The Ministry of Homeland Security

C'mon... this blog is, like, dead, already

2007-05-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

Come Join Me On Facebook

I found blogging on Facebook to just be a LOT easier than using Blogger... maybe if I get super famous or something I'll start a -real- blog, but if you're just a friend or a fan (or an enemy) looking to touch base, Facebook is the site where you'll find me. MySpace is ugly and clunky and so overly alterable that some people's too-complex pages slow my top-of-the-line computer to a dead crawl. Twitter is for mobile phones, and I can't be bothered to pay $120/year to AT&T Mobile for a no-limit text messaging program. Friendster is like an abandoned strip mall, and seems like it's mostly full of junkies, pimps & whores (oh my). WAYN? No one uses it. XING? I'm not Chinese. No, it's Facebook for me for the forseeable future, so if you'd like to keep getting a daily dose of anti-establishment smarm, you know what to do: go to Facebook.com and add "Micah Ian Wright" as a "friend" (or frenemy, I don't care which you are) and enjoy.

So long, Google!

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=622546618

Gates, Gonzales, & Gitmo

2007-03-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

Soon after he was confirmed as Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates began to advocate closing down Guantanamo Bay, according to The New York Times, reports. He argued that the base "had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantanamo would be viewed as illegitimate."

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice backed him up. But they had a powerful contingent opposing them:

Mr. Gates’s arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said.

...[T]he high-level discussions about closing Guantánamo came to a halt after Mr. Bush rejected the approach, although officials at the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the State Department continue to analyze options for the detention of terrorism suspects.

The main logic for Cheney's and Gonzales' opposition was two-fold. First and foremost was the reason that Gitmo was created, because bringing the prisoners to American soil would make things much more complicated -- because of American law. Second was that, even though Bush has said that he wants to eventually close Gitmo, "closing it would be seen as a public admission of an incorrect policy" (i.e. much better for Bush to go back on his word than reverse a disastrous policy).

For now, Gates and Rice are on the losing side of the debate. But that might not last too much longer:

Even so, one senior administration official who favors the closing of the facility said the battle might be renewed.

“Let’s see what happens to Gonzales,” that official said, referring to speculation that Mr. Gonzales will be forced to step down, or at least is significantly weakened, because of the political uproar over the dismissal of United States attorneys. “I suspect this one isn’t over yet.”

Yeah, well, maybe. I personally don't think that this President is smart enough to cut bait and dump Alberto Gonzales before this investigation creeps its way into the Oval Office.

AttorneyGate Reaches Into Vice President's Office

2007-03-22T12:10:00.000-07:00

Oh My God...

This scandal not only has legs, it suddenly now has the potential to run the distance and bring down George W. Bush.

Some background:

Carol Lam, the fired US Attorney for San Diego was the prosecutor who nailed Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham for accepting bribes from defense contractor Mitchell Wade. The biggest bribe involved a scam where Wade purchased Cunningham's home for $1,675,000, then sold it 2 months later for under $975,000. Wade also bought Cunningham several pieces of antique furniture as undeclared gifts. Like $50,000 Louis XVII dressers type of gifts. Most amusingly, Wade bought Duke Cunningham a boat which the Congressman named "The Duke-Stir." In return, Duke slipped defense contracts worth several millions of dollars to Wade by secretly earmarking them into the top-secret House Intelligence Committee budget which no one is allowed to read. Because the earmarking rules don't require any one Congressman take blame/credit for slipping shit into the budget, Cunningham's shenanigans went unnoticed for several years... but once noticed, the San Diego US Attorney's office prosecuted Cunningham & Wade with vigor. Both are currently in jail.

Carol Lam rolled Wade up and flipped him on his Republican cronies to see who else he'd bribed or been involved with. She discovered another corrupt contractor had been playing the same schemes with Cunningham, one Brent Wilkes, who had been throwing "Hookers & Poker" parties at the Watergate Hotel for Republican Congressmen & Senators. Lam nailed Wilkes, then flipped HIM and kept climbing the ladder of corruption.

On May 10, 2006, Lam notified the Justice Department that she intended to execute search warrants on a high-ranking CIA official as part of a corruption probe. The very next day, Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales' right-hand-man (and The White House's designated Fall Guy for this entire scandal) sent an e-mail to another fellow Justice Department official that said "because of the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam" she needed to be fired. A week later, Lam was informed that the President no longer required her services. She clearly what was happening and prepared for her resignation -- and then, on the day before she resigned, Lam indicted the #3 guy at the CIA, Dusty Foggo, forcing Porter Goss, George Bush's hand-picked CIA director, to resign.

More importantly, Lam was in the middle of leveraging her continuing investigation into super-crook-congressman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) when she was told "hey, you're fired" by the White House/Justice Department. This clearly partisan firing has been at the true center of the entire AttorneyGate scandal raging in Washington.

But now a MUCH more interesting picture is emerging, one that reaches all the way up into the White House itself and could bring down this Presidency in flames if true:

The facts:

– Wade pled guilty last February to paying then-California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham more than $1 million in bribes.

– Wade confessed that his company MZM Inc., which had NEVER received ANY government contracts was "somehow" placed on a list of approved Government Contractors.

– Wade/MZM received its first federal contract just one week later from the White House. The contract, which ran from July 15 to August 15, 2002, stipulated that Wade be paid $140,000 to “provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney.”

– Two weeks later, on August 30, 2002, Wade purchased a yacht for $140,000 for Duke Cunningham, the “Duke-Stir.”

– According to Cunningham’s sentencing memorandum, the purchase price of the boat had been negotiated through a third-party earlier that summer, around the same time the White House contract was signed.

To recap, the White House awarded a one-month, $140,000 contract to an individual who had never held a previous federal contract. Two weeks after he got paid, that same contractor used a cashier’s check for exactly that amount to buy a boat for a now-imprisoned congressman at a price that the congressman had pre-negotiated weeks earlier.

Sooo....one of the fired Federal Prosecutors was inches from tying Dick Cheney to a $140,000 bribe paid to a convicted former Congressman. Then she was suddenly fired for supposedly not bringing enough good illegal immigration cases... despite having been given special notices for doing exactly that a year earlier. Hmmm.

Yeah, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers shouldn't have to testify under oath. They clearly have no reason to lie and far too much respect for the rule of law. Those damned partisan Democrats!

It's a bit like convicting Al Capone for Tax Evasion and ignoring the underlying murders, but hey at this point, I'll take Impeachment any way that I can get it.

Bush Orders Wounded Troops Into Iraq

2007-03-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

This guy is just fucking astonishing. No sooner than I finished my last post about Bush's VA fucking over wounded troops, I stumbled across this Salon.com article which says that Bush is ordering wounded troops into Iraq.

WHY does ANYONE still believe that this piece of crap "supports the troops"? Military veterans and families are like abused wives here... no matter how much Bush shits all over them, they love him all the more for it. It's dissociative from reality and it's extremely disturbing.

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

The 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade is now leaving for Iraq for a third time in a steady stream. In fact, some of the troops with medical conditions interviewed by Salon last week are already gone. Others are slated to fly out within a week, but are fighting against their chain of command, holding out hope that because of their ills they will ultimately not be forced to go. Jenkins, who is still in Georgia, thinks doctors are helping to send hurt soldiers like him to Iraq to make units going there appear to be at full strength. "This is about the numbers," he said flatly.

That is what worries Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, who has long been concerned that the military was pressing injured troops into Iraq. "Did they send anybody down range that cannot wear a helmet, that cannot wear body armor?" Robinson asked rhetorically. "Well that is wrong. It is a war zone." Robinson thinks that the possibility that physical profiles may have been altered improperly has the makings of a scandal. "My concerns are that this needs serious investigation. You cannot just look at somebody and tell that they were fit," he said. "It smacks of an overstretched military that is in crisis mode to get people onto the battlefield."

It's exceptionally clear to anyone who's not retarded that the only things George W. Bush Jr. thinks America's soldiers are good for are (a) enriching himself and his upper class friends by sacrificing their lives for Iraq's oil, and (b) Photo Opportunities and Speech Backdrops:

President Fails To Support Troops

2007-03-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

Yet again, we learn that Republicans are long on talk about "Supporting The Troops" but very short on action when it comes time to actually give them support, whether that be proper training, proper armor, proper equipment and now, with the Walter Reed filthy-hospital scandal, proper care.

But in all the talk in recent weeks about medical care for injured veterans, the conventional wisdom has been that despite all the shortcomings, those with the most severe injuries receive great care. Today, A Page One story in the NY Times reveals that may not always be the case. The paper talked to several families of veterans who suffered severe brain injuries who say the military health-care system either abandoned hope for their loved ones too early or failed to provide options that could improve the situation. In one case, the Army basically told a veteran that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, but three months after going elsewhere for rehabilitation, he is walking again.

Nice! Bush has finally turned the VA into an HMO! So much for "support the troops" -- at least when it comes to GW Bush.

Terrorists Come In All Shapes, Colors

2007-03-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Washington Posthas a story today about Europe's recent experiences with attempted racial/ethnic profiling of Terrorists, and it devastates the American right-wing's arguments about how we need to ethnically profile Americans.

Seems that European Authorities are seeing more people from different backgrounds or characteristics that don't follow the patterns that were once the norm for terrorists. Some European intelligence officials say that terrorist organizations are purposefully recruiting these types of people so they won't be the targets of unwanted attention. The suggestion of the experts that we should be focusing on suspicious behavior and not skin color probably won't sink in to the Michelle Malkin's of our political world, but one hopes that the people in charge of protecting us are paying attention anyway, though I highly doubt the FBI is.

The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.

European authorities said the trait patterns of those arrested on terrorism charges are constantly shifting. In the Netherlands, officials said they are seeing an increase in the number of young teenagers and people of Turkish descent, two groups that used to be low on their radar. Among the key players in the Hofstad group, a cell of Islamic radicals that targeted Dutch politicians and cultural figures, was Jason Walters, the teenage son of a U.S. soldier.

In neighboring Belgium, people are still perplexed over what drove Muriel Degauque, 38, a blond, white Catholic, to convert to Islam and travel to Iraq to blow herself up in November 2005. Nizar Trabelsi, convicted two years earlier of plotting to bomb a NATO base in Belgium, had been a European soccer star before going to Afghanistan to attend al-Qaeda training camps.

In Britain, three of the suspects arrested in last summer's alleged transatlantic airline hijacking plot were religious converts who grew up in north London's affluent suburbs. One was the well-to-do English son of a Conservative Party activist; he worked in a bar and loved the movie "Team America."

It's all true... just look at THIS surveillance photo of the most dangerous Terrorists in the United States:

White House Admits Karl Rove's Involvement in Firing US Attorneys

2007-03-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of Democratic officials in the state.

Rove said he did not suggest that any of the U.S. attorneys be forced to resign, Perino said.

The new details about Rove's involvement in the firings emerged as the top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee declared their interest in talking to him. The committee is trying to determine whether the firings were part of an effort to exert political influence over federal prosecutions.

This is a smoking gun which ties Rove (and thus Bush) directly to the firings of United States Attorneys for refusing to engage in partisan witch-hunts, and for firing US Attorneys who dared investigate Republican criminals... clear Obstruction of Justice. So why is the White House releasing this information?

Two reasons: (a) they're off their game because they have no idea how to spin a hostile Congress, having never faced one before, and (b) because the Senators, Congressmen and state Republican apparatchiks involved have already spoken out that they delivered their findings to Rove... the White House is just trying to get ahead of the story and desperately trying to spin this entire event as "disgunted ex-employees" who got fired for "just causes" and "who cares anyway, it's an internal Human Resources issue" -- when it's clearly politically motivated and illegal.

Several of the prosecutors who were fired were fired because they investigated Republicans with connections to the White House. Two of them were STILL investigating well-connected Republicans when they got fired. That's obstruction of justice, hindrance of a federal prosecution and a whole slew of other FELONY crimes. The kind of felony crimes that can take down Alberto Gonzales & Karl Rove at the bare minimum.

Not to mention that the President's men secretly rewrote the Patriot Act in the middle of the night stripping Congress of Federal oversight of US Attorney hiring without telling ANYONE, including the Republicans in the Senate. That's enough power-play to infuriate any Senator who might be willing to hinder this investigation.

This is it. This is this Administration's Watergate, Monicagate, Iran-Contragate, etc. We've just begun to skin this onion, and each layer is going to reveal a new, seamier, more rotten layer beneath. Using this one crime, we can finally leverage out all of the wrongdoing these scumbags have accomplished since they took office, and EVERYONE can understand this one: They fired some guys who were investigating them. That's what finally woke up America during Watergate, the "Saturday Night Massacre" when Nixon fired everyone at the Justice Department to prevent them from investigating him. That's what we're really talking about here... these prosecutors were on the trail of guys connected to the White House, so they had to go. Even an idiot could understand it.

Now let's just see if the morons in the Corporate Media get it and if they're able to frame it in such simple terms.

Pssst, Uncle Sam Can See You Naked

2007-03-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

d;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t7AtsQ4hJu0/RfCswC25yYI/AAAAAAAAARA/GSAj61Kmww8/s400/backscatter.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5039717924428433794" />This is a picture of Susan Hallowell, who runs the Transportation Security Administration's research lab. Four years ago, she volunteered to be scanned by a backscatter x-ray machine, which sees through clothing. She was wearing a skirt and blazer. But in the picture, she's as good as nude.

Now it's your turn.

Like retarded children drooling over old comic-book ads for "X-Ray Specs!" and daydreaming of actually being able to see through clothing and and leer shapely women, America Top Cops™ at the Homeland Security Department/Transportation Security Administration have decided that in order for you to be Safe From Terror™, they have to be able to take naked photos of you.

Now, any kid with half a brain knew that X-Ray Specs were a novelty gag that didn't really work. But time marches on and technology makes the impossible possible. Get ready, air travelers, because this week the Homeland Security Department began using backscatters at airports to screen passengers for weapons. The first machine is up and running in Phoenix, Arizona. The next ones will be in New York and Los Angeles.

Are you ready to get naked to protect your country from Osama Bin Laden™?

This is no joke. The government desperately craves to look under your clothes. Ceramic knives, plastic guns, and liquid explosives have supposedly all made metal detectors obsolete. Carry-on bags are X-rayed, so the safest place to hide a weapon is on your body. Puffer machines can detect explosives on you, but only if you're sloppy. Backscatters are different. They can scan your whole surface, locating and identifying anything of unusual density—not just metals, which have high atomic numbers, but also explosives or, say, large sums of money and/or drugs, which have low ones.

Which may be the real reason the TSA is rolling out these types of scans. Not for the terrorists... but in order to help them catch people with undeclared cash or drugs on them. Hurrah! Another way to tie together the War On Terror™ with the War on Drugs™!

Of course, the TSA has downplayed the privacy concerns about these backscatter x-rays, saying that they've imposed very rigid protocols for this early "experimental" and "voluntary" use of backscatter x-rays. In Phoenix, for example, the TSA screener operating the machine can't see you in person -- he's in an entirely different airport terminal entirely. The idea being that it's totally cool for you to be strip-searched so long as you don't have to look at the face of the guy doing it to you via remote, I suppose. Additionally, the TSA's backscatter x-ray machines won't currently identify you by name, nor do they currently save scans of your naked body, nor do they currently print out scans of your naked body (as always, the key is their emphasis on the word CURRENTLY, of course). The TSA was also forced by privacy activists to "distort" the images the machine produces. Here are some examples of the "distorted" images:

Note that the sexual organs of both the male and female are very clearly visible

More importantly, the TSA's "voluntary submission" and "very rigid protocols" are just the proverbial camel's nose under the tent. It's very clear that someday everyone, without exception, will need to go through one of these things to get on an airplane. Of course, once that legal justification is made, then there isn't much reason that you can't be required to go through a backscatter everywhere else. To take a train. To get on a bus. To enter any courthouse or federal building. Every day at school. Private businesses.

And once we get to the point of private businesses requiring this technology ("but we Have To... it'll keep Puff Daddy's rap protégé from sneaking handguns into our club!"), then we immediately lose the strict procedures which are currently set in place for the TSA. Worse, there's no proof and it's not very likely that these proceedures will be enforeced at non-experimental airports once the program rolls out wide.

Think about the airport today... the TSA has proven completely incapable of getting luggage x-ray machines out of the lobbies of our airport terminals after SIX YEARS. Still we have to step up, check in, watch that luggage belt rotate behind the counter uselessly, then trudge with our luggage to a different part of the lobby, then undergo a pointless explosives residue test, then take the luggage to a different part of the lobby and stand in a NEW line and drop it off with the TSA who x-rays it right there in the middle of what used to be space for walking and THEN puts the luggage on the conveyor belt.

Where the hell are they going to put these x-ray strip show machines BUT in the middle of the lobby? Great, a new line to stand in. Oh, and for everyone standing behind the TSA guy to be able to see you naked. Sweet! Humliate Yourself For America!

Corporations will claim it's too much work, takes too many employees, etc. to have 2 people scanning entrants. People will rig their private machines to make jpegs, etc. Then we'll all be naked all the time. How better to cow and scare and terrify the Little People than to expose them in all their flabby nakedness?

Oh, and it'll only be the Little People, don't fool yourself. The powerful and wealthy won't be subjected to this bullshit... they'll just bypass all security just like they already do. No, this invasive bullshit is just for us plebes.

And in case you think I'm being overreactionary, think about this: Because of concerns about killing people with radiation, body scanners are designed not to penetrate the skin. All that's needed to defeat this entire system is for is someone heavily overweight to go through the system with a weapon or explosives pack tucked into a flabby body fold and it won't be detected by the scanner. For that matter, how big of an issue is it -REALLY- for a Terrorist who's perfectly willing to die for Allah to shove 10 pounds of C4 explosive up his ass in order to sneak it onto a plane?

Lastly, consider this simple question: would this technology have prevented 9/11? Answer: No. Those 19 men took common household objects on board that plane with them and then used them as weapons. Any of you could do today exactly what Mohammed Atta did with 19 friends armed with metal coat hangers and aluminum soda cans torn in half.

No, once again, this is baloney fake-o protection designed to make America FEEL safe while simultaneously stripping our Civil Liberties from us AND simultaneously shift tax dollars from the poor and working class to the wealthy connected few who own these defense corporations.

The Military-Industrial-Terrorism-Drug-Complex strikes again.

Our Helicopters Are Still Falling...

2007-03-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to following up on this earlier post about the newfound ability of Iraqi Insurgents to shoot down America's helicopters, the government's attempted coverup of the incidents, and the exposure and admittance of the facts by the military, for three weeks now.

A few weeks ago, I read a NYTimes Article about this very topic, which had a few interesting things to say:

Some aspects of the recent crashes indicate that insurgents have become smarter about anticipating American flight patterns and finding ways to use old weapons to down helicopters, according to military and witness reports. The aircraft, many of which are equipped with sophisticated antimissile technology, still can be vulnerable to more conventional weapons fired from the ground. [...]

American officials emphasize that a new sense of coordinated aggressiveness on the part of insurgents toward attacking aircraft, or even luck, may be playing as large a role in the high pace of crashes as improved skill and tactics among insurgents. [...]

Historically, improved tactics in shooting down helicopters have proved to be important factors in conflicts in which guerrillas have achieved victories against major powers, including battles in Somalia, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Oh, well, that's a positive predictor reflecting our chances for victory in Iraq, isn't it?

I also discovered this helpful Wikipedia Article which details every single coalition (i.e. American) aircraft lost in this war. If one includes the two Blackwater Mercenary (oh, sorry, Private Military Contractor) choppers shot down in January & February, that brings the number of downed choppers to 9 in the first nine weeks of 2007 alone. There were only 13 in all of 2006, 12 in 2005, 26 in 2004, and 30 in 2003.

Something tells me we're heading for a 2003-type number this year. Maybe even double 2003's numbers if this rate of loss keeps up. As for what the new "secret method" that the Insurgency is quite clearly using, it's only a secret to the American people since evidently the Press is obviously cooperating with the Military to keep news of this "secret attack style" out of the papers... why, is uncertain, because it's super-clear that the "insurgents" (which, incidentally, if Americans, would be called "freedome fighters" or "the resistance") have discovered that if you shoot out the tail rotor of a helicopter it crashes. Yeah, that's something the papers desperately need to hide... otherwise printing that secret information might give the insurgents more ideas!

Errhm... too bad Roy Schieder taught us all what it was in BLUE THUNDER back when I was 14.

Bush's Idea of "Justice"

2007-03-06T13:40:00.000-08:00

Wow.

The Bush White House has fucked up BIG TIME this time.

In case you haven't been following it, here's a quick rundown of the Justice Department Prosecutor Firing scandal:

Over a period of three weeks during December & January, each timed deliberately for Friday afternoons in order to make any press reports go unnoticed, the Justice Department fired 7 Federal Prosecutors. That's not newsworthy, except in the numbers involved... Federal Prosecutors work at the discretion of the President, and they are occasionally fired with cause. What was weird about these firings was that no cause was publicly given, and interim appointees were announced, but weren't then scheduled to go before the Senate, which is supposed to approve all new Federal Prosecutors within 120 days.

The biggest case so far has been in San Diego, where Prosecutor Carol Lam was in the middle of the largest public corruption investigation in the history of the United States (the Duke Cunningham scandal, which has already brought down 2 Republican Congressmen & the #3 guy at the CIA with much more on the way) when she was suddenly fired for doing "a bad job on border cases" as the Justice Department later said. This despite the Justice Dept. sending a letter just a few months ago to Senator Dianne Feinstein saying that Lam was doing a great job on border cases.

Three of California's four United States attorneys resigned in two months. Two of them we know were actually asked to step down on December 7th: San Diego's Carol Lam and San Francisco's Kevin Ryan, but the other, Los Angeles' Debra Wong Yang, stepped down November 10th, just after the election. On January 1st, she left for the heavy-hitting law firm that just happened to be representing Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), who is being investigated by her office.

So, by mid-January, it had become quite clear that some of these Prosecutors were fired because they wouldn't indict Democrats in tight House & Senate races, despite pressure and demands being made by the Justice Department, various Senators & House members and the White House. Others were fired because they opened up investigations into Republicans during the same time period. And if that's not enough, the former U.S. attorney in Maryland said today that he was forced out of his position in 2005 because of political pressure not to pursue an investigation involving associates of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican.

But none of the Prosecutors would speak on the record, and neither would the Justice Department. AG Alberto Gonzales even claimed that he had "no idea" how many prosecutors had been fired by his office in the last six months.

Two days later, news broke that Sen. John Ensign (R-NV} was told that the decision to remove U.S. attorneys, primarily in the West, was part of a plan to "give somebody else that experience" to build up the back bench of Republicans by giving them high-profile jobs. Since last March, the administration has named at least nine U.S. attorneys long on ties to the Bush administration ties but short on the type of experience one needs to be a US Attorney. They include a former aide to Karl Rove, a member of the secretive, ideologically conservative Federalist Society, a former aide to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the husband of assistant secretary of homeland security Julie Myers, a former Justice Department counselor, a protege of conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, an acting assistant attorney general in Oklahoma City, a senior associate counsel to President Bush, and a Bush Administration civil rights lawyer. For this crop of exceedingly poor candidates, other qualified experienced prosecutors were forced out. The theory seems to be to pump up their resumes in order to get them ready to be crammed into the Federal Judiciary & someday onto the Supreme Court itself. Charming. Still, the Justice Department denied all and claimed that all prosecutors had been fired for just causes.

Then, in late January, in New Mexico, one of the prosecutors broke their silence and said that he had been threatened by two elected members of Congress that if he didn't speed up prosecutions of Democrats, he'd be fired by the White House. This was a Republican prosecutor, mind you, appointed by the Bush White House. Every member of the NM Congressional Caucus denied that it was them. Then hearings were announced to begin yesterday and that all of the fired Prosecutors would be testifying.

Then suddenly last Friday, after weeks of stonewalling and lying, Senator Pete Domenici admitted that he was one of the elected people who had called the NM Prosecutor, but denied pressuring him. The Senate Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Domenici yesterday. Then yesterday, 8 hours before being named by the Prosecutor in question, House member Heather Graham admitted that she was the other who had called him, but denied pressuring him, clumsily claiming that she had merely been asking if everything was going a-ok with those indictments of her Democratic opponent two weeks before her re-election race. So now Graham will be investigated by the House Ethic Committee, and everything will be great, right?

