A Controversial and/or Informative Site

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A DIFFERENT KIND OF NEWSLETTER
FROM THE OMNIVORE:

http://www.theomnivore.com

Head Off Martial Law + War With IRAN: Push HARD For CHENEY'S IMPEACHMENT - WE MUST HEAD OFF A SEQUEL TO 911 RIGHT NOW!


From the desk of John C. Hammell, President, International Advocates for Health Freedom (edited for brevity).

Impeachment Proceedings Against Cheney Will Proceed if Conyers Just Gets 3 More Co-sponsors on H.Res 333.

The Future of Civilization Literally Depends on Our Impeaching This Monster Now to Stop The Planned 911 Sequel From Happening In August Which Is Intended to Trigger War with IRAN and PLUNGE AMERICA into a TOTAL POLICE STATE.

You must take immediate action to push for Cheney's impeachment to help avert another false flag event that would trigger war with Iran, and put America under Martial Law. If Conyers gets just 3 more cosponsors on H.Res. 333, he'll launch impeachment proceedings against Cheney, and we all need that to happen, here is WHY:

WHY DOES IAHF THINK A SEQUEL TO 911 COULD BE SCHEDULED TO OCCUR DURING AUGUST RECESS?

See this interesting assessment by Captain Eric May, former Army Intel Officer: http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/07/07/23/may.htm

Especially take note of these accurate observations he's making:

This spring, on 5/9/07, Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 51, which allows him and his Homeland Security Agency to establish a dictatorship in the event of a national catastrophe -- like 9/11-2B.

More recently, on 7/10/07, Homeland Security Agency Director Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune that he had a "gut feeling" that Al Qaeda would attack us this summer.

The next day, on 7/11/07, a leaked National Intelligence Estimate affirmed Chertoff's gut feeling by announcing that Al Qaeda is rested and ready to hit us again with a 9/11-2B attack.

Last week reliable Bush sirens Condi Rice and Judith Miller made the rounds with obliging TV talking heads, discussing the enormity and inevitability of 9/11-2B.

On 7/20/07 ABC News presented articles carrying an official 9/11-2B worst-case scenario: a nuked Sears Tower -- or something equally catastrophic in another U.S. city: Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell seems to expect "Al Qaeda" (Al CIADuh) to attack "A very large building. The Sears Tower, or some large building in Seattle or L.A. or Dallas."
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/07/us-intel-chief-.html

WHAT TO DO RIGHT NOW ABOUT THIS NONSENSE:

1. Go here and watch this brief You Tube Video http://impeachcheney.org There you will witness this lying son of a bitch as he put his hand on a bible and swore to defend the constitution and swore to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic. He lied to get us into Iraq, and he's lying again to try to get us into war with IRAN.

2."Should Vice President Cheney be Impeached?" The answer to that question in the National Cheney Impeachment poll has been that 99.19 percent of more that 90,000 total votes so far say "Yes".

We've reached the impeachment moment for Vice President Dick Cheney. We've pushed the cosponsor list for H. Res. 333 up to 14. Chairman John Conyers says that if he gets 3 more he'll begin the impeachment proceedings.

And many Congress Members must be recognizing that there is no other path available. Cheney and Bush have repeatedly refused to comply with subpoenas, ordered former staffers not to comply, and announced that the Justice Department will not enforce contempt citations from Congress. When a special prosecutor attempted to hold this administration accountable, Cheney's chief of staff obstructed justice, and Cheney persuaded Bush to commute his sentence. There is no course left for Congress but Impeachment.

On Monday, July 23rd, the fifth anniversary of the meeting that produced the Downing Street Minutes, Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Ann Wright, Debra Sweet, Dave Lindorff, David Swanson, Jodie Evans, Medea Benjamin, Kevin Zeese, and Tina Richards will lead a march to Chairman Conyers office and not leave until he agrees to begin impeachment proceedings.

If you cannot be there, you can take two minutes on Monday and do two things: phone Chairman Conyers at 202-225-5126 and ask him to start the impeachment of Dick Cheney; and phone your own Congress Member at 202-224-3121 and ask them to immediately call Conyers' office to express their support for impeachment. Your Congress Member might be one of the three needed, not just to keep impeachment activists out of jail but to keep this nation from devolving into dictatorship.

Some have asked why take action against Cheney first. It is not just
that he is the least popular, he is also the most guilty. Already a
majority of the American people support his impeachment, by even the
most conservative pollsters. And of course once Cheney impeachment
reaches critical mass, his puppet Bush will be pulled in by the same
trail of evidence. But if you would also like to call for both of
them to be impeached at once, here is an action page for that too.

IMPEACH BOTH: http://www.usalone.com/impeach_both.php

The guy is evil beyond your wildest imaginings, and if we don't all work VERY HARD, RIGHT NOW to get him IMPEACHED, there is a VERY strong possibility that a SEQUEL to 911 could happen somewhere on US Soil during August recess when Congress is on vacation intended to manufacture consent for war with IRAN. The Gulf of Tonkin incident (false flag event that was used to manipulate us into the Vietnam War happened during August recess, and these monsters realize that people FORGET things like that so they try the same things AGAIN!! Lets NOT fall for it! Congressman Ron Paul is pushing for Bush and Cheney's impeachment, and I'm right there with him.

MORE ON THE RON PAUL PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

I'm really enjoying my participation in the Ron Paul Meetup Groups in Vancouver BC Canada, Bellingham, WA, and Seattle. You'll be glad to know that Dr. Paul has the most support in cyberspace of any candidate, with more than 571 Ron Paul Meetup Groups currently hard at work around the USA and the World- find out where the one is nearest you at


http://ronpaul.meetup.com/

I'm either going to do a road trip to Ames Iowa to help with the Iowa Straw Poll on August 11th, or I'm going to help our local Bellingham Ron Paul meetup group man a booth at the NW Washington State Fair in Lynden which is coming up soon. I have a gathering planned for this weekend at my house to which people from the Ron Paul Meetup groups in Vancouver BC and Bellingham will be coming so we can work in shifts to call Registered Voters in Iowa to urge them to turn out to the Straw Poll in Ames on August 11th.

We're going to work in shifts on the phones, and also have a barbecue, do some hiking, sailing and swimming. People all over the USA are doing the same thing to help Ron Paul who has done more to defend our access to supplements than anyone in congress.

Ron Paul refuses to accept his congressional pension when he retires, every year he gives some money back to the US Treasury in a personal effort to help balance the National Debt, and if he's elected he'll pull the troops out of Iraq ASAP. He'll also move rapidly to disband large chunks of the government, which is what we really need. He wants to repeal the Patriot Act and a lot of other mind numbing intrusive government BS and he's the only HONEST candidate running- watch this:

Ron Paul- Stop Dreaming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWfIhFhelm8&mode=related&search=
Ron Paul Revolution- Phoenix
http://www.rescue-us.org/ronpaulrevolutionhome.htm - see all videos on this site

IAHF TAKES DOWN BOTH HILARY AND GIULIANI EXPOSING BOTH AS THE SCUM THAT THEY ARE

Hilary Clinton sure isn't someone any of us can feel comfortable supporting. She is a tool of Pharma and has vowed to repeal the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. She is totally aware of the CIA's MKULTRA Mind Control program and is doing nothing to stop it.

She was NAILED recently when she thought the microphone had been turned off, collaborating with Edwards to try to manipulate further Democratic debates to try to shut others out of the debates, and this footage is TOTALLY REVEALING of what a manipulative individual the woman really is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwgLlDbwNwU
Amy Goodman discussed this on Democracy Now, so she sure doesn't support Hilary.

Friends - I know the CIA installs Presidents in this country, and I know that right now they're fixin' to either install Hilary or probably Giuliani. I can't stand either of 'em- here is why: My friend Robert Lederman in NYC is an artist who sells his artwork on the sidewalk. He was arrested several times by Giuliani's goon squad (the NYC Police) for selling portraits of Giuliani which depicted him when he was Mayor as Hitler with a brush mustache. Lederman won in court on First Amendment grounds, but this is very telling as to who the egomaniacal jerk really is. He was also exposed an Urban Legend by a bipartisan group of NYC Fire Fighters who shred any contention that this opportunistic SOB was EVER any sort of 911 "hero"- watch this video and forward it widely to expose this dirt bag for who he REALLY is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYEEO-58I

AND REMEMBER: If a sequel to 911 happens this summer, Bush/Cheney could become dictators for life. The BEST way to stop that is to push with everything we have for impeachment to send a strong mssg to the Neocon Whores and their AIPAC buddies who are trying so hard to get us into WAR with IRAN.

Remember- if we get into war with IRAN - the USA will become a TOTAL police state. We won't be able to go ANYWHERE without our PAPERS being checked, and there will probably be a huge push to have us line up and get microchipped, either that, or they'll start irradiating the hell out of us with HAARP to control us with directed energy. They've had the technology to do this for a long time and they've been experimenting with it for a long time too.

For Health Freedom,
John C. Hammell,
President
International Advocates for Health Freedom
556 Boundary Bay Road
Point Roberts,
WA 98281-8702
USA
http://www.iahf.com
jham@iahf.com
800-333-2553 N.America
360-945-0352 World
. . .
The views here are their own. SRH

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Leahy issues subpoena for Rove
By
Klaus Marre
July 26, 2007

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) Thursday issued a subpoena for top White House adviser Karl Rove to compel him to testify about the firing of several U.S. attorneys.
“The evidence shows that senior White House political operatives were focused on the political impact of federal prosecutions and whether federal prosecutors were doing enough to bring partisan voter fraud and corruption cases,” Leahy said. “It is obvious that the reasons given for the firings of these prosecutors were contrived as part of a cover-up and that the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort.”

Leahy issued the subpoenas, one to Rove and one to White House aide Scott Jennings, after consulting with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the committee’s ranking member.

“The Bush-Cheney White House continues to place great strains on our constitutional system of checks and balances,” Leahy added. “Not since the darkest days of the Nixon administration have we seen efforts to corrupt federal law enforcement for partisan political gain and such efforts to avoid accountability.”

The move is a further escalation of the constitutional battle between Congress and the White House over whether Bush administration officials must provide testimony and documents to legislative branch investigators.

Leahy said he is not taking this step lightly and only decided to proceed after “[exhausting] every avenue seeking the voluntary cooperation of Karl Rove and J. Scott Jennings.”

The Judiciary Committee chairman concluded that the investigation has “reached a point where the accumulated evidence shows that political considerations factored into the unprecedented firing of at least nine United States attorneys last year.”

In a letter to Rove, Leahy gives the White House official a week to appear before the panel and testify under oath.

“I hope that the White House takes this opportunity to reconsider its blanket claim of executive privilege, especially in light of the testimony that the President was not involved in the dismissals of these U.S. Attorneys,” Leahy said in his letter. “I am left to ask what the White House is so intent on hiding that it cannot even identify the documents, the dates, the authors and recipients that they claim are privileged.”
http://www.buzzflash.com^ ^ ^ ^ ^ .

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.x x x x x x x If Only America Were the National Basketball Association,
Gonzales Might be History by Now
By mark karlin
Created 07/26/2007 - 12:39pm
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Published on BuzzFlash.org

We read with keen interest the great sorrow and lamentation about an NBA referee who was allegedly discovered to be betting on league games.

As the Chicago Tribune reported in its July 25 editorial entitled "A flagrant foul on the NBA": [1]

Last month, the National Basketball Association was informed that the FBI and the Justice Department were investigating Tim Donaghy, a 13-year referee, on suspicion that he bet on NBA games and provided inside information to gamblers about players. On July 9, Donaghy sent a letter to the league tendering his resignation.

So, in less than time than you can say b-ball, the compromised ref was gone. Would we were so lucky with Alberto "Consigliere" Gonzales.

But there's potentially worse news for the league: Donaghy has reportedly told investigators that he will name other officials and players involved in gambling.

These charges could shatter the already fragile credibility of the NBA. Complaints about officiating were rampant during this year's NBA playoffs.

The analogy to the Bush Administration goes without saying, except that the reaction of so many poobahs, pundits and almost the entire Republican Congressional delegation is comparable to standing up for the referee and defending his right to stay on officiating games.

That certainly is how this group of D.C. insiders, and betrayers of the rule of law, are handling the brazen -- and even outlandishly bizarre -- ongoing perjury committed by Gonzales in his recent appearances before Congress.

Furthermore, in Gonzales’ July 25 testimony, it took just a few hours to nail him for perjuring himself as to the reasons he and Bush’s former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, "visited" John Ashcroft in the hospital, as he was sedated and recovering from a serious medical condition. Gonzales’ most recent explanation of the now historically infamous hospital bed attempt at bullying Ashcroft to sign off on Bush and Cheney’s illegal domestic spying activity is now indisputably proven to be an act of perjury before Congress.

"Tuesday morning," the Tribune writes, "a somber David Stern stood before a room of sports reporters to outline what he called 'the most serious situation that I have experienced either as a fan of the NBA, a lawyer for the NBA or commissioner of the NBA.'"

The Bush Administration’s assault on the rule of law, the Constitution, and democracy is certainly the most "serious" threat to the Republic in memory.

Ken Starr and the right-wing junta-in-waiting who backed him knew that they had to nail Clinton on a technical violation of the law. Bush, Cheney and Rove are relying on keeping Gonzales as head of the Justice Department to prevent any possible legal indictment that could be used to impeach or try them.

Given that Gonzales is essentially the chief "referee" of justice in the United States, as long as he is there, there will not be a legal indictment of any high-level Busheviks. (Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation was a fluke that occurred when Ashcroft, for still unknown reasons, recused himself from the Plame investigation.)

So, the Democrats don’t need to call for any more special counsels or probes as a political gesture to put Bush on the defensive.

It’s time to stop pussyfooting around. Bush and his crew don’t care about what anyone says or calls for. They only respond to direct action.

Impeach Gonzales for perjury, which is already proven in the public record. Anything less allows the White House to continue to stonewall.

Bush, Cheney and Rove have prevented more high-level crooks from breaking ranks and seeking immunity for two reasons: loyalty to the crew and the fear of swift retaliation if anyone were to squeal.

It’s time to remove this "foul" stain on America and restore integrity to our system of justice.

It is time for the power play, not for shouting from the bench.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Technorati Tags: Editorials [2] Gonzales [3] Impeachment [4] Perjury [5] NBA Referee [6]
Source URL:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/articles/editorials/150

Links:
[1]http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0725edit1jul25,0,1235959.story
[2] http://technorati.com/tag/Editorials
[3] http://technorati.com/tag/Gonzales
[4] http://technorati.com/tag/ Impeachment
[5] http://technorati.com/tag/ Perjury
[6] http://technorati.com/tag/ NBA Referee
(http://www.buzzflash.com/articles)
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"Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck."

Susan Jacoby:
-
(1945-)
American author
~~~

"The government of the absolute majority is but the government of the strongest interests; and when not effectively checked, is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised. [To read the Constitution is to realize that] no free system was ever farther removed from the principle that the absolute majority, without check or limitation, ought to govern."

John C. Calhoun
(1782-1850)
American statesman
~~~
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."

Rev. Edmund A. Opitz
(1914-2006)
American minister, author

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.V V V V V V V
A VIDEO - AN ARTICLE - A VIDEO
What Harry Reid Doesn't Know About His Own Bill"Exit" Amendment Would Leave Troops in Iraq Indefinitely
By
Tina Richards

07/26/07 "Counterpunch" -- - I attended the MoveOn.org rally on Tuesday night where Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid discussed how they were going to "end the war" and "bring our troops home" with the Levin-Reed Amendment. When I asked if they meant all the troops, I was quickly told to, "shut up" and muscled aside by security. A fellow Marine Mom was treated in much the same manner and we couldn't get over how much like the Republicans the "Anti-Escalation" folks were acting. (Video link below.)

I thought maybe I missed something in the Amendment and should reread it to ensure I did not miss anything. Yet an in-depth analysis of the Amendment is not needed in order to find the contradictions. A quick glance paired with recent statements made by Senator Reid prove that it holds no ambitions of easing the minds of military families and moms who want to know, "how do you choose which of our sons and daughters to abandon in Iraq?"

The Amendment provides for our troops to come home, except for the following three reasons:

(1) Protect United States and Coalition personnel and infrastructure,

(2) Provide logistical support for Iraqi security forces and to

(3) Engage in counter-terrorism operations against international terrorism groups and their local affiliates.

I had an opportunity to ask Leader Reid about how many troops will be abandoned in Iraq. He bluntly stated, "we haven't spoken to the military yet, at that this stage we don't know."

We don't know? They have pushed and prodded for this Amendment and they don't know?

If Members of Congress do not have any idea how large of a future force this amendment calls for, then how can we as military families possibly support it? Senator Reid has admitted that this proposed "pull-out plan" does nothing yet leave the decision up to the military leadership, who take their direction from President Bush.

It must be made clear to the public that the Levin-Reed Amendment does not call for a specific withdrawal from Iraq nor does it seek to revamp the American mission in the region. Representatives such as Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi who proudly boast of being men and women of peace; disgrace not only their own selves, yet also the millions of true warriors of peace in this country, when they back a plan that will leave America's future in Iraq to military generals. The Levin-Reed Amendment is nothing more than a political stunt that calls for, at best, a smaller war, not an end to the occupation which the American public and the world yearns to see.

Under the Amendment, our sons and daughters will be abandoned with no way home. Maybe if it wasn't our sons and daughters being abandoned we could join in with MoveOn and American's Against Escalation and be thankful the Democrats want some of them home. Next time you say, "support the troops," try to include all the troops.

Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi and all of the other Democratic leadership; we plead you to push forward legislation that will bring "all" our sons and daughters home from this occupation. We cannot support an amendment that provides for leaving stranded an "unknown" amount of our troops. Until that time, the peace movement will continue to speak out against these cruel promises of withdrawing our troops. We will also continue to struggle against MoveOn.org and other such groups that blindly fall in line with the Democratic Party and their anti-escalation, not-anti-war, agenda.

You Tube Video, Tina & Grassroots America Interviews Harry Reid on the War and impeachment:
Go on-site to view:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

Tina Richards is the director of Grass Roots America and the mother of Marine Cloy Richards. V V V .

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. . . . . . .O’Reilly On His Message Board:
‘When We See Objectionable Things,
We Take It Off Immediately’

Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly has embarked on a smear campaign to marginalize the netroots through a full frontal assault on the Daily Kos site. First, he was able to pressure JetBlue into distancing itself from the upcoming YearlyKos convention. Now, he is focused on preventing presidential candidates from attending the conference next week.

Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, he labeled Daily Kos a “hate website.” His guest, Howard Wolfson — a political adviser for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — defended the netroots as a community of people “participating in our democracy.” O’Reilly responded by cherry-picking a few comments that were demeaning and derogatory towards Clinton, prompting Wolfson to note that O’Reilly’s own site contains similar garbage:

WOLFSON: Bill, even your website has things on it that you would find objectionable.

O’REILLY: That’s bull. Look, we know what you’re going to say because the Kos planted someone in there. But when we see objectionable things, we take it off immediately. They traffic in it.

Watch the interview:Go on-site to view.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress perused the O’Reilly messageboard (available only to paid subscribers) to examine the contents of the comments posted there. We found Bill Clinton referred to as “cow manure,” Hillary as “the she devil,” Obama as “the anti-Christ,” and other derogatory remarks. Contrary to O’Reilly’s claim that “objectionable things” are taken off immediately, these comments are still on the site this morning:

I thought that Bill Clinton was a piece of cow manure, but he still was the President of the United States. [posted by vvatc, 7/23/07, 8:23 PM PT]

Yeppers, the she devil is the smart one. A turn towards the right does that for people. She’s crafty! [posted by Martha Wells, 7/24/07, 3:11 AM PT]

Obama may well be the anti-Christ for the way the media builds him up as the savior for all of the ills in the country. [posted by Mike Piche, 7/19/07, 5:56 PM PT]

RE: Illegal immigrants worth fighting for??? they breed likes rats 100 make 1000 in 9 months [posted by bullpen, 7/16/07, 11:16 AM PT]

My daughters looking through it the other day, sees Chertoff, says, “is that the guy in charge of our homeland? He looks like a Nazi mom.” I concur. [posted by Debra Sanders, 7/15/07, 9:48 AM PT]

Aravosis has more here and here.

Previously, O’Reilly blasted ThinkProgress as “hired guns” who are “paid to smear people.” He also suggested that the best way to deal with the blogosphere is to “go in with a hand grenade.”

Editor’s Note: It is very difficult to sanitize comments sections. While each blog should have a terms of use policy that restricts hateful or threatening commentary, it is extremely difficult to find the resources to enforce these policies around the clock in a fair way. ThinkProgress commenters know this as well as anyone. O’Reilly shouldn’t be trying to smear blog sites by cherry-picking a few unrepresentative comments. If he has objections to front-page posts, he should voice them.

UPDATE: Lane Hudson has more.

Filed under: Ethics, Media
Posted by Think Progress July 25, 2007 11:16 am

Permalink | Comment (147)

147 Comments » Go on-site to view or add to comments . . . . .
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Food in botulism recall still being sold
By
ANDREW BRIDGES
Associated Press Writer
Sat Jul 28, 4:22 AM ET

Stores nationwide are continuing to sell recalled canned chili, stew, hash and other foods potentially contaminated with poisonous bacteria even after repeated warnings the products could kill.

Thousands of cans are being removed from store shelves as quickly as investigators find them, more than a week after Castleberry's Food Co. began recalling more than 90 potentially contaminated products over fears of botulism contamination.

The recall now covers two years' production at the company's Augusta, Ga., plant — a tally that spirals into the tens of millions of cans.

Spot checks by the Food and Drug Administration and state officials continue to turn up recalled products for sale in convenience stores, gas stations and family run groceries, from Florida to Alaska. The FDA alone has found them in roughly 250 of the more than 3,700 stores visited in nationwide checks, according to figures the agency provided to The Associated Press.

In states like North Carolina, more than one in three stores checked by state officials in recent days were still offering recalled products for sale. Officials there pulled 5,500 cans and pledged to keep searching.

"We're not going to quit. These numbers are too high," said Joe Reardon, who oversees food protection for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Four people have been sickened and hospitalized because of the contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials fear the tally will grow.

A Hawaii man was hospitalized with symptoms of botulism poisoning after eating canned chili that was subject to the recall, a state health official said. Tests were being conducted to confirm the cause of his illness.

California health officials were investigating whether botulism confirmed in a San Diego County woman was linked to the recall. The woman reported eating a Castleberry's product before falling sick in early July.

"Frankly, the fact we have had only four illnesses in this situation has people saying, 'Well, what is the big deal?' The deal is this is something that can land you in the ICU, not being able to breathe, for weeks," said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's lead food safety expert, prior to Friday's disclosure of the possible cases in Hawaii and California.

FDA investigators believe Castleberry's failed to properly cook some or all the products, allowing the Clostridium botulinum bacteria to survive the canning process. In the oxygen-free and moist environment of the sealed cans, the bacteria thrive and produce a toxin that causes botulism, a muscle-paralyzing disease.

"The longer this stuff stays in the can, the worse it gets," Acheson said.

The bacteria also produce gases that can cause contaminated cans to swell and burst. Already, cans being held in a company warehouse have begun to break open. Health officials say the extremely potent toxin can infect people if it is inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the eye or breaks in the skin.

Health experts consider botulism a severe health threat but worry that word of the recall has not reached all consumers or retailers, especially mom-and-pop operations.

"It has been a problem getting the message out. We're having a problem reaching the smaller stores," said Lynae Granzow, an epidemiologist with the Indiana Department of Health.

In Massachusetts, health inspectors found recalled products in fewer than 50 small stores, mostly in the Boston area, state Department of Public Health spokeswoman Donna Rheaume said. Spot checks in Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, Montana, New York, Indiana and elsewhere also have found them on shelves.

Castleberry's has hired a company to collect the recalled products from stores. It has posted a complete list of the recalled products, including some dog foods, on its Web site — http://www.castleberrys.com/

People who have any of the recalled products at home should double-bag and throw them away, the FDA recommends.

Castleberry's is owned by Bumble Bee Seafoods LLC, based in San Diego.


On the Net:

FDA botulism information: http://tinyurl.com/324exf
Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

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Judge expects Vioxx stroke cases By
JANET McCONNAUGHEY
Associated Press Writer
Fri Jul 27, 5:55 PM ET


Next year's federal Vioxx trials may focus on people who had strokes after taking the once popular painkiller, the judge assigned to handle pretrial matters in all 8,575 federal lawsuits said Friday.

"We may carve out five or six stroke cases and try them," U.S. District Judge Eldon E. Fallon told attorneys for plaintiffs and manufacturer Merck & Co., which pulled the blockbuster drug from the market in 2004 after studies indicated it doubled cardiovascular risks.

The five cases heard so far in federal court all involved people who had heart attacks after taking Vioxx. Merck won four of them.

The judge said arguments on two disputes may wait on testimony from the governors of Mississippi and Indiana about their consultations with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as new drug label rules took effect.

Plaintiffs' lawyers have subpoenaed Gov. Haley Barbour, R-Miss., a former lobbyist whose clients included major drug companies, and Gov. Mitch Daniels, R-Indiana, a former executive for Eli Lilly and Co.

Fallon said he would schedule hearings later on Merck's requests for a new trial in a case it lost and for permission to immediately appeal Fallon's ruling on the FDA label question.

Merck faces about 26,950 lawsuits from people who claim the drug caused heart attacks or strokes and Merck failed to provide enough warning about cardiovascular dangers. A 16,400 are in state court in New Jersey, with additional cases in other states.

The suits include about 45,225 plaintiffs, and Merck has agreed to let another 14,450 potential claimants sue after their statute of limitation expires.

Lawyers for individuals and companies suing Merck subpoenaed the governors for videotaped testimony about their responses when asked by the FDA whether the new label rules would violate states' rights.

That will have a direct bearing on Merck's request for permission to immediately appeal a ruling that the FDA's approval of a label does not protect drug makers from lawsuits claiming a label's warnings were inadequate, plaintiffs' lawyer Russ Herman of New Orleans said Friday.

The FDA made that claim in the preamble to rules that took effect in January 2006. Fallon ruled early this month that the arguments are "entirely unpersuasive" and two trials may proceed.

After the hearing Friday, plaintiffs lawyer Arnold Levin of Philadelphia said FDA was supposed to get states' opinions about whether a proposed rule would violate states' rights.

"The FDA forgot to do that. After the rule took effect, they said, `Whoops! How about talking to the governor of Indiana? He's OK, he used to be CEO for a drug company. How about talking to the governor of Mississippi? He's OK; he used to be a drug lobbyist.'"

But, Levin said, the FDA never made their responses public.

The FDA contends that since its rules control what is on the labels, they pre-empt state law — the controlling issue even in federal court claims that a warning is inadequate. Merck wants to appeal now, rather than after final rulings in the two specific cases on which Fallon ruled.

Herman said the question also affects Merck's request for a retrial of its only loss in federal court — a suit filed by retired FBI agent Gerald Barnett of Myrtle Beach, S.C., who had a heart attack in 2002.

Fallon said he may hold that hearing after getting Barbour and Daniels to testify or hold the hearing sooner and wait to rule until the depositions are in. The governors' testimony could come by September.

Merck lawyer Phil Wittmann said he didn't think the governors' testimony was relevant to Barnett's case. But Fallon said he had mentioned the issue in a footnote to his ruling. "This issue has come up in every case," he said.

Merck contends Fallon usurped a jury's job when he proposed a $1.6 million award to Barnett to replace the $51 million jury judgment he had found excessive.

Jurors in Barnett's case decided he should get $50 million to compensate him for injuries from a 2000 heart attack and $1 million in punitive damages against Merck. Fallon ruled the compensatory damages were unreasonable, since Barnett was retired and had made a good recovery.

As an alternative to a retrial on damages, Barnett asked the judge to suggest a more reasonable award, and accepted Fallon's recommendation: $1 million in punitive damages, $600,000 in compensatory damages.

Merck contends that by doing so, Fallon usurped a job that should have been done by a jury. And, the company said in court documents, "Because there is no way to determine what damages the jury concluded Mr. Barnett suffered, let alone what compensation it awarded for each component of his damages, there is no way to lop off — or even calculate — the `excessive' part of the jury's award."

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070727/ap_on_he_me/vioxx_federal_cases;_ylt=Amj5Mw92InakoWp_4Khaf3Za2 4cA
We know two elderly ladies who after taking this drug, became ill. They said they did think they were going to die as their hearts were hurting so, this along with other feelings of being sick. One lady even gave us the packet the medicine came in and asked us to check on it for her. This was well before any national news organization picked up on the fact that Vioxx was making people very sick and some have even been reported to have died from this medication, as well as suffering strokes. Once this medication became known for it's dangers, and cases ended up in court, and when a jury sided with the pharmaceuticals, and didn't decided in the injured party's favor we were shocked. We are dismayed by that verdict, and the jurors certainly didn't know much about the subject.

A top attorney told us that Hospitals and Pharmaceuticals have hired guns who will go in and say anything they tell them to; other doctors and so called "experts" who are there at their bidding. It is almost impossible to win against such a padded defense. Pity, but this is just how it is. The injured party is not so likely to win a thing in court, as the perpetrators have an unlimited expense account, they have the hired guns on hand, and they have the know-how as to how to go about making the injured parties cases look made up and frivolous. This was told to me by one of the top attorneys in the United States; one whose firm represents numerous doctors and hospitals, so he does know what he's talking about as he and his colleagues have experienced just what it is he was talking about. SRH
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"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. 'We have a single system,' he wrote, and 'in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.'"

Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
~~~

"No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies."

Salvador de Madariaga
(1886-1978 ),
Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian,
noted for his service at the League of Nations
~~~
"...free enterprise, a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich."

Noam Chomsky
[I] ~~~
"Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort."

Marshall McLuhan
-
(1911-1980)
~~~
"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire - 'Here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, 'Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe.

"But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe."

Janice Fine
-
Dollars and Sense magazine

~~~~~

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:: :: :: A VIDEO

When Will We Have Had Enough?

"It's far easier to fight for principles than to live up to them"

Last night, I went to bed with a book. Not as much fun as a 29 year old, but the book contained a speech by Adlai Stevenson. The year was 1952. He said, "The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live and fear breeds repression. Too often, sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-Communism." Today, it's the cloak of anti-terrorism. Stevenson also remarked, "It's far easier to fight for principles than to live up to them" Click here for 1950s: Adlai Stevenson's ''Nature of Patriotism'' Speech, 1952

From Boston Legal - Boston Legal:03/14/2006

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
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. . . . . . .A BOOK REVIEW: . . .
No Place to Hide
(Paperback) By
Robert O'Harrow

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
Considering the ongoing effort to get to the bottom of the Bush Administration's illegal spying on Americans, this book (from 2006) provides an excellent, well-researched introduction to the increasing surveillance that the government -- primarily through private corporations -- is conducting on American citizens, which means us.

And since the information is coming through "outsourced" profiteering companies, it means that that data collected on our private lives is in the hands of both private companies AND the government. Are you starting to feel like your privacy has been invaded?

You should.

And some of these same corporations, such as ChoicePoint, have been used by the Republicans to help suppress voting, as ChoicePoint did in Florida in 2000 through its infamous "Felons Voter Purge."

In short, modern advances in surveillance have allowed the people with the data to control the nation. That is why the Bush Administration is so fiercely trying to -- even in mid-2007 -- increase its "Big Brother" powers.

Booklist:

"In this era obsessed with terrorism, an explosion in surveillance and related activities has resulted in the creation of a security industrial complex. O'Harrow outlines changes in data collection as a result of evolving technology originally designed for marketing that has now been adopted by our government for homeland security and the war on terrorism. O'Harrow critiques the merger between public and private interest in high-tech intelligence systems in ways that trample our traditional values of privacy and civil liberties. He implicates all of us--not just the usual suspects--in the erosion of privacy when we use cell phones and cars that allow our locations to be tracked or when we use credit cards and produce profiles that can be linked and made widely available. The result is vulnerability to identity theft or invasion of privacy on a level of which most citizens are unaware. O'Harrow argues for greater balance between--and awareness of--our national security needs and the greatest risks to our privacy as citizens."

From a Washington Post review of "No Place to Hide":

"So what's the problem? Should we care that there's no place to hide? What dangers are posed by this more convenient, more secure society? In this chilling narrative, O'Harrow identifies the risks and vividly illustrates them with powerful real-life stories.

First, there is the simple risk of mistake. The data in these systems, according to Ole Poulsen, one of HOLe's creators, are "full of errors and noise and wrong information." As a result, individuals are denied insurance, credit, employment, the right to board an airplane, and even the right to vote when the system spins out inaccurate information. And, as O'Harrow persuasively demonstrates, correcting the record can be a nightmare.

Second, there is the risk of public disclosure. We regard much of this information as private. But hackers can all too easily capture it and use it to humiliate, blackmail and impersonate us. The Federal Trade Commission reports that in a typical year, 10 million Americans were the victims of identity theft, resulting in bounced checks, loan denials, harassment from debt collectors, cancelled insurance and false accusations of criminal conduct.

Third, there is the risk that government will use this information not only to ferret out terrorists, but also to suppress dissent and impose conformity. In the 1990s, this technology was developed primarily by private companies to enable marketers to target and profile consumers. After Sept. 11, however, the FBI, CIA, NSA, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security aggressively sought access to these business databases, creating a vast private-public partnership in the exchange of such information. Moreover, the USA Patriot Act took full advantage of the post-9/11 crisis mentality and authorized a wide range of previously restricted government surveillance and data-gathering activities. Although the stated goal of these activities is to ensure our security, history teaches that once government has such information, it will inevitably use it to harass and silence those who question its policies.

Finally, O'Harrow warns that such massive invasion of privacy and intrusion into our ordinary anonymity may well alter the very fabric of our society. Once we understand that our every move is being tracked, monitored, recorded and collated, will we retain our essential sense of individual autonomy and personal dignity? Can freedom flourish in such a society? Is this the long awaited coming of 1984, the Brave New World of the 21st century, or will we somehow continue business, and life, as usual?"
http://www.buzzflash.com . . . . .
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<<<<<::>>>>>

OUR OPINION:
Bush asserts a king's prerogative
With showdown over Iraq looming,
president courts constitutional crisis
By
Jay Bookman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 07/25/07

"Congress shall have the power ...

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces."

—- Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution

In theory, President Bush is sworn to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. In reality, he has treated federal law as a menu from which he picks and chooses those laws he likes, while ignoring those that do not suit his taste.

That royalist attitude may soon inspire a constitutional confrontation unrivaled in U.S. history.

At the moment, the president's penchant for ignoring laws he finds inconvenient is best displayed in the standoff with Congress over subpoenas. Congress has demanded the sworn testimony of White House officials as part of an investigation into the Justice Department; the White House is refusing to allow that testimony, citing executive privilege.

In itself, that conflict is hardly unusual; it continues a traditional contest of wills between presidents and Congress that goes back to the earliest days of the Republic. The conflict is so standard that federal law lays out a clear process for resolving it. If witnesses refuse to honor congressional subpoenas and are found in contempt, the matter is referred to the U.S. attorney from Washington, D.C., "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."

The wording of that law doesn't give the U.S. attorney any leeway. It doesn't say that he or she "can" or "may" bring it before the grand jury. It says he or she "shall" bring the matter to the grand jury, so the courts can resolve the conflict between the other two branches of government.

Bush, however, claims the right to ignore that law. He not only refuses to allow his aides to testify, he refuses to allow the U.S. attorney to refer the matter to the grand jury, as the law says he must. In essence, Bush is denying Congress access to the courts as an impartial arbiter of their dispute.

Now, in most other eras in American history, that would be the making of a serious confrontation between the congressional and executive branches. But in the Bush administration, it's a minor prelude to what may be coming next.

For months now, Congress has been debating ways to force a change of course in Iraq. Under the Constitution, the president is commander- in-chief, but Congress has the power of the purse —- the right to fund or refuse to fund government activities. That means that the most obvious means of forcing a change of policy in Iraq is through the appropriations process. Congress could chose to fund military operations in Iraq only until a certain date, or only under certain conditions.

The Bush administration argues strongly against taking that course, as is its right. However, the White House also claims that any provision that sets a date certain for withdrawal would "infring[e] on the president's constitutional authority as commander-in-chief." In other words, the White House believes that any law telling the president what to do in Iraq would be unconstitutional, and thus could be ignored.

The administration has already refused to abide by numerous other provisions of law that it considered an unconstitutional assault on its powers, with the law regarding congressional subpoenas only the most recent. And within the administration, that a hard-nosed approach toward executive power has been championed most strongly by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney did not come to that position lately. He expressed similar opinions 20 years ago, when he was still a member of Congress from Wyoming and vice chairman of a committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal.

The heart of that scandal involved the Boland Amendment, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. That provision —- a clear case of Congress exercising its power of the purse —- barred the U.S. government from sending financial or military aid to the Contra guerrillas, who were trying to overthrow the Communist government of Nicaragua. When a cabal inside the Reagan White House arranged secret means to fund the Contras anyway, in clear violation of federal law, a scandal was born.

Most congressmen, Republican and Democratic alike, believed the White House had broken the law by funding the Contras. Cheney did not. In a minority committee report, he and others argued that the right to conduct foreign policy belongs exclusively to the president, and the Constitution "does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping presidential power."

"Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism," the 1987 report argued. "If they interfere with core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down."

"The power of the purse . . . is not and was never intended to be a license for Congress to usurp presidential powers and functions," the report concluded.

That attitude clearly animates the Bush administration in its dealings with Congress on lesser issues, and if applied to Iraq could have enormous ramifications. It provides the philosophical foundation —- a foundation poured, set and cured over the previous six years —- for the administration to continue trying to fight in Iraq no matter what restrictions Congress may choose to enact. And that would set the stage for a whole range of nightmares, up to and including impeachment.

—- Jay Bookman, for the editorial board (jbookman@ajc.com)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info <<<::>>>

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:: :: :: :: ::

Cheney Big Brother?
MotherJones.com07/30/07 4:13 AM
Last week, increasingly beleaguered attorney general Alberto Gonzales exasperated Senators with another round of dubious testimony concerning everything from warrantless domestic surveillance to authorizing torture to US attorneys firings. But on one point, Gonzales' prevaricating may have been to protect his career benefactor Bush not from direct responsibility, but from something else. Gonzales refused to tell Senators who had ordered him to go to then ailing attorney general John Ashcroft's hospital bedside to try to coerce him to sign off on a domestic spying program that then acting attorney general James Comey had refused to reauthorize.

There are growing signs that Cheney was behind the whole incredible series of events that culminated with Gonzales and former chief of staff Andy Card being sent to a nearly comatose Ashcroft's bedside on March 2004 with an envelope with the orders to reauthorize the NSA domestic spying program. Former deputy attorney general James Comey had previously testified about the extraordinary scene at Aschroft's hospital bed.


Yesterday, Newsweek revealed that it was Cheney who briefed the "Gang of Eight" Congressional leaders on the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program the day of the controversial Gonzales Ashcroft hospital visit:
Late on the afternoon of March 10, 2004, eight congressional leaders filed into the White House Situation Room for an urgent briefing on one of the Bush administration's top secrets: a classified surveillance program that involved monitoring Americans' e-mails and phone calls without court warrants. Vice President Dick Cheney did most of the briefing. But as he explained the National Security Agency program, the lawmakers weren't fully grasping the dimensions of what he was saying.

Today, via TPM, a New York Times editorial says that it was Cheney who ordered Gonzales to Ashcroft's bedside.

Is "Fredo" Gonzales protecting Bush not from acknowledgement that he ordered the attempted end run around the acting attorney general on warrantless domestic spying, but rather from the revelation that he had turned over the keys on the issue to Cheney?

- Laura Rozen
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, ....

MotherJones.com / News / MoJo Blog

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/07/5015_cheney_big_brot.html?src=email&link=hed_20070730_bl3_bigbrothercheney
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Office of Special Counsel's War On Whistleblowers OSC is investigating Karl Rove's political machine. But until recently OSC head Scott Bloch's policy was to ignore whistleblowers' tips on murder, espionage, and terrorism, while vigorously rooting out any signs of the "homosexual agenda."

