Project Rainbow NOT in History Books - No Surprise!

   “Project Rainbow” was an experiment conducted upon a small destroyer escort ship during World War II while the ship was in Philadelphia Harbor at the Navy Yard and while it was at sea.  The purpose of the experiment was to make the ship invisible to enemy detection.  The accounts vary as to whether the original idea was to achieve invisibility to enemy radar or whether the prize sought after was more profound:  optical invisibility.  
   Either way, it is commonly believed that the mechanism involved was the generation of an incredibly intense magnetic field around the ship, which would cause refraction or bending of light or radar waves around the ship, much like a mirage created by heated air over a road on a summer day.  The legend goes on to say that the experiment was a complete success ... except that the ship actually disappeared physically for a time, and then returned.  They wanted to “cloak” the ship from view, but they actually achieved was apparent de-materialization and teleportation instead.

Military Contractors Treatment of Prisoners in Iraq

A recent Army report charging that U.S. Military Police and other private personnel, including civilian contractor personnel, abused Iraqi prisoners held under the

authority of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has given rise to questions

regarding the applicable law. The report was the result of an Army investigation

initiated after a soldier turned over to military law enforcers photographs depicting

U.S. military personnel subjecting Iraqi detainees to treatment that has been

described as degrading, inhumane, and in some cases, tantamount to torture.

The international law of armed conflict, in particular, those parts relating to belligerent occupation, applies in Iraq. The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 related to the treatment of prisoners of war (POW) and civilian detainees, as well as the Hague Regulations define the status of detainees and state responsibility for their treatment. Other international law relevant to human rights and to the treatment of prisoners may also apply. For example, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The U.N. Declaration on Human Rights and the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT) may also be relevant. Federal statutes that implement the relevant international law, such as the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Torture Victim Protection Act, as well as other criminal statutes with extraterritorial application may also come into play.

Finally, the law of Iraq as amended by regulations issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) may also apply in some circumstances.

This report summarizes pertinent provisions of the Geneva Conventions Relative to the Treatment of Victims of War (Geneva Conventions) and other international agreements concerning the treatment of certain types of prisoners. The report begins with a discussion of international and U.S. standards regarding the treatment of prisoners. A discussion of accountability in case of breach of these

standards follows, including potential means of asserting jurisdiction over alleged violators, either in military courts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) or U.S. federal courts, by applying U.S. criminal statutes that explicitly apply extraterritorially or within the special maritime or territorial jurisdiction of the United States (as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 7) or by means of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Finally, the report discusses international requirements to provide redress for those whose treatment at the hands of U.S. officials may have fallen below the standards outlined in the first section of the report.

End Game

Check your phone lines. Do you hear breathing?

Bush's 9/11 Alibi?

Did the Bush administration deliberately turn a blind eye to those 9/11 warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch war in the Middle East and usher in another century of American hegemony? A large group of people - collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement - cite evidence that an airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Center could not have been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. This final group points to video evidence which they claim shows puffs of smoke - so-called demoliton squibs - emerging from the Twin Towers at levels far below the aircraft impact zones and prior to the collapses. They also believe that, on the day itself, the US Air Force was deliberately stood down or sent on exercises to prevent intervention that could have saved the lives of nearly 3,000 people.All of this in the name of war-mongering and profiteering. American lives lost, but military contractors win to the tune of billions.

Geneva Convention....um, hello?

Foreign personnel hired to provide military services have often been present in armed conflicts. During the sixties and the seventies, this situation has been mainly associated with covert, mercenary activity. The provisions on mercenaries included in Article 47 of the First Protocol Additional to the Geneva Convention of 1949 the “Convention on the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa " , and the “International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries“ were adopted at a time when this phenomenon was widely observed.

In recent years, however, there has been the emergence of highly professional companies that offer mercenary services openly, sometimes using websites. Some companies such as Executive Outcomes, Blackwater, Condor Security and Sandline have carried out active combat operations in various countries. Executive Outcomes, which drew heavily on members of South African special forces, assisted the Angolan government against the rebel movement, UNITA, and helped the Sierra Leone authorities defeat the Revolutionary United Front and restore the elected President to power . Sandline, a sister company to Executive Outcomes “admits to having undertaken six international operations since 1993”, including in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone.These are not government sanctioned military forces, but private mercenaries and assassins-for-hire that do not abide by Protocol I. In this age of profiteering, is the Geneva Convention no longer relevant? Does anyone care?

Zero Transparency

Try researching Route Irish. Or HeavenBled. Try sifting through information on the PSC's active right now being paid for by American tax dollars in Iraq. Or Pakistan. Or Afghanistan. I couldn't find out with any certainty how many private contractors were working in Iraq, how many had been killed or injured, and how many Iraqis they had killed under cover of Order 17, imposed by the Americans, which gave them blanket impunity from prosecution by Iraqi authorities. Why keep a list when it invites scrutiny? Three cheers for capitalism!

Red

Out of the three colors in the current US Flag, Red and Blue are the only two that can actually be deemed colors. White is analytically the brain's way of processing all colors in the visible spectrum at the same time, while conversely Black would be the absence of color. Why is it that the United States went with Red and Blue and left out the third primary color Yellow?

Red, the stripes, standing for the original 13 colonies that settled in our nation before our independence also symbolizes blood, as is the blood that has been shed in order to establish our "freedoms" and our "rights." When in hindsight the so-called "rights" are simply a cover for what I like to call "government approved actions." We tell children in our schools that we left England so long ago because we were not allowed to practice dutch religions. In actuality what happened is that a few men who were about to become expelled from their own country sailed to Columbus' new land and proceeded to inhabit territory already lived upon by indigenous natives. Several years later, our forefathers destroyed all native populations in order to confiscate their land. This, my friends, is where the Red comes from in our flag. It's not the blood we had shed, but the blood we were going to shed.

The United States of America was born out of war. We are a young nation barely 300 years old and already we have seen more war than most of the world has seen since the dawn of time. First we warred to claim our land. Then we warred to declare our independence. Then we fought over domestic issues and warred over that. We then disagreed with foreign politics and warred with the world twice, attempting to apply the facade of a global hero. Excellent timing! We've had cold wars that have lasted decades, and guerrilla wars that we had no place in withstanding.  We've shed blood in the middle east and we continue to do so to this day!

And every time we make war, there is someone, somewhere in our government who tells us that it is okay to make war. We've seen time and time again that all is needed is a little suppression to create angst, then the government can turn angst into blame and create hate. Hate is when war becomes acceptable, whether it's disguised as survival or defense.

Red is the color of blood. Blood that HAD to have been spilled for the GREATER GOOD of us as a people.