Except today it was revealed that Republican Representative Doc Hastings of Washington, the former CHAIRMAN of the House Ethics Committee, and still ranking Republican on the House Ethics Committee was one of the people demanding a partisan investigation, this one to help oust the Democratic Governor of Washington... and when he didn't get it, suddenly that Prosecutor was fired by the White House, too. Whoops. Guess that says a lot about how Hastings ran the Ethics Committee when he was in charge of it... problem is, he's still the #1 Republican on it and can stop any investigation of himself or Heather Graham.

More, one of the recently fired Prosecutors claimed under oath before the Senate today that the Deputy Attorney General's Chief of Staff, Michael Elston, called all of these prosecutors last week and told them that if they didn't stop encouraging Congress for an investigation into their firings and giving quotes to the press, that the Justice Department would "take their gloves off" and start punching back, revealing "damaging" material from their personnel files. Of course, this is the very definition of obstruction of justice, which may also be why the official at the DOJ who was put in charge of firing these prosuctors, Michael A. Battle, resigned this morning. Watch this awesome video of the fired prosecutors talking about their "Witness Intimidation" cases they would spin out of what happened to them:

Most amazingly, it turns out that the White House's new appointees weren't planned to EVER go before the Senate for confirmation. Why? Because the Justice Department requested that a staffer on Orrin Hatch's Senate Staff secretly slip a tiny revision into the text of the Patriot Act revision last year, a tiny change which granted the Executive Branch the unprecedented power to fire & hire Federal Prosecutors without oversight by the Senate or the Federal Judiciary (which formerly had to the power to make temporary appointments if the White House and Senate wouldn't or didn't act within 120 days).

That staffer just -happens- to be be a former clerk of Clarence Thomas, and was hired at the exact moment that Arlen Spector was in trouble in his primary last year about seeming not Republican enough and being perceived as an enemy of the White House. The law was signed in March of last year and Bush immediately began pushing out Prosecutors without anyone recognizing a pattern until he fired 7 over 3 weeks time. We still don't know the total number forced out prior to the Christmas Slaughter.
http://www.slate.com/id/2161260?nav=ais

To make yourself even more sick, click "More from this user" on YouTube to see TalkingPointsMuckracker's outtakes from today's Senate Investigations and watch some of today's testimony.

Finally, these are just the 8-15 Federal prosecutors who RESISTED political pressure to indict Democrats who were in tight races with Republicans. The shoe yet to drop is "How many Federal Prosecutors gave in to political pressure to indict Democrats leading up to November 2006?" In early February, a study of reported federal investigations of elected officials and candidates shows that the Bush administration’s Justice Department pursues Democrats far more than Republicans. 79 percent of elected officials and candidates who’ve faced a federal investigation (a total of 379) between 2001 and 2006 were Democrats, the study found – only 18 percent were Republicans... but Democrats only made up 50 percent of elected officeholders and office seekers while 41 percent were Republicans during that period, according to the study. "The chance of such a heavy Democratic-Republican imbalance occurring at random is 1 in 10,000," according to the study's authors.

This scandal takes down Alberto Gonzales at the very least. With any luck and a few more weeks of investigations, maybe even Bush himself if public understanding of the case picks up. I wouldn't bet on Bush because at this point he's got stronger teflon than John Gotti, but I'll take an even-money bet that Alberto Gonzales will be out on his ass by the end of this year.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/cats/us_attorneys/
http://www.slate.com/id/2160965/

I'm Big In the U.K.

2007-02-16T13:45:00.000-08:00

I made UK Metro!

Here Comes War With Iran

2007-02-12T10:57:00.000-08:00

Weird... I wonder if THIS story

Military Ties Iran To Arms In Iraq
Explosives Supplied To Shiite Militias, U.S. Officials Say
Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD, Feb. 11 -- Senior U.S. military officials in Iraq sought Sunday to link Iran to deadly armor-piercing explosives and other weapons that they said are being used to kill U.S. and Iraqi troops with increasing regularity.

During a long-awaited presentation, held in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, the officials displayed mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades and a powerful cylindrical bomb, capable of blasting through an armored Humvee, that they said were manufactured in Iran and supplied to Shiite militias in Iraq for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops.

"Iran is a significant contributor to attacks on coalition forces, and also supports violence against the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi people," said a senior defense official, who was joined by a defense analyst and an explosives expert, both also from the military. The analyst's exact titles and full names were not revealed to reporters. The officials released a PowerPoint presentation including photographs of the weaponry, but did not allow media representatives to record, photograph or videotape the briefing or the materials on display.

Could possibly have anything to do with THIS story?

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan passes two fishermen in their small boat as it leaves for its second deployment in a year from North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado, California January 27, 2007. The Reagan is the third aircraft carrier headed to the Persian Gulf to support war efforts in Iraq. REUTERS/Fred Greaves

Naaah... I mean, big deal, so Bush is sending 3 out of our 10 aircraft carrier groups that currently cover the entire world to an area the size of my backyard just off the coast of Iran. That doesn't NECESSARILY mean that he's "secretly" planning to bomb the shit out of Iran... right? Oh, look over there, Anna Nicole Smith just died! Pay no attention to the war about to break out over here, look at the dead "celebrity"!!!

Huh, well, it worked for most people and almost all the Mainstream News Media... you must be one of those people who have that irritating habit of "thinking." Well, read on, then, smartass.

Sadly, though, even if America DOES decide to bomb the shit out of Iran using our mighty aircraft carriers, we might find that they're one HELL of a lot more capable of fighting back than Iraq ever was. See, the Iranians own several Russian-made SUNBURN anti-ship cruise missiles which will hurl 750 pounds of explosives towards our "mighty" aircraft carriers at an unstoppable Mach 2.1 -- you've heard of the sub-sonic French Exocet missile which sank British ships during the Falklands war? Compared to the super-sonic Sunburn, the Exocet is like a birthday candle compared to an atomic bomb. Here's a really horrifying article which makes clear what awaits our Navy should Bush think that he's Tuff Enuff™ to take on Iran... we're going to get our asses HANDED to us, courtesy of modern Russian missile design. Each of those carriers has 3100 US sailors on it plus the thousands more on the surrounding ships... I wonder what America's reaction will be when over 10,000 American sailors are killed in a single day by the Iranians after Bush starts his new, illegal war?

Worse, take a look at a map of the Persian Gulf... it's a GODDAMNED LAKE, with the Straights of Hormuz at the mouth. Iran controls the Straights of Hormuz, the only way in or out of the Persian Gulf... and with Iran's Sunburn missiles at the ready, whose Navy is going to come to our rescue? No one's... not even ours.

The writing has been on the wall for the Aircraft Carrier Battle Group concept for a LONG time... there's a reason that China hasn't built a bunch of them: they don't work in a world where a supersonic Sunburn cruise missile (which costs less than a single jet fighter on that aircraft carrier) can sink an entire carrier within a matter of seconds.

Sadly, though, we have an idiot for a President, a warmongering fool intent on defying all reality. Every foreign policy problem we have today can be directly tied back to Bush's desire to impose his fanciful visions onto the real world. When Bush desired to invade Iraq, he folded Saddam and Osama together into one Arch Enemy and he lied to the American people about Saddam having nuclear weapons. We all know how well THAT turned out.

Similarly, when Bush wanted to hide his intent to invade Iraq from the American people, he concocted the "Axis of Evil" starring Iraq, Iran & North Korea. The second he did so, he put Iran and North Korea on notice that he intended to invade them next (even if he didn't mean to), and he put us on the path to inevitable war with these two countries. He also silenced Iran's moderates who were seeking reapproachment with America... possibly permanently.

When Bush bombs Iran (or allows Israel to overfly Iraqi airspace in order to bomb Iran), we will give the Mullahs the excuse they need to crack down on their own people and to strike out against us. They're very likely to kick our ass in the process, a humiliation for which jingoistic, militarized America is VERY unready.

Our economy is increasingly based solely on Military Keynesianism. Given our outrageous foreign debts and the fact that we have offshored all manufacturing jobs, we now command our forefront in world finance based solely on our perceived military might as the world's last remaining Superpower. With our ground military currently devastated and almost defeated in Iraq, our Air Force & naval air power are the last remaining legs of our military might. A stinging rebuke in the Persian Gulf via Sunburn missile will shatter the world's perception of us, revealing our military as a paper tiger, and our economy will vanish overnight. Likewise, the sinking of 3 aircraft carriers will either force a humiliated America to embrace navel-gazing isolationism, or perversely make Americans so militaristically aggressive that we go on a rampage of unilateralist war to prove once again our will and means to fight. Neither solution is an appealing one.

Congress must act NOW to stop Bush's saber-rattling, they must act BEFORE Bush concocts a bullshit excuse to declare war on Iran, and they must decisively act to PREVENT this war at any cost. Otherwise, we can kiss America as we know it GOODBYE FOREVER.

Dick Cheney, Omnipotent God-King

2007-02-10T23:25:00.000-08:00

The Office of the Vice President is refusing to cooperate with a government directory which lists government employees. Federal agencies have to comply by listing staffers in the "Plum Book" directory, but Dick Cheney’s office claimed an exemption for itself, arguing that the “Vice Presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch.”

In other words, employees of the three branches of the federal government have to give staff lists for the Plum Book, but the Office of the Vice President apparently believes it’s not part any of the three branches. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it’s one of those horrifying arguments that makes me worry about the integrity of our constitutional system.

And now it turns out that Cheney has extended his Crazy-Ass Theory of Vice-Presidential God-King Power:

An important legal ruling is pending over Vice President Cheney’s refusal to disclose statistics on document classification and declassification activity. The Information Security Oversight Office, which is responsible for the policy and oversight of the government’s security classification system, has asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to direct Cheney’s office to disclose these statistics.

Cheney’s office provided the information until 2002 but then stopped doing so, J. William Leonard, the director of ISOO, told U.S. News. At issue is whether the office of the vice president is an executive branch entity when it comes to supporting the activities of the president and the vice president. The reporting requirements for disclosing classification and declassification activity fall under a presidential executive order.

“Basically the definition says that any entity of the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information is covered by the reporting requirements,” says Leonard. “I have my understanding of what the executive order requires, and I’m going to the attorney general to ascertain if my reading of the executive order is correct.”

However, Megan McGinn, Cheney’s deputy press secretary, says the vice president’s office is exempt.

“This matter has been thoroughly reviewed,” McGinn told U.S. News, “and it has been determined that reporting requirements do not apply to the office of the vice president, which has both legislative and executive functions.”

Y'know, back in 2000 Bush ran for President on the theory that it was okay that he was a moron because if elected, he'd surround himself with great people who could do the job.

Now, six long, failed years later, we see that far from surrounding himself with competence, he hired Dick Cheney and a bunch of Dick's pals (like Rumsfeld!). Now we see the results: the Vice-President has set himself apart as some kind of Fourth branch of the American government. It’s legislative, it’s executive, it’s accountable to no one... it’s the Super Branch that over-rides all others.

Dick Cheney is our God-King.

In this particular case, the executive branch is required to disclose statistics on document classification and declassification activity to the Information Security Oversight Office. It’s about accountability and oversight, two words that seem to send shivers down Cheney’s spine. The OVP’s creative constitutional interpretation leads it to a convenient conclusion, keeping secret their efforts to keep things secret. Or, more accurately, how much stuff they keep secret.

I used to think that the idea of Dick Cheney being one pretzel-choking away from having his finger on the nuclear button was scary. What's scarier is that now we desperately NEED a pretzel-choking in order to force Cheney out into the open on his scary extra-legal bullshit. If he was PRESIDENT instead of Secret President, he wouldn't be able to get away with ANY of the bullshit that he's been getting away with (30% job approvals, for example).

God, Please, just ONE pretzel.

American-On-British Accident Video

2007-02-10T16:45:00.000-08:00

ITV's report on the "Friendly" Fire incident, including the audiotape of the pilot's conversation. This pilot's neighbor really takes "Support Our Troops" to a whole new level, doesn't he? Small wonder that British support for this stupid war has dwindled to almost 0% with idiots like this popping off on British TV about how we saved England during WWII, how they're no help to us now, and other stupidity.

For the last time, the BRITISH saved Europe during WWII by refusing to give in during the Blitz, standing up while Hitler destroyed his air force smashing it against the RAF's stern defense. The RUSSIANS saved Europe by bleeding, starving and freezing Hitler's ground military to a pale shadow of what it was before the Eastern Front. America helped with all of that, but the idea that somehow "Europe" forever owes America for "saving their ass" in the 1940s massively overstates the case. We stayed out of that war for as long as possible, and when we did finally wade in, it wasn't out of any sense of do-gooderism, it was because the Japanese had attacked us. We entered World War II after the countries of Europe had already been at war for YEARS, and we entered that war for the same reason we've entered any other: to secure natural resources and hegemony for ourselves. That our entry happened to coincide with the needs of the British was a nice benefit, not a primary motivation.

If the roles in this killing were reversed (British troops accidentally shooting down an American plane), this guy and his neighbors would all be howling for blood. When Americans kill British or Canadian troops, though, it's deny, cover-up, and rationalize afterwards. Can warfare ever be made Zero Defect? No, but hiding and covering up for mistakes only makes it impossible for other soldiers to learn from the mistakes of those who screwed up, and compounds a possibly legitimate error with a deliberate scheme to lie. Which is worse, an accident, or lying about an accident after the fact to avoid punishment?

Videotape Emerges of U.S. Pilots Killing British Soldier

2007-02-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

We're not sorry!

Once more, our allies in the War on Terror have learned a hard lesson about being in the same war zone as trigger-happy American troops. This incident happened FOUR YEARS AGO, and the US Military has been fighting an investigation that entire time. That's disgusting. Support our troops? Maybe, but it's certainly hard to do so knowing that the Pentagon is covering up blatant fuckups like this... it makes one wonder how much other stuff they're also covering up. What's especially sinister here is that we're ONLY hearing about this incident because the outraged British Military has been fighting the Pentagon to get this evidence for a coroner's inquest. How many hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times has this happened to Iraqi civilians without us hearing about it? I'm betting a lot.

Video of U.S. 'Friendly Fire' Revealed
Associated Press | February 06, 2007

LONDON - A U.S. pilot was heard saying "we're in jail, dude" in radio traffic during an incident in which friendly fire killed a British soldier in Iraq four years ago, The Sun newspaper reported Tuesday.

The British Broadcasting Corp. also played excerpts which it said were taken from the recording.

The United States has refused to release a video and voice recording to a coroner's inquest into the death Lance Cpl. Matty Hull on March 28, 2003.

Two U.S. A-10 jets allegedly opened fire on his tank, which was part of five-vehicle convoy engaged in combat outside of Basra. Four others were injured, including the convoy's leader, Capt. Alexander MacEwen.

The inquest was adjourned last week to give Britain's Ministry of Defense more time to try to win the disclosure of the U.S. material.

The transcript printed in The Sun records the alleged exchange between the pilots after they realize their mistake:

Pilot 1: "I'm going to be sick."

Pilot 2: "Ah f---."

Pilot 1: "Did you hear?"

Pilot 2: "Yeah, this sucks."

Pilot 1: "We're in jail, dude."

Naaah, you're not going to jail, dude! You're getting a medal and a promotion and a coverup!

This same type of thing happened in Afghanistan back in 2003 when some US Pilots shot up Canadian troops, and one of the reasons was that the Air Force had been keeping their pilots awake for days on end using amphetamines. When is the U.S. Air Force going to realize that popping their pilots full of "Nazi Speed" is NOT a good idea?

We put transportation company employees in jail here in America for giving their truckers amphetamines so they can drive longer... why isn't the Pentagon held to the same principle?

Our Helicopters Are Falling...

2007-02-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

On the 4th of February, the Pentagon admitted that they have been lying about the cause of 4 helicopter crashes in Iraq...

US: Four Copter Losses Due to Ground Fire
By Sameer N. Yacoub
The Associated Press
Sunday 04 February 2007

Baghdad, Iraq - The four U.S. helicopters that have crashed in Iraq since Jan. 20 were apparently shot down, the chief American military spokesman said Sunday - the first time the U.S. command has publicly acknowledged that the aircraft were lost to enemy fire.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters that the investigations into the crashes of three Army and one private helicopters are incomplete but "it does appear they were all the result of some kind of Iraqi ground fire that did bring those helicopters down."

"There's been an ongoing effort since we've been here to target our helicopters," Caldwell said. "Based on what we have seen, we're already making adjustments in our tactics and techniques and procedures as to how we employ our helicopters."

Fantastic, thanks for admitting that you've been lying to the American People and the Press about this. Totally makes us what to trust you when you tell us that it's IRAN who's funding the "insurgents" shooting down our helicopters, doesn't it?

Oh... but WHY would Iran bother? I mean, the insurgency is mostly Sunni Iraqis who are opposed to Iran's influence. Not only that, but Bush has allied the United States with the Shiite Dawa party whose clear intention is to ethnically cleanse Iraq of the Sunni minority, and that's entirely in Iran's self-interest. So why would Iran arm their enemies with sophisticated ground-to-air missiles?

Oh, but it DOES make sense for the Administration to tell us that IRAN is attacking us because they're trying to fake a reason for us to attack Iran, just like they did for attacking Saddam/Iraq.

But, Shhhhh, Don't Ask Questions about who's REALLY funding the insurgency because the answer turns out to be Bandar Bush & his rich Saudi Arabian pals!

Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunni insurgents
12/8/2006

CAIRO (AP) — Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.

Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.

But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.

Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money comes from private donations, called zaqat, collected for Islamic causes and charities.

In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said.

Overall, the Iraqi officials said, money has been pouring into Iraq from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a Sunni bastion, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled the Sunni-controlled regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Saudi officials vehemently deny their country is a major source of financial support for the insurgents.

Ahhhh... now we see why Bush hated the Iraq Study Group so very much... they had the nerve to put his buddy Bandar in the mix! Typical of Bush to protect his family's multiple benefactors in the House of Saud above and beyond his loyalty to America, the Military and our ostensible mission in Iraq.

Even More Domestic Surveillance!

2007-02-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

Not content to eavesdrop on your phone calls, read your mail, snoop through your bank records, dig around in your credit report, spy on anti-war authors & protest groups, attempt to turn telephone & cable installers into domestic spies, and all of the other bullshit that Bush has put in place across America, now we find out that the FBI isspying wholesale on America's internet use.

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)

That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

"What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets."

When the FBI announced two years ago it had abandoned Carnivore, news reports said that the bureau would increasingly rely on Internet providers to conduct the surveillance and reimburse them for costs. While Carnivore was the subject of congressional scrutiny and outside audits, the FBI's current Internet eavesdropping techniques have received little attention.

Carnivore apparently did not perform full-pipe recording. A technical report (PDF: "Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System") from December 2000 prepared for the Justice Department said that Carnivore "accumulates no data other than that which passes its filters" and that it saves packets "for later analysis only after they are positively linked by the filter settings to a target."

It's entirely clear that Bush hates and fears America's freedoms. For proof, one need only compare the resources put into snooping into our private lives to the resources spent on, oh, say, x-raying all packages which go onto airplanes (i.e. not a dime... for $50, any Al Qaeda Terrorist can ship a package on a commercial airliner and it won't be x-rayed, even though he's not getting on board).

We used to have a word for people who waste millions of dollars spying on their own citizens: Fascist Dictators.

One Senator Grows A Spine

2007-02-02T10:57:00.000-08:00

Naturally, the moment after I post saying "When is Congress going to stand up to this idiot warmonger?" I run across this article in the New York Times which is an interview with new Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). In it, Rockefeller "sharply criticized the Bush administration's increasingly combative stance toward Iran, saying that White House efforts to portray it as a growing threat are uncomfortably reminiscent of rhetoric about Iraq before the American invasion of 2003." Rockefeller said the White House "was building a case against Tehran even as U.S. intelligence agencies still know little about either Iran's internal dynamics or its intentions in the Middle East."

The Times also quotes the senator as saying, "To be quite honest, I'm a little concerned that it's Iraq again. [...] This whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre."

Welcome to the Party, Senator. Now let's see how many of your brethren you can bring with you.

Rockefeller said he believed President Bush was getting poor advice from advisers who argue that an uncompromising stance toward the regime in Tehran will serve U.S. interests. "I don't think that policymakers in this administration particularly understand Iran," he said.

The comments of Rockefeller reflect the mounting concerns being voiced by other influential Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, about the Bush administration's approach to Iran. The Democrats have warned that the administration is moving toward a confrontation with Iran when the United States has neither the military resources nor the support among U.S. allies and members of Congress to carry out such a move.

As one of only a handful of lawmakers with access to the most classified intelligence about the threat from Tehran, Rockefeller's views carry particular weight. He has also historically been more tempered in his criticism of the White House on national security issues than some of his Democratic colleagues.

Rockefeller was biting in his criticism of how Bush has dealt with the threat of Islamic radicalism since the Sept. 11 attacks, saying he believed that the campaign against international terrorism was "still a mystery" to the president. "I don't think he understands the world," Rockefeller said. "I don't think he's particularly curious about the world. I don't think he reads like he says he does."

I sure hope that Rockefeller and his fellow Democrats aren't going to let Bush start another war. Trouble is, I don't know how they can stop him short of pre-emptive impeachment of both Bush AND his Vice President, and that will NEVER happen.

Pentagon Gins Up War Machine

2007-02-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

For the last few years, I've been telling people that Iraq was NOT the end zone for the Bush Administration. If you read their Right-Wing Think Tank reports that they write to one another, if you peruse the Project For A New American Century's webpage where they talked about the Middle East, if you pay attention to troop movements in and around the Middle East, it's always been quite clear that Bush's endgame was Iran. Why? Because he and his neoconservative nutjob advisors live in the Fantasy World, as opposed to the Real World... just like in Iraq, Bush's Brains have convinced themselves that the people of Iran will greet our troops with open arms, if only we kill their mullahs and clerics first.

He's wrong, of course, but that hasn't stopped him. Now we hear that JUST LIKE BEFORE IRAQ, Bush has set up his own special "intelligence" group inside the Pentagon, devoted to finding the "evidence" to "justify" an attack on Iran. Additionally worrisome is the fact that NO ONE from this administration will admit that the President needs the authority of Congress to go to war. Even more worrisome is that Bush has recently diverted massive naval air resources into the gulf off Iran's coast, almost BEGGING for an incident he can blow out of proportion and use as an excuse for war. Finally, let's remember that Alberto Gonzales says that Article II of the Constitution plus the 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Iraq means that Bush has special Presidential Superpowers to fight any war he likes.

The only conclusion one can draw is that we're headed to War against Iran.

Current military and former intelligence officials remain concerned about a US-led strike on Iran, despite the recent appearance of diplomacy on the part of the US State Department and the offer of an incentives package to Iran.

Officials point to new developments, such as a recent meeting in Rome between an Iranian arms dealer and controversial neoconservative Michael Ledeen and the March creation of the Iranian directorate inside the Pentagon, as examples of recent events similar to the lead up with war in Iraq.

[..]Lt. Col. Barry E. Venable, a spokesman for the Pentagon, confirmed the creation of the directorate for Iran in both a phone conversation and an email message.

"As the State Department stated in early March (Daily Press Brief, Mar. 3), the U.S. Government is organizing itself better to address what Secretary Rice called ‘one of the great challenges for the United States, a strategic challenge for the United States and for those who desire peace and freedom,'" Venable wrote.

Not content simply to lie and invade Iraq, Bush has now put in place all of the steps to invade Iran, or, at the very least, to bomb them back into the Stone Age. But if we thought we had problems occupying Iraq, let's take a look at what we're facing in Iran:

IRAQ:
defeated militarily in 1991
never able to properly re-arm because of sanctions
no air force
demoralized conscript army who mostly surrendered
3 distinct tribal groups, Shiite & Sunni Muslim
population: almost 27,000,000
size: 168,754 sq. miles//437,072 sq km (about that of California)

IRAN:
continuously re-arming since end of 1988 Iran-Iraq war
strong air forces
army of dedicated fanatics
2 intermingled tribal groups, both Shiite Muslim
population: 68,700,000
size: 636,296 sq. miles//1.648 million sq km (slightly larger than Alaska)

So, in other words, Bush is about to attack a country almost 4x as large as Iraq with a population two and a half times the size of Iraq's and a military 1000x as strong as Iraq's was.

Where's he planning to get the troops? He doesn't have enough to lock down Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. If he does this, there's only one place they can come from: a draft.

When is Congress going to stand up to this idiot warmonger?

That Booming Economy

2007-02-01T17:11:00.000-08:00

The only positive thing this President has done that Republicans can ever point to is our "great economy." They prattle on and on about the economic boom. Point out that it's a boom only for the Wealthy and that the Middle Class and Poor are getting hosed and they say it's a lie, the Economy is great for everyone.