Daniel Schulman
April 24 , 2007

it looked as if leroy smith was going to get some recognition after all. A safety manager at a federal prison in California, he had challenged his bosses, risked his job, and endured threats of retaliation to expose hazardous conditions in a prison computer recycling program where inmates were smashing monitors with hammers, unleashing clouds of toxic metals. Now the federal government was flying him to Washington, D.C., as a whistleblowing hero. The Office of Special Counsel (osc), the federal agency charged with protecting government employees who expose waste, fraud, and abuse, had scheduled a catered event honoring Smith as "Public Servant of the Year." The office's director, Scott Bloch, had prepared a flowery speech that was later posted on the agency's website, referencing Sophocles and The Shawshank Redemption: "In the end, Morgan Freeman's character truly becomes what his name implies—a Free man," it read. "One person can root out corruption and abuse of power. Once he understands this, he is redeemed and can break out of the trap of fear, and break free into the light of integrity and justice. That is the effect of seeing a brave whistleblower stand up and win; it inspires the rest of us."

Only Bloch never delivered that speech. Just minutes before the September 7 ceremony was to begin, Smith received word that the event was off because a relative of an osc staffer had died. It seemed "kind of fishy" to Smith; indeed, an osc source told me the excuse was so transparent as to be "ludicrous." The real problem, the source said, was that Bloch—a Bush appointee who, employees say, shares his boss' antipathy for dissent—had learned that Smith was planning to speak at a press conference sponsored by the whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (peer), a persistent critic of the osc. The peer event went forward as planned, and at it Smith told the press that he felt the osc "bears some examination." True, he had been vindicated, but many of his colleagues who'd made similar disclosures had been ignored, and the prison conditions had not changed. "I cannot help but feel that my experience is a beacon of false hope for public servants who are trying to correct wrongdoing," he said.

Then again, given the current climate for whistleblowers, false hope might be all the hope there is. A series of court rulings, legal changes, and new security and secrecy policies have made it easier than at any time since the Nixon era to punish whistleblowers; the climate has deteriorated in recent years with the Bush administration's emphasis on plugging leaks and locking down government information. Bloch's tenure—he is the first director of the whistleblower office to face a whistleblower complaint of his own—has only added insult to injury.

It's come to the point where some advocates now counsel federal employees against coming forward, period. "When people call me and ask about blowing the whistle, I always tell them, 'Don't do it, because your life will be destroyed,'" says William Weaver, a professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and a senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. "You'll lose your career; you're probably going to lose your family if you have one; you're probably going to lose all your friends because they're associated through work; you'll wind up squandering your life savings on attorneys; and you'll come out the other end of this process working at McDonald's."

Weaver says that most of the people who contact him are so determined, they go ahead with their disclosures anyway. "I see what the result is," he sighs. "It's destruction from one end of their lives to the other."

the term "whistleblower" refers to the warning English bobbies used to sound when they saw a crime in progress, an alarm to other officers as well as bystanders. The first U.S. law protecting whistleblowers, the 1912 Lloyd-La Follette Act, came after the Taft administration tried to forbid federal employees from talking directly to Congress. But whistleblowers continued to encounter harassment and retaliation; in 1969, Air Force auditor Ernie Fitzgerald, who had told Congress about massive cost overruns in the C-5 cargo plane program, found himself fired at the behest of President Nixon. (On the Watergate tapes, Nixon can be heard saying, "Get rid of that son of a bitch!") Later, Nixon's plumbers went after Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, at one point breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in an effort to discredit and humiliate him. In response to these and other cases—and to the role that Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, had played in exposing Watergate—Congress passed a wave of anti-retaliation measures, including the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which established the Office of Special Counsel, and the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act. But today, many of these safeguards are gone or at serious risk. In 2005, the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight reported that the Whistleblower Protection Act has "suffered from a series of crippling judicial rulings [that] have rendered the Act useless, producing a dismal record of failure for whistleblowers and making the law a black hole." Says Thomas Devine, longtime legal director of the Government Accountability Project and one of the law's key advocates: "My baby turned out to be Frankenstein."

Long gone are the days of successful whistleblowers such as Ernie Fitzgerald—who ended up winning his job back and worked at the Pentagon until his retirement last year. "That's the wrong model for today's environment," a senior Pentagon official told me. "The model for today's environment is Deep Throat. You need to be buried deep in the system, completely anonymous, in order to have effective protection." These days, he added, whistleblowers who go public can expect "15 minutes of fame and 40 years of misery."

In theory, the Office of Special Counsel is supposed to prevent those problems—both by taking whistleblower tips and referring them for investigation, and by helping whistleblowers facing retaliation. In practice, advocates as well as some of the agency's staffers say, the osc has become yet another black hole into which disclosures and complaints disappear.

Bloch, 48, who's tall and heavyset and wears a close-cropped goatee, is a former law professor and attorney from Lawrence, Kansas. A devout Catholic and one-time fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, he was tapped early in President Bush's first term as the deputy director of the Justice Department's Task Force for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives; then, in June 2003, the president nominated him to run the osc.

It was a culture clash from the start. Having chosen as his deputy a Catholic lawyer who had publicly taken a position against the "homosexual agenda," and hired young lawyers from Ave Maria Law School, the conservative Catholic school founded by Domino's Pizza billionaire Tom Monaghan, Bloch questioned whether the osc should defend federal workers discriminated against for their sexual orientation. When the story got out and dozens of members of Congress signed letters of protest, Bloch blamed whistleblowers: "It's unfortunate that we have a leaker or leakers in our office who went to the press rather than coming to me," he told the Federal Times. Eventually, an embarrassed White House delivered a subtle rebuke to Bloch in the form of a statement reaffirming a long-standing federal prohibition against sexual-orientation discrimination, and noting that the president "expects federal agencies to enforce this policy."

Bloch's high-profile troubles had only begun. In February 2005, his office was accused of improperly dismissing hundreds of whistleblower cases that had been pending when Bloch took over. Among them was the complaint of Adam Finkel, a senior official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who, in October 2003, had disclosed to the osc that the government had refused to offer blood testing for federal workplace inspectors who were likely to have been exposed to the toxic substance beryllium while inspecting plants that use the metal. (When osha finally did test the inspectors, in 2004, 3.7 percent in fact came up positive for exposure to beryllium, which can cause fatal lung disease.) "It's bad enough that this all happened at osha, where they have a worker-protection mission," says Finkel, who is now a visiting professor at Princeton University, "but the federal employee who goes to osc looking for some kind of intelligent and grown-up analysis of these health issues, at least in my case, is getting nothing of the kind. I got nothing but skepticism and amateur science.... I was treated like, 'You're a Harvard Ph.D. but you're not a medical doctor, are you?'"

Bloch says he did not dismiss any cases improperly, but was simply trying to reduce the osc's perennial backlog. Before his tenure, he points out, some whistleblowers died while waiting for a response to their complaints. "If outside advocacy groups want to throw rocks at me, that's fine. We can take criticism. But it's really unfair to federal workers, and it's really unfair to the career staff here who have been working their tails off to bring justice in a more timely fashion."

It's those same career staffers, though, who have become Bloch's harshest critics. Weeks before the controversy over the dismissed cases erupted, Bloch announced, with no warning, that he was reassigning 12 staffers—about 10 percent of the total osc workforce, and the majority of them his perceived critics—to field offices across the country. They had 10 days to accept, or else they'd be fired. (Ten ultimately resigned.) Three months later, four Washington-based advocacy groups and an anonymous group of current and former osc employees—some affected by the transfers, some not—filed a complaint against Bloch with his own office. The transfers, says the employees' lawyer, Debra Katz, were retaliation against Bloch's critics, those perceived to be loyal to his predecessor, and those seen to have a "homosexual agenda."

Members of Congress also considered Bloch's reorganization suspicious. During a Senate oversight hearing in May 2005, Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) said he was "alarmed" by the restructuring—especially given that it came on the heels of a $140,000 outside evaluation of the office that had not recommended anything of the kind.

So that Bloch wouldn't have to investigate himself, the complaint against him was ultimately referred to the inspector general in the federal Office of Personnel Management. The investigation has been under way for more than a year, and there have recently been reports in the conservative press—which has cast Bloch as a martyr to liberal and gay activism—that the White House may be trying to cut him loose. "Bloch has been ostracized by the White House and was privately sent word that he should resign," the Weekly Standard reported in October. Bloch would neither confirm nor deny the report, saying only, "I look forward to being exonerated. There simply is no truth to the allegations, and I stand by that."

whatever bloch's fate, his critics say the osc controversy is symptomatic of a larger problem. "The Bush administration has absolutely not endorsed the concept of whistleblowing—they see it as disloyalty," one senior osc official told me. Bloch's tenure, echoes Sibel Edmonds, a former fbi translator and the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, is simply "a very good example that shows that the system is broken." Helped by post-9/11 security fears, the Bush administration has worked to lock down information in all areas of government. "Secrecy has become a central axis of executive branch policy," William Weaver, the Texas professor, testified before Congress this winter.

The administration has fought disclosures by invoking provisions such as the State Secrets Privilege and "sovereign immunity"—the English common-law notion that the king can do no wrong. It has worked behind the scenes on Capitol Hill to undermine whistleblower legislation, and, in the case of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, has launched a criminal probe to determine the source of leaks to the press. The president himself told reporters that leaking the nsa program had been "a shameful act" and said "the fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy." More documents than ever before are being shielded from public view—the number of classifications nearly quadrupled from 1995 to 2005, from 3.6 million to 14.2 million. The rampant classifications put whistleblowers at risk of criminal prosecution: Disclosing classified national security information to someone not cleared to receive it is a felony. In fact, in the administration's view, even members of Congress who sit on the intelligence committees and have top security clearances don't have the right to know some of the government's business. After nsa whistleblower Russ Tice made clear his intention to report the agency's warrantless surveillance program, carried out under a highly classified Special Access Program (sap), the nsa warned him that "neither the staff nor the members of the [Senate and House intelligence committees] are cleared to receive the information covered by the saps."

The courts have also not been kind to whistleblowers. Last May, in what whistleblower lawyer Steve Kohn calls "the single biggest setback for whistleblowers in the courts in the past 25 years," newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cast the tiebreaking vote in Garcetti v. Ceballos, a case involving a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney's office who claimed whistleblower retaliation. Under the ruling, Kohn says, public employees—all 22 million of them—have no First Amendment rights when they are acting in an official capacity, and in many cases are not protected against retaliation. "What that means is for employees who are making these disclosures on the job or in any official capacity, unless they have some statutory protection, they're shit out of luck," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of peer, the whistleblower advocacy group. Kohn estimates that "no less than 90 percent of all whistleblowers will lose their cases on the basis of that decision." Members of Congress—both Democrats and Republicans—scrambled to pass broader protections but failed in the face of opposition from the White House.

There are signs that Congress might be poised to reclaim some of its authority. On a bleak and snowy morning in late winter, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—in whose name chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) had just restored the word "oversight," stricken by his Republican predecessor—held hearings on government secrecy, with Edmonds and Tice watching from the gallery. That day, Waxman introduced whistleblower-protection legislation that has since passed in the House of Representatives; the White House has threatened a veto. Later this year, Congress will also take up the fate of Bloch's osc, which is up for reauthorization. (Proposals include moving the agency into Congress' Government Accountability Office, removing it from the White House's purview.)

For Bloch's critics, change can't come soon enough. "The public has every reason to be concerned," says the osc official. Bloch, he adds, "has contempt for whistleblowers."
::
Case Studies
Hung Out to Dry
Joseph Darby
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Fellow soldiers at Abu Ghraib
ALLEGATION: Torture
REWARD: Death threats
UPSHOT: Still fears for his life
For weeks after turning over graphic pictures depicting the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to military investigators, Army Specialist Joseph Darby slept with a cocked pistol under his pillow, fearing what might happen if his fellow soldiers caught wind of what he'd done. His name surfaced in Seymour Hersh's April 30, 2004, New Yorker exposé on Abu Ghraib but troops in Iraq didn't notice. A week later, as Darby sat in the mess hall watching a congressional hearing about Abu Ghraib, he heard Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly thank "Specialist Joseph Darby, who alerted the appropriate authorities that abuses were occurring." Darby was quickly dispatched back to the United States; upon his arrival, the Army warned him not to return to his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland, where many regarded him as a traitor. He and his wife now live in an undisclosed location. In a rare interview with 60 Minutes in December, Darby said he still fears for his safety. "I worry about the one guy who wants to get even with me," he said.

Rumsfeld "nailed [Darby] to the cross," a senior Pentagon official told me. "How can you go home and get a job selling cars in Maryland when you've just been revealed to be the guy who narc'd on all your people from Maryland who were from the same unit?" He added, "That case was completely blown. That guy's life has been ruined."
::
Code Talker
Russ Tice
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Defense Intelligence Agency
ALLEGATION: Agency infiltrated by spies
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: Went on to expose nsa domestic spying
A veteran intelligence official involved with the nation's most secretive special-access (or "black") programs, Russ Tice was subjected to emergency psychological testing, trailed by the fbi, stripped of his security clearance, and then exiled to the National Security Agency motor pool to gas up cars and chauffeur government officials—all after he reported his suspicion that a colleague at the Defense Intelligence Agency might be spying for China. It hardly seemed like a coincidence when, days after his May 2005 appearance at a press conference on Capitol Hill to advocate for stronger whistleblower protections, the nsa fired him.

Seven months later, Tice made headlines as a source for the New York Times' exposé on warrantless eavesdropping by the nsa. The Bush administration quickly launched a grand jury investigation—into the leaks, not the eavesdropping—and Tice was served with a subpoena, a move he says was meant to intimidate fellow whistleblowers. Tice insists that he didn't provide the paper with any classified material, and says he has much more information about "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" at the nsa and the dia. But thus far he has been prevented from sharing this information with Congress because, the nsa maintains, no one on Capitol Hill has the security clearance to hear what he has to say.
::
Red Team Alert
Bogdan Dzakovic
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Federal Aviation Administration
ALLEGATION: Lousy airport security (pre-9/11)
REWARD: Demotion
UPSHOT: Still sidelined
Wanna know how to get a bomb onto a plane? A submachine gun? Ask Bogdan Dzakovic, who for seven years led an faa "red team" that probed airport vulnerabilities and managed to breach security 90 percent of the time. Instead of taking action, the faa attempted to whitewash Dzakovic's findings. "We were ordered not to write up our findings in some cases and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities to see if the problems had been fixed," he later told the 9/11 Commission. "Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be checking."

After his worst fears came true on 9/11, Dzakovic filed a disclosure with the Office of Special Counsel. Overnight, he went from commanding an elite security force to "punching holes in paper and putting orientation binders together" for the Transportation Security Administration. The osc ordered the Transportation Department to investigate. In 2003, the probe substantiated Dzakovic's key concerns; four years later, Dzakovic is still hole-punching at the tsa.
::
Life as a State Secret
Sibel Edmonds
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: FBI
ALLEGATION: Bureau infiltrated by spy
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: $285,000 legal bill
Fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azeri, Sibel Edmonds was hired in the fbi's translation unit shortly after 9/11. Just six months later, after reporting her suspicions that her department had been infiltrated by a Turkish intelligence operation, she was abruptly fired.

The department's inspector general later found many of her allegations to be well founded and concluded that the fbi displayed "an unwarranted reluctance to vigorously investigate these serious allegations." The report offered eight recommendations for improving the fbi's translation service. None were implemented. Edmonds sued the Justice Department for unfair dismissal; former Attorney General John Ashcroft mounted an unprecedented defense, invoking the State Secrets Privilege to essentially classify any information regarding the case and even barring Edmonds and her lawyer from hearing the government's arguments to the judge. The suit was dismissed and Edmonds was left with a $285,000 legal bill. "Five years of fight, and it's like, 'Why do we even blow the whistle?'" she says. "It didn't fix the system."
::
Banished to the Basement
Richard Levernier
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Department of Energy
ALLEGATION: Nuclear weapons sites wide open to terror attacks
REWARD: Security clearance pulled, demoted
UPSHOT: Retired from dead-end job
Until August 2000, Richard Levernier, a 26-year Department of Energy employee, organized terrorist attacks against U.S. nuclear weapons sites—mock raids designed to expose weaknesses in the doe's security procedures. More than half the time, his pretend attacks succeeded. "The reason for this abysmal record was ingrained bureaucratic negligence to a terrifying degree," Levernier told Congress last year. Alarmed by doe's refusal to reform security procedures, in 2000 Levernier provided the media with an unclassified, but damning, report by the agency's inspector general. That got his bosses' attention—but instead of fixing the problem, they yanked Levernier's security clearance and transferred him to a windowless basement to oversee the department's foreign-travel program. Levernier took his case to the Office of Special Counsel, which eventually sided with him. But the office didn't have the power to restore his clearance, only to order doe to investigate his allegations. That report took 18 months to complete, and as Levernier noted in congressional testimony last year, it "insisted that all of the problems that I had identified had been fixed, despite the fact that there were at least a dozen reports...that said exactly the opposite." After five years of administrative purgatory, Levernier finally decided to retire last year—rather, he told Congress, "than being paid not to contribute to the national security."
::
Murder, He Wrote
Sandalio Gonzalez
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
ALLEGATION: Informant implicated in multiple murders while on payroll
REWARD: Ultimatum: Leave, or be downgraded
UPSHOT: Retired, won financial settlement
By the time Sandalio Gonzalez fired off a letter to the Office of Special Counsel on June 30, 2004, he'd tried everything else. For months, the longtime dea agent, then head of the agency's El Paso field office, had been trying to jump-start an official inquiry into the "House of Death" murders, in which a paid informant for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was implicated in a series of brutal drug-related killings in Juarez, Mexico. In one case, the informant bought the duct tape used to bind a victim, restrained him as he was immobilized, and provided quicklime to dissolve the remains. Worse, ice officials, who had the informant wear a wire and monitored his phone conversations, may have had foreknowledge of some of the killings (the code "carne asada" was frequently used to indicate an impending murder), yet refused to intervene, so intent were they on building a case against a particular high-level drug smuggler.

Gonzalez knew that blowing the whistle was unlikely to earn him friends within the agency. Years earlier, when he was the second in command of the dea's high-profile Miami field office, he had raised concerns about the suspicious disappearance of 10 kilos of cocaine from a raid, and for his trouble he had been transferred to the agency's much smaller field office in El Paso. This time, the agency had confronted him with an ultimatum: Retire quietly, or accept a downgrade on a crucial performance review.

Nevertheless, Gonzalez went ahead and alerted the osc. Days later, the whistleblower agency informed him that it "receives a large number of matters concerning disclosures of information" and that "cases are generally processed in the order in which they are received." Facing the end of a 32-year career in law enforcement, he wrote back again in September, this time filing a whistleblower reprisal complaint. When asked to describe the nature of his original disclosure, he wrote in neat capital letters: "MURDER."

By November, Gonzalez had received his response: The case was being closed without investigation. Two months later he retired from the dea, after 26 years of service.

Unlike many whistleblowers, Gonzalez did get a taste of vindication: He won an undisclosed financial settlement from the dea when he filed a retaliation suit in connection with the "House of Death" case; then, last December, a federal jury found that his transfer had also been an act of retaliation and awarded him $85,000. Now 56, Gonzalez lives near Miami and works for a defense contractor. Despite his settlement, he remains bitter. "This stuff consumes you," he says. "The whole thing is so unfair. And then you come to the realization that your government is a farce. That's what really hits you. I have no confidence in this government whatsoever, because I've seen it from the inside."

Beyond a "joint assessment" by the dea and ice, whose final report still has not been made public, the "House of Death" murders have never been investigated. Nor has Congress responded to Gonzalez's entreaties for a congressional inquiry

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

Go on-site for the not so flattering caricature of Karl Rove.
Just click on the following URL:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/dont_whistle_while_you_work.html

X X X X X .

[Saundra Hummer]

. X X X X XDaily Impeachment News:
July 30, 2007IMPEACHMENT TO BE INITIATED AGAINST GONZALES TOMORROW
Filed under: Impeachment Progress News
—
Mikael @ 3:08 pm
From NBC's Mike Viqueira
A group of House Democrats will introduce a resolution calling on the Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) will sponsor the measure. It will be dropped in the hopper tomorrow.

It's too early to say whether it will actually get anywhere.

Here's the text of resolution…

RESOLUTIONDirecting the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate whether Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, should be impeached for high crimes and
misdemeanors.
1 Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary shall
2 investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the
3 House of Representatives to impeach Alberto R. Gonzales,
4 Attorney General of the United States, for high crimes
5 and misdemeanors.
(Original Article: Go on-site to gain access to this article and more)
Let us know of impeachment news and help us spread the word:
2 Comments »
IMPEACHMENT TO BE INITIATED AGAINST GONZALES TOMORROW…

A group of House Democrats will introduce a resolution calling on the Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) will sponsor the measure. It will be dropped in the hopper tomo…

Trackback by
www.buzzflash.net
— July 30, 2007 @ 3:13 pm

Excitement and thrills through the halls of Congress to finally have the spine to introduce impeachment against someone other than Bush or Cheney.
The most corrupt administration in modern times. Since 1 AD ..
The administration of Bush and Cheney want to change the definition of the presidency and vice-presidents power and duties with no checks and balances as described in the constitution of the United States .. Osama Bin Laden may be on the loose until the United States becomes either a third world country or a dictatorship. Since Bush who had said one reason why Osama assisted the terrorist attack was because he did not like our freedoms.

Comment by makesenseofit
— July 30, 2007 @ 3:59 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a commenthttp://impeachforpeace.org/impeach_bush_blog/?p=2931 X X X

[Saundra Hummer]

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* * * * * * *
A BREAKING NEWS STORY
* * *
Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:
A FOUR-LANE INTERSTATE BRIDGE SPANNING THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER COLLAPSED DURING EVENING RUSH HOUR WEDNESDAY, SENDING VEHICLES AND TONS OF CONCRETE CRASHING INTO THE WATER

http://abcnews.go.com?CMP=EMC-1396* * * * *

We've been being warned of this very tragedy. Our deteriorating infrastructure has been the topic of conversation on PBS, and other media outlets numerous times, and has been for several years now.

Our government is letting our infrastructure rot away; letting it disintegrate before our eyes, and now this horrific tragedy has hit us smack between the eyes.

When will we learn that things need to change? (When change comes, will it be foreign contractors who will build our roads, bridges and other things which keep us as a country, up and running?) What has to happen for government, and we citizens, to begin to realize improvements must be mandatory? We can't allow this to continue to happen to us, as it surely will. Structures, just as we ourselves do, have a lifespan, and can only last so long without retrofitting or a total replacement. How many bridges could the money wasted in the administrations unneeded, and deadly, fiasco in Iraq have funded? How many lives were needlessly lost today? How many more lives will be lost tommorow? On which roads? On which interstate highways? SRH * * *
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X X X X X
What the Democrats Enable By Cowering Before a Bunch of Crooks. Busheviks Use FBI to Raid Possible Whistleblower, Who May Have Heroically Leaked the Existence of Bushevik Illegal Spying on Americans. This is What Used to Happen in the Soviet Union. The Democratic Leadership is Letting the Republicans Sovietize America. Weep for This Tyrannical Tragedy, as the Weak Democrats Play the Role of the Pro-Democracy Party in the Weimar Republic, Who Gave up the Power of the State to....Well, You Know Who.

Newsweek
Govt. Looks for Leaker on Warrantless Wiretaps
Aug. 13, 2007 issue -The controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm's desktop computer, two of his children's laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants. (At the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the leak: "This is really hurting national security; this has really hurt our country.")

A veteran federal prosecutor who left DOJ last year, Tamm worked at OIPR during a critical period in 2004 when senior Justice officials first strongly objected to the surveillance program. Those protests led to a crisis that March when, according to recent Senate testimony, then A.G. John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and others threatened to resign, prompting Bush to scale the program back. Tamm, said one of the legal sources, had shared concerns about he program's legality, but it was unclear whether he actively participated in the internal DOJ protest.

The FBI raid on Tamm's home comes when Gonzales himself is facing criticism for allegedly misleading Congress by denying there had been "serious disagreement" within Justice about the surveillance program. The A.G. last week apologized for "creating confusion," but Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy said he is weighing asking Justice's inspector general to review Gonzales's testimony.

The raid also came while the White House and Congress were battling over expanding NSA wiretapping authority in order to plug purported "surveillance gaps." James X. Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the raid was "amazing" and shows the administration's misplaced priorities: using FBI agents to track down leakers instead of processing intel warrants to close the gaps. A Justice spokesman declined to comment.

-Michael Isikoff
URL: http://www.buzzflash.com
OR....URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20121795/site/newsweek/
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2007 MSNBC.com X X X.

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:: :: :: :: ::Americans: Put $100 billion plus into new bridges

Investigators on the collapsed north end of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis.

Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii /Minneapolis Star Tribune/MCT)
Go on-site to view by clicking on the following URL:

http://www.buzzflash.com

by
Mark Silva

Americans appear to be in a fix-it mood when it comes to the nation’s crumbling bridges, with a new Gallup Poll finding that most Americans have not only paid close attention to the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, but also view the calamity as indicative of broader problems with the nation’s infrastructure.

And most appear quite willing to see Congress commit more than $100 billion toward fixing some of the problems. More than two thirds of those surveyed – 73 percent -- say they'd support Congress spending more than $100 billion on rebuilding bridges.

And here, perhaps, is the Swamp’s suggestion for a new political term for those candidates perennially targeting voters for support: “Bridge Moms.’’

The Gallup Poll has found that women tend to more concerned than men about the safety of the bridges which they are driving over since the Minneapolis disaster. The survey found 74 percent of women greatly or somewhat concerned and 58 percent of men similarly concerned.

In the survey, 57 percent told Gallup that the Minneapolis collapse is indicative of serious problems in the nation’s transportation system. Only 37 percent called the fall of the bridge over the Mississippi River an isolated incident.

Additionally, 31 percent of Americans are following the story of the bridge collapse very closely, and another 47 percent are following it somewhat closely. This combined 79 percent runs well above average in the attention that people have paid to stories in past polls.

It’s difficult to tell what impact the Minnesota bridge collapse will have on the average American drivers' “psyche,’’ Gallup’s Frank Newport reports. But the poll shows that the majority of Americans “are at least somewhat concerned about the safety of the bridges they drive over, including one-third who say they are very concerned.’’

Among those surveyed, 37 percent said they are very concerned about the safety of bridges over which they travel regularly and 30 percent said somewhat concerned – another 22 percent are not too concerned and 10 percent not concerned at all.

The survey involved 1012 adults interviewed Friday through Sunday, with the results carrying a possible margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. For more on the Gallup Poll, see editor-in-chief Frank Newport's report.

Posted by
Mark Silva
on
August 7, 2007 8:20 AM
Can we even begin to imagine the enormous benefit our country would see if all governments, federal, state, and local were to get busy and go to work on our failing and endangered infrastructure? The benefits would be tremendous; down to the designer, manufacturers, sellers and transporters of the last paper clip; the last printer ink cartridge. Seriously, the jobs created, the revenues gained by so many different industries are tied in together like an all encompassing web. There are the steel and iron workers who would benefit enormously, and they would put their earnings back into our economy, and the materials they work with would need to be supplied, manufactured and hauled. Look at the jobs there alone. There are any number of products and services, from bottled water, to tanks of diesel fuel, from sand and gravel. Then there's paint company's, drill and bit makers, die manufacturers, down to skip loaders & catapillars. Trucks and cars would be in great demand, and the money would be there to buy them. This from the ground up and all about. The sellers and the manufacturers of anything and everything would be greatly benefited. Family's needs and wants would also funnel money back into the economy, purchasing everyday goods as well as higher ticket items. They will have the funds to do it with. There's lighting and electric, trucking company's hauling to and fro; lunch wagons, lunch box manufacturers, to paper towel companies, from nuts and bolts, to shovel manufacturers. The jobs, suppliers, manufacturers, and services which would benefit are mind boggling and it would benefit a majority of us, not only a landed few.

The war machine would survive believe it or not, and we would benefit more than can be told, as a war economy, or so I've read, is a false economy, whereas, a country which has a well maintained infrastructure often times has a healthier economy. It would make for a happier people as well. One can feel proud of such accomplishments, instead of the sadness and fears a war brings on. One can sit back and feel much more secure; even happier and proud, about the state of our country; this when we build a safer and more prosperous America by taking care of our own internal needs. This can be done without turning our backs on the rest of the world.

Why can't this be policy rather than waging war to do what? Build up a few into mega billionaires? Why can't this type of outlook be policy rather than dealing in arms to get rich and working to rule over other country's?

Something has gone terribly astray with the mindset of this administration, and with too many who would like to take their place in the world. Some thought patterns need drastic make overs, there's a need to look for what it is which will actually benefit this country, not their cronies pocket books. It looks as though by just working on a failing infrastructure that more money than can even be contemplated will be out there to earn, and by thousands upon thousands of us, and it will come back to keep things afloat. We would, in all likelihood, prosper individually, and as a nation. SRH:: :: ::
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[Saundra Hummer]

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~~~~~~~
“The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press.” . . . . “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

"At the Audubon, December 13, 1964." In Malcolm X Speaks:
Selected Speeches and Statements, ed.
George Breitman, 96-114.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1964, 101
~~~
"Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang"

Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan
14 March 1785 (B 11:16-7)
~~~
"If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."

Henry David Thoreau
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849
~~~
"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may."

Mark Twain
~~~
"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."

Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Letter from Birmingham Jail,"
Why We Can't Wait, 1963
~~~
"Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor." --infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people."

Wendell Phillips

~~~~~
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X X X X X
The Pentagon’s latest Big Lie

By
Mike Whitney

08/08/07 "ICH" -- -- The quality of Pentagon-propaganda is really deteriorating.

The War Dept.’s latest fraud appeared in this week’s newspapers under the ominous-sounding headline:

“US Kills Mastermind of Iraq Shrine”

The article is similar to hundreds of other stories we’ve seen in the passed few years boasting of the murder of an “alleged” terrorist kingpin whose evil deeds have prevented democracy from flourishing in Iraq.

Oh, please.

CNN: “Coalition troops killed the al Qaeda terrorist who masterminded the February 2006 attack on Samarra's al-Askariya mosque and set off continuing violence and reprisal killings between Sunnis and Shiites, the U.S. military said Sunday.” Snip “Haitham Sabah al-Baderi, the al Qaeda emir of greater Samarra, was killed Thursday east of Samarra, said Rear Adm. Mark Fox during a news conference”. snip "Eliminating al-Baderi is another step in breaking the cycle of violence instigated by the attack on the holy shrine in Samarra," Fox said. "We will continue to hunt down the brutal terrorists who are intent on creating a Taliban-like state in Iraq." (CNN)

In truth, CNN has no idea who al-Baderi really was or whether he belonged to Al Qaida or not. They just jot down whatever the Pentagon spokesman tells them and then pass it off later as news. It’s the same with the rest of the media. They don’t care. They build their stories on statements from government officials and don’t bother looking for evidence. All they know is that al-Baderi is another unlucky victim in Bush’s war on terror who has been subsumed into the Pentagon’s propaganda war against the American people. That’s it.

So why bother publishing a crazy story like this? It doesn’t change public opinion on the war or convince people that al Qaida is the main enemy in Iraq. So what good is it? It's just an attempt to show progress in a losing cause by holding up another enemy scalp.

But, that’s not public relations--- it’s barbarism. Don’t the Pentagon big-wigs know that? They think the American people relish the idea of assassinating enemy “suspects” without any proof of wrongdoing or judicial oversight. But they’re wrong. People are sickened by it. Can’t they see that?

What is gained by fabricating another goofy story before the dust has even settled on the Tillman fiasco? Why not let the public fully-digest the last “Big Lie” before moving on to the next one?

Remember Tillman---the outspoken NFL star who figured out the war was a fake and started blasting the Bush administration’s lies?

Well, he took three bullets to the head---“gangland style”---in what the Pentagon dubbed “friendly fire”.

What a joke. Is the Pentagon trying to destroy what little credibility it has left?

Apparently.

THIS WEEK’S BIG LIE

I’ve done a lot of research on both bombings of the Golden Dome Mosque and I can tell you that THE MILITARY HAS NEVER CONDUCTED AN INVESTIGATION OF WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. Never. That means the CNN headline is just more empty blather. The few eyewitness accounts that appeared in Iraqi blogs and web sites strongly suggest that US Intelligence agencies and Iraqi troops from the Interior Ministry may have been involved. The theories connecting Al Qaida to the incident are pure speculation with no factual basis.

And yet, here’s what Bush said in a speech just days after the first bombing:

“Al Qaida terrorists and Sunni insurgents… blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam—the Golden Mosque of Samarra—in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements; some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.”

How does Bush know who it was? He never ordered an investigation and he doesn’t have a crystal ball. If there’s proof---show us! Otherwise we should assume that he is just trying to blame someone else for his part in turning Iraq into a charnel house.

Those aren’t Al Qaida’s B-1 Bombers dropping cluster bombs and Daisy Cutters on Iraqi cities. And, that isn’t al-Baderi kicking down doors and dragging off civilians to be tortured in some god-forsaken hell-hole. Those are Bush’s planes and Bush's troops! He’s the one who’s responsible.

Here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote just a few months ago after the last bombing in Samarra:

“Less than 4 hours after the explosion, the Bush public relations team cobbled together a statement that the bombing was the work of Sunni extremists or al Qaida terrorists. But, they’ve never produced a scintilla of evidence to support their claims. It may be that the administration simply saw the bombing as an opportunity to twist the facts to suit their own purposes.

After all, the incident has been a propaganda-bonanza for the Bush team. They’ve used it to support their theory that Iraq is “the central battle in the war on terror” and that “we must fight them there if we don’t want to fight them over here”. It’s been used as one of the main justifications for the occupation; implying that the US military is needed as a referee to keep the warring factions from killing each other. It’s all just nonsense that’s designed to advance the administration’s political agenda.

If there had been an investigation, it would have shown whether or not the perpetrators were experts by the placement of the explosives. They might have found bomb-residue which could have determined the composition of the material used. Forensics experts could have easily ascertained whether the explosives came from Iraqi munitions-dumps (as suggested) or from outside the country (like the USA, perhaps?)

The incident may well have been a “false flag” operation carried out by US intelligence agencies to provoke sectarian violence and, thus, reduce the number of attacks on American troops. (That is what the vast number of Sunnis and Shiites believe)

In any event, as soon as the mosque was destroyed the media swung into action focusing all of its attention on sectarian violence and the prospect of civil war. The media’s incessant “cheerleading” for civil war was suspicious, to say the least.

In the first 30 hours after the blast, more than 1,500 articles appeared on Google News providing the government version of events without deviation and without any corroborating evidence; just fluff that reiterated the Pentagon’s account verbatim and without challenge.

1500! Now that’s a well-oiled propaganda system!

Most of the articles were “cookie cutter-type” stories which used the same buzzwords and talking points as all the others; no interviews, no facts, no second opinions; simple, straightforward stenography - nothing more.

The story was repeated for weeks on end never veering from the same speculative theory. Clearly, there was a push to convince the American people that this was a significant event that would reshape the whole context of the war in Iraq. In fact, the media blitz that followed was bigger than anything since 9-11; a spectacular display of the media’s power to manipulate public opinion.

There were a few articles that didn’t follow the party-line, but they quickly disappeared into a cyber-“black hole” or were dismissed as conspiracy theories. One report in AFP said that the bombing “was the work of specialists” and the “placing of explosives must have taken at least 12 hours”.

Ah-ha!

The article said: “Construction Minister Mohammed Jaafar said, ‘Holes were dug into the mausoleum’s four main pillars and packed with explosives. Then charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance.”

Of course, what does that prove? Perhaps, al Qaida has skilled explosives experts? But why not investigate? After all, if this was the “catalyzing event” which thrust the country towards civil war; why not have the FBI come in and take a look-around?

A professional team of investigators could have quickly determined whether highly-trained saboteurs were operating in the area. (which meant that American troops would be at greater risk) Isn’t that worth checking out?

Nope. The Pentagon did nothing. There was no effort at all to find out who might have been involved. It was an open and shut case; wrapped up before the dust had even settled in Samarra.

Very strange.

Apparently, there was at least one witness who was interviewed shortly after the bombing. He said that he heard cars running outside the mosque “the whole night until morning” but, he was warned “to stay in your shop and don’t leave until morning”.

At 6:30 AM the next morning, the vehicles outside the mosque left. 10 minutes later the bombs exploded.

None of the people living in the vicinity of the mosque were ever questioned. Likewise, the Construction Minister Mohammed Jaafar has never resurfaced in the news again. I expect that his comments in the newspaper may have had something to do with his sudden disappearance, but then maybe not. (Bush’s War on Perception the bombing of the Golden Mosque, Mike Whitney)

Here’s an excerpt from another article titled “Information Warfare, Psy-ops and the Power of Myth” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17078.htm

New Clues in the Bombing

New clues have surfaced in the case of the bombing of the Golden Mosque which suggests that the claims of the Bush administration are false. An article by Marc Santora, (“One Year Later, Golden Mosque still in Ruins”, New York Times) provides eyewitness testimony of what really took place one year ago:

“A caretaker at the shrine described what happened on the day of the attack, insisting on anonymity because he was afraid that talking to an American could get him killed. The general outline of his account was confirmed by American and Iraqi officials.

The night before the explosion, he said, just before the 8 p.m. curfew on Feb. 21, 2006, on the Western calendar, men dressed in commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry entered the shrine.

The caretaker said he had been beaten, tied up and locked in a room.

Throughout the night, he said, he could hear the sound of drilling as the attackers positioned the explosives, apparently in such a way as to inflict maximum damage on the dome”. (NY Times)

Clearly, if the men were men dressed in “commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry”, then the logical place to begin an investigation would be the Interior Ministry. But there's never been an investigation and the caretaker has never been asked to testify about what he saw on the night of the bombing. However, if he is telling the truth, we cannot exclude the possibility that paramilitary contractors (mercenaries) or special-ops (intelligence) agents working out of the Interior Ministry may have destroyed the mosque to create the appearance of a nascent civil war.

Isn’t that what Bush wants----to divert attention from the occupation and to show that the real conflict is between Shiites and Sunnis?

It's unlikely that the mosque was destroyed by “Sunni insurgents or Al Qaida” as Bush claims. Samarra is predominantly a Sunni city and the Sunnis have nearly as much respect for the mosque as a cultural icon and sacred shrine as the Shiites.

The Times also adds, “What is clear is that the attack was carefully planned and calculated”.

True again. We can see from the extent of the damage that the job was carried out by demolition experts and not merely “insurgents or terrorists” with explosives. Simple forensic tests and soil samples could easily determine the composition of the explosives and point out the real perpetrators.

The Times even provides a motive for the attack: “Bad people used this incident to divide Iraq on a detestable sectarian basis.”

Bingo! The administration has repeatedly used the incident to highlight divisions, incite hostilities, and prolong the occupation.

The Times also notes the similarities between 9-11 and the bombing of the Golden Mosque: “I can describe what was done as exactly like what happened to the World Trade Center.”(NY Times)

In fact, the bombing of the Golden Mosque is a reenactment of September 11. In both cases an independent investigation was intentionally quashed and carefully-prepared narrative was immediately provided. The administration’s version of events has been critical in creating the rationale for an extended US military occupation of Iraq, but is it true.

Probably not. The so-called “deeply ingrained sectarian animosity between Sunnis and Shiites” has no historical precedent. It is an invention of propagandists in the intelligence services who intend to fragment the Iraqi state so that precious resources can be more easily controlled. “Divide and rule” continues to be the driving force behind America’s aggressive counterinsurgency strategy.


THE SECOND BOMBING OF THE GOLDEN DOME MOSQUE

Here’s excerpt from another article which outlines some of what we know about the second bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque a year later: (The Battle of Gaza, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17894.htm )


Graham Bowley (“Minarets on Shiites Shrine in Iraq Destroyed in Attack” NY Times) clarifies some of the important details of what took place at the site of the Mosque just prior to the second bombing. He says:

“Since the attack in 2006, the shrine had been under the protection of local — predominantly Sunni — guards. But American military and Iraqi security officials had recently become concerned that the local unit had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda forces in Iraq. A move by the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad over the last few days to bring in a new guard unit — predominantly Shiite — may have been linked to the attack today.”

No reference is made to the sudden and unexplained changing of the guards at the mosque in future accounts in the mainstream press. And, yet, that is the most important point. The minarets were blown up just days after the new guards took charge. They cordoned off the area, placed snipers on the surrounding rooftops, and then blew up the minarets in broad daylight.

