGI animators and designers NOT BEING ABLE TO DO LAPELS, ever? Christ.

I like to hang around conspiracy forums. It’s entertaining, and just very occasionally you actually get something sensible. But for the most part, this is pretty much what you get.

Catch this week’s strip, which actually doesn’t exist, but actually does exist, and which is funded by a secret government black budget skunkworks program, and which actually isn’t, right here.

Oh, Alex Jones. That decibel-heavy, shouty loud protester of all things New World Order and conspiracy. Many people dig a good conspiracy theory; many people seek the truth where they feel there are lies. But not all charge for their services. And for those that pay for such services, they expect, well, from a self-confessed truthseeker, the truth. Funny that.

So what has the internet’s number one cause of earache done to illicit the ire of may conpiracy theorists and truth seekers around the world? Find out after the jump!

While brash, loud and usually utterly annoying, Jones does seem to go out of his way to chase down truths and misdeeds as aggressively as possible – often with a bullhorn as a tool – with the apparent intent of educating the mindless masses out of their torpor.

From time to time he does seem to come up with some good points. And, of course, as befitting any web host who has a message that despeartely needs to get to the ears of the public at any cost lest they be blinded by government misdirection and sleight of hand this information can be found in handy-dandy purchaseable items such as books and DVDs. A guy’s gotta eat, right?

So over the last few days the buzz has been built up with an announcement from Jones that (and I paraphrase here):

“ZOMGWTFBBQ I HAEV TEH MOAST AMAZEING THING COMING UP THAT IS TEH MOAST ASTOUNDING THING EVER IN THE HISTORY OF EVERTINK I HAEV DONE EVAR!!!one!!eleven AND U MUST BE HEAR TO WITNESS IT!!!!one!!”

So, understandably, with Jones’ overbearing reputation for fighting for the common man, people watched infowars.com and waited.

What did they get?

They were presented with a transcript of an interview granted to Charlie Sheen by President Barack Obama, in which Sheen harangues and cajoles the POTUS about 9/11 and the lies surrounding it. Think of it as a 21st Century version of David Frost grilling Nixon about Watergate. Quite impressive. The Pres. himself comes off as a bit of a jerk, ducking the issue and patting Sheen on the head like an annoying puppy.

Quite groundbreaking you think? A testament to Jones’ common man spirit and journalistic ability?

Well, actually, no. Not in the slightest. A testament to Jones’ ability to shill, deceive and misrepresent, in the name of site traffic, most likely. See, about an hour and a half after the interview transcript was posted, it was pulled. Then reposted with a slight addition: right at the bottom, after you have read the whole thing and believed every word, is the tiniest of disclaimers: 

Author’s Note: What you have just read didn’t actually happen… yet.

This is an open letter to the President requesting a new investigation.

Charlie Sheen.

So, in essence, what you have now just wasted 10 minutes reading is utter and complete bullshit. Fan-fiction from a Z-list celeb that no-one alive actually gives a fuck about, and of no greater value than someone posting on in the Skunkworks forum on AboveTopSecret.com saying that they are a Zeta Reticulan here to warn us of impending doom.

What this faux interview does  – apart from open Jones up to the possibility of libel lawsuits from the Whitehouse – is reinforce, to the common man, that a) all conpiracy theorists are nutjobs; b) Jones is an ass of the highest order and is simply fawning like a schoolgirl because he knows a faded celeb; and c) this was the most underwhelming piece of faux-journalism in the history of bullshit.

Whatever credibility Jones may have had before is now shot to pieces. He is no more than your typical tinofoiler, except he probably has a nice car and house thanks to you buying his material. And a bullhorn.

If any of his work ever was valid or correct before, well, that’s gone now.

Jones is purported to have stated that the reason for the lie was a psy-ops tactic to get the mainstream media to pick up the story and get the important questions about 9/11 raised into the public consciousness. Unfortunately, presenting the article as genuine with a big hoo-haa and then only confessing an hour and a half later in a tiny tiny postscript (so missable that even most of the commenters on the article missed it) that it is a work of fiction invalidates the entire thing, effectively calls those who believed it fools, and more egregiously risks the dismissal of all of the points that Sheen raises in his faux-grilling. “This is all a matter of public record, reported through mainstream media, painstakingly fact checked and verified” he states. Well, unfortunately, because the interview is a lie, this statement rings hollow – nothing in the article can therefore be trusted, and most people will investigate no further.

As one reader comments at the end of the article: 

“Wait a minute. All that hype for an imaginary interview with Obama? About 9-11? About Sheen going on the Alex Jones show presenting evidence WE ALREADY KNOW? I’m a believer but I DON”T like being sucked into a “News at 11″ teaser.”