Well, we can put that bullshit spin to rest now...

…the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases. The 2006 figure was lower than a negative 0.4 percent in 2005 and was the poorest showing since a negative 1.5 percent savings rate in 1933 during the Great Depression.

Yup. Great Economy you've got there. People spending 101% of what they make. Exactly how long is that sustainable for? Idiots.

Quick! Don't pay attention! There are Terrorist Toys in Boston!

Far Too Little, Far Too Late

2007-01-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

And now, in "Fox To Guard Henhouse" news, we have this doozy:

Army Probes War Contractor Fraud
By John Heilprin
The Associated Press
Saturday 27 January 2007

From high-dollar fraud to conspiracy to bribery and bid rigging, Army investigators have opened up to 50 criminal probes involving battlefield contractors in the war in Iraq and the U.S. fight against terrorism, The Associated Press has learned.

Really? 50? $750 Billion in a pointless, never-ending, waste-filled war and they've uncovered a whopping 50 prosecutions? Wow, how DOES the Pentagon do it? It's like living in a town with Matlock AND Jessica from Murder She Wrote.

Senior contracting officials, government employees, residents of other countries and, in some cases, U.S. military personnel have been implicated in millions of dollars of fraud allegations.

But... our troops... must blindly support all troops... militarized population conditioned to support all troops, does not compute... does not compute... Oh, what's that? A "Few Bad Apples?" Oh, okay, then.

"All of these involve operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait," Chris Grey, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, confirmed Saturday to the AP. "CID agents will pursue leads and the truth wherever it may take us," Grey said. "We take this very seriously."

Really? Even into the Vice President's office and Halliburton's corporate offices in the Cayman Islands? Who's fooling whom, here? Maybe the AP laps up your bullshit, but no one else is.

Battlefield contractors have been implicated in allegations of fraud and abuse since the war in Iraq began in spring 2003. A special inspector general office that focused solely on reconstruction spending in Iraq developed cases that led to four criminal convictions.

Really? $18,000,000,000 in reconstruction funds TOTALLY WASTED and all you could find was four fucking cases? WOW! Move over C.S.I., the crack financial forensics team of the Pentagon is on the case. Maybe the fact that the electrical grid doesn't work, the phones don't work, the bridges are all still bombed out, the sewage system barely works and the hospitals all lie in ruins should have tipped the Pentagon's investigators off that a FUCKING LOT of Contractors and major Republican-connected firms took $18,000,000,000 from America's taxpayers and built nothing in return? Fuck you, this is clearly a weak attempt to head off Congressional Investigation, and it ain't gonna work. I, for one, cannot WAIT to watch Henry Waxman crawl right up the Pentagon's ass and shake free documentation on all of the people involved with this debacle and where, exactly, their political contributions went.

The problems stem in part from the Pentagon's struggle to get a handle on the unprecedented number of contractors now helping run the nation's wars. Contractors are used in battle zones to do nearly everything but fight. They run cafeterias and laundries for troops, move supplies, run communication systems and repair weapons systems.

Problems created by none other than Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was back in the Bush Sr. White House and recommended that all non-combat aspects of war be outsourced to private companies who supposedly could do the job cheaper and faster and better. Cheney then left public "service" to run the largest of these new military outsourcing contractors. So yeah, first off, I'm unimpressed by the idea that the Pentagon is "getting a handle on the unprecedented number of contractors now helping run the nation's wars" because they eagerly aided and abetted this change.

Also, I love how the article avoids talking about the OTHER set of major contractors in Iraq: the Private Military Contractors who are taking US tax dollars in return for riding roughshod over the country's civilians, thereby making Iraqis hate us all the more. And where do these $5000/week mercenaries come from? Oh, the US Military trains them at the cost of millions of dollars, then loses them to PMC's the second their committments are finished... a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. First, you've paid a fortune to train these mercenaries, then you pay 100x their old military salaries to do the same job. Where's the "savings" in that?

Special agents from the Army's major procurement fraud unit recently were dispatched to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, where they are "working closely and sharing information with other law enforcement agencies in the region," Grey said.

"Given the billions of dollars in contract dollars that have been and are being spent, it is our experience that our agents will detect millions of dollars in fraud before we are done," Grey said. "And just as likely, we will be instrumental in bringing back to the U.S. government millions of dollars in recoveries."

Wow, bringing back MILLIONS of dollars. Of course, at $18,000,000,000 that means that even if the Pentagon's investigators return $180 Million dollars, it's still only ONE FUCKING PERCENT of the money which was squandered on Iraq's "rebuilding." And that itself is a drop in the bucket compared to the eventual $1-2 TRILLION dollar cost of this war.

One case involves an Army chief warrant officer accused of taking a $50,000 bribe to steer a contract for paper products and plastic flatware away from a government contractor and to a Kuwaiti company, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday in federal court at Rock Island, Ill.

Prosecutors say the officer took the bribe while at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, while he was the Army's food service adviser for Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, according to the indictment. The officer is also accused of trying to smuggle $40,000 in undeclared cash into the United States on a December 2005 flight from Kuwait to Dover, Del.

Sooo... it wasn't so much that investigators caught this guy and investigated him, it's more that he got caught at the border with $40G in cash and then the Pentagon figured it out. Oh, yeah, my confidence IS high.

Other cases involve a government officer manipulating a contract in exchange for large bribes, a contractor making false claims against the government and an official accepting gratuities. The cases range in type, seriousness and complexity and involve contractors both inside and outside the United States.

Other such cases include a former President earning billions off the war that his son started, a sitting Vice President falsifying evidence for this war in order to drive the price of his corporation's stock up by 700% since he entered office, and a stubborn dry drunk of a president unwilling to change course or even admit he's made any mistakes because he's absolutely certain that his benefactors in the Saudi Royal Family will handsomely reward him with lavish "Speaking Fees" for speeches in return for his having demolished Iraq's ability to pump oil. These cases, however, will NEVER be investigated, because to do so would be to expose our country's leadership as a group of Armaments Manufacturers who are simply imitating their great-grandparent's activities in World War One.

The Pentagon has viewed outsourcing a wide variety of military tasks as much more efficient, leaving troops trained in combat to the business of war.

But the Government Accountability Office reported in December that the military has been losing millions of dollars because it cannot monitor industry workers in far-flung locations. The Defense Department's inability to manage contractors effectively has hurt military operations and unit morale and cost the Pentagon money, the GAO said.

Some 150,000 contractors have been supporting the Army in Southwest Asia, which includes Iraq. That compares with 9,200 contractors in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Commanders are often unsure how many contractors use their bases and require food, housing and protection, according to the report. One Army official said the service estimates losing about $43 million each year on free meals provided to contractors who also get a food allowance.

The new Democratic Congress plans to ramp up oversight of the billions of dollars being spent in Iraq, including dollars awarded to contractors. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has said he plans to target contractor abuse.

The best news of the entire article, but frankly, it's a bit like closing the barn door after the horses have all run away.

Bush Was Never Elected

2007-01-27T22:54:00.000-08:00

People have asked me why I didn't blog Bush's recent State of the Union. Well, to be honest, it's because I have a limited taste for lies. Not that I didn't watch the grand and boring speech, I did, but my feeling is that his lies are now so fucking obvious on the face of them that no one needed me to sit and analyze his bullshit. It's a waste of my time.

Ah, but more importantly, it's because I'm not willing to expend the energy writing about the speech of a man who has never been legitimately elected President.

See, in 2000, the Supreme Court could have ordered that every ballot in Florida be counted. Instead they pulled off a judicial coup and stole the election for Bush. Later recounts of every Florida ballot proved that if all counties had been recounted, Bush would have lost Florida by a few thousand votes.

Then, in 2004, we saw the election-rigging machine at it again in Ohio. Kenneth Blackwell, scumbag extraordinaire did everything he could to help Diebold steal the election. Robert Kennedy exposed much of this in the pages of Rolling Stone. Bush stole his re-election and the mainstream Corporate Media promptly ignored it.

Now they're ignoring THIS story, a story far more interesting than anything that ~~President~~ Citizen Bush might have to say...

Ohio Election Staff Convicted in Recount Rig

By M.R. Kropkop
The Associated Press

Wednesday 24 January 2007

Cleveland - Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio's most populous county.

Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.

Prosecutors accused Maiden and Dreamer of secretly reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004. They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.

Defense attorney Roger Synenberg has said the workers were following procedures as they understood them.

Ohio gave President Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House in 2004.

Special prosecutor Kevin Baxter did not claim the workers' actions affected the outcome of the election - Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.

Maiden and Dreamer, who still work for the elections board, face a possible sentence of six to 18 months for the felony conviction. Sentencing is on Feb. 26.

A message left for Elections Board Director Michael Vu was not immediately returned Wednesday. The board released a statement that said its goal is to restore confidence in the county's election progress and pursue reforms in addition to those made since 2004.

I think it's amusing that the Elections Board Director's words are taken as truth in this article, especially considering that all three of the people charged in this case were placed on ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE and their legal fees paid for BY that same Elections Board, who are clearly trying to cover up their ignominious record as election thieves.

This isn't some isolated incident... writers Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have a great account of how widespread and egregious the election fraud in Ohio was this last election.

But Cleveland, which usually gives Democrats an extremely heavy margin, was crucial to Bush's alleged victory of roughly 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million counted. Some 600,000 votes were cast or counted in Cuyahoga County. But official turnout and vote counts varied wildly and improbably from precinct to precinct. Overall the county reported about a 60% turnout. But several predominantly black precincts, where voters went more than 80% for Kerry, reported turnouts of 30% or less. In one ward, only a 7% turnout was reported, while surrounding precincts were nearly ten times as high. Independent studies indicate Kerry thousands of votes in Cuyahoga County that rightfully should have been counted in his column.

In the Cuyahoga case, the poll workers are charged with circumventing state recount laws that require a random sampling of at least three percent of the votes cast in a given precinct, to be recounted by hand and by machine. The prosecution charges that the workers instead hand picked sample precincts to recount that they knew did not have questionable results. Once they were able to match those recounts with official results, they could then do the rest of the recount by machine, in effect rendering the entire process meaningless. "This was a very hush operation," said prosecutor Baxter.

Similar allegations have been made in other counties. Indeed, such illegal non-random recounting procedures appear to have been common throughout the state, carried out by board of election employees with the tacit consent of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell was officially charged with administering the election that gave Bush a second term while simultaneously serving as the Ohio co-chair of his Bush's re-election campaign. Blackwell has just been overwhelmingly defeated in his own attempt to become governor of Ohio.

Defense attorney Roger Synenberg, who represents Dreamer, told the jury that the recount was an open process, and that his client and the others "were just doing it the way they were always doing it."

It's now very clear that this country is being led by an illegitimate fraud who calls himself The Decider. Why should Congress defer to anything he wants at this point?

Google: The Enemy Within

2007-01-24T21:22:00.000-08:00

Google is making moves to becomeTHE ONLY internet.

That's it. Got nothing to say about it except "uhm, scary?"

Oh, and all these cable and phone companies who hate Net Neutrality so much had better look 3 years down the road and realize that without Net Neutrality, their stupid, slow, lumbering asses are out of business as Google sits down at the table and eats their lunch and they're unable to do Jack Fuggin Shit about it.

Iraqi Government No Show Jobs

2007-01-24T21:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a neat dispatch out of Baghdad that amounts to a progress report on the Iraq parliament, where lawmakers are still finding it difficult to convene because, most of the time, there is no quorum. The New York Times reports that "nearly every session since November has been adjourned" because most lawmakers don't show up for work even though they receive salaries and benefits worth about $120,000, which seems like a ridiculously large sum for Iraq.

I'm used to hearing about "No Show" jobs on mob-controlled construction jobs. I'm not used to hearing about them in Government, although the Republican-controlled 109th Congress did its damnedest to not show up and worked as little as possible (Tuesday through Thursday only, out of the building by 6pm). It looks like someone in Iraq was paying attention.

Hey... maybe Bush is exporting American-style Democracy to Iraq, after all!

Pentagon Spying On Americans. AGAIN.

2007-01-24T10:44:00.000-08:00

See, THIS is thinking outside the box. If stupid old Congress makes it difficult for the CIA to spy on America's citizens, then you bypass the CIA and instead assign the Military to spy on America's citizens. You know, that same Military which is oh, so hard-pressed in Iraq. Hey! Looks like I found a few surplus units that aren't doing jack shit and can be instead rotated into the Meat Grinder!

Support Our Troops? Not when the motherfuckers are spying on us, we shouldn't.

Military Expands Intelligence Role in U.S.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.

The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.

Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.

The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

Oh, Don't Worry, Vice-President Cheney says it's not illegal for him to spy on you for being against ~~Halliburton's~~ his war:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the Pentagon and CIA are not violating people's rights by examining the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage in the United States.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel will be the judge of that.

National security letters permit the executive branch to seek records about people in terrorism and spy investigations without a judge's approval or grand jury subpoena.

"The Defense Department gets involved because we've got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets," Cheney said.

"The Department of Defense has legitimate authority in this area. This is an authority that goes back three or four decades. It was reaffirmed in the Patriot Act," he said. "It's perfectly legitimate activity. There's nothing wrong with it or illegal. It doesn't violate people's civil rights."

This entire issue brings a few things to mind. Firstly, a personal note; I first heard of this entire Pentagon-Is-Spying-On-Americans issue a few months ago when I was in Florida, giving a book reading/slideshow at the Wolfsonian Museum. As I mentioned in my blog at the time, there was a creep with a crew-cut in the audience taking notes on a clipboard the entire time. When my talk was over, I ran into him in the hall and asked if he enjoyed the speech and joked that I hoped he didn't work at the Department of Homeland Security. He replied "See you at Gitmo, kid." Gitmo, of course, being mil-speak for our Gulag at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba. The next day there was a report on the radio about the Pentagon's increased spying on anti-war groups and rallies and things sorta fell into place about my odd museum notes-taker.

Having that guy in the audience made me feel creepy. Which it was obviously intended to do as a means of chilling debate and complaint about Beloved Leader Bush's stupid war. Several of the other museum guests complained to me at the book signing after the night's slideshow about Crewcut Clipboard... ALL of them (and we're talking mostly about elderly men & women 50+ who were docents and benefactors of the Museum, mostly) pegged the mid-40's crewcut guy as DHS. Ooops, turns out we were all wrong, he's Pentagon.

That's the personal side, though. On a Macro level this turn by the Pentagon is highly alarming because the fact is that in the entire history of Mankind, whenever a country's military has been turned into a domestic spying force, it has become a dangerously brutal force for repression of the population and extension of the privileges of the Wealthy and Powerful. Nazi Germany, East Germany, the Soviet Union, Spain, Italy, Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, Chile... mankind's history is littered with so-called civilized countries whose leaders turned the military into an apparatus for oppressing their people... it ALWAYS starts with spying on them. Only after digging up "suspicious" materials do the killings begin.

So what's Bush's end-game here? Because from the seat of History, it looks rather sinister.

Letters For Dear Leader

2007-01-24T10:38:00.000-08:00

This is a bit old... but still hilarious.

If you feel like a little comic relief — or a terrifying look at the state of things on the right-wing fringe when it comes to Bush — take a look at some of the messages posted at WingNutDaily’s forum, “Your questions for George W. Bush and his spokesmen“, which asks readers to contribute questions for Tony Snow and the Chimperor. This is what WND says:
Ever have a great question to ask the president or Tony Snow? Ever been frustrated watching White House press conferences because reporters just “beat around the Bush”? Now’s your chance to participate. Post your tough questions for the White House at the MR. PRESIDENT! forum where they will be reviewed by WND editors and our White House correspondent. Who knows? Your question may be asked at the next White House press briefing.

Here's my favorite question:

What might Jesus do?
Posted by Conservative (I) on Jan 17, 2007 14:04

Would Jesus knowingly allow terrorists, murderers, rapists, child molestors, theives, and the like to freely enter into our country illegally?

Would Jesus support providing illegal criminals with FREE health care while there are legal immigrants and citizens who are scratching from the bottom of the barrel just so they and their families can see the doctor for illness?

Would Jesus KNOWINGLY provide illegal criminals with FREE education?

Would Jesus Christ want to knowingly grant amnesty to a pack of illegal animals that just gang raped a young teenage girl?

Would Jesus share George Bush’s “compassion” for such criminals?

Would Jesus Christ twice take an oath to protect His country from invasion and then immediately commit TREASON against Americans by ABSOLUTELY REFUSING to secure our borders?

Would Jesus Christ go behind the backs of His fellow citizens and make an agreement with a foreign government to provide social security benefits for that government’s citizens and the time they were here illegally?

Would Jesus Christ have the same definition for compassion as George W. Bush?

Did Jesus Christ die for all of those that will repent and submit themselves to Him?

Far be it from me to speak for the Son of God, but I do believe the only question that would have an answer of “yes” here would be the last question that I posed. It is true that Christ died for every sinner and He did so lovingly and willingly. He is forgiving, compassionate, and tolerant. However, Jesus does believe in justice and the rule of law. With Bush’s border and immigration policy being so treasonous and disgraceful, it’s a wonder that he could possibly expect anyone to want to follow any laws. What’s the point?

Yeah, far be it from you to speak for the Son of God, because you people NEVER take that job on for yourselves. Naaah.

5 Years Late, Relief Arrives For Banned Travellers

2007-01-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

Word from the Department of Homeland Security is that it will review the terror watch list for travelers and would probably cut it in half. In addition, an appeals process will be put in place as of 20 Feb 2007, so people can appeal their inclusion on the list.

That's great. The people on the Do Not Fly List will FINALLY be able to beg the Government for the right to travel and assemble freely. Neato.

I note that it doesn't say ANYTHING about the "Hassle When They Fly List" which the DHS admitted existed. Maybe those of us with big mouths will just have to get used to to being hassled.

Still, it's a fine step for the DHS to be taking, what, almost six full years after the 9/11 attacks? I'm thrilled that the Bush Administration has finally managed to realize that babies with names similar to those of suspected terrorists probably aren't those terrorists.

Sadly, the DHS just can't manage to do one single good thing without simultaneously adding an additional inconvenient "security" measure:

Passport Requirement for Air Travel Now in Effect

January 23, 2007 — Citizens of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda are now required to present a passport to enter the United States when arriving by air from any part of the Western Hemisphere.

The department expects a smooth transition to the new passport requirement based on the current numbers of travelers arriving at U.S. airports with passports. Over 90 percent of U.S. citizens, 97 percent of Canadians, and virtually 100 percent of Mexicans and Bermudans flying to the United States over the past week arrived with passports.

Ha ha, have fun flying to see your friends in Canada and Mexico with your passport at hand, something that has NEVER been required before today. Sucks to be one of those American tourists, filmmakers, students or any number of other innocents who happen to be in Canada right now who don't know about this obscure rule change... have fun getting back into our Free Country™ you filthy terrorist scumbags!

Stupid Terror War Pulls Troops Away From Stupid Drug War

2007-01-23T18:39:00.000-08:00

Burdened U.S. military cuts role in drug war
I bet Tony Montana is loving life lately...

Air and sea patrolling is slashed on southern smuggling routes.
January 22, 2007

WASHINGTON — Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs, leaving significant gaps in the nation's narcotics interdiction efforts.

Since 1989, Congress has directed the Pentagon to be the lead federal agency in detecting and monitoring illegal narcotics shipments headed to the United States by air and sea and in supporting Coast Guard efforts to intercept them. In the early 1990s, at the height of the drug war, U.S. military planes and boats filled the southern skies and waters in search of cocaine-laden vessels coming from Colombia and elsewhere in South America.

But since 2002, the military has withdrawn many of those resources, according to more than a dozen current and former counter-narcotics officials, as well as a review of congressional, military and Homeland Security documents. Internal records show that in the last four years the Pentagon has reduced by more than 62% its surveillance flight-hours over Caribbean and Pacific Ocean routes that are used to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and, increasingly, Colombian-produced heroin. At the same time, the Navy is deploying one-third fewer patrol boats in search of smugglers.

The Defense Department also plans to withdraw as many as 10 Black Hawk helicopters that have been used by a multi-agency task force to move quickly to make drug seizures and arrests in the Caribbean, a major hub for drugs heading to the United States. And the military has deactivated many of the high-tech surveillance "aerostats," or radar balloons, that once guarded the entire southern border, saying it lacks the funds to restore and maintain them.

The Department of Defense defended its policy shift in a budget document sent to Congress in October: "The DOD position is that detecting drug trafficking is a lower priority than supporting our service members on ongoing combat missions."

Members of Congress and drug-control officials have said the Pentagon's cuts and redeployments have hamstrung the U.S. drug interdiction effort at a time when an estimated 1,000 metric tons of inexpensive, high-quality cocaine is entering the country each year.

The cutbacks continue at a time when the Pentagon has officially reclassified the drug interdiction effort as part of the broader war on terrorism, citing intelligence showing growing ties among terrorists, drug dealers and organized-crime syndicates.

"In the post-9/11 world, where both securing and detecting threats to our nation's borders have become critical national security objectives, we cannot continue to neglect the fact that narco-traffickers are breaching our borders on a daily basis," according to a report that was quietly issued last month by the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.

The weakening of the U.S. drug interdiction effort comes just as U.S. authorities have had some major successes in the drug war, led by the Pentagon's Joint Interagency Task Force-South, based on Key West, Fla. Authorities have seized increasing amounts of cocaine since 2001, including a record 300,000 pounds in 2005, although records show that seizures dropped off sharply in 2006, to 230,000 pounds.

What you're seeing here is a scramble by bureaucrats to cover their budgets and perceived importance in the eyes of Congress.

"Congress is afraid of Terrorims? Okay, give them Terrorists. Run some ads that say buying drugs funds Terrorism. We'll make 'em give us more Anti-Drug funding if we have to dress up as Terrorists and fly drugs into the Capitol Building"

Incidentally, "1,000 metric tons"? REALLY? Because 1000 metric tons = 2,204,622 pounds of pure, uncut cocaine.

That's 45.5 grams of pure coke for every one of the 22 million Americans estimated by the DEA to have ever -tried- Cocaine in their entire life. Since the powder that reaches the street often contains no more than 12% pure cocaine, those original kilos have now been fattened to some eight kilos, thus increasing all 22 million coke-trying Americans share to 363 grams per year, or 8/10ths of a pound of cocaine per user. Assuming that a whopping 50% of those who ever try coke once become steady users, that means the government is claiming that these 11 million American cokeheads are consuming a pound and a half of coke per year, or 727 grams. At $80-$100 or so per gram, according to Google, that means I'm supposed to believe that the AVERAGE cokehead is spending a whopping $72,700/year on coke.

Sorry, but I'm calling bullshit on this.

The Drug War is the War On Terror version 1.0; an excuse for the Government of this country to declare war on its own people and to strip us of our freedoms in the name of "winning" an unwinnable war.

Unabomber Bitches About Studio Notes

2007-01-23T16:44:00.000-08:00

Theodore "the Unabomber" Kaczynski is trying to lay claim to more than 40,000 pages of his writings to allow the public to read them in their original form. The government wants to auction "sanitized versions of the materials" on the Internet to raise money for four of the Unabomber's victims. But Kaczynski has thrown a monkey wrench into the works:

The journals contain blunt assessments of 16 mail bombings from 1978 to 1995 that killed 3 people and injured 28, as well as his musings on the suffering of victims and their families. The government wants to auction sanitized versions of the materials on the Internet to raise money for four of Mr. Kaczynski’s victims.

But, citing the First Amendment, Mr. Kaczynski has argued in court filings that the government is not entitled to his writings and has no right to alter them. The writings were among the items taken from his remote Montana cabin after his arrest in April 1996. In a motion drafted in pen, he said he planned to argue that the government had too much discretion under a federal restitution law to confiscate writings.

The four victims pursuing restitution from Mr. Kaczynski were initially reluctant to agree to the auction, fearing it could ghoulishly generate more notoriety for him and further publicize their pain. But some were equally horrified by the prospect of Mr. Kaczynski reclaiming his writings.

Mr. Kaczynski came to be known as the Unabomber after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s code name for the case, Unabom, coined because the targets included universities and airlines. In his 18-year bombing campaign Mr. Kaczynski seemed bent on thwarting the advance of technology, and his victims included university professors, scientists and business executives.

One victim who is not seeking restitution, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said in a letter to the court that he hoped “the criminal’s property will be destroyed, or (if need be) sealed for a century at least and then made available at no charge to scholars of depravity.”

A lawyer for Mr. Kaczynski, John P. Balazs, said his client wanted to donate the originals to a library.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, isn't it?