The first explosion took place at 9:30 AM. Ten minutes later the second bomb was detonated.

Al Qaeda?

Not likely.

The Golden Dome mosque has been heavily guarded ever since it was blown up in 2006. The four main doors have been bolted shut and not a tile has been moved in over a year. The reason for this is that the Shiites consider it a “crime scene” which they intend to investigate more thoroughly when the violence subsides.

The Shiites never accepted the official US-version of events that “al Qaeda did it”. Many believe that US Special Forces were directly involved and that it was a planned demolition carried out by experts. There is considerable proof to support this theory including eye witness accounts from the scene of the crime as well as holes that were drilled in the floor of the mosque to maximize destruction. This was not a simple al Qaeda-type car-bombing but a technically-demanding demolition operation.

The damning information in the New York Times article has been corroborated in many other publications including an official statement from the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI). According to the AMSI, Prime Minister Nouri al Mailiki replaced the Sunnis who had been guarding the site for over a year with Shiite government forces from the Interior Ministry. Their statement reads:

“Security forces arrived yesterday afternoon from Baghdad Tuesday for the receipt of the task of protecting two tombs instead of the existing force there. Somehow they obtained a scuffle followed by gunfire lasted two hours over control of security forces coming from Baghdad."

So, the Sunni guards were replaced (after a scuffle) with goons from the Interior Ministry. The next day the minarets blow up.

Coincidence?

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki immediately issued statement where he claimed that the al Qaeda was responsible for the attack. At the same time, however, he arrested all 12 of the guards he sent from the Interior Ministry.

Why? Was he afraid they would talk to the media?

The Association of Muslim Scholars said that “last year’s explosion happened after a severe political crisis between blocs involved in the political process to the occupation. After the elections, the establishment of the government was blocked at that time. It is quite similar to the political crisis faced by the government and parliament today”.

The AMSI is right. The destruction of the Golden Dome Mosque took place soon after the Iraqi parliament rejected the US-plan for dividing Iraq. (“Federalism”) This time, the parliament has voted-down the US-plan to transfer control of Iraq’s vast petroleum reserves to the American oil giants via the “oil laws”.

The AMSI sees the bombing as a desperate attempt by the US occupation to break the logjam in Parliament over the oil laws and to conceal the failures of the “surge” by inciting sectarian violence. The only difference this time is that the Shiite militias have been less responsive to US manipulation. In fact, Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr has tried to stop his Mahdi Army from attacking Sunni areas and he has decried the bombing as another plot by US-Israeli intelligence agents operating in Iraq. He said that the incident reveals “the hidden hand of the occupier.”

He added, “This is what the occupiers brought to Iraq: a disintegration plot and fanning the flames of sectarian violence. Destroying the Askariya shrine goes exactly with the insurgents' beliefs.”

Among Shiites, there’s nearly unanimous agreement that the US was behind the bombing. Middle East expert Juan Cole reports on his blog-site “Informed Comment, that protests have broken out in India, Pakistan, the Caucasus, Bahrain, Iran and other locations where there are high concentrations of Shiites. The consensus view is that the minarets were blown up as part of a larger US-Israeli strategy for controlling the Middle East.

But why would the Bush administration want to unleash a fresh wave of sectarian violence when they can’t even establish security in Baghdad?

Here’s what the AMSI says:

“Sectarian violence is an effective means to enable the militias to fully impose their control on (Sunni) neighborhoods and cities as it did after the bombings of Samarra….The government is also trying to control the capital of Baghdad; seeking to extend its power over other cities that reject the occupation, especially the cities of Baquba and Samarra”.

This is what is gained by the bombings—further ethnic cleansing of the Sunni neighborhoods and greater control over the public through a campaign of terror. It’s all part of a broader neocon strategy that centers on “creative destruction” rather than the traditional US policy of “regional stability

Final Comment

The bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque is a psychological operation (psy-ops) that evolved from the theories of former Counselor at the State Dept, Philip Zelikow, (Zelikow was also executive director of the 9-11 Commission and author of the National Security Strategy NSS) Zelikow “is an expert in “the creation and maintenance of ‘public myths’ or ‘public presumptions’, which he defines as beliefs thought to be true although not necessarily known to be true with certainty, shared in common with the relevant political community. He has taken a special interest in ‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events that take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain there power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene”. (“Thinking about Political History” Miller Center report; winter 1999)

“In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he co-authored an article called ‘Catastrophic Terrorism’ in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade center had succeeded ‘the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. ‘It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet bomb test in 1949. The US might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or US counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently”. (Wikipedia)

Zelikow’s theories help us understand how “catastrophic events” are being used to shape public consciousness and create a narrative that advances the political objectives of the people in power. The actual facts about the bombing of the shrine are have been intentionally suppressed while the prevailing theory—that we are fighting Al Qaida in Iraq—has been meticulously maintained with a solid wall of disinformation. The media has played a central role in this process by disseminating the official storyline from every outlet and newspaper without challenging the government’s “uncorroborated” assertions. This has had a deeply corrosive effect on American democracy.

The extraordinary expansion of state power has been legitimized by the deliberate misreading of “catastrophic events”. History, legal precedent and even cultural tradition have been brushed aside in an effort to rationalize a new order in which state repression, autocratic rule and aggressive war are deemed the requisite components of national security. The entire human experiment---dating back tens of thousands of years--is now conveniently divided into two parts: pre-9-11 and post 9-11.

The bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque has been used the same way as 9-11. A “unifying myth” has been build around a “catastrophic event” in a way that serves the overall goals of the political establishment. As we have seen, the facts don’t matter as long as the illusion that we are fighting terrorists is maintained. (According to Anthony H. Cordesman, an Iraqi specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, al Qaida’s attacks make up only 15 per cent of the total in Iraq though they launch 80-90 per cent of the suicide bombings”. Patrick Cockburn).In reality, the US is engaged in a brutal colonial war that has destroyed a sovereign nation that posed no threat to American national security. That obvious fact never finds its way into America’s “free press”.

The Bush administration and their enablers in the Pentagon’s “Dept. of Strategic Information” will continue to promote their threadbare narrative of “foreign fighters and terrorists” until the Iraq mission collapses and the troops are withdrawn.

Until then, many more lives will be sacrificed to preserve the myth of a war on terror. Haitham Sabah al-Baderi was one such victim. His assassination has helped to conceal the fact that 700,000 Iraqis have been butchered without cause in their own country by Bush’s army.

Go on-site to gain access to this article and others pertaining to Iraq by clicking on the following URL:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
I'm not able to wrap my beliefs up with Mr. Whitney's and others who believe as they do about 9/11, however, I do find thoughts such as these interesting. There is a need to investigate thoroughly, if, for no other reason, than to dispell any such beliefs. SRH
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Band's lyrics cut in Webcast

Pearl Jam protests to AT&T about omission of anti-Bush lines; firm calls editing a mistake
By
Jon Van
Tribune staff reporter
August 9, 2007

chicagotribune.com

A live Internet broadcast of Pearl Jam's performance at Chicago's Lollapalooza music festival Sunday went off without a hitch -- until singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush.

Lyrics critical of the president didn't make it past editors of the show's Webcast, the band complained Wednesday on its Web site.

The performance, sponsored by AT&T Inc. and carried on AT&T's "Blue Room" site, omitted the lyrics "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush, find yourself another home" as part of a version of the song "Daughter," according to the Pearl Jam Web site.

Fans had complained to the band about the possible censorship, the site said.

"When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were, in fact, missing from the Webcast and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them," the Pearl Jam site said.

An AT&T spokeswoman confirmed the omission Wednesday, saying that it had been a mistake made by someone working for the agency hired by AT&T to handle its Blue Room content.

"We don't have a policy in place to censor," said AT&T's Tiffany Nels. "We have a policy on excessive profanity. This was an honest mistake. There was no censorship intended."

Nels said that there is a delay of a few seconds between the performance and its streaming to the Web so that an editor can cut out profane language because the Web site is available to all ages and AT&T doesn't want foul language going out.

She declined to name the agency in charge of the Web site content or elaborate on why an editor would cut out references to George Bush beyond saying, "We think it was just a little overzealous. It's not our policy to edit political commentary."

While stopping short of calling the omission intentional censorship, the band's Web site said the incident "troubles us as artists, but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media."

The band said it will post the unedited version of its performance on its Web site, and Nels said that AT&T hopes also to post an unedited version on its Blue Room site archives. The comments critical of the president were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" as part of the performance of "Daughter."

Critics of large Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. and others seized on the incident as an example of why Congress should pass legislation to guarantee the freedom of Internet content from manipulation by the large corporations that provide Internet connectivity.

This issue, referred to as "net neutrality," has roiled communications policy debates for more than two years. Consumer advocates and large Internet players such as Google have supported the legislation while telecom and cable corporations have opposed it.

The statement from Pearl Jam, a band with strong political views, cited net neutrality in its statement as an issue.

"If a company that is controlling a Webcast is cutting out bits of our performance -- not based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations -- fans have little choice but to watch the censored version," the band said. "What happened to us this weekend was a wake-up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band."


jvan@tribune.com
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
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Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience... therefore have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950
[I] ~~~
"Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they’re part of the crime."

Olavo de Cavarlho

~~~
"And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war."

Aristotle, Politics
~~~
"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy ... The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States."

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

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< < < < <0> > > > >
US Hegemony Spawns Russian-Chinese Military Alliance
By
Paul Craig Roberts

08/09/07 "ICH " -- -- This week the Russian and Chinese militaries are conducting a joint military exercise involving large numbers of troops and combat vehicles. The former Soviet Republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgkyzstan, and Kazakstan are participating. Other countries appear ready to join the military alliance.

This new potent military alliance is a real world response to neoconservative delusions about US hegemony. Neocons believe that the US is supreme in the world and can dictate its course. The neoconservative idiots have actually written papers, read by Russians and Chinese, about why the US must use its military superiority to assert hegemony over Russia and China.

Cynics believe that the neocons are just shills, like Bush and Cheney, for the military-security complex and are paid to restart the cold war for the sake of the profits of the armaments industry. But the fact is that the neocons actually believe their delusions about American hegemony.

Russia and China have now witnessed enough of the Bush administration’s unprovoked aggression in the world to take neocon intentions seriously. As the US has proven that it cannot occupy the Iraqi city of Baghdad despite 5 years of efforts, it most certainly cannot occupy Russia or China. That means the conflict toward which the neocons are driving will be a nuclear conflict.

In an attempt to gain the advantage in a nuclear conflict, the neocons are positioning US anti-ballistic missiles on Soviet borders in Poland and the Czech Republic. This is an idiotic provocation as the Russians can eliminate anti-ballistic missiles with cruise missiles. Neocons are people who desire war, but know nothing about it. Thus, the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reagan and Gorbachev ended the cold war. However, US administrations after Reagan’s have broken the agreements and understandings. The US gratuitously brought NATO and anti-ballistic missiles to Russia’s borders. The Bush regime has initiated a propaganda war against the Russian government of V. Putin.

These are gratuitous acts of aggression. Both the Russian and Chinese governments are trying to devote resources to their economic development, not to their militaries. Yet, both are being forced by America’s aggressive posture to revamp their militaries.

Americans need to understand what the neocon Bush regime cannot: a nuclear exchange between the US, Russia, and China would establish the hegemony of the cockroach.

In a mere 6.5 years the Bush regime has destroyed the world’s good will toward the US. Today, America’s influence in the world is limited to its payments of tens of millions of dollars to bribed heads of foreign governments, such as Egypt’s and Pakistan’s. The Bush regime even thinks that as it has bought and paid for Musharraf, he will stand aside and permit Bush to make air strikes inside Pakistan. Is Bush blind to the danger that he will cause an Islamic revolution within Pakistan that will depose the US puppet and present the Middle East with an Islamic state armed with nuclear weapons?

Considering the instabilities and dangers that abound, the aggressive posture of the Bush regime goes far beyond recklessness. The Bush regime is the most irresponsibly aggressive regime the world has seen since Hitler’s.

If only a sweet young thing would volunteer to give Bush a blowjob so that he can be impeached before he leads us to Armageddon

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Go on-site to view war stats, the human and monetary toll. Just click on the following URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.
> > >0< < <

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BuzzFlash.com Presents:
Media PUTZ.com

Honoring reporters who just can't handle the truth!

August 9, 2007

Rush Limbaugh
For reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession of journalism, and for being beholden to corporate paymastersrather than the citizens of America.

There is no more deserving role model of the demagoguery at the heart of the right-wing media echo chamber than the porcine, illegal pill popping, Vietnam draft-dodging (due to a claimed anal cyst -- how appropriate), thrice-married Rush Limbaugh.

Toss in a heavy dollop of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, along with a streak of hedonism (don't forget his Viagra, condom-laden trip to the Dominican Republic where he sought sex with your pick of men, women, or children) – and you have the ideal role model for Republican hypocrisy.

But it's not the hypocrisy that makes Rush such an ideal shill for the right wing; it's his "down-home" appeal to the basest instincts in the disenfranchised white American vote (displaced by the globalization agreements that have put them in economic harm's way). Meanwhile, Rush's only real hardcore ideology, whatever his sexual orientation and latest drug addiction status, is to fatten his pocketbook.

So many progressives get caught up in trying to debunk Rush's lies that they forget his success as a right-wing on-air demagogue has nothing to do with the facts and everything to do with scapegoating and fear. He makes the vulnerable white male -- and female -- feel like victims. The world of "terrorist-supporting liberals and feminazis" is conspiring to deprive God-loving Americans of their "values," jobs, and rightful place at the top of the pyramid. Don't you get it?

Rush's appeal is straight from a not-so-coded "white power" script to the reptilian emotional needs of those who feel America has passed them by and need to blame someone Rush can toss like a ham hock into their salivating jaws.

BuzzFlash reader John Landis of Vienna, Virginia, nominated Limbaugh because he

"recently illustrated perfectly the fatuous arrogance and convenient forgetfulness of right wing media attack dogs' delusional assertions when he claimed he did not know who was implying that Hillary Clinton was a murderer -- when the record clearly showed he had made such allusions on multiple occasions on his radio show. Limbaugh daily employs sophistry (actually too kind a word for his juvenile bloviating, B.S. and lies) in his role as the primary mobilizer of the idiot vote for Republicans. He has been amazingly effective, much to the detriment of our country. His dittoheads are obnoxious, impervious to reason, and their votes count as much as those of rational people. He has done more to wreck thoughtful discourse in this country than any other individual in our nation's history. He is definitely a pathetic putz, but also much worse."

On behalf of Rush, thank you for those kind words. BuzzFlash reader Landis might be a tad harsh on Limbaugh listeners, who are more like sheep being led to their own economic and national security demise, but he’s definitely got the pigboy's number.

Rush Limbaugh, you are officially inducted into the BuzzFlash Media Putz Hall of Shame. You have proven without question that you are an embarrassment to the profession of journalism, and tailor your incessant drivel to your corporate paymasters rather than serving the true needs of your listeners. You remind us how easy it is to separate faux punditry from the truth.

Click here for early notice of the
MEDIA PUTZ of the WEEK winners
Go on-site to gain access to this archive
and to join up for their news letter
by clicking on the following URL:

http://mediaputz.com/07/08/putz0809.html

Media Putz is a project of BuzzFlash.com ©2007
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"We no longer live in a society, we live in an economy, where right and wrong is determined not by fairness, but by profitability -- and where the law no longer dictates corporate behavior, but corporate behavior dictates the law."

Kelly Overton
Executive Director
of
People Protecting Animals & Their Habitats
~~~
"Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected "radicals" without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity..." --

Robert M. Lafollette Sr.
(1855-1925)
U.S. Senator
-
Source:
The Progressive
March 1920
~~~
"Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units."

Carl Gustav Jung
1875-1961
Source:
The Undiscovered Self
1957
~~~
"Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?"

Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945)
Source: quoted in
Robert N. Proctor,
The Nazi War on Cancer
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 74.

~~~~~
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How the Democrats Blew It in Only 8 Months
By
Alexander Cockburn

08/10/07 - -- [from the August 27, 2007 issue of The Nation magazine] --- -Led by Democrats since the start of this year, Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower than Republicans scored last year.

The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted the money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement was to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wiretapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush. The Democrats control the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she'd wanted to. But she didn't. The Democrats' game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base to their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.

The row over the US Attorneys and the conduct of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has always been something of a typhoon in a teaspoon. The Democrats love it, since they imagine it portrays them to the public as resolute guardians of the impartial administration of justice, a concept whose credibility most Americans sensibly deride. The Democrats now plan to track Gonzales's firing of the US Attorneys back to that comic opera villain of the Bush era, Karl Rove, another great provoker of dust storms.

The one Democrat acting on principle in the Gonzales affair has been Senator Russ Feingold. He at least tried to dig into the visit of chief White House counsel Gonzales, as he then was, to the bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft, to get him to sign off on the illegal wiretaps. And how did the Democrat-controlled Congress deal with Feingold's efforts to nail Gonzales for his efforts to undermine the Constitution and for his prevarications under oath? It promptly legalized the eavesdropping.

Just as the Democrats work tirelessly to demonstrate to the voters that it makes zero difference which party controls Congress, the political establishment forces all candidates for the presidential nomination to sever any compromising ties to sanity and common sense.

Right now they're hosing down Barack Obama because he said in the YouTube debate in South Carolina that he would be prepared to meet with Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chávez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro to hash over problems face to face. The pundits whacked him for demonstrating "inexperience." Experienced leaders order the CIA to murder such men.

Then Obama drew even fiercer fire by saying he would take nukes off the table in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance," Obama told the AP on August 2, adding, after a pause, "involving civilians." Then he quickly said, "Let me scratch that. There's been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That's not on the table."

I'm beginning to respect this man. He displays sagacity well beyond the norm for candidates seeking the Oval Office. He comprehends, if only in mid-sentence, that when you drop a nuclear bomb, it will kill civilians. He also realizes that strafing Waziristan with thermonuclear devices in the hopes of nailing Osama bin Laden is a foolish way to proceed.

So Obama is being flayed for his "inexperience," first and foremost by Hillary Clinton, who permits no table setting that does not include a couple of nuclear weapons next to the sugar bowl. To recoup, Obama has declared his readiness as Commander in Chief to order US forces to hotly pursue Osama into Pakistan, whatever the government of Pakistan might think of this onslaught on its sovereignty.

Has the left the capacity to influence the conduct of the Democrats? In terms of substantive achievement the answer thus far has been no. People didn't like it when I wrote here a month ago that the antiwar movement was at a low ebb. They invoke the polls showing that 70 percent of Americans want the troops to come home. This is presumptuous, like a barking dog claiming it made the moon go down. It didn't take an antiwar movement to make the people antiwar. People looked at the casualty figures and the newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion that the war is a bust. Their attention is already shifting to the economic crisis: housing meltdown, car sales meltdown, credit crisis, threats from the Chinese to destroy the dollar. What war?

The left is as easily distracted, currently by the phantasm of impeachment. Why all this clamor to launch a proceeding surely destined to fail, aimed at a duo who will be out of the White House in sixteen months? Pursue them for war crimes after they've stepped down. Mount an international campaign of the sort that has Henry Kissinger worrying at airports that there might be a lawyer with a writ standing next to the man with the limo sign. Right now the impeachment campaign is a distraction from the war and the paramount importance of ending it.

For sure, there are actions around the country: Quakers and Unitarians picketing outside shopping centers, campus vigils, resolutions by city councils and so forth. It's all pretty quiet, in a conflict that has now--as my brother Patrick recently pointed out--gone on longer than the First World War. At the liberal blogger convention, Yearly Kos, held the first weekend in August, the organizers nixed any serious strategy session on the war. John Stauber of PR Watch had to force an impromptu (and very successful) session with leaders of the Iraq Veterans Against the War.

A war people hate, Gitmo, Bush's police-state executive orders of July 17--the Democrats have signed the White House dance card on all of them. And guess what? Just as their poll numbers are going down, Bush's are going up, by five points in Gallup from early July. People are beginning to think the surge is working, courtesy of the New York Times. So are we better or worse off since the Democrats won back Congress?

Go on-site to gain access to this article and several others by clicking on the following URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18157.htm
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Fighting the Democrats’ Complicity with Bush
By Francis A. Boyle

08/10/07 "ICH' -- -- Despite the massive, overwhelming repudiation of the Iraq war and the Bush Jr. administration by the American people in the November 2006 national elections conjoined with their consequent installation of a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party with a mandate to terminate the Iraq war, since its ascent to power in January 2007 the Democrats in Congress have taken no effective steps to stop, impede, or thwart the Bush Jr. administration’s wars of aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or anywhere else, including their long-standing threatened war against Iran. To the contrary, the new Democrat-controlled Congress decisively facilitated these serial Nuremberg crimes against peace on May 24, 2007 by enacting a $95 billion supplemental appropriation to fund war operations through September 30, 2007.

In the spring of 2007 all the Congressional Democrats had to do was nothing. They could have sat upon the supplemental appropriation request for war operations by the Bush Jr. administration and thus failed to enact it into law. At that point, the money for war operations would have gradually run out, and the Bush Jr. administration would have been forced to have gradually withdrawn U.S. armed forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of so doing, the Congressional Democrats knowingly prolonged these wars of aggression and thus in the process became aiders and abettors to these Nuremberg crimes against peace.

Under the terms of the United States Constitution, the President cannot spend a dime unless the money has somehow been appropriated by the United States Congress. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution expressly provides: “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law…” Furthermore, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 12 of the Constitution also provides that “Congress shall have power . . . To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years . . . ”

America’s Founders and Framers deliberately strove to keep America’s prospective military establishment on a financial short-leash tightly held by the hands of Congress precisely because of their well-founded fear that a standing army would constitute a dire threat to the continued existence of the Republic based upon their recent experience confronting and defeating King George III’s standing army. As the American July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence stated their objections in part: “[H]e has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power . . . For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us…”

Congress must use its constitutional power of the purse to terminate the Bush Jr. administration’s wars of aggression immediately. Those Congressional incumbents of either political party who refuse to do so must be replaced by men and women of good faith and good will of any or no political party who will do their constitutional duty to terminate ongoing Nuremberg crimes against peace. To the contrary, the current leadership of the Democratic Party (though, to be sure, not all Democrats), let alone most of the Republicans, have been complicit with all the atrocities that the Bush Jr. administration has inflicted upon international law, international organizations, human rights, the United States Constitution, civil rights, civil liberties, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere since September 11, 2001.

Further confirmation of this proposition can be found in the fact that when the self-described Peace Mom Cindy Sheehan went on July 23, 2007 with 200 protesters to speak with Democratic Congressman John Conyers — Chair of the House Judiciary Committee that has supervisory jurisdiction over bills of impeachment — about starting impeachment proceedings against President Bush Jr., at the end of an hour Congressman Conyers ordered her and 45 others arrested for disorderly conduct when they refused to leave his office. In other words, one of the leaders of the Democratic Party arrested one of the leaders of the American Peace Movement for insisting that he and his congressional colleagues perform their constitutionally-mandated duties. Nothing could be more symptomatic of the constitutional, moral, and political bankruptcy of the so-called two-party system of politics in the United States of America: Republicans versus Democrats, Tweedle Dum versus Tweedle Dee.

Since the Democrats’ Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi had already ruled arbitrarily that President Bush’s impeachment was “off the table,” Peace Mom Cindy Sheehan announced her intention to run against Pelosi in the 2008 national elections. Once again Mrs. Sheehan’s instincts, principles, judgment, and strategy are directly on target. The American people must oppose, defeat, and replace all members of the United States Congress of any political party who will not impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney in order to terminate their needlessly — inflicted death and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia as soon as possible. The so-called leaderships of both political parties have left the American people with no alternative. Even more urgently, the Neo-Conservative cabal known as the Bush Jr. administration are still threatening, planning, preparing, and conspiring to attack Iran, which could very well set-off World War III. Just recently they added nuclear-armed Pakistan to their publicly proclaimed list of targets.

Meanwhile, the Bush Jr. administration’s “surge” of 30,000 troops into Iraq announced in January of 2007 has marched on to its inexorable bloodbath for the Iraqi people and U.S. armed forces. There is more than enough circumstantial evidence to conclude that the underlying strategy of the Bush Jr. administration is nothing more than to postpone their inevitable defeat in Iraq until after their departure from office in January 2009 no matter what the cost in lives to Iraqis and Americans. But the world cannot wait until January of 2009 for America to start to end these wars and their related war crimes, as well as to prevent more threatened wars, especially against Iran or Pakistan, which could prove catastrophic for humankind.

The United States Congress must immediately and simultaneously proceed to exercise both its constitutional power of the purse and its constitutional power of impeachment toward that end. That is the bilateral strategy which the U.S. Congress pursued a generation ago in order to terminate the Nixon administration’s criminal wars of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. That must be the bilateral strategy by which the U.S. Congress today terminates the Bush Jr. administration’s criminal wars of aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and otherwise perhaps soon Iran or Pakistan. Despite Pelosi’s disingenuous protestations to the contrary, the Nixon/Vietnam precedent proves that Congressional impeachment and cutting-off funds for wars are mutually reinforcing strategies. They might even win the 2008 U.S. Presidential and Congressional elections for those who embrace them.

Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU :: :: ::
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^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^China’s “Nuclear Option” is real
By
Paul Craig Roberts

08/11/07 "ICH' -- -- Twenty-four hours after I reported China’s announcement that China, not the Federal Reserve, controls US interest rates by its decision to purchase, hold, or dump US Treasury bonds, the news of the announcement appeared in sanitized and unthreatening form in a few US news sources.

The Washington Post found an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin to provide reassurances that it was “not really a credible threat” that China would intervene in currency or bond markets in any way that could hurt the dollar’s value or raise US interest rates, because China would hurt its own pocketbook by such actions.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, just back from Beijing, where he gave China orders to raise the value of the Chinese yuan “without delay,” dismissed the Chinese announcement as “frankly absurd.”

Both the professor and the Treasury Secretary are greatly mistaken.

First, understand that the announcement was not made by a minister or vice minister of the government. The Chinese government is inclined to have important announcements come from research organizations that work closely with the government. This announcement came from two such organizations. A high official of the Development Research Center, an organization with cabinet rank, let it be known that US financial stability was too dependent on China’s financing of US red ink for the US to be giving China orders. An official at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences pointed out that the reserve currency status of the US dollar was dependent on China’s good will as America’s lender.

What the two officials said is completely true. It is something that some of us have known for a long time. What is different is that China publicly called attention to Washington’s dependence on China’s good will. By doing so, China signaled that it was not going to be bullied or pushed around.

The Chinese made no threats. To the contrary, one of the officials said, “China doesn’t want any undesirable phenomenon in the global financial order.” The Chinese message is different. The message is that Washington does not have hegemony over Chinese policy, and if matters go from push to shove, Washington can expect financial turmoil.

Paulson can talk tough, but the Treasury has no foreign currencies with which to redeem its debt. The way the Treasury pays off the bonds that come due is by selling new bonds, a hard sell in a falling market deserted by the largest buyer.

Paulson found solace in his observation that the large Chinese holdings of US Treasuries comprise only “one day’s trading volume in Treasuries.” This is a meaningless comparison. If the supply suddenly doubled, does Paulson think the price of Treasuries would not fall and the interest rate not rise? If Paulson believes that US interest rates are independent of China’s purchases and holdings of Treasuries, Bush had better quickly find himself a new Treasury Secretary.

Now let’s examine the University of Wisconsin economist’s opinion that China cannot exercise its power because it would result in losses on its dollar holdings. It is true that if China were to bring any significant percentage of its holdings to market, or even cease to purchase new Treasury issues, the prices of bonds would decline, and China’s remaining holdings would be worth less. The question, however, is whether this is of any consequence to China, and, if it is, whether this cost is greater or lesser than avoiding the cost that Washington is seeking to impose on China.

American economists make a mistake in their reasoning when they assume that China needs large reserves of foreign exchange. China does not need foreign exchange reserves for the usual reasons of supporting its currency’s value and paying its trade bills. China does not allow its currency to be traded in currency markets. Indeed, there is not enough yuan available to trade. Speculators, betting on the eventual rise of the yuan’s value, are trying to capture future gains by trading “virtual yuan.” The other reason is that China does not have foreign trade deficits, and does not need reserves in other currencies with which to pay its bills. Indeed, if China had creditors, the creditors would be pleased to be paid in yuan as the currency is thought to be undervalued.

Despite China’s support of the Treasury bond market, China’s large holdings of dollar-denominated financial instruments have been depreciating for some time as the dollar declines against other traded currencies, because people and central banks in other countries are either reducing their dollar holdings or ceasing to add to them. China’s dollar holdings reflect the creditor status China acquired when US corporations offshored their production to China. Reportedly, 70% of the goods on Wal-Mart’s shelves are made in China. China has gained technology and business knowhow from the US firms that have moved their plants to China. China has large coastal cities, choked with economic activity and traffic, that make America’s large cities look like country towns. China has raised about 300 million of its population into higher living standards, and is now focusing on developing a massive internal market some 4 to 5 times more populous than America’s.

The notion that China cannot exercise its power without losing its US markets is wrong. American consumers are as dependent on imports of manufactured goods from China as they are on imported oil. In addition, the profits of US brand name companies are dependent on the sale to Americans of the products that they make in China. The US cannot, in retaliation, block the import of goods and services from China without delivering a knock-out punch to US companies and US consumers. China has many markets and can afford to lose the US market easier than the US can afford to lose the American brand names on Wal-Mart’s shelves that are made in China. Indeed, the US is even dependent on China for advanced technology products. If truth be known, so much US production has been moved to China that many items on which consumers depend are no longer produced in America.

Now let’s consider the cost to China of dumping dollars or Treasuries compared to the cost that the US is trying to impose on China. If the latter is higher than the former, it pays China to exercise the “nuclear option” and dump the dollar.

The US wants China to revalue the yuan, that is, to make the dollar value of the yuan higher. Instead of a dollar being worth 8 yuan, for example, Washington wants the dollar to be worth only 5.5 yuan. Washington thinks that this would cause US exports to China to increase, as they would be cheaper for the Chinese, and for Chinese exports to the US to decline, as they would be more expensive. This would end, Washington thinks, the large trade deficit that the US has with China.

This way of thinking dates from pre-offshoring days. In former times, domestic and foreign-owned companies would compete for one another’s markets, and a country with a lower valued currency might gain an advantage. Today, however, about half of the so-called US imports from China are the offshored production of US companies for their American markets. The US companies produce in China, not because of the exchange rate, but because labor, regulatory, and harassment costs are so much lower in China. Moreover, many US firms have simply moved to China, and the cost of abandoning their new Chinese facilities and moving production back to the US would be very high.

When all these costs are considered, it is unclear how much China would have to revalue its currency in order to cancel its cost advantages and cause US firms to move enough of their production back to America to close the trade gap.

To understand the shortcomings of the statements by the Wisconsin professor and Treasury Secretary Paulson, consider that if China were to increase the value of the yuan by 30 percent, the value of China’s dollar holdings would decline by 30 percent. It would have the same effect on China’s pocketbook as dumping dollars and Treasuries in the markets.

Consider also, that as revaluation causes the yuan to move up in relation to the dollar (the reserve currency), it also causes the yuan to move up against every other traded currency. Thus, the Chinese cannot revalue as Paulson has ordered without making Chinese goods more expensive not merely to Americans but everywhere.

Compare this result with China dumping dollars. With the yuan pegged to the dollar, China can dump dollars without altering the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar. As the dollar falls, the yuan falls with it. Goods and services produced in China do not become more expensive to Americans, and they become cheaper elsewhere. By dumping dollars, China expands its entry into other markets and accumulates more foreign currencies from trade surpluses.

Now consider the non-financial costs to China’s self-image and rising prestige of permitting the US government to set the value of its currency. America’s problems are of its own making, not China’s. A rising power such as China is likely to prove a reluctant scapegoat for America’s decades of abuse of its reserve currency status.

Economists and government officials believe that a rise in consumer prices by 30 percent is good if it results from yuan revaluation, but that it would be terrible, even beyond the pale, if the same 30 percent rise in consumer prices resulted from a tariff put on goods made in China. The hard pressed American consumer would be hit equally hard either way. It is paradoxical that Washington is putting pressure on China to raise US consumer prices, while blaming China for harming Americans. As is usually the case, the harm we suffer is inflicted by Washington.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18154.htm
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A Policy of Genocide

By:
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

“The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty”.- Immanuel Kant

08/13/07 "ICH" --- -They thought Iraq would be a cakewalk. After all, for years, its army was being depleted of fresh recruits in preparedness for an attack. Half a million Iraqi children were killed during the 13 years of sanctions leading to the 2003 invasion - “Mission Accomplished”.

The sanctions imposed on Iraq following the First Gulf War, under the watchful eyes of the Pentagon, monitored the degradation of Iraq's water supply. Reports itemized the likely outbreaks of "acute diarrhea" brought on by bacteria such as E. coli, shigella, and salmonella, or by protozoa such as giardia, which would affect "particularly children," or by rotavirus, which would also affect "particularly children," a phrase it put in parentheses. Also cited were possibilities of typhoid and cholera outbreaks.” “Gastroenteritis was killing children. . . . In the south, 80 percent of the deaths were children (with the exception of Al Amarah, where 60 percent of deaths were children)." [ii]

In the words of one of the few decent and courageous congressional members, Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, referred to the document "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities" and said: "Attacking the Iraqi public drinking water supply flagrantly targets civilians and is a violation of the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental laws of civilized nations."

We were ‘told’ that we, the civilized world, are fighting the ‘uncivilized’ terrorists’.

So it is that Dick Cheney whispers into Mr. Bush’s ear to attack Iraq, confident that with her children buried, the parents too weak from mourning and disease, she will surrender – quickly. He made sure America stayed on track; track of deception. Prior to the invasion, Cheney was confronted with a report from the IAEA which threw doubts on the administration’s allegations about Iraq’s WMD, and he responded: “We know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong" (Meet the Press, March 16, 2003).

The demon of greed never seems to get enough. Over 1 million dead Iraqis – with Dick Cheney’s old company KBR/Halliburton being the prime benefactor of theft, Mr. Cheney now has his eyes on Iran. More bodies, dead ones, are needed for the task. Once again, his old company, KBR/Halliburton, not only comes to the rescue, but benefits from the deal.

In November 2006, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction auditor reported that in 2004, KBR, a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, ‘had lost’ more than 14,000 weapons destined for the Iraqi government. Pentagon had lost track of them. However, the Pentagon immediately ‘found’ an old, obscure clause and shuts down the audit[iii]. On August 6, 2007, Washington Post reported that there were in fact 190,000 weapons missing – while they referred to the previously reported 14,000, they made no mention of Dick Cheney’s old KBR/Halliburton.[iv] According to Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, "They really have no idea where they are," .."It likely means that the United States is unintentionally providing weapons to bad actors." [v] And Dick Cheney’s [old] company gets paid in spite of the corruption, theft, and mismanagement [vi]. Americans and Iraqis get killed – and Iran is held accountable for arming the Shiite militias; A win-win situation for Dick Cheney who is itching to go to war, and his old company.

Dismissing claims from al-Maliki that Iran is a positive force in Iraq, listening to Dick Cheney’s whispers – much like the false allegations about Afghanistan that even though Dan McNeill, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, said: "What we've found so far hasn't been militarily significant on the battlefield." McNeill also said that more likely sources for the arms are drug traffickers, black market dealers, or al-Qaida groups” (Inter Press Service, June 20, 2007), is being blamed on Iran -- Mr. Bush bows to Dick Cheney and repeats that Iran is arming the insurgents who are killing American soldiers. Dick Cheney is arguing for military action[vii]. I wonder of Dick Cheney is the God that Mr. Bush talks to, the higher authority that told him to go to war in Iraq?

But surely America does not have the soldiers for another illegal and immoral war?

The Army is already only meeting its goals by offering larger monetary incentives to enlistees, and by allowing those who "normally" would not qualify for military service to enlist: those without a high-school diploma, those with criminal records and those previously rejected for being physically unfit[viii]. Perhaps its time to look for a partner – a gay partner.

Army Lt. Gen. Douglas, Mr. Bush’s war adviser says “the draft is worth a look” [ix]. In fact, much like everything else, such as curbing our freedoms, the draft will be upon us and 18-year olds will be dying for Halliburton and other Crusades. This is not the first time the draft has been seriously considered; in December 2006, the Pentagon announced that it was planning on testing the military-draft machinery, but to alleviate fears of parents of 18-year olds, it announced it would not be doing this until 2009[x]. Dick Cheney will not wait until 2009. Today, with Dick Cheney’s [old] company Halliburton safely in Dubai dodging taxes and criminal charges, he is eager to push for a military strike on Iran. The profits would make Iraq look like child’s play – as would the death toll.

Several years ago, sipping a hot cup of coffee in my kitchen in Needham, Massachusetts, with my Polish neighbor, I was shocked to hear her guilt-ridden confession. She admitted that at times, when she looked at my husband, given his German heritage, she could not help but wonder with unease if his family had been involved in the killing of her (Jewish) relatives. Having overcome my shock at her bitter narrow-mindedness towards all people German, I told her that my husband was third generation American and his family could not have been involved in what went on during Hitler’s time.

Today, as I write this, I have become victim of the same intolerance and dread. I cannot help but wonder how many among us, citizens of the world, not just Americans, can exonerate themselves of the crimes of their governments knowing silence and inaction have been the most powerful weapons yet. it

[I]Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has lived and studied in Iran, the UK, France, Australia and the US. She obtained her Bachelors Degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and she is currently pursuing a Masters Degree in Middle East Studies concentrating in Political Science. She has done extensive research on US foreign policy towards Iran and Iran’s nuclear program.

[i] http://www.harpers.org/archive/2002/11/0079384

[ii] http://www.progressive.org./default.htm

[iii] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6114132.stm

[iv] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501299.html

[v] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501299.html

[vi] Defense Dept. Read Audits Yet Paid KBR Bill

[vii] http://www.mcclatchydc.com:80/227/story/18834.html

[viii] http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/07/wouldbe_recruits_vote_with_the.html

[ix] http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-War-Adviser.html

[x] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/21/AR2006122101327_pf.html
Go on-site to gain access to this article, war stats, monetary and deaths, civilian and military, as well as their archived materials, cartoons, anchor articles, and other issues of the day. Just click on the following URL:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
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. ~~~~~~~
"...the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."

