An internet sensation, the Tory who told Brown to his face that he's a disaster

By Kirsty Walker

Withering: Daniel Hannan pulled no punches in his attack on Mr Brown

A Tory who criticised Gordon Brown to his face in a brutal personal attack has won an army of fans worldwide.

A video of MEP Daniel Hannan delivering a withering assessment of the Prime Minister's handling of the economic crisis has become a surprise hit on the internet.

More than 730,000 users have viewed it on YouTube, making it the most popular clip on the site two days in a row.

Mr Hannan's assault came after the Premier had given a keynote speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday.

As Mr Brown looked on through gritted teeth, shaking his head, the Tory lambasted him as a 'Brezhnev era apparatchik' who was ' pathologically incapable' of taking responsibility for his role in the financial crisis.

The 37-year-old, who was the youngest British member elected to the European Parliament in 1999, yesterday received plaudits for his tongue-lashing.

Broadcasters - including the BBC - failed to report Mr Hannan's onslaught despite giving full coverage to Mr Brown's most pro-European speech to date.

But it was quickly posted on YouTube and news outlets from Australia to America seized on his comments.

The clip features Mr Brown looking on with a frozen smile, while Mr Hannan warned how Britain was entering the recession in a 'dilapidated condition' with an 'almost unbelievable' deficit.

Scroll down to watch the video of Daniel Hannan's address

Tirade: Gordon Brown addressing the European Parliament on Tuesday. He then had to sit through an attack on his record by MEP Daniel Hannan

After accusing Mr Brown of losing his moral authority, he finished with the pay-off line: 'You are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.'

The speech, which was met with cheers and laughter from fellow MEPs, unleashed a torrent of comments on the internet with most praising Mr Hannan's assessment.

Mr Hannan, who represents South East England, said he had been stunned by the response. He said: 'I suspect what has happened is that a lot of people have wanted to say something similar to him and have never had the chance.

'There is something very surreal about a speech in the European Parliament - one of the most boring places on earth - causing so much excitement.'

Mr Hannan, who went to Oriel College, Oxford, has good form in the debating chamber.

A former journalist, he has previously worked as a speechwriter for Michael Howard and William Hague. He has also been a key opponent of the Lisbon Treaty.

Downing Street last night failed to comment on Mr Hannan's internet fame. But one of the 5,000 who left comments on YouTube said: 'Thanks for telling Gordon to his face what many people would like to.'

Another added: 'Brilliant! As a British victim who has suffered under the Labour yoke for 12 long, depressing years, I am delighted to see that, here at last, is someone telling the story as it really is.'

A BBC spokesman last night insisted its reporting of Mr Brown's speech was 'entirely balanced'.

He said the Daily Politics show on BBC2 had run a clip of Mr Hannan's speech yesterday and a discussion with bloggers about the story.

He added: 'Daniel Hannan was one of the Daily Politics guests on the programme when it broadcast an entire edition from Brussels last week.'

Watch Daniel Hannan's tirade against Gordon Brown

Here is the Tory MEP's speech in full:

'Prime Minister, I see you've already mastered the essential craft of the European politician: namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You've spoken here of free trade, and amen to that.

Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase 'British jobs for British workers,' and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swaths of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.

Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this House if your actions matched your words, and perhaps more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not sailing into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is now born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Now, once again today, you have tried to spread the blame around. You spoke about an international recession, an international crisis.

Well, it's true that we are sailing together into the squalls but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging - in other words, to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further.

As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the waterline under the accumulated weight of your debt.

We are now running a deficit that touches 10 per cent of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure - more than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF has already been called in.

It's not just that you are not apologising - like everyone else I've long accepted that you are pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things - it's that you are carrying on wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left.

In the last year 100,000 private sector jobs have been lost and yet you have created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister, you cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line.

You know and we know and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times.

The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets say so, which is why the pound has lost a third of its value.

In a few months, the voters will have their chance to say so, too.

They can see what the markets have seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government.'

