Well, I’ll be. Lookie this:
CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush on Monday signed a bill aimed at giving the public and the media greater access to information about what the government is doing.
The new law toughens the Freedom of Information Act, the first such makeover to the signature public-access law in a decade. It amounts to a congressional pushback against the Bush administration’s movement to greater secrecy since the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Good sources for audio talks about practice.
San Francisco Zen Center (Blanche Hartman, Reb Anderson, others)
World Community for Christian Meditation (after John Main and Bede Griffiths)
Some talks by Stephen Hoeller (esoteric Christianity, Wester Hermetic traditions, etc.)
find yourself exhausted in the search for quality commentary on the grimoire of Pope Honorius? don’t fret. here’s a tool for those hard to reach “occult” places, when you get tired of stumbling over flaky sites selling chintzy trinkets:
’silversword occult search’
An ongoing game of “finding out” would be a good exercise for librarian bloggers. Do more with the outboard memory than store info — maybe run a few hot cycles, pour some ether in the carburetor?
In that spirit, what’s this:
This is one busy site today: http://www.foia.cia.gov/
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What’s New at FOIA?
Site last updated: June 26, 2007
CIA Releases Two Significant Collections of Historical Documents
Two significant collections of previously classified historical documents are now available in the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room.The first collection, widely known as the “Family Jewels,” consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter.
The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of in-depth analysis and research from 1953 to 1973. The CAESAR and POLO papers studied Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, respectively, and the ESAU papers were developed by analysts to inform CIA assessments on Sino-Soviet relations.
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Notes on searching…
They control the view/interface carefully. It’s digital images, but not in pdf format… it’s their own inhouse format (just images of pages in a javascript window dressed up with a touch of formatting. On the bottom of each doc, you get a tad of metadata. That helps. None of these seem to be full-text searchable once the doc is opened, though.
You can right click to capture/view images (pages) from these docs. Are those permalinked?
Advanced searching. All, exact, any. Date ranges.
“Below is an alphabetical list of all the keywords used to index the documents on this site. They can be used in a search to find documents related to each term.” Keyword index here.
Here’s what your metadata formatting looks like at the bottom of each record:
(the above image has in its keyword field: ufo; lithuania; lithuanian border)
You can skip ahead pages to navigate documents, but you can’t search within docs once the doc is opened — no OCR in this view:
Other search details as they come. Please share tips if you’ve got ‘em.
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Alright. A friend points to interesting bit by Robert Baer (reflecting on “Why the CIA is Airing its Dirty Laundry“) at Time:
Which brings us to today. A day doesn’t pass that I don’t get a call from someone who asks me what really happened on 9/11. My initial reaction is, Read the 9/11 Commission report — Osama bin Laden did it. But then again, we hear more and more that key evidence in the 9/11 Commission Report is based on abusive interrogation tactics. We have no idea whether the 9/11 suspects were telling the truth or telling someone else’s truth to please their interrogators. I hope Hayden puts a line under this one too, although no doubt he’s going to have to wait until the next administration.
I reckon Bob Baer is in a better position to speculate than most of us. I’ll just be here searching the “family jewels”, if you need me.
Judicial Watch (via Wonkette): New FBI Documents: Osama bin Laden May Have Chartered Saudi Flight Out of U.S. after 9/11.
That would have been Ryan Flight 441 out of Orlando, according to these newly realeased documents.
That’s weird… or seems so to a basically optimistic and somewhat naive southern boy like myself. Too many secrets. I mean, those at the helm of our government are basically good, and do want to protect the citizenry from evil, right?
Is this a false negative? A case of similar names (Usama)? Even so, the questions about why and how the Saudis got the right to fly from the United States (to flee, even) after the attacks has never been clearly answered. This really needs to be clearly answered.
I’m trying to hunt a copy of an old Daniel Gold article without paying for it. E-copy, hopefully. My sources only index the journal back to ‘96… Tips appreciated.
The Fate of the Householder Nath
Daniel Gold, Ann Grodzins Gold
History of Religions, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Nov., 1984), pp. 113-132
This article consists of 20 page(s).
I was getting ready to send a friend some info on novelty theory, when I saw that Terence McKenna’s collection of rare books (slated for installation at the Esalen Institute) burned up a couple of months ago. What a library that would have been. It apparently contained many rare books and manuscripts, McKenna’s own personal notes and writings… a copy of Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books, a 1659 edition of Casaubon’s book on John Dee… good gracious.
And the fire started in the Quizno’s next door? The only news articles I can find on McKenna in 2007 is a NY Times review of a book about Esalen, and an Agrentinian story on cryptozoology. Was the entire collection destroyed? Did any of the scraps go to archivists in other libraries? I bet Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake would know. And Dennis McKenna, of course. It’s a shame… It’s like we’ve got less and less of him left.
I guess it’s time now to go back and listen to Terence again.
If I was a superstitious guy, I might be superstitious about this:
Thirteen years later than he might have done, Mr Brown launched his leadership campaign behind a brace of “invisible” glass autocues that virtually obscured him from his television audience.
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