My feeling is this: The Unabomber is a nutjob. Let his work be published unedited. His crazed and demented writings will speak for themselves. Free governments have nothing to fear from people like Ted Kaczynski.

All sympathies to Dr. Gelernter's victimhood status, but it's not the place of the Government to decide which objectionable writings do and don't belong to the people who wrote them. Nor is it the Government's place to unilaterally rewrite such documents... doing so will only add to the perception that Kaczynski is a victim of some type of Government conspiracy.

Publish them in their entirety or don't publish them. I don't want the Government to get it into their heads that they need to start issuing "redacted" and "cleaned up" versions of other criminal writing and manifestos.

A jew-baiting-free version of Mein Kampf, for example.

2007-01-18T16:09:00.000-08:00

Senator Leahy Just Ripped Alberto Gonzales a new hole over torturing suspected terrorists. Haw haw. Guess Alberto didn't get the memo that it's not Republican Patty-Cake Land up on Capitol Hill any longer...

Thank goodness that we have a guy with a spine like Senator Leahy in that job now. Where's Hilary Clinton's outrage? Or Barack Obama's angry statement about the fact that our President is a willy-nilly torturer?

Expect Your Taxes To DOUBLE

2007-01-18T16:00:00.000-08:00

US Comptroller Testifies That US Taxes Will Have To Double

Only Reuters covered this story:

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Tax increases are essential to avoiding long-term fiscal ruin and overcoming a "demographic tsunami" that would eventually swamp the U.S. budget with senior citizen health care and retirement costs, Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Thursday.

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing on America's long-term budget outlook, Walker urged Congress to waste no time in cutting spending on massive government programs, many of which will grow significantly as large numbers of "baby boomers" retire.

But Walker also warned the new Democrat-controlled committee that cutting spending will not be enough.

Tax revenues at the current 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product "won't get the job done," said Walker, who heads the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Republicans have been steadfast against any federal tax increases and are hoping to make permanent a series of President George W. Bush's tax cuts that expire after 2010, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenues.

Asked what level U.S. taxes revenues should be at, Walker said, "I can't tell you an exact number ... but more than 18.2 percent (of GDP), but below 25 percent."

Since nearly the beginning of Bush's presidency, the U.S. has suffered chronic budget deficits caused by a combination of a then-slowing economy, huge new domestic security costs, the war in Iraq, tax cuts and rapidly growing government health care costs for senior citizens.

Those deficits peaked at a record $412.7 billion in fiscal 2004 before falling to $247.7 billion by fiscal 2006.

They would be significantly higher, however, when taking into account government programs paid with annual Social Security surpluses, which will last for only 10 more years. Without this diversion of retirement money, the fiscal 2006 budget deficit would have been about $434 billion, Walker noted.

"The picture I will lay out for you today is not a pretty one and it's getting worse with the passage of time," Walker said.

For example, in 2000, the government's major future liabilities, including publicly-held debt, Social Security and Medicare and other pension-related costs, totaled about $20 trillion, Walker said. By 2006, he said that figure had grown to about $50 trillion.

Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, said he would spearhead a bipartisan effort this year to rein in long-term government spending. That effort, he said, would include input from the White House and would require a "supermajority" of negotiators and the entire Congress to approve. Tax code changes are likely to be part of that review.

Hmmm... I wonder why neither the Mainstream Media nor either political party wants to talk about what's going to HAVE to happen soon? That is, of course, broadly raising taxes to pay for Bush's idiotic $2 trillion dollar war and the old Republican congresses additional $2 Trillion in profligate spending combined with their regressive tax cuts for the rich.

Could it be no one wants to discuss tax raises because the Presidential Primaries are already heating up, and that everyone wants to pretend that there isn't a problem until the 2008 elections are over? There's precedent for just such a "conspiracy theory" to be put forth... in 1988 the Republicans and Democrats agreed to hide the scope and nature of the Savings & Loan Crisis until after the '88 Presidential Election. Both parties knew that the winner would be left holding the bag for the tax raises, tax raises which proceeded to be a partial cause of the early 90's recession that cost George Herbert Walker Bush the Third his Presidency in 1992. The most amazing part? That economy-hobbling scandal ONLY cost $150 Billion. Billion with a B. Bush & the Republicans have increased the Federal Debt by more than $4 TRILLION over the last six years. Imagine what the tax raises to pay for THAT is going to do to the economy.

I mean, Bush won't care... he'll be out earning cash for giving speeches to his Chinese and Saudi overlords by that point, but the rest of us are going to feel it, and how.

Walker's full statement can be accessed at the GAO website. Go read it... it's terrifying.

Another Gitmo Innocent Speaks Out

2007-01-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Go read the story of Gholam Ruhani in the Washington Post. Ruhani is the third Gitmo prisoner whose story has been broken in the papers, and once more, it's particularly compelling because he's been held at the naval station for five years despite the lack of evidence against him, and in spite of the fact that all evidence points at him having simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time... but he is still being held indefinitely. Because he's the "worst of the worst."

The 23-year-old Afghan shopkeeper, who spoke a little English, was seized near his hometown of Ghazni when he agreed to translate for a Taliban government official seeking a meeting with a U.S. soldier.

Ruhani is still at Guantanamo, marking the fifth anniversary of the prison and his own captivity. He remains as stunned about his fate, according to transcripts of his conversations with military officers, as he was when U.S. military police led him inside the razor wire on Jan. 11, 2002, and accused him of being America's enemy.

"I never had a war against the United States, and I am surprised I'm here," Ruhani told his captors during his first chance to hear the military's reasons for holding him, three years after he arrived at Guantanamo. "I tried to cooperate with Americans. I am no enemy of yours."

Now prison and prisoner are forever linked, joined by hasty decisions made in war and trapped by that fateful beginning.

But after five years and more than $600 million, Gitmo has failed to quickly and fairly handle the cases of hundreds of people such as Ruhani, against whom the government has no clear evidence of a role in attacks against the United States, according to current and former government officials and attorneys for detainees.

"We of course had to make snap judgments in the battlefield," said one administration official involved in reviewing Guantanamo cases, who spoke anonymously to avoid angering superiors. "Where we had problems was that once we had individuals in custody, no one along the layers of review wanted to take a risk. So they would take a shred of evidence that a detainee was associated with another bad person and say that's a reason to keep them."

That policy, and persistent reports of detainee abuse inside Guantanamo's walls, have provided rallying points for Islamic radicals, undermined international support for U.S. efforts to track down terrorists and ignited a legal effort that has repeatedly embarrassed the administration.

"Guantanamo took on a life of its own," said Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former U.S. ambassador at large for war crime issues. "What started as a solution to an immediate problem became both a more permanent place and a cause celebre internationally."

President Bush, relying on advisers' untested legal theories, declared a week after the prison opened that the captives were not entitled to Geneva Conventions protections or prisoner-of-war status and could be held in Cuba, without charges, indefinitely.

Between its opening and Feb. 14, 2002, the number of prisoners at Guantanamo swelled to 300. In late January of that year, Vice President Cheney said the detainees were "the worst of a very bad lot" and added: "They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans."

But of the 773 detainees who have spent time in Guantanamo, the government has released roughly half, most because they had no information and no role in any fighting. The majority were sent home after the evidence against each was formally reviewed at military hearings required in 2004 by the Supreme Court, which rejected the Bush administration's claim that it could detain foreign nationals indefinitely without such sessions.

Of the 393 prisoners who remain today, the military has determined that 85 pose so little threat, they should be transferred to their home countries. Officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because some evidence about the prisoners is classified, estimate that about 200 pose a danger to Americans.

One major obstacle for Ruhani and dozens of others still at the prison is nationality. The U.S. government has determined that Afghanistan, and a few other countries, cannot keep track of released detainees who the United States believes are low-risk but need monitoring.

Afghans make up the largest group of current detainees. Yemenis and Saudis, whose countries either cannot handle released detainees or do not want them, also remain in large numbers.

The detainees in that first group of 20 are emblematic of Guantanamo's prisoners. Half have been released. Of the remaining 10, one is David Hicks -- prisoner No. 2 -- an Australian who fought in the Kosovo Liberation Army, then converted to Islam and was captured in Afghanistan. Two are admitted Taliban commanders.

Three others are more like Ruhani, with public files that appear to make them unlikely enemies of the United States.

One is Shakhrukh Hamiduva, an 18-year-old Uzbek refugee who fled his country after the government there killed one of his uncles and jailed other relatives. He tried to cross the border from Afghanistan when U.S. bombs started falling but was captured by a tribal leader and sold to U.S. forces for a bounty. He said soldiers told him he would be released, but instead he ended up in Cuba.

"We went after small fries at every turn," said Neal Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who helped argue the Supreme Court case last June that struck down the government's original plan for military trials. "Gitmo blew our credibility. And it's going to take a long time to get it back."

When is someone in the Bush White House going to realize that Donald Rumsfeld has been fired for a reason, and that ALL of his ideas were stupid, especially the one about opening a prison on foreign soil and holding innocent people there indefinitely? Oh, right, that would require a bit of thinking about the matter, instead of reflexively defending stupid decisions that have already been made.

Hanging Saddam, Attempt #2

2007-01-16T10:22:00.000-08:00

The New York Times leads with news that the head of Saddam Hussein's half-brother was severed from his body during yesterday's early morning execution. Although Iraqi government officials insist the decapitation was accidental, it sparked protests among Sunni loyalists who said it was a deliberate act of revenge by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.

Iraqi officials say the decapitation happened because they made a mistake when they calculated how high the drop had to be in order to snap the prisoner's neck. The NYT notes that at least one United States Army manual reveals that Iraqis used too much rope. It's a tricky business... too much rope and the head pops off, too little rope and the guy chokes to death for 5 minutes, gurgling and struggling all the while, instead of breaking his neck.

By all accounts it seems the Iraqi government took extra measures yesterday to prevent a repeat of the sectarian taunts that met Saddam Hussein before his execution. A video shown to a small group of journalists seems to back the government's assertion that there were no outbursts from those who witnessed these hangings ("Moqtada Moqtada Moqtada!"), but the fact that officials waited almost 13 hours to show the video seems to suggest they were trying to figure out how to deal with the decapitation. The LAT says the video that was shown to Iraqi journalists did not have the entire execution and some have expressed doubts of what actually took place. The NYT, on the other hand, says, "The video showed his head being snapped off as the rope went taut."

Either way, it's gross. And capital punishment is still merely state-sanctioned revenge killing. But, hopefully we'll never have to think about this again.

"Moqtada Moqtada Moqtada!"

We -Removed- Instability?

2007-01-14T21:25:00.000-08:00

Bush on "60 Minutes": The war was justified because Saddam Hussein "was a significant source of instability" that needed to be removed, adding: "Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude."

Oh... for their stability?

Fundamentalists Make Poor College Students

2007-01-13T04:12:00.000-08:00

From Pharyngula:

"Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views:
The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (conservative, moderate, liberal), education (high school or less, some college, graduate school), and respondent's religious denomination (fundamentalist or not). Belief in evolution rises along with political liberalism, independently of control variables.

It's not surprising that fundamentalism puts such a strong damper on evolution, but it is surprising that political conservatism would do likewise. That, I suspect, is a consequence of the strong association between the religious right and Republicans in this country, and I have to wonder whether conservatives who reject religion completely are as screwed up as this sample indicates, and if conservatives from other countries would do as poorly.

It's utterly unsurprisingly that idiots who think the Earth is 5,000 years old tend not to believe in evolution. What surprised and depressed me more was this mysterious 14% of liberals with graduate school educations who still can't bring themselves believe in evolution. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? The ones with advanced degrees and no religious zealotry who think Yahweh made us out of dust and Magikal Faerie Juice? Let's call them Species Homo Liebermanus.

I guess when the civil war comes, we'll have to keep a close eye on 14% of "our" number... they're secretly brainwashed morons in disguise.

Is Condoleezza Rice a Lesbian?

2007-01-13T03:27:00.000-08:00

Answer: I don't really give a shit, but obviously a LOT of Republicans sure seem to think so.

The always hilarious AmericaBlog has a great post up about whether Republicans' fears that Condi might be secretly gay is behind their super-uptight-outrage about a relatively minor comment made in Senate hearings yesterday towards Secretary Rice: "Who pays the price [for Bush's incompetence in Iraq]? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young," Boxer said. "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Boxer is correct, that neither she nor Condi are going to pay a personal price in Iraq. But for some reason, the White House, and conservatives across the board, have jumped on Boxer's comment and gone ballistic over it. AmericaBlog thinks they know why:

One thing I've learned is that conservatives flip out the most when they think you've found their weak spot. ... The moment an enemy hits close to home, conservatives flip out in order to ensure the enemy never dares go there again.

What that suggests in the case of the Condi uproar is that, I think, the White House and conservative activists like FOX News are deathly afraid of Condi's unmarried status and what it might suggest about her sexual orientation. Condi is a potential future Republican presidential, or VP, candidate. She is a rising star (or at least was until the Iraq fiasco) in a party that has few stars left. And if Condi were to turn out to be a bit light in the Manolos, it wouldn't go over too well with the family values crowd that controls the Republican party. ... And while I tended to be agnostic on the Condi-is-gay rumors up until this point, the bizzarely vicious reaction of the White House and FOX News and Matt Drudge to this episode is starting to make me wonder if they know something I don't.

Ahh, Matt Drudge. Yechh.

I honestly don't give a crap if people are Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered or Magikal Faeire Elves. It's when you pretend that you're not a Magikal Faerie Elf in order to get elected, then turn around and use the Government's powers to enact draconian legislation which legalizes bigotry against your fellow Magikal Faerie Elves that I get mad... it's the hypocrisy of Gay Closeted Republicans like Ken Mehlman, David Drier, Mark Foley, Matt Drudge and Shepard Smith smoking a little pole in their private Log Cabin while making it illegal for other non-rich-non-connected gays to go about their lives that pisses me off.

As for Kinda-Skeezer Rice, I've always disliked her not for any theoretical Lesbian tendencies, but rather for her frigidity, her condescending demeanor, her lecturing schoolmarmish tone of voice and her incredible superpower to consistently tell George Bush whatever he wants to hear rather than what's true or what's likely. Besides, I think she's a 52-year-old childless spinster not because she doesn't crave penis, but rather because she craves only the one which she can't have: George W. Bush, or as she has refferred to him, "My Husband.

### UPDATE ###

Condi Rice has now punched back at evil Barbara Boxer. In an interview in the New York Times,

Ms. Rice suggested that Ms. Boxer had set back feminism by suggesting during the hearing that the childless Ms. Rice had paid no price in the Iraq war: "I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn't have children."

First off, since WHEN do Conservatives give a fuck about Feminism? Aren't these the same scumbags who invented the word "Feminazi" to refer to strong career women like Hilary Clinton? You don't get to kick women in the face and then complain when someone walks by and doesn't stop you.

Rice's faux feminism is completely NOT the reason for this comment... read Boxer's original comment again: "Who pays the price [in Iraq]? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact."

What part of that can POSSIBLY be misconstrued as an attack on Condi's Feminist Right to have a career? That's a LUDICROUS interpretation.Rush Limbaugh also got into the act:

“Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show.

Once again Limbaugh demonstrates just how BAD his hearing has gotten as a result of his Oxycontin abuse. Boxer's statement CLEARLY had nothing at all to do with RACE. Bringing up the words "African American" and "lynch" and "Martin Luther King Day" is race-baiting of the worst type. Either Limbaugh is being disingenuous, or he's a racist who views all conflict in terms of black-vs-white.

He's in good race-centric-fixation company, though:

Deneen Borelli, a fellow with Project 21, which describes itself as a “leading voice in the African-American community,” said, “I am deeply appalled by Senator Barbara Boxer’s cruel and callous attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

“The debate should have been about the war in Iraq and not a platform to demean Secretary Rice,” Ms. Borelli said in a statement issued by the organization.

Ms. Borelli neglects to mention (as does the NYT) that Project 21 is a far-right Conservative Fringe group, attempting instead to pretend that it represents the entire Africa-American community, something which they do not. Oh, and I thought it was Conservatives who were always bitching when blacks viewed everything through race-relations glasses? Guess what's good for the goose is NOT good for the gander.

Boxer is CLEARLY saying calling Rice a Chickenhawk: she never served, she doesn't have any children or family members who are serving, yet she's thrilled to throw other people's kids into a pointless meat grinder from the safety of Washington D.C. Moreover, Boxer then says that SHE ALSO has no kids who are serving. Point being, neither one of us two powerful broads is gonna have to bury our kid, but lots of other mothers ARE going to have to bury their dead sons because of what you, Condi Rice, are deciding to do here.

And, y'know, absent a dead kid, there aren't going to BE a lot of real-world consequences for Condoleezza Rice when her boss's SURGE-GASM 2007™ fails to produce victory in Iraq. Bush has already proven incapable of firing her incompetent ass (oooh, I referred to her ass, I must be anti-feminist!), so no matter how badly the war goes, her job is safe until 2008. When Bush's turn in office is over, Condoleezza will either return to academia and warping reality for a new generation of moron conservatives, or return to working for her other old employer, Big Oil (see, you forgot that one, dincha?), or go to some kind of Right Wing Think-Tank and attempt to use her Soviet-era mindset to analyze the modern world (like she does for Bush).

"I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn't have children."

It IS okay to be single (albeit a bit suspicious at 52 for a Right-Wing Conservative true-believer...) and it IS okay to not have children (although, y'know, your kind of fundamentalist nutjob supposedly believes that marriage exists exclusively for raising children with standardized gender roles by two parents of the opposite sex). And it IS possible to make good decisions on behalf of the country if you are single and don't have children (though I can't imagine a childless male bachelor getting elected to... well, much of anything in this country, much less President). No, the problem is, Condi, you make HORRIBLE decisions which dreadfully impact this country.

Friday Evil News Roundup

2007-01-12T17:55:00.000-08:00

Friday is usually the day on which this White House chooses to dump bad news, unfriendly reports, notices of resignations, etc., all in the hopes that no one in the media or out in the country notices them. Bad news isn't generally dumped on Saturday because it might find its way into the Sunday morning headlines, and NEVER dumped on Sunday because it'll lead off the Monday morning newscasts. But, the theory goes, dump that sucker on Friday and who's going to see it? The newlyweds who stay in watching TV on Friday night? Saturday newspaper readership & tv news viewing are the low mark for the entire week.

So, let's see what President Bush and his lackeys are trying to dump THIS week:

This first story isn't FRIDAY news... it actually came out earlier this week, but not a SINGLE American News Media source has picked up on it. Why? Because it proves that Bush's war IS all about War For Oil after all.

Let's not forget that the very first legal step that Bush took after securing control of Iraq's government was to oil contracts which Iraq had signed with France and Russia. This is the first time since 1972 that Iraq's oil will be open for exploitation by Western firms.

Let's also not forget that one of the key reasons that Saudi government-controlled Wahabi clerics are preaching that foreign fighters should kill Americans and attack Iraq's oil infrastructure is because those Clerics are funded by members of the Saudi Royal Family who don't want to see the price of oil drop when Iraq's oil pumping capacity comes back online.

So Saudi Arabia NEEDS a war to keep the price of oil high... I guess that explains Bush's new SURGE™ of troops to extend our fiasco there.

President Bush Seizes Unilateral Control of All National Guard Units, displacing state Governors. Eh. So much for State's Rights, huh? Well, the President's need to SURGE™ more troops to Iraq outweigh local matters.

Similarly, there's this creepy story where the Pentagon has abandoned the active-duty time limit on National Guardsmen & military reserves. Until now, the Pentagon's policy on the Guard or Reserve was that members' cumulative time on active duty for the Iraq or Afghan wars could not exceed 24 months. That cumulative limit is now lifted; the remaining limit is on the length of any single mobilization, which may not exceed 24 consecutive months, Pace said. Of course, Bush can order the Pentagon to change that any time he likes.

In other words, a citizen-soldier could be mobilized for a 24-month stretch in Iraq or Afghanistan, then demobilized and allowed to return to civilian life, only to be mobilized a second time two weeks later for as much as an additional 24 months. In practice, Pace said, the Pentagon intends to limit all future mobilizations to 12 months.Anyone who signs up for the Guard or Reserves should now consider themselves a permanent active-duty soldier and report to get shipped to Iraq for several years in a row.

One more time, what's the point of calling it an Enlistment Contract if only one party has to keep its word?

Lessee, other Evil Friday News:

Britain, Unlike bullheaded America sees the handwriting on the wall. UK to withdraw 3,000 troops from Iraq. With the Slovaks pulling out, Britain is just about our only ally left in Iraq, except for 100,000+ ~~Mercenary Soldiers~~ Private Military Contractors.

Oh, hey, 774,000 Americans are homeless. But you thought the Economy was doing great? Shut up, you! Incidentally, that's 1 in every 403 people you meet during the day. 1 in 400 in the wealthiest country in the world. Y'know, if we hadn't invaded Iraq, we could have spent that $2 Trillion dollars on homes for the homeless. But who wants homes or schools when we can have Civilian Collateral Damage? YEAH! Killing! U-S-A! We're #1, We're #1...

Keep checking back... often Evil Friday News doesn't surface until Saturday morning (and often not even then... god bless our lazy-ass Mainstream Media).

Lieberman Snuggles Up To Bush Again

2007-01-12T15:26:00.000-08:00

After spending two days watching House and Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Armed Services Committee members tear into Condoleeza Rice and treat Robert Gates with the barest civility due to the newest guy at the bottom of the totem pole, it began to amaze me that no one, not a single member of Congress had expressed enthusiastic support for the president's Surge-tastic™ New Way Forward In Iraq©. Even McCain was grimly supporting it as a last final chance for victory. No one, not Democrat nor Republican, was 100% behind George W. Bush. America had finally achieved bipartisan agreement... Congress was united in dismissing George Bush's idiotic Surge™...

And then Joe Lieberman opened his fat mouth.

Yes, a lick-spittle lapdog sycophant toady to his last fiber, Holy Joe stepped forward to be the first volunteer to go up in flames with Bush's Surge™. Holy Joe loves Bush's "correct and courageous" new strategy. "I applaud the president for rejecting the fatalism of failure and pursuing a new course to achieve success in Iraq," Lieberman says. He says that Bush has offered up "a comprehensive program to chart a new course in both winning the military struggle to establish order and in achieving the political and economic objectives to build a more promising future for Iraqis."

What about all those other Senators and Representatives --Democrats and Republicans alike-- who aren't thrilled with the President's new catchy sloganeering? Lieberman has a warning for them, too: "Excessive partisan division and rancor at home only weakens our will to prevail in this war."

Then again, what should we expect from the man who warned all of us that "Democrats need to realize that George Bush is going to be their commander-in-chief for three more years, and to question his leadership is to give aid and comfort to the enemy."

I don't know about other Democrats, but from this side of the aisle, it looks to me like Holy Joe is the one giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Crocodile Tears From A Crocodile Heart

2007-01-12T12:33:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I just don't buy it.

Bush cries for Medal of Honor hero
January 12, 2007
Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- A young Marine who fell on a hand grenade in Iraq two years ago, giving his life to save comrades, was given the Medal of Honor Thursday by a tearful President Bush, becoming only the second Iraq war recipient. Bush awarded the medal, the nation's highest military decoration, to the late Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham of Scio, N.Y. Dunham's parents accepted on their son's behalf during the somber ceremony in the White House's East Room.

A tear rolled down Bush's cheek during the event, an extraordinary display of emotion by the commander-in-chief.

In 2004, Dunham, a 22-year-old corporal, received a report that a convoy had been ambushed, according to a Marine Corps account. Dunham led his men to the site near Husaybah, halting a convoy of departing cars. An insurgent in one of the vehicles grabbed him by the throat when he went to search the car and the two fought. A grenade was dropped, and Dunham covered the explosive with his Kevlar helmet. He died a few days later.

"I've lost my son but he became a part of history,'' Dunham's mother, Deb, said. ''It still hurts as a parent, but the pride that you have from knowing he did the right thing makes it easier."

That marine threw himself on top of his grenade to save his buddies. He deserves that Medal. He deserves a nation's tears, shed over the pointlessness of his death. But George W. Bush? On Thursday, his minions were crawling all over Capitol Hill repeating "it doesn't matter how we got into Iraq, we need to send more troops and we need to stay there, the President knows best, he's taking the long view." That same Long View that his lying and illegal war cost Corporal Dunham -forever-.

I try not to swear too much on this blog, but considering that this lying scumbag pushed America into a war based entirely on lies and motivated by financial gain for himself, his family, his vice-president, his father, and his financial contributors, he's in exactly the position he deserves to be in.