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries

By JOHN MARKOFF

TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

Enlarge This Image

Tim Leyes for The New York Times

The Toronto academic researchers who are reporting on the spying operation dubbed GhostNet include, from left, Ronald J. Deibert, Greg Walton, Nart Villeneuve and Rafal A. Rohozinski.

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Graphic

The Vast Reach of ‘GhostNet’

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.

The newly reported spying operation is by far the largest to come to light in terms of countries affected.

This is also believed to be the first time researchers have been able to expose the workings of a computer system used in an intrusion of this magnitude.

Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

The Toronto researchers said they had notified international law enforcement agencies of the spying operation, which in their view exposed basic shortcomings in the legal structure of cyberspace. The F.B.I. declined to comment on the operation.

Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

The Toronto researchers, who allowed a reporter for The New York Times to review the spies’ digital tracks, are publishing their findings in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication associated with the Munk Center.

At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans, are releasing an independent report. They do fault China, and they warned that other hackers could adopt the tactics used in the malware operation.

“What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course,” the Cambridge researchers, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson, wrote in their report, “The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.”

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The Vast Reach of ‘GhostNet’

In any case, it was suspicions of Chinese interference that led to the discovery of the spy operation. Last summer, the office of the Dalai Lama invited two specialists to India to audit computers used by the Dalai Lama’s organization. The specialists, Greg Walton, the editor of Information Warfare Monitor, and Mr. Nagaraja, a network security expert, found that the computers had indeed been infected and that intruders had stolen files from personal computers serving several Tibetan exile groups.

Back in Toronto, Mr. Walton shared data with colleagues at the Munk Center’s computer lab.

One of them was Nart Villeneuve, 34, a graduate student and self-taught “white hat” hacker with dazzling technical skills. Last year, Mr. Villeneuve linked the Chinese version of the Skype communications service to a Chinese government operation that was systematically eavesdropping on users’ instant-messaging sessions.

Early this month, Mr. Villeneuve noticed an odd string of 22 characters embedded in files created by the malicious software and searched for it with Google. It led him to a group of computers on Hainan Island, off China, and to a Web site that would prove to be critically important.

In a puzzling security lapse, the Web page that Mr. Villeneuve found was not protected by a password, while much of the rest of the system uses encryption.

Mr. Villeneuve and his colleagues figured out how the operation worked by commanding it to infect a system in their computer lab in Toronto. On March 12, the spies took their own bait. Mr. Villeneuve watched a brief series of commands flicker on his computer screen as someone — presumably in China — rummaged through the files. Finding nothing of interest, the intruder soon disappeared.

Through trial and error, the researchers learned to use the system’s Chinese-language “dashboard” — a control panel reachable with a standard Web browser — by which one could manipulate the more than 1,200 computers worldwide that had by then been infected.

Infection happens two ways. In one method, a user’s clicking on a document attached to an e-mail message lets the system covertly install software deep in the target operating system. Alternatively, a user clicks on a Web link in an e-mail message and is taken directly to a “poisoned” Web site.

The researchers said they avoided breaking any laws during three weeks of monitoring and extensively experimenting with the system’s unprotected software control panel. They provided, among other information, a log of compromised computers dating to May 22, 2007.

They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California.

Beyond that, said Rafal A. Rohozinski, one of the investigators, “attribution is difficult because there is no agreed upon international legal framework for being able to pursue investigations down to their logical conclusion, which is highly local.”

Congress Hears About ACORN's Extortion Racket

By Matthew Vadum

In recent months demands for ACORN to be investigated under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for repeated incidents of electoral fraud have been growing.

But voting-related fraud is just the tip of the iceberg.

ACORN runs a mob-style "protection" racket known within the radical direct-action group as the "muscle for the money" program, a lawyer told the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties today.

Lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh filed an unsuccessful lawsuit last year against ACORN, specifically, a court injunction in Pennsylvania against ACORN's voter registration efforts in last year's presidential campaign. (A transcript of the Oct. 29 hearing in Moyer v. ACORN is available here.)