Oh, Alex. Time to shut the fuck up and go get a job, I guess, What a cockbollock.

In case you require proof, here is the original posting of the interview sans disclaimer, that most people assumed was the real deal, thankfully saved by a canny member at ATS. 

Jones gets an honorary “Retard Of The Week” tag on this article for being such a dick.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I am not a disinfo agent in the employ of some shadowy government enclave. I’m far too hopeless for such shenanigans like that.

UPDATE: a half-assed missive has been posted on Jones’ sister site, prisonplanet.com, addressing the issue. It includes:

“Separately, a few other blogs were up in arms about Sheen’s letter being a “hoax” because the disclaimer clarifying that the meeting with Obama was a stylized fictional account and not a real event did not get added to the bottom of the article until a little later due to technical snafus and a bombardment of traffic that shut down servers and locked out Infowars and Prison Planet webmasters. With the Infowars version having been copied across from Prison Planet, both original versions did not contain the disclaimer until the error was brought to our attention and promptly fixed as soon as we could gain access to servers that kept crashing, as many readers noted at the time. We added the disclaimer as soon as possible as well as other information that should have been included at the bottom of the original article regarding Sheen’s appearance on the show. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused and are trying to move our servers in house to prevent this routine occurrence from happening again.”

That’s no moon apology. Nor is it a believable excuse. Firstly, we are expected to believe that after over apparently many, many hours of perparation for the whole week’s events, someone misses out a line of text? Then we are expected to believe that the demand on the sites causes overload so that the updated article could not be corrected. I don’t think so. Research has revealed the hosting for both sites is outsourced and of a nature that is specifically designed to avoid such scenarios for high-traffic sites. Plus, it would have taken all of a few seconds to add the line, re-upload the page file and voila! no one is the wiser, and this cold have been done the moment the original upload went live. You show me someone who writes and article, puts it on the web and he doesn’t read through it? Even the most modest of writers reads through the published piece to make sure it all came out ok (and to get a little tickle to the ego – don’t deny it). Lastly, it does not explain why someone so dedicated to freedom of speech would cull negative comments on forums (as has been reported by many posters) and why comments are now turned off on all articles on Prisonplanet. He wants free speech for all, but not when you might be critical, obviously.

And one last nail in the coffin – if this had been my mistake, you know what I would have done? Included an apology or explanaton there and then, maybe even with the disclaimer that was added. But no, we get a very subtle and seemingly reluctant apology the next day, amidst self-congratulatory boasting.

I call foul. My gut feeling is still wilful deception to raise traffic and hits – not to break the story. 

End. 

NASA, 17/7/09: Finally, after many years of myth and tin-foil conspiracy, NASA has released the first ever post-Apollo images of the equipment the astronauts left behind on the lunar surface.

Taken by the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter, the series of images – although not the sparkly close up beauty passes that show every little detail that the conspiracy nuts would like – show the presence of all the lunar landers (save Apollo 12) on the surface of the moon – and in one low pass, scientific equipment and even the trails left behind by the boots of the astronauts in the lunar dust.

It is important to note that these are “first pass” images – lower pass flights are scheduled that should give more detailed images:

The satellite reached lunar orbit June 23 and captured the Apollo sites between July 11 and 15. Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution.

The future can only bring better images from the orbiter – we hope – but these images are the first of hopefully many that will prove once and for all that, yes, we did fucking go there.

To read the full NASA article and see all the images close up, click here.

The world apparently on the threshold of a Swine Flu pandemic. Millions could be at risk. No one is safe. Governments positioning themselves for mass enforced vaccination programs. Ever get that hit of “I’m sure I’ve been here before”?

You should do, at least in the U.S.

You have been here before. Except last time, one person died, a handful of unconfirmed cases were noted around the world, and the U.S. government forced millions to take enforced flu shots.  

Oh, and one other difference – that time, the CDC was fully aware that that particular strain of the vaccine had not been tested as safe for humans and could lead to severe neurological disorders, paralysis, and even death. Thing is, they kinda forgot to mention this to the 46 million people that were forced to take the shot.

The above CBS 60 minutes film was broadcast once in 1976, and then never seen again. Until now, when it has ben unearthed. It’s quite satisfying to watch the former head of the CDC squirming when he denies ever being told of the risks, only to then be confronted with one of his staffers stating “well, actually, you knew because I told you so.” Fucker.

So, when the government tells you that you must take the shot to stave off the risk of death, make your own decision. But remember this and my earlier posts. And don’t think for one minute that your government isn’t capable of putting your life at risk by feeding you with propaganda and not quite giving you the full picture.

Me? I think I’ll pass and take my chances.

Facebook readers click here for the video.