Bush doesn't get to waltz into a Press Conference a full FIVE fucking years after his wars began and steal America's pity/respect/sympathy by shedding some crocodile-tears in full view of the cameras on the very same day that he's ordered 21,500 more soldiers into the same exact meat-grinder.

I call BULLSHIT on this entire ceremony. It was rigged up by Karl Rove and timed to coincide with Bush's "Where Mistakes Were Made I Am Responsible" non-admission faux-apology the night before, all in order to trick America into thinking that this evil, lying, depraved piece of shit disaster of a President actually has a heart deep down inside his reptile chest and that he feels bad for what he's done.

HE DOESN'T FEEL BAD

He doesn't feel ANYTHING. He's a sociopath. He's incapable of genuine feelings. Go ahead, retarded fundamentalist wing-nuts, put your sons in the hands of the crying crocodile... the rest of us have caught on to the act.

A Voice From Gitmo's Darkness

2007-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

I'm fond of blogging about Gitmo. Oh, sweet Gitmo, apple of Bush's eye... how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. Gitmo stands as THE premiere example of what's this entire Administration: (1) It's secretive, (2) It's illegal, (3) they know it's illegal, that it breaks multiple laws and treaties and they don't care, (4) They lie about what happens there, (5) Torture happens there, (6) Innocents are imprisoned there and they know it, (7) Children are imprisoned there and they know it, (8) It violates every notion and legal precept that underlies our Constitution; habeus corpus, fast & fair trial, jury of your peees, right to an attorney, protection against self-incrimination, right to a impartial judge, the right not to be tortured and have whatever you blurt out to make the pain stop suddenly held against you in court, the right to face your accuser... the list goes on and on and on about what's wrong with America's Gulag™ at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

I've written about Bush & Cheney's zealous use of waterboarding, dog-baiting (and biting), freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation, stress-positions, loud noises, Koran-defacing (yes, it happened) and more. I've written myself blue in the face. So, let me stop writing for a second and turn this space over to Jumah al-Dossari, a 33-year-old citizen of Bahrain in his own words, excerpted from letters he wrote to his attorneys:

I AM WRITING from the darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo in the hope that I can make our voices heard by the world. My hand quivers as I hold the pen.

In January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled, drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray and locked us in cages with two buckets — one empty and one filled with water. We were to urinate in one and wash in the other.

At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious.

What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators.

During the first few years at Guantanamo, I was interrogated many times. My interrogators told me that they wanted me to admit that I am from Al Qaeda and that I was involved in the terrorist attacks on the United States. I told them that I have no connection to what they described. I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen.

I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.

But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? For how long will fathers, mothers, wives, siblings and children cry for their imprisoned loved ones? For how long will my daughter have to ask about my return? The answers can only be found with the fair-minded people of America.

I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center.

If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States.

Show the world the letters I gave you. Let the world read them. Let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba.

This is a Gulag of President Bush's making. The Supreme Court ordered him to unmake it and instead he twisted their rebuke into a sign of assent. The man is just this side of a South American dictator, and the crimes that happen at Guantánamo aren't his alone... they belong also to the 52% of Americans who re-elected him, but most especially to the 32% who still inexplicably support his every action. Jummah might say "I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States" but he is WRONG. Those soldiers represent the express desires of a stupid, uncaring population of the priviledged and uninformed. Those soldiers and their tortures represent a White House which redefined torture into a state policy. Those soldiers and their waterboarding represent a brutal thug of a President who refuses to admit the lessons that HUNDREDS of years of police work has proven: that beatings and torture produce false confessions and that personal interaction and produce actionable information. Bush doesn't have these people in Gitmo because he thinks they're truly guilty... the military itself has told him repeatedly that this is NOT true.

No, Bush has those people there because he likes torturing people. His personal relationship with God assuages his guilt... but what assuages OURS? Gitmo has been in existence for five years now, with no end in sight. Call your Senators and Congressperson and tell them enough is enough.

Fired Republican Senators To Become Lobbyists

2007-01-12T02:25:00.000-08:00

Corrupt Scum lose their elections because of their ties to lobbyists and break down the front door of the building rushing to cash in favors owed to them by other scum. Go figure.

In this case, it's Ex-Senators Conrad Burns and Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum.

Former Sen. Conrad Burns, whose ties to lobbyists helped sink his re-election bid, has landed at a new workplace: a Washington lobbying firm. Burns will work for his former chief of staff, Leo Giacometto, at the firm Gage, which has lobbied for Montana interests and several national technology companies, often making headlines for its connections to Burns and his staff.

Well, at least there Burns will be able to earn more than enough to pay his lawyers as prosecutors investigating the Abramoff scandal grow closer and closer... both Burns and Giacometto are under investigation by the FBI for Burns' earmarking shenanigans.

They can't rot in jail fast enough.

What's a Plan B?

2007-01-12T02:14:00.000-08:00

Condoleezza Rice gave America a terrifying insight into the policy-making process in Bush's White House:

"It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work."

Ohhhhh... so THAT'S why everything this White House has tried has failed! Becuase of poor contingency planning! Sweet! Now we know the problem and can move to fix it by FIRING ALL OF THESE STUPID MORONS.

1/3 of All Americans Are Morons

2007-01-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

Why We Can NEVER "Win" In Iraq

2007-01-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

We can't "win" in Iraq.

Why? Because ever since World War Two ended, the United States Military has refused to assume the role of government administration of occupied territory. In Vietnam, in Somalia, and now in Iraq, we see a repeating pattern: the United States won't assume control of the country and therefore can't enforce its will.

In 2003, the State Department recommended this exact plan before the war, but Bush is ideologically opposed to taking the advice of the State Department. Before the war, he refused to take State's advice against invading Iraq, directly after the war, he ignored State's existing occupation plan which was based on Nato's experiences in Bosnia. Now he ignores State's advice about regional negotiation.

Instead, Bush's answer was to hold a premature election (something that still hasn't been done to this day in the former Yugoslavia) and award rule of the entire country to the winners, which by sheer dint of numbers was very predictably the majority Shiite tribe. Bush talks a lot of game about going after both Sunni Insurgents and Shiite Death Squads, but in reality, the government of Iraq seems capable of going after only one of those parties... because the Shiites in the Iraqi Government are unwilling to kill their partners.

Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki is the leader of the Dawa Party which was founded by Moqtada Al-Sadr's father, his party's version of George Washington. Expecting for al-Maliki to suddenly turn on the party he's been a member of his entire life, and to betray and attack the son of the man who founded that party, is ridiculous.

As far as America's military force being capable of destroying the insurgency, that's impossible unless they CHOOSE to identify themselves and fight us openly. They did that once in Fallujah and learned their lesson. After America had killed several hundred of them, the rest of the insurgency realized the futility of open combat, laid down their weapons, mingled with the civilians and spread out across the country to concentrate on terror and guerrilla war. The Iraqi population cooperates with the Insurgency, either through ignoring them, collaborating with them, or just not telling the police and Americans where to find them. Why? Because they know that if caught helping the Americans, they or their families will be murdered.

If we wanted to, we could end the insurgency in Iraq tomorrow... history gives us brilliant object lessons in how to do so. The Roman Legions controlled Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa with only 300,000 troops (of which only 100,000 were profession full-time troops). How? By razing entire villages and killing everyone within whenever locals struck out against Roman rule. The Nazis controlled all of Europe with a minimum number of troops because they used the same method. If any German soldier was killed by local partisans, the Nazis would retaliate by killing 10, 20 or 40 locals until all resistance stopped. Despite the scenes from romanticized films, there was very little in the way of open attack on the Nazis by "resistance" forces because of the Nazis' vicious deterrence tactics. As a Democracy, America should not and must not take up these methods

We do not have the patience to govern Iraq ourselves, we don't have the stomach to terrorize the population into turning over the insurgents and terrorists among them, we won't engage with Iraq's neighbors to bring about a political solution, and because of these facts, we cannot win in Iraq.

What a Flaming Turd

2007-01-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

I had just finished blogging about my suspicion that Bush has a pathological inability to admit mistakes, when I strolled over to Salon.com where Sidney Blumenthal confirmed my thoughts:

Informed correspondents of the Washington Post and New York Times related in conversation that Bush furiously called the report "a flaming turd," but his colorful remark was not published. Perhaps it was apocryphal. Nonetheless, it conveyed the intensity of his hostile rejection.

Cheney galvanized his neoconservative allies inside and outside the administration to counter the Iraq Study Group. In order to have their own proposal they put Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff and longtime neocon fellow traveler, in touch with Frederick Kagan, an analyst at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, who urged a massive "surge" of troops into Iraq. Kagan and Keane and a team of neocons at AEI whipped up a PowerPoint presentation, and one week after the ISG report release, on Dec. 11, they were ushered into Bush's presence.

The president had become enraged at the presumption of the Baker-Hamilton Commission even before its members gave him their report. "Although the president was publicly polite," the Washington Post reported, "few of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations appealed to the administration, which intensified its own deliberations over a new 'way forward' in Iraq. How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme. As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton."

Donald Rumsfeld had been sacrificed as the secretary of defense, but his replacement, Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA and member of the ISG, turned from skeptic into team player. The Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command; and Gen. George Casey, commander in Iraq, all opposed the "surge" as no answer. Cheney and the neocons saw their opposition as the opening for purging and blaming them. The Joint Chiefs were ignored and sidelined, and Abizaid and Casey forced into retirement. Their dissent, leaked to the Washington Post for appearance in the paper on the day of Bush's "surge" speech, was an extraordinary gesture by the senior military leaders to distance themselves from impending failure.

So, because the Iraq Study Group's report didn't have any mention of a Surge™, Bush and his lackies seized upon a Surge™ as a way to differentiate themselves from the Baker-Hamilton commission?

That's pretty much what I would expect from a man unwilling to admit that he's made mistakes or that other people might have good ideas for fixing the problems he's made. The simple phrase "The president had become enraged at the presumption of the Baker-Hamilton Commission even before its members gave him their report" speaks volumes about the mindset of this man... petty, vindictive, angry at anyone with the temerity to speak out against him.

What a flaming turd.

That article also contains this brilliant summary of Bush's Surge™ Logic:

When the U.S. military commanders in Iraq and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad protested against a rush by the Iraqi government to hang Saddam Hussein, Condoleeza Rice overrode their objections and gave the signal to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to proceed.

Maliki's management and subsequent defense of the gruesome circus surrounding Saddam's execution disabused any illusion that he could act in the larger Iraqi national interest rather than as a political representative of Shiite sectarianism. He is to his marrow a creature of the Dawa Party, founded by Muqtada al-Sadr's father, and his alliance with al-Sadr. While the intent of the surge is to revitalize the Maliki government, that government cannot and does not wish to be reformed. The problem is not merely that Maliki is a weak political leader, or that his political coalition wouldn't permit it, or that his Iranian sponsors wouldn't allow repudiation -- all of which are indisputably true. The irreducible reason is that Maliki exists only to achieve Shiite control, and if he did not he would not exist. There is no other Maliki. Nor can Bush invent one.

Bush's "surge," therefore, is a military plan that cannot produce its stated political outcome and will instead further unleash the forces he claims will be controlled. His offensive to subdue the Sunni insurgents, for example, is already accelerating the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad by the Shiite militias, which, rather than being contained, are further empowered.

Yeah... like he said.

Bush has chosen to aid the Shiite militias in their endgoal: the complete elimination of the Sunni minority. I find it highly interesting that this lasst violent two days in Iraq were spent hunting and killing Sunni "insurgents" (which, y'know, some people call old men, women & children) when the Shiite Death Squads outnumber the Sunni Insurgents by a factor of 4 to 1.

Once those Sunni Insurgents are all dead, yes, it WILL be quite peaceful in Iraq... because Iraq will be a graveyard which shames anything that Saddam Hussein could dream up in his most feverish nightmares.

And we will have helped.

Bush Speech Surprise: We're Pulling Out of Iraq

2007-01-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

Ha ha ha, no, just kidding. THAT would require conceptual thinking and flexibility that this president is sorely lacking.

No, instead, we were presented with a President who STILL can't truly admit errors of his own making.

Astonishingly, President Bush did acknowledge that a mistake was made when a military buildup wasn't ordered last year, back when it could have done some good. What Bush DIDN'T admit was that HE was the guy who made that decision, instead twisting history to seem as if someone else, some rogue element long since fired (coughcoughRumsfeldcough) was the individual who had made any mistakes. Bush's comment? "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me."

That's a far cry from "The Buck Stops Here." In fact it's a little like saying "If my underlings fucked up, well, I guess I'll be gracious and fake some public contrition for their actions, which -might- have been errors. Maybe."

Read it aloud: "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me." Not that it doesn't really mean ANYTHING.

Oh, mistakes were made, for sure... they just weren't Bush's mistakes. Making a wholesale confession for any and all mistakes just distances himself from any real responsibility. If Bush had said, "When I said that we were winning the war in Iraq just two months ago, that was not only a mistake, that was a lie," that would be a real admission. So would "I'm sorry, but members of my administration deliberately contorted evidence in order to justify attacking Iraq," that would be a real admission and apology. Those apologies would take genuine backbone and America loves candor paired with courage. That's what they want in a leader. If Bush had followed that up with, "and I pledge to not do that again," it would have cut his enemies off at the knees and large numbers of Americans would rally to support him. But he didn't do any of that.

With public support for the war long eroded and almost totally vanished, Bush is trying to win some back. His message: "OK, I get it. Now get off my back."

Except he DOESN'T get it. The proof of this is Bush's answer to last year's pressing need for more troops in Iraq. How's he going to fix it? Why, he's just gonna SURGE another 21,500 troops into Baghdad.

Never mind the fact that the situation on the ground NOW is drastically different than it was a year ago.

Never mind the fact that toppling Saddam Hussein's Sunni-run regime has rekindled the centuries-old divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the region, suspicions that have grown stronger since Saddam's Dec. 30 sectarian execution.

Never mind the fact that a majority of Iraqis think that American troop presence is making the country LESS stable and that over 80% want America OUT of Iraq.

Never mind that Bush just lost an election where the key issue was ENDING his war.

Never mind that General Petraeus said just a few months ago that concentrated counter-insurgency requires 20 soldiers per 1,000 residents (or 120,000 combat soldiers for Baghdad alone... when we only have 70,000 combat troops in the entire country now).

Never mind the fact that Bush is ordering top military leaders to do something which, at least initiallythey were opposed to, and probably still ARE, but don't want to say anything lest they get demoted.

Never mind the fact that Bush has frequently said commanders on the ground know what is best.

Never mind that just last month he told the Washington Post that "it's important to trust the judgment of the military when they're making military plans."

No, never mind any of that because none of it ever happened for Bush... it slipped down his Memory Hole, just like every other inconvenient fact which contradicts how he's feeling on any given day.

No, the message of the day is SURGE™. We never said STAY THE COURSE, we have always said NEW WAY FORWARD: SURGE™.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

It's not a surprise, I suppose. Admission of mistakes is the opposite of Bush's natural tendency. When he makes a big mistake, the admission seldom comes, and when it does arrive, it's usually reluctantly and belatedly.

Most famously, late in 2004, Bush was asked to name his biggest mistake in office. He struggled to come up with one, eventually castigating the reporter: "I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time."

That span of time included the September 11th attacks, the entire Iraq War, and all of the whopping lies told to the American people to rally them around the flag, "Wanted Dead or Alive," "Bring 'em On," Abu Ghraib and more... but Bush couldn't think of a single error he'd made.

I used to think that Bush's obstinancy was a show, a front, a cynical way of misleading a gullible public into supporting The Decider (as in "he sticks to his guns! I admire a man who doesn't flip-flop!"). I don't believe that any longer. Lying to the public is one thing (and, IMO, an impeachable thing), but Bush doesn't even seem capable of admitting errors to himself. Instead, he seems insanely confident in his decisions, and worse, he seems completely unaware when he HAS changed his mind.

Take, for example, Bush's evolving qualifications about the U.S. commitment to Iraq. A year ago, he stated that "We will stay until the job is done." Tonight that became "America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people - and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people."

So much for staying until the job is done, huh? Wasn't it just a few months ago that Bush's henchmen and their Right-Wing echochamber were chanting that withdrawing from Iraq was Treason? Cut and Run? Oh, right, the never said Cut and Run. More Memory Hole.

I could forgive this President for being a liar and a bungler... what I can't forgive is an insane person who lies to himself and drags his country, the Middle East and the entire planet into a raging war all for... what, exactly?

-NEW- Saddam Films Appear

2007-01-09T10:41:00.000-08:00

It's the Story That Won't Die (unlike the Dictator)!

Yes, amazingly, the dummies responsible for filming Saddam Hussein's wacky last moments on Earth ("Moqtada Moqtada Moqtada!") are at it again. This time, though, the new cell-phone footage is of Saddam's Corpse! Wheee! As if watching him plunge to his death wasn't gruesome enough, now we get to see his dead body.

Naturally, it's turned up on the internet, because some really great stuff you just can't keep to yourself and your hateful religious sect, right?

So now Saddam's officially a martyr and we get footage of Moqtada's boys playing with his corpse. How soon until video shows up of them shitting in his dead mouth?

Incidentally, I've been asked why I give a shit how Saddam died and my answer is twofold: first, the cell-phone video revealed the sectarian nature of his execution and will inflame tensions in Iraq. Second, all of these films being released prove one thing: the first film released had been edited to present a propaganda view of a sedate, solemn execution, something we now know was complete bullshit. If we can't believe how they killed Saddam, then why should we believe anything else that comes out of the Maliki government?

Polly Want A Cracker?

2007-01-09T09:59:00.000-08:00

A cracker? No, Polly wants to have an English vocabulary of 950 words, to be able to distinguish and use correctly past, present, and future verb tenses, to invent new words when Polly come across concepts she doesn't have words for already, and to tell jokes.

If that talking bird can get subject/verb agreement right, it's already smarter than our President ("Is our children learning?").

When the aliens arrive and realize how many other intelligent lifeforms we're wiping out on this planet (dolphins, whales, parrots, gorillas, etc.), they're going to recognize us as the monsters we are and burn us off the face of the globe.

Fine with me. Let Polly and Koko take over.

Hey Joe, Whaddya Know?

2007-01-09T00:15:00.000-08:00

Ooops, nothing, you're still a rotten fascist apologist...

I'm still catching up on all the super-keen news I missed over the weekend (remember the days before all bad news was dumped during the weekend so the public hopefully wouldn't notice it?), and I came across this article and photo of these two worthless Bush Apologists smugging it up together:Ain't it enough to make you want to vomit?

Anyway, McCain-Lieberman (And what a ticket THAT would be! Sign Me Up!) are on some kind of Surge-Fest 2007 this weekend, speaking out about the desperate need for a SURGE of troops to Iraq. Let's do the numbers for a second... Gen. David Petraeus, the new general in charge of Iraq wrote in the Army's new counter-insurgency manual that stamping out insurgents requires a lot of manpower—at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area's population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops. Petraeus' writings are what got him the new Top Job in Iraq (a promotion he'll someday come to regret, no doubt, when he's unable to provide the Miracle Victory that Reichschancellor Bush dreams is coming). Petraeus' theories about troop levels are ALSO what created this bullshit "SURGE" talk in and around Washington, where it's finally filtered up to The Decider who decided that it sounded better than "I'm sorry, I wasted $2 Trillion of your dollars on a war to hang Saddam Hussein."

Here's the problem with Surge-Fest 2007: right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 or even 30,0000 combat troops would leave the force well short of the minimum required, and that's with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.

So, yeah, this Urge To Surge is pointless bullshit and the citizens of America know it. So does the Congress and it remains to be seen if they'll play ball with the President or not.

Which brings us back to Senators Holy Joe Lieberman and John "Maverick" McCain ("that's right, Ice. Man. I -AM- dangerous.") and their pro-surge pro-war tour at the American Enterprise Institute. They were there to speak for a Surge Sensation because they believe only a Gushing Surge can win in Iraq. They insisted their Mighty Surge be open-ended rather than temporary, and that it "must be substantial and it must be sustained."

They evidently haven't read the Army's most recent readiness reports. You know, the ones which say 33% of units aren't ready to be deployed to Iraq with a month's notice?

According to McCain, A Surgeaclypse Now would give the Maliki "government" (if a collection of leather-clad thugs shouting "Moqtada Moqtada Moqtada" can be CALLED a government), "a fighting chance to pursue reconciliation."

Erhm... what "reconciliation" is that, Senator? Maybe you didn't see the cell-phone footage of Saddam's Lynching? Because every Sunni sure as hell did.

In his craven op-ed piece in the Washington Post last week, Lieberman quoted some unnamed colonel who told him in private how he and his men fully support the war. At the American Enterprise Institute, Joementum quoted him again, but this time claimed that Colonel Frank Not Fakealoo also supports a surge, saying that “We need some more troops to... fight to a victorious finish." Weird that this detail wasn't in the op-ed piece... it's almost as if Joe's just putting words into his straw-man colonel's mouth.

Lieberman also expressed unflagging confidence in Bush’s boundless wisdom – "The president of the United States gets this." Strangely, McCain didn’t utter Bush's name once. Man, I wonder why not? Incidentally, watching this phony nice-up to the slime who did all that to him, his wife and his kids has blown all respect for John McCain that I ever had.

Speaking of losing respect, Joe Lieberman never had much of mine to begin with (countless condescending lectures about how Great God Is during the 2000 election ruined it forever), but whatever was left circling the bowl was permanently flushed away when I read about Joe's historical references in his speech at the AEI: You see, to Joe, Iraq is just like the Spanish Civil War, a prelude to an even bigger war.

One hates to mock Joe's loose understanding of historical events, but if one MUST, (and as a student of the Spanish Civil War, I kinda MUST), then the main way that Iraq is like the Spanish Civil War is that while the world community turned its back and sat the war out, it also imposed an arms limit on both sides of the war. Meanwhile, a fascist power that wanted to test its military might against a civilian population broke the rules without penalty, supplied one side of the civil war and committed horrible aerial bombardments which left hundreds of thousands of innocents dead.

Hmmm... now who does THAT sound like? Oh, right, Osama Bin Laden!

McCain, on the other hand, went for the liberal traitor's jugulars, discussing how in the 1940's, there was an "incredible" desire in the USA not to be dragged into another European war, and "some of the most respected Americans in our country -- Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford and many others -- were out and out about isolationists."

Isn’t it strange that of all those "many others," (several of whom were powerful Republican Senators, including Senator Prescott Bush) the only isolationists McCain can point to by name were actually Nazi sympathizers? Why, going by that logic, that means anyone against Bush's crazy hijinks in Iraq is probably a Nazi sympathizer, also! Gosh... I'd better shape up!

Oddly, Joe didn't jump in here with a big speech, which he's usually wont to do when Nazis come up.

Oh, but not to fear, Joementum did whip out at least one more nasty piece of hate speech: "If the American people could talk to the American military, as we do regularly, and hear their commitment to this cause, their selfless bravery, their honor, I believe that they would support the troops as we are."

Right. Because Americans don't support Bush's mindless and expensive war, we don't support the troops! Been watching Faux News much, Mister Senator?

In closing, Holy Joe once more threw himself and Congress alike under the treads of Bush's War Machine, demanding that Bush simply ignore Congress if it dares to defy him: "this moment cries out for the kind of courageous leadership that does what can succeed and win in Iraq, not what will command the largest number of political supporters in Congress."

It's not really all that confusing to hear Joe talk this way... after all, he didn't care much that he won the popular vote in 2000 (and Florida besides), so why should we expect the spineless little shitheel to respect the will of America's voters now?

Oh, and one final note... in the transcript of their remarks, John McCain said it all better than anyone else ever could: "On a foreign trip one time, due to the fact we're both losers, Joe described us as a government in exile."

It Was ALWAYS About The Oil

2007-01-08T23:36:00.000-08:00

From Counterpunch.org comes this awesome razor-lined piece:

"And above it all, on his alabaster throne, sits the President, our Supreme Warlord. While even such a scalawag as Lyndon Johnson knew that an unpopular war is a losing hand for a politician to draw, President Bush seems unperturbed by it all. Many columnists have attributed his attitude to intellectual deficiencies, or irrational stubbornness, or megalomania. But if Bush possessed the IQ of Descartes and the wisdom of Aquinas, he could hardly act otherwise.