Heidelbaugh says that ACORN, which I profiled in the November issue of Capital Research Center's Foundation Watch, has provided protest-for-hire services and extracted donations from the targets of demonstrations by shaking down those targets mafia-style. (Heidelbaugh's written congressional testimony is available here.)

The taxpayer-subsidized ACORN network, which owes millions of dollars in back taxes, also played a major role in the subprime mortgage mess that has undermined Americans' support for free market problem-solving and set off a worldwide chain of financial troubles.

And then there's ACORN's eight-year-long coverup of the million-dollar embezzlement by founder Wade Rathke's brother. When ACORN board members Marcel Reid and Karen Inman demanded to see the financial documents, they were expelled from the group.

What else is ACORN hiding?

(Compiler's note: Just a little history provided by a friend.)

XM607 at RAF Waddin

Mission impossible of the Falkland's War

By CHRISTOPHER HUDSON, Daiy Mail
26 May 2006

It was the most daring RAF raid since the Dambusters: Flying a jet 20 years past its sell-by date 4,000 miles beyond its range to bomb a target a few yards wide...the result was to change the course of the Falklands War:

Mission impossible many people called it - an attempt to fly an ageing British jet bomber 4,000 miles beyond its maximum to bomb a 40-yard wide target from a height of 10,000ft.

The Pentagon believed it was impossible. So, privately, did others commanding the British Task Force sailing south towards the Falkland Islands after their invasion by Argentina in the spring of 1982. And for the six-man crew of Vulcan 607, in the early hours of April 31, it was beginning to turn into a suicide mission.

Martin Withers and his co-pilot Dick Russell were 300 miles north of their target: the airstrip near the Falklands capital Port Stanley. It had to be destroyed to stop Argentine fighter jets using it to attack the task force.

They still needed 14,000lb of fuel to carry out their mission and - if they survived the ground-to-air missiles from the heavily fortified capital - to reach the refuelling rendezvous off the coast of Brazil, 300 miles east of Rio de Janeiro.

As it headed towards the Falklands the final mid-air refuelling of the Vulcan was beginning. Withers eased his plane into position behind the Handley Page Victor tanker, the last in an immensely complex alternation of 11 tankers and 15 fuel transfers which had been involved in getting the bomber this far.

Once settled in its wake, less than 20 yards from the Victor's tail-cone, and plugged into its trailing fuel hose, Withers waited for the red lights at the base of the hose to flash green to show that fuel was flushing into the Vulcan's tanks through the four-inch pipes that ran beneath his feet.

The gauge spun up to 7,000 gallons - just a fraction of its total fuel capacity of 36,000 - and then the tanker signalled that it could give them no more. Withers was baffled and furious. Just as he was approaching his target, he was being left in the lurch.

He had no way of knowing that the tanker was even lower on fuel than the Vulcan and had probably sacrificed its crew to give the Vulcan a fighting chance of making the rendezvous."We don't have the fuel to carry out the mission," radioed the electronics officer from the back of the Vulcan. "I'm sorry, that's it. I have no more fuel to give you," replied the Victor's pilot, Bob Tuxford, as the tanker decoupled and turned north into the night. That was that.

Headed for the scrap heap

Dick Russell, the only man on board the Vulcan with any real experience of air-to-air refuelling, knew what the failsafe procedures were. He told Withers that to guarantee the safety of the aircraft they should abort the mission. If they were to succeed and then lose the bomber as the tanks ran dry, they would face disaster. Really it was a miracle they had got this far. Britain's V-bombers, built to deliver nuclear bombs, were headed for the scrapheap.

In the Fifties they had been state-of-the-art, our most impressive weapon in the Cold War. Built to deliver nuclear bombs, the delta-shaped Vulcans were brilliantly manoeuvrable, considering their size - an inch short of 100ft in wingspan. Their lightning-fast low-level flying played havoc with enemy radar. But by 1982 the writing was on the wall. Their base at RAF Waddington in the Lincolnshire fens was to be closed. In weeks, the last four Vulcan squadrons would be gone. On the far side of the base Vulcans were already being torn apart for scrap.