Benjamin Franklin
1787
~~~

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. "


U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Robert Jackson
U.S. representative to the
International Conference
on
Military Trials,
Aug. 12, 1945
~~~

Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

Robert Louis Stevenson
~~~

"The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty".

Immanuel Kant

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^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned
By
Jeremy Grant
in
Washington

08/14/07 "FT" -- - - The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress.

While most of its studies are commissioned by legislators, about 10 per cent – such as the one containing his latest warnings – are initiated by the comptroller general himself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before but now wanted to “turn up the volume”. Some of them were too sensitive for others in government to “have their name associated with”.

“I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call,” he said. “As comptroller general I’ve got an ability to look longer-range and take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country but we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough,” said Mr Walker, who was appointed during the Clinton administration to the post, which carries a 15-year term.

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.

“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.

Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an “unsustainable path”.

“Our very prosperity is placing greater demands on our physical infrastructure. Billions of dollars will be needed to modernise everything from highways and airports to water and sewage systems. The recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis was a sobering wake-up call.”

Mr Walker said he would offer to brief the would-be presidential candidates next spring.

“They need to make fiscal responsibility and inter-generational equity one of their top priorities. If they do, I think we have a chance to turn this around but if they don’t, I think the risk of a serious crisis rises considerably”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
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:: :: :: :: ::Of
Lies, History
&
Throwing Flowers

By
Mirza Yawar Baig

08/14/07 "ICH" -- -- Question: What do you call a Prime Minister who tells lies in Parliament to justify selling the sovereignty of his nation down the drain?

Answer: You call him Master.

Sovereignty?? What is that??

Remember the British Raj and their Residents? Remember what they wanted to control?

1. Foreign policy – We will decide which state you will befriend and which one you will not.

2. Defense – Don’t worry about your own defense. We will defend you. You are not allowed to do anything that has the danger of making you strong as you don’t know how to use your power.

Imagine; we used to call that ‘colonialism’. But obviously we were wrong. Gandhiji and all those who fought for ‘Independence’ along with him had it wrong all the time. We were not enslaved at all. What a waste of time and energy!! And on top of it Jawaharlal inflicted the non-aligned theory on us. Not that we were all that non-aligned at that time. But we did support freedom movements in Palestine and South Africa. But then we did not realize the value of friendship with Israel, did we? Today we do. After all trust an Indian to recognize a bargain. And South Africa became free conveniently on its own so today we don’t have to decide whether or not to support apartheid in yet another form.

But then what is the real value of sovereignty? After all Puerto Rico by itself is distinguished only by a name that is difficult to spell. But as a willing vassal of the United States, Puerto Ricans don’t even need a visa to go to the US. Now ask all those who stand in serpentine queues outside US Embassies having camped there on the street the previous night if they wouldn’t like that? And to do that if we have to make our nuclear program subservient to the US and to say that Iran is not our friend, so what? Who likes the Iranians anyway?

So why do we object to the Prime Minister telling lies? Maybe he is exercising his freedom of expression. After all we insist that Tasleema Nasreen must not be denied her right to freedom of expression. So what if she distorts facts. So what if she maligns people. So what if she tries to make sordid all that is sublime. It is her right to freedom of expression. So why must Manmohan be denied his right? The only problem seems to be that nobody in Parliament thought of throwing flowers at him when he was speaking. Or maybe they don’t keep bouquets handy as they did in the Press Club in Hyderabad.

Lies don’t change the truth. Lies don’t change facts. Reality does not change because we refuse to believe it. Reality is that which exists even if nobody wants to accept it. And reality bites. It bites very hard. The first thing that a doomed nation loses is the ability to read the writing on the wall. I wonder if we have reached that stage yet. All effects have causes. All actions have consequences. We are free to choose but no choice is ever free. I remind myself of these things because at the end of 60 years we are looking at a changed nation. We are looking at a nation that is no longer what we dreamt of.

A nation is exemplified by its leaders. There was a time when our leaders were Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalaam Azaad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Dr. Mohammad Iqbal, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and many others. There was a time when our leaders stood for causes. There was a time when our Administrative Services were filled with people who stood out for their adherence to principles of integrity. There was a time when our Judiciary was respected because believe it or not, it stood for justice.

(Ref: Muslim Freedom Fighters of India/edited by S. Ganjoo. New Delhi, ISBN 81-261-1281-6.)

A nation is exemplified by its legends and the stories that parents and grandparents tell their children in their homes. A nation is exemplified by the values that are passed on to children by their elders. The fabric of a nation is woven in the homes in the villages and towns. What were these stories? My grandfather did not buy a new shirt for 5 years because he used all his savings to send my father to medical school. My great-grandfather was a police officer who did not have enough money sometimes to feed his family because he refused to take bribes. And one day he was suspended because a prisoner that was being transported from Kurnool to Hyderabad by two of his constables, escaped. My great-grandfather who was a DSP was suspended and demoted to Head Constable as he was the superior officer. Did he fight the punishment? Did he resign in protest? No. When he was asked why he said, “When you accept authority, you also accept the fact that you will be responsible not only for your own actions but also for the actions of those who work under you. If my subordinates had done well, I would have got the credit for that. So why should I complain if I get the blame for their mistake?”

We learnt to respect our elders, teachers and scholars on the basis of their knowledge as we realized the value of that learning. So we spent time in their company. We didn’t care if they were rich or poor. That was not a criterion to judge anyone. Contribution to society was. JRD Tata said that the only time his father hit him was when as a small child, he said to his nanny, “I can say anything I want to you because you are poor and I am rich.” My teachers were Rai Mahboob Narayan, Kuruvilla Jacob, Mohini Rajan, Venkat Rama Reddy and Nawab Nazir Yar Jung. None of them formally my teachers in a ‘school’ sense, but my elders who were also my friends and from whom I learnt how to live. My ‘teachers’ were also those I read, Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (many books), Nani Palkiwala (We the People), JRD Tata (Beyond the Last Blue Mountain), Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged and others), J. Krishnamurthy, Mahatma Gandhi (My Experiments with Truth). There were many others but I think my point is made.

Today I would like to ask my young friends, ‘Who are the people in whose company you spend time? What do you learn from them? What values do they impart to you? What do you read other than your curriculum? What questions do you ask? Who do you ask?’

When the leaders of a nation change, it indicates that the nation has changed. Leaders after all come from the people. At least in a democracy. Even a malfunctioning one like ours. Today we are a nation whose leaders are the likes of Vajpayee, Advani, Narender Modi, Manmohan Singh, Jayalalitha…need I name more? Today we are a nation which thanks to its ‘development’ and ‘liberation’ has embraced Western values with such gusto that elders have become the symbols of backwardness. Their knowledge and experience of no value because they can’t operate cell phones or send email. Teachers are useless and not worthy of respect because they are poor.

Money is the sole criterion for all value including of ourselves. So we try constantly to show how ‘successful’ we are by showing how wasteful we can be. Contribution to society is not even in the reckoning any more. Sure, some of us, especially the new entrepreneurs are looking at ways to contribute. But in the same breath we idolize those who have institutionalized corruption in the land to such an extent that they actually have entire departments in their companies specifically dedicated for this purpose. We are a nation today where when 3000 innocent civilians were slaughtered in Gujarat, aided and abetted by the very government which they had elected, not one single industry head either raised his voice against it nor did he or she offer any aid to the victims who survived the heinous crimes committed against them,. Can you imagine this happening if Sardar Vallabhai Patel had been the Chief Minister of Gujarat?

We are today a nation where corruption in the Judiciary is called ‘Speed Money’ and is justified in that delay in project implementation would cost more. We are today a nation where murder by the state is called ‘Encounter Killing’ and the murderers are glorified by the name ‘Encounter Specialist’. We are today a nation where corruption is justified as a ‘reality’ that we have to face. By that we mean ‘accept’. After all, to fight corruption one would also have to face it, wouldn’t one? But that is not what we mean when we use the word ‘face’. We are today a nation where even lip service to poverty eradication is not fashionable any more. Instead even our communist party is killing farmers whose lands are sought to be ‘annexed’ to create walled fortresses called ‘SEZ’ for rich industrialists. Money talks. And nowhere does it talk louder than in India. For on this band wagon one can see some strange companions. Together are people who at one time ran organizations that were the symbols of corporate integrity and responsibility along with those who always stood for the axiom that ‘charity begins at home, so what’s good for me is good for the nation.’

That we have changed is a fact. But do we want to remain the way we are? That is the question.

I believe the time has come for all Indians who are serious about ensuring that we remain an independent nation, free to govern ourselves in a way that is good for our country, be a responsible global citizen and take decisions internally that are good for the vast majority of our population that still can’t afford two square meals a day 60 years after political independence, need to take charge of our lives. We need to call meetings locally and nationally and debate what is going on. We need to face facts. We need to stop denying what is happening before our eyes. If we don’t want to be sold into slavery once again, we need to stop it. If we don’t want to become victims of random violence we have to address poverty. If we want to emerge from ignorance we have to focus on quality education. If we want the rule of law then we have to vote on principles, not caste. If we want progress we have to value people of knowledge, not only people who have money. There are serious issues that face our nation. Issues that will decide our fate for the next several generations.

It is our responsibility to decide what to do about these issues. Future generations will hold us accountable.

For comments: yawarbaig@gmail.com
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
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Bush's Booming Economy
--
For The Rich

By
Sheila Samples

08/14/07 "ICH" -- -- Sometimes I'm amazed at how much I know about the financial markets and the economy. I don't understand any of it, but I know a lot of stuff, thanks to my friend and mentor, Richard Walrath, who's been to the market more than once. He says when George Bush brags that the economy is booming, he's probably right. The economy is exploding with a big boom, and Walrath says now we are engaged in a great battle to see how long this country can endure.

The Fed just poured a bunch of money into the market, which was news to me, but Walrath said the Fed has been manipulating the market for years, especially during the Bush years. "There was great fear the United States was going to follow Japan into a period of deflation and recession -- maybe even a depression," Walrath said. "Interest rates were cut close to zero while hundreds of billions of dollars were added to the National Debt through tax-cuts for the rich and 'Big Bidness.' And it gets worse just at the time the National Debt limit has to be raised again."

With things as bad as they are, Walrath says it's going to be interesting to see how this crisis is handled. Congress may have to return early to pass legislation to raise the National Debt. But it makes more sense to me -- since the bulk of our lawmakers were so eager to get out of school for recess, that Bush could decide to handle the whole thing like he does everything else to avoid partisan jawboning or oversight -- just dash off an Executive Order.

But the National Debt is just one of many problems battering our economy. Walrath points out a major problem is "all those margin accounts out there with people getting calls to come up with some real money because their stock is down. As you might expect, this led to speculation in housing -- let's flip it -- and millions of people who couldn't afford to pay their rent bought houses."

Wait a minute...Let's flip it? What does that mean? Nothing comes to mind -- okay one thing does -- but Walrath never takes such a cavalier attitude about economics. Let's flip it, Walrath says is when "--you buy the house with no intention of ever living in it. You add a kitchen, spruce up a bathroom, and "flip" it, or put it back on the market, hoping to make a profit.

This goes on all the time, Walrath says, but there were more flippers than buyers this time around because it cost almost nothing to own a house while you were waiting to sell it. That's sub-prime credit. You could buy a house with no money down, no income, no job, no assets.

Of course! Now I understand. If you buy a house with no money down, you have little or nothing invested. Just walk away. Let the banks worry about selling them. But to whom will banks sell them? What are the banks going to do? "That's why houses for sale are now piling up all over the country," Walrath said. "It's a terrible situation."

Donald Trump begs to differ. When you're in a hole, keep digging as hard and as fast as you can. Trump's advice, according to Walrath is to "just go back and make another deal with whoever holds the mortgage. Trump says you'll get a better deal this time than the one you had before. Don't walk away from it -- go make another deal. The last thing the bank wants is your house. What are they going to do with it? They can't find anybody to buy it."

So, who's flipping whom in this credit seizure?

According to an unsigned editorial in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, the root cause of this credit correction was the Federal Reserve's willingness to keep money too easy for too long. The Journal warns an "emergency rate cut, as some in the market seem to be anticipating or hoping for -- carries the risk of introducing even greater moral hazard into the financial system."

We can't have immorality in our financial system, now can we? Oh, the horror!

While chiding Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton for proposing a $1 billion federal bailout fund for homeowners at risk of default and foreclosure, the Journal goes on to channel Barbara Bush's flash of morality when speaking of homeless Katrina victims -- "No one wants to see someone lose his home to foreclosure. But many of those most at risk bought their homes with little or no money down, and so have very little at stake economically. Bringing in the feds to bail them out would send precisely the wrong message -- that risky or overly aggressive borrowing will be rewarded by the government rather than punished in the marketplace. To the extent that bad loans were made, the market needs to clear, not be propped up by federal-aid programs."

Unfortunately, despite what the Journal and the endlessly bleating "Money Heads" on TV would have you believe, millions of Americans are in deep trouble. CNBC's Jim Cramer "flipped out" last week in a torrent of truth about the current economic situation.

Walrath agrees, and says if we continue in the direction we're headed, Bush's "boom" will make the Savings and Loan bail-out look like a Girl Scout Cookie Sale.

According to Walrath, there are four sets of losers in this housing meltdown...

~~Those caught with the homes they bought for flipping purposes are not going to be able to find buyers. They are going to lose whatever they have invested, plus whatever mortgage payments they make. It may be cheaper for them just to walk away.

~~Those who own homes will see the value of their houses go down because of the current oversupply due to overbuilding when interest rates were lower and people were buying homes with little or nothing down with the idea of flipping the houses as soon as possible.

~~Those who bought homes with variable-rate mortgages are having trouble making payments because those payments keep going up, and there's nothing they can do about it. Many did not even realize they had such a mortgage. Millions are going to lose their homes.

~~And then, there's the murky many -- the banks and the hedge funds which ended up with mortgages used as collateral for junk bonds, which ended up as holdings by French and German and English banks, not to mention those in this country.

"This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built, and we ain't seen nothing yet," Walrath says.

"When it comes to saving the rich from losing money, no expense will be spared. Actually," Walrath mused, "the economy is good -- if you're rich. For the rest of us, there's not much to write home about."

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@sirinet.net
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CIA and FBI
Computers Used
for
Wikipedia Edits

By
PC Magazine.

WASHINGTON (Reuters)—People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.

The changes may violate Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.

The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.

The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.

WikiScanner revealed that CIA computers were used to edit an entry on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A graphic on casualties was edited to add that many figures were estimated and were not broken down by class.

Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited by CIA computers to expand his career history and discuss the merits of a Vietnam War rural pacification program that he headed.

Aerial and satellite images of the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were removed using a computer traced to the FBI, WikiScanner showed.

CIA spokesman George Little said he could not confirm whether CIA computers were used in the changes, adding that “the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly.”

The FBI did not have an immediate response.

Computers at numerous other organizations and companies were found to have been involved in editing articles related to them.

Griffith said he developed WikiScanner “to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike (and) to see what ‘interesting organizations’ (which I am neutral towards) are up to.”

It was not known whether changes were made by an official representative of an agency or company, Griffith said, but it was certain the change was made by someone with access to the organization’s network.

It violates Wikipedia’s neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization.

However, she said, “Wikipedia is self-correcting,” meaning misleading entries can be quickly revised by another editor. She said Wikimedia welcomed the WikiScanner.

WikiScanner can be found at wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

– By Randall Mikkelsen ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ .

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Add Internet freedom to Pearl Jam’s greatest hitsBy
Seattle Times. AT&T could not have picked a worse band to censor than
Pearl Jam.

Our boys from Seattle have always been a very politically loud and thoughtful band. Their early hits, “Even Flow” and “Jeremy,” were popular but also carried a social message not often found in contemporary music. Lyrics of social issues and politics have continued through Pearl Jam’s latest release.

AT&T overextended its reach when it deleted lyrics critical of President Bush recorded at a Pearl Jam concert that was shown through the telecom’s Blue Room site. All the stories and howls of protest this past week got me thinking about the band’s music and lyrics.

A number of lines jump out when discussing net neutrality, which seeks to ban Internet service providers such as AT&T from giving preferential treatment or charging more for particular Web sites or content.

Consider this line from “Marker in the Sand”: “There is a sickness. A sickness coming over me. Like watching freedom, being sucked straight out to sea. And the solution?”

If Congress finally gets around to passing a net-neutrality law, we can thank, in part, Pearl Jam. Not solely because they were censored, although AT&T’s clumsiness helps, but for their long-standing concern about the consolidation of the media and the misuse of power, as displayed in the song “Grievance”: “Have a drink they’re buying. Bottom of, bottle of denial. Big guy, big eye watching me. Have to wonder what it sees … Progress, laced with ramifications. Freedom’s big plunge.”

These lyrics fit nicely into the narrative of AT&T’s actions. The company released a lame statement claiming it did not mean to censor political statements by Pearl Jam. The explanation rings hollow because in the same statement the spokesperson goes on to say that it has happened before. Not surprisingly, the other musicians censored through Blue Room webcasts were also criticizing Bush.

I get the feeling AT&T is using the “move along, nothing to see here,” routine until Congress and the Federal Communications Commission fail to act on net neutrality. AT&T already had to accept net neutrality for two years as a condition of the FCC approving its merger with BellSouth.

The San Antonio-based AT&T would like nothing more than to emerge from two years in the neutrality wilderness and begin competing against other ISPs such as Verizon with no government regulations to worry about.

Net neutrality is only a part of the debate, though. The public also needs to be worried about media consolidation, the lack of diversity of media ownership, and the assault on Internet radio and low-power FM.

Pearl Jam understands this. A statement on the band’s Web site says, “AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.”

Democracy thrives only when voices are dispersed and diverse. The FCC and Congress have been doing their best the past three decades to work against a press and media that foster democracy. Now, a couple large corporations are in position to put a stranglehold on what most Americans read, watch and listen to.

How much difference can Pearl Jam make? They might be just what the public needed to understand what is close to being lost.

The solution can be found in the song “Indifference”: “I will hold the candle, till it burns up my arm. I’ll keep takin’ punches, until their will grows tired. Oh I will stare the sun down, until my eyes go blind. Hey I won’t change direction, and I won’t change my mind.”

Let’s hope not, because the cablecom beast is not going to change its mind.


By
Ryan Blethen
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/08/17/add-internet-freedom-to-pearl-jams-greatest-hits/
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School Of Shock
MotherJones.com / News / Feature
Eight states are sending autistic, mentally retarded, and emotionally troubled kids to a facility that punishes them with painful electric shocks. How many times do you have to zap a child before it's torture?

Jennifer Gonnerman
August 20 , 2007

Rob Santana awoke terrified. He'd had that dream again, the one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-control activators watched his every move. One press of a button, and there was no telling where the shock would hit—his arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was that the pain would be intense.

Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there weren't electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn't about to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring nightmare came from—not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America's most controversial "behavior modification" facility.

In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which calls itself a "special needs school," takes in all kinds of troubled kids—severely autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed—and attempts to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten. Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900 employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million, charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school districts pick up the tab.

The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, six children have died in its care, prompting numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrive—in large part because no one except desperate parents, and a few state legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.

In Rob Santana's case, he freely admits he was an out-of-control kid with "serious behavioral problems." At birth he was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin, and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him out of foster care when he was 11 months old, but his troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus; when he was six, he cut himself with a razor. His mother took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of psychiatric problems: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Rob was at the Rotenberg Center for about three and a half years. From the start, he cursed, hollered, fought with employees. Eventually the staff obtained permission from his mother and a Massachusetts probate court to use electric shock. Rob was forced to wear a backpack containing five two-pound, battery-operated devices, each connected to an electrode attached to his skin. "I felt humiliated," he says. "You have a bunch of wires coming out of your shirt and pants." Rob remained hooked up to the apparatus 24 hours a day. He wore it while jogging on the treadmill and playing basketball, though it wasn't easy to sink a jump shot with a 10-pound backpack on. When he showered, a staff member would remove his electrodes, all except the one on his arm, which he had to hold outside the shower to keep it dry. At night, Rob slept with the backpack next to him, under the gaze of a surveillance camera.

Employees shocked him for aggressive behavior, he says, but also for minor misdeeds, like yelling or cursing. Each shock lasts two seconds. "It hurts like hell," Rob says. (The school's staff claim it is no more painful than a bee sting; when I tried the shock, it felt like a horde of wasps attacking me all at once. Two seconds never felt so long.) On several occasions, Rob was tied facedown to a four-point restraint board and shocked over and over again by a person he couldn't see. The constant threat of being zapped did persuade him to act less aggressively, but at a high cost. "I thought of killing myself a few times," he says.

Rob's mother Jo-Anne deLeon had sent him to the Rotenberg Center at the suggestion of the special-ed committee at his school district in upstate New York, which, she says, told her that the program had everything Rob needed. She believed he would receive regular psychiatric counseling—though the school does not provide this.

As the months passed, Rob's mother became increasingly unhappy. "My whole dispute with them was, 'When is he going to get psychiatric treatment?'" she says. "I think they had to get to the root of his problems—like why was he so angry? Why was he so destructive? I really think they needed to go in his head somehow and figure this out." She didn't think the shocks were helping, and in 2002 she sent a furious fax demanding that Rob's electrodes be removed before she came up for Parents' Day. She says she got a call the next day from the executive director, Matthew Israel, who told her, "You don't want to stick with our treatment plan? Pick him up." (Israel says he doesn't remember this conversation, but adds, "If a parent doesn't want the use of the skin shock and wants psychiatric treatment, this isn't the right program for them.")

Rob's mother is not the only parent angry at the Rotenberg Center. Last year, Evelyn Nicholson sued the facility after her 17-year-old son Antwone was shocked 79 times in 18 months. Nicholson says she decided to take action after Antwone called home and told her, "Mommy, you don't love me anymore because you let them hurt me so bad." Rob and Antwone don't know each other (Rob left the facility before Antwone arrived), but in some ways their stories are similar. Antwone's birth mother was a drug addict; he was burned on an electric hot plate as an infant. Evelyn took him in as a foster child and later adopted him. The lawsuit she filed against the Rotenberg Center set off a chain of events: investigations by multiple government agencies, emotional public hearings, scrutiny by the media. Legislation to restrict or ban the use of electric shocks in such facilities has been introduced in two state legislatures. Yet not much has changed.

Rob has paid little attention to the public debate over his alma mater, though he visits its website occasionally to see which of the kids he knew are still there. After he left the center he moved back in with his parents. At first glance, he seems like any other 21-year-old: baggy Rocawear jeans, black T-shirt, powder-blue Nikes. But when asked to recount his years at the Rotenberg Center, he speaks for nearly two hours in astonishing detail, recalling names and specific events from seven or eight years earlier. When he describes his recurring nightmares, he raises both arms and rubs his forehead with his palms.

Despite spending more than three years at this behavior-modification facility, Rob still has problems controlling his behavior. In 2005, he was arrested for attempted assault and sent to jail. (This year he was arrested again, for drugs and assault.) Being locked up has given him plenty of time to reflect on his childhood, and he has gained a new perspective on the Rotenberg Center. "It's worse than jail," he told me. "That place is the worst place on earth."

One Punishment Fits All
The story of the Rotenberg Center is in many ways a tale of two schools. Slightly more than half the residents are what the school calls "high functioning": kids like Rob and Antwone, who have diagnoses like attention-deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other emotional problems. The other group is even more troubled. Referred to as "low functioning," it includes kids with severe autism and mental retardation; most cannot speak or have very limited verbal abilities. Some have behaviors so extreme they can be life threatening: chomping on their hands and arms, running into walls, nearly blinding themselves by banging their heads on the floor again and again.

The Rotenberg Center has long been known as the school of last resort—a place that will take any kid, no matter how extreme his or her problems are. It doesn't matter if a child has been booted out of 2, 5, 10, or 20 other programs—he or she is still welcome here. For desperate parents, the Rotenberg Center can seem like a godsend. Just ask Louisa Goldberg, the mother of 25-year-old Andrew, who has severe mental retardation. Andrew's last residential school kicked him out after he kept assaulting staff members; the Rotenberg Center was the only place willing to accept him. According to Louisa, Andrew's quality of life has improved dramatically since 2000, when he was hooked up to the shock device, known as the Graduated Electronic Decelerator, or ged.

The Rotenberg Center has a policy of not giving psychiatric drugs to students—no Depakote, Paxil, Risperdal, Ritalin, or Seroquel. It's a policy that appeals to Louisa and many other parents. At Andrew's last school, she says, "he had so many medicines in him he'd take a two-hour nap in the morning, he'd take a two-hour nap in the afternoon. They'd have him in bed at eight o'clock at night. He was sleeping his life away." These days, Louisa says she is no longer afraid when her son comes home to visit. "[For him] to have an electrode on and to receive a ged is to me a much more favorable way of dealing with this," she says. "He's not sending people to the hospital."

Marguerite Famolare brought her son Michael to the Rotenberg Center six years ago, after he attacked her so aggressively she had to call 911 and, in a separate incident, flipped over a kitchen table onto a tutor. Michael, now 19, suffers from mental retardation and severe autism. These days, when he comes home for a visit, Marguerite carries his shock activator in her purse. All she has to do, she says, is show it to him. "He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being."

Massachusetts officials have twice tried to shut the Rotenberg Center down—once in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. Both times parents rallied to its defense, and both times it prevailed in court. (See "Why Can't Massachusetts Shut Matthew Israel Down?" page 44.) The name of the center ensures nobody forgets these victories; it was Judge Ernest Rotenberg, now deceased, who in the mid-'80s ruled that the facility could continue using aversives—painful punishments designed to change behavior—so long as it obtained authorization from the Bristol County Probate and Family Court in each student's case. But even though the facility wasn't using electric shock when this ruling was handed down, the court rarely, if ever, bars the Rotenberg Center from adding shock to a student's treatment plan, according to lawyers and disability advocates who have tried to prevent it from doing so.

Since Evelyn Nicholson filed her lawsuit in 2006, the Rotenberg Center has faced a new wave of criticism and controversy. (See "Nagging? Zap. Swearing? Zap," page 41.) And again, the facility has relied heavily on the testimonials of parents like Louisa Goldberg and Marguerite Famolare to defend itself. Not surprisingly, the most vocal parent-supporters tend to be those with the sickest children, since they are the ones with the fewest options. But at the Rotenberg Center, the same methods of "behavior modification" are applied to all kids, no matter what is causing their behavior problems. And so, while Rob would seem to have little in common with mentally retarded students like Michael and Andrew, they all shared a similar fate once their parents placed them under the care of the same psychologist, a radical behaviorist known as Dr. Israel.

Dr. Israel's Radical Behavior
In 1950, matt israel was a Harvard freshman looking to fill his science requirement. He knew little about B.F. Skinner when he signed up for his course, Human Behavior. Soon, though, Israel became fascinated with Skinner's scientific approach to the study of behavior, and he picked up Walden Two, Skinner's controversial novel about an experimental community based on the principles of behaviorism. The book changed Israel's life. "I decided my mission was to start a utopian community," he says. Israel got a Ph.D. in psychology in 1960 from Harvard, and started two communal houses outside Boston.

One of the people Israel lived with was a three-year-old named Andrea, the daughter of a roommate. The two did not get along. "She was wild and screaming," Israel recalls. "I would retreat to my own room, and she'd be trying to pull away and get into my room, and I'd have to hold the door on one side to keep her from disturbing me." When company would come over, he says, "She would walk around with a toy broom and whack people over the head."

Through experiments with rats and pigeons, Skinner had demonstrated how animals learn from the consequences of their actions. With permission from Andrea's mother, Israel decided to try out Skinner's ideas on the three-year-old. When Andrea was well behaved, Israel took her out for walks. But when she misbehaved, he punished her by snapping his finger against her cheek. His mentor Skinner preached that positive reinforcement was vastly preferable to punishment, but Israel says his methods transformed the girl. "Instead of being an annoyance, she became a charming addition to the house."

Israel's success with Andrea convinced him to start a school. In 1971, he founded the Behavior Research Institute in Rhode Island, a facility that would later move to Massachusetts and become known as the Judge Rotenberg Center. Israel took in children nobody else wanted—severely autistic and mentally retarded kids who did dangerous things to themselves and others. To change their behavior, he developed a large repertoire of punishments: spraying kids in the face with water, shoving ammonia under their noses, pinching the soles of their feet, smacking them with a spatula, forcing them to wear a "white-noise helmet" that assaulted them with static.

In 1977, Israel opened a branch of his program in California's San Fernando Valley, along with Judy Weber, whose son Tobin is severely autistic. Two years later, the Los Angeles Times reported Israel had pinched the feet of Christopher Hirsch, an autistic 12-year-old, at least 24 times in 30 minutes, while the boy screamed and cried. This was a punishment for soiling his pants. ("It might have been true," Israel says. "It's true that pinches were being used as an aversive. The pinch, the spank, the muscle squeeze, water sprays, bad taste—all those procedures were being used.") Israel was in the news again in 1981, when another student, 14-year-old Danny Aswad, died while strapped facedown to his bed. In 1982, the California Department of Social Services compiled a 64-page complaint that read like a catalog of horrors, describing students with bruises, welts, and cuts. It also accused Israel of telling a staff member "to grow his fingernails longer so he could give an effective pinch."

In 1982, the facility settled with state officials and agreed to stop using physical punishments. Now called Tobinworld, and still run by Judy Weber, it is a $10-million-a-year organization operating day schools near Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Rotenberg Center considers itself a "sister school" to Tobinworld, and Israel makes frequent trips to California to visit Weber. The two were married last year.

Despite his setback in California, Israel continued to expand on the East Coast—and to generate controversy. In 1985, Vincent Milletich, an autistic 22-year-old, suffered a seizure and died after he was put in restraints and forced to wear a white-noise helmet. Five years later, 19-year-old Linda Cornelison, who had the mental capacity of a toddler, refused to eat. On the bus to school, she clutched her stomach; someone had to carry her inside, and she spent the day on a couch in a classroom. Linda could not speak, and the staff treated her actions as misbehaviors. Between 3:52 p.m. and 8 p.m., staffers punished her with 13 spatula spankings, 29 finger pinches, 14 muscle squeezes, and 5 forced inhalings of ammonia. It turned out that Linda had a perforated stomach. She died on the operating table at 1:45 a.m.

The local district attorney's office examined the circumstances of Vincent's death but declined to file any charges. In Linda's case, the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation investigated and found that while Linda's treatment had "violated the most basic codes and standards of decency and humane treatment," there was insufficient evidence to prove that the use of aversives had caused her death.

By the time Linda died, Israel was moving away from spatulas and toward electric shock, which, from his perspective, offered many advantages. "To give a spank or a muscle squeeze or a pinch, you had to control the student physically, and that could lead to a struggle," he says. "A lot of injuries were occurring." Since shocking only required pressing a button, Israel could eliminate the need for employees to wrestle a kid to the ground. Another benefit, he says, was increased consistency. It was hard to know if one staff member's spatula spanking was harder than another's, but it was easy to measure how many times a staff member had shocked a child.

Israel purchased a shock device then on the market known as sibis—Self-Injurious Behavior Inhibiting System—that had been invented by the parents of an autistic girl and delivered a mild shock that lasted .2 second. Between 1988 and 1990, Israel used sibis on 29 students, including one of his most challenging, Brandon, then 12, who would bite off chunks of his tongue, regurgitate entire meals, and pound himself on the head. At times Brandon was required to keep his hands on a paddle; if he removed them, he would get automatic shocks, one per second. One infamous day, Brandon received more than 5,000 shocks. "You have to realize," Israel says. "I thought his life was in the balance. I couldn't find any medical solution. He was vomiting, losing weight. He was down to 52 pounds. I knew it was risky to use the shock in large numbers, but if I persevered that day, I thought maybe it would eventually work. There was nothing else I could think of to do...but by the time it went into the 3,000 or 4,000 range, it became clear it wasn't working."

This day was a turning point in the history of Israel's operation—that's when he decided to ratchet up the pain. The problem, he decided, was that the shock sibis emitted was not strong enough. He says he asked sibis's manufacturer, Human Technologies, to create a more powerful device, but it refused. "So we had to redesign the device ourselves," he says. He envisioned a device that would start with a low current but that could increase the voltage if needed—hence its name, Graduated Electronic Decelerator or ged—but he abandoned this idea early on. "As it turns out, that's really not a wise approach," he says. "It's sort of like operating a car and wearing out the brakes because you never really apply them strongly enough. Instead, we set it at a certain level that was more or less going to be effective for most of our students."

Thirty years earlier, O. Ivar Lovaas, a psychology professor at ucla, had pioneered the use of slaps and screams and electric jolts to try to normalize the behavior of autistic kids. Life magazine featured his work in a nine-page photo essay in 1965 with the headline, "A surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental cripples." Lovaas eventually abandoned these methods, telling cbs in 1993 that shock was "only a temporary suppression" because patients become inured to the pain. "These people are so used to pain that they can adapt to almost any kind of aversive you give them," he said.

Israel encountered this same sort of adaptation in his students, but his solution was markedly different: He decided to increase the pain once again. Today, there are two shock devices in use at the Rotenberg Center: the ged and the ged-4. The devices look similar and both administer a two-second shock, but the ged-4 is nearly three times more powerful—and the pain it inflicts is that much more severe.

The Mickey Mouse Club
Ten years ago, Israel hung up a Mickey Mouse poster in the main hall, and he noticed that it made people smile—so he bought every Mickey Mouse poster he could find. He hung them in the corridors and even papered the walls of what became known as the Mickey Mouse Conference Room. Entering the Rotenberg Center is a bit like stepping into a carnival fun house, I discovered during a two-day visit last autumn. Two brushed-aluminum dogs, each nearly 5 feet tall and sporting a purple neon collar, stand guard outside. Giant silver stars dangle from the lobby ceiling; the walls and chairs in the front offices are turquoise, lime green, and lavender.

Israel, 74, still holds the title of executive director, for which he pays himself nearly $400,000 in salary and benefits. He appears utterly unimposing: short and slender with soft hands, rounded shoulders, curly white hair, paisley tie. Then he sits down beside me and, unprompted, starts talking about shocking children. "The treatment is so powerful it's hard not to use if you have seen how effective it is," he says quietly. "It's brief. It's painful. But there are no side effects. It's two seconds of discomfort." His tone is neither defensive nor apologetic; rather, it's perfectly calm, almost soothing. It's the sort of demeanor a mother might find comforting if she were about to hand over her child.

Before we set off on our tour of the facility, there's something Israel wants me to see: Before & After, a homemade movie featuring six of his most severe cases. Israel has been using some of the same grainy footage for more than two decades, showing it to parents of prospective students as well as visiting reporters. They've already mailed me a copy, but Israel wants to make sure I watch it. An assistant slips the tape into the vcr, Israel presses the remote, and we all stare at the screen:

1977: An 11-year-old girl named Caroline arrives at the school strapped down onto a stretcher, her head encased in a helmet. In the next shot, free from restraints, she crouches down and tries to smash her helmeted head against the floor.

1981: Janine, also 11 years old, shrieks and slams her head against the ground, a table, the door. Bald spots testify to the severity of her troubles; she's yanked out so much hair it's half gone.

Both girls exhibit autistic behaviors, and compared with these scenes, the "After" footage looks almost unbelievable: Janine splashes in a plastic pool, while Caroline grins as she sits in a chair at a beauty salon. "Most people haven't seen these pictures," Israel says, setting down the remote. "They haven't seen children like this, so they cannot imagine. These are children for whom positive-only procedures did not work, drugs did not work. And if it wasn't for this treatment, some of these people would not be alive." The video is extremely persuasive: The girls' self-abuse is so violent and so frightening that it almost makes me want to grab a ged remote and push the button myself. Of course, this is precisely the point.

Considering how compelling the "After" footage is, I am surprised to learn that five of the six children featured in it are still here. "This is Caroline," one of my escorts says an hour or two later as we walk down a corridor. Without an introduction, I would not have known. Caroline, 39, slumps forward in a wheelchair, her fists balled up, head covered by a red helmet. "Blow me a kiss, Caroline," Israel says. She doesn't respond.

A few minutes later, I meet 36-year-old Janine, who appears in much better shape. She's not wearing a helmet and has a full head of black hair. She's also got a backpack on her shoulders and canvas straps hanging from her legs, the telltale sign that electrodes are attached to both calves. For 16 years—nearly half her life—Janine has been hooked up to Israel's shock device. A couple years ago, when the shocks began to lose their effect, the staff switched the devices inside her backpack to the much more painful ged-4.

Rogue Science
In 1994, matthew israel had just 64 students. Today he has 234. This astonishing rate of growth is largely the result of a dramatic change in the types of students he takes in. Until recently, nearly all were "low functioning," autistic and mentally retarded people. But today slightly more than 50 percent are "high functioning," with diagnoses like add, adhd, and bipolar disorder. New York state supplies the majority of these students, many of whom grew up in the poorest parts of New York City. Yet despite this change in his population, Israel's methods have remained essentially the same.

Israel has long faced criticism that he has not published research about his use of electric shocks in peer-reviewed journals, where experts could scrutinize it. To defend his methods, he points to a bibliography of 110 research articles that he's posted on the Rotenberg Center website. This catalog seems impressive at first. Studied more closely, however, it is not nearly so convincing. Three-quarters of the articles were published more than 20 years ago. Eight were written or cowritten by Lovaas, the ucla-affiliated behaviorist. One of America's leading autism experts, Lovaas long ago stopped endorsing painful aversives. And Lovaas' old studies focus primarily on children with autism who engage in extreme self-injury—not on troubled teens who have been diagnosed with adhd or add.

But then, it would be hard for Israel to find contemporary research supporting his program, because the practice of treating self-abusive kids with pain has been largely abandoned. According to Dr. Saul Axelrod, a professor at Temple University and an expert on behavior modification, "the field has moved away from painful stimuli because of public outcry and because we've devised better techniques," including determining the cause of an individual's self-abuse.

Another expert Israel cites several times is Dr. Brian A. Iwata, a consultant on the development of sibis, the device Israel modified to create his ged. Now a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Florida, he's a nationally recognized authority on treating severe self-abuse among children with developmental disabilities. Iwata has visited the Rotenberg Center and describes its approach as dangerously simplistic: "There appears to be a mission of that program to use shock for problem behaviors. It doesn't matter what that behavior is." Iwata has consulted for 25 states and says there is little relationship between what goes on at Israel's program and what goes on at other facilities. "He may have gotten his Ph.D. at Harvard, but he didn't learn what he's doing at Harvard. Whatever he's doing, he decided to do on his own."

Paul Touchette, who also studied with B.F. Skinner, has known Israel since the 1960s when they were both in Cambridge. Like Israel, Touchette went on to treat children with autism who exhibit extreme self-abuse, but he isn't a fan of Israel's approach either. "Punishment doesn't get at the cause," says Touchette, who is on the faculty of the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine. "It just scares the hell out of patients."

Over the decades, Touchette has followed Israel's career and bumped into him at professional conferences. "He's a very smart man, but he's an embarrassment to his profession," Touchette says. "I've never been able to figure out if Matt is a little off-kilter and actually believes all this stuff, or whether he's just a clever businessman."

Big Reward Store
At the rotenberg center, an elaborate system of rewards and punishments governs all interactions. Well-behaved kids can watch TV, go for pizza, play basketball. Students who've earned points for good behavior visit a store stocked with dvd players, cds, cologne, PlayStation 2, Essence magazine, knockoff Prada purses—anything the staff thinks students might want. But even more prized is a visit to the "Big Reward Store," an arcade full of pinball machines, video games, a pool table, and the most popular feature, a row of 42-inch flat-screen TVs hooked up to Xbox 360s.

Students like the "brs" for another reason—it's the only place many can socialize freely. At the Rotenberg Center, students have to earn the right to talk to each other. "We had to wait until we were in brs to communicate with others," says Isabel Cedeño, a 16-year-old who ran away from Rotenberg in 2006 after her boyfriend, a former student, came and got her. "That was the only time you really laughed, had fun, hung around with your friends. Because usually, you can't talk to them. It was basically like we had to have enemies. They didn't want us to be friendly with nobody."

Students live grouped together in homes and apartments scattered in nearby towns and are bused to the facility's headquarters every morning. They spend their days in classrooms, staring at a computer screen, their backs to the teacher. They are supposed to teach themselves, using self-instruction programs that include lessons in math, reading, and typing. Even with breaks for gym and lunch, the days can be incredibly dull. "On paper, it does look like they're being educated, because we have lesson plans," says former teacher Jessica Croteau, who oversaw a classroom of high-functioning teens for six months before leaving in 2006. But "to self-teach is not exciting. Why would the kids want to sit there and read a chapter on their own without any discussion?"

Croteau says teachers have to spend so much time monitoring misbehaviors there's often little time left for teaching. Whenever a student disobeys a rule, a staff member must point it out, using the student's name and just one or two rote phrases like, "Mark, there's no stopping work. Work on your task, please." Each time a student curses or yells, a staffer marks it on the student's recording sheet. Teachers and aides then use the sheet to calculate what level of punishment is required—when to just say "No!" and when to shock.

Employees carry students' shock activators inside plastic cases, which they hook onto their belt loops. These cases are known as "sleds," and each sled has a photo on it to ensure employees don't zap the wrong kid.

Behaviorism would seem to dictate that staff shock students immediately after they break the rules. But if employees learn about a misbehavior after it has occurred—by, say, reviewing surveillance footage—they may still administer punishment. Rob Santana recalls that Mondays were always the most stressful day of the week. He would sit at his desk all day, trying to remember if he had broken any rules over the weekend, waiting to see if he'd be shocked.

Employees are encouraged to use the element of surprise. "Attempt to be as discreet as possible and hold the transmitter out of view of the student," states the employee manual. This way, students cannot do anything to minimize the pain, like flipping over their electrodes or tensing their muscles. "We hear the sound of [a staffer] picking up a sled," says Isabel, the former student. "Then we turn around and see the person jump out of their seat."

Employees shock students for a wide range of behaviors, from violent actions to less serious offenses, like getting out of their seats without permission. In 2006, the New York State Education Department sent a team of investigators, including three psychologists, to the Rotenberg Center, then issued a scathing report. Among its many criticisms was that the staff shocked kids for "nagging, swearing, and failing to maintain a neat appearance." Israel only disputes the latter. As for nagging and swearing? "Sometimes a behavior looks innocuous," he says, "but if it's an antecedent for aggression, it may have to be treated with an aversive."

New York officials disagreed, and in January 2007 issued regulations that would prohibit shocking New York students for minor infractions. But a group of New York parents filed a federal lawsuit to stop the state from enforcing these regulations. They prevailed, winning a temporary restraining order against the state, one that permits the Rotenberg Center staffers to continue using shock. The parents' case is expected to go to trial in 2008.

When they talk about why they use the shock device, Israel and his employees like to use the word "treatment," but it might be more accurate to use words like "convenience" or "control." "The ged—it's two seconds and it's done," says Patricia Rivera, a psychologist who serves as assistant director of clinical services. "Then it's right back to work." By contrast, it can take 8 or 10 employees half an hour or longer to restrain a strong male student: to pin him to the floor, wait for him to stop struggling, then move his body onto a restraint board and tie down each limb. Restraining five or eight kids in a single day—or the same student again and again—can be incredibly time-consuming and sometimes dangerous.

Even with the ged, the stories both students and employees tell make the place sound at times like a war zone: A teenage boy sliced the gym teacher across the face with a cd. A girl stabbed a staffer in the stomach with a pencil. While staff have been contending with injuries ever since Israel opened his facility, the recent influx of high-functioning students, some with criminal backgrounds, has brought a new fear: that students will join forces and riot. Perhaps tellingly, among high-functioning kids most of the violence is directed at the staff, not each other.

"Our Students Have a Tendency to Lie"

Rotenberg staff place the more troubled (or troublesome) residents on 1:1 status, meaning that an aide monitors them everywhere they go. For extremely violent students, the ratio is 2:1. Soon after I arrived, right before I set off on my tour, a small crowd gathered—it seemed that almost the entire hierarchy of the Rotenberg Center was going to follow me around. That's when I realized I'd been put on 5:1. As I began to roam around the school with my escorts, my every move monitored by surveillance cameras, I realized it would be impossible to have a private conversation with any student. The best I could hope for would be a few unscripted moments.

Ten years ago, a reporter visiting Israel's center would have been unable to talk to most students; back then few of them could speak. These days, there are more than 100 high-functioning kids fully capable of voicing their views, and Israel has enlisted a few in his campaign to promote the ged. "If we had only [severely] autistic students, they couldn't talk to you and say, 'Gee, this is really helping me,'" Israel says. "Now for the first time we have students like Katie who can tell you it helped them."

In the world of the Rotenberg Center, Katie Spartichino is a star. She left the facility in the spring of 2006 and now attends community college in Boston. Around noon, a staff member brings her back to the facility to talk to me. We sit at an outdoor picnic table away from the surveillance cameras but there's no privacy: Israel and Karen LaChance, the assistant to the executive director for admissions, sit with us.

Katie, 19, tells me she overdosed on pills at 9, spent her early adolescence in and out of psych wards, was hooked up to the ged at 16, and stayed on the device for two years. "This is a great place," she says. "It took me off all my medicine. I was close to 200 pounds and I'm 160 now." She admits her outlook was less rosy when she first had to wear the electrodes. "I cried," she says. "I kind of felt like I was walking on eggshells; I had to watch everything I said. Sometimes a curse word would just come out of my mouth automatically. So being on the geds and knowing that swearing was a targeted behavior where I would receive a [GED] application, it really got me to think twice before I said something disrespectful or something just plain-out rude."

As Katie speaks, LaChance runs her fingers through Katie's hair again and again. The gesture is so deliberate it draws my attention. I wonder if it's just an expression of affection—or something more, like a reward.

"Do you swear anymore?" I ask.

"Oh, God, all the time," Katie says. She pauses. "Well, I have learned to control it, but I'm not going to lie. When I'm on the phone, curse words come out."

The hair stroking stops. LaChance turns to Katie. "I hope you're not going to tell me you're aggressive."

"Oh, no, that's gone," Katie says. "No, no, no. The worst thing I do sometimes is me and my mom get into little arguments."

For Israel, of course, one drawback of having so many high-functioning students is that he cannot control everything they say. One afternoon, when I walk into a classroom of teenagers, a 15-year-old girl catches my eye, smiles, and holds up a sheet of paper with a message written in pink marker: HELP US. She puts it back down and shuffles it into her stack of papers before anyone else sees. When I move closer, she tells me her name is Raquel, she is from the Bronx, and she wants to go home.

My escorts allow me to interview Raquel while two of them sit nearby. Raquel is not hooked up to the ged, but she has many complaints, including that she has just witnessed one of her housemates get shocked. "She was screaming," Raquel says. "They told her to step up to be searched; she didn't want to step up to be searched, so they gave her one." After 20 minutes, my escorts cut us off. "Raquel, you did a great job—thank you for taking the time," says Patricia Rivera, the psychologist.

Once Raquel is out of earshot, Rivera adds, "Some of the things she said are not true, some of them are. Our students obviously have a tendency to lie about things." She explains that a staff member searches Raquel's housemate every hour because she's the one who recently stabbed an employee with a pencil.

The Rotenberg Center does not have a rule about how old a child must be before he or she can be hooked up to the ged. One of the program's youngest students is a nine-year-old named Rodrigo. When I see him, he is seated outside at a picnic table with his aide. Rodrigo's backpack looks enormous on his tiny frame; canvas straps dangle from both legs.

"He was horrible when he first came in," Rivera says. "It would take five staff to restrain him because he's so wiry." What was he like? "A lot of aggression. A lot of disruptive behavior. Whenever he was asked to do a task that he didn't feel like doing, he would scream, yell, swear. The stuff that would come out of his mouth you wouldn't believe—very sexually inappropriate."

"Rodrigo, come here," one of my escorts says.

Rodrigo walks over, his straps slapping the ground. He wears a white dress shirt and tie—the standard uniform for male students—but because he is so small, maybe 4 feet tall, his tie nearly reaches his thighs. "What's that?" he asks.

"That's a tape recorder," I say. "Do you want to say something?"

"Yeah."

Unfazed by the presence of Israel, Rivera, and my other escorts, Rodrigo lifts a small hand and pulls the recorder down toward his lips. "I want to move to another school," he says.

The Employee-Modification System


To understand how the Rotenberg Center works, it helps to know that it runs not just one behavior-modification program, but two—one for the residents, and one for the staff. Employees have no autonomy. If a staffer believes it's okay to shock a kid who is smashing his head against a wall, but it's not okay to shock someone for getting out of his chair without permission, that could spell trouble. "There's pressure on you to do it," a former teacher told me. "They punish you if you don't."

I met this former teacher at a restaurant, and our meeting stretched on for six hours. At times it felt less like an interview than a confession. "The first time you give someone a ged is the worst one," the teacher said. "You don't want to hurt somebody; you want to help. You're thinking, 'This has got to be okay. This has got to be legal, or they wouldn't be doing this.'" At the Rotenberg Center, it's virtually impossible to discuss such concerns with coworkers because there are cameras everywhere, even in the staff break room. Staff members who want to talk to each other without being overheard may meet up in the parking lot or scribble notes to each other. But it's hard to know whom to trust, since Israel encourages employees to file anonymous reports about their coworkers' lapses.

In addition, staff members are prohibited from having casual conversations with each other. They cannot, for example, say to a coworker, "Hey, did you see the Red Sox game last night?" "We don't want them discussing their social life or the ball games in front of the students or while they're on duty," Israel says. "So we'll sometimes actually have one staffer deliberately start a social conversation with another and we'll see whether the other—as he or she should—will say, 'I don't want to discuss that now.'" Monitors watch these setups on the surveillance cameras and punish staffers who take the bait.

Former employees describe a workplace permeated with fear—fear of being attacked by students and fear of losing their job. There are so many rules—and so many cameras—it's not easy to stay out of trouble. Employees quit or are fired so often that two-thirds of the direct-care employees remain on the job for less than a year.

New employees must sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to talk about the Rotenberg Center—even after they no longer work there. Of the eight ex-employees I interviewed, most did not want to be identified by name for fear of Israel suing them; all were critical of how the ged is used. Maybe, says one, the use of shocks was justified in a few extreme self-injurious cases, but that's all. "Say you had a hospital that was the only hospital in the nation that had chemotherapy, and they were treating people who had the common cold with it," she says. "I think the extreme to which they abuse their power has outweighed what good they do."

The Hard Lessons of Connie Chung

Matthew Israel has been fielding questions from journalists since the 1970s, but few have examined his operation as thoroughly—and critically—as the producers at Eye to Eye with Connie Chung did. In 1993, they spent six months investigating the facility. They even found an employee willing to go inside with a hidden camera. But Israel ended up getting the last laugh. As he recounts the story for me, he can barely contain his glee. "We refused to meet with her unless the parents could be in the same room," he says, grinning. "She talked to the parents, and they really gave it to her." This is no exaggeration: When Chung tried to ask him tough questions, his parent-supporters shouted her down.

Throughout this raucous meeting, Israel had his own camera rolling, too, which turned out to be a brilliant move. Before cbs got its 40-minute story on the air, Israel launched a national campaign to discredit both Chung and her report. He accused her of being "biased" and "hostile," and to prove it, he distributed edited videotapes of her interview to media critics and cbs affiliates. It worked. A New York Times television critic savaged cbs, accusing it of using "shabby tricks of the trade." Suddenly the story was not about whether the school had abused students—but whether cbs had abused the school.

"I don't think it was a positive thing for her career," says Israel, still smiling. It's late in the day, right near the end of my visit, and I'm starting to wonder why he's brought up this topic.

By now I've spent 22 hours with Israel and his staff—wandering around the facility, meeting parents they've brought in for me to interview. But before I depart, there's one more place I want to see, the room where they repair the geds. Israel and Glenda Crookes, an assistant executive director, agree to take me there. It is just past 7 p.m. and drizzling as we climb into Israel's Lexus for a short drive to the maintenance building.

There, Crookes and Israel lead me down a hall, past storerooms filled with red helmets, ged sleds, batteries and their chargers. The room at the end of the hall looks like it could be a repair shop for any sort of electronics equipment: scissors, screwdrivers, industrial-grade glue, a Black & Decker Pivot Driver. On one desk, I spot a form called a ged Trouble Report. The report explains that someone dropped off Duane's shock device because it was "making rattling noises." Crookes explains, "Anytime a screw is loose or anything is wrong with the device, it's automatically sent back here."

A Trouble Report on another desk suggests a more serious problem: "Jamie Z was getting his battery changed, Luigi received a shock." "What does this mean?" I ask. Crookes picks up the paper, reads it, then hands it to Israel and walks away. Her gesture seems to say, I cannot believe we just spent two days with this reporter and now this is the last thing she sees.

Israel stares at the report, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of reading glasses. Nobody says anything. Outside, one car after another races by, the tail end of the evening commute.

After a minute or two, Israel says, "Well, I don't understand the whole of it." He is still staring at the paper in his hand. "But there was apparently a spontaneous activation." The ged, in other words, delivered a shock without anyone pressing its remote.

This moment reminds me of something Israel told me earlier about the premise of Skinner's Walden Two, that by changing people's behaviors you can help them have a better life. But, Israel was careful to add, "The notion was that you needed to have the whole environment under control. With a school like this, we have an awful lot. Not the whole environment, but an awful lot."

He was right; he controls nearly every aspect of his facility. But all of his surveillance cameras and microphones and paperwork and protocols had failed to protect Luigi, a mentally retarded resident who had done nothing wrong.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

Go on-site to gain access to this article. and many others which are current, as well as their archives, cartoons, etc. Just click on the following URL: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html?src=email&hed_20070820_ts1_schoolofshock <<<???>>>
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Prelude to an Attack on Iran

By
Robert Baer
Saturday, Aug. 18, 2007

Reports that the Bush Administration will put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: it's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. And they think that as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities. An awe and shock campaign, lite, if you will. But frankly they're guessing; after Iraq the White House trusts no one, especially the bureaucracy.

As with Saddam and his imagined WMD, the Administration's case against the IRGC is circumstantial. The U.S. military suspects but cannot prove that the IRGC is the main supplier of sophisticated improvised explosive devices to insurgents killing our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most sophisticated version, explosive formed projectiles or shape charges, are capable of penetrating the armor of an Abrams tank, disabling the tank and killing the crew.

A former CIA explosives expert who still works in Iraq told me: "The Iranians are making them. End of story." His argument is only a state is capable of manufacturing the EFP's, which involves a complicated annealing process. Incidentally, he also is convinced the IRGC is helping Iraqi Shi'a militias sight in their mortars on the Green Zone. "The way they're dropping them in, in neat grids, tells me all I need to know that the Shi'a are getting help. And there's no doubt it's Iranian, the IRGC's," he said.

A second part of the Administration's case against the IRGC is that the IRGC has had a long, established history of killing Americans, starting with the attack on the Marines in Beirut in 1983. And that's not to mention it was the IRGC that backed Hizballah in its thirty-four day war against Israel last year. The feeling in the Administration is that we should have taken care of the IRGC a long, long time ago.

Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking.

And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. "IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran."

— Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down

http://www.buzzflash.com

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1654188,00.html
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Experts Tie Pigeon Dung, Bridge Collapse

By
MARTIGA LOHN
08.22.07, 4:41 PM ET
Associated Press



ST. PAUL, Minn. - Pounded and strained by heavy traffic and weakened by missing bolts and cracking steel, the failed Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River also faced a less obvious enemy: pigeons.

Inspectors began documenting the buildup of pigeon dung on the span near downtown Minneapolis two decades ago. Experts say the corrosive guano deposited all over the span's framework helped the steel beams rust faster.

Although investigators have yet to identify the cause of the bridge's Aug. 1 collapse, which killed at least 13 people and injured about 100, the pigeon problem is one of many factors that dogged the structure.

"There is a coating of pigeon dung on steel with nest and heavy buildup on the inside hollow box sections," inspectors wrote in a 1987-1989 report.

In 1996, screens were installed over openings in the bridge's beams to keep pigeons from nesting there, but that didn't prevent the building of droppings elsewhere.

Pigeon droppings contain ammonia and acids, said chemist Neal Langerman, an officer with the health and safety division of the American Chemical Society. If the dung isn't washed away, it dries out and turns into a concentrated salt. When water gets in and combines with the salt and ammonia, it creates small electrochemical reactions that rust the steel underneath.

"Every time you get a little bit of moisture there, you wind up having a little bit of electrochemistry occurring and you wind up with corrosion," said Langerman. "Over a long term, it might in fact cause structural weaknesses."

Langerman emphasized that he wasn't saying pigeon dung factored into the collapse of the 40-year-old bridge. "Let's let the highway transportation and safety people do their job," he said.

The problem is familiar to bridge inspectors everywhere.

The Colorado Department of Transportation spent so much time cleaning pigeon manure off bridges that it is embarking on a two-year research project looking for ways to keep pigeons away from its spans.

"It can be damaging to our structures because it's slightly acidic and it has other compounds in it that can dissolve especially things like concrete," said Patricia Martinek, the agency's environmental research manager.

Pigeon guano isn't just a danger to the bridges.

In the Denver area, the Colorado DOT pays outside environmental specialists to clean bridges wearing full biohazard suits with respirators because of heightened fears about bird flu and other diseases, said Rob Haines, who supervises maintenance there.

Keeping pigeons off bridges usually requires a multi-pronged strategy that can include netting to block holes and surfaces, spikes to keep them from landing, and sometimes poisoning, shooting or trapping the birds, said John Hart, a Grand Rapids, Minn.-based wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The problem is that pigeons are naturally drawn to bridges and tall buildings since they're descended from cliff-dwellers, said Karen Purcell, who heads Project PigeonWatch at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Bridges offer shelter from predators and flat surfaces for nesting and roosting.

"It's a nice fit for them," Purcell said.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...partner=alerts

* * * .

[Saundra Hummer]

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~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball”

Charles V
~~~
"Let those who would die for the flag on the field of battle give a better proof of their patriotism and a higher glory to their country by promoting fraternity and justice."