"As a Texas plutocrat marinated in petroleum, Bush is merely acting out his destiny, and that of his class. Should the reader need reminding, one can always turn to the more iconoclastic foreign press. While the great American dailies are debating whether "we" need 20,000 additional troops or 40,000, or are limning the Napoleonic qualities of the new Iraq commander, General David Petraeus, the London Independent reveals the following:

"'Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

"'The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.'" [6]

"Was Auschwitz a German government-run death camp? Or was it just one of I.G. Farben's synthetic rubber factories, subject to a high employee turnover? One may also ask whether Iraq is the central front of the war on terrorism, or merely a profit center for corporations like BearingPoint and Exxon-Mobil.
###

The article starts with a great quote from one of America's most unknown national heroes, Marine General Smedley Butler, who single-handedly stopped a rich-guy industrialist Putsch on Washington D.C. when he refused to lead the 500,000 men the industrialsts were planning to bring together to descend on the Capitol and throw F.D.R. out of the White House in the early days of the New Deal. His brilliant book "War Is a Racket" is available at Amazon.com.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
-General Smedley Butler (1935)

I think that just about sums it up. The Republican Spin Machine managed to convince most of the Mainstream Media to shout down anyone who dares suggest that the invasion Iraq might possibly be about their oil, but only a moron would ever believe that America would spend upwards of $2 Trillion dollars on anything BUT oil. Certainly not on freeing people under despotic rule... especially not if the Despot in question is willing to sell us oil on the cheap. After all, we still use Iranian and Saudi Arabian oil, don't we?

The Path To Hussein's Lynching

2007-01-08T23:23:00.000-08:00

The NYT has a lengthy ~~chunk of dictation~~ in-depth report on the long back-door maneuvering between the American government and the Iraqi government in the days leading to the dreadful execution of Saddam Hussein.

Supposedly the U.S., looking to conform to international protocols, wanted to delay Hussein's execution, while the Iraqis, motivated in large part by revenge, wanted to hasten it—a conflict that led to several heated exchanges between the two parties before the U.S. decided to bow to Iraqi sovereignty and hand Hussein over. Right, because we care oh SO much about Iraqi sovereignty. Hey, you think if those soverign Iraqis had acquitted Saddam and wanted to set him free, the Americans would have turned him over so quickly? I mean, y'know, because our respect for Iraqi sovereignty is just sooooo strong?

The best bit in the entire article is a small detail which has never before surfaced: the Americans wanted a written statement from the chief judge of the highest court that the execution was lawful. He refused, so Prime Minister Maliki went instead to a body of Shiite clerics. Because, really, the execution didn’t already look enough like an act of sectarian vengeance.

Still not explained: why Saddam Hussein had to die before his second trial (the one most likely to uncover US collusion in the poison-gassing deaths of 180,000 Kurds) could conclude. We were left with the disgusting spectacle of his judges dropping the case against him. Saddam will go down as officially Not Guilty of what was supposedly his biggest crime against Humanity. Good job, everyone!

Probably Right Before He Kills Them

2007-01-08T18:52:00.000-08:00

"Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die."
George W. Bush, speaking with reporters on facing the challenges of war, Washington, D.C., Dec. 7, 2006

Click here to see video of Bush's sinister utterance (located at 23:16)

Bush Announces Brilliant New Plan For Iraq

2007-01-08T17:08:00.000-08:00

Tonight President Bush pledged a "New Way Forward" for America's troubles in Iraq and vowed to somehow find 20,000 troops that aren't already in Iraq and send them there. This Troop Surge will fix Iraq and we will be victorious!

Oh, wait, that's tomorrow night's news.

No, tonight, we just get to sit around and wait for Bush to wheel out his already-tired-before-he-announces-it scheme for Victory in Iraq. A strategy all but already repudiated by the Democratic Leadership in the House and Senate. This brings to mind the question of "What the Hell is wrong with George Bush?" Why is he so stubborn, so unwilling to change ANYTHING that he does?

In the final paragraph of the New York Times' Jan. 2 story about the impending new Iraq strategy, President Bush is quoted as telling members of the Baker-Hamilton commission that "victory" was still his goal in Iraq: "It's a word the American people understand, and if I start to change it, it will look like I'm beginning to change my policy."

So... does Bush not want to change his policy? Or just not LOOK like he's changing his policy? Either way, Bush's obstinacy portends nothing good. It suggests that any reduction of American troops is impossible while he's in charge. Forget a pullout, forget a reduction, and forget even a simple lowering of American troops' profile, nothing in this realm is on this president's agenda. As Bush warned his commanders, "What I want to hear from you is how we're going to win, not how we're going to leave." Good to see you're open to all options, Mr. President.

Bush's obstinacy also suggests that he believes the American people don't want reductions and pullouts to be on his agenda, and that we don't want him to change his rhetoric or his policy. He's wrong, and the November elections should have proven that to him. I expect public reaction to Bush's Iraq Surge™ to be blisteringly nasty.

Besides, it's not like this is the first time we've heard from Bush that he's got some Secret Plan For Victory™. He wheeled this same exact speech out back in January 2006, remember? And 2006 was a BANNER year for America in Iraq, right? Why on Earth would anyone expect that he'd change his mind now when the facts are so clearly on his side that his team knows what they're doing?

I fully expect Bush to be the last man on Earth to admit that he's been wrong about Iraq from word one. His unwillingness to acknowledge mistakes, however profound or trivial, is legendary. Bush has an unwavering commitment to his beliefs, which can be an admirable trait... or it can be the hallmark of the delusional; it depends on the vision. In Bush's case, we can safely expect him to reiterate a new version of the same old plan that's not winning in Iraq.

What I don't expect tomorrow is for America to continue to follow him headlong over his cliff. Just that bothersome 25% who think he can do no wrong.

Jesus Is Coming... on a Wave of Nuclear Fire!

2007-01-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

Born-Again psychotics across the South can rejoice today as news comes that Israel is secretly planning to attack Iran with nuclear weapons.

My initial reaction is to say "So What? The United States has a contingency plan for invasion and/or destruction of every country on Earth, including contingency plans which include first-strike nuclear bombing. Just because Israel has such a plan for a nuclear Iran, doesn't mean they intend to carry it through."

My second reaction is that with this psychotic in the White House, Israel might be stupid enough to carry through on a nuclear first-strike on Iran.

While some might think this is the height of madness, let's not forget what the Israelis have to gain from a rash first-strike using nuclear weapons: erhm... uh... oh, right, nothing but the enmity and disgust of the entire world community.

To be the first country to use nuclear weapons in combat since the US bombed Nagasaki isn't the kind of "We're Number One!" slogan that Israel should want for itself. Firstly, any sort of unprovoked attack of this nature simply gives permission for all of the nuclear Islamic countries in the region (Turkey, Pakistan, probably Saudi Arabia and whomever else over there bought bombs from A.Q. Khan) to nuke the holy fuck out of Israel in retaliation. Secondly, if Israel thinks it has a tough time in the United Nations now, try going it alone without the support of the United States. I have no doubt that American public opinion would be overwhelmingly against ANY nation which used nukes without serious provocation.

Let me reiterate: "Iran -might- build a bomb in two years or so" is NOT serious provocation. Not when Israel has between 100 and 300 nuclear bombs. It's not like the lessons of Mutual Assured Destruction are lost on the Persians... why else do you think they're so eager to build nuclear bombs? To defend themselves against a perceived threat from Israel, of course.

Everyone in the Mainstream Media likes to pretend that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is some sort of crazy person determined to obtain nuclear weapons so he can nuke Israel. He doesn't help deter this kind of thinking when he hosts Holocaust Denial Parties. The fact remains, though, that the Iranian Presidency is primarily a domestic governance position. Ahmadinejad won't ever even SEE one of those nukes. The control of the military, foreign policy, nuclear policy, and Iran's main economic policies are clearly within the power of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Ahmadinejad's election represented three things: (1) the ascendancy of the Iranian generation who fought the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war (and who therefore hate America for sponsoring Iraq in that war), (2) his campaign promises to increase direct financial aid to the country's poor & working poor residents, and (3) the fact that the Supreme Leader wanted Ahmadinejad to be the next president because he didn't want an equal partner or rival as president. The Iranian presidency was the last holdout of Iran's reformists, and the victory of Ahmadinejad gave total control of Iran's state institutions to hard-liners. Khamenei controls the Parliament, the judiciary, the army, radio and television, and he now controls the presidency as well.

This allows the Supreme Leader to play a subtle game, the same subtle game that Dr. Martin Luther King played in the 60's with Malcolm X: use your enemy's fear of a crazy person to obtain the common-sense things that you -really- want. It's a time-honored tactic of negotiating: Good-Cop-Bad-Cop. The crazier that Ahmedinejad acts, the more that the Supreme Leader seems like a reasonable alternative to bargain with. It's all a matter of shifting perception of Iran from out-of-control country ruled by dictatorial clerics to Iran as a right-of-center country ruled by an out-of-control madman where the clerics are the moderating influence. Israel surely knows this, as do the smarter elements of the US State Department. The question now is will those who understand what's really going on have any influence over the reactionary Right-Wingers who are running things in both countries?

As to the question of whether or not Bush would back an idiotic Israeli nuclear first-strike, it's probably a "Yes." Why? Because this administration -ALWAYS- backs ideology over reality. Bush probably thinks that Americans will rally to him and celebrate his starting a nuclear war in the Middle East. Perhaps some of them will, too... after all, right-wing fundamentalists have flooded Israel with cash over the last eight years in an attempt to influence Israeli domestic and foreign policy, and I'm sure that fundie nutjobs like Pat Robertson are on the phone with Tel Aviv every day assuring them that "America" is behind a nuclear strike.

Why? Because Christian nutjob literalists think that Isreal must stand together as one country in order for Armageddon to come and for Jesus to return to Earth in a fiery battle to the finish with Satan's son, The Beast 666. I'm not going to dignify these stupid Fairy Tale beliefs except to point out that their precious Bible states that The Beast 666 will rise from "The Eternal Sea" which many Bible "scholars" have taken to mean the eternal roiling sea of politics, that The Beast 666 will profess to be a heavily religious person, that he will support Israel at all costs, and that The Beast 666 will rule for Seven Years before his final battle with Jesus happens. I can only think of ONE current world leader who that prediction describes, and his name is George W. Bush.

Have fun in Hell, Christians!

I also feel that Bush would welcome an Israeli nuclear first strike as a testing-ground for using the same technology himself. He's been developing these weapons in secret over the objections of Congress and against long-standing nuclear treaties himself, so no doubt Bush will be eager to see these nuclear bunker-busters tested in real-world situations. It's a win-win for The Bush 666: he gets to test out his battle strategies and the ensuing nuclear war in the Middle East will bring about his final battle with Jesus Christ. Yay!

UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR BOMB EXPLOSION FOOTAGE

Yeah, those Iranians won't be mad if we help do this to them. It's not like they're terrified of Earthquakes or anything. Setting off thermonuclear bombs underground certainly couldn't trigger a loose fault line or anything, could it? I'm sure that Bush's planning has considered the world repudiation which would arise from our allies accidentally triggering a massive quake...

Meanwhile for those of us who find nuclear war to be an unappetizing alternative to negotiation, take comfort in the news that our new Bush-sponsored generation of nukes might not even fucking work. Yes, Bush manages to even screw up stupid shit that he WANTS. The NYT reports that America's first new nuclear warhead in over twenty years will likely end up a sort of Frankenbomb hybrid of two competing designs. Instead of choosing between designs submitted by teams at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (TP loves the name) will fuse elements of both designs, an approach that some believe is as likely to result in a dud as a functional weapon. "It's one thing to have all the components working and another to have them all working together," said one Berkeley scientist.

Bush Claims New Power To Open & Read Your Mail

2007-01-08T10:46:00.000-08:00

New Postal Law Allows Bush to Snoop Through Your Mail

By James Gordon Meek
New York Daily News

WASHINGTON - President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant, the New York Daily News has learned.

The president asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open people’s mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush’s move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

“Despite the president’s statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people’s mail without a warrant,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

“The (Bush) signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

“The danger is they’re reading Americans’ mail,” she said.

“You have to be concerned,” agreed a career senior U.S. official who reviewed the legal underpinnings of Bush’s claim. “It takes Executive Branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.”

A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised, “It’s something we’re going to look into.”

Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane reform measures. But it also explicitly reinforced protections of first-class mail from searches without a court’s approval.

Yet in his statement Bush said he will “construe” an exception, “which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent … with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances.”

Bush cited as examples the need to “protect human life and safety against hazardous materials and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.”

White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore denied Bush was claiming any new authority.

“In certain circumstances - such as with the proverbial `ticking bomb’ - the Constitution does not require warrants for reasonable searches,” she said.

Bush, however, cited “exigent circumstances” which could refer to an imminent danger or a longstanding state of emergency.

Critics point out the administration could quickly get a warrant from a criminal court or a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge to search targeted mail, and the Postal Service could block delivery in the meantime.

But the Bush White House appears to be taking no chances on a judge saying no while a terror attack is looming, national security experts agreed.

Martin said that Bush is “using the same legal reasoning to justify warrantless opening of domestic mail” as he did with warrantless eavesdropping.
###

This is objectionable in the extreme. In response to those government tools who state that nothing has changed, the question is: what does that mean? Has Bush already been opening Americans' mail without a warrant? And if it's not a policy change, the why has Premiere Bush suddenly put this in writing?

I wonder if Joe Average is going to get it now... or if the mainstream news will just cover this up like everything else this fascist presidency attempts to pull off.

An Army of Undead Zombies

2007-01-07T13:44:00.000-08:00

So THIS is the surge that George W. Bush has been talking about... a sustained surge of Undead Zombie Soldiers!

You know, when Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series proposed this very idea in a short film directed by Joe Dante, I laughed and enjoyed. When the Army does it, people's careers need to be ended...

Army asks dead to sign up for another hitch

POSTED: 7:58 p.m. EST, January 6, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 275 officers killed or wounded in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.

The letters were sent a few days after Christmas to more than 5,100 Army officers who had recently left the service. Included were letters to about 75 officers killed in action and about 200 wounded in action. The 75 represent more than one-third of all Army officers who have died in Iraq since the war began.

"Army personnel officials are contacting those officers' families now to personally apologize for erroneously sending the letters," the Army said in a brief news release issued Friday night.

The Army did not say how or when the mistake was discovered. It said the database normally used for such correspondence with former officers had been "thoroughly reviewed" to remove the names of wounded or dead soldiers.

"But an earlier list was used inadvertently for the December mailings," the Army statement said, adding that the Army is apologizing to those officers and families affected and "regrets any confusion."

The total number of Army officers who have died in Iraq since the war began stood at 217 as of Dec. 2, according to the latest available Pentagon statistics. In all, the Army has had 1,552 soldiers — combining officers and enlisted — killed in action in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, plus 409 who died of non-hostile causes.

The number of Army officers wounded in action in Iraq stood at 894 as of Dec. 2, out of an Army total — for both officers and enlisted — of 14,165, according to the latest Pentagon figures.

Altogether, at least 3,006 members of the U.S. military have died in Iraq since the war began, according to an Associated Press count.

Pat Robertson Predicts "Mass Killings"

2007-01-03T00:50:00.000-08:00

So...

If mass killings come about, can we then go for the Death Penalty on Pat Robertson on the theory that if he'd only spilled more of the details to the authorities, they would have been able to prevent these "Mass Killings?" I mean, if it worked for that idiot who wished he was the 20th hijacker...

Pat Robertson Predicts 'Mass Killing'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 3, 2007

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) -- In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show ''The 700 Club'' on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

Robertson said God also told him that the U.S. only feigns friendship with Israel and that U.S. policies are pushing Israel toward "national suicide."

Robertson suggested in January 2006 that God punished then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a stroke for ceding Israeli-controlled land to the Palestinians.

The broadcaster predicted in January 2004 that President Bush would easily win re-election. Bush won 51 percent of the vote that fall, beating Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

In 2005, Robertson predicted that Bush would have victory after victory in his second term. He said Social Security reform proposals would be approved and Bush would nominate conservative judges to federal courts.

Lawmakers confirmed Bush's 2005 nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. But the president's Social Security initiative was stalled.

"I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss."

In May, Robertson said God told him that storms and possibly a tsunami were to crash into America's coastline in 2006. Even though the U.S. was not hit with a tsunami, Robertson on Tuesday cited last spring's heavy rains and flooding in New England as partly fulfilling the prediction.

What does it take for this psychotic nutjob to get fully discredited? When will the mainstream media stop paying him attention?

What's more, how the fuck is it possible that this maniac beat George Herbert Walker Bush the 3rd in the Iowa Caucuses back in 1988?

Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

2007-01-03T00:06:00.000-08:00

Take 100,000+ military contractors in Iraq and add that together with a new movement in America to farm out police powers (arrest, shoot to kill, search & seizure) to private firms and what do you get?

I mean, other than the world's most hilarious G.I. Joe doll:

Oh, right, you get a bunch of out-of-control, incompetent, secretive, nutjobs
machine-gunning us down in our homes and on our streets.

America has about 135,000 troops in Iraq right now. Britain has about 10,000 troops in Iraq. The rest of our allies together contribute about another 6000. 151,000 Western troops.

There are over 100,000 military contractors in Iraq right now.

What the fuck do we think these guys are going to do when Halliburton orders Bush to pull out of Iraq? Stay & Fight? For what money? You think these PMCs are going to get the psych evaluations and post-traumatic-stress-treatments that our soldiers can't even get?

Naw, them boys is coming home to America, and they'll be coming home crazy. Maybe they'll become private police for Rich Folks like the one in the article up above. Maybe they'll just become criminals. Who knows? Yet another consequence of Dick Cheney's efforts to privatize war in this country for the profit of secretive corporations.

Sucks To Be Bush

2007-01-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

US poll: Bush more hated than Osama Bin Laden

Associated Press/Ipsos Public Affairs/AOL asked Americans to name the biggest villain and biggest hero of 2006, and Bush topped both lists.

Bush ran away with the worst villain title, earning 25 percent of respondents' ire. As if the midterm election outcome wasn't proof enough of unhappiness with the Decider in Chief, the survey's results show Osama bin Laden trailing Bush by 17 points for second place.

Rounding off the top five are some more expected names and faces. Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was hanged on Saturday after being convicted of war crimes, came in third with 6 percent. The two other "axis of evil" leaders -- Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea's Kim Jong Il -- earned 5 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tied with the communist enclave's dictator.

Bush was also cited as the biggest hero of the past year, which just goes to show what total idiots Republicans have become. I'm sorry, but when the ABC/Washington Post poll shows that "80 percent of Republicans pledged their confidence in the president," then Republicans need to seek mental help, because they've lost their minds.

Once more we're back to the concept that 20-30% of Americans are total sheeple who only long to OBEY.

R2D2 Singing

2007-01-02T20:41:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or does the "Chase" theme from Midnight Express sound like R2D2 singing?

Ahh, Giorgio Moroder. Whatever happened to Euro-disco-syntho-pop?

Black Dahlia's Top Ten Most Outrageous Civil Liberties Violations of 2006

2007-01-02T20:32:00.000-08:00

Dahlia Lithwick, one of the best writers out there about about legal matters, has a great article today at Slate.com where she lists her "Bill Of Wrongs" for 2006:

10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui
9. Guantanamo Bay
8. Slagging the Media
7. Slagging the Courts
6. The State-Secrets Doctrine
5. Government Snooping
4. Extraordinary Rendition
3. Abuse of Jose Padilla
2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
1. Hubris

Good list. Good writing about each point in the list. Go read the article.

Wanna Watch Saddam Die?

2007-01-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

Psst: wanna watch Saddam die?

Cell-phone video of Saddam's ~~Execution~~ Murder

Saddam Hussein was a brutal murdering scumbag, but I'll give him this: he went to the gallows like a man, and he was the only guy in his dank, squalid execution shed with a single shred of dignity.

I especially love how the hangmen all chant the name of Shiite Fundamentalist Cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. Because, you know, that's what professionals do. The best part is when Saddam sneers back "Feh. Moqtada" right before they hang him. You can hear the "Blow Me" in his voice.

Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!

Once more, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE BOTHERING? WHY? Why are we bothering? Nothing can fix this country. The people running it are Iranian puppets. We need to get the fuck out RIGHT NOW.

Did U.S. officials know that the designated "executioners" would be the unwashed goons of Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army"—the same group of thugs who killed several American troops after the liberation, the same thugs who murdered Moqtada's moderate religious opposition, and the same murderous thugs who engage in extra-judicial executions and beheadings of innocent Iraqis every day (and night)? Did our government or military ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions?

I ask, because from watching this video, it seems clear that Bush just helped carry out a crude Shiite coup d'état.

The timing —isn't anyone in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad paid to notice this kind of thing?— was explicitly designed to rub every kind of humiliation into Iraqi Sunnis. It profaned their observance of the Sunni Eid ul-Adha holiday (the day of forgiveness, incidentally) while gratifying the Shiite fundamentalists whose ceremonies begin one day later.

To have made Saddam The Butcher into a martyr, to have gratified one religious sect at the expense of another, to have short-changed all modern notions of judicial review, to have forever given up any attempts to retrieve billions of dollars in stolen money that only Saddam knew the whereabouts of, and to have cheated millions of Iraqis and Kurds of the chance for a full accounting of ALL of Saddam's crimes—what a fine day's work for the Bush Administration. Why could they ever have been eager to kill Saddam so quickly? Oh, RIGHT, now I remember...

We HELPED Saddam gas the Kurds and all the other shit he did in the 80's... and a real trial would have shown exactly how much George W. Bush's daddy had to do with all of that. Can't have that, nossirre! Bring in the men with the pleather coats and black ski-masks!

The government America set up in Iraq has been infiltrated by Religious Theocrat Nutjobs who just hung the only guy in the Middle East to ever stand in their way. And we helped them. Far from bringing anything like "closure," this grotesque hanging ensures that the death of Saddam Hussein will serve as a clarion signal that Iraq is fucked. Fucked beyond recovery. For the Sunnis, they now see exactly how "fair" their Judicial System is, and exactly how deeply infiltrated by the Shiite Militias it is, and exactly how little America gives a shit about it. Expect the sectarian violence to continue and expand... not because the Sunnis want to "revenge" Saddam (though there will be a few), but rather because what these black-hooded, leather-coated thugs just did to Saddam happens every night on the streets of Baghdad to innocent Sunnis, and now there's no disguising it.

The shabby, tawdry scene of Moqtada Al-Sadr's riffraff taunting their defenseless former tyrant as he stands silently in his noose is pathetic. While Saddam Hussein was alive, they cringed. Now, they find their lost courage, and meanwhile take the drill and the razor blade and the blowtorch to their fellow Iraqis. To watch this abysmal spectacle is bad enough. To know that the U.S. government had even a silent, shamefaced part in it is to feel something well beyond embarrassment.

Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!

Pentagon Seizes Control Of Banking Rules

2007-01-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting article this week in Businessweek. I'll spool it out and comment on it as the story continues:

Saving Private Ryan From Greedy Lenders
A crackdown on gouging soldiers creates a new regulator: The Pentagon
Businessweek: 1/08/2007

The Defense Dept. is about to become a major financial regulator, and that's throwing lenders for a loop. Pentagon officials and consumer advocates pushed Congress this summer to help the many thousands of service members incurring excessive debt, some of whom have lost security clearances as a result, making them ineligible under Defense rules for deployment to Iraq.

Ah, so here we have the primary motivation to fix the problem, disguised by the public-relations propaganda. In the Propaganda, it's all about "Helping Our Troops," while in reality, the true reason anyone gives a shit about these people getting into crippling wage-slave debt is that it makes our soldier-cogs ineligible to go fight for our attempts to seize Iraq's oil. Gotcha.

The main culprit, the Pentagon said, are so-called payday lenders, which cluster around military bases and charge as much as 800% interest to provide soldiers with cash advances against their paychecks. Congress gave the Pentagon broad new authority to cap interest rates on most consumer loans to more than 1.4 million active-duty personnel and their families. Not surprisingly, payday lenders objected that they will be hurt and that their customers, who often have poor credit, will be left with no place to turn.

Now even mainstream lending institutions and traditional financial regulators say they fear the hastily written law will have unintended consequences. "From our perspective, the scope of the measure that was enacted is so broad that we're still trying to get our arms around it," says Diane Wagner, a spokeswoman for Bank of America BAC . Among the uncertainties: whether the law applies to existing loans, and also what happens when any of the 1.2 million reservists or National Guardsmen are called to active duty.

Sob, sob... those poor payday lenders won't be able to charge 800% interest any longer! Is this justice, I ask you? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Feh.

Why should military members receive special civilian-life protections that normal American civilians don't deserve?

