STOCK RESULTS FEB 8,2012

DOCTOR DOCTORIAN FROM ANGEL OF GOD
then the angel said, Financial crisis will come to Asia. I will shake the world.

JAMES 5:1-3
1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

REVELATION 18:10,17,19
10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

EZEKIEL 7:19
19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.

REVELATION 13:16-18
16 And he(FALSE POPE) causeth all,(WORLD SOCIALISM) both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:(CHIP IMPLANT)
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.(6-6-6) A NUMBER SYSTEM

WORLD MARKET RESULTS
http://money.cnn.com/data/world_markets/
CNBC VIDEOS
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15839263/?tabid=15839796&tabheader=false

HALF HOUR DOW RESULTS WED FEBRUARY 08,2012

09:30 AM -2.43
10:00 AM +9.25
10:30 AM +11.25
11:00 AM -21.07
11:30 AM -57.16
12:00 PM -44.05
12:30 PM -28.84
01:00 PM -18.81
01:30 PM -23.58
02:00 PM -20.25
02:30 PM -6.40
03:00 PM +4.54
03:30 PM -5.68
04:00 PM +5.75 12,883.95

S&P 500 1349.96 +2.91

NASDAQ 2915.86 +11.78

GOLD 1,735.80 -12.60

OIL 98.89 +0.48

TSE 300 12,521.02 +8.60

CDNX 1665.74 +2.41

S&P/TSX/60 712.01 -0.38

MORNING,NEWS,STATS

YEAR TO DATE PERFORMANCE
Dow +2 points at 4 minutes of trading today.
Dow -57 points at low today.
Dow +11 points at high today so far.
GOLD opens at $1,744.70.OIL opens at $99.94 today.

AFTERNOON,NEWS,STATS
Dow -57 points at low today so far.
Dow +11 points at high today so far.

WRAPUP,NEWS,STATS
Dow -57 points at low today.
Dow +11 points at high today.

GOLD ALLTIME HIGH $1,902.60 (NOT AT CLOSE)

CRUDE OIL +304,000 BARRELS
GASOLINE +1.6 MILLION BARRELS
DISTILLATE INVENTORIES +1.2 MILLION BARRELS

Matt Stein: 400 Chernobyls, Solar Flares, EMP & Nuclear Armageddon Infowars.com February 7, 2012

Alex talks with environmentalist, bestselling author, and MIT trained engineer Matt Stein, who will talk about his article, 400 Chernobyls: Solar Flares, EMP, and Nuclear Armageddon. Stein’s latest book is When Technology Fails.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GUrCVhPdQWE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0eaXHZK2Tig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGkwwdrdIn4&feature=player_embedded

Infowars Issues Emergency Terror Alert-Threat of a false flag event has never been greater Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones Infowars.com Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Given the fact that the US and Israel are both yearning for a casus belli to launch an attack on Iran, added to recent history where a staged provocation was considered, and in addition to the innumerable examples of false flags overseen by the Obama administration alone, the threat of staged terror has never been greater.
Unlike the plethora of fake terror alerts that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge admitted were issued for political propaganda, this one is very serious indeed.US intelligence officials last week upped the rhetoric against Iran during congressional testimony by claiming that Tehran is prepared to launch reprisal attacks inside the United States.Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. cited the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil as a sign that,Some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.
As we documented at the time, according to retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, no information concerning the supposed plot even existed within FBI channels, strongly suggesting the story was manufactured by the Obama administration. The New York Times also reported that the dubious nature of the plot caused a wave of puzzlement and skepticism from some foreign leaders and outside experts.Advocates of an attack on Iran have implied that the US could stage a provocation as a pretext for a military assault. In January 2008, Dick Cheney’s office considered staging an incident to be blamed on Iran wherein US ships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz were attacked.Despite the sordid history of lies that were manufactured about weapons of mass destruction, Niger yellowcake and dodgy dossiers to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we’re seeing history repeat itself as the US seeks to exploit another artificial crisis as a pretext to back the Israeli attack on Iran.

Numerous examples since Obama took office illustrate how his administration, and the intelligence agencies that surround it, are by no means reticent to brazenly lie and stage events for political purposes.Despite the Obama administration’s best efforts to characterize Operation Fast and Furious, an ATF program that sought to put U.S.-based firearms into the hands of Mexican drug smugglers, as little more than a screw up, the most damning evidence strongly indicates that the whole operation was in fact an attempt to launch a false flag assault on the second amendment rights of the American people.Obama himself told gun control advocate Sarah Brady last year that his administration was working under the radar to sneak attack the second amendment, just months before the Fast and Furious scandal leaked, and at the same time as administration officials were blaming violence in Mexico on the second amendment, when in reality the administration itself was responsible for arming the drug cartels.A further example of a false flag attempt under the current administration involves the Christmas Day underwear bomber, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, who was helped through security, despite him being on a terror watchlist with no passport, by a well dressed Indian man, on Christmas Day 2009.It later emerged that the State Department was ordered not to revoke Abdulmutallab’s visa by “federal counterterrorism officials” even though the accused bomber had known terrorist ties, in addition to the fact that his own father had warned U.S. intelligence officials of the threat posed by Abdulmutallab a month before the attempted attack.