Benjamin Harrison
1889-1893
Inaugural Address, 1889
~~~
"The soul of our country needs to be awakened . . .When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders."

Veterans Fast for Life
~~~

"These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland."

John Kenneth Galbraith
(1908- )
Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor.
Source: The Affluent Society, 1976
~~~

"Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect."

Thomas Sowell
(1930- )
Writer and economist
~~~


"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."

Sir Francis Bacon
~~~

"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

Sir John Harrington
1561-1612
~~~

"When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty."

George Mason
~~~

"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men".

Plato
~~~
"Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots".

H.L. Mencken
~~~

We are the ruling race of the world... We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world... He has marked us as his chosen people... He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples."

Sen. Alfred Beveridge
~~~

"I firmly believe that when any territory outside the present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for our defense or essential for our commercial development, we ought to lose no time in acquiring it."

Sen. Orville Platt
of
Connecticut 1894.
~~~

"Between 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times and Columbia 4 times," Washington has intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times."
~~~
"If the people are not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job - yours and mine -- to keep our people convinced that theonly way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America's might."

Charles Wilson
Chairman of the Board of General Electric
&
Truman appointee to head the Office of Defence Mobilization.
In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950


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[Saundra Hummer]

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^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
A VIDEO'The War on Democracy'
'The War on Democracy' is John Pilger's first major film for the cinema - in a career that has produced more than 55 television documentaries. Set in Latin America and the US, it explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

"The film tells a universal story," says Pilger, "analysing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called war on terror".
Click on the following URL to gain access to this video, to view comments, or to leave one of your own:
URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18236.htm ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
.

[Saundra Hummer]

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~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations".

Andrew Jackson
Farewell address
04 March 1837
~~~
"What is the great Amercican sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of "concentrated indignation" as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed....The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin."

Joseph Fort Newman
Atlantic Monthly
October 1922
~~~
"For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is slavery".

Jonathan Swift
Irish author
1667-1745

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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[Saundra Hummer]

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~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children, whose nightmares will now feature screaming missiles from unseen terrorists, will be known only as Americans."

Martin Kelly
~~~
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today."

President Theodore Roosevelt
~~~
"A great industrial Nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.

"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." :

Woodrow Wilson
-
From his Campaign Speeches
1912
~~~
"If a baseball player slides into home plate and, right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out, the player says to the umpire - 'Here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, 'Your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is $1,000.' What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. "But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe."

Janice Fine
-
Dollars and Sense magazine

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.X X X X X
Why Cheney Really Is That Bad
By
Scott Ritter

08/23/07 "Truthdig" --- - Karl Rove, interchangeably known as “Boy Genius” or “Turd Blossom,” has left the White House. The press conference announcing his decision to resign has been given front-page treatment by most major media outlets, but the fact of the matter is the buzz surrounding Rove’s departure is much ado about nothing, especially in terms of coming to grips with the remaining 16 months of the worst presidency in the history of the United States.

Rove is a domestic political marauder, the personification of a conservative movement which lacks a moral compass and has a complete disregard for facts. The master of exploiting mainstream America’s predilection for news-as-entertainment, under which the likes of Rupert Murdoch can manufacture headlines out of thin air, Rove helped turn “fair and balanced” into a national joke which everyone laughs at but few actually comprehend. Rove served as the maestro of a political-smear orchestra composed of such intellectually challenged muckrakers as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, manipulating the NASCAR/professional wrestling crowd’s addiction to seedy gossip in an effort to maintain the all-important 51 percent majority needed to win elections.

Perhaps if the Democratic Party had possessed a semblance of organization and cohesion (not to mention a post-Clinton message that could be sold to a majority of America), then Rove would be but a footnote in history, known simply as the man who helped the worst governor in the history of Texas get elected. Even the self-destructive campaign run by Al Gore in 2000, in which he distanced himself from a sitting president who, despite all of his faults, would have defeated Bush in a landslide if the Constitution permitted a third term, was enough to deny Rove his beloved 51 percent—it was Gore, not Bush, who won the majority of votes in that contest. It took a Republican governor of Florida, backed by a compliant Supreme Court, to put George W. Bush into the White House, not any genius on the part of Rove.

“Bush’s Brain” may claim that it was his careful manipulation of fiction over fact that carried the 2004 election, in which the term became synonymous with political character assassination, but it was the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq which sank the Democratic Party and its candidate for president, John Kerry. It is very difficult to unseat a president in a time of war, especially when so many Democrats voted in favor of the concept, first by buying into every post-9/11 policy put forward by the Bush administration (find me one Democrat who actually read the Patriot Act in its entirety before it was voted into law) and second by rubber-stamping the lies that led to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Remember, it was Kerry’s inarticulate defense of his decision to vote in favor of granting war powers to the president that sank his election hopes, not his Vietnam War record.

Certainly, Karl Rove played a significant behind-the-scenes role in supporting Bush’s war policies. The perjury trial of “Scooter” Libby forced the collective of deaf, dumb and blind pseudo-journalists who populate what is known as the mainstream media in America to recognize how pathetically duplicitous and petty the Bush administration could get when it came to defending the policies propping up the so-called Global War on Terror and the awful tragedy of Iraq. Rove’s fingerprints were all over the decision by Vice President Dick Cheney to leak CIA officer Valerie Plame’s name to the media in an effort to thwart the truth-telling of her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.

But that is about as deep as Rove’s involvement in the two issues that will define the presidency of George W. Bush gets. While Rove might be the “genius” behind the kind of winner-takes-all dirty politics that won the Republicans a majority in Texas The vice president is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today. Not Osama Bin Laden. Not the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Not Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung Il. Not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Jose Padilla himself. Not even George W. Bush can lay claim to this title. It is Dick Cheney’s alone. Operating in a never-never land of constitutional ambiguity which exists between the office of the president and the Congress of the United States, Cheney’s office has made its impact felt on the policies of the United States of America as had no vice president’s office before him. Granted unprecedented oversight over national security and foreign policy by executive order in early 2001, many months prior to the terror attacks of 9/11, Cheney has single-handedly steered America away from being a nation among nations (albeit superior), operating (roughly) in accordance with the rule of law, and toward its present manifestation as the new Rome, a decadent imperial power bent on global domination whatever the cost.

The absolute worst of the rot that has infected America because of the policies and actions of the Bush administration has originated from the office of the vice president. The nonsensical response to the terror attacks of 9/11, seeking a “global war” versus defending the rule of law at home and abroad, taking the lead in spreading the lies that got us involved in Iraq, legitimizing torture as a tool of American jurisprudence, advocating for warrantless wiretappings of U.S.-based communications (regardless of what the Fourth Amendment says against illegal search and seizure), and pushing for an expansion of America’s global conflict into Iran—all can be traced back to the person of Cheney as the point of origin.

America today is very much engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the forces of evil. The enemy resides not abroad, however, but at home, vested in the highest offices of the land. Neither Osama Bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein threatened the life blood of the United States—the Constitution—to the extent that Cheney has. Not Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Not since the American Civil War has there been a constitutional crisis of the magnitude that exists today, threatening to rip the very fabric of American society apart at the seams, courtesy of Dick Cheney.

That Congress today remains relatively mute on this crisis is one of the great mysteries of our time. Perhaps the vagaries of national politics can be blamed. The Democratic majority in Congress appears to have ceded its leadership role to unelected presidential candidates who seem solely empowered to comment on current events, domestic or foreign, and who, out of fear of any misstep which could hurt their chances to seize the White House as their own, refuse to actually take a substantive stand against the policies of the Bush administration. In an effort that is curiously Rovian in the quest for electoral victory, the Democratic candidates (with a few notable exceptions) have been less than bold in their opposition to the heinous policies that are currently in place concerning Iraq, Iran, the war on terror, torture and constitutional violations—unless you count empty rhetoric.

In many ways, the leading Democrats, both those running for office and those currently holding office, are a far greater insult to American values than the conservative standard-bearers for the policies of Cheney. No one of substance takes seriously the manic ranting of the Hannity/Limbaugh/Coulter triad. These Democrats, on the other hand, have mastered the art of compromise to the point that they stand for nothing at all—this at a time in American history when the policies of the administration, derived from the dark abyss of Bush’s soul, Cheney, provide the most concrete example of what we as Americans should be standing against.

The Democrats need to stand for something. Cheney has provided the sort of political ammunition that would enable them to fight, and win, a constitutional battle over the heart of America, the kind of defining struggle which I believe the vast majority of Americans would rally around. Unless the Democrats start separating themselves from the policies of the Bush administration, and take an active role in outing and suppressing the true evil that is Dick Cheney, all they will achieve in the coming years is a change in the titular political orientation of America, without the kind of deep-seated break from the failures and crimes of the past six-plus years that have taken our nation, and the world, right up to the edge of chaos.

“Bush’s Brain” may be gone, but his “Soul” lives on. It is high time all of America put Dick Cheney fully in the spotlight of collective accountability, purging our nation of this scourge which has harmed us in so many ways. If there is any case for impeachment to be made against any member of the Bush administration today, it can be made against a vice president who has shamed our nation, destroyed our moral standing and broken our laws.
Go onsite to access this article and others in the archives by Mr. Ritter, as well as their stat's, their home anchor articles, cartoons, and comments. Just click on the following URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
X X X .

[RonF]

These Democrats, on the other hand, have mastered the art of compromise to the point that they stand for nothing at all—this at a time in American history when the policies of the administration, derived from the dark abyss of Bush’s soul, Cheney, provide the most concrete example of what we as Americans should be standing against.

The democrats are pitiful. For Bush, the gift that keeps on giving. For many I talk to, apathy has replaced any hope for change. It's getting bad.

[patricia]

The democrats are pitiful. For Bush, the gift that keeps on giving. For many I talk to, apathy has replaced any hope for change. It's getting bad.


Where were those who now demand change from the Democrats when the 2004 Presidential Election was held??
Had the voting public turned their back on the decisions made by the Bush and Co. thugs, voting them out of office because they lied and cheated and cost the lives of thousands of people, needlessly, perhaps the soldiers would already have been re-deployed home.
But, having given the Republicans another term, it's unfair to expect the House and the Senate to undo the chaos that has grown like Topsy since 2003 when Iraq was invaded.
The Dems can withhold funds. Period. They cannot stop the endless killing. The Bush Administration would simply run on credit, from wherever.
The only way that the troops can come home, before Bush is out of office is if not only the Democrats put forward a bill to end the occupation, all of them voting for it, but if they can bring enough Republicans on board to over-ride a veto by the President.
It's amazing just how many geldings there are, on both sides of the aisle.
Nobody wants to offend someone who could affect their career and to hell with the troops, the tax-payers' money and the country's honour.
Sad indeed.

[Saundra Hummer]

Where were those who now demand change from the Democrats when the 2004 Presidential Election was held??
Had the voting public turned their back on the decisions made by the Bush and Co. thugs, voting them out of office because they lied and cheated and cost the lives of thousands of people, needlessly, perhaps the soldiers would already have been re-deployed home.
But, having given the Republicans another term, it's unfair to expect the House and the Senate to undo the chaos that has grown like Topsy since 2003 when Iraq was invaded.
The Dems can withhold funds. Period. They cannot stop the endless killing. The Bush Administration would simply run on credit, from wherever.
The only way that the troops can come home, before Bush is out of office is if not only the Democrats put forward a bill to end the occupation, all of them voting for it, but if they can bring enough Republicans on board to over-ride a veto by the President.
It's amazing just how many geldings there are, on both sides of the aisle.
Nobody wants to offend someone who could affect their career and to hell with the troops, the tax-payers' money and the country's honour.
Sad indeed.

Darn, had a response to this post Patricia, but hit a wrong button, and off it went. It had to do with the GOP grabbing up our own complaints about this administration and the other monkey's on the hill.

Monkey see, monkey do. They picked up on our ire over fear being used to scare us into believing that anything they did regardless of the consequences and the untruthfulness of it all would keep us safe. They learned that us getting scared ended up making us angry at them for their sky is falling, Chicken Little rhetoric. A lot of us became angry over the color coded fear messages being foisted on us at regular intervals, which we felt were only meant to keep us all in line and on their side of this horrible war they've tricked too many of us into. How maddening was that? Now the GOP is using the same ploy, trying to peak our ire, making us angry at how they say the Democrats are trying to scare us. Give me a break! This, by saying that the Democrats are trying to scare the country with how we will die and die if we fight in Iraq, etc. Over and over they say all of this, and morem about Democrat scare tactics. Oh Really?

Maybe I'm wrong, but this administration needs to be held accountable for the laws they've broken and the situation they've plopped us down into around the globe. They're the scary ones. Not imagined fears, they are spooky people with their total disregard for the Constitution and the laws we've instituted for this land of ours.

Impreachment is called for, but will the "geldings", as Patricia rightfully calls those who can bring it about, see that there is a great need for it? It doesn't look like it, so they will keep wrecking their havoc our our country, on our troops, Iraq and the region.

Lessons need to be taught to politician such as these, and lessons need to be learned.

We need to go back to being a country of laws, not a country of corporate and religious lackeys. We need men and women who are made of the right stuff for a change, elected to office with all of the right reasons in their makeup. Elected officials who respect the laws of this country and who are capable of living under them, and making sure they are adherred to. Quit abusing them; change them if you must, however, if there are antiquated laws; if there are laws in place; abide by them until that time. If it's needed, change can be worked out, if it's for a viable and rightious law that will benefit the country, not just the landed few.

[papsrus]

Where were those who now demand change from the Democrats when the 2004 Presidential Election was held??

Right here! :fineprint ... in 2000 and 2004. Don't forget Gore won the popular vote in 2000, so you could argue that more than half the voting public was disappointed (outraged?) with the result then. And it wasn't exactly a landslide in 2004 (the apparent dirty work in Ohio not withstanding). The country's been divided -- fractured really -- since 2000. Democrats have been pretty united in their opposition all along. That's why it's so disappointing the Democratic majority in Congress is doing so little now to stop this war.

EDIT: ... united in their opposition to this administration, though not necessarily united in opposition to the war. Thought I should clear that up.

[Saundra Hummer]

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:: :: :: :: :: - Gun Guys -

Ted Nugent, NRA Board Member, Threatens to Kill Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton During Vicious Onstage Rant

Posted On 24th August 2007 @ In NRA, Guns, Ted Nugent

GunGuys.com is urgently demanding that the National Rifle Association immediately remove Ted Nugent from his position as a board member of the NRA after Nugent threatened United States Senators and Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This is the latest in a series of unacceptable extremist rhetoric -- and in this case a threat against the life of U.S. Senators -- from NRA role model and activist, Ted Nugent.

[1] According to Rolling Stone magazine:
Renegade right-winger Ted Nugent recently went on a vicious onstage rant in which he threatened the lives of Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Decked out in full-on camouflage hunting gear, Nugent wielded two machine guns while raging, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary,” he continued. “You might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch.” Nugent summed up his eloquent speech by screaming “freedom!”

This isn’t the first time Nugent has been caught spewing hatred. Last January, the guitarist caused a scandal for Republican Texas governor Rick Perry when he, among other abhorrent comments, wore a Confederate flag shirt and insulted immigrants at Perry’s inauguration event. In July, Nugent was quoted in a Wall Street Journal story blaming “stoned, dirty, stinky hippies” for “rising rates of divorce, high school drop-outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes.”

Gun Guys.com will have more to say about this vile and disturbing rhetoric from the National Rifle Association soon. But for now, it is incumbent on the NRA to forcefully and categorically distance itself from its board member, Ted Nugent, by demanding his immediate resignation from the board of directors.

Second, Gun Guys.com is calling on the NRA to apologize both to Senators Obama and Clinton and pledge to disavow all forms of hate speech and threats to political candidates from individuals affiliated -- in this case as a member of its governing body -- with the National Rifle Association.

In the 2000 presidential election campaign, Charlton Heston, then head of the NRA, called for the lynching of Al Gore during a Michigan campaign rally for George W. Bush.

The NRA's failure to immediately remove Ted Nugent from the NRA's board will signal its complicity in these contintued threats and vile rhetoric.

Go to Buzz Flash.com to see this artice as well as other topical issues of the day, and while there check out their archives and publications. Just click on the following URL:

http://www.buzzflash.com

Article printed from Gun Guys: http://www.gunguys.com
URL to article: http://www.gunguys.com/?p=2417

URLs in this post:
[1] According to Rolling Stone magazine:: http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2007/08/24/ted-nugent-threatens-to-kill-barack-obama-and-hillary-clinton-during-vicious-onstage-rant - http://www.gunguys.com -
:: :: ::
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[Saundra Hummer]

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) ) ) O ( ( (
Historian: Bush use of quote 'perverse'

By: Avi Zenilman
August 25, 2007 05:10 AM EST

A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president’s remarks Thursday.

“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse.”

In a speech on Wednesday, Bush quoted “one historian” as suggesting that foreign policy experts – and, by implication, critics of Bush’s approach to Iraq – aren’t always right. “An interesting observation, one historian put it, ‘Had these erstwhile experts’ — he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, ‘Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage.’ ” [Update: See clip of the president's speech and MSNBC interview with Dower, courtesy of Breitbart.tv, here.]

A search of Google books revealed that the “one historian” is Dower. The quote is from his book, “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II,” which won the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize, among other awards, in 1999.

Dower was decidedly unhappy with his 15 minutes of fame. “I have always said as a historian that the use of Japan [in arguing for the likelihood of successfully bringing democracy to Iraq] is a misuse of history,” he said when notified of the Bush quote.

He immediately directed me to a November 2002 New York Times op-ed where he outlined 10 reasons why “most of the factors that contributed to the success of nation-building in occupied Japan would be absent in an Iraq militarily defeated by the United States.”

In March 2003, Dower wrote an essay for Boston Review, entitled “A Warning From History: Don’t Expect Democracy in Iraq.”

And what about the specific quote Bush used – that experts on Japan were wrong about the country’s capability for democracy?

“Whoever pulled that quote out for him is very clever,” Dower said, acknowledging that “if you listen to the experts prior to the invasion of Japan, they all said that Japan can’t become democratic.”

But there are major differences, Dower said. “I’m not being misquoted, but I’m being misrepresented.”

“In the case of Iraq,” Dower said, “the administration went in there without any of the kind of preparation, thoughtfulness, understanding of the country they were going into that did exist when we went into Japan. Even if the so-called experts said we couldn’t do it, there were years of mid-level planning and discussions before they went in. They were prepared. They laid out a very clear agenda at an early date.”

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that Bush used Dower’s quote “to in no way endorse his view of Iraq, only his view of Japan.”

[B]Added Fratto: “While professor Dower may disagree with the applicability of the quote, the president in no way endorses his view of Iraq.”

TM & © THE POLITICO & POLITICO.COM, a division of Allbritton Communications Company

http://www.buzzflash.com

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=9481FEA8-3048-5C12-008847582F0D77D6
) O ( .

[Saundra Hummer]

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.!.!.!.!.!.!.!. A VIDEOJon Stewart: Magical History Tour; Bush's traveling through time for war analogies. Watch this video to the end to see Bush in the following exchange at a 2004 press conference: "QUESTION [to Bush]: How do you answer the Vietnam comparison? BUSH: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy." By his own Vietnam analogy this week, Bush is giving comfort to the enemy and sending the wrong message to our troops. Unbelievable hypocritical opportunism.

To gain access to this video, just go to Buzz Flash.com by clicking on the following URL:

http://www.buzzflash.com

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=92012 .!.!.!.
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[Saundra Hummer]

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~~~~~~~
“When Iraq becomes strong enough in our opinion to stand alone, we shall be in a position to state that our task has been fulfilled, and that Iraq is an independent sovereign state. But this cannot be said while we are forced year after year to spend very large sums of money on helping the Iraqi government to defend itself and maintain order.”

Winston Churchill
-
1922
~~~
"The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business...a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world."