And then General Galtieri decided to grab the Falklands. These islands of sheep farmers, 8,000 miles away in the South Atlantic, were practically indefensible. The nearest British base, Ascension Island, was 4,000 miles away to the northeast - too far for C-130 transport planes to deliver troops. But it was British sovereign territory.

The islanders were British: in return for their allegiance the Crown owed them protection. Margaret Thatcher, a Prime Minister sinking low in the polls, ordered a naval task force to be prepared which could set up an exclusion zone around the islands. However, if the invaders could resupply themselves by air, the campaign could turn into a gruelling siege.

The only aircraft in the entire RAF which could fly to the Falklands from a friendly base was the Handley Page Victor K2, a bomber which had been turned into an air-to-air refuelling tanker. The Tornado GR1s were too new and unproven to be risked, even if they could be refuelled, and it would need a convoy of Sea Harrier jump jets to drop the same weight of bombs and an aircraft carrier nearby - which itself would be most vulnerable to fighters based at Port Stanley.

That left the Vulcan nuclear bombers. None of their crews had practised dropping conventional bombs for ten years. And they hadn't practised air-to-air refuelling for 20 years. Had not the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Michael Beetham, himself been a pioneer of the technique, nobody would even have considered them. Of the ten Vulcan bombers requisitioned, only three had accurate bomb delivery and powerful enough engines for the task.

Each had its own quirks and eccentricities. Parts were hard to find. A vital refuelling component was salvaged from a ground crew room where it was serving as an ashtray. The bomb cradles in which conventional bombs could be carried, not used since the Vulcans turned nuclear, were hard to find; some turned up in a scrapyard in Newark, Notts.

The nose-mounted probes on which the hoses clamped for air-to-air refuelling frequently sheared off during the intensive training that the pilots were now undergoing; replacements had to be found from military museums.

Navigation problems

Then there were the navigation problems. The Vulcans would have to fly over 4,000 miles of open ocean, without a single surface feature that the radar officers could use to fix a position. There were no detailed maps of the area and, at that time, no satellite imagery.

The only reliable instrument was a sextant which, as in Nelson's day, was used to chart the aircraft's position relative to the angles of the stars.

Not until late in the planning did someone remember that the old Vickers Super VC10 airliners, abandoned by British Airways, had a carousel inertial navigation device which, once aligned to true north, was accurate enough to get them there.

The Argentinian armed forces meanwhile were consolidating their advantage on the Falklands, confident in the belief that could not be attacked by They had occupied the islands on April 2. Within a few days they had flown in Marine detachments armed with 30mm cannon and Tiger Cat optically guided surface-to-air missiles. An anti-aircraft battery went up behind Stanley Town Hall.

Residents, powerless to resist the invader, watched a constant stream of aircraft flying in: C-130s, Fokker F-27s and F-28s and British-built BAC 1-11s. A skilful Argentine pilot even landed a fully-laden four-engined Boeing 707 on the small Stanley airstrip. By the end of April, the islands were bristling with defences.

What really worried Simon Baldwin, the Flight Commander back in Waddington, were not the Tiger Cats but the Swiss Oerlikon cannon which could punch through a two-foot slab of steel and fire high-explosive shells 6,500 feet into the air. The Franco-German Roland radar-guided missiles were even more deadly.

Capable of supersonic speeds and accurate to 12,800ft, they would leave a Vulcan dangerously vulnerable. Baldwin checked twice with Intelligence whether the ground-based Roland was deployed on the islands, and was told that it wasn't.

Intelligence were wrong.

Pilot training at Waddington continued day and night, while the engineers struggled to enhance the old bombers' capability and their chances of surviving. The Vulcans still looked beautiful, but inside the cockpit was a cramped, claustrophobic confusion of wires and pipes crafted from steel, canvas and Bakelite.