While the public is being told that terrorists are about to strike on U.S. soil, the U.S. government itself has armed and funded Al-Qaeda terrorists in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi and is now backing Al-Qaeda groups in Iran to carry out bombings and assassinations in an effort to undermine the Ahmadinejad government. The same terrorists used in Libya were also subsequently airlifted into Syria as part of an effort to depose President Bashir Assad.It is crystal clear that the gigantic anti-terror apparatus itself, created in the aftermath of 9/11, is now being used against the American people, with citizens being trained to spy on each other under the auspices of Homeland Security’s See Something, Say Something campaign. To illustrate the absurdity of how far this reaches, hot dog sellers at the recent Super Bowl were trained by the TSA to spot terrorists.Both the DHS and the FBI are also characterizing mundane behavior, such as paying for a cup of coffee with cash, using a video camera, talking to police officers, wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and using a cell phone recording application, all as indicators of terrorist activity.To top it all off, the Obama administration was also instrumental in passing a provision of the NDAA bill which authorizes the military to kidnap and incarcerate US citizens without trial, merely on the accusation that they may be terrorists.The environment of fear and paranoia that has been created as a result of all this makes fertile ground for the government to stage a crisis or manufacture an emergency situation that will be used to rally the American people around a number of different domestic and geopolitical agendas.
READ LINKS
http://www.infowars.com/infowars-issues-emergency-terror-alert/

PERSECUSSION,BEHEADINGS

JESUS PERSECUTED BIGTIME

PSALMS 14:1
1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

ISAIAH 53:4
4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

MATTHEW 9:34
34 But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils.

JOHN 8:41
41 Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.

JOHN 10:20
20 And many of them said, He hath a devil, and is mad; why hear ye him?

PHILIPPIANS 2:10-11(JESUS GETS REVENGE)
10 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;
11 And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.(JUDGEMENT SEAT OF CHRIST AND FOR SINNERS, THE GREAT WHITE THRONE FINAL JUDGEMENT).

WE ARE CHRISTIANS WE WILL BE TREATED THE SAME.

2 TIMOTHY 3:1-5 (WHY WE ARE PERSECUTED BY THE WORLD)
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous (DANGEROUS) times shall come.
2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

MATTHEW 5:10-12
10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

MATTHEW 24:9
9 Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.

JOHN 15:18-20
18 If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me (JESUS) before it hated you.
19 If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
20 Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.

REVELATION 6:9-11
9 And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain(BEHEADED) for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
10 And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
11 And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.

REVELATION 20:4
4 And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World Feb 6, 2012 12:00 AM EST-From one end of the muslim world to the other, Christians are being murdered for their faith.

We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.

But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.

Egypt Coptic Christians

At least 24 Coptic Christians were killed in Cairo during clashes with the Egyptian Army on Oct. 9., Thomas Hartwell / Redux-From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many nations live in fear. In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war. Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means Western education is sacrilege.Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the country.In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting Allahu akbar (God is great) while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens. They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem. While they started out by using crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in 2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group’s recent attacks show a new level of potency and sophistication.The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian and animist minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained persecution of religious minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which charged him with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted the semi-independence he grant-ed to South Sudan in July of last year, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject-ed to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnap-ping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that between 53,000 and 75,000 innocent civilians have been displaced from their resi-dences and that houses and buildings have been looted and destroyed.

Both kinds of persecution—undertaken by extragovernmental groups as well as by agents of the state—have come together in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. On Oct. 9 of last year in the Maspero area of Cairo, Coptic Christians (who make up roughly 11 percent of Egypt’s population of 81 million) marched in protest against a wave of attacks by Islamists—including church burnings, rapes, mutilations, and murders—that followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship. During the protest, Egyptian security forces drove their trucks into the crowd and fired on protesters, crushing and killing at least 24 and wounding more than 300 people. By the end of the year more than 200,000 Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks. With Islamists poised to gain much greater power in the wake of recent elections, their fears appear to be justified.Egypt is not the only Arab country that seems bent on wiping out its Christian minority. Since 2003 more than 900 Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed by terrorist violence in Baghdad alone, and 70 churches have been burned, according to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled as a result of violence directed specifically at them, reducing the number of Christians in the country to fewer than half a million from just over a million before 2003. AINA understandably describes this as an incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq.The 2.8 million Christians who live in Pakistan make up only about 1.6 percent of the population of more than 170 million. As members of such a tiny minority, they live in perpetual fear not only of Islamist terrorists but also of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws. There is, for example, the notorious case of a Christian woman who was sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad. When international pressure persuaded Punjab Gov. Salman Taseer to explore ways of freeing her, he was killed by his bodyguard. The bodyguard was then celebrated by prominent Muslim clerics as a hero—and though he was sentenced to death late last year, the judge who imposed the sentence now lives in hiding, fearing for his life.