Ralph Wald Emerson
-
1838
~~~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

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* * * * *US general warns of bloody ‘Ramadan Offensive’ in Iraq
US intelligence warns that Iraq's government to become more precarious in coming months.
WASHINGTON - A senior US general warned Thursday of "sensational" attacks during the upcoming Ramadan period in Iraq directed at swaying perceptions of a key upcoming US report on progress in the war there.

Brigadier General Richard Sherlock, deputy director for operational planning for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that insurgents are likely to attempt to make use of the coincident sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the onset of Ramadan, and the much-awaited US progress report to accelerate attacks in Iraq.

"Overall, violence in Iraq has continued to decline and is at the lowest level since June 2006," Sherlock told reporters.

"However, for the last few years, the Ramadan period has tended to be the most violent time of the year in Iraq."

"And with the upcoming assessment from Ambassador (Ryan) Crocker and General (David) Petraeus, the start of Ramadan in mid-September, and the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on our nation, we can expect the enemy to increase their attempts to create both sensational attacks and large numbers of casualties in order to affect the reception of that report and the will of the coalition and the people of Iraq."

US intelligence: Iraqi leadership precarious
Iraq's government will become more precarious in the coming months and a drawdown of US forces could increase sectarian violence, US spy agencies said in a grim report Thursday.

The new intelligence estimate also predicted that security improvements made over the past six months will erode if the US military narrows its mission to supporting the Iraqi security forces and fighting Al-Qaeda.

The US intelligence community "assesses that the Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months because of criticism by other members of the major Shia coalition" as well as Sunni and Kurdish parties, the new estimate warned.

The declassified judgments of the assessment were released by the office of the Director for National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and came amid mounting US frustration over the lack of political progress in Iraq.

Attempts by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki to bridge Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divides have so far failed. Seventeen members of his 40-person cabinet have resigned, and the daily bloodshed takes a stiff toll on ordinary Iraqis.

Barring "a fundamental shift in factors driving Iraqi political and security developments," compromises needed for "sustained security, long-term political progress, and economic development are unlikely to emerge," the assessment said.

Iraqi leaders who are already "unable to govern effectively" will struggle to achieve national political reconciliation, it warned.

Since its January assessment there have been "measurable but uneven" improvements in Iraq's security, the report said, adding however that the "level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high."

Earlier in the year US President George W. Bush ordered 30,000 more troops to Iraq -- boosting US forces on the ground to 160,000 -- in a bid to improve security.

Iraqi security forces have performed adequately, but have not improved enough to conduct major operations independent from US-led coalition forces, the report said.

Changing the coalition's mission to focus on providing combat support for Iraq's security forces and fighting Al-Qaeda "would erode security gains achieved thus far," it warned.

Click on the following links to gain access to this article and more:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=21853
* * * .

[Saundra Hummer]

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
MotherJones.com / News / Feature Extra

Storm Warning: The Unlearned Lessons of Katrina

An article in three parts.


News: New Orleans and its surrounding areas are a petri dish for global climate change. What's happening there will show up in your neighborhood sooner than you think. Part one of a three-part series.

By
John McQuaid
August 26, 2007

RELATED ARTICLES
Broken: The Army Corps of Engineers
A Hundred Katrinas: Climate Change and the Threat to the U.S. Coast
Mother Jones' Full Coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath

Eroding coastline, sinking land, rising seas; failing levees, poor evacuation planning; a city that would fill like a soup bowl if its flood defenses were breached. In 2002, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John McQuaid coauthored a series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, where he'd worked for more than 20 years, that predicted the fate that would befall New Orleans 3 years later. Now, in a three-part series for Mother Jones, McQuaid reports that the initial surge of attention to strengthening the Gulf Coast's defenses has ebbed, once again, to complacency. And residents of the Gulf Coast are not the only ones who should be worried. As McQuaid reports, it's not just the levees that are broken—it's the entire political system by which we create disaster defenses. Climate change will bring more storms, floods, fires, and tornadoes, but Washington has done very little to get us prepared. In part one of "Storm Warning," McQuaid visits a New Orleans landfill that is ground zero for understanding what we haven't learned from Katrina.
—The Editors

Recently, I hiked to the top of a hurricane levee along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a shipping channel running through the east side of New Orleans. During Hurricane Katrina, this spot had been hard hit: Easterly winds drove the hurricane storm surge straight down the canal into the center of the city, overflowing levees and floodwalls all the way. Some washed out. Some breached. In the end, the neighborhoods they shielded were mostly destroyed.

Guided by local lawyer Joel Waltzer, we walked about 50 yards, then turned and looked north, the water at our backs. In front of us was an enormous mound of construction debris, about 60 feet high and a football field long, covered with thick, gray-brown clay. Trucks rolled through a FEMA checkpoint on the far side and then up to the top of the mountain. There, attended by bulldozers and scoopers, they dumped their cargo, the remains of the New Orleans that used to be: the Sheetrock, wood, concrete, wire, plastic, and steel that once composed the city's wrecked buildings, which are still being torn down or gutted. Like many spots in New Orleans, the dump, called the Old Gentilly Landfill, is grimy and workaday on the one hand, elegiac on the other. "I'm thinking about how many homes are in there," Waltzer told me. "Mine's in there somewhere. I never did find it. I used to trudge up to the top of this son of a bitch and look."

The view was troubling for another reason: It doesn't take a geotechnical engineer to see that piling billions of pounds of debris next to a hurricane levee will affect its stability, which depends on a complex, poorly understood interplay between the extreme pressures of rising floodwaters and the cohesion of the squishy Mississippi delta soils. Miscalculate and your wall will breach. And even if the levee itself holds, a flood that overtops it will wash over the landfill, sending the remains of the city coursing through the streets—again.

When residents of nearby neighborhoods raised these questions in the months after the storm, the state dismissed their concerns at first. The agency that built the levee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was in the best position to gauge the safety issues, but it stayed out of the dispute—technically, it turns levees over to local authorities after construction is complete. Frustrated residents—members of a nearby Vietnamese community, among the few damaged neighborhoods to return in force—hired Waltzer to represent them in their attempts to shut down Old Gentilly and another nearby landfill. Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley who had participated in a comprehensive review of the Katrina levee failures, volunteered to analyze the levee-dump relationship on behalf of the residents. He concluded that as the pile of debris grew, it would indeed cause mounting instability. The Corps still had ultimate responsibility for levee safety, so it agreed to upgrade the dump's safety standards—though not enough, in the view of Bea or the residents, who have continued to use every bureaucratic route available to try to close the dump.

The details of this fight won't be shocking news to anyone who has paid attention to the city's slog over the past two years; the entire reconstruction effort has been plagued by similar bureaucratic snarls and disputes. Basic safety—that is, what New Orleans needs more than anything else to survive—seems to have gotten lost amid the infighting between agencies of the city, state, and federal governments, and the myriad contractors doing the work. The unreliable political interests and bureaucracies that set the stage for the disaster are still in place, mostly unchanged, and now charged with planning for the city's future.

Catastrophes are supposed to nudge history in new directions. After the 1927 Mississippi River flood engulfed vast areas of the south, the Corps overhauled the river's basic flood-control architecture, building the foundation of the modern system we have now. Katrina's devastating blow to New Orleans raised some history-making issues: Can the damaged city be sustained—that is, can it survive not just the next few hurricane seasons, but the next 100? And as global climate change causes sea levels to rise and possibly fuels larger hurricanes, will other cities inevitably go under too? (See "A Hundred Katrinas: Climate Change and the Threat to the U.S. Coast.")

Instead of addressing those questions, though, the national debate has stressed the idiosyncrasies of New Orleans. Some have written that French explorer Bienville made a mistake when, in 1718, he founded New Orleans on the fringe of a low-lying swamp dangerously close to Hurricane Alley. Others take it a step further and say that three centuries has been a good run, but it's time to give up. There's some truth to these statements—New Orleans' location on a low-lying, sinking river delta has indeed put it in a terrible predicament. But the underlying message is that Katrina was a fluke: that New Orleans' problems are unique and its existential concerns mostly irrelevant to the rest of the country. That may be comforting to people outside Louisiana. But it's not realistic.

Thanks to centuries of man-made alterations to its fragile topography—levee construction, oil and gas drilling, suburbanization—New Orleans has become a place where environmental changes are accelerated, amped up. Year to year, sometimes day to day, the shape of the land is changing, and the life it supports is ever more exposed to danger, hurricanes being only the most dire on a long list of environmental threats. New Orleans and environs are a kind of petri dish for global climate change—what's happening there will be showing up elsewhere sooner than you think.

The rest of the nation already has plenty in common with New Orleans. For decades, government agencies at all levels have subsidized development in risky areas. Along coastlines and in river plains, this arrived in the form of flood defenses, federal flood insurance, and aid for businesses (in Louisiana, for example, oil and gas drilling and refining). Near fire-prone forestlands, road building and the marketability of nature itself drove construction of subdivisions. Katrina exposed this ad hoc approach as both lethal and unsustainable. The current wrangling over New Orleans is a preview of what will happen over the coming decades. As melting polar ice is projected to encroach on more and more coastal communities, larger hurricanes and powerful rainstorms will send floods rolling over outmoded flood defenses, and heat waves and ecological disruptions may make some now-comfortable locales unlivable. We don't yet have any idea how, or where, we'll draw the last lines of defense. As post-Katrina New Orleans is proving, it's not simply a matter of building levees; far more important is constructing the basic political architecture to decide who will be protected, and how.

Tomorrow, in part two of "Storm Warning," John McQuaid explores what the Dutch can teach us about protecting our coastline.

A former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, John McQuaid is a Katrina Media Fellow at the Open Society Institute and the coauthor, with Mark Schleifstein, of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms.
Photo: Sarah Cross
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Go on-site to gain access to the photo's and article, as well as links in it.
What the Dutch Can Teach Us About Weathering the Next Katrina

News: A 1953 storm that killed 1,835 people forced the Netherlands to change the way disaster protection is done. The same can't be said of the U.S., where innovation has been stymied by pork-barrel politics. Part two of a three-part series.
By
John McQuaid
August 28, 2007

In the first part of "Storm Warning," John McQuaid explored lessons we haven't learned from Katrina—even as climate change increases the risk of catastrophic storms and flooding far beyond the Gulf Coast. The Bush administration has yet to devise a national strategy for protecting the nation from such disasters. But the Dutch did it—50 years ago, after a major storm breached a network of dikes similar to New Orleans' levees, killing close to 2,000 people. Today, McQuaid assesses what we can learn from the Netherlands.
—The Editors

In the centuries-long battle to protect New Orleans from rising waters, the hurricane levees are an afterthought. Built over the past 40 years, they are short, weak, and ramshackle structures, especially when compared to the river levees that keep the Mississippi River in its narrow navigation-channel banks. Ports, shipping, and barge companies all have influential lobbies, and over the decades the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers became a one-stop shop for pork-barrel river projects, sometimes justified with cooked cost-benefit analyses. The Louisiana landscape is dotted with these and includes the now-infamous Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping channel not far from the Old Gentilly Landfill in eastern New Orleans. Though it hasn't received substantial traffic in decades, it did cause significant marsh erosion and turned out to be a conduit for storm surges into New Orleans. By contrast, hurricane levees have no economic benefit other than preventing disasters, and thus no constituency other than the public itself. The Corps' now-notorious slapdash engineering in New Orleans (see "Broken: the Army Corps of Engineers") wasn't happenstance. It was the logical result of this dysfunctional system.

Two years after Katrina exposed the fragility of the hurricane levees and the system that made them, the city remains exposed and vulnerable. Since Katrina, the Corps has embarked on an ambitious program to repair and fortify the levee system by 2011, one whose price tag keeps rising. Last week, Corps officials announced they would be asking Congress for an additional $7.6 billion, bringing the project total to $14.7 billion of improvements: compacted clay and mud, concrete armoring, floodgates, and pumping stations. It's a clear upgrade from the shoddy pre-Katrina system. It includes, for example, a proposed floodgate on the Intracoastal Waterway, which should provide a measure of protection for the Old Gentilly Landfill and the residents nearby.

But even if the Corps can pull this off—and it's not clear that it can—this huge investment is still, in some sense, a mere stopgap. Statistically, the odds that any spot in this enhanced system will be overtopped in 30 years—the life of a mortgage—are about 1 in 4, and probably greater given the eroding landscape and the increased risk of severe storms that may accompany climate change.

So today Louisiana politicians are demanding "Category 5" protection, a system of flood defenses capable of repelling the worst that a hurricane could dish out. Congress has ordered the Corps to study the matter and report back next year with some options. But what, exactly, does Category 5 protection mean? Right now, nobody knows. There is no master plan for New Orleans.

But models for this kind of endeavor already exist, and the best of them is in the Netherlands. Over the past 50 years, the Dutch have built the world's most sophisticated system of flood defenses. I went to see them two months after Katrina. After weeks of looking at decidedly low-tech structures of mud, steel, and concrete, it was like materializing into a Star Trek episode. I was soon strolling under a giant canopy of tubular white girders in the Maeslant storm surge barrier, a gateway across a shipping channel into Rotterdam. Completed in 1997, it's the last piece of a massive project to fortify the coast, begun after a 1953 flood that busted hundreds of dikes and inundated the country's south, killing 1,835 people. The barrier is both functional and beautiful: From the air, it resembles a delicate butterfly. When a storm surge approaches on the North Sea, an electronic warning system activates the barrier automatically, and the two gates—the butterfly wings—swing out into the water on ball bearings 30 feet in diameter to close the channel and block the storm surge.

But it's not the machinery so much as the political and legal system behind it that offers lessons for America. After an intense debate following the 1953 disaster, the Dutch decided to junk the philosophy that had guided them for hundreds of years. Instead of building hundreds of miles of dikes around inhabited areas—the approach now employed in New Orleans—they decided to raise gated barriers across the three large estuaries where the sea enters Dutch territory. (North of the estuaries, the coastline is hardened with walls and gates, dunes high enough to block storm surges are scrupulously maintained, and a 20-mile seawall was built to close off a large inlet from the sea.)

Like positioning soldiers in a mountain pass, the estuary plan focused resources at the most critical places, preventing storm surges from getting near settled areas farther back. It's a system engineered to a safety standard 100 times more stringent than the current goal (not yet achieved) for New Orleans' most heavily populated areas. Even Dutch pasturelands have more protection than the Big Easy.

To do all this, the Dutch had to push their science in new directions. "For a hydraulic engineer, this was like putting a man on the moon," Tjalle de Haan, a government engineer who worked on the projects, told me. But the true innovation was the acknowledgement that as environmental conditions change, humans must get out in front of them—and stay there. As land sinks, or the sea rises, the government must upgrade its flood defenses; in the Netherlands, that's a legal mandate, not a question to be debated, one pork-barrel project at a time, with each new legislative session.

America is not the Netherlands, of course. The differences in landscape alone make it impossible to exactly replicate the Dutch model—there is no way to build a wall around the entire Mississippi delta, nor is that advisable. But the larger, and more critical, difference is that the United States has nothing resembling the Dutch mandate for protection. The Netherlands' approach—designing projects based on estimated risk—long ago became routine for the private U.S. nuclear, aviation, and energy industries, and for the government agencies that build bridges and other infrastructure. But not for the federal agency charged with protecting millions of people from floods, the Corps of Engineers.

Congress allocates money for water projects on the basis of political power, not a scientific accounting of who's most at risk. This year's Water Resources Development Act, the final version of which passed the House earlier this month and is expected to be green-lighted by the Senate in September, is a cornucopia of earmarks, including beach-replenishment projects demanded by vacation communities in New Jersey and Florida, as well as money to study the navigation impacts of one of Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young's two infamous "bridges to nowhere." There's money for short-term fixes to New Orleans' levees, and a modest provision that would require outside review of the design of big Corps projects. But there's little funding set aside for much-needed flood defense upgrades in other vulnerable communities. The White House, which should be devising a long-term strategy for protecting the population, has also done nothing on this front. Further confusing matters, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill if Congress doesn't cut its $21 billion price tag.

Tomorrow, the conclusion of "Storm Warning," which examines the lax response to Katrina, the enormity of the task at hand, and why it could take another catastrophic storm for the government to finally take action.


A former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, John McQuaid is a Katrina Media Fellow at the Open Society Institute and the coauthor, with Mark Schleifstein, of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms.

Photo: Sarah Cross


Never Again?
The Politics
of
Preventing Another Katrina
The Bush administration's lackluster response to one of the largest natural disasters in the nation's history has been to rely on stopgap measures and incompetent contractors, rather than devising a national plan to protect the U.S. coastline. Will it take another Katrina for the government to act? The conclusion of a three-part series.

John McQuaid
August 29 , 2007

Yesterday, in the second installment of his three-part series, "Storm Warning," John McQuaid visited the Netherlands, whose state-of-the-art system for protecting its coast could offer the United States lessons for buffering our own vulnerable coastal communities—that is, if the government is willing to make this a national priority. So far the president has committed to building a "flood protection system stronger than it has ever been," which, frankly, isn't saying very much. Today, in the conclusion of the series, McQuaid reports on what it will take to strengthen the nation's coastal defenses: among other things, efforts to preserve and rebuild the vanishing marshlands that act as a natural barrier to storm surges; a shake-up at the feckless U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an agency that has carried out wasteful pork-barrel projects while ignoring those intended to keep Americans safe; and, yes, a national commitment to protecting coastal communities. The need to take bold action should have been evident after Katrina destroyed one of America's most storied cities. Sadly, it may take another Katrina before the government gets the message.
-The Editors

The term "terraforming"—reshaping the surface of another planet for human settlement—was coined by science-fiction writers. And that's not too far from what engineers must do for the Mississippi delta. They must resculpt a patchwork of degraded marshland, ruined city neighborhoods, and sprawling subdivisions into an integrated defense against flooding.

Part of the idea is to revive the process that built the Mississippi delta in the first place. When New Orleans was founded, rising, silt-laden water overflowed the riverbanks each spring, refreshing and expanding the marshes. The river levees constricted this flow in the 19th century, and the entire delta started slowly sinking back into the sea. Now scientists want to try strategically breaching the levees, diverting river water over the marshes to deposit silt once again. Those projects would be knit together with upgraded levees, walls, and floodgates at a cost of $50 to $55 billion spread over several decades, according to Louisiana officials.

On an array of high-resolution monitors in Joannes Westerink's Notre Dame University lab in South Bend, Indiana, a virtual storm is taking shape and crashing into a digital New Orleans. Anyone watching the news coverage of Katrina was treated to images like these—computer programs capable of digitally recreating landscapes and weather patterns, rerunning historical storms, even rearranging the configuration of levees and wetlands to test different designs and possible outcomes. It was these simulations that back in the 1980s and 1990s revealed shocking weaknesses in the levee system—yet Corps "muddy boots" traditionalists scorned modeling and never bothered to use it to reassess their decades-old designs.

A native of the Netherlands, with a mathematician's clinical detachment, Westerink has worked for years to bring the virtual world into ever-more precise alignment with the real world of wind, water, and barriers made of mud. Katrina provided both a wealth of new data and, in the end, funding from a reawakened Corps. Now that the Corps is finally interested, the models are revealing huge and dangerous defects in the entire delta layout.

Westerink, who has rerun his virtual Katrina hundreds of times, fires up his monitor once more for me. Speaking in a soft monotone, he explains that the river levees, which bisect the delta marshes for a hundred miles southeast of New Orleans, are the highest objects around. As Katrina approached from the south that August 29, it began pushing water against the river levees. Water built up against the walls and then moved northward with the storm, swallowing small towns. Some of that buildup flowed into metro New Orleans. Then, as Katrina passed east of the city, it propelled the rest of the huge wave straight into the Mississippi coast, where it reached a height of 30 feet, the highest storm surge ever to hit the U.S. coast. If the river levee hadn't been there—or had been designed differently—the devastation would have been far less.

"Can you control that flow?" Westerink asks. "This becomes a huge federal problem of who gets whose water." The hurricane risk to the Mississippi and Alabama coasts would be much lower if the river levees disappeared tomorrow. But nobody, least of all the Corps, wants to tell that to the shipping companies. Westerink and some Corps scientists say one solution is to cut big gaps in the levees, so storm surge waves would flow through and dissipate. That might preserve navigation, but it also would upend life in the delta as it's existed for more than a century. Louisiana towns such as Venice, at the extreme southeast end of the river, would literally become islands, tethered to each other by bridges. Places left outside the hurricane protections, such as Isle de Jean Charles, a tiny community of Indians from the Biloxi-Choctaw-Chitimacha tribe southwest of New Orleans, would probably disappear.

Clearly, such big fixes will make government agencies and political jurisdictions think about things they never imagined before. But thinking big is necessary; the alternative is to face more Katrina-sized storm surges—which will be increasingly likely given warming seas and melting polar ice—with weak flood defenses.

The most ambitious piece of any coastal protection plan will be rebuilding Louisiana's raggedy, sinking marshes. Anyone who grew up on the bayou knows that marshes help reduce storm surges. But official flood control policy has always focused on levees, so very few scientists—and no one in the Corps—had ever looked at just how that happens. That changed in 2002, when Tropical Storm Isidore nearly flooded Corps geologist John Lopez's house on Lake Pontchartrain. Isidore was a weak storm, yet its surge was large; Lopez wondered if the area's vanishing marshes had had anything to do with it.

Louisiana's vast wetlands have been sinking and eroding for decades. Since the 1930s, approximately 1,900 square miles of land has vanished—a swath roughly the size of the state of Delaware. In a single year, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita washed away an additional 217 square miles, according to a recent study by the U.S. Geological Service. Since then, scientists have grown even more alarmed at the rate at which erosion has been outpacing the modest efforts at coastal restoration. Rebuilding wetlands isn't easy, and it's that much harder if they're disappearing. In many places it will be possible only to slow the pace of erosion, not reverse it. Unless major progress is made in the next decade, the Times-Picayune reported in March, some coastal scientists say the delta may enter a kind of death spiral.

Taking these trends into account, and working on his own time, Lopez began examining every feature of the delta landscape that could possibly offer protection from a surge wave, starting with the continental shelf and ending with evacuation routes. Stands of cypress trees, expanses of marsh grass, elevated roadways, and clusters of fishing camps all slow down a storm surge. By the spring of 2005, he had put together something called "multiple lines of defense," a radical yet intuitively simple new approach built on the notion that all the elements involved in flood control must work together—or they won't work at all. In June 2005, Lopez presented his "lines of defense" outline to the chief engineer of the Corps' New Orleans district. Nice idea, he was told. But no way the agency would implement it. "You know, the Corps tends to see itself rigidly," Lopez recalls his boss saying. "This is a good idea. But we just don't think we could do it." Katrina hit two months later.

I met Lopez at the Bonnet Carré Spillway just upriver from New Orleans. A short, compact man with flecks of gray in his hair and a heavy beard, he speaks a bit haltingly, as if he's still working things out in his head. We drove along the levee in his silver Toyota pickup, covering ground very much like the original site of New Orleans, before development covered all available space—a marsh between river and lake, part dense cypress forest, bayou waters glinting through the trees. To our right, suburban homes sat atop a low, sloping ridgeline—with both a levee and a stretch of marshland between them and Lake Pontchartrain. The lake poses the greatest threat to New Orleans, which sits on its south rim. It's not really a lake but a big salt water lagoon, connected to the Gulf of Mexico via two deep channels. During a storm it can fill like a bathtub. If the water rises high enough to top or breach the levees, it will flood most of the metro area. We stopped and hopped out onto the gravel track, gazed toward the lake, and imagined a storm surge coming our way. "When you have a wetland in front of a levee, two things will happen," Lopez explained. "Wetlands can reduce the actual elevation of the surge—trees, especially, will reduce waves and wind-driven water heights. This should be our model for development. Build on ridges, which are high to begin with. Then you'll have a back levee with wetlands on the other side. In New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, they didn't do that. They just built out to the lakefront."

During Katrina, that pattern proved disastrous. Rather than being slowed and diverted by various natural features, floodwaters simply rose adjacent to neighborhoods until the levees collapsed. And yet the flooding is only a fraction of what could happen if the remaining coastal wetlands disappear: Right now, the New Orleans area is fringed with marshes that extend for dozens of miles, literally into the Gulf of Mexico. Without them, the ocean will lap at the hurricane levees. New Orleans will become Venice, except that Venice has no hurricanes.

After Katrina, Lopez's plan was dusted off; it is now the basis of the state's coastal protection plan, and the Corps has adopted a similar notion that it dubs "Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration," or LACPR. But it will take a lot more than a new acronym to do the job.

Corps officials seem genuinely chastened by their New Orleans failures. But at the moment that it desperately needs to be innovating, the agency remains insular and plodding, driven mostly by large, wasteful projects to facilitate shipping—not hurricane protection. Neither the White House nor Congress has even tried to shake up the Corps' management in the way NASA was following its two shuttle disasters. The Corps' own post-Katrina investigation was purely an engineering endeavor; it delved only into the failure mechanisms in soil, concrete, and steel, ignoring the institutional problems.

And when the Corps does show a glimmer of initiative, the Bush administration seems determined to stifle it. Last summer, officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Army squelched an early draft of the Corps' long-term flood control study; no one, including Louisiana's congressional delegation, ever got a straight answer on why. The draft contained some possible designs and solutions; the scrubbed version offered only something called "decision matrices" for figuring stuff out later. Lately, the Corps has even backed off its congressional mandate to design options for Category 5 protection. Officials now say that they're instead examining ways to repel a surge from a Katrina-like storm. That would make the city safer than it is now, but would also repeat the major strategic error of the past. Levees and other flood defenses have always been built to prevent the last disaster, not the next one. Then a bigger storm comes along.

The uncertainty about the future of hurricane protection is a perceptible drag on the entire recovery effort. And in a place where government has failed so spectacularly, on so many levels, many people no longer believe the Corps or other decision makers are acting in their best interests. That distrust has sparked the creation of several vocal citizens' groups that lobby on hurricane issues—among them the east New Orleans Vietnamese community that challenged the placement of the Old Gentilly Landfill. Its several thousand members had not been very politically active before Katrina. After the storm, disaster recovery agencies paid them little attention. In late 2005, a commission issued a controversial map, later abandoned, suggesting a moratorium on building permits in much of the city, including eastern New Orleans. "The funny thing was," said Reverend Vien Thé Nguyen, the pastor of the local Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church, "as we have insulated ourselves so much, we weren't even on that map. Neither were we on the Urban Land Institute map [another early planning document], nor were we on the most recent FEMA flood map. I mean literally: We were not on the map. So now we want to make sure we are on the map. So that when they do any consideration, they better count us in."

Most New Orleanians paid little attention to the details of hurricane protection before Katrina, so this new activism can make a difference. But a process that involves congressional appropriations, the White House, the Army, the state, and a mountain of arcane engineering studies has a lot of built-in insulation against grassroots involvement.

The basic unseriousness of the federal response to Katrina has been apparent since the president addressed the nation from Jackson Square on September 15, 2005. He didn't say "never again." His carefully-worded promise was for a "flood protection system stronger than it has ever been." The bar wasn't high, and the minimalist goal has indeed been achieved.

Last winter, President Bush did sign a law granting Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states a big chunk of royalty payments from new offshore oil and gas development—money that should provide Louisiana coastal projects an estimated $13 billion over the next 30 years. But most of that money doesn't begin flowing for another decade, and the marshes could be too far gone by then.

What's needed beyond these opening bids is a genuine national commitment—not just to New Orleans, but to protecting the entire U.S. coastline. No one knows precisely how high sea levels will rise, but every inch makes a difference in how severe, and frequent, floods become. Structures that might do the job today won't be up to the task in the coming decades. Low-lying cities near the coast, such as Houston and Charleston, are particularly vulnerable, as are places with already-weak levees such as Sacramento and San Francisco. If rainfalls increase, inland river communities will also face new problems.

The Corps' old levee system was built on the assumption that all circumstances it had to confront—the land, the sea, the frequency and size of hurricanes—were more or less static. When you have all the variables accounted for, building a wall will do the trick. Today, none of the variables is stable, and they'll be less so with each passing year.

New Orleans might have been a national lab for innovative solutions. But the approach of the Bush administration has been to throw money at the problem—or rather, at contractors. The centerpiece of the rebuilding effort, for example, is called the "Road Home," and is intended to reimburse people for their damaged homes so they can either rebuild or cash out their property. But the $7.5 billion in federal funds flowed through the state bureaucracy and then to an incompetent contractor, Virginia-based ICF International. The result was an estimated $5 billion shortfall and long delays in distributing the money. As applications continued to come in, overwhelmed officials announced they would stop taking them effective July 31, over the objections of community groups. By then, the program had closed out only 22 percent of its applications and distributed $2.7 billion.

As new environmental threats appear, it's going to become more and more obvious that the nation's political levees are just as poorly designed as those that failed New Orleans two years ago. Sadly, it may take more Katrinas to get the bureaucracy reengineered. "Just as we discovered the levees are made out of crap, we discovered the whole water resources and flood protection system is also built out of crap," said Oliver Houck, a Tulane University law professor who has followed the issue for decades. "It's like the Wizard of Oz—you pull back the curtain and there's nobody back there."

A former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, John McQuaid is a Katrina Media Fellow at the Open Society Institute and the coauthor, with Mark Schleifstein, of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms.

There are those who never have a good word to say about the corp of engineers, thinking that they wouldn't fit in anywhere else so they work for the government, steady and year round employment, it's not a job easily fired from. Everywhere they put in a installation in communites around the country, they are cussed. How about hiring some independents to take a look. Has anyone ever read about or seen the Dutch system? It's astounding, it really is. Our levies are so very primative in comparison. They knew what they were doing and I would imagine they've learned even more in the meantime. Either put up or shut up is what the government should do, either save New Orleans or declare it a national reserve and forbid and prevent any development on it. This is why there's the delay in fixing the problem, or so many believe. It's the developers that the government wants to see benefit from fixing it, not the last occupants, nor their heirs. SRH

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

Go on-site to gain access to the first installments, and to view the related articles. There's much more to see on other issues as well.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/08/never-again-the-politics-of-preventing-another-katrina-2.html
. . . . . . . . . .

[papsrus]

Just read the Ted Nugent item. I'd have to say based on his comments he's a deranged maniac who should be Baker-Acted immediately.

What a moron.

[Saundra Hummer]

Just read the Ted Nugent item. I'd have to say based on his comments he's a deranged maniac who should be Baker-Acted immediately.

What a moron.


Our grand daughter has a girlfriend whose family is great friends of Ted Nugents, and, they spend a lot of time together, and have invited Fallon to go with them on outings where he will be. Jeeze, I don't know, like I told Barri if it were me, I wouldn't think so, I wouldn't be for it. I told her he's a radical nut case. You don't like to deprive your kids of friendships and times spent with them, but I wouldn't want her anywhere around that type of venonous blathering or his camouflaged, fatigued self. He just isn't anyone I would want an impressionable aged child around. He's not all bad, or he doesn't always seem to be, but he seems to be more than just a little wacked to me, I myself wouldn't want to be around him. Not worried about his crazed ideas rubbing off, but his ways aren't my ways and never will be. He would only rub the wrong way and his rants get tiring.

[papsrus]

I am beginning to believe that Bush will almost certainly attack Iran before his term is up in order to try to force the next president to continue his wars in the Middle East. Once attacked, it will not be easy to back away from that engagement.

So the less likely it becomes that the next president will continue his war in Iraq, the more likely it becomes that Bush will attack Iran, IMO.

Greenwald comments (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/)

Excerpt:

The groundwork for an attack on Iran is so plainly being laid in the same systematic way as the attack on Iraq was and by the same people. Last week, Djerejian read and then dissected the full "trip report" issued by Pollack and O'Hanlon following their return from Iraq. In addition to including even more propaganda-bolstering claims about Iraq than was found in their Op-Ed, Djerejian noted that the report also recites the most mendacious aspects of the administration's case for war against Iran, including the truly idiotic accusation regarding "Iran's ability to supply al-Qa'ida" -- an accusation so absurd that nobody other than Joe Lieberman has been willing to voice it until now. Yet now it issues from our most Serious Democratic, "liberal" foreign policy "scholars": Iran is arming Al Qaeda.

The true danger here is that even if there would be marginally more political opposition to an attack on Iran than there was for an attack on Iraq -- and surely there would be, perhaps considerably more opposition -- those who favor an attack are still politically strong within the administration. And there simply are no factions which would oppose such an attack that are anywhere near strong enough to stop one. Who and where are they? What are the political factions which have sufficient political strength and who are willing to risk political capital to stop such a confrontation?

UPDATE: Kimberly Kagan, of our nation's preeminent War Family (speciality: Advocating Wars, not fighting them), has a new report in The Weekly Standard today melodramatically entitled: "The Iran Dossier -- Iraq Report VI: Iran's proxy war against the U.S. in Iraq." Wow, she has a "dossier." Sounds ominous, and very serious.

She alleges that "Iranian-backed insurgents accounted for roughly half the attacks on Coalition forces" and decrees that "Iranian intervention is the next major problem the Coalition must tackle." In other words, we are at war with Iran. One would be remiss if one failed to note that always fueling these efforts is the incomparably gullible "war reporting" of Michael Gordon and his endless series of NYT front page articles designed to legitimize the war case against Iran.

[Saundra Hummer]

I am beginning to believe that Bush will almost certainly attack Iran before his term is up in order to try to force the next president to continue his wars in the Middle East. Once attacked, it will not be easy to back away from that engagement.

So the less likely it becomes that the next president will continue his war in Iraq, the more likely it becomes that Bush will attack Iran, IMO.

Greenwald comments (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/)

Excerpt:

* * *
Has Bush Boxed Himself In?

By
Pat Buchanan

08/29/07 "Creators Syndicate" -- -
As Americans anguish over how to extricate this country from Iraq without a disaster greater than what we now have, and without our friends suffering the fate of our friends in Cambodia and Vietnam, they had best brace themselves. This escalator is going up.

and his generals are laying out the case for a new war. And there has been no resistance offered either by a vacationing Congress or the major presidential candidates.

On CNN's "Late Edition" Sunday, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, No. 2 commander in Iraq, said, "It is clear to me that (the Iranians) have been stepping up their support" for enemy fighters in Iraq.

"They do it from providing weapons, ammunition, specifically mortars and explosively formed projectiles. ... They are conducting training within Iran of Iraqi extremists to come back here and fight the United States."

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said his troops were following 50 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who have been crossing the border and training fighters in Iraq. The State Department is about to declare the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.

Earlier in August, President Bush directly charged Tehran with aiding Iraqi insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers:

"I asked Ambassador Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq ... to send the message that there will be consequences for ... people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs, that kill American troops."

The EFPs are roadside bombs that penetrate Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tanks. They have taken the lives of scores of U.S. soldiers.

Whether Bush has made the decision to attack the al Quds training camps inside Iran, he has painted himself into a corner.

If he does not strike the camps, he will be mocked by the War Party as a weak commander in chief, too timid to use U.S. power to protect soldiers he sent into battle or to punish those killing them.

Thus, Bush must either announce that his diplomacy has worked, and attacks out of Iran have diminished or been halted, or he will have to explain why the Top Gun of the carrier Lincoln was too wimpish to do his duty by the soldiers he sent to fight.

Who is pushing for attacks on Iran? Israel and its lobby. Vice President Cheney. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has been calling for air strikes on Al Quds camps for months. And a War Party facing lasting disgrace for having lied the country into an unnecessary war, and for having assured the American people it would be a "cakewalk."

The arguments for war on Iran are both strategic and political.

Israel is terrified Iran will end its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and wants an all-out U.S. war on Iran to prevent it. The War Party fears Iran may acquire a nuclear weapon, which would inhibit U.S. freedom of action in the Gulf and convince the Arab states that the United States is yesterday and they must appease Iran or go nuclear themselves.

As for Bush and Cheney, if they go home without hitting Iran's nuclear sites, and Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the Bush Doctrine will have been defied by the Ayatollah as well as Kim Jong-il, and their legacy will be a no-win war in Iraq.

The War Party is thus seeking an excuse to launch air strikes on Iran, as that would trigger Iranian counterstrikes on our forces. Then they will have their long-sought casus belli for U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

First, the al Quds camps, then Natanz, Isfahan and Bushewr.

Initially, Americans might cheer the bombing of Iran, and Congress would head for the tall grass. But as U.S. strikes would be an act of war, rallying the Iranians behind the failing regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and igniting a long war the end of which we cannot see and the troops for which we do not have, there are powerful arguments against a new war.

Iran and the United States would both pay a hellish price, and Iran at least seems to recognize it. Both the Iraqi and Afghan governments say Iran is behaving as a good neighbor. There is evidence Tehran's nuclear program is faltering, or being curbed. Iran is said to be making concessions to U.N. inspectors.

Iran has released an American seized in response to our seizure of five Iranian "diplomats" in Iraq. Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, in a letter to the Washington Post, denies Iran is aiding the Iraqi insurgency and calls on the U.S. government to "proffer evidence" and "provide the list of Iranian agents who it alleges are operating in Iraq."

If there is a rush to war here, it is not on the part of Iran.

As Bush is preparing for war on Iran, if he has not already decided on war, where is Congress, which alone has the constitutional power to authorize a war?

Or has it given Bush and Cheney another blank check?
To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at:

www.creators.com
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
To gain access to this article and more, click on the following url:
http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle18275.htm* * * * * * *
.

[papsrus]

Buchanan makes a good deal of sense. (I can't decide if that's worrisome or reassuring.)

In any case, I think that, as a country, we are going to have to reject this notion (which the Bush Doctrine made explicit) that we have the right to attack any country that challenges our "national interest."

Buchanan writes:
The War Party fears Iran may acquire a nuclear weapon, which would inhibit U.S. freedom of action in the Gulf and convince the Arab states that the United States is yesterday and they must appease Iran or go nuclear themselves.

This is not a legal reason for war, to my understanding. The United States only has the legal right to attack another country if that country attacks us. Period. We have to specifically reject any other use of military force, otherwise we will be involved in an endless series of military engagements without ever being attacked.

The sad irony is that we long ago turned away from the legitimate and legal military action in Afghanistan.

War is the result of the failure of diplomacy. The failure of diplomacy is a sign of weakness. The inescapable paradox here is this: the more forcefully we project our military, the weaker we appear in the eyes of the world.

Our leadership is viewed as unimaginative, lacking diplomatic skills, unable to cooperate even with allies, let alone able to diplomatically engage rivals, or countries that threaten our "national interest."

We have to get over the idea that our national interest must be everyone else's national interest. Where we have differences, diplomatic engagement -- not military engagement -- should be pursued vigorously.

[hepcat1950]

Preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Note: the original hand-written text ended on the phrase "the pursuit of property" rather than |the pursuit of Happiness" but the phrase was changed in subsequent copies in part because it was broader. The latter phrase is used today).

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

At least George W. Bush can't be re-elected a second time.....

[Saundra Hummer]

Buchanan makes a good deal of sense. (I can't decide if that's worrisome or reassuring.)
In any case, I think that, as a country, we are going to have to reject this notion (which the Bush Doctrine made explicit) that we have the right to attack any country that challenges our "national interest."

That's funny papsrus, and I'm with you on these thoughts about Buchanan.

I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be in agreement with Patrick Buchannan. Since he left the Republican Party, he is a free man and tells it more like it is, or so I would have to guess; it does seem this way. Since then, many of his writings have taken on the flavor of the truth, and quite a bit of wisdom. I never understood how he could be a favored aid in the Whitehouse, and a favorite friend of many "conservatives", as he seemed such a street bumpkin, a head knocker with a silly giggle, not an intellectual, which he is now showing himself to be in political and international matters. I don't always agree with his stances on race, religion and such, but quite often, he, to my way of thinking hits the nail squarely on the head.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
***********
“They wanted them poor niggers out of there.”New Orleans two years after
by Greg Palast[Thurs August 30] "They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that's just the bottom line."

It wasn't a pretty statement. But I wasn't looking for pretty. I'd taken my investigative team to New Orleans to meet with Malik Rahim. Pretty isn't Malik's concern.

We needed an answer to a weird, puzzling and horrific discovery. Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing "Blackwater" badges: "Try to go into your home and we'll arrest you."

These aren't just any homes. They are the public housing projects of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others. But unlike the cinder block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the tony French Quarter.

Raised up on high ground, with floors and walls of concrete, they were some of the only houses left salvageable after the Katrina flood.

Yet, two years later, there's still bars on the windows, the doors are welded shut and the residents banned from returning. On the first anniversary of the flood, we were filming this odd scene when I saw a woman on the sidewalk, sobbing. Night was falling. What was wrong?

"They just messing all over us. Putting me out our own house. We come to go back to our own home and when we get there they got the police there putting us out. Oh, no, this is not right. I'm coming here from Texas seeing if I can get my house back. But they said they ain't letting nobody in. But where we gonna go at?"

Idiot me, I asked, "Where are you going to go tonight?"

"That's what I want to know, Mister. Where I'm going to go - me and my kids?"

With the help of Patricia Thomas, a Lafitte resident, we broke into an apartment. The place was gorgeous. The cereal boxes still dry. This was Patricia's home. But we decided to get out before we got busted.

I wasn't naïve. I had a good idea what this scam was all about: 89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security's trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it.

Malik's organization, Common Ground, wouldn't wait for permission from the federal and local commissars to help folks return. They organized takeovers of public housing by the residents. And, in the face of threats and official displeasure, restored 350 apartments in a destroyed private development on the high ground across the Mississippi in the ward called, "Algiers." The tenants rebuilt their own homes with their own sweat and their own scraps of cash based on a promise of the landlords to sell Common Ground the property in return for restoring it.

Why, I asked Malik, was there this strange lock-out from public housing?

Malik shook his dreds. "They didn't want to open it up. They wanted them closed. They wanted them poor niggers out of there."

For Malik, the emphasis is on "poor." The racial politics of the Deep South is as ugly as it is in Philadelphia, Pa. But the New Orleans city establishment has no problem with Black folk per se. After all, Mayor Ray Nagin's parents are African-American.

It's the Black survivors without the cash that are a problem. So where New Orleans once stood, Mayor Nagin, in connivance with a Bush regime more than happy to keep a quarter million poor folk (i.e. Democrats) out of this swing state, is creating a new city: a tourist town with a French Quarter, loose-spending drunks, hot-sheets hotels and a few Black people to perform the modern version of minstrel shows.

Malik explained, "It's two cities. You know? There's the city for the white and the rich. And there's another city for the poor and Blacks. You know, the city that's for the white and rich has recovered. They had a Jazz Fest. They had a Mardi Gras. They're going to have the Saints playing for those who have recovered. But for those who haven't recovered, there's nothing."

So where are they now? The sobbing woman and her kids are gone: back to Texas, or wherever. But they will not be allowed back into Lafitte. Ever.

And Patricia Thomas? The middle-aged woman, worked sweeping up the vomit and beer each morning at a French Quarter karioke joint. Not much pay, no health insurance, of course. She died since we filmed her - in a city bereft of health care. New Orleans has closed all its public hospitals but for one "charity" make-shift emergency ward in an abandoned department store.

And the one bright star, Malik's housing project? The tenants' work was done this past December. By Christmastime, they received their eviction notices - and all were carried out of their rebuilt homes by marshals right after the New Year, including a paraplegic resident who'd lived in the Algiers building for decades.

Hurricane recovery is class war by other means. And in this war of the powerful against the powerless, Mr. Bush can rightly land his fighter plane in Louisiana and declare that, unlike the war in Iraq, it is, indeed, "Mission Accomplished."
***************
This report is based on Greg Palast’s film, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans. You may watch an excerpt or read the new chapter on New Orleans in Palast’s New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.
Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports at:
http://www.GregPalast.com
************* .

[Saundra Hummer]

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:: :: :: :: ::
SPECIAL REPORT:
NEW REPORTS SUGGEST
AN ATTACK ON IRAN IS IMMINENT

I swore I was taking the holiday weekend off but as I reviewed articles I was sent I felt I had to share them with you. There is more than chatter out there suggesting that the US is planning to bomb Iran. (Just Today, the Iranians claimed they have more nuclear centrifuges than even the International Atomic Energy organization estimated. Are we in for a showdown or something worse. What better way to shift attention off Iraq in the very month that a report is due reporting on the "progress" there. There being no real progress, to report why not open up a second front? Hmmmm?..

Is it possible? Could the Bush-Cheney cabal be serious about expanding the war into Iran despite their obvious defeat in Iraq, despite the incredible cost to the people of the United States and our country's honor? Is this kind of insanity in the cards, in the plans, about to happen.?

There were reports of US war planning going back a year now, beginning with Sy Hersh's New Yorker report. Scott Ritter was sounding the alarm. It was reported but then downplayed. It was supposed to happen in June. It didn't. War critics including Noam Chomsky said he doubted the war plan was still on. After all Europe trying to mediate. US backed leaders like Maliki or Iraq and Karzi of Afghanistan were meeting with Iranian leaders and suggesting they had a role to play in peace in the region. We were reminded that the Iranians had actually promoted free elections in Kabul.

But the rumors would not go away even if the US press was not playing it up.

This past weekend, The Sunday Times in London reported: "The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians' military capability in three days, according to a national security expert."

Media analyst Jerry Policoff
had this to say about this report:

This article, which ran in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London, was clearly planted by Bush's Neocon enablers, and seems to be preparing the world for a massive U.S. air operation against Iran involving 1,200 targets. Also note the inclusion of references to a report released by the Institute for the Study of War written by Kimberly Kagan. Kagan is the wife of Fred Kagan, one of the most un-repentant of the PNAC Neocon gang that got us into Iraq. He is also one of the architects of the current "surge."

True? I don't know. Plausible? Absolutely. It follows the pattern of the P.R. campaign that started around this time in 2002 and led to the Iraq war. The President's rhetoric on Iran has been nothing short of bellicose lately, warning of "the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." And the Iranian government's behavior?detaining British servicemen and arresting American passport holders, pushing ahead with uranium enrichment, and, by many reliable accounts, increasing its funding and training for anti-American militias in Iraq?seems intentionally provocative.

Perhaps President Ahmedinejad and the mullahs feel that they win either way: they humiliate the superpower if it doesn't take the bait, and they shore up their deeply unpopular regime at home if it does. Preëmptive war requires calculations (and, often, miscalculations) on two sides, not just one, as Saddam learned in 2003. When tensions are this high between two countries and powerful factions in both act as if hostilities are in their interest, war is likely to follow.

It's one thing for the American Enterprise Institute, the Weekly Standard, et al to champion a war they support. It's another to jump like circus animals at the crack of the White House whip. If the propaganda campaign predicted by Rubin's friend is launched, less subservient news organizations should ask certain questions, and keep asking them: Does the Administration expect the Iranian regime to fall in the event of an attack? If yes, what will replace it? If no (and it will not), why would the Administration deliberately set about to strengthen the regime's hold on power? What will the Administration do to protect highly vulnerable American lives and interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world against the Iranian reprisals that will follow? What if Iran strikes against Israel? What will be the strategy when the Iranian nuclear program, damaged but not destroyed, resumes? How will the Administration handle the international alarm and opprobrium that would be an attack's inevitable fallout?

If this really is a return to the early fall of 2002 all over again, then I'm fairly sure that no one at the top of the Administration is worrying about the answers.

Postscript: Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: "I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I'm not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic."

Majorie Cohn comments on Common Dreams:
Bush has already set the wheels in motion. With Rovian timing, Alberto Gonzales' resignation was sandwiched between two Bush screeds - one aimed at ensuring Congress scares up $50 billion more for the occupation of Iraq, the other designed to scare us into supporting war on Iran. As Gonzales rides off into the sunset, the significant questions are who will take his place and how that choice will facilitate Bush's occupation of Iraq and attack on Iran.

One name that's been floated for Bush's third attorney general is Joe Lieberman, the "independent" senator from Connecticut. Lieberman, who advocates the use of military force against Iran, was the only person Bush quoted in his August 28 speech to the American Legion. Bush called Iran "the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism" and pledged to "confront Tehran's murderous activities."

Gonzales greased the Bush/Cheney wheels for torturing in violation of the Geneva Conventions, illegally spying on Americans, and purging disloyal Bushies.

Similarly, Lieberman would ensure the Justice Department mounts a vigorous defense of a war of aggression against Iran. And Bush would get a two-fer: Connecticut's Republican governor would appoint a Republican to fill Lieberman's seat, returning control of the Senate to the GOP. A Republican-controlled Senate would direct the agenda, thereby furthering the Bush/Cheney plan.

We have to be careful about disinformation on all sides-false reports, unconfirmed rumors and speculative journalism. Joe Dunphy sent me this item:

Kos is calling the Iran attack diary by Maccabee a hoax. However, the timing of the hoax is itself interesting, given the announcement of apparantly good news from North Korea on a nuclear weapons research agreement. Could it be deliberate disinformation? hard to tell. At any rate, here's a resend of a 4-19-2007 analysis of the potential situation in the Gulf of Hormuz. It's still dangerous, and the missle threat against both naval ships and oil tankers remains a big risk. We know the Bush administration has put writers on the payroll, and engages in assymetric information warfare. One has to wonder whether this is a deliberate attempt to undermine the credibility of Daily Kos, as the memos in the investigation of the White House eventually undermined anchor Dan Rather. Ugly stuff.

MEANWHILE, US POLICY IS UNDER ATTACK FROM BRITISH GENERALS
LONDON (AFP) ? The British backlash over the United States's handling of post-invasion Iraq grew Sunday as another military commander blasted Washington's "fatally flawed" policy.

Major General Tim Cross, the top British officer involved in planning post-war Iraq, said he raised serious concerns with then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the possibility of the country descending into chaos.

But Rumsfeld "ignored" or "dismissed" his warnings, the general told the Sunday Mirror newsapaper.

On Saturday, the head of the British Army during the 2003 invasion launched a fierce attack on the United States over its handling of troubled Iraq since.

General Sir Mike Jackson branded US post-invasion policy "intellectually bankrupt" and said Rumsfeld was "one of the most responsible for the current situation in Iraq."

OTHER MUST READS;
Robert Parry | Iraq's Endless "False Hopes" Leila Fadel, the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspaper describes a new word being used in Iraq in her blog:

"Enaalso," he said in Iraqi slang. It's a new Iraqi word, a phrase used to explain being turned in by an informant to a militia and then being killed. Literally it means he was "chewed up."

It's what Iraqis now repeatedly say to explain the killings of families by militias that control their neighborhoods with fear and weapons; a word to explain the corpses that show up in the streets.

The Shiites in the neighborhood have grown disdainful towards the Mahdi Army, the militant wing of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr. They to are being killed for one errant word, he said. But no one will say anything.

He ran his finger across his neck, in a motion of a throat being slit. That's what happens, rah yaalsouch, they will chew you up.

SET BACK IN AFGHANISTAN
The NY Times: In six weeks, the Taliban have driven government forces out of roughly half of a strategic area that U.S. and NATO officials declared a success story last fall

BUSH DREAMS OF HIS FUTURE:
PUTTING THE "Ol' COFFERS" FIRST
"I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers." With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, "I don't know what my dad gets ? it's more than 50-75" thousand dollars a speech, and "Clinton's making a lot of money."

Then he said, "We'll have a nice place in Dallas," where he will be running what he called "a fantastic Freedom Institute" promoting democracy around the world.

I will have a full blog on Tuesday but I didn't want to hold this material back. Question to the US Media:WILL YOU INVESTIGATE THESE REPORTS?
Go on-site to see this article and it's follow-ups, etc
http://mediachannel.org/ :: :: ::
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~
"I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."

Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865)
16th US President
~~~
"HYPOCRITE, n. One who, profession virtues that he does not respect secures the advantage of seeming to be what he depises.":