What's so horrific and disgusting about this law is that Congress has now stated in legislation that soldiers should be protected from predatory lending, but that there's absolutely NOTHING wrong with payday lenders charging ordinary American civilians loanshark-shaming 800% interest. This law sets up a two-tiered system for America's working poor and lower-middle class: if you're just Joe Blow: 800%, but if you're G.I. Joe: 36%.

Well, Fuck That Unamerican Bullshit. I'm all for supporting our troops, but giving them special protection from evil banking corporations that the rest of America doesn't qualify for is NOT the answer to the problem. The answer to wage-slavery and indentured debtitude is to outlaw bullshit like 800% payday loans. Oh... but it gets worse:

Lenders and regulators say the measure's rate caps put in doubt the legality of debt consolidation loans, credit-card cash advances, student loans, overdraft protection, and other types of finance for soldiers and their dependents. "Every day a lightbulb goes off in the lending community with ways this could limit or restrict credit to our military," says Andrew Barbour, a lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents such institutions as Wachovia WB , American International GroupAIG , Merrill Lynch ML , and Capital One Financial COF.

America's largest corporations demand answers: why can't we fuck THESE people as well? Haven't we paid Congress enough in bribes? Haven't we spread around the wealth from offshoring middle-class jobs and selling America's infrastructure out from under it? Get with the picture, Congress, we want to suck America's soldiers dry as well!

WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY?
Kevin Mukri, spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, adds: "To my knowledge, this is unprecedented—giving consumer credit regulation to the Defense Dept. I wouldn't know how to write a regulation for bombers."

Oh, right, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency... the same motherless sons of rats who greenlit Congress' utter destruction of bankruptcy protection. The same slimey sacks of filth who refuse to force the credit card companies to raise their credit rating criteria, so poor people aren't offered more credit than they can feasibly handle. The same snot-lickers who refuse to force the credit card companies to raise the percentage due each month so that people can't become enslaved forever to their credit card debt. The same scum-suckers who refuse to force the credit card companies to make clear what the REAL percentage rate on those credit cards are, to disclose their true fees, etc.

Well, of course THOSE donkey-suckers are furious. Someone's trying to help out a consumer somewhere! The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was created to screw the little guy, not to help him... and here suddenly these soft-hearted saps at The Pentagon want to go easy on poor suckers just because they're in the military? Nosirree, not on OUR watch!

Outgoing Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.), however, stands by the law, which he backed. "Congress has an absolute responsibility to protect members of the military and their families from such unfair practices," says a spokesman.

"Congress has no responsibility to protect the average consumer from these same unfair practices," the Senator mumbled as he cashed his paychecks from MBNA, Citibank and Capital One.

The law, which was attached to a defense bill last fall and will take effect on Oct. 1, 2007, establishes a 36% cap on interest rates for most loans to military members and their families. Unlike most credit regulations, the new law requires the annual percentage rate for military loans to include all fees. Factoring in fees can push the APR beyond the law's cap. Home mortgages, auto loans, and credit secured by personal property are exempt.

Once again, WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?

So it's -totally- cool for predatory lenders to disguise closing costs, early pay-down charges and other vampiric fees when dealing with the general public, but our soldiers need to have these things spelled out for them in simple language with a cap of 36% on such fees and interest?

WHY ISN'T THAT THE LAW OF THE LAND FOR EVERYONE?

Oh, right, because Joe Biden got paid a bajillion dollars by the Credit Card Industry in the last election cycle.

Lenders say stiff penalties for violations of the new law may scare off institutions. If a lender unwittingly provides a loan with an improper rate to a service member's spouse, the loan becomes invalid and doesn't have to be repaid. If the lender "knowingly" violates the law, it is subject to fines, and its employees can even get jail time. Avoiding these missteps could be complicated by separate laws that prohibit lenders from asking about marital status.

One lender worrying about such ambiguities is Cooperative Bank in North Carolina, which serves Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune, south of the Outer Banks. CEO Rick Willetts says of the new law: "This is a well-intended idea that is opening Pandora's box."
###

Yet Another Shocker

2007-01-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

WHAT?!?

A Bush Administration executive in charge of a multibillion-dollar Interior Department oil-trading program is suspected of being a paid consultant to oil companies while also determining which of those companies get government contracts?!

Cozy relations with Big Oil in the Bush administration? The Ministry of Homeland Security is shocked. Shocked!

Well, That Didn't Take Long

2006-12-30T11:56:00.000-08:00

Bush hung Saddam today. Err... I mean, our puppet state hung our former puppet dictator... no, wait, the Free People Of Iraq have freely hung their former leader and America had nothing to do with any of it! Yeah, that's it! Sorry, I get confused about which version of reality I'm supposed to believe in... I mean, it was supposedly an Iraqi court which carried out an independently arrived-at decision... but he was hung in the Green Zone in an American prison. Huh. Whatever. He's dead and we won the war in Iraq! Right? We can go home now? Please?!

Saddam Hussein Executed
By Sudarsan Raghavan
The Washington Post
Friday 29 December 2006

Former Iraqi leader hanged for crimes against humanity.

Baghdad - Clutching a Quran and refusing a hood, Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein went to the gallows to be executed before sunrise Saturday morning in Baghdad, according to Iraqi state television.

Hussein, 69, who demanded a cultlike devotion from his people and built monuments to proclaim his own greatness, was hung around 6 a.m. local time (10 p.m. Friday EST) in the American-controlled Green Zone in central Baghdad. Hussein was executed before a small group of observers, including some who had been tortured by his regime.

The execution took place three days after Iraq's highest court upheld Hussein's death sentence, a decision that meant the execution should take place within 30 days. On Thursday, he met in his prison cell with his two maternal half brothers and handed them personal messages, according to his lawyers.

The Sunni Arab son of a landless peasant who died before he was born, Hussein was raised by an uncle in the farmlands that surround the northern town of Tikrit. As a young man, he joined the Iraqi Baath Party, which advocated secular pan-Arab nationalism, eventually playing a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the party to power. In July 1979, Hussein become Iraq's president and quickly plunged the nation into a vicious, debilitating eight-year war against Iran. Three years after that war ended, a U.S.-led coalition attacked Iraq in 1991 over Hussein's invasion of Kuwait the year before.

Almost nine months after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Hussein was captured near a small village on the outskirts of Tikrit. The following June, Iraq's interim government took legal custody of the former president and prosecuted him for crimes against humanity.

Many human rights groups criticized the trial as unfair, delivering nothing more than victor's justice, a charge Iraqi officials denied.

Also hanged on Saturday morning were Hussein's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court.

As the noose was placed around his neck, Saddam shouted: "God is great. The nation will be victorious, and Palestine is Arab."

Iraqi TV did not broadcast the moment of Saddam's execution but officials said his death was recorded on video. The television footage included a shaky image of the aftermath: a shot of what appeared to be Saddam's corpse, laid out on a hospital gurney, his head wrenched grotesquely to the right. His neck appeared to be bruised.

Hussein leaves behind a fractured Iraq. Cycles of sectarian violence have deepened the divide between Sunnis and Shiites and paralyzed the government. Sunni insurgents are killing U.S. troops almost every day, with this month's death toll already the second-highest this year. Shiite militias are storming neighborhoods and using power drills and other forms of torture before killing victims. Sunni Arab loyalists have already vowed to take revenge for Hussein's execution.

Well, it was certainly smart of them to simultaneously kill Barzan... that kills the last paternal male blood relation of Saddam. Along with the killings of Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay and his 14-year-old nephew Mustafa, the new Caliphate of Iraq will be safe from challenge by the previous ruler's bloodline! Huzzah! A return to 13th Century politics! Show trials and show executions! This is why we invaded Iraq... to give them American-style freedom!

Take a good look at that official photo of Saddam on the gallows... look at his hangmen. Does that have the look of an official ceremony carried out by a responsible Government? Because to me, it just looks like four fat thugs in ski masks and mis-matching pleather coats hanging an old man... the imagery isn't much different than what we see when the "insurgents" cut the heads off of kidnapped American truck drivers. What, the Iraqi government couldn't whip up four matching police uniforms and some wicked cool hoods?

No doubt George W. Bush will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that Saddam's death sentence was signed on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the last day of the annual Hadj, and the very moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

Ooooops!

This entire trial was designed for one thing: to send the signal to the American taxpayer that George Bush Is Winning The War! The trial just -happened- to end with a death sentence on the eve of the American elections. Now Saddam's execution just -happens- to occur just before the end of the year. Coincidence? Not likely, especially with Bush needing to have a big "Win" in his column before giving his annual State of the Union speech in 3 weeks.

Hussein was a scumbag who needed to be held to account... but even scumbags deserve fair trials, honest judgments and justly-applied punishments. The former dictator got none of these.

The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders... and this new Iraqi government has essentially proven itself no different in method or means than the previous head of government whom they just executed. State-sponsored execution is the tool of the Chinese and Iranians (and Governor George W. Bush). The vast majority of the world's nations have eliminated the "death penalty" because it's an irreversible punishment which deters no one, is commonly misapplied, and reduces the government to the moral status of murderer. But Iraq isn't Vermont and George Bush has never met a criminal (or brain-damaged retard) that he didn't want to execute, so why should we expect anything better from his hand-picked puppet government?

But don't take MY word for it... last month Human Rights Watch, issued a niney-seven-page report detailing the severe problems with the trial. Human Rights Watch, incidentally, has been baying for Saddam's head on a pike for 20+ years... but in keeping with their group's stated principles that EVERYONE deserves a fair trial, they wanted the former dictator prosecuted properly. Instead, their report, based on close monitoring of the prosecution of the former president, found that:

•"(The) Iraqi High Tribunal was undermined from the outset by Iraqi government actions that threatened the independence and perceived impartiality of the court."

• The Iraqi administrators, judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers lacked sufficient training and expertise "to fairly and effectively try crimes of this magnitude."

• The government did not protect defense lawyers--three of whom were killed during the trial--or key witnesses.

• "(There were) serious flaws in the trial, including failures to disclose key evidence to the defense, violations of the defendants' right to question prosecution witnesses, and the presiding judge's demonstrations of bias."

• "Hussein's defense lawyers had 30 days to file an appeal from the November 5 verdict. However, the trial judgment was only made available to them on November 22, leaving just two weeks to respond."<

The report did not study the appeals process, but the speed with which the tribunal's verdict and sentence were confirmed suggests that the Iraqi Appeals Chamber failed to seriously consider the legal arguments advanced by Hussein's legal team. It defies imagination that any independent Appeals Chamber could have thoroughly reviewed the 300-page judgment and the defense's written arguments in less than two weeks time.

Most importantly, the terms of Saddam's "Fair Trial" were dictated to the Iraqi Government by George W. Bush. Ill-mannered questions like "WHO encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980?" (surely the greatest of Saddam's war crimes because it led to the deaths of a million and a half people) or "WHO sold Saddam the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds?" were strictly forbidden to be raised by prosecutors because the answers would also expose America's culpability in Saddam's war crimes.

There will, of course, be those Right Wingers who counter criticism of this unfair trial's processes by pointing out that Saddam Hussein himself did not give his victims fair trials or just sentences. That is certainly true, but such statements don't defend... instead they stand as a stinging indictment of the new Iraqi government and its judiciary. With all the support of the United States government, with massive resources and access to the best legal advice in the world, with all the lessons of the past, Iraq has a legal system that delivers no better justice than that of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Congratulations. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

This is the ugly legacy of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq: An awful mess of a country that cannot even get the trial and punishment of a deposed dictator right, a justice system that schedules the taking of life for political and propaganda purposes, a thuggishly brutal state that executes according to whim rather than legal standard and due process. The crude lawlessness of Saddam Hussein has been officially replaced... by the calculated lawlessness of the new regime.

Finally, as the head of Iraq's deposed Baath party lies on a gurney with his neck broken (awaiting, no doubt, some type of humiliating cremation and ignominious disposal rather than a proper Muslim burial--something else for the Sunni rebels to revenge themselves upon), we should look at the political state that Saddam built with truly open eyes free of our leaders' recent propaganda.

While it's fun to sit around after the fact and despise Saddam's Baath Party and everyone who belonged to it, let's remember for a second the founding principles of the Iraqi Baath Party: it advocated secular pan-Arab nationalism, unlike the exclusionary, explicitly-religious, sectarian Shiite-only Dawa Party which America helped the Baathists depose in 1968. Yes, the same Dawa Party which was until recently officially listed as a terrorist group, the same Dawa Party which set off car bombs all across Iraq during Saddam's reign killing thousands of innocent Iraqis, the exact same terrorist Dawa Party which dumbfuck George W. Bush has now put back in charge of Iraq.

Moreover, until America's invasion, the Baath Party was open to ALL Iraqis and had kept the lid on religious fundamentalism and Iraq's tribal and religious tensions by uniting the various parties as Iraqis, not Kurds or Shiites or Sunnis. Saddam's secularized Iraq was also the BEST Middle Eastern country in which to be a woman... there was no formal dress requirement and women were allowed to work in any job and even to drive (shock! horror!). Not so in today's increasingly fundamentalist Iraq.

When Saddam was captured in December of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. Now, after his state-sponsored murder, it will redouble in intensity again. Worse, freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of Saddam's Baathist secular regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair... and there's a thought to chill the blood.

Four years into a messy occupation which has cost 3,000 American soldiers their lives, and one year into an increasingly violent religious civil war, and with no end or exit in sight, America may soon find ourselves wishing for another secular Iraqi strongman fierce enough to make the country's warring parties subvert their fanatical religious hatreds to secular politics. Too bad we're probably going to get a pro-Iranian religious zealot like Moqtada Al Sadr instead.
###

Addendum: as I predicted, Bush has already weighed in with his Official Response, and it's almost exactly as I predicted it would be, including the already-hoary "Fair Trial which he denied others" excuse:

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial -- the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

Saddam Hussein's execution comes at the end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops. Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror.

We are reminded today of how far the Iraqi people have come since the end of Saddam Hussein's rule - and that the progress they have made would not have been possible without the continued service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform.

Many difficult choices and further sacrifices lie ahead. Yet the safety and security of the American people require that we not relent in ensuring that Iraq's young democracy continues to progress.
###

Ehhrr... great! Saddam got a Fair Trial! We managed to America's complicity in his gassing of the Kurds and Iranians out of his Fair Trial! Saddam's Death is an important milestone towards Democracy! The Iraqis have come far! Support Our Troops! Don't Relent... Stay The Course! We're Winning The War In Iraq!

What a bunch of bullshit.

Additional Reading:
How George Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq by Professor Juan Cole
U.S. tolerated, then Villified Saddam

Some Ye Olde Saddam Captured Propaganda Unraveled:
Republican Lawmaker Predicts Saddam Capture "Within Days"
How We Got Saddam
Democratic Lawmaker Claims Saddam Capture Story Phony
Kurds Say They Captured Saddam, Not Americans
Was Saddam actually captured on December 13?
Former Marine Admits Saddam Capture Fabricated
Pentagon Denies Marine's Version of Saddam's Capture
Indications Imply Saddam Not Captured, But Rescued From Captors By US

And finally, the REAL Story that Saddam's "Capture" was designed to obscure:
Bush Grabs New Power for FBI while Nation Distracted
President Signs Key Section of "Withdrawn" Patriot Act II

And the real stories that Saddam's execution is most likely timed to obscure today:
Pentagon to Request $100 Billion More in War Money
Bush's Guantánamo "Review Boards" Fail To Deliver Due Process

We live in a Propaganda State. Government by Propaganda. Culture™ by Propaganda. Finance by Propaganda. And now, History by Propaganda. Enjoy!

Happy New Year, Time To Die

2006-12-27T11:14:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, Saddam, it's time for us to kill you!

Saddam Hanging Ordered in Iraq
Execution must occur within 30 days
USA TODAY

BAGHDAD — Iraq's highest court said Tuesday that Saddam Hussein must be hanged within 30 days. The decision generated uncertainty about the timing of an execution and concern over whether his death could spark more violence. The court rejected an appeal by the former Iraqi dictator, who was convicted and sentenced to death Nov. 5 for ordering the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims in the town of Dujail in 1982. "From tomorrow, any day could be the day" for the execution, said Aref al-Shahin, the court's chief judge.

The Iraqi government has not announced any details of plans to send Saddam to the gallows. There were no announcements Tuesday of plans for curfews in Baghdad. Curfews would probably be imposed for an event as politically sensitive as Saddam's execution.

The White House called the decision a milestone in Iraq's efforts "to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."

"Saddam Hussein has received due process and legal rights that he denied the Iraqi people for so long. So this is an important day for the Iraqi people," said deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel.

Some, however, such as Human Rights Watch, condemned the sentence as unfair because of alleged interference by the Shiite-dominated government in Saddam's trial.

Basam Ridha, an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said the presidency council cannot delay or alter Saddam's sentence under Iraqi law. Ridha said Iraqi officials will meet in the next few days to discuss when to send Saddam to hang. "We're anxious to do it as soon as we can," he said. "We want to put an end to it."

A prompt execution would short-circuit an ongoing trial in which Saddam and former top aides are accused of killing tens of thousands in a genocidal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s. That trial is in recess until Jan. 8. Some Iraqi politicians said Saddam's execution would aggravate efforts at a political reconciliation between Iraq's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions — and could intensify the Sunni-led insurgency.

It's like some sort of pulse-pounding mystery! When will our puppet government execute our former puppet dictator? Oh, it's so exciting!

Let's reflect on the fact, for a moment, that few people deserve death as much as Saddam Hussein does. Likewise, those who aided and abbetted his murders should also pay for those crimes, no? Too bad that includes several members and ex-members of President Bush's administration (i.e. Donald Rumsfeld and all the other 80's-leftovers who helped arm Saddam to help him kill the Iranians).

For all the discussion of Saddam's murders, let's also reflect on the fact that killing him only legitimizes the use of state-sanctified murder as a principle of a modern government -- this, in a country which NEEDS to shed itself of government-by-murder.

Likewise, since killing a deposed and pathetic Saddam now can ONLY serve to strenghten the insurgency, the best thing to do would be to sentence Saddam rot in jail forever... but that doesn't fit President Bush's need for a "WIN" on the books, does it?
###

Added: 3:48pm

Sigh, THIS didn't take long, did it?

Baath Party Threatens to Retaliate
By Shafika Mattar
The Associated Press
Wednesday 27 December 2006

Amman, Jordan - Saddam Hussein's Baath Party threatened Wednesday to retaliate if the ousted Iraqi leader is executed, warning in an Internet posting it would target U.S. interests anywhere.

The statement appeared on a Web site known to represent the party, which was disbanded after U.S.-led forces overthrew Saddam in 2003. The site is believed to be run from Yemen, where several exiled Baathists are based.

On Tuesday, Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal against a conviction and death sentence for the killing of 148 people who were detained after an attempt to assassinate in Dujail, northern Iraq, in 1982. The court said the former president should be hanged within 30 days.

"Our party warns again of the consequences of executing Mr. President and his comrades," the statement said. "The Baath and the resistance are determined to retaliate, with all means and everywhere, to harm America and its interests if it commits this crime," the statement added, referring to Baath fighters as "the resistance."

"The American administration will be held responsible for any harm inflicted on the president because the United States is the decision-maker (in Iraq) and not the puppet Iraqi government."

The statement said that if the execution takes place, it would be impossible for the Baath to take part in any prospective negotiations with U.S. and Iraqi officials to reduce the violence in Iraq.

Merry Christmas, You're Drafted

2006-12-25T20:14:00.000-08:00

SURPRISE!

Perfectly timed to coincide with the news cycle downturn at Christmas comes this stealth announcment from the Bush Administration. I've been saying this for years: we don't have enough troops to keep 130-150,000 combat troops in Iraq full-time for the 10-20 years that it's going to take to pacify the country. It appears that someone in the Bush Administration understands this finally and is seeking an "alternative" to the current system... OR you can choose to believe their protestations that they don't want a draft and would never accept a draft and blah blah blah. Considering their record on other important topics of the day (WMDs, War is Final Option, Saddam = Osama, etc.), I'm going with a new draft.

Military Draft System To Be Tested
Friday 22 December 2006

Washington - The Selective Service System is making plans to test its draft machinery in case Congress and President Bush need it, even though the White House says it doesn't want to bring back the draft.

The agency is planning a comprehensive test - not run since 1998 - of its military draft systems, a Selective Service official said. The test itself would not likely occur until 2009.

At the direction of the White House, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson is making it clear he is not advocating the reinstatement of a military draft. He told a news conference that society would benefit from a return to the draft, but a few hours later, after the White House disavowed the remark, Nicholson issued a statement in line with administration policy. He said he strongly supports the all-volunteer military and does not support returning to a draft.

President Bush has repeatedly stated that the all-volunteer army would remain all-volunteer. The administration has for years forcefully opposed bringing back the draft, and the White House said Thursday that policy has not changed and no proposal to reinstate the draft is being considered.

The "readiness exercise" would test the system that randomly chooses draftees by birth date and its network of appeal boards that decide how to deal with conscientious objectors and others who want to delay reporting for duty, Campbell said. The Selective Service will start planning for the 2009 tests next June or July, although budget cuts could force the agency to cancel them, Campbell said.

President Bush said this week he is considering sending more troops to Iraq and has asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to look into adding more troops to the nearly 1.4 million uniformed personnel on active duty.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, increasing the Army by 40,000 troops would cost as much as $2.6 billion the first year and $4 billion after that. Military officials have said the Army and Marine Corps want to add as many as 35,000 more troops.

Recruiting new forces and retaining current troops is more complicated because of the unpopular war in Iraq. In recent years, the Army has accepted recruits with lower aptitude test scores.

In remarks to reporters, Nicholson recalled his own experience as a company commander in an infantry unit that brought together soldiers of different backgrounds and education levels "in the common purpose of serving."
###

Ohhh, it's Okay... it's ONLY a "Readiness Test." Go back to sleep, America...

Media Asks The Wrong Question... Again

2006-12-20T23:40:00.000-08:00

Today over at Slate.com, Jacob Weisberg has an interesting, yet fatally flawed piece up today that gets everything wrong and reveals the underlying bigotry underlying most Mainstream Media discussions of religion (hint: it'ts not what you think):

Romney's Religion
A Mormon president? No way.
By Jacob Weisberg

Someone who refuses to consider voting for a woman as president is rightly deemed a sexist. Someone who'd never vote for a black person is a racist. But are you a religious bigot if you wouldn't cast a ballot for a believing Mormon? The issue arises with Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's as-yet-undeclared bid for the 2008 Republican nomination.

The piece goes on to tell us the history of famous Mormons in federally elected positions, and to discuss the likelihood of a Mormon ever being elected president, and that's all well, and good, but it's the underlying unasked question I take issue with. See if you can spot what's wrong with THIS paragraph:

But if he gets anywhere in the primaries, Romney's religion will become an issue with moderate and secular voters—and rightly so. Objecting to someone because of his religious beliefs is not the same thing as prejudice based on religious heritage, race, or gender. Not applying a religious test for public office, means that people of all faiths are allowed to run—not that views about God, creation, and the moral order are inadmissible for political debate. In George W. Bush's case, the public paid far too little attention to the role of religion in his thinking. Many voters failed to appreciate that while Bush's religious beliefs may be moderate Methodist ones, he was someone who relied on his faith immoderately, as an alternative to rational understanding of complex issues.

While that's a great dig about Bush's immoderate reliance upon the voices in his head as a replacement for actual advisers, Weisberg not only dances around the real point raised by his article, but by positing the question as he does, he reinforces its implicit prejudice. Here's the REAL question we should be asking ourselves as a nation:

Why can ONLY politicians who profess belief in ancient magikal tales of Gods & Devils be elected president?

Weisberg says that objecting to someone based on his religious beliefs isn't the same thing as a prejudice based on religious heritage, race or gender, then continues:

Nor is it chauvinistic to say that certain religious views should be deal breakers in and of themselves. There are millions of religious Americans who would never vote for an atheist for president, because they believe that faith is necessary to lead the country.

And Zing, Weissberg is done, flowing into whether or not he would vote for a Hassidic Jew:

Others, myself included, would not, under most imaginable circumstances, vote for a fanatic or fundamentalist—a Hassidic Jew who regards Rabbi Menachem Schneerson as the Messiah, a Christian literalist who thinks that the Earth is less than 7,000 years old, or a Scientologist who thinks Earth is haunted by the souls of space aliens sent by the evil lord Xenu. Such views are disqualifying because they're dogmatic, irrational, and absurd. By holding them, someone indicates a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.

So... Atheism which rejects ALL dogmatic, irrational and absurd unprovable religious beliefs in invisible superpowered Gods is equal to Scientology and people who think Satan put dinosaur bones into the Earth to trick us?