Uncomfortably cramped

In the small blister above the plane's nose where the pilot and co-pilot sat, it was uncomfortably cramped, with barely room to squeeze in between the two ejector seats. Behind them, four or five feet below and facing backwards, sat the radar, navigation and electronics officers at their chart tables. The light was provided by three dented reading lamps and two small, high portholes; the space smelled of sweat, leather and old metal.

On April 29, three Vulcan bombers took off for Ascension Island, so heavily laden with fuel and cargo that they could hardly stagger into air. Ascension is leased by Britain to the US which, in return, provides 'logistical support' - at that point it was overrun by British aircraft and servicemen, with hundreds more quartered on the Task Force flagship, the requisitioned liner Canberra offshore.

The following morning, Jerry Price, the senior RAF officer on Ascension Island, received the order for Operation Black Buck, the codename given to the mission to bomb Port Stanley airfield. Two more Victors arriving from England, completed the force: 14 tankers, representing more than half of the RAF's entire tanker fleet. He was going to need every one of them.

Together with his operations team, Price now laboured over the fiendishly complicated refuelling plan - their only computer assistance a £3.99 pocket calculator bought at a market. The tankers would refuel each other, then the last tanker to refuel the Vulcans before their bombing run would then turn north to the rendezvous, where more Victors would be waiting to transfer enough fuel for the Vulcans to make it back to Ascension.

The crews all knew they were entering uncharted territory. If the mission succeeded, it would be the furthest bombing raid in history.

Before their night flight, few managed to sleep. The Vulcan radar officers carefully removed the safety pins from the 21 1,000lb bombs hanging in the bomb bays.

Among the security codes and the authentication codes were

the two words Superfuse and Rhomboid. The first was to be transmitted if the bomb run was successful, the second if it failed. Whatever the outcome of Operation Black Buck, by the following morning Britain would be committed to war.

In case the Vulcans were shot down, the crew had to memorise the coordinates of remote safe houses on the Falklands where they would wait to be picked up: for three nights a Sea King helicopter would come looking for them. They were also handed bullets and pistols.

The men pulled on their flying suits and then eased into their tough rubber immersion suits, zipped front and back and sealed tight at the cuffs and neck. If they ditched in the South Atlantic without them, they would last three hours at most.

At 10.30 pm on April 30, the first aircraft fired up its engines to full power. Followed by the other aircraft they hoisted their massive fuel loads into the sky.

Within minutes, the lead Vulcan was in trouble. The red pressure-warning light was on and a alarm sounded. One of the little portholes had come unstuck and could not be resealed. In the cabin, the temperature was dropping to minus 30 as the plane climbed towards 20,000 ft.

There was nothing to be done. Vulcan 598 had to return to base with its bitterly disappointed crew. The entire operation now depended on Martin Withers and his team in the second Vulcan, 607.

Then a tanker had to pull out. Of the 14 Victors on Ascension two had now failed and been replaced. A minimum of 10 Victors were needed to make the refuelling plan work. If there was another failure, Price would have to abort the mission.

The crew of 607 went through their well rehearsed routines, checking through the walls of dials, and flickering needles that surrounded them. On the flight deck, Withers and Russell held 607' s place in the formation as they waited for the last two refuelling operations to commence. Two of the final four tankers fuelled each other and then the Vulcan in a 500mph dance and left with just enough fuel to get home. Radar was switched off

to avoid being detected by the enemy.

Further on, the last two tankers were busy fuelling each other before giving the Vulcan the fuel it would need to return from its bombing mission when, at 40 degrees south, the convoy flew into the path of a raging electrical storm. The two Victors were thrown around and the fuel hose thrashed between them.

Suddenly with a loud crack the probe sheared off one of the tankers which was due to shepherd 607 to its last refuelling. The tanker disengaged and was left with just enough fuel to get back to Ascension, leaving Bob Tuxford's tanker with rapidly diminishing fuel. He gave what he could to 607 and narrowly avoided ditching on the way back to Ascension.