Such cases are not unusual in Pakistan. The nation’s blasphemy laws are routinely used by criminals and intolerant Pakistani Muslims to bully religious minorities. Simply to declare belief in the Christian Trinity is considered blasphemous, since it contradicts mainstream Muslim theological doctrines. When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal. Just ask the members of the Christian aid group World Vision. Its offices were attacked in the spring of 2010 by 10 gunmen armed with grenades, leaving six people dead and four wounded. A militant Muslim group claimed responsibility for the attack on the grounds that World Vision was working to subvert Islam. (In fact, it was helping the survivors of a major earthquake.)

EGYPTIAN COPTIC CHRISITANS

At least 13 people were killed and 140 injured on March 8, 2011, when participants in a large Christian demonstration in a Cairo slum were attacked by residents of a surrounding neighborhood., Mohamed Omar / EPA-Landov-Not even Indonesia—often touted as the world’s most tolerant, democratic, and modern majority-Muslim nation—has been immune to the fevers of Christophobia. According to data compiled by the Christian Post, the number of violent incidents committed against religious minorities (and at 7 percent of the population, Christians are the country’s largest minority) increased by nearly 40 percent, from 198 to 276, between 2010 and 2011.The litany of suffering could be extended. In Iran dozens of Christians have been arrested and jailed for daring to worship outside of the officially sanctioned church system. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, deserves to be placed in a category of its own. Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in the country as foreign workers, churches and even private acts of Christian prayer are banned; to enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim’s. Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem. No, the violence isn’t centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. In that sense the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.

As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have lost the protection of their societies. This is especially so in countries with growing radical Islamist (Salafist) movements. In those nations, vigilantes often feel they can act with impunity—and government inaction often proves them right. The old idea of the Ottoman Turks—that non-Muslims in Muslim societies deserve protection (albeit as second-class citizens)—has all but vanished from wide swaths of the Islamic world, and increasingly the result is bloodshed and oppression.So let us please get our priorities straight. Yes, Western governments should protect Muslim minorities from intolerance. And of course we should ensure that they can worship, live, and work freely and without fear. It is the protection of the freedom of conscience and speech that distinguishes free societies from unfree ones. But we also need to keep perspective about the scale and severity of intolerance. Cartoons, films, and writings are one thing; knives, guns, and grenades are something else entirely.As for what the West can do to help religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies, my answer is that it needs to begin using the billions of dollars in aid it gives to the offending countries as leverage. Then there is trade and investment. Besides diplomatic pressure, these aid and trade relationships can and should be made conditional on the protection of the freedom of conscience and worship for all citizens.Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world. Tolerance is for everyone—except the intolerant.Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992. She served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006 and is currently a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her autobiography, Infidel, was a 2007 New York Times bestseller.For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/05/ayaan-hirsi-ali-the-global-war-on-christians-in-the-muslim-world.html

REVELATION 13:16-18
16 And he(FALSE POPE) causeth all,(WORLD SOCIALISM) both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:(CHIP IMPLANT)
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.(6-6-6) A NUMBER SYSTEM

PROJECT ECHELON

JUNE 2001 - The E.C. Parliament has confirmed (admitted?) the existence of the communications intelligence and information exchange network called ECHELON.
This global network of wiretaps, data-sniffing and general eavesdropping systems enables the U.S. government (and probably the U.K.) to intercept digital communications. In effect this means that , amongst other activities, ECHELON is capable of recording all email messages and all telephone conversations - regardless of who is making them. ECHELON is based at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire U.K - rumours of its existence have circulated for years.

ECHELON does not require a suspicion element to monitor any communications and can ,therefore, snoop into innocent peoples personal data. An E.C. spokesman stated that there is good reason to believe that information has been obtained by ECHELON by illegally monitoring private emails.Amongst other things the French government is sure that commercial contracts have been lost to the U.S. (Including an Airbus contract with Saudi Arabia) despite U.S. denials. Unless encrypted ,any persons communications ,from any location can be snooped upon - in fact it is suspected that all European emails and telephone communications are automatically recorded at Menwith Hill.

Menwith Hill - near Harrogate North Yorkshire (UK).