Right. WE'RE the ones who are unreasonable. I mean, God forbid anyone elect an atheist!

Weisberg continues:

By the same token, I wouldn't vote for someone who truly believed in the founding whoppers of Mormonism. The LDS church holds that Joseph Smith, directed by the angel Moroni, unearthed a book of golden plates buried in a hillside in Western New York in 1827. The plates were inscribed in "reformed" Egyptian hieroglyphics—a nonexistent version of the ancient language that had yet to be decoded. Smith was able to dictate his "translation" of the Book of Mormon first by looking through diamond-encrusted decoder glasses and then by burying his face in a hat with a brown rock at the bottom of it. He was an obvious con man. Romney has every right to believe in con men, but I want to know if he does, and if so, I don't want him running the country.

Nicely done. You've managed to tie Romney's belief in his hokey fairytales to his ability to govern rationally... except I don't find the idea of magic diamond-encrusted decoder glasses to be any more or less ridiculous than I do the idea that God formed the world in seven days a mere 5000 years ago and populated it with the offspring of Adam and Eve. In other words, the stupid shit that Mitt Romney believes is no more ridiculous than the stupid shit that George W. Bush believes or John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all profess to believe. Oh, but Weisberg is ready for MY sort:

One may object that all religious beliefs are irrational—what's the difference between Smith's "seer stone" and the virgin birth or the parting of the Red Sea? But Mormonism is different because it is based on such a transparent and recent fraud. It's Scientology plus 125 years. Perhaps Christianity and Judaism are merely more venerable and poetic versions of the same. But a few eons makes a big difference. The world's greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor. The Church of Latter-day Saints is expanding rapidly and liberalizing in various ways, but it remains fundamentally an orthodox creed with no visible reform wing.

One may object that all religious beliefs are irrational. Chrisianity and Judaism are better than Scientology or Mormonism because they're more ancient and their baloney has been translated over the years into beautiful religious metaphor Nice wiggle language, but guess what? Those religions, beautifully splintered, moderated and metaphorical though they may be, are just as fucking ridiculous as the Mormon faith. The con men who concocted Judaism and Christianity and Islam were no different than Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. We just have better record-keeping for the last two centuries than we do for 2000 years ago, that's all.

Belief in supernatural Gods is a salve for the simpleminded. The idea that invisible supermen live in outer space spying our every deed and eavesdropping our every thought in order that they may correctly decide at the end of our life if we get angel wings or burn in a lake of fire is purely stupid. Gods of any kind are a fairy tales invented to keep people in line.

More importantly "God" doesn't work in a globalized world where religious fanatics of all stripes are only a $300 ticket away from smacking a 767 into the side of the World Trade Center. If you believe that God exists and that he chooses sides, then you should convert to Islam right now because God obviously allowed 9/11 to happen because He hates America and loves Osama Bin Laden. See? Shocking to say, and yet, by the logic of belief, it's utterly true. In fact, if you'll remember, several of America's holiest men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell insinuated that we got hit on 9/11 because God Hates Fags (or whatever kinder words they used at the time).

What's good for the goose is good for the gander: if you're silly enough believe in ANY God, you're not allowed to deny the existence of anyone else's God or to proscribe anyone else's religion, including fundamentalist Islam and fake religions made up by convicts so they can legally smoke dope. Otherwise you're just another "my religion is the only TRUE religion" hypocrite. It's all stupid and just because the magical fairytales of Virgin Birth and burning bushes and plagues of frogs in the Bible are older than the magical fairytales of Joseph Smith's magic sunglasses doesn't make them any more useful or credible in today's world.

Which brings us back to Mitt Romney. No, idiot, you don't get to be President, because as Weisberg correctly points out,

Romney has never publicly indicated any distance from church doctrine. He is an "elder" who performed missionary service in France as a young man and did not protest the church's overt racism and priestly discrimination before it was abolished in 1978.

The Mormon Church is a regressive, conservative, bigoted, power-hungry institution whose followers are cult-like in their exclusion of The Other, up to and including, up until 1978, naming black people as the evil against which mankind must struggle. I'm already saddened that their church has bought itself 2 U.S. Senators. Hell, screw Clearwater, Florida... the Church of Latter Day Saints shows the way forward for Scientology and other modern financially well-endowed "alternative religions." Wyoming only has 500,000 residents... surely Scientology can convince a million of its members to move there and electorally seize control of its governmental institutions? With two Senators in their pocket, Scientology would suddenly be a force to be reckoned with, that's for sure. I'm fascinated mostly by the fact that they seem not to have realized they already have the power to do it.

Weisberg's piece correctly posits that

Various evangelical sects continue to view Mormonism as heretical, non-Christian, or even satanic. But because of their shared faith in social conservatism, evangelical leaders seem open to supporting Romney.

That's true... but Evangelical leaders are ONLY supporting Romney because of their common cause of turning back America's Moral Clock to the 1800's... once the god-fearing dummies who voted for GW twice find out about some of the juicier aspects of the Mormon religion, however, I predict that they'll quickly rush to Sam Brownback's side (and yes, they'll tell themselves, although Brownback's a born-again Evangelical who converted and became a filthy Catholic, at least THAT evil papist-led false church has a few thousand years of history and beautiful religious metaphor behind it).

Don't take MY word for it..., let's allow noted Christian writer Jack T. Chick to show us what's going to happen:

Introducing The "Smoky Bomb"

2006-12-19T10:59:00.000-08:00

Peter D. Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist, is a professor of science and security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He was chief scientist of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2001 to 2003.

The exotic murder-by-polonium of the former K.G.B. spy Alexander Litvinenko has embroiled Russia, Britain and Germany in a diplomatic scuffle and a hunt for more traces of the lethal substance. But it also throws into question most of the previous analyses of “dirty bombs,” terrorist attacks using radioactive isotopes wrapped in explosives (or using other dispersion techniques) to spread radioactive material in crowded areas.

Essentially all analysts, including myself, played down the possibility of using alpha radiation — fast-moving helium nuclei ejected during the radioactive decay of certain isotopes, such as of polonium 210, the substance that killed Mr. Litvinenko — as a source of dirty bombs. We concentrated instead on isotopes that emit penetrating gamma rays, which are basically super-powered packets of light, hard to shield and effective at a yard or more.

The alpha radiation from polonium can be easily shielded — by a layer of aluminum foil, a sheet or two of paper, or the dead outer layer of skin. And so, the reasoning went, alpha radiation could not hurt you as long as the source stayed outside your body. Exactly. Mr. Litvinenko was apparently killed by polonium that he ate or drank or inhaled. That source was so physically small that it was hard to see, perhaps the size of a couple of grains of salt and weighing just a few millionths of a gram.

Dirty bombs based on gamma emitters, analysts have learned, can’t kill very many people. Mr. Litvinenko’s death tells us that “smoky bombs” based on alpha emitters very well could.

Polonium 210 is surprisingly common. It is used by industry in devices that eliminate static electricity, in low-powered brushes used to ionize the air next to photographic film so dust can be swept off easily, and in quite large machines placed end-to-end across a web of fabric moving over rollers in a textile mill. It is even used to control dust in clean rooms where computer chips and hard drives are made.

It may be difficult to get people to eat polonium; it isn’t hard to force them to breathe it. The problem for a radiological terrorist is to get his “hot” material inside people’s bodies where it will do the most harm. If the terrorist can solve that problem, then alpha radiation is the most devastating choice he can make. Precisely because alphas emit their nuclei so quickly, they deposit all of their energy in a relatively small number of cells, killing them or causing them to mutate, increasing the long-term risk of cancer.

The terrorist’s solution lies in getting very finely divided polonium into the air where people can breathe it. I see several fairly simple ways to accomplish this: burn the material, blow it up, dissolve it in a lot of water or pulverize it to a size so small that the particles can float in the air and lodge in the lungs.

It would be unwise of me to dwell on the details of just how one goes about getting a hot enough fire or breaking polonium into extremely fine “dust.” In the end, however, the radioactive material will appear like the dust from an explosion, or the smoke from a fire. My point is to demonstrate the urgent need for new thinking in the regulatory arena, not to give away important information.

Air containing such radioactive debris would appear smoky or dusty, and be dangerous to breathe. A few breaths might easily be enough to sicken a victim, and in some cases to kill. A smoky bomb exploded in a packed arena or on a crowded street could kill dozens or hundreds. It would set off a radiological emergency of a kind not seen before in the United States, and the number of people requiring life support or palliative care until death would overwhelm the number of beds now available for treating victims of radiation. First responders dashing unprotected into the cloud from a smoky bomb might be among the worst wounded. Fire and police departments around the country will need alpha radiation detectors, since the counters they carry now cannot see alphas.

Some of the steps involved with making a good smoky bomb from polonium would be dangerous for the terrorists involved, and might cost them their lives. That, unfortunately, no longer seems like a very high barrier.

What can we do to stop them? We must make it far less easy for them to acquiring polonium in deadly amounts. Polonium sources with about 10 percent of a lethal dose are readily available — even in a product sold on Amazon.com. Only modest restraints inhibit purchase of significantly larger amounts of polonium: as of next year, anyone purchasing more than 16 curies of polonium 210 — enough to make up 5,000 lethal doses — must register it with a tracking system run by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But this is vastly too high — almost no purchases on that scale are made by any industry.

The commission (and the International Atomic Energy Agency as well) is said to be considering tighter regulations to make a repeat of the Litvinenko affair less probable. There is talk that it might tighten the polonium reporting requirement by a factor of 10, to 1.6 curies. That’s better, but still not strict enough.

The biggest problem is that the regulatory commission’s regulations do not restrict the quantity of polonium used in industry. This may make it quite easy for terrorists to purchase large amounts of one of the earth’s deadliest substances. A near-term goal should to require specific licensing of any person or company seeking to purchase alpha sources stronger than one millicurie, about a third of a lethal dose. A longer-term goal ought to be eliminating nearly all use of polonium in industry through other technologies.

That is a technical challenge and would cost some money, but it would certainly be less expensive than coping with the devastation of a smoky bomb.

One Less Dead Fish In The Bucket

2006-12-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

Evan Bayh Drops Out of Presidential Race
Indiana Senator Evan Bayh announced a surprise decision today that he would not to run for president. Bayh began unofficially running the moment that John Kerry lost in 2004, immediately calling Kerry's largest contributors and announcing that he was a moderate Democrat, the only type who could win in 2008. This announcement shows how much established Democrats are being affected by the excitement the surrounding possible presidential candidacy of Illinois Senator Barak Obama. Whether or not Obama can prove to America that he's got the experience to run the world (which is, essentially, the current job description of the President of the United States), remains to be seen.

One thing that doesn't remain to be seen, though, is whether Obama can draw a crowd. He can. Evidently Bayh was scared out of the race by the contrast between Obama's rock-star-like reception last week in New Hampshire (which holds the nation's first presidential primary in January 2008), and the modest turnout of wait for it... DOZENS... for Bayh's own appearance there on the same day. Eeeep.

2008 used to be Hilary Clinton's turn. It's been well known for years that she's going to run. She's quietly raised millions of dollars in the last six years and has a huge war-chest because she hasn't faced a serious challenger yet for her Senate seat... but has been able to use that seat to gather cash, prepping for a Presidential run.

She used to have the all-important Black Vote clinched because of Bill Clinton's popularity in the African-American community and because she's spent the last six years courting it directly. She had brought all the African-American minister organizations into her camp. Right there, that's 40% of the Democratic vote. That leaves only the 60% White + Hispanic vote for Hillary's 4 to 5 competitors to squabble over, and she would likely get a LOT of those votes, too. Yes, the 2008 Democratic nominee -USED- to be a lock for Hillary.

Now, however, she may be pushed out. If Barack Obama enters the race, her best-laid mousey plans gang aft aglay. Suddenly the Black Vote is up for grabs and Hillary's strategy of triangulation on the Iraq War begins to drastically hurt her. She's been one of the most vocal supporters of this idiotic war (in preparation for nullifying a "weak on defense" charge in 2008 because of her Democratic-ness and femalen-ess) and that continuing support will hurt her badly if our troops aren't out of Iraq by 2008. The exit polls in this last election showed that the #1 concern on people's minds was this stupid war. If Hillary and the Senate allow Bush to leave our troops in harm's way refereeing Iraq's civil war, that opens the door wide for Obama to become the "I never voted for this war" candidate and push for withdrawal.

The Wild Card in her favor is the dangerous streak of Royalism that's emerged in American culture where we pick a family and anoint them as our elected sovereigns. The Bushes. The Kennedys. People seem to actually like the idea of a family which hands power down from generation to generation. I'm sure that in 20 years we'll see Jeb Bush's stalker-creep son George Prescott Bush running for Florida Senator and winning. Maybe one of Neil's kids. Or Doro Bush's unholy offspring. We loves us a royal family over here. That royalist streak helps Hillary Clinton because her husband is known countrywide in a way that it doesn't help Evan Bayh because his daddy never won. Christ, Paris Hilton has more of a shot than Evan Bayh... everyone's stayed in one of her Grandpa's hotels.

US Special Forces Spy Teams Operating In Europe

2006-12-18T18:35:00.000-08:00

US Seeks to Rein in Its Military Spy Teams
By Greg Miller
The Los Angeles Times
Monday 18 December 2006

Washington - U.S. Special Forces teams sent overseas on secret spying missions have clashed with the CIA and carried out operations in countries that are staunch U.S. allies, prompting a push for tighter rules for military units engaged in espionage, according to senior U.S. intelligence and military officials.

The spy missions are part of a highly classified program that officials say has better positioned the United States to track terrorist networks and capture or kill enemy operatives in regions such as the Horn of Africa, where weak governments are unable to respond to emerging threats.

But the initiative has also led to several embarrassing incidents for the United States, including a shootout in Paraguay and the exposure of a sensitive intelligence operation in East Africa, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter. To date, the effort has not led to the capture of a significant terrorist suspect.

Some intelligence officials have complained that Special Forces teams have sometimes launched missions without informing the CIA, duplicating or even jeopardizing existing operations. And they questioned deploying military teams in friendly nations - including in Europe - at a time when combat units are in short supply in war zones.

More in link, but how much more do you need to know that our President is a fucking madman who sees enemies every direction he looks, whether they exist or not?

Support Our Fucking Troops!

2006-12-18T14:33:00.000-08:00

y'know, I'm getting REALLY tired of being yelled at by Conservatives and Liberals alike that I -must- at all costs, Support Our Troops. This is a mindless slogan designed to Propagandize our citizenry into supporting The Military, supporting the underlying Military-Industrial Complex and supporting societal Militarism.

Guess what? I don't believe that the institution of Militarism as it exists in this country today is worthy of respect OR support. The Pentagon is a giant money-sponge sucking up every available dollar to increase its own growth. Our short-sighted commitment to Military Keynesianism has set America on a path to destruction and I can't celebrate that.

That said, the "troops" or the individual soldiers in uniform who carry out the orders of the Military-Industrial Complex (aka, the cogs in the War Machine) are generally free of blame for this war. I don't blame them for either being born poor and having limited options in life, nor do I dislike those who join the service out of a sense of altruism and wanting to help other people, and I genuinely admire the guts that all of these groups show in the face of hostile forces who want to kill them.

I don't, however, subscribe to the notion that "the military keeps us free" or we only have our freedoms because soldiers are in Iraq defending them for us. Saddam never once threatened our freedom, and America's militaristic response to the 9/11 attacks has harmed our individual liberties far more than Osama Bin Laden ever dreamed of. If and when the orders come down to impose Martial Law, I'm sure that all these troops that I'm supposed to support will willingly shoot me dead in the street after curfew. Post-Katrina New Orleans proved that.

Either way, I do, for the most part, support the men and women in uniform. The good ones, anyway. Then, occasionally, I come across an Abu Ghraib/Haditha/Rape-And-Murder-Of-A-14-Year-Old-Iraqi-Girl type story which drives home just how FUCKED it is to blindly support anything, much less "our troops" who are, in the final equation, just people subject to the same pressures and failings that the rest of us are. Here's just one such story about troops whom I have no fucking intention of ever supporting.

FBI: Military Recruiters Ran Cocaine

A Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson. Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools. They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.

The big difference is that when civilians commit crimes, they don't expect blind patriotism to wallpaper over it.

Let's Just Stay In Iraq Forever, Then...

2006-12-18T13:43:00.000-08:00

In the NYT's op-ed page, Ben Connable, a major in the Marine Corps who is no stranger to writing for the papers, says any talk of withdrawal from Iraq should take into account how that would affect the people on the ground. U.S. troops have withdrawn from Anbar Province twice, and each time, insurgents were quick to take over and proceeded to kill and torture many of those who were seen as friendly to U.S. interests.

Well, what are we to do, then? Connable (and whoever at the White House agreed to let him write opinion pieces for the Times) doesn't have an answer, but he DOES have a warning:

The confusion caused by withdrawal would be compounded as religious, militia and political loyalties divided inadequately prepared military and police units. Full-scale ethnic killing would become a very real possibility.

For some, the collapse of Iraqi society into Hobbesian mayhem is inevitable no matter how many American troops remain on the ground. A few argue that disintegration of the Iraqi state actually would bring about the national catharsis that seems so elusive today — that absolute civil war would be a greater good.

This cold calculus ignores the very real impact of an American withdrawal on the people we now protect. Any debate that does not consider the bloody reality we would leave in our wake does a disservice to the people of Iraq and the troops who have fought so hard to defend them.

Okay, so I guess you can put me into the "some" and "few" categories: I feel that Hobbesian mayhem is inevitable, a vicious round of ethnic cleansing unstoppable and the division of the country into three hostile territories inescapable and probably for the better.

The good major seems to think our first allegiance, however, is to the "people on the ground" in Iraq and to the "disservice... to the troops who have fought so hard to defend them." Here are my rebuttals to the good major: First, Abu Ghraib, Second, Haditha, Third, 200,000 dead Iraqi Civilians since we invaded and Fourth, "disservice" to the troops? IT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB TO DO WHATEVER YOU'RE ORDERED TO DO. If we order you to defend those Iraqis, you do it. If we order you to pull out, you do it. I'll tell you something that every single Social Worker, Teacher, Ambulance Driver, Cop, Fireman, and Doctor has hammered home to them in their early training on the job: Don't Get Attached. Fuck you and your "disservice" to the troops.

Let me get this straight, Major:
(1) The Bush Administration lied to the American people to falsify a case for war,
(2) The Bush Administration fatally screwed up the post-election planning,
(3) The Bush Administration deliberately ignored the State Department who tried to war everyone that Civil War was sure to follow after Saddam was deposed,
(4) The Bush Administration fucked up every opportunity to fix Iraq and instead concentrated assisting their rich friends in the looting of the $18 Billion "rebuilding" funds,
(5) Now, one invasion and failed rebuilding later, Bush says we can't leave or a civil war will break out?

Tough.

At this point, its exceptionally clear that Bush could give a rat's ass about the poor people of Iraq... he's reputedly killed between 50,000 and 200,000 of them by this point.

All this talk of staying "until the job is done" is to ignore the fact that the job will NEVER be "done." These people HATE each other. It's just like Yugoslavia... Tito kept that country together with an iron fist and when he died, poof... here comes the ethnic cleansing and wholesale slaughter. The same thing was clearly what was going to happen when Saddam was deposed, those of us on the Commie Traitor Left said so at the time, but stupid-ass Bush didn't even know there were three different kinds of Iraqis until 2 weeks before the invasion began.

The reason the Republicans don't want America out of Iraq now is because they don't want the inevitable civil war & genocide to happen on their watch. Once Bush is out of office, they will blame this entire war on the Democrats, they will blame the failure of Iraq on the Iraqis and they will make a deal with the genocidal Shiite victors for the oil.

It's clear now that this war was always about two things: (1) getting Bush relected as a heroic War President, and (2) The Oil. Nothing else ever mattered to these people, nothing else ever will.

Meanwhile, estimates have this war costing the taxpayers of America $2 Trillion dollars. That number goes up for every single day we're in Iraq. Bush has racked up an additional $4 Trillion in national debt since he took office. Soon there will be no money left for anything in our budget except for Social Security and paying interest on our debt.

This is the penalty we pay for our current system of Military Keynesyiaism. Until we are willing to stop the war spending, we will increasingly go broke paying for these wars until our foreign debtors (China: $825 Billion in US savings bonds and Japan $850 Billion in US savings bonds) close the books on our country and we find ourselves in the position of a third-world banana republic: broke & with a despotic ruler.

At some point America needs to look deep into its gut and ask itself: do the lives of foreigners (80% of whom want us to leave the country immediately) count more than the entire future of this country? Are the lives of these foreigners who want us gone worth more than our Constitution? More than our own children & grandchildren? More than our jobs and way of life? Because THOSE are the opportunity costs to America if we stay in Iraq and if we continue on our permanent war economy path.

This war is the straw which will break the camel's back: America is already headed towards becoming an impoverished debtor nation with no industry, no economy and a warped authoritarian government. Staying in Iraq means hastening that end.

The good major (and his Republican backers) want to stay in Iraq to protect the Iraqis from one another at the cost of bankrupting our nation. I think we should leave and let them fight it out amongst themselves and attempt to preserve our Republic from the debt and dictatorship which are both accumulating under this war. It's an easy choice for me... but then, my job doesn't require there to be an American Empire.

Colin Powell = Surrendermonkey

2006-12-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell broke his long-held silence on the issue of Bush's handling of the military when he declared yesterday that the U.S. Army "is about broken" and he doubts an increase in the number of troops in Iraq would help resolve the current situation. Instead, he said the United States should work to transfer security responsibilities to Iraqi forces and American troops should begin withdrawing next year.

One is tempted to call him a coward for advocating a withdrawal from Iraq, but I'd have to say that he's a coward for not having the guts to go directly to the media about the fact that Bush's entire case against Iraq was bullshit from word one. Colin Powell was too cowardly to go behind George Bush's back before the war and now that Bush has fucked it up, I'm supposed to think Powell's some sort of hero for speaking out? F--- that and F--- him for being a coward.

Europeans Helped CIA Kidnap Squad

2006-12-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

So much for the "But we had No Idea this was happening to our citizens" defense.

Also, note that these are only the cases which this report could PROVE. There are quite a few more, I would guess, that they know about but can't prove, or sadly, don't even know about.

Once more, WHEN did America become the world's jailer?
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Testimony Helps Detail CIA's Post-9/11 Reach
By Craig Whitlock
The Washington Post
Saturday 16 December 2006

Europeans told of plans for abductions.

Milan - A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA station chief in Rome paid a visit to the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, Adm. Gianfranco Battelli, to float a proposal: Would the Italian secret services help the CIA kidnap terrorism suspects and fly them out of the country?

The CIA man did not identify which targets he had in mind but was "expressly referring to the possibility of picking up a suspected terrorist in Italy, bringing him to an airport and sending him from there to a foreign country," Battelli, now retired, recalled in a deposition.

This initial secret contact and others that followed, disclosed in newly released documents, show the speed and breadth with which the CIA applied in post-9/11 Europe a tactic it had long reserved for the Third World - "extraordinary rendition," the extrajudicial abduction of Islamic radicals overseas for interrogation in friendly countries.

A year after the first contact, the CIA officer held another meeting with his Italian counterparts, this time sharing a list of more than 10 "dangerous people" the agency was tracking in Italy, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands, according to a deposition from Gen. Gustavo Pignero, another high-ranking Italian military intelligence official. "It was clear that this was an aggressive search project, that their willingness to employ illicit means was clear," Pignero said, adding that the list was later destroyed and he could not recall the names.

U.S. spies drew up suspect lists with the help of European intelligence agencies and chased some of the men around the globe before putting a brake on the operations in early 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, according to documents unearthed in criminal investigations, lawsuits and parliamentary inquiries.

All told, the U.S. agency took part in the seizure of at least 10 European citizens or legal immigrants, some of them from countries not cited in that list of "dangerous people" received by the Italian spies. Four renditions occurred on European soil: in Sweden, Macedonia and Italy. Six operations targeted people who were traveling abroad or who had been captured in Pakistan; European intelligence agencies provided direct assistance to the CIA in at least five of those cases, records show.

Each prisoner was then secretly handed over to intelligence services in the Middle East or Africa with histories of human rights abuses. Some remain imprisoned in those countries; others have been taken to the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. One man was later released after being taken from the Balkans to Afghanistan, the victim of an apparent case of mistaken identity.

In the early stages, the CIA had prepared even more ambitious plans, according to the depositions from the Italian intelligence officials, who testified last summer during a criminal investigation into a CIA- sponsored kidnapping of a radical Islamic cleric in Milan.
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more in linked story...