Short of fuel

In the Vulcan, Withers was furious. They were already 37 minutes behind plan. But as Russell warned him to turn back, Withers consulted the others and made his decision. "We're short of fuel, but we've come this far," he told them. "I'm not turning back now." At 290 miles away from the target, 607 began a shallow descent towards Port Stanley.

Even now they could not be certain where they were. The inflight navigation system gave two different compass readings.

The Radar Officer, Bob Wright, and the Navigator, Gordon Graham, had split the difference. If they were on course, the computer would respond with the information needed for Wright to get the bombs on target but only when the radar was switched on again - seconds before the planned drop.

Simon Baldwin in Waddington had worked out that the bomber should approach low to minimise its 'footprint' and then climb upwards to 8000 or 10,000 feet to try to stay clear of the "kill zone" of the Argentinian defences before unleashing its weaponry.

As Vulcan 607 streaked towards her target, Graham called the mileage before the rapid climb, and Hugh Prior, the electronics officer, made sure that the chaff and decoy flares, which would be fired to draw enemy fire, and the American Dash 10 detection jammer were operational.

A radar contact appeared: 607 was dead on target. It was 4.30

in the morning, local time, when the Vulcan roared upwards, straight into view of the Argentine search radars. But the young radar operators were unperturbed. The bomber could only be one of theirs - this had not been a shooting war so far.

During the few minutes it took the Argentinians to wake up to the fact that this was in fact an enemy aircraft, the Vulcan had soared to its 10,000ft altitude and levelled off for the bomb run.

Its speed was 400 mph. From this moment the aircraft could not deviate, even if enemy radar was locked on them. At this height the runway would have been the size of a scratch of a fingernail on the map and the bomb run had to be precise to a few yards.

Two miles from the runway the first of the thousand-pounders fell away from the Vulcan's cavernous belly. When all 21 were away, Withers turned the Vulcan in a steep curve, in time for the crew to see a blossom of fire as the first bomb bored deep into the centre of the runway and detonated. Other blasts hit the airfield, gouging out massive chunks of its surface.

Vulcan 607 did, in fact, have enough fuel to make the rendezvous. It returned to Ascension Island and a heroes' welcome. The most ambitious sortie since World War II, had

by the skin of its teeth been successful.

The damage destroyed any remaining hopes Argentine forces had of using the runway for their fast jets. Their entire Mirage fighter force had to be moved promptly back to the north of Argentina, and any jet cover during the coming British invasion would have to come from the mainland.

It shook Argentine morale to the core and provoked Galtieri's decision to order a naval offensive against the British Task Force, which had disastrous consequences for the Argentine Navy.

The V-bomber had been designed decades before to reach into the snowy wastes of Soviet Russia, but had never been used in anger. Their last outing, to a part of the world no one had dreamed they would visit, had finally justified these beautiful aircraft.

The Falklands War lasted just 74 days. Though taken by surprise, Britain launched a task force to retake the islands and after conflict costing 255 British and 649 Argentinian deaths, the Union Jack was hoisted in Port Stanley on June 14.

* * * * * * * * * *

Take care.

Cheers - - - Charlie

If it weren't for the United States military,
there'd be NO United States of America.

Canada says will defend its Arctic

(Compiler's note: We may ultimately have some use for all the arctic warfare gear the Marine Corps bought and stored in Norway! And, who knows, the Russians may drill into the ANWR from offshore and get our oil! Putin has been becoming more belligerent about the Arctic for several months. Oil is one of the factors.)

The Canadian government on Friday reaffirmed its Arctic claims, saying it will defend its northern territories and waters after Russia earlier announced plans to militarize the North.

"Canada is an Arctic power," Catherine Loubier, a spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, said in an email to AFP.

"The government is engaged in protecting the security of Canada and in exercising its sovereignty in the North, including Canadian waters," she said.