Menwith Hill JULY 18TH - 2001 The residents of North Yorkshire are registering a strong protest against the Menwith Hill Listening Station [ right ] following the closure of its sister station in Bavaria (Germany).Despite U.S. denials the German base was not closed due to a cost cutting exercise (millions of dollars have recently been spent on improved electronic eavesdropping equipment) but protests from the German public forced the U.S. agencies to transfer their activities to Menwith Hill.It is likely that Menwith Hill will become the most important covert listening station in the world and also an integral component in the new Star wars Defense system.It is understandable that the people of the North of England want no part of this skulking and covertly dangerous element of U.S. military World dominance.In a report produced by the United States Space Command ,entitled A Vision for 2020, General Howell M. Estes 111 states Globalization of the World Economy will continue with a widening between the haves and the have nots. The aims of the U.S. Space Command - dominating the space dimension for Military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into War fighting capabilities across the full system of conflict.The following article was published in The Independent (UK)27th February, 2004

How Britain and the US keep watch on the world
By Phillip Knightley

From the National Security Agency's imposing headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, ringed by a double-chain fence topped by barbed wire with strands of electrified wire between them, America bugs the world.Nothing politically or militarily significant, whether mentioned in a telephone call, in a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, or in a company fax or e-mail, escapes its attention.Its computers - measured in acres occupied by them rather than simple figures - vacuum the entire electromagnetic spectrum, homing in on key words which may suggest something of interest to NSA customers is being conveyed.The NSA costs at least $3.5bn (£1.9bn) a year to run. It employs at least 20,000 officers (not counting the 100,000 servicemen and civilians around the world over whom it has control). Its shredders process 40 tons of paper a day.Its junior partner is Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the eavesdropping organisation for which Katharine Gun worked. Like NSA, GCHQ is a highly secret operation. Until 1983, when one of its officers, Geoffrey Prime, was charged with spying for the Russians, the Government had refused to reveal what GCHQ's real role was, no doubt because its operations in peacetime were without a legal basis. Its security is maintained by massive and deliberately intimidating security.

Newspapers have been discouraged from mentioning it; a book by a former GCHQ officer, Jock Kane, was seized by Special Branch police officers and a still photograph of its headquarters was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, leaving a blank screen during a World in Action programme. As with NSA, the size of GCHQ's staff at Cheltenham, about 6,500, gives no real indication of its strength. It has monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia and smaller ones elsewhere. Much of its overseas work is done by service personnel.Its budget is thought to be more than £300m a year. A large part of this is funded by the United States in return for the right to run NSA listening stations in Britain - Chicksands, Bedfordshire; Edzell, Scotland; Mentworth Hill, Harrogate; Brawdy, Wales - and on British territory around the world.

Chicksands - always listening? [ right ] click on image for larger size

The collaboration between the two agencies offers many advantages to both. Not only does it make monitoring the globe easier, it solves tricky legal problems and is the basis of the Prime Minister's statement yesterday that all Britain's bugging is lawful. The two agencies simply swap each other's dirty work.GCHQ eavesdrops on calls made by American citizens and the NSA monitors calls made by British citizens, thus allowing each government plausibly to deny it has tapped its own citizens' calls, as they do. The NSA station at Menwith Hill intercepts all international telephone calls made from Britain and GCHQ has a list of American citizens whose phone conversations interest the NSA.The NSA request to GCHQ for help in bugging the diplomats from those nations who were holding out for a second Security Council resolution to authorise an attack on Iraq is unsurprising. Nor is it surprising that both organisations wanted to provide their political masters with recordings of private conversations of high-ranking international diplomats.It is not difficult. Listening bugs can be planted in phones, electrical plugs, desk lamps and book spines. Given a clear line of sight, one device enables someone to detect and and interpret sound waves vibrating against the glass window panes of an office.Bugging the world is not the problem. The problem is avoiding drowning in a sea of information. We should not be surprised that GCHQ and NSA eavesdrop on us. We pay them to do it. We should be asking: Do they earn their keep? And, unless we get a few more whistle-blowers like Ms Gun, we will not know, because both agencies surround themselves with a wall of secrecy.


WHO DO WE BUG?

Although under domestic law GCHQ needs a warrant from the Home Secretary to tap telephones in Britain, it can do so abroad without such authorisation.But the United Nations headquarters in New York is considered sovereign territory, and placing a bug there would be illegal under international law.Intelligence services spy on hostile and friendly countries, the latter mainly for commercial reasons, but also to gain an edge in diplomatic negotiations. Nato allies are not always immune from intelligence operations by Britain.Staff working for the UN inspection teams in Iraq were convinced they were under surveillance.France, Germany and Russia complained of a rise in espionage against them. There was intense activity directed at Jordan and Syria, as well as Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Egypt.Officials say the only shock about Katharine Gun's discovery of an e-mail from the National Security Agency is that she was surprised by it.The WHY? FILES wish to make it quite clear that we unconditionally support any responsible and careful techniques utilised in the current efforts to combat terrorism.