Ambrose Bierce
Journalist and Editor
1842-1914
~~~
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause."

Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865)
16th US President
Source: Letter to Horace Greeley
August 22, 1862 http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm
~~~
"The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural..The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

Samuel Huntington,
Harvard Professor
"The Clash of Civilizations"
~~~
"I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."

US General Curtis LeMay
Commander of the 1945 Tokyo fire bombing operation.
~~~
"It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true."

Henry Kissinger

~~~~~
.

[Saundra Hummer]

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:: :: :: :: ::
Iran’s Nuclear Chess Game

By
Nader Bagherzadeh
and
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

09/04/07 "ICH" -- -- Ali Larijani , who is the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council responsible for nuclear discussions with the West, has called nuclear negotiations a “diplomatic chess.” Perhaps he is implying that like a good chess player he plans a few moves ahead of his opponent. After receiving two sanctions, Larijani had taken the position that as long as the Security Council (SC) refuses to return Iran’s case to the IAEA, Iran will not clarify nuclear ambiguities that have been reported by the Atomic Agency and will continue to reduce cooperation on many additional inspection activities that are not within the framework of the standard Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The grand wizard of current US interventionist foreign policy, Dick Cheney and his cohorts such as Elliot Abrams, were eager to take advantage of this situation and rally up the support of the P5 members of the Security Council for a third and more damaging sanction against Iran. Although the War Party is very much in favor of a military outcome to the current debacle, there are some that prefer the continuation of sanctions to squeeze and isolate Iran even further and not risk another preemptive war in the Middle East with a far more devastating outcome.

However, Larijani’s decision to clarify nuclear activities while under SC sanctions has made grand wizard’s job tougher to get a unanimous support for yet another sanction. That is probably one of the reasons why the war mongering rhetoric from the White House has reached a dangerous level: The opponent does not like Iran’s latest chess move and wants to shake up the board. Bush’s incendiary speech at the American Legion was a clear indication of Cheney’s frustration with Iran and looking to find a way out of this juggernaut, by elevating it to a military confrontation. After all the only way Cheney can be assured that centrifuges will not continue to work after he leaves office is to have them destroyed--enrichment suspension is not good enough.

The result of Larijani’s bold reversal move could not bear fruit unless both Javier Solana and Mohammad El Baradei were willing to engage Iran while US was pushing for more sanctions. El Baradei’s recent balanced comments regarding Iran’s case to BBC and New York Times are truly exemplary of a Nobel Peace laureate and if his actions prevent another illegal and immoral attack by US, he should be fully recognized by UN for his efforts. The IAEA’s latest report has several interesting points about their agreement with Iran for resolving existing concerns that are worth discussing:

1. The plutonium related concerns have all been satisfactorily addressed by Iran. Recall that plutonium is one of the key elements to make a nuclear bomb and also a byproduct of nuclear power reactor. Contrary to what US officials have been saying IAEA does not confirm existence of any plutonium reprocessing activities.

2. According to this agreement all the remaining concerns will be addressed sequentially. Namely once a concern has been fully resolved they will move on to the next one. This is a good move for Iran, since it will allow them to close a file before moving on to the next concern. The agreement schedule is as follows:

• Explain circumstances related to a more advanced centrifuge machine that is in the R&D phase

• Resolve equipment contamination at Tehran University

• Explain uranium metal design document which could be related to instructions for bomb making

• Explain Polonium 210 (Po 210) experimentation; this was used by Russia for their early nuclear bomb designs and for poisoning a former Russian agent in London and caused several death cases in Israel more than 40 years ago

• Provide details about a uranium mine near Bandar Abbas

•Explain the alleged military nature of Iran’s nuclear program on a “laptop” that was given by a defector to US

3. IAEA is expecting Iran to accept the highly intrusive Additional Protocols (AP). Not all NPT members have accepted it. For instance, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Brazil have not ratified it yet. Once accepted AP will force the member country to, inter alia, allow spot inspection of non-declared nuclear sites.

4. Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz which is the source of controversy with US has been running at a reduced capacity since the last IAEA report. The number of cascades has increased from 8 to 12, but they are running at one tenth of the capacity. Given the quality of Iranian engineers working on this project, it is most likely due to political reasons that anything else. The remaining 6 cascades are at different levels of preparation; and it is likely that this slow down will continue unless the third sanction is ratified. The Agency has also implemented a variety of safeguards at the FEP, including unannounced inspections.

5. IAEA has assigned a staggering 219 inspectors for Iran. This must be a record for this organization for inspecting any country in the past 50 years.

In spite of this, nothing can be achieved in an arena void of honor. The mainstream media in reporting this intricate ‘chess game’ has decided to champion the side of war and has given the truth a ‘check mate’. Even ‘reputable’ papers such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post have all decided that serving a departing administration that has led the nation into one quagmire is of greater importance than loyalty to a nation consistent in its devotion to the flag. By violating the truth and misinforming the public about the IAEA’s findings on Iran’ cooperation with the Atomic Agency, the media’s betrayal of the sons and daughters of a nation which goes to war to make possible the existence of the free media, is nothing short of treachery most brutally executed.

For deceit, we have others. An English Terrier that barked, and a French Poodle that bites. Mr. Blair and Mr. Sarkouzy have taken the war to the edge, waiting to push humanity into a dark abyss where it will not be recovered. It will pass the gates of hell, Dante’s inferno will no longer be a work of imagination – for us, it will be our experience, our doom. Will the papers, the media, be the trumpeters to this eternal hell that Mr. Cheney has in mind?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info :: :: :: .

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The Center for American Progress Action Fund

THE PROGRESS REPORT
SEPTEMBER 6, 2007
by
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel,
Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley,
Ali Frick, and Jeremy Richmond
ETHICS
Beyond Larry Craig
Conservative elected officials such as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), and others, quickly sought to distance themselves last week from Sen. Larry Craig (R) after the longtime Idaho lawmaker pled guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct. The ethically-challenged former House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay (R-TX), proudly heralded Craig's temporary resignation as an example of conservatives' efforts to deal with ethics issues. "You see," DeLay explained, conservatives "kick out" lawmakers with "problems." Yet corruption continues to stain the House and Senate chambers despite the departures of DeLay, former Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA), and others. Conservatives' efforts to cut ties with Craig while remaining silent over Sen. David Vitter's (R-LA) similarly lewd behavior have revealed a glaring "homophobic hypocrisy" in dealing with improper personal behavior. More importantly, it has showcased the unwillingness of lawmakers to display a similar desire to root out the existing corruption. The Progress Report highlights just a few "problems" that persist:

ALASKA'S WILD CORRUPTION: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) had his home "raided by the FBI this summer, and news reports also have linked Rep. Don Young (R-AK) to the public corruption probe, raising questions about the future of two men who have served Alaska for more than three decades." Stevens's investigation involves his efforts to steer multi-million dollar contracts to an oil company executive who also helped oversee the remodeling of Stevens's home. Young is also being investigated for his ties to the oil company, but his troubles extend even further and involve numerous other earmarking favors he has done for his friends and allies.

LEWIS PROBE STALLED: Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee (and former chairman), is under investigation for earmarking millions of dollars in public funds for individuals who donated heavily to his political action committee. In 2006, Los Angeles federal prosecutors were in the middle of a wide-ranging investigation into Lewis. Due to a budget squeeze put on the U.S. Attorneys' offices by Alberto Gonzales, the federal criminal investigation has stalled for nearly six months due to a lack of funds, according to former prosecutors. "The lead prosecutor on the inquiry and other lawyers departed the office, and vacancies couldn't be filled." Lewis recently announced that he'll seek a 16th term, putting to rest speculation that he would retire amid the ongoing probe.

ABRAMOFF PROBE ONGOING: Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) Virginia home was raided this past April by the FBI. Investigators are seeking information regarding suspicious amounts of money that he paid his wife through his political action committees. His wife, Julie Doolittle, and her company received a subpoena from the grand jury investigating Abramoff. Most recently, Doolittle's "chief of staff and deputy chief of staff have been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in a federal probe into ties between Doolittle, his wife and jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff." Another congressman, Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), was recently questioned by the FBI "about his dealings with Jack Abramoff as part of its ongoing investigation into the lobbyist convicted of defrauding clients." Abramoff paid for Feeney's lavish 2003 trip to Scotland. Ironically, when Doolittle stepped down from his seat on the appropriations committee due to the Abramoff investigation, conservatives replaced him with Feeney.

COLD HARD CASH: In May 2006, the FBI raided Rep. William Jefferson's (D-LA) congressional office. In June, federal officials unveiled a 16-count indictment against him, involving allegations that Jefferson solicited bribes. He has pled not guilty, claiming he is "absolutely innocent." Jefferson stepped down from his seat on the Small Business Committee and was stripped of his seat on the Ways and Means Committee in June 2006 due to the federal investigation. Due to his efforts to fight the indictments, Jefferson has been unable to serve as an effective representative for a district in dire need of strong representation, and he "should consider resigning for the good of his constituents."

IRAQ -- BUSH KNEW BEFORE INVASION THAT SADDAM HAD NO WMD: Two former CIA officers have confirmed to Salon that President Bush was told in Sept. 2002 that Saddam Hussein did not possess any weapons of mass destruction. According to the officer, CIA director George Tenet provided Bush with top-secret information that "detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissible material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons." Bush reportedly dismissed the warning immediately. According to one of the officers, "Bush didn't give a f*ck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up." Tenet never brought up the information again; in fact, only a few months later he infamously referred to the case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction as a "slam dunk." The intelligence about the lack of weapons of mass destruction was never provided to Congress before their vote to authorize military operations in March 2003, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair depended on this faulty information to make his decision to support the Iraq war. "Blair was duped," said one of the CIA officers. "He was shown the altered report." Even though Bush finally publicly admitted in 2004 that "Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there," he continued to believe that they were. In his new book on Bush, Robert Draper writes that the President repeated conviction that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction "to Andy Card all the way up until Card's departure in April 2006."

JUSTICE -- SEN. WHITEHOUSE SEEKS TO RESTRICT EXCESS WHITE HOUSE INTERFERENCE IN DOJ INVESTIGATIONS: In April, during testimony by outgoing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) revealed that during the Bush administration, the number of White House officials allowed to intervene in pending criminal investigations by the Justice department increased by 10,325 percent, from four to 417. In a subsequent hearing in July, Whitehouse also revealed that Gonzales had given Vice President Cheney's office increased access. Whitehouse is now seeking to limit "the number of people in the White House who can be briefed by Justice on pending criminal matters." His bill, which is co-sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), "states that only certain 'covered officers' in both the Justice Department and White House may discuss ongoing criminal or civil investigations carried out by the Justice Department. The bill also requires the Attorney General and President to notify the Senate and House Judiciary Committees when new covered officers are designated." The Senate Judiciary Committee will discuss the bill in a business meeting today.

IRAQ -- UPSET OVER GAO'S FINDINGS ON IRAQ, CONSERVATIVES ATTACK AGENCY'S QUALIFICATIONS: Now that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported little to no progress in Iraq and the administration may be cooking the books on levels of violence, conservatives are desperately trying to attack the agency's credibility. Yesterday at a House International Relations Committee hearing, ranking member Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) complained, "I just feel uncomfortable listening to a report by the Government Accountability Office about a war effort." GAO Comptroller General David Walker explained the work his agency does is based on "looking at hard data, interviewing qualified individuals, and appropriate parties have an opportunity to review and comment on our work," he said. "It's my understanding that Secretary of Defense Gates does not have any military experience either." Ros-Lehtinen has had no problem citing the work of the GAO in a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff or enlisting the GAO's resources to pursue her agenda. Similarly, Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon, a staunch war supporter, attacked the GAO's work as "flat-out sloppy." It's only when the right wing doesn't like the agency's conclusions that it finds fault with the work of the office.

THINK FAST
Al Gore is working on a new environmental book entitled The Path to Survival, a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth that offers a blueprint on what can be done to fight global warming. The book will be released on Earth Day, April 22, 2008.

Intelligence analysts dispute the Bush administration's claims that sectarian violence has dropped in Iraq, noting the selective way the military categorizes deaths. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," a senior intelligence official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

Global warming "is already affecting the nation's parks, forests, marine sanctuaries and monuments" and the federal government needs to do a "better job" addressing the issue, according to a new Government Accountability Office report to be released today.

"[T]he program devised to rebuild Iraq at the provincial level has gone through three directors in the past four months, and much of the staff hired to organize the effort in Baghdad has left." Just "29 of the 610 people deployed in Iraq as part of the provincial reconstruction program have extensive knowledge of Arabic culture, history and language."

"One day after Rep. John Doolittle's (R-Calif.) top two aides revealed that they had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury" in the Jack Abramoff corruption probe, "Alisha Perkins, Doolittle's office manager, told the chamber Wednesday that she too had been called by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to give testimony."

Identifying 171 "performance expectations," a new report from the Government Accountability Office concludes that the "Homeland Security Department has failed to meet even half its performance expectations in the four years it has been in existence."

And finally: Move over, Singing Senators. Seven House members "backed up gospel singer BeBe Winans in a rendition of 'America the Beautiful'" on Wednesday during a tribute to music legend Quincy Jones. One observer reported that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) "ducked into the event to give Jones a bear hug that seemed to last eons."

GOOD NEWS
Responding to Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-OK) hold on "a measure mandating the screening of all veterans for suicide risk," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) promised yesterday that he would bring the bill, known as the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Act, to the Senate floor for a vote.

STATE WATCH
NEW JERSEY: New Jersey police win praise for efforts to eliminate racial profiling.

LOUISIANA: New Orleans's first inspector general begins his job with "no car, no staff, no city office, no city phone" and no clear budget.

FLORIDA: Largest budget shortfall in two decades likely to mean cuts to health care and human services.

BLOG WATCH
THINK PROGRESS: House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) caught shifting his own benchmarks on escalation.

TAPPED: The U.S. military's Iraqi civilian casualty count appears to exclude "casualties caused by U.S. action."

POLITICAL ANIMAL: The myth of al Qaeda in Iraq.

DAILY GRILL
"If you had asked me two years ago, I would have said three out of four, if you ask me now, I think it is one out of four."
-- Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT), 8/28/07, on the "odds" of President Bush's escalation succeeding

VERSUS
"The surge is working. ... It's a huge success!"
-- Shays, 9/4/07

Go on-site to gain access to the
NUMEROUS LINKS
within this newsletter.
Just click on the following URL:

http://www.americanprogressaction.org :: :: :: .

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Has Mystery of Bee Deaths Been Solved?By
ANDREW BRIDGES,AP
Posted: 2007-09-06 18:35:56
Filed Under: Science News
WASHINGTON (Sept. 6) - Scientific sleuths have a new suspect for what's been killing billions of honeybees: a virus previously unknown in the United States.

Photo Gallery: Virus Eyed in Die-Off Matt Cardy, Getty Images By using a novel genetic technique along with old-fashioned statistics, some scientists said they have identified a virus thought to be largely responsible for decimating the U.S. honeybee population.
1 of 6 (Go on-site to gain access to photo and any links if available)
The scientists report using a novel genetic technique and old-fashioned statistics to identify Israeli acute paralysis virus as the latest potential culprit in the widespread deaths of worker bees, a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Next up are attempts to infect honeybees with the newfound virus to see if it's indeed a killer.

"At least we have a lead now we can begin to follow. We can use it as a marker and we can use it to investigate whether it does in fact cause disease," said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist and co-author of the study. Details appear this week in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Experts stressed that parasitic mites, pesticides and poor nutrition all remain in the lineup of suspects, as does the stress of travel. Beekeepers shuffle bees around the nation throughout the year so they can pollinate crops as they come into bloom. The newfound virus may prove to have added nothing more than insult to the injuries bees already suffer, said several experts unconnected to the study.

What's Your Take?
"This may be a piece or a couple of pieces of the puzzle, but I certainly don't think it is the whole thing," said Jerry Hayes, chief of the apiary section of the Florida department of agriculture.

Still, surveys of honey bees from decimated colonies turned up traces of the virus nearly every time; bees untouched by the phenomenon were virtually free of it. That means finding the virus should be a red flag that a hive is at risk and merits being quarantined, scientists said.

"The authors themselves recognize it's not a slam dunk, it's correlative. But it's certainly more than a smoking gun - more like a smoking arsenal. It's very compelling," said May Berenbaum, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entomologist.

The mysterious deaths have struck between 50 percent and 90 percent of commercial honeybee hives in the United States, sowing fears about the effects on the more than 90 crops that rely on bees to pollinate them.

Scientists previously have found blasting emptied hives with radiation apparently kills whatever infectious agent that causes the disorder. That has focused their attention on viruses, bacteria and the like, to the exclusion of other noninfectious phenomena, like cell phone interference, also proposed as culprits.

The earliest reports of colony collapse disorder date to 2004, the same year the virus was first described by Israeli virologist Ilan Sela. That also was the year U.S. beekeepers began importing bees from Australia - a practice that had been banned by the Honeybee Act of 1922.

Now, Australia is being eyed as a potential source of the virus. That could turn out to be an ironic twist, since the Australian imports were meant to bolster, not further damage, U.S. bee populations devastated by another scourge, the varroa mite. Meanwhile, officials are discussing reinstating the ban, said the Agriculture Department's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis.

In the new study, a team of nearly two dozen scientists used the genetic sequencing equivalent of a dragnet to round up suspects. The technique, called pyrosequencing, generates a list of the full repertoire of genes in bees they examined from U.S. hives and directly imported from Australia.

By separating out the bee genes and then comparing the leftover genetic sequences to others detailed in public databases - a move akin to running a suspect's fingerprints - the scientists could pick out every fungus, bacterium, parasite and virus harbored by the bees.

They then looked for each pathogen in bees collected from normal hives and others affected by colony collapse disorder. That statistical comparison showed Israeli acute paralysis virus was strongly associated with the disorder.

The technique is a model for investigating outbreaks of infectious diseases in people too, since it can rapidly pinpoint likely causes, Lipkin said.

Sela, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor, said he will collaborate with U.S. scientists on studying how and why the bee virus may be fatal. Preliminary research shows some bees can integrate genetic information from the virus into their own genomes, apparently giving them resistance, Sela said in a telephone interview. Sela added that about 30 percent of the bees he's examined had done so.

Those naturally "transgenic" honeybees theoretically could be propagated to create stocks of virus-resistant insects, Lipkin said.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. .
2007-09-06 15:50:42
http://news.aol.com/story/_a/has-mystery-of-bee-deaths-been-solved/20070906154909990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001 * * * * * .

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.The Tin Roof Blowdown:
A Dave Robicheaux Novel
(Hardcover)
By
James Lee Burke
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
THOM HARTMANN'S
"INDEPENDENT THINKER" BOOK OF THE MONTH REVIEW
The Tin Roof Blowdown
by James Lee Burke
Reviewed by Thom Hartmann

James Lee Burke is, in my humble opinion, the best living writer in America. He's the Hemingway of our generation. One of my most valued possessions is a first edition of Purple Cane Road, one of his Dave Robicheaux novels. My son-in-law's father walked down the street to his friend Burke's house and asked him to autograph it to me as a Christmas gift.

Burke has also written the first truly big American novel that revolves around Hurricane Katrina. His tortured and introspective character, police officer Dave Robicheaux, goes into the Big Easy after the hurricane to help the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). Dante couldn't have done better in describing the scene.

. . . . .For those who do not like to brood upon the possibility of simian ancestry in the human gene pool or who genuinely believe that societal virtue grows from a collective impulse in the human breast, the events of the next few days would offer their sensibilities poor comfort. Helen had been worried she would have to give up command of her department to either NOPD or state or federal authorities. That was the least of our problems. There was no higher command than ourselves. The command structure and communication system of NOPD had been destroyed by the storm. Four hundred to five hundred officers, roughly one third of the department, had bagged ass for higher ground. The command center NOPD had set up in a building off Canal Street had flooded. Much to their credit, the duty officers didn't give up their positions and wandered in chest-deep water outside their building for two days. They had no food and no drinking water, and many were forced to relieve themselves in their clothes, their handheld radios held aloft to keep them dry.

From a boat or any other elevated position, as far as the eye could see, New Orleans looked like a Caribbean city that had collapsed beneath the waves. The sun was merciless in the sky, the humidity like lines of ants crawling inside your clothes. The linear structure of a neighborhood could be recognized only by the green smudge of yard trees that cut the waterline and row upon row of rooftops dotted with people who perched on sloped shingles that scalded their hands.

The smell was like none I ever experienced. The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals. Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines. The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. The bodies of dead animals, including deer, rolled in the wake of our rescue boats. And so did those of human beings, sometimes just a shoulder or an arm or the back of a head, suddenly surfacing, then sinking under the froth.

They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquimines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest.

If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life.

But while the novel takes place in large part in the desolation of the city and the hurricanes, it's ultimately - as Burke's novels always are - the story of people. In this case, a junkie priest, Father Jude LeBlanc; Bertrand Melancon, a lifelong criminal who hopes eternally for redemption; and Otis Baylor, a man swept up in it all like flotsam. And, of course, Dave Robicheaux is tortured by his own demons, particularly toward the end of the book when, some considerable time having passed since the disaster, he revisits the city.

Early Tuesday I collected Clete Purcel at his motor court and headed for New Orleans. When we drove down I-10 into Orleans Parish, the city was little changed, the ecological and structural wreckage so great and pervasive that it was hard to believe all of this destruction could come to pass in a twenty-four-hour period. I had been on the water when Audrey hit the Louisiana coast in 1957 and in the eye of Hilda in 1964 when the water tower in Delcambre toppled onto City Hall and killed all the Civil Defense volunteers inside. But the damage in New Orleans was of a kind we associate with apocalyptical images from the Bible, or at least it was for me.

Perhaps I carried too many memories of the way the city used to be. Maybe I should not have returned. Maybe I expected to see the streets clean, the power back on, the crews of carpenters repairing ruined homes. But the sense of loss I felt while driving down St. Charles was worse than I had experienced right after the storm. New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people.

When Clete and I [had] walked the beat on Canal, music was everywhere. Sam Butera and Louis Prima played in the Quarter. Old black men knocked out "The Tin Roof Blues" in Preservation Hall. Brass-band funerals on Magazine shook the glass in storefront windows. When the sun rose on Jackson Square, the mist hung like cotton candy in the oak trees behind the St. Louis Cathedral. The dawn smelled of ponded water, lichen-stained stone, flowers that bloomed only at night, coffee and freshly baked beignets in the Cafe du Monde. Every day was a party, and everyone was invited and the admission was free.

The grandest ride in America was the St. Charles streetcar. You could catch the old green-painted, lumbering iron car under the colonnade in front of the Pearl and for pocket change travel on the neutral ground down arguably the most beautiful street in the Western world. The canopy of live oaks over the natural ground created a green-gold tunnel as far as the eye could see. On the corners, black men sold ice cream and sno'balls from carts with parasols on them, and in winter the pink and maroon neon on the Katz and Besthoff drugstores glowed like electrified smoke inside the fog ...

Every writer, every artist who visited New Orleans fell in love with it. The city might have been the Great Whore of Babylon, but few ever forgot or regretted her embrace.

What was its future?

I looked through my windshield and saw fallen trees everywhere, power and phone lines hanging from utility poles, dead traffic lights, gutted downtown buildings so badly damaged the owners had not bothered to cover the blown-out windows with plywood. The job ahead was Herculean and it was compounded by a level of corporate theft and governmental incompetence and cynicism that probably has no equal outside the Third World.

In addition to being one of the most stark and powerful of Burke's novels, and certainly one of the finest descriptions of the Katrina disaster, Burke resists the impulse that so often overwhelms lesser writers to slip into polemic.

The novel will leave you furious and sad and - because of its characters - hopeful and inspired, but the politics of the situation get only the lightest (and, thus, the most powerful) touch.

Early on, without mentioning that George W. Bush was out west eating cake with John McCain, and Michael Chertoff was largely ignoring New Orleans, safe in his belief that the free market would solve all problems, Burke drops a light but powerfully truthful note into the dialogue about how past presidents have dealt with hurricane disasters.

At 10:00 A.M. Helen Soileau came into my office. "How'd you make out yesterday?" she said.

"I wrote up everything I found and faxed it to the FBI in Baton Rouge. There's a copy in your box. I also talked to an NOPD guy on the phone. I don't think this one has legs on it."

"You don't think Otis Baylor shot these guys?"

"His neighbor seemed willing to finger him, but I had the sense the neighbor had some frontal-lobe damage himself. I think bodies are going to be showing up under the rubble and mud for months. Who's going to be losing sleep over a couple of looters who caught a high-powered round while they were destroying people's homes?"

"All right, let's move on. The Rec Center at City Park is full of evacuees. We need to get some of them to Houston if we can. Iberia General and Dauterive Hospital are busting at the seams. It's worse in Lafayette. I tell you, Streak, I've seen some shit in my life, but nothing like this."

"I couldn't argue with her. In fact, I didn't even want to comment.

"What did you think of Lyndon Johnson?" she asked.

"Before or after I got to Vietnam?"

"When Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in '65, Johnson flew into town and went into a shelter full of people who had been evacuated from Algiers. It was dark inside and people were scared and didn't now what was going to happen to them. He shined a flashlight in his face and said, 'My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I'm your goddamn president and I'm here to tell you my office and the people of the United States are behind you.' Not bad, huh?"

But I wasn't listening. There was a detail about the Otis Baylor investigation I hadn't mentioned to Helen ...

"The Tin Roof Blowdown" is a masterpiece. It's entertaining, compelling, forceful, and delicate. And once you've read it, you'll be hooked - there are another 15 Robicheaux novels by Burke, and numerous other masterpieces of fiction, all equal in power and brilliance, and subtle yet touching in politics and the human condition.

Prepare for one of the greatest reads of your life.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling author and the host of The Thom Hartmann Program syndicated nationally by Air America Radio. His website is ThomHartmann.com.
THOM HARTMANN'S
"INDEPENDENT THINKER"
BOOK OF THE MONTH REVIEW
http://www.buzzflash.com
.

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Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis Reborn

By
Robert Parry
September 8, 2007
consortiumnews.com

Just as Sylvester and Tweety Bird achieved lasting Hollywood fame from their comical cartoon chases, the less amusing duo of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden continue to benefit each other by reviving their long-distance rivalry, one posturing against the other in a way that helps them both.

In a new video, al-Qaeda leader bin Laden again taunts Bush, the United States – and then the Democrats for not forcing an American withdrawal from Iraq, which should help guarantee that the Democrats won’t dare press for a withdrawal from Iraq.

At a summit of Pacific Rim leaders in Sydney, Australia, President Bush then did his part, highlighting bin Laden’s Iraq comments:

“I found it interested that on the tape Iraq was mentioned, which is a reminder that Iraq is part of the war against extremists. If al-Qaeda bothers to mention Iraq, it’s because they want to achieve their objectives in Iraq, which is to drive us out.”

Except that U.S. intelligence has long concluded that al-Qaeda really wants the opposite: to bog the United States down in a hopeless, bloody war in Iraq that has been a boon for recruiting young jihadists, raising money and protecting al-Qaeda’s leadership holed up in base camps inside Pakistan.

Bin Laden continues to play the role of another cartoon character, Walt Disney’s Brer Rabbit, who escaped one famously tight spot by begging not to be thrown into the briar patch when that was exactly where he wanted to go. [For more details on this Bush-bin Laden symbiosis, see Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.]

Cole Attack
At least since the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, al-Qaeda’s strategy has been to draw the United States militarily into the Middle East as a way both to enhance al-Qaeda’s status in the Muslim world and to weaken the Americans by draining their resources and damaging their army.

However, the Clinton administration couldn't verify that al-Qaeda was behind the Cole attack until January 2001 and then turned over the evidence to the incoming Bush team, which didn’t act because it had other priorities.

By summer 2001, U.S. intelligence was picking up chatter indicating that al-Qaeda was disappointed by the lack of a response to the Cole provocation but was confident that the next blow would force Washington’s hand.

That next attack on Sept. 11, 2001, did compel an American military reaction, but al-Qaeda may have miscalculated as an effective U.S. counter-attack ousted al-Qaeda’s Taliban allies in Afghanistan and cornered bin Laden and other top leaders at Tora Bora.

At that crucial point, however, Bush failed to dispatch sufficient U.S. troops to seal off bin Laden’s escape routes, allowing many of al-Qaeda’s top leaders to flee into the rugged tribal region of Pakistan.

To al-Qaeda’s relief and amazement, Bush also began diverting key U.S. military resources away from Afghanistan toward Iraq, whose secular Sunni leader Saddam Hussein was an enemy of al-Qaeda’s Sunni fundamentalists.

Bush’s invasion of Iraq not only eliminated a key Sunni rival in Hussein but rallied thousands of angry Muslims to al-Qaeda’s banner. Soon, al-Qaeda even had an affiliate in Iraq led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

As al-Qaeda gained strength in the Islamic world, bin Laden came to see Bush as a something of a strategic ally. When Bush found himself in a tight battle with Democratic Sen. John Kerry, bin Laden issued a videotape denouncing Bush on the Friday before Election 2004.

The tape had the predictable effect of giving Bush a last-minute boost in the polls, which CIA analysts concluded was precisely bin Laden’s intent. Bin Laden wanted to keep Bush around as a foil for another four years. [See Neck Deep for details.]

Prolonged War

Also, contrary to Bush’s repeated assertions that al-Qaeda wants U.S. troops to leave Iraq so it can establish a safe haven there, the terrorist group’s internal messages, which have been intercepted by U.S. intelligence, reveal that al-Qaeda fears most the impact of a sudden American withdrawal.

A July 9, 2005, letter attributed to al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri warned that a rapid U.S. pullout could cause al-Qaeda’s new recruits, who traveled to Iraq to wage war on the Americans, to simply give up the fight and go home.

“The mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal,” wrote Zawahiri, who worried that a premature departure of the Americans also might leave the depleted ranks of al-Qaeda foreign fighters at the mercy of angry Iraqis.

Another internal communiqué revealed that al-Qaeda’s real wish was for the United States to stay in Iraq indefinitely, so the terrorist group could continue recruiting and training young jihadists while buying time to overcome the hostility of Iraqis toward outsiders.

In a letter to Zarqawi, dated Dec. 11, 2005, “Atiyah,” another top aide to bin Laden, described the hard work needed to overcome the animosity of Sunni tribal leaders. In that context, Atiyah said the continued American presence was crucial.

“Prolonging the war is in our interest,” Atiyah wrote in a letter captured when Zarqawi was killed in June 2006. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]

So, the interests of President Bush and Osama bin Laden continue to dovetail perfectly. The open-ended “war on terror” has allowed Bush to consolidate previously unimaginable powers for a U.S. chief executive. Simultaneously, bin Laden has emerged as a hero to many Muslims offended by the American occupation of Arab lands.

Now, as Bush faces another Democratic challenge to his plans for continuing the Iraq War, bin Laden shows up again, essentially berating the Democrats for not forcing U.S. troop withdrawals.

“The vast majority of you [Americans] want it [the Iraq War] stopped,” bin Laden said. “Thus you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning.”

That means if the Democrats do renew their efforts toward forcing American troop withdrawals, Bush and his supporters can simply accuse the Democrats of following bin Laden’s orders or playing into bin Laden’s hands.

The reality may be the opposite, but a few Republican floor speeches and a couple of well-placed op-eds should be enough to spook the already nervous Democrats.

Fox News commentator Sean Hannity offered a taste of how the new bin Laden tape will be used against both Democrats and the American Left.

“One of the things that also struck me is the language specifically that he used,” Hannity said. “He seemed to adopt the very same language that is being used by the hard Left in this country, as he describes what’s going on in Iraq as a ‘civil war’; he actually used the word ‘neocons’; he talked about global warming; he denounces capitalism and corporations.”

In other words, any similarity in language between bin Laden and what many Americans say in common conversations will be used to discredit them. They will become bin Laden’s fellow travelers.

All the better to get Bush and bin Laden what they both really want: a prolonged war in Iraq – and possibly a U.S. attack on the Shiite government of Iran.

[B]Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/090807.html

http://www.buzzflash.com
:: .

[Saundra Hummer]

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. . . . . . . . . . .

A Newsletter We Receive:
Dear Richard ,

Sign the petition today!

Last weekend, the London Times reported that the Pentagon was drawing up plans for a massive wave of air strikes on Iran aimed at wiping out that nation's military forces.

I can understand that leaking this plan is intended to raise the pressure on Iran. But is it credible? And will it have the desired impact? To be effective, such "threats" have to be conveyed -- and not just by exercises and planted stories but by earnest dialogue, the more broad-ranging, factual and non-emotional, the better.

One-dimensional efforts like this usually don't payoff. They arouse fears among friendly nations, and hostility from the intended targets. If anything, they're likely to leave the Administration in a less credible position.

We must let the Administration know that its one-dimensional Iran policy -- threaten, intimidate, coerce -- isn't likely to work. And when it fails, we'll be left with war. War.

Sign my petition at StopIranWar.com today to tell the Bush administration that the best way to stop Iran's nuclear program is by engaging in diplomacy -- not by shooting first and asking questions later.

Sign my petition at:

http://www.StopIranWar.com today!

If there is one mistake that George Bush makes over and over again, it is that he believes that military force is the solution to every problem. The Bush administration refused to engage in any serious diplomacy before the war in Iraq -- and now our nation is entangled in an endless guerilla war in that nation. We cannot make the same mistake again.

Now the Times reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for "massive airstrikes" against over 1,200 targets in Iran. Why would the US draw up such plans without engaging in a full--scale diplomatic effort with Iran?

The Adminstration's failure to engage in diplomacy shows its preference for a military "showdown." This violates common sense and experience.

The ideas of national security are to gain objectives and protect interests, without military conflict, if possible. War is costly and permanent. Lives are lost, and outcomes are usually more difficult and have unanticipated consequences.

So why doesn't George W. Bush get it? Why not? Not enough casualties, yet? Not enough pain? Not enough sorrow? And especially, not enough wisdom?

Tell George W. Bush: "You've failed too often, miscalculated too often, misled us too often. Enough is enough! It is time for diplomacy with Iran."

Sign my petition today at:
http://www.StopIranWar.com!

We must give diplomacy a chance to work. It is our best hope for defusing this crisis peacefully, creating a more stable Middle East, and protecting American security.

Sincerely,



Wes Clark

Sign the petition today
. . . . . . . .

[Saundra Hummer]

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~~~~~~~
"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose".

Thomas Jefferson
~~~
"Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"