Loubier pointed to the planned acquisition of Arctic patrol vessels, construction of a deep water port and eavesdropping network in the region, annual military exercises and boosting the number Inuit Arctic rangers keeping on eye on goings-on along its northern frontier.

Earlier, Russia announced plans to turn the Arctic into its "leading strategic resource base" by 2020 and station troops there, documents showed, as nations race to stake a claim to the oil-rich region.

The country's strategy for the Arctic through 2020 -- adopted last year and now published on the national security council website -- says one of Russia's main goals for the region is to put troops in its Arctic zone "capable of ensuring military security."

American mob rule

By Victor Davis Hanson

In the last three months, we've been reduced to something like the ancient Athenian mob — with opportunistic politicians sometimes inciting, sometimes catering to an already angry public.

The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes once described how screaming politicians — posing as men of the people — would sway Athenian citizens by offering them all sort of perks and goodies that the government had no idea of how to pay for.

The historian Thucydides offers even more frightening accounts of bloodthirsty voters after they were aroused by demagogues ("leaders or drivers of the people"). One day in bloodthirsty rage, voters demanded the death of the rebellious men of the subject island city of Mytilene; yet on the very next, in sudden remorse, they rescinded that blanket death sentence.

Lately we've allowed our government to forget its calmer republican roots. We've gone Athenian whole hog.

Take the AIG debacle. The global insurance and financial services company is broke and needed a federal loan guarantee of $180 billion to prevent bankruptcy. Some $165 million (about 1/1000th of that sum) had previously been contracted to give bonuses to its derelict executives.

That set off a firestorm in Congress. Politicians rushed before the cameras to demand all sorts of penalties for these greedy investment bankers. Soon, they passed an unprecedented special tax law just to confiscate 90 percent of these contracted bonuses.

Those who shouted the loudest for the heads of the AIG execs had the dirtiest hands. President Obama was outraged at their greed. But he alone signed their bonus provisions into law. And during the recent presidential campaign, no one forced him to accept over $100,000 in AIG donations.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D, N.Y., was even more infuriated at such greed and helped pass the retroactive tax bill. Yet for years, the populist Rangel — who is in trouble over back taxes owed and misuse of his subsidized New York apartments — had tried to entice AIG executives to fund his Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., was the fieriest in his denunciations of Wall Street greed. Yet he was the very one who inserted the bonus provision into the bailout bill, despite later denying it. And Dodd has taken more AIG money than any in Congress — in addition to getting V.I.P. loan rates from the disgraced Countrywide mortgage bank.

Then there is the matter of blowing apart the budget. President Obama inherited from George Bush a $500 billion — and growing — annual budget deficit and a ballooning $11 trillion national debt. Obama nevertheless promised us an entirely new national health plan, bigger entitlements in education and a vast new cap-and-trade energy program.

But there is a problem in paying for the $3.5 trillion in budgetary expenditures that Obama has called for in the coming fiscal year. Proposed vast additional taxes on the "rich" still won't be enough to avoid tripling the present budget deficit — and putting us on schedule over the next decade to add another $9 trillion to the existing national debt.

During the Clinton years, we got higher taxes but eventually balanced budgets. During the Bush administration, we got lower taxes but spiraling deficits. But now during the era of Obama, we apparently will get the worst of both worlds — higher taxes than under Clinton and higher deficits than under Bush.

In other words, we — through our government — are spending money that we don't have. We're told the rich will pick up the tab, even though there are not enough rich with enough money to squeeze out the necessary amounts. Our new demagogues, though, are arguing that this is the only fair course of action. Meanwhile, these leaders — who have taken so much Wall Street money in the past — are driving us into fury to punish the guilty on Wall Street. This is truly the age of mindless mob rule.

Of course, we probably won't hear any candidate in four years assure the voters, "I won't take any more money from Wall Street and will give back any that I already got. And if elected, I promise four consecutive years of budget cuts to achieve each year $1.5 trillion in annual budget surpluses. Only that way can we get the national debt back down to the past 'manageable' 2008 sum of $11 trillion."