Lillian Hellman
-
(1905-1984)
American playwright and memoirist
~~~
"For in a Republic, who is 'the country?' Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."

Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhornne Clemens]
-
(1835-1910)
~~~
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

Texas Governor George W. Bush
April 9, 1999
On the US intervention in Kosovo
~~~
"Conquered states that have been accustomed to liberty and the government of their own laws can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them; the second, for the conqueror to go and reside there in person; and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of a few, who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror".

Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
~~~
"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.":

Fredrich August von Hayek
-
(1899-1992)
Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution of Liberty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1972), p. 146.
~~~~~
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[Saundra Hummer]

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.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.The Stupidest People On Earth

By
Angie Riedel

09/08/07 "ICH" -- - The overwhelming majority of the American people are not breaking any laws.

We cannot say that about the government.

It looks increasingly hypocritical when the government insists that it must break the law in order to save us. It's become the government's mantra that it cannot protect us unless it breaks the law at will, without oversight, and without our knowledge or consent. It's been openly stated that unless our basic rights are fully yielded to the government, further terrorist attacks will come, and because of our failure to yield what literally defines us, those attacks will be our own fault.

The implications of this illogic are chilling. Our reticence to allow the government to break the law at will makes us complicit with terrorists.

As revolting a notion as that is, and as obviously untrue as it is, nevertheless, Congress has systematically passed laws forcing us to lie down and take it, in the name of security.

Several of the amendments to the constitution, our basic inalienable rights, have been thoroughly and systematically undermined due to government urging and incessant claims that they need our rights in order to do their jobs.

Every shred of our privacy has become a thing of the past, as we now know that every electronic communication in this country is collected, scanned and archived even though it is patently illegal and clearly unjustified. A real time national surveillance grid is being established and interconnected with every possible government and private interest that can utilize our most personal information against us, or for it's own benefit and profit. This is further darkened by the concerted efforts of government to refuse to allow us the ability to look into these situations, much less reject them.

The sweeping banner of national security is always unfurled when we are alarmed by bizarre government activity, and seems to be all it takes to prevent the people from obtaining the truths we need to be able to discern whether government activity is warranted. The people need to know whether what the government is doing is in our own best interest or not. That can never become something that is too much to ask. To the extent that it has, we have been seriously diminished, undermined and disempowered.

Why is the focus of government activity regarding national security so widespread when they obviously need to be focused only where needed? Why look at 100% of the grid when only a small fraction of it is of actual pertinence to their efforts to provide security to the nation? Not only does this spread their efforts incredibly thin, it wastes time and energy and man-hours, and it dilutes whatever successful outcomes this unprecedented microscopic surveillance could ostensibly turn up.

Why are they making their own jobs so much harder and so much less successful by looking in all of the places that will never bear fruit?

It's time to ask for clarification of the term 'national security'. Exactly what do they mean when they say those words? Because we as a nation have never felt less secure, in fact we have never been less secure than we are right now.

It's really no wonder that there's been little in the way of turning up actual terrorists in our own country. There are simple facts like, there aren't many terrorists here to begin with, if any. As of yet, all these years after 9-11, not a single credible terrorist has been discovered and taken out of operation. No one has been held accountable for 9-11 and of course, the infamous Osama Bin Laden, an intelligence operative, has vanished into thin air, and is all but forgotten. He seems only to turn up at those times when his prerecorded threats against us seem to serve the government's will to a "T", supporting their assertions and plans, providing justification for the continuing need for their uncomfortable way of doing things.

Why does the government suddenly find our rule of law so inconvenient? It seems to severely burden the highest office in the land to be confined to operating inside of the law. What is the law for then if it is not good enough for the government to believe in? Why have laws at all? Again, the hypocrisy is unsettling. It is the president's responsibility to uphold the law, yet it's now a situation where he decides the law, rejecting and redefining it at will. As no one in America is above the law, at what point does the president deem himself beyond it's confines? More importantly, why would he want to?

Why would our president find the law to be so repellent? Does he not believe in the value of the rule of law? The questions are left to answer themselves. The government no longer feels compelled to answer to us.

We have seen abuses of citizens here and of hundreds of private individuals abroad who have been arrested and imprisoned
without charges being filed. Certainly if there is sufficient cause to deprive someone of their freedom, there could be no problem
filing charges at the time of their arrest. An arrest can only come because of specific charges. It remains seriously difficult to
understand why charges are not filed, and those imprisonments continue for years. The right to know what one is being charged with,
the right to defend oneself and call witnesses and provide exonerating evidence, even the right to a lawyer, a phone call, or to contact
one's family, all of these rights have been stricken, and are bitterly fought against by the very government charged with upholding
these very laws.

One is left to conclude there are no charges to be made against these arrestees, and what follows is that the reasons for those arrests
don't truly exist. Why the arrests then? Why the torture? Why the refusal to provide the legal protections that define our beliefs?

All of it is wholly frightening and valid reason to worry.

The bill of rights defines our values. We don't look at those rights as something unusual or optional or arbitrarily reserved for ourselves. On the contrary, we believe our bill of rights represents what we deeply believe is right, not just for ourselves but for everyone on this earth. That is why anyone who comes here is entitled to the same legal protections that we are. We believe this is the right thing to do for everyone.

For that reason one is deeply concerned when our president, attorney general, and our military heads feel compelled to deprive people
of the rights we live by, on the grounds that people in other countries are not us. Or, that people anywhere who they deem to be suspect, without evidence to support that assertion, should immediately be deprived of due process. This is exactly the time and reason for due process. These are not grounds to mistreat anyone. If our government believed in our principles would they not take our principles with them everywhere they went on the planet? Would they not uphold them here at home? It seems outsourcing is confined only to our jobs and futures, not our human values. What a shame. What an inconceivable, perplexing shame.

I am no longer sure of what our government stands for. It seems completely opposed to everything we treasure most. It lusts for wars of aggression, it dismisses our laws, it disrespects our rights and contends they keep them from doing their jobs. They use the law against us, to tie our hands and keep us from knowing what they're doing, and worse, to prevent us from stopping them from doing things we abhor.

The endless string of abuses of law and human rights, the invasions of our privacy, the heavy handed treatment of law abiding people at
airports and by police, the exorbitant costs of their visions and philosophies, their refusal to consider the people while granting corporations every accommodation and benefit, the dollar in it's death throws, the perversions exposed in official after official, all combine to paint an obvious picture. These are not people who deserve to be trusted. These are not people who have our security in mind. These are not people we should hand the reigns of the nation to as they are driving us directly to our own demise.

Why is our Congress complicit in allowing this? Where is the belief that our nation is good, and the recollection that the people are paying for everything, and the knowledge that we don't want the country to be changed into a fascist dictatorship? We don't want to be bankrupt and jobless and homeless and hopeless. Does that really need to be said? Is that not self evident to our elected representatives?

When we have to make a case for justice, freedom, prosperity, privacy, human rights and peace, then we have lost them already.

When we are forced to beg for what supposedly defines us and keep hearing those requests denied for our own "security", we must face the reality that everything we once had is gone, and is not coming back.

Government has separated itself from us. It has abandoned the people and now seeks only to exert unlimited control over us, and to do with us as it will. Just as it can dismiss the law, it has dismissed the notion of the people being of consequence. This country has become their own property to do with as they choose, and we seem only to be standing in their way, along with our rights and the laws we once had that protected us.

Does anyone really believe that we willingly gave it all away believing it would make us safe? The painful truth of it is, that's exactly what we did. It could not be any more clear. Americans are the stupidest people on earth.

Please visit Angie's blog:
http://www.thinkorbeeaten.blogspot.com/
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18338.htm. . . . ..

[Saundra Hummer]

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~~~~~ "House of Strength"
By Fredrik Dahl
2:04 ET, Wed 5 Sep 2007
REUTERS

TEHRAN (Reuters) - For the men who practice it, it's about not just fitness but a connection with God.

Zurkhaneh, an ancient Persian sporting ritual whose name means "House of Strength", is a historic breeding ground for wrestlers in Iran, and now enjoying something of a comeback.

It looks to a Western eye like an exotic mixture of body-building and aerobics. But for the men whirling like dervishes to frenetic drumbeats, juggling heavy wooden clubs and doing push-ups in the pit of a "House of Strength" in northern Tehran, the ritual is about much more.

"It is a holy thing," said Nader Ghasemi, wearing traditional embroidered trousers with a German Bayern Munich soccer shirt.

"It makes me feel close to God," said Ghasemi, preparing to step into the octagonal pit at the center of the hall to perform a series of coordinated routines together with about 20 others.

Some say Zurkhaneh helped to inspire wrestling in Iran -- a sport where it has international standing and can put aside its differences with its arch-foe, the United States.

About 20 American athletes and their coaches came to Iran for a wrestling competition last January. In April, the State Department said Iranian wrestlers had been invited to train in the United States for the 2008 Olympics, as part of efforts to increase ties with the Iranian people.

But by comparison with Zurkhaneh, wrestling is prosaic. Images of Muslim religious leaders and pre-Islamic mythological heroes -- as well as old photographs of bare-chested champions -- adorned the walls of the "House of Strength".

A drummer chanted poems written centuries ago.

At 33, Ghasemi was one of the evening's younger participants, an indication that Iran's soccer-mad young men are not easily drawn to the ancient ritual.

But spectator Parviz Tamani said that, although it had suffered in popularity since its heyday in 19th-century Persia, Zurkhaneh was coming back to life.

"People like to revive old historical traditions and to keep them alive," said the 68-year-old, who practised the sport when he was young. "This is special, it goes back thousands of years."

BODY AND SOULAs he spoke, the athletes -- ranging from two young boys accompanying their father to burly men in their 70s -- did push-ups, whirled with outstretched arms in a seeming trance, and swung clubs weighing up to 15 kg over their shoulders or into the air.

Enthusiasts say the practice, also present in neighboring countries, is as much about seeking purity and becoming a good person who helps those in need as about physical prowess.

"Most sports have as a goal to build your body. But this sport builds both the body and the spirit," said Alireza Saffarzadeh of Iran's traditional sports federation.

Its enduring appeal nonetheless underlines Iran's passion for sports based on body strength.

Weightlifter and Olympic gold medalist Hossein Reza Zadeh, the "Iranian Hercules", is one of the country's biggest celebrities. Last December a retired wrestler was voted onto Tehran's city council, defeating more established politicians.

Zurkhaneh also plays a social role, with men coming to the gymnasium to chat over tea before the event starts.

Women are not involved in the discipline, said to have its roots in military training long before the 7th-century Arab invasion of what is now Iran.

Iran's dominant religion, Shi'ite Islam, has since become a key element of the ritual, and the hall itself looks a shrine.

Sayings by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late founding father of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, are on display as are depictions of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad and revered by Shi'ites.


WRESTLING CHAMPIONS
A black-turbaned cleric was a special guest at this training session in one of Tehran's dozens of Zurkhaneh halls, which lasted for about two hours and ended with prayers.

On this occasion there was no physical contact, but every now and then wrestling-like competitions are held in the pit.

"Most Iranian wrestling champions come from Zurkhaneh," said Mostafa Tajiki, who competed in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

The 77-year-old, who still trains twice a week, said that in his time the Zurkhaneh was the only athletics club on offer: "It was the center of Iranian sports."

On the wall behind him, a black-and-white photograph from the 1950s showed him as a muscular and moustached young national wrestling champion.

"We now have young, talented wrestlers and we hope to see good results in next year's Olympics in Beijing," he said.

© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
Go on-site to gain access to the photo's in a slide presentation by clicking on the following URL:http://features.us.reuters.com/wellbeing/news/L04821006.html ~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

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:: :: :: :: ::
A MAN FOR THE TIMES - HE'LL BE MISSED - SRH
Hagel says he's had enough
Senator will leave Congress, won't run for President

Sen. Chuck Hagel: A maverick bows out (AP Photo) Go on-site to view.

By DAVID ESPO
September 9, 2007 - 7:09am.

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a persistent Republican critic of the Iraq war, intends to announce on Monday he will not seek a third term, according to Republican officials.

The officials also said Hagel does not plan to run for the White House in 2008, despite earlier flirting with a candidacy.

The 60-year-old senator arranged a news conference for Monday in Omaha, Neb., to make his formal announcement. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting the event.

The decision by Hagel is the latest in a string of setbacks for minority Republicans in the Senate, who must defend 22 of the 34 seats on the ballot next fall.

Last week, Sen. John Warner of Virginia announced his retirement, a decision expected to create an intensely competitive race for a seat he probably would have held easily had he decided to run again.

Nebraska is one of the most Republican states in the nation, but Hagel's retirement could open the way for former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey to attempt a political comeback. Democratic officials have been in contact with him in recent weeks, hoping to recruit him to become a candidate if Hagel were to retire.

Colorado Republican Sen. Wayne Allard is the third GOP retirement of the election cycle, and incumbents in New Hampshire, Oregon, Minnesota and Maine face particularly competitive races.

In addition, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens faces a federal corruption investigation, and Sen. Larry Craig is expected to resign his seat following his arrest in an airport men's room sex sting. Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, but has hired a lawyer to try and withdraw his plea.

Hagel was elected more than a decade ago with a resume that included a tour in combat in Vietnam.

He has compiled a generally conservative voting record, yet emerged as one of the earliest and most biting Republican critics of the Iraq war.

In January, Hagel was the only member of his party on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to support a nonbinding measure critical of President Bush's decision to dispatch an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq.

"There is no strategy. This is a pingpong game with American lives," Hagel said at the time.

Later, he virtually lectured fellow senators about their responsibilities.

"If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes," he said.

"This is a tough business. But is it any tougher, us having to take a tough vote, express ourselves and have the courage to step up on what we're asking our young men and women to do?"

Associated Press writer Anna Jo Bratton in Omaha, Neb., contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press
COMMENTS BY VIEWERS:
I am a strong Democrat who
Submitted by pupnannie on September 10, 2007 - 11:42am.
I am a strong Democrat who could have very easily voted for Chuck Hagle. Senator Hagle did not appear to be Republican or Democrat, he just appeard to be an AMERICAN and that is how all Congress should be. His leaving the Senate will be a great loss to the American people and I am sad to see him go.
I hope his colleagues have learned something from him as he was a wonderful example for them to follow. Senator Hagle, you will be missed by all.
»
Good news for Bush
Submitted by Donnat on September 10, 2007 - 12:34pm.
Good news for Bush supporters in Nebraska, though, now they can find someone who might just follow his orders with blind submission (like our Texas senators do)

Hagel and all decent Republicans are disgusted to the point of walking away, and that's too bad.
Donnat» Go on-site to view this article and any links, other issues of the day, etc. Just click on the following URL:http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/3336 :: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

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~~~~~~~
The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge."

Butler D. Shaffer Professor
Southwestern University School of Law
June 9, 2003
~~~
If a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime."

Charles Eliot Norton
(1827-1908)
American educator, writer,
and editor who founded the Nation
(1865)
~~~
"To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads -- such is the behavior of the multitude."

Mencius
[Mengzi Meng-tse]
(c.371 - c.288 B.C.)
Chinese Confucian philosopher
~~~
"Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human".

John Cogley
Source: Commonwealth,
24 April 1959
~~~
"Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare."

Lance Morrow
~~~
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

Arundhati Roy
~~~~~.

[Saundra Hummer]

* * * * * * * * *A VIDEO


Helen Thomas Takes On Press Sec Concerning Wiretaps
September 11, 2007

Helen Thomas recently won MediaChannel.org's Journalism of Truth and Courage Award. She once again displayed journalism of truth and courage by taking on the White House Press Secretary: "Does the president think he should obey the law? He put his hand on the Bible twice to uphold the Constitution. Wiretapping is not legal under the circumstances without a warrant…. You know what happened to Nixon when he broke the law."

If you can't see the video, click below to
Launch in external player
or
Download Windows Media Player for Mac OS X

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

NOTE: This is a new service and we will be making improvements over the next few weeks. If you are on a Mac computer, please download windows media player here. If you cannot see the video, please send us a note. http://mediachannel.org/mv11.shtml* * * * * * * * * * * .

[Saundra Hummer]

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^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Thomas Friedman: Hooked on War
By Norman Solomon.
“…Iraqi civilians keep dying from the U.S. war effort and other violence catalyzed by the occupation; meanwhile, of course, not a single concert or merry-go-round has stopped in the USA.”

Reading his “Letter From Baghdad” column in the New York Times on Sept. 5, you’d never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States — “everyone loves seeing us tied down here” — stuck in the “madness that is Iraq.” And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis “if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”

The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America’s most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can’t bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.

On the last day of November 2003 — eight months after the invasion — Friedman gushed that “this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan.” He lauded the Iraq war as “one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.”

But the assumptions built into a Friedman column are murky outside the context of his worldview. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” Friedman wrote approvingly in one of his explaining-the-world bestsellers. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Those words appeared in Friedman’s book “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” but the passage first surfaced (with a few tweaks of syntax) in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1999, near the end of a long piece adapted from the book. Filling almost the entire cover of the magazine was a red-white-and-blue fist, with the caption “What The World Needs Now” and a smaller-type explanation: “For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is.”

The clenched graphic could be seen as the “hidden fist” that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without.” While the cover story’s patriotic fist was intended as a symbol of the globe’s need for multifaceted American power, the military facet had been unleashed just as the magazine went to press. By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for 78 straight days.

Writing columns and appearing on broadcast networks to assess the war, Tom Friedman was close to gleeful. (The man was widely viewed as a liberal, whatever that meant, and “the liberal media” provided Friedman with many platforms that often seemed to double as pedestals.) Interviewers at ABC, PBS and NPR ranged from deferential to fawning as they solicited his wisdom on the latest from Yugoslavia.

Even when he lamented the political constraints on the military options of the 19-member NATO alliance, Friedman was upbeat. “While there are many obvious downsides to war-from-15,000-feet,” he wrote after bombs had been falling for more than four weeks, “it does have one great strength — its sustainability. NATO can carry on this sort of air war for a long, long time. The Serbs need to remember that.”

So, Friedman explained, “if NATO’s only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.”

He added: “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too….”

The convenience marbled through such punditry is so routine that eyebrows rarely go up. The chirpy line “Let’s at least have a real air war,” for instance, addressed American readers for whom, with rare exceptions, the “real air war” would be no more real than a media spectacle, with all the consequences falling on others very far away. As for rock concerts and merry-go-rounds, we could recall — if memory were to venture into unauthorized zones — that any number of such amusements went full throttle in the United States during the Vietnam War, and also for that matter during all subsequent U.S. wars including the one that Friedman was currently engaged in cheering on.

If the idea of civilians trying to continue with normal daily life while their government committed lethal crimes was “outrageous” enough to justify inflicting “a merciless air war” — as Friedman urged later in the same column — would someone have been justified in bombing the United States during its slaughter of countless innocents in Southeast Asia? Or during its active support for dictators and death squads in Latin America? For that matter, Friedman could hardly be unaware that for several weeks already American firepower had been maiming and killing Serb civilians, children included, with weaponry including cluster bombs. Today, Iraqi civilians keep dying from the U.S. war effort and other violence catalyzed by the occupation; meanwhile, of course, not a single concert or merry-go-round has stopped in the USA.

When righteousness moved Friedman to call for “lights out in Belgrade,” he was urging a war crime. The urban power grids and water pipes he yearned to see destroyed were essential to infants, the elderly, the frail and infirm inside places like hospitals and nursing homes. Targeting such grids and pipes would seem like barbarism to Americans if the missiles were incoming. Any ambiguity of the matter would probably be dispelled by a vow to keep bombing the country until it was set back 50 years or, if necessary, six centuries. But Friedman’s enthusiasm was similar to that of many other prominent American commentators who also greeted the bombing of Yugoslavia with something close to exhilaration.

The final paragraph of Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times on April 23, 1999, began with a punchy sentence: “Give war a chance.” It was a witticism that seemed to delight Friedman. He repeated it, in print and on national television, as the bombing of Yugoslavia continued. A tone of sadism could be discerned. ———This article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” which just came off the press. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com
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:: :: :: :: :: :: ::Damn, it's 'Nam

Americans are now in a familar tight spot
By
Eric Margolis

09/10/07 "Toronto Sun" --- - We all know what "deja vu" is. But I recently read of a condition psychiatrists call "jamais vu." That's where one sees something very familiar, but cannot identify it.
Both the White House and U.S. military seemed gripped by jamais vu.

Many of the same mistakes made in the Vietnam War are being repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, but neither the White House, Pentagon, nor U.S. field commanders seem to recognize or understand them.

This week, Gen. David Petreaus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will issue a report on the "progress" his troops are making in Iraq in the face of serious problems, and hint at future troop reductions.

The report will speak of important security successes in Baghdad and Anbar province. Gen. Petreaus is a very smart, highly respected commander, but one suspects his report will unfortunately be the latest example of jamais vu syndrome.

U.S. commanders in Iraq, like their Canadian counterparts in Afghanistan, keep proudly reporting how their men have occupied villages or towns, killed scores of "suspected terrorists" (usually thanks to air attack), and forced the enemy to flee.

They do not seem to understand they are fighting a fluid guerrilla war in which territory and body counts mean little.


GUERILLA WAR
Mao Zedong perfectly described the principles of such guerilla war: "When the enemy advances, withdraw; when he stops, harass; when he tires, strike; when he retreats, pursue."

The "successes" being reported from Iraq and Afghanistan are illusory.

We heard exactly the same story during the Vietnam War, when U.S. military spokesmen trumpeted daily glowing reports about enemy body counts, strategic hamlets created, Viet Cong tunnels blown up, hearts and minds won over, and smiling children waving little American flags.

While the U.S. was "winning" all these little daily battles, Communists were winning the war.

Institutional memory rarely exceeds 10 years.

Most of Vietnam's bitter lessons, paid for by the blood of 58,000 Americans, have been totally forgotten by the White House and Pentagon.

But don't blame the soldiers. Once again, U.S. fighting men in Iraq and Canadians in Afghanistan have been sent into no-win wars by their poorly informed, badly advised civilian masters, and ordered to keep coming up with rosy progress reports.

I have covered numerous guerilla wars in my time and have never seen Western powers win a single one. Yet we keep forgetting this hard lesson.

We have also forgotten the great Gen. Douglas MacArthur's warning after Korea, "never fight a land war in Asia."

The much ballyhooed Petreaus report will be a key part of the game of political chicken President George Bush is playing with the Democratic-controlled Congress, which wants to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq.


AVOIDING BLAME
Bush appears determined to keep the war going until his term expires to avoid blame for defeat in Iraq.

Congress is trying to lay all the blame on Bush, get him to admit defeat, and evade its own shameful role in authorizing the trumped-up Iraq War.

But Congress is in a jam. If U.S. troops do withdraw, Iraq may fall into even worse chaos than it now suffers -- which a Democratic president will inherit.

In an election year, Republicans will blast Democrats as "defeatists" for "cutting and running" and "losing Iraq."

That's why worried leading Democrats are now backing off calls for total withdrawal and mumbling about partial pullbacks and "training Iraqi forces."

Meanwhile, the administration refuses to admit Iraq has no real government or army, and is an anarchic stew of competing Shia militias, tribal chiefs, death squads, 22 Sunni resistance groups, and breakaway Kurds. Iran is becoming the real power in Iraq.

Polls show 80% of Iraqis want U.S. forces out. The U.S. occupation is largely responsible for unleashing Shia ethnic cleansing that has created four million Iraqi refugees.

History does not repeat itself, but men's mistakes and follies do.

The latest sombre example is Iraq, where our memory of Vietnam is ... jamais vu.
Go on-site to gain access to this article and others as well as their war stats, cartoons and archives. Just click on the following URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info:: :: :: .

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Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water
By
David Templeton
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Tue, 11 Sep 2007, 11:41AM

ERIE, Pa. - An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.

The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations.

The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said.

The discovery is "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years," Roy said.

"This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere," Roy said. "Seeing it burn gives me the chills."

Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding.

The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen — which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery.

"We will get our ideas together and check this out and see where it leads," Roy said. "The potential is huge."
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Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/1570
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SUING TOM
A Berlin Attorney Takes on Cruise
By
Juan Moreno
Taking her cue from massive damage settlements in lawsuits in the United States, a Berlin lawyer is taking on the case of extras injured during the filming of a Tom Cruise movie here. She's only been to court 15 times, and her underdog story could come straight from a script featuring the Hollywood actor.
MARCO-URBAN.DE
Lawyer Ariane Bluttner: "We are discussing the possibility of several million."
He plays the hero in most legal thrillers -- the young, inexperienced lawyer who sits in a sad office with a secretary in the front room, often scatterbrained, sometimes vulgar or often both. At some point the phone always rings. It's an impossible case. Everyone says it's unwinnable -- the opponent is too powerful, too smart. But the young attorney takes it on, fights and wins -- catapulting it to the case of his career.

Ariane Bluttner doesn't know if the case against Tom Cruise will be the trial of her career. But it would be difficult for her to find a more famous person on the planet to go up against. Bluttner began her career as an attorney just 10 months ago. Up until now, she's taken on minor cases -- rent disputes, traffic accidents and tax discrepancies. The amount in dispute in the last case she took was a paltry €100.

Now the young attorney is planning a multimillion dollar case against United Artists, a film production company partly owned by Cruise. A lawyer who has only pleaded 15 cases in court is about to take on a goliath. It's the kind of story that Hollywood scripts are made of.
Foto: SPIEGEL TV Go onsite to view this and other photo's on this site abot this article.Video: SPIEGEL TV
"I can't name the exact damages we are going to seek, but internally we are discussing the possibility of several million," soft-spoken Bluttner says. She's sitting at a small desk in her office and slowly and carefully considers her words, taking long pauses before answering questions. Bluttner works for the law firm Dr. Schmitz and Partners, located in an office on the less tony end of Berlin's grand shopping boulevard, the Ku'Damm. On this end of the street, the designer boutiques yield to car dealerships and the European equivalents of Applebees and Sizzler.

Cruise is currently in Berlin shooting "Rubicon," the Stauffenberg biopic formerly known as "Valkyrie." He's playing would be Hitler assassin Claus von Stauffenberg. Cruise, who recently became a part-owner of United Artists, is co-producing the film. During filming three weeks ago, 11 extras fell from the bed of a truck. Cruise wasn't on the set at the time. It was a Sunday and the actor had the day free. The extras, dressed in the uniforms of Nazi-era Wehrmacht soldiers, had to be treated after the accident and spent the night in the hospital.

FROM THE MAGAZINE
Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. Apparently one of them had seen some of those American legal thriller films. The next day, he called Arianne Bluttner. The man said he wanted to sue the film firm and he wanted to be paid damages -- American-style damages. He said he knew other injured extras and that together they were entitled to millions in damages.

In America, damage payment demands are often much higher than they are in Germany. The idea seems to be simple: Anyone who damages a person or thing must pay. It also sounds fair. Unfortunately, though, the system has a tendency to make people a little too greedy -- be they victims, family members, lawyers or, above all, if major corporations are involved. The process is only painful for these companies if it gets really expensive. For a company like United Artists -- which has films like "1900," "Rain Man," "Rocky" and "James Bond" under its belt -- that would take a lot of money. Cruise vehicle "Rubicon" alone is expected to cost $80 million to produce.

PHOTO GALLERY: CRUISE'S WAR FILM SHOOTS IN BERLIN
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (10 Photos)It would be easy to poke fun at the young attorney. She has fire-engine red hair that hasn't been cut in months, silly drawings of ducks cover the walls of her office and her law practice's Web site introduces "Ben" on its homepage. Ben is a mounted deer head and he even has his own e-mail address. Perhaps it's all just meant to show that even lawyers can have a sense of humor.

And perhaps Bluttner is just doing what any good lawyer would do in her situation. She's going to keep making a fuss until everyone has heard about it. So far, Hollywood hasn't responded to the charges, which has only served to further irritate Bluttner. She's placed ads searching for other victims on a special Web site, www.komparsen- vs- hollywood.de (Extras vs. Hollywood). And she says her clients have told her about other accidents involving extras, adding that her "main aim is to push for better safety standards on filmsets in Germany." The situation on filmsets is inhumane, with bruises, sprains and lacerations the order of the day, she claims.

DPA
Two weeks ago, extras on the set of "Rubicon" were injured and taken to hospital after falling off this truck. Indeed, if you sit down and listen to her for long enough, you might think that in the eyes of American film producers, Germany is seen as a kind of second or Third World Romania. And in many ways it is. Hollywood executives see Berlin as a place where you can film a whole lot cheaper than you can in the United States.

But Bluttner has little choice but to say these kinds of things. It takes years to bring a case to court in the US -- it's very expensive and it can never be considered a given than a court will take on the case. The first thing Bluttner has to do is somehow demonstrate malice on the part of the film production company -- otherwise it is protected by the waiver signed by the extras before filming.

That won't be an easy task for Bluttner, but she appears to be doing a good job of it. Nevertheless, a statement made this week by Berlin's state employment protection office is unlikely to help her case any. The office said there hadn't been significant safety problems on the set, citing testimony from other extras, and that the accident had been caused because the extras failed to properly shut the truck's tailgate. Robert Rath, who heads the agency, says the truck was safe and not a "jalopy," but his office still ordered the film company to install a fulltime safety manager on the set, the German news agency DPA is reporting.

Still, Bluttner is sticking with the case, she's tenacious and won't give up easily. She says she has found other witnesses who are prepared to testify "that everyone on the set knew that the vehicles were in terrible shape," and that extras playing Wehrmacht soldiers had repeatedly complained about loose parts on the flatbed truck.

At some point, it's even plausible that United Artists will grow so frustrated by all the bad publicity that it would just give the victims a payout. That, of course, would be a victory for Bluttner.

And it would also be a scene straight out of a Tom Cruise movie. There are few actors in Hollywood who look more the part of the lawyer than him. He's even played one twice -- in "The Firm" and "A Few Good Men." In both films he played an underdog, and in both he beat the odds against true goliaths. Now, Ariana Bluttner is playing his part.

SPIEGEL ONLINE
September 13, 2007
05:25 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,505592,00.html . . . .

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Censored!By
San Francisco Bay Guardian.

There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.

The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals “enemy combatants,” or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.

Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

“This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top,” said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.

While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories — the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.

“I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading,” writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.

For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as “the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts,” which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. “We need to broaden our understanding of censorship,” he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: “The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this.”

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. “Every day they’re checking out what we think,” he said. “The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy.”

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. “I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here,” he said.

1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUSThe Military Commissions Act, passed in September 2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s judicial system.

The law allows the president to designate any person an “alien unlawful enemy combatant,” shunting that individual into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of preserving national security.

Habeas corpus, a constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called it the greatest defense against “the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.”

The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a method for dealing with Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, in quite definitive language, “this law does not apply to American citizens.”

Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific “alien unlawful enemy combatant” to the vague “any person subject to this chapter.”

“Why does it contain language referring to ‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United States’?” Parry wrote. “Who has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?”

Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that “this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly.” He said he’s consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security legislation, and they agreed that the “any person” terminology is troubling. “It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted,” Parry said.

Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.

Sources: “Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right,” Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; “Still No Habeas Rights for You,” Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; “Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?” Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, Oct. 19, 2006

2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOUThe Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two punch to civil liberties. While the first blow to habeas corpus received some attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for defense spending.

Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act, section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878, when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the states take care of their own territories.

The Warner act defines a public emergency as a “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States” and extends its provisions to any place where “the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.” On top of that, federal troops can be dispatched to “suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away.

The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders.” In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.

Sources: “Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!” Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; “Bush Moves toward Martial Law,” Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes “information from occupied Iraq”), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, Oct. 26, 2006

3. AFRICOMPresident Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent “vital interest” in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he said, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick “vital interest.”

The United States is now constructing a similar permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas.

Though the official objective may be peace, some say the real desire is crude. “A new cold war is under way in Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it,” Bryan Hunt wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, “disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy.”

Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another “vital interest.”

Source: “Understanding AFRICOM,” parts 1–3, b real, Moon of Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html, Feb. 21, 2007

4. SECRET TRADE AGREEMENTSAs disappointing as the World Trade Organization has been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when brokering multilateral agreements.

At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs.

In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed by the US and the EU, are cut like backroom deals, with the larger country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached through the WTO.

Bush administration officials, always quick with a charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements “competitive liberalization,” and the EU considers them essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements.

But critics see them as fast tracks to increased foreign control of local resources in poor communities. “The overall effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global markets,” states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty activist group.

Sources: “Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries” Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service (global news service), ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008, March 20, 2007; “Signing Away the Future” Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site, www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703, March 2007

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US EMBASSY IN IRAQPart of the permanent infrastructure the United States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy, built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the workers are from small or developing countries like the Philippines, India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read Dubai. Their passports are stamped Dubai. But when they get off the plane, they’re in Baghdad.

Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”

These workers have often been banned by their home countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil, protections are few. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. “If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?” asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.

The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any violating contractors or announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little accountability exists. As Phinney reported, “No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site.”

Source: “A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy,” David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173, Oct. 17, 2006

6. FALCON’S TALONSOperation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than 960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.

The Justice Department claimed the agents were targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, “Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime.”

However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related to terrorism. Additionally, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.

Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says the numbers just don’t add up. For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094 registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives.

What about the other 7,481 people? “Who are they, and have they been charged with a crime?” Whitney asked.

The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).

As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids, which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.

Sources: “Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State,” Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; “Operation Falcon,” SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, Nov. 18, 2006

7. BLACKWATERThe outsourcing of war has served two purposes for the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts with private security firms like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently engaged in conflicts.

Blackwater is one of the more successful and well connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war. Started in 1996 by an ex–Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s largest private military base.

“It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war on terror,” author Jeremy Scahill said on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books.

Source: “Our Mercenaries in Iraq,” Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232, Jan. 26, 2007

8. KIA:
THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIAA March 2006 pact under which the United States agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say the initiative is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops.

The deal provides a captive customer base for genetically modified seed maker Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for 500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors.

Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of mealy bugs, which have proven immune to the pesticides the chemical companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has shifted from the traditional to the trade friendly. Farmers accustomed to cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant foreign to India.

Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of opposition to what’s occurring in their country.

Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report titled Seeds of Suicide, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.

Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.

Sources: “Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India,” Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229, Dec. 13, 2006; “Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India take on Monsanto,” Arun Shrivastava, Global Research (Web site of Montreal’s Center for Global Research), www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427, Oct. 9, 2006

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTUREIn 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered through legislation for the greatest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely by the federal government.

Fifty years later many of those roads are in need of repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.

But opponents of all political stripes are criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation — in many cases, to foreign companies with considerable experience building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for their shareholders in as little as 10 years.

As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, “the Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix — and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities that don’t have to worry about getting reelected.”

The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.

Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a 10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, taking advantage of cheap labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo that around the country.

Sources: “The Highwaymen” Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html, Feb. 2007; “Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway,” Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497, June 12, 2006

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATENamed for a bird that picks offal from a carcass, this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a third world country, then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus interest. In most courts, they win. Recently, Donegal International spent $3 million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for $55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15 million.

Often these countries are on the brink of having their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that “the vultures have already sucked up about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the World Bank in Washington.”

With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of Britain’s Parliament as well as the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. US Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donald Payne (D-N.J.) lobbied Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt Advisory International, an investment consulting firm that’s been involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits, is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to Bush’s campaigns.

Source: “Vulture Fund Threat to Third World,” Newsnight, www.gregpalast.com/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world, Feb. 14, 2007

>>More: The story of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest

Go on-site to see this and other topical issues and realated topics by clicking on the following URL:

http://www.democracyinaction.org
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Intentional Roughness:
Fan Faces Jail Term in Attack
Oklahoma-Texas Football Rivalry Takes a Bloody Turn After Near Castration
By
ROHIT JOSHI
OKLAHOMA CITY
Sept. 13, 2007

As college football rivalries go, few can match the intensity of the ill will between the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas. But even the most rabid fans in this football-obsessed city are shocked by the viciousness of a barroom fight between two men with opposing loyalties.

It all began on June 17, when Brian Thomas, 32, a Texas fan, entered Henry Hudson's Pub in Oklahoma City wearing a Texas burnt orange shirt. He immediately inflamed fellow bar patron Allen Beckett, 53, a government auditor and church deacon.

"My client just came in wearing a basic University of Texas T-shirt and was minding his own business," said Carl Hughes, Thomas' attorney. "(Beckett) had made some rude comments to my client and his date, so they then got up and sat across the bar."

The incident ended with Thomas heading for the hospital to receive more than 60 stitches after being nearly castrated, allegedly by the churchgoing Beckett.

Hand Signals
The bartender noticed that Beckett, a regular in the establishment, appeared to be upset that day, Hughes said in an interview with ABC News. The bartender saw that Beckett had been taunting Thomas throughout the night and had been constantly signaling hand gestures toward Thomas and his date, according to Hughes.

"(Beckett) kept making hand gestures that were in the 'bring it on' fashion in the direction of my client," Hughes said. Thomas and his date decided they had had enough and got up to leave.

Beckett's attorney, Billy Bock, maintains that the razzing was all in good fun and his client was playfully teasing Thomas. Bock said his client alleges that Thomas had threatened him while in the bar.

"As (Thomas) and his date were leaving, he passed Allen and gave him a chest bump and said that he was going to kick his you-know-what a few times. My client was then placed in a headlock and acted in a manner that would ensure his security against a person who is younger and stronger than him," said Bock.

According to the police report, both men then fell to the ground and Thomas delivered blows to his assailant, who had a firm grip on his testicles.

"He just turned around and Beckett had grabbed his groin area to the point where his scrotum ripped," said Hughes. "He looked down at his white shorts and saw that they were stained with a lot of blood."

According to Hughes, Thomas quickly rushed to the men's bathroom, where his date, a registered ER nurse, was able to help stop the bleeding until Thomas was treated at nearby Baptist Hospital.

Trash talk and the violence that stems from it is no stranger to the Oklahoma-Texas rivalry. As fans from both schools assembled in Dallas for the 100th meeting of the two teams in 2005, 67 arrests were made during the pregame partying.


'Stupid Thing to Do'
"One thing I've noticed when I go down to Dallas for the game is that the trash talk worsens depending on how good your opposition's team is," said University of Oklahoma senior Brent Upham. "I guess that the older you get, tension starts piling up and you finally reach a tipping point, but assault is pretty ridiculous."

Oddly enough, Thomas' attorney, Carl Hughes, is an OU alumnus and does have some allegiance to his alma mater's team. But he called the situation way out of line.

"It was a stupid thing to do. I went to OU and come from a long line of OU graduates and to get so involved in a football team to do something like this is just plain stupid," Hughes said.

Officials at OU were understandably reluctant to comment on the attack.

"It would be inappropriate for us to comment as this is a situation that is for the courts to decide," said Catherine Bishop, a spokeswoman for the University of Oklahoma.

Beckett faces aggravated assault charges that could land him in prison for up to five years. He'll have a court hearing Oct. 4, two days before the Sooners and Longhorns meet at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures
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Arctic sea route opens
Sat Sep 15, 2007 8:55am EDT
LONDON (Reuters) - The Arctic's Northwest Passage has opened up fully because of melting sea ice, clearing a long-sought but historically impassable route between Europe and Asia, the European Space Agency said.

Sea ice has shrunk in the Arctic to its lowest level since satellite measurements began 30 years ago, ESA said, showing images of the now "fully navigable" route between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

A shipping route through the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic has been touted as a possible cheaper option to the Panama Canal for many shippers.

"We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million square km," said Leif Toudal Pedersen of the Danish National Space Centre, describing the drop in the Arctic sea ice as "extreme".

The figure was about 1 million sq km (386,870 sq miles) less than previous lows in 2005 and 2006, Pedersen added.

The Northeast Passage through the Russian Arctic remained partial