We need such a Socrates in Washington right now, who would dare tell the American mob the truth of how we are descending into financial serfdom. But in this present mood, the aroused mob would first make him drink the hemlock.

Congresswoman: Hands off dollar!

Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn.

A member of Congress is warning the Obama administration to keep its hands off the U.S. dollar's status as the world's international currency.

U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., has introduced a resolution that would bar the U.S. from recognizing any other currency than the dollar as its reserve currency.

Her action comes in response to suggestions from China, Russia and the United Nations that another currency be explored. Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has admitted he would be open to the idea, although he quickly backtracked when the stock market plunged on his announcement.

"During a Financial Services Committee hearing, I asked Secretary Geithner if he would denounce efforts to move towards a global currency and he answered unequivocally that he would," Bachmann said. "And President Obama gave the nation the same assurances. But just a day later, Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table. I want to know which it is. The American people deserve to know."

Although Title 31, Sec. 5103 USC prohibits foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S., the president has the power to engage foreign governments in treaties, and the president is principally responsible for the interpretations and implementation of those treaties according to the Constitution, according to the congresswoman.

As a result, legislation prohibiting the president and Treasury Department from issuing or agreeing that the U.S. will adopt an international currency would need to come in the form of a Constitutional Amendment differentiating a treaty used to implement an international currency in the U.S. from other types of treaty agreements, she said.

"If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom," Bachmann told the Glenn Beck program on the Fox News Channel today.

Her proposal, H.J.R. 41, isn't complicated:

It is titled: "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States "

Already with several dozen sponsors, it states:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:"

It would add to the Constitution:

The president may not enter into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the latest voice to endorse an "alternative" to the dollar was the head of a U.N. expert panel discussing solutions to the financial crisis.

Officials from both Russia and China have spoken out on the idea of a new global currency standard, and a U.N. panel published a report that said a new global reserve system would add to the world's "economic stability and equity."

According to a report in the Financial Times, the subject could be on the table at the coming G20 summit of leading and emerging nations in London.

Specifically, the U.N. said a new system could "counteract the risk of a rapid fall in the value of the major reserve currency, gutting hard-earned reserve funds."

from WorldNetDaily

Hizballah using Mexican drug routes to enter U.S.

(Compiler's note: We've been saying for some time now that we need to get control of our borders -- wonder when our gov't will get the message?)

by Robert Spencer

The Taliban makes much of its money through drugs, and Hizballah "has long been involved in narcotics and human trafficking in South America's tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil." This is not inconsistent with their self-image as pious Muslims since the ones using the drugs is the dirty kuffar.

"EXCLUSIVE: Hezbollah uses Mexican drug routes into U.S.," by Sara A. Carter in the Washington Times, March 27 (thanks to Kim):

Hezbollah is using the same southern narcotics routes that Mexican drug kingpins do to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, reaping money to finance its operations and threatening U.S. national security, current and former U.S. law enforcement, defense and counterterrorism officials say.

The Iran-backed Lebanese group has long been involved in narcotics and human trafficking in South America's tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Increasingly, however, it is relying on Mexican narcotics syndicates that control access to transit routes into the U.S.

Hezbollah relies on "the same criminal weapons smugglers, document traffickers and transportation experts as the drug cartels," said Michael Braun, who just retired as assistant administrator and chief of operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

"They work together," said Mr. Braun. "They rely on the same shadow facilitators. One way or another, they are all connected.

"They'll leverage those relationships to their benefit, to smuggle contraband and humans into the U.S.; in fact, they already are [smuggling]."

His comments were confirmed by six U.S. officials, including law enforcement, defense and counterterrorism specialists. They spoke on the condition that they not be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.

While Hezbollah appears to view the U.S. primarily as a source of cash - and there have been no confirmed Hezbollah attacks within the U.S. - the group's growing ties with Mexican drug cartels are particularly worrisome at a time when a war against and among Mexican narco-traffickers has killed 7,000 people in the past year and is destabilizing Mexico along the